Giving religion its evolutionary due

If you’re tired of hearing heated yet worn-out arguments regarding religion and science, check out this intellectually nimble and energized exchange published by Edge.org: Responses by David Sloan Wilson, Michael Shermer, Sam Harris, P. Z. Myers and Mark D.  Hauser to Jonathon Haidt’s “Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion.”  Here’s a link to Haidt’s original article (“Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion.”).

David Sloan Wilson sets the tone by challenging “the new atheists” to answer all four of the following questions:

1. Is there any empirically verifiable evidence for the existence of supernatural agents?
2.  If not, how can we explain the phenomenon of religion in naturalistic terms?
3.  What are the impacts of religion, good or bad, on human welfare?  and
4.  How can we use our understanding of religion to advance the goals of a stable and peaceful society?

Wilson argues that the new atheists sometimes neglect questions 2, 3 and 4.  “This is like a debater leaving the debate after the opening round.”

For his part, Sam Harris reaches even deeper than usual in two his arsenal of weapons to present the many stupidities exhibited by many religions.  In the process, Harris suggests that Haidt had incorrectly argued that all religious ways of life contains some wisdom and insights.  In his response, Haidt makes it clear that he is suggesting no such thing.  I won’t review the challenges and criticisms issued by the other reviewers point by point, but I’ll skip to Haidt’s …

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Searching Dangerous Intersection (or anything else) with Google’s Advanced Search

Dangerous intersection is now more than 1 1/2 years old.  We currently have a couple dozen active authors who have contributed 1,500 posts on 60 categories.  These posts have drawn almost 7,000 comments.  Many of these posts (I'm guessing perhaps one-third of them) make reference to news of the day,…

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Intelligent Design in a Nutshell

If you read and listen to enough information and testimony by proponents of Intelligent Design, you’ll discover that the basic premise is: “If I don’t understand exactly how something happens, then it must have been done by a supernatural agent.”

This telling phrase is rarely used by Design Proponents, who evolved from Creationists via the missing link “CDesign proponentsists” that was excavated from a draft of their textbook during discovery for the Dover Trial (click to watch the Nova Documentary of the trial).

One Intelligent Design website has an article it calls Intelligent Design in a Nutshell. Anyone with an understanding of science or information theory will find the unsupported and largely disproved assertions laughable. However, by mis-stating the scientific method, and claiming as supporting proof scientific conclusions that have long been discarded, it makes a convincing case.

Former child actor, and aging teen heartthrob Kirk Cameron is a visible proponent of this odd IDea (sic). Here’s a short video of a Fox News report interviewing him after he taped a debate against Richard Dawkins. There are some annotations placed by the video editor, but the interview itself is untouched. Watch it and see that my initial assertion is correct. Kirk actually says to the unapologetically supportive Creationist (“unbiased”) interviewer, that if he doesn’t understand how it could have formed, then we must accept that it was obviously designed.

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