brainstorms

Sunday June 25, 2006

not to have a mind is being very wasteful

there are certain bombastic, spit-in-your-eye and rip-your-tongue-out kinds of claims that can render some knowledgeable people giggling while others speechless. if this sort of thing happens early and often, the claimant is rightly ignored as a street corner megaphone crank. if it gradually develops in the right atmosphere with large doses of nastiness, fanaticism and wood pulp, the claimant becomes a "best selling author" and a whispered embarrassment to his or her causes:

Liberals’ creation myth is Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which is about one notch above Scientology in scientific rigor. It’s a make-believe story, based on a theory that is a tautology, with no proof in the scientist’s laboratory or the fossil record - and that’s after 150 years of very determined looking. We wouldn’t still be talking about it but for the fact that liberals think evolution disproves God.

[related entertaining reading: william dembski, christian theodicy in light of genesis and modern science, version 2.0, may 06]

[charlie stross's note]