I take that as a compliment. ! (For those who haven't picked up on this movie yet, the Intelligence bit is a play on words regarding the intelligence of some of those interviewed in the movie, the intelligence of some of the Universities that have denied certain professors the right to speak about Intelligent Design, and of course, Intelligent Design itself. But you'd already figured all that out, hadn't you?)
Anyway, more on the movie itself. CT at the Movies has a fairly lengthy but worth reading review of it here. They're perhaps a little more middle of the road about it than Henry was, which is okay, and have some positive things to say about it. And I'd like to quote a short section of the review, which might give some of you a laugh:
Stein, in his inimitable way, tries to corner [Richard]Dawkins into acknowledging the possible existence of God — or at least some sort of intelligent designer behind it all. At first, Dawkins doesn't budge, and is incredulous at Stein's line of questions. But Stein, deadpan yet persistent, latches on to Dawkins' comment that he's 99 percent certain there's no God — and runs with it. "Why not 97 percent?" Stein asks. "Why not 49 percent?"
Stein continues to press until a clearly irritated Dawkins says something quite astonishing. "Okay," he says in essence (I'm paraphrasing, because I don't have the precise quote), "maybe there is an intelligent designer. But if there is, I can guarantee that that intelligent designer is a life form that evolved elsewhere and came to earth and seeded life here."
Huh? So that's his concession to the ID camp? That if they're at all right, that we were designed by aliens who evolved somewhere else in the universe? Yowza.
2 comments:
At least Dawkins' hypothetical answer is more plausible than anything resembling Biblical creation or some unknown and unproveable supernatural entity.
Here is Dawkins' explanation for his answer from his review of Expelled at:
http://richarddawkins.net/articleComments,2394,Lying-for-Jesus,Richard-Dawkins,page73
"Another example. Toward the end of his interview with me, Stein asked whether I could think of any circumstances whatsoever under which intelligent design might have occurred. It's the kind of challenge I relish, and I set myself the task of imagining the most plausible scenario I could. I wanted to give ID its best shot, however poor that best shot might be. I must have been feeling magnanimous that day, because I was aware that the leading advocates of Intelligent Design are very fond of protesting that they are not talking about God as the designer, but about some unnamed and unspecified intelligence, which might even be an alien from another planet. Indeed, this is the only way they differentiate themselves from fundamentalist creationists, and they do it only when they need to, in order to weasel their way around church/state separation laws. So, bending over backwards to accommodate the IDiots ("oh NOOOOO, of course we aren't talking about God, this is SCIENCE") and bending over backwards to make the best case I could for intelligent design, I constructed a science fiction scenario. Like Michael Ruse (as I surmise) I still hadn't rumbled Stein, and I was charitable enough to think he was an honestly stupid man, sincerely seeking enlightenment from a scientist. I patiently explained to him that life could conceivably have been seeded on Earth by an alien intelligence from another planet (Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel suggested something similar -- semi tongue-in-cheek). The conclusion I was heading towards was that, even in the highly unlikely event that some such 'Directed Panspermia' was responsible for designing life on this planet, the alien beings would THEMSELVES have to have evolved, if not by Darwinian selection, by some equivalent 'crane' (to quote Dan Dennett). My point here was that design can never be an ULTIMATE explanation for organized complexity. Even if life on Earth was seeded by intelligent designers on another planet, and even if the alien life form was itself seeded four billion years earlier, the regress must ultimately be terminated (and we have only some 13 billion years to play with because of the finite age of the universe). Organized complexity cannot just spontaneously happen. That, for goodness sake, is the creationists' whole point, when they bang on about eyes and bacterial flagella! Evolution by natural selection is the only known process whereby organized complexity can ultimately come into being. Organized complexity -- and that includes everything capable of designing anything intelligently -- comes LATE into the universe. It cannot exist at the beginning, as I have explained again and again in my writings."
"charitable enough to think he was an honestly stupid man"
Interesting view of charity! LOL.
I don't think anyone's going to change Richard Dawkins' view of origins. He's convinced he's right, and that's pretty much where it's going to stay!
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