Professor Antony Flew dies at 87

Roy Varghese has just notified me of the death of Professor emeritus Antony Flew, the rationalist philosopher who died on April 8 aged 87, spent much of his life denying the existence of God until, in 2004, he dramatically changed his mind.

Here is Britain’s Telegraph’s obituary.

I feel lonely now. I remember sitting in the window seat at the U rez in about 1968, studying Flew. He really made people think.

Varghese is kind enough to thank me for contributions I have made to the discussion - essentially defending Flew.

For the record, here are some of them:

Flew calls Dawkins a bigot - and I would say he has a pretty good case. On that point, also here.

New atheists vs the ex-atheist

Response to hit review of Flew’s “There IS a God” in The New York Times.

Antony Flew: Is emotion really better than reason in religious matters?

Antony Flew: The authorship controversy

Antony Flew: Author or puppet?

Antony Flew: Is he too old to believe in God?

Why lifelong atheist Antony Flew decided there must be a God

Coffee!!: Should we reject Darwinism due to its obvious support for new atheism?

Recently, a group of friends was mulling over coffee whether one should reject Darwinism in principle because it is the creation story of atheism. One friend argued that we should not reject it just because its staunchest proponents are mostly atheists.

I am not so sure. Consider this: Approximately 80 percent of evolutionary biologists (= Darwinists) are pure naturalists (no God and no free will, according to William Provine’s recent study). Welcome to the world of Minority Report, where social engineering seems completely reasonable, even "humane." As in the "Humane Society."

Now let me put a case to you:

Assume that 80% of the members of a social group also hold memberships in a Communist or other type of Fascist political party. But I, as it happens, am a free speech journalist who supports an open society. Should I continue to hang around with them, or distance myself from them, repent, and then feel free to denounce them when they eventually perpetrate some fraud or evil?

In my humble opinion, it is NOT irrelevant that the new atheists are overwhelmingly Darwinists. That guides the way they interpret data, and the way they behave toward scientists who dissent from their orthodoxy, based on failure to replicate their results or legitimate suspicion as to how they were obtained.

The Darwinists' certainty that they are right is based on occult knowledge (= natural selection, in reality an important conservative force in nature, has unbelievable creative powers.) They need to believe that, so they do.

Madam Xerxa, our local psychic, is just as certain that she is right, based on occult knowledge, but on a much humbler level. In her dirty, ramshackle walkup, she can predict only the future, not the past. But, hey, she doesn’t charge as much for her nonsense.*

Classic unbelievable beliefs, both. But unbelievable beliefs have consequences. So I would argue that a high level of acceptance by atheists is a good reason for a high level of suspicion on the part of others.

The new atheists have the right to be atheists on their own time, but not to front a system dedicated to that purpose at tax expense - and call it science.

* The Darwinist claims to know what Stone Age man was thinking about religion or about shopping. Madam Xerxa can merely inform you that you will soon meet a tall, dark, and attractive-looking stranger.

Yes, of course, that traffic plod who caught you doing 50 km in a 40 km zone! $120 later in fines, Madam Xerxa is still right.

If either of these propositions is science, I am an apple pie.

"Theistic evolution": Facing the facts as if facts mattered

In Are Religious Liberals Useful Idiots or Just Idiots?, Darwinists Debate, David Klinghoffer writes, at BeliefNet:

Today Daily Kos blogger Erratic Synapse lashes Discover Magazine blogger Chris Mooney and Barbara Forrest, author of Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design. Their offense? Calling for "civility" toward Darwin-believing religious moderates. Mooney had previously attacked biologist Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution Is True, who urges a No More Mr. Nice Guy stance. Writes Coyne: "Professional societies like the National Academy of Sciences...have concluded that to make evolution palatable to Americans, you must show that it is not only consistent with religion, but also no threat to it." Coyne is particularly annoyed by the folks at the Darwin-defending but religion-appeasing National Center for Science Education, for "compromising the very science they aspire to defend."

In the 2008 documentary Expelled, atheist Richard Dawkins scathingly makes a similar point about the NCSE and its ilk. "There's a kind of science defense lobby or an evolution defense lobby, in particular," Dawkins says. "They are mostly atheists, but they are wanting to -- desperately wanting -- to be friendly to mainstream, sensible religious people. And the way you do that is to tell them that there's no incompatibility between science and religion."

Of course, everyone knows this is true. Darwinism is basically about atheism; its frantic promotion is about providing atheism with a creation story, which any religious agenda must have.

I had not thought much about Darwinism until I started to research By Design or by Chance? in 2002, and then I was astonished to discover the number of people who had lost their contact with traditional religion explicitly on that account.

People deserve to know this, especially when Darwinism is fronted to the school system as "just another theory in science." It never has been and never will be, and the day it is, it will be quietly relegated to the shelf as just another theory about how life forms come to look like they do, along with neoteny and Lamarckism.

As for the religious liberals, it seems to me that they have just plain lost their way. There was a time when religious liberalism accommodated traditional religions to the facts of globalization, technical change, and so forth. But today, it seems primarily about accommodating to atheistic materialism in stages rather than all at once, which is why liberal church membership is tanking rapidly.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

An excellent specimen of bluting for Darwin

This is a telling performance of pro-Darwin hatred of one's fellow citizens because - as a matter of simple fact - Lamarckism (a quite different theory of evolution from Darwinism) is making a comeback:

ACCORDING TO a survey conducted recently, 75% of British people don't get Charles Darwin. Astounding. That's three from four. That's most of the two-legged beings you are liable to meet. That's almost everyone at the check-out. That's most of your blood relatives.

It should come as no surprise, however. Reportedly, these folk harbour "doubts" as to natural selection. They incline instead towards myths with a comforting whiff of refutation and brimstone. They are otherwise persuaded, despite a ton of evidence. People, as ever, believe what they want to believe.

Perhaps, though, they also demonstrate, at a monkey-never-typing-Hamlet stroke, that there might be less to this evolution business than the brochures claimed. Chimps will be chimps.

Speaking as a monkey's uncle's less popular nephew, I don't mind. If I have read Darwin half-way right, employing both opposable thumbs to prop up the book, natural selection depends on a majority always missing the point. Then we kill and eat them.

Metaphorically speaking, obviously. I have no wish to chew your leg. But consider things from my evolutionary point of view. Here I am on a planet upon which, reportedly, two billion beings profess a Christian outlook. By my count, thumbs included, that's two thousand million mammals who are mildly mentally ill. Or blessed.

It seems to me that people like Ian Bell, quoted here, from Scotland's Sunday Herald (15 02 09) have long ago given up thinking, and are simply bluting for Darwin.

So what has atheism done for science lately?

Indeed, what has atheism done for science?, agnostic Warwick U sociologist Steve Fuller asks, and the answer is, apparently, not much:

The most popular non-answers usually involve some vague appeal to “innate animal curiosity”. But this hardly distinguishes science from, say, gossip or sheer nosiness – let alone religion. It also doesn’t explain why we persist in doing science even when trails grow cold or, worse, dangerous. Most evolutionary explanations account for a trait’s persistence in one of two ways: it either increases our chances for survival or it is the by-product of something that increases our chances for survival. But does science fit either description?

and worse,

More generally, atheism has not figured as a force in the history of science not because it has been suppressed but because whenever it has been expressed, it has not encouraged the pursuit of science. The general metaphysical idea underlying Darwinism – that a morally indifferent nature selects from among a variety of organic possibilities – has many secular and religious precedents across the world. In each case, it has led to an ethic of equanimity and even resignation, certainly not a drive to remake the planet, if not the universe, to our own purposes. Yet, so far we have got pretty far on that drive. The longer we continue successfully, the stronger the evidence that at least human life cannot be fully explained in Darwinian terms.

Actually, never mind human life, I don't think even animal life can be fully explained - or even reasonably explained - in Darwinian terms. And plant life - definitely not! Lamarck and Mendel could tell you far more about plants than Darwin ever did.

What atheism has done for science is sold a lot of popular atheist books that use the word "science" every few sentences. Wow.

See also The god they don't believe in certainly isn't great.

"Accepting evolution" does not make you an atheist? Oh come on, not this rubbish again!

A Dr. Ginger Campbell, MD, of the Brain Science podcast, writes to say,

I happened upon your recent blog post "Straw in the wind." and I just wanted to say that I agree with you that the most rabid atheists have done more to promote intelligent design than they seem to realize. I recently interviewed Eugenie Scott from the NCSE for my podcast Books and Ideas and I want to share the links with you. One of the things we talked about was the fact that accepting evolution does not mean one is an atheist.

She offers Link to show notes and to audio.

Oh, but come on, let's be realistic, Dr. Campbell. The majority of evolutionary biologists are pure naturalists (no God and no free will). Same thing goes for National Academy of Sciences. Did Eugenie Scott tell you that?

I realize that you were not intentionally trying to spin me, but - for the record, Darwinism is the creation story of materialism and Eugenie Scott is in the business of forcing it down everyone's throats - despite its gross and ridiculous deficiencies, about which more and more people are becoming informed.

Look, I deal daily with people who must decide how to avoid conflict with an increasingly rampant materialist system. If you want to know what the next stage is, take the time to learn about our struggles in Canada. It could be enlightening.

And as for "theistic evolution," don't get me started on that. If it meant anything, I would be considered a theistic evolutionist, because I have no doubt that God could design the universe so that everything was encoded at the Big Bang. But I am not called a theistic evolutionist. I am called a creationist.

Why? Because I think that we can reasonably expect to find evidence for God's work in nature. (The intelligent design theorists say that too.)

The Bible teaches that, as does tradition, reason, and experience.

But "theistic" evolution means that "God's work cannot be distinguished from chance events" so to believe in God we must take a "leap of faith" (= there is no real evidence for God's existence).

Incidentally, the atheistic evolutionary biologists cozy up to the theistic evolutionists. But they throw everything they can at the intelligent design guys and do everything they can to suppress evidence they bring up.

Did you ever wonder why that is?

By the way, I do not know which straw in the wind you meant - there is nearly a haystack by now - but it might be this one.

Materialist myths: Religious people opposed anesthesia in childbirth!

There couldn't be a better example of the warfare between religion and science than anesthesia in childbirth. Religious folk, we are told, opposed anesthesia in childbirth because women should suffer, right? Indeed, the claim that religious folk opposed such anesthesia has become a minor but regular component of the folklore of materialism.

Medical historian A. D. Farr actually went to the trouble of methodically searching the literature from Britain in the 1840s and 1850s, where modern anesthesia during childbirth was first introduced there. He found that religious opposition to the introduction of childbirth anesthesia was a figment of later propaganda.

How did the idea get started, despite a lack of evidence? Well, now, that's a story ....

Read the rest at Overwhelming Evidence, a student friendly ID site - and encourage students to visit as well and get wise about some of this stuff.

Where have all the Christians gone ... from science?

(Note: This is my most recent ChristianWeek column, in which I address the reason for the current preponderance of materialist atheists in some fields of science.)

When I first started researching the intelligent design controversy, I often heard from Christian notables in science that there was no conflict between faith and science. I didn't suppose that there was a conflict, actually, but I soon came to realize that there is an inevitable conflict between strong Darwinian evolutionists and Christianity. A recent study of the views of key Darwinian evolutionists confirms my best guess - and raises some interesting questions about the Christian community in North America.

In "Evolution, Religion and Free Will" (American Scientist, Volume 95, 294ff) , Gregory W. Graffin and William B. Provine found that, of 149 eminent evolutionists polled, 78% were pure naturalists (no God) and only two were clearly theists (traditional idea of God). Some were in between these poles. The authors describe most of them as deists (some sort of divinity might have got things rolling but it is not God in any sense that Christians understand).

The authors note that the level of advocacy of any degree of theism among evolutionary biologists is the lowest measured so far in any poll of biologists' beliefs. They described the vast majority of their respondents as "metaphysical naturalists", "materialists", and "monists". In other words, these are people who are serious about their materialism and atheism.

These evolutionary biologists generally view religion as a product or byproduct of human evolution so that "... evolution is the means to understanding religion, whereas religion as a 'way of knowing' has nothing to teach us about evolution." The authors make quite clear that "Seeing religion as a sociobiological feature of human evolution, while a plausible hypothesis, denies all worth to religious truths."

So these are the people who are in charge of interpreting biology to your children. Mainstream media, covering the intelligent design (ID) controversy, warn you that most ID advocates are Christians or other theists. But how many have told you what I just did - that most of the people who strongly promote a no-design universe and no-design life forms are atheists? This has been true, by the way, for the better part of a century, ever since James Leuba started his surveys in 1914.

If the design advocates' views are coloured by theism, how is it that the no-design views of the atheists are not coloured by atheism? In adopting this perspective, mainstream media tacitly assume that atheism is the correct view, however one arrives at it. And your tax dollars are commanded in support of that view, as propounded at universities and, increasingly, in public high schools.

It seems to me that there are only two realistic ways to see this: Either atheism is correct, and therefore the reasonable point of view for scientists to have. Or there is some other reason that atheism predominates among biologists.

Here is one reason things have got to this pass: What do non-religious people suggest that their talented children should do? Go into business or science. What do religious people suggest that their talented children should do? Go into the clergy, ministry, or missionary work.
The result? Over time, the upper echelons of science have been dominated by atheists and agnostics. They increasingly dominate public policy too, while Christians praise Jesus irrelevantly in comfy tabernacles where no one but Jesus hears us.

Yet atheism is not evidence derived from science; it is merely a presumption by which many scientists interpret what they see. And the presumption is certainly not shared by all who have experience of the wonders of the natural world. While I was at Write! Canada 2007, I ran into a hand surgeon (now professor emeritus) who told me that he had checked out of believing in a non-design explanation for the human hand as a result of his own best efforts at mending broken hands.

I went away from the conversation with him reflecting on the fact that I may well be the only journalist in Canada who is simultaneously a member of The Word Guild, a confessional Christian writers' association, and the Canadian Science Writers' Association. I will be glad when the day comes that I am merely one of hundreds.

(Note for the record: "Evolutionists" here means scientists who believe that gradual Darwinian processes completely account for every aspect of life and that no design whatever is required. It does not mean scientists who merely accept that evolution occurs or that Earth is billions of years old.)

Thinkquote of the day: Did Einstein believe in detectible intelligent design?

This explanation of his religious beliefs appeared in his 1955 New York Times obituary.:

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive With our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible Universe, forms my idea of God.

Einstein explicitly denied being an atheist in a number of places, though many have insisted he was. Apparently, when getting on in years, he told a friend:

You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the world (to the extent that we are authorized to speak of such a comprehensibility) as a miracle or an eternal mystery. Well a priori one should expect a chaotic world which cannot be grasped by the mind in anyway. One could (yes one should) expect the world to be subjected to law only to the extent that we order it through our intelligence. Ordering of this kind would be like the alphabetical ordering of the words of a language. By contrast, the kind of order created by Newton's theory of gravitation, for instance, is wholly different. Even if the axioms of the theory are proposed by man, the success of such a project presupposes a high degree of ordering of the objective world, and this could not be expected a priori. That is the "miracle" which is being constantly re-enforced as our knowledge expands.

There lies the weaknesses of positivists and professional atheists who are elated because they feel that they have not only successfully rid the world of gods but "bared the miracles." (That is, explained the miracles. - ed.) Oddly enough, we must be satisfied to acknowledge the "miracle" without there being any legitimate way for us to approach it . I am forced to add that just to keep you from thinking that --weakened by age--I have fallen prey to the clergy …
— From a letter to Maurice Solovine; see Goldman, p. 24

Based on his views, one only wonders what Einstein would have made of the current anti-God crusade, waged by Darwin's village atheists.


Meanwhile, this which advances the view that this commonly quoted Einsteinism might have been spin doctored:

I'm not an atheist and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza's pantheism, but admire even more his contributions to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and the body as one, not two separate things.

My own sense is that Einstein wanted design without a designer, but he hated chance (which is why he hated quantum physics (and may not really have understood it), so he settled for design with (maybe) a designer, but he sure wasn't having anything to do with religion as such.)

New Book: Letter from a Christian Citizen

Apparently, there is a new book, Letter from a Christian Citizen responding to Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation. Harris should be glad to know he got heard somewhere other than the people he expected to be heard from. Go here for my own take on Harris as a non-materialist atheist who doesn't get it. (Materialist atheism is the only kind that is acceptable in North America. You have to learn to shut your eyes and ears to all kinds of evidence.)

If you want to understand why the intelligent design controversy cannot go away, read By Design or by Chance?.

Interview: Intelligent design converts atheists to theist

Anthony Flew, one of the world's best known and most academically serious atheists, became a theist on account of the evidence for intelligent design of the universe , and he gave an interview to journalist Lee Strobel, who had a similar experience:

It was the evidence from science and history that prompted me to abandon my atheism and become a Christian – and now biological discoveries have caused the world’s most famous philosophical atheist, Dr. Antony Flew, to declare his belief in a Creator. An account of my rare interview with Flew is below, and you can find free video clips at www.LeeStrobel.com.

. Flew also accepted the Phillip Johnson award.

Could Flew have discovered a big secret? The ID folk are actually cool and fun to hang out with? Well, it makes sense because cannot imagine wanting to grow old with the anti-ID folk.

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

Are you looking for one of the following stories?

My U of Toronto talk on why there is an intelligent design controversy, or my talk on media coverage of the controversy att he University of Minnesota.

A summary of tech guru George Gilder's arguments for ID and against Darwinism

A critical look at why March of the Penguins was thought to be an ID film.

A summary of recent opinion columns on the ID controversy

A summary of recent polls of US public opinion on the ID controversy

A summary of the Catholic Church's entry into the controversy, essentially on the side of ID.

O'Leary's intro to non-Darwinian agnostic philosopher David Stove’s critique of Darwinism.

An ID Timeline: The ID folk seem always to win when they lose.

O’Leary’s comments on Francis Beckwith, a Dembski associate, being granted tenure at Baylor after a long struggle - even after helping in a small way to destroy the Baylor Bears' ancient glory - in the opinion of a hyper sportswriter.

Why origin of life is such a difficult problem.

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American biology teachers insist on atheism?

An American lawyer who is active in intelligent design issues has written me to say that the National Association of Biology Teachers, far from foreswearing atheism, has in fact merely moved some of its former upfront atheistic tenets to the supporting material under its current grand (and relatively innocuous-sounding) statement.

From the May 2004 version:

NABT endorses the following tenets of science, evolution, and biology education. Teachers should take these tenets into account when teaching evolution.

Essential Concepts of Biological Evolution

- The diversity of life on earth is the outcome of biological evolution - an unpredictable and natural process of descent with modification that is affected by natural selection, mutation, genetic drift, migration and other natural biological and geological forces.

Okay, well, wait a minute ... unless we know for sure that there is no meaning or purpose in the universe, how can we possibly know that biological evolution is unpredictable and (purely) natural?

A number of well-respected scientists who, incidentally, do not align with the intelligent design theorists, would dispute the view that evolution is unpredictable, notably Michael Denton and Simon Conway Morris.

Also, if one claims that biological evolution is unpredictable, it may also be untestable and unfalsifiable. That's too bad. I had hoped it would be more than nice graphics. I especially hoped that because I have just finished tickng off playwright Paul Rudnick on account of the fact that I thought his treatment of the subject is shallow. But if it's not science after all, maybe shallow wins.

(Note: Before you waste a lot of time denouncing my remarks in the Comments box, please note the title of this blog: I am not a creationist, as the term is normally understood. I think, from observing the current controversy, that the dogma of Darwinian evolution without design or purpose is primarily designed to serve materialist philosophy, and does not have nearly enough evidence to stand on its own. That said, I do not dispute the current dating of the age of the universe or of Earth—or the idea, in principle, of common ancestry. Whether our origins really happened that way, is, of course, another matter, and it is disquieting to learn that evolution is supposed to be "unpredictable." )

Teaching atheism at public expense?

A commenter has asked me to provide evidence for the use of Darwinism to teach atheism in the school system at public expense. For that, I need only point to a curious episode in the mid-Nineties involving the
National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT).

for more than two years, from April 1995 to October 1997, the U.S.'s National Associaton of Biology Teachers (NABT) declared that "natural" does mean "without God" in their position statement on evolution, which stated that evolution is an "unsupervised, impersonal" process.

And they fought any change. But finally, as Craig Rusbult reports,

After first refusing to do so, the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) has dropped the words "unsupervised" and "impersonal" from its official description of evolution. The group's eight-person board of directors voted unanimously on October 11 to alter the wording of its two-year-old statement in support of teaching evolution — and the board did so just three days after it had voted unanimously not to make the change. Religion scholar Huston Smith and philosopher Alvin Plantinga had urged NABT to make the change, arguing that inclusion of the two words constituted a theological judgment about the nonexistence of God that went beyond the boundaries of empirical science.

Not only Christian scholars such as Smith and Plantinga but the Darwin lobby itself had to get involved to make the biology teachers' organization back down.

So accustomed were they to teaching atheism, one must infer, that it had never occurred to them that they might be challenged on the point. NABTs current statement has dropped all that language and merely insists that intelligent design theory and various types of creationisms are "are outside the realm of science and not part of a valid science curriculum."

So we are back in familiar territory now: The biology teachers know, presumably by faith, that life forms do not show evidence of intelligent design. Hence evidence to the contrary is not really evidence. Therefore, they are justified in refusing to discuss it, even if it's the hottest question of the day ...

I should stress that I think the current statement is a vast improvement. At least we can now focus on whether the NABT attitude to intelligent design is justified, not on trying to explain to them why they MUST NOT teach atheism at public expense.

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

Blog policy note: This blog does not intentionally accept fully anonymous Comments, Comments with language unsuited to an intellectual discussion, URLs posted without comment, or defamatory statements. Defamatory statement: A statement that would be actionable if anyone took the author seriously. For example, someone may say "O’Leary is a crummy journalist"; that’s a matter of opinion and I don’t know who would care. But if they say, "O’Leary was convicted of grand theft auto in 1983," well that’s just plain false, and probably actionable, if the author were taken seriously. Also, due to time constraints, the moderator rarely responds to comments, and usually only about blog service issues.

Interesting new reads in the intelligent design controversy

These items landed in my intray recently:

Blogger Stephen E. Jones has a most interesting post today on the problems of accounting for the minimal cell using Darwinian evolution. A number of readers of this blog have expressed interest in hearing about the problems of Darwinian evolution, so they will want to check out that one.

The World Socialists have weighed in on the intelligent design controversy, offering their support for Darwinism. Few Darwinists should rejoice at that, given the WS’s political and economic track record. Note, incidentally, how firm the WS types are at stamping out dissent. They are really at home, in their slippers, in the closed society.

(Note: If this is not the story you were looking for, see the Blog service note below or the stories listed in the sidebar. )

"Signs of intelligence" by William Constantine addresses the connections between Darwinism and atheism:

It may be the case that evolution's founding fathers had no deliberate pact with atheism, but if the two are still unrelated why does the Atheist Alliance ("the only national democratic atheist organization in the United States" according to their website) partake in the annual celebration of "Darwin Day"? Why does the National Secular Society of Great Britain feature the face of Charles Darwin as part of a series of "Hero's of Atheism" coffee mugs and why was the father of evolution voted the overwhelming favorite hero by the organizations members?

And those groups are just the riff-raff. Respected intellectuals often make the same association ...

I was glad to see this, because the near-constant obsession about links between intelligent design and theism should be met by at least some modest examination of the links between Darwinism and atheism. I hope Constantine reads some works by ID theorists at some point. It's not clear from his article that he has yet done so; he relies heavily on a criticism by H. Allen Orr.

In "Alien autopsy: Martians as metaphors", editor Jim Emerson at RogerEbert.com manages to pry an anti-ID message out of Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds. Fair enough, because Spielberg did apparently want to "make it suggestive enough so everybody could have their own opinion."

Emerson says,

Spectacularly dangerous stuff happens to Ray, and all around Ray(which is what makes him a worthy protagonist; if he just sat at home and trembled it could get pretty dull) -- but he takes a bashing and keeps on dashing toward the predetermined finish line.

And, when you think about it, that's kind of like the unsupported assumption behind Intelligent Design - that things have turned out the way they have (so far) because it was inevitable that they should; that an overriding, interventionist intelligence guided events so that they would result in the world as we see it today; and that the course of history and biology could not have gone otherwise because it was all planned in advance. The assumption is that evolution has been pointed toward this moment, rather than the present being just another point in a still-ongoing process with no "destination" in sight.

Ebert should read some lay-friendly works by intelligent design theorists. His quarrel seems to be with Laplace or perhaps with Simon Conway Morris, not with the ID guys. ID makes no claim that all current events were inevitable or that human life had to turn out the way it did. ID theorists claim only that some aspects of life forms and of the universe are best explained as the outcome of design.

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.