Randy Pausch

"I'm constantly finding myself in situations where people are saying, well, it's never been done that way before, and I say, well, that's fine, and I guess that's an instructive piece of knowledge to share with me, but why are you saying that as if it's some sort of design constraint? You know, you said you wanted to accomplish something. And I suggested, well, why don't you do thus-and-such. And then you said, but it's never been done that way before! But I say that's not relevant to whether or not this is a good solution. Of course if you told me it had been done and it failed, that would be really useful data, all right."

Randy Pausch was an American professor of computer science, human-computer interaction and design at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

He gave his "The Last Lecture" speech on September 18, 2007 at Carnegie Mellon after he learned that his previously known pancreatic cancer was terminal. The talk was modeled after an ongoing series of lectures where top academics are asked to think deeply about what matters to them, and then give a hypothetical "final talk", with a topic such as "what wisdom would you try to impart to the world if you knew it was your last chance?" The talk was later released as a book called The Last Lecture, which became a New York Times best-seller.

Expelled again

Some comments relating to this blog don't actually make it onto the site. Henry Neufield, to whom I referred readers in regard to the film, Expelled - No Intelligence Allowed, wrote to me personally, and we had a bit of email chit-chat back and forth. He told me he "was most impressed since you are the first person in many moons to call me "pretty sane"!"

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.

Expelled - Ben Stein

There's a new film available in the States called Expelled, which aims to align Darwinism with Naziism, to disprove the theory of evolution and promote Intelligent Design, to claim that scientists and university lecturers who don't agree with evolution are sidelined in their careers.

Of course the film is being heavily promoted amongst Christians, especially on various evangelical sites and blogs. So I did some checking out, since part of the aim of this blog is source good DVD material for use in churches and amongst home groups. I started by watching (or trying to watch) the extended trailer, but for some reason it doesn't want to download properly. However I got enough of an idea of it to want to check out things further.

Ben Stein, who 'stars' in the movie (it's more a doco than a feature), is anti-Darwinism - not in itself a bad thing - and so are the producers of the movie. Clicking further back and forth across the web I eventually came across a writer who says he's a passionate moderate Christian who is a member of a United Methodist congregation. His name is Henry Neufield. Henry's no slouch, he's no fly-by-night blogger, and he seems pretty sane.

He slams the movie for six reasons:
It misrepresents evolution;
First amendment issues are badly confused;
Academic freedom doesn't guarantee you a job or tenure;
The problem for intelligent design is not that it hasn't been considered;
The connection of Hitler with evolution;
Lastly, the one that annoys me most, is the lie that accepting the theory of evolution is the equivalent of atheism.

I don't have space here to give the detail from Henry's post, so I recommend you check it out on his blog.