A Plea to Scientists!

There are many scientists who read and comment on this blog, for which I am, and my other readers are, I am sure, very grateful.  So I have a plea which I hope will find fertile ground.

Evolution, as we all know, is a process by which biology changes over time.  It is always referred to as proceeding from the simple to the complex, and that is a little misleading, as  it implies that the simplest forms of life – perhaps judged simple in intelligence, or motivation, in range of movement, or because of their humble size – are biologically simple.  Evolution is, after all a biological process.

So, saying we know it proceeds from the simple to the complex doesn’t fit with the facts: should we not say, it proceeds from the highly complex to the staggeringly complex, or at the very least from the complex to the highly complex.

The simplest form of life we know of today is the humble bacteria.  Its motivations are straightforward, its size is minuscule, its lifespan and range of movment are limited and its cellular arrangment is basic – one cell.  But we don’t have factual evidence of any life form simpler than this.  We can suppose it, we can imagine it, we can theorise it, we can assume it, we can demand that the idea be declared mandatory and taught in schools, we can even openly admit that we intuitively propose it, but science prides itself on being based on facts, not suppositions, imaginings, demands for acceptance in the absence of proof, or intuitive assumptions: scientific readers always remind me of this. Today I was told that intuition must play no part in science; I argued otherwise, but perhaps I am wrong.

So, since we have no factual proof of a simpler life form than the bacteria – that is, no fossils, no living fossils, no laboratory specimens of our own creation validating our theories, and no traces at all that we can point to – we are bound to say, life on Earth evolved, as far as we can prove now – based only on facts – from the highly complex to the staggeringly complex, or at the very least, from complex to the highly complex.  The rest we can fairly say: assume as you see fit pending laboratory proof.

Of course, we can project a line from the bacteria backwards to simpler forms – just as we can extrapolate a line from humanity to Divinity, as I often do, and am then (perhaps fairly) accused of being far fetched and fanciful in so doing – and of course, we might well imagine that such forms exist, because logically these bacteria had to come from somewhere.  To blithely say they came from outer space is to shift the problem out of reach, and now the credibility becomes more convoluted as we are safe to shape the origin in any imaginary form, no matter how fantastic, since nobody is likely to travel to the distant corners of the Universe simply to contradict us.

We have fossil proof of the dinosaurs along with their age and progressions, as also many of the earliest vegetation, so we are at liberty to talk about these as genuine entities all we want.  And one day we may have factual proof of the proposed simpler-than-bacteria entity, whatever it may have been, but today if we are basing our science on facts, should we not draw the line at what we can strictly prove – lest we be accused of letting assumptions, imaginings, preferences, and wishful thinking be labelled science and thereby throw all our other conclusions into disrepute?

Coming next: Nature’s Chainsaws!

This illustration shows a cross-section of a small portion of an Escherichia coli cell. The cell wall, with two concentric membranes studded with transmembrane proteins, is shown in green. A large flagellar motor crosses the entire wall, turning the flagellum that extends upwards from the surface. The cytoplasmic area is colored blue and purple. The large purple molecules are ribosomes and the small, L-shaped maroon molecules are tRNA, and the white strands are mRNA. Enzymes are shown in blue. The nucleoid region is shown in yellow and orange, with the long DNA circle shown in yellow, wrapped around HU protein (bacterial nucleosomes). In the center of the nucleoid region shown here, you might find a replication fork, with DNA polymerase (in red-orange) replicating new DNA. © David S. Goodsell 1999.

Seeding Planets for Life

We’re a little late to class: each speck above  is a galaxy in a patch of sky about 40 times the area of the full moon, recorded by the Herschel telescope.  Most are so far away that they are seen as they were between 3 and 10 billion years ago (Hilaire, Kingsland; guardian.co.uk)

This isn’t breaking news, but it’s still interesting:  the Royal Astronomical Society announced last year that super-complex molecules of 24 atoms have been found in interstellar space.

An astronomer yesterday (Illustration: Exupery)

A few years ago in 2004 it was revealed in Astrophysics Journal, that organic molecules of nine atoms in size had been spotted, bringing the total number of molecules found in space at that point to 141 :

A two-year survey of enormous interstellar dust clouds has turned up eight organic molecules in two different regions of space. One is a stellar nursery awash in light while the other is a cold, starless void.

The finding, detailed in the current issue of Astrophysical Journal, supports other recent studies suggesting molecules important for life commonly form in the gas and dust clouds that condense to form stars and planets.

The molecules were discovered using the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT), a large radio telescope located in West Virginia.

Acetamide

“Finding eight [organic] molecules in the space of two years is quite remarkable,” said study leader Jan Hollis of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

The newly discovered molecules are made up of 6 to 11 atoms each and are classified as organic because they contain carbon.

Five of the molecules were discovered in Sagittarius B2(N), a star-forming dust cloud located 26,000 light-years from Earth near the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. This stellar nursery is the largest known repository of complex interstellar molecules.

The other three molecules were found in the Taurus Molecular Cloud (TMC-1), located only 450 light-years away. TMC-1 is starless; it is cold and dark and has a temperature of only 10 degrees above absolute zero.

“The discovery of these large organic molecules in the coldest regions of the interstellar medium has certainly changed the belief that large organic molecules would only have their origins in hot molecular cores,” said study team member Anthony Remijan of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). “It has forced us to rethink the paradigms of interstellar chemistry.”

..one of the molecules found in Sagittarius B2(N), called acetamide, contains a type of chemical bond important for linking together amino acids, the molecular building blocks of proteins.

Made up of 9 atoms, acetamide “is the largest molecule found in space that has that bond,” Hollis told SPACE.com.

(..http://www.space.com/2711-organic-molecules-diverse-space-places.html)

If organic molecules are found in huge quantities in space, suddenly the origin of life is less of a fluke.  What better way to guarantee a planet is seeded with life than for vast clouds of these molecules to accompany the formation of the stars which gave birth to it?  Perhaps this mechanism even guarantees that life forms on different planets are chemically matched to their particular star.  Perhaps you could tell from a creature’s biochemical makeup what kind of star system it came from!  Or perhaps not.

But in any case, it seems to show the origin of life was not left to a fluke occurrence in a gaseous pond of methane by a volcano during a lightning storm, or whatever the current theory is, but made overwhelmingly certain by drenching the planets, at a certain stage, with organic molecules.

Put them all together and what do you get? A ribosome of course – a protein factory. Illustration by David S Goodsell, author of The Machinery of Life

I always imagined that planetary life must have emerged in discrete, preparatory stages in much the same way that its components arose from cells, which arose from proteins, which arose from amino acids, which arose from atoms, which arose from who knows what.  Each layer is a different classification because it contains something not present in the previous one: a rigid order and arrangement, something which could never have been predicted by looking at the qualities of the previous level.

Seeing a small cluster of atoms, who could predict the mighty ribosome?  Even looking at a completed cell – a buzzing hive of tape recorders, chainsaws, factories, scaffolding, delivery boys, traffic wardens, customs officers, changing rooms, tollbooths and parking depots, who can imagine the next step being a thinking creature, one so far removed from the scale of the cell that he has no indication that he is anything but what he sees – a seamless construction, with no awareness about what goes on down there at speeds a million times quicker than he can think?  The previous level of organisation is completely hidden in size and speed.  He sits and tries to figure out the workings of the Universe, sure of the ground on which he stands.

But on the cosmic plane, his whole planet is no more than a tiny speck, invisible to anyone living around even the next star over, one more out of billions in a galaxy whose shape and activity is completely hidden from him.  Even with the whole galaxy in the palm of our hand, time and space shrunk to such a degree that a thousand years passes in a second for us to observe at our leisure, like some curious God, we find it behaves not as it should, because of dark matter and energy hidden view, and a hundred billion other galaxies still beyond our reach.  Such a strange Universe, with so many hidden chambers and mysterious veils!  Yet here we all are, stuck tight in a tiny slice of it, we know not how, a lifespan of a few moments, arguing confidently as if we know all we need to know – as if seeing half a second of Gone With The Wind would be plenty enough to understand all its drama, social setting, summers and winters, justice and injustice, and the destiny of a whole country, and its characters, and all their life stories, and hours-long arcs of plot and intrigue contained in the entire film, a tiny slice of which is shown openly to our senses, yet its interpretation and context remaining a matter for idle speculation.

It looks so tranquil, so pristine.. a warm shelter from deadly radiation, supplied with air, water, fruits, crops, scenes of stunning beauty, on a gentle ride between the icy depths and the ferocious infernos.  Hard to believe a primitive race is down there fighting to the death over it and cursing God; no doubt a range of precautions exist to prevent the trashing of a planet, but they’re not likely to be gentle (photo: Anders/Lovell, NASA)

It seems that the first kind of plants, strange, simple flat fern-like things growing underwater are thought to have created various essential gases over unimaginable spans of time, after which that particular kind of plant vanished, never to be seen again.  The interesting thing about changing the components of the atmosphere is that anything you put into it affects the whole thing as one unit: proposed machines for reducing greenhouse gases can be sited anywhere on Earth, and they’ll have the same effect everywhere.

Predictably, this stage-by-stage concept has long been confirmed by experts, but how pleasant to have one’s imaginings bolstered by those who really know what they’re doing:

“Our research shows that land plants and fungi evolved much earlier than previously thought–before the Snowball Earth and Cambrian Explosion events–suggesting their presence could have had a profound effect on the climate and the evolution of life on Earth,” says Blair Hedges, an evolutionary biologist and leader of the Penn State research team that performed the study.

The researchers found that land plants had evolved on Earth by about 700 million years ago and land fungi by about 1,300 million years ago–much earlier than previous estimates of around 480 million years ago, which were based on the earliest fossils of those organisms.

Hedges and his research team made their surprising discoveries ..by studying as many of the genes as possible of their descendants–the species of plants and fungi living today. They began by sifting through their molecular fingerprints–the unique sequences of amino-acid building blocks–in many thousands of genes from hundreds of species archived in the public gene-sequence databases.

(..http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/08/010810070021.htm)

As for the dinosaurs, what better way to fertilise the planet than hardy, well armoured creatures which don’t spend all day on laptops or contemplating existentialism but eating and reproducing and carrying seeds from vegetation everywhere in their waste output.

Then at a certain time, those forms faded away through whatever disaster overtook them, after which the planet’s ecosystem was in a very different condition than on their arrival.  The very fact that we assign different eras to history shows the quantum nature of planetary evolution: the Jurassic was distinct from the Permian, Devonian and Cambrian, and so on, because they represented different conditions entirely.  The Cambrian era was populated with life forms that strangely had no precedent.  There was no gradual accumulation: they appeared fully formed, in evolutionary terms, overnight.  It was assumed the accumulations would be seen in previous fossil layers, but all those studied, for example in the Burgess Shale, seemed to show nothing, so it was supposed that conditions must not have been just right for fossil formation in those locations.

Cambrian life, recreation from Morocco fossil.  Photo: Esben Horn

Some paleontologists still search for the fossil precursors to the Cambrian forms, but most now suspect they will never be found for one very good reason – they never existed.  Where a complete fossil strata, located finally in China, was found to have faithfully recorded traces of the previous era’s life forms, all that were seen were small, sponge-like forms which bore no relation to the fantastic creatures that followed.  An exhaustive search turned up nothing.

If history had been just one steady incremental progression, the ages could never be clearly separated in such a way.  Once again we see discrete quantum jumps, but on an almost unimaginable scale.  If organic molecules appear in star factories, then this is another surprise for the intellect, because it turns the arena of life which we assumed was limited to Earth, into the Universe at large, a phenomenal change in concept.

Dinosaurs raising methane through flatulence: I’d give it five million years if I were you

Anyway, back to the Royal Astronomical Society article, which reveals the discovery of molecules made of 24 atoms, a significant molecule indeed:

‘We have detected the presence of anthracene molecules in a dense cloud in the direction of the star Cernis 52 in Perseus, about 700 light years from the Sun,’ explains Susana Iglesias Groth, the IAC researcher heading the study.

In her opinion, the next step is to investigate the presence of amino acids. Molecules like anthracene are prebiotic, so when they are subjected to ultraviolet radiation and combined with water and ammonia, they could produce amino acids and other compounds essential for the development of life.

Fanciful Greek Mythology, telescopes, frighteningly large molecules, a rainbow, and a diagram of how to get there

‘Two years ago,’ says Iglesias, ‘we found proof of the existence of another organic molecule, naphthalene, in the same place, so everything indicates that we have discovered a star formation region rich in prebiotic chemistry.’ Until now, anthracene had been detected only in meteorites and never in the interstellar medium. Oxidized forms of this molecule are common in living systems and are biochemically active. On our planet, oxidized anthracene is a basic component of aloe and has anti-inflammatory properties.

The new finding suggests that a good part of the key components in terrestrial prebiotic chemistry could be present in interstellar matter.

(..http://www.ras.org.uk/news-and-press/157-news2010/1853-complex-space-molecules)

The job of a star besides holding planets in predictable state is to support life: definitive proof of this was revealed in 1962 by a researcher who looked out of a window.  But if star nurseries also produce the molecules required for life, how long will it be before it dawns on us that the Universe must be absolutely teeming with life, and always has been – not by chance, but by design?

The difficulty with getting mainstream science to accept this is much like the difficulty of getting the mainstream media to label an outright massacre as such, and not a run-of-the-mill NATO exercise causing “collateral damage”.  The problem is a mind unable to see reality.  Consider this quote from Prof Watson, from the School of Environmental Sciences, who is certain intelligent life is highly unlikely, despite seeing it everywhere from the end of his nose to Antarctica, because each required step must be performed exactly in sequence.  One could declare the successful boiling of an egg to be a feat highly unlikely to be repeated for the exact same reasons, and be wrong in exactly the same way:

According to Prof Watson a limit to evolution is the habitability of Earth, and any other Earth-like planets, which will end as the sun brightens. Solar models predict that the brightness of the sun is increasing, while temperature models suggest that because of this the future life span of Earth will be ‘only’ about another billion years, a short time compared to the four billion years since life first appeared on the planet.

“At present, Earth is the only example we have of a planet with life. If we learned the planet would be habitable for a set period and that we had evolved early in this period, then even with a sample of one, we’d suspect that evolution from simple to complex and intelligent life was quite likely to occur. By contrast, we now believe that we evolved late in the habitable period, and this suggests that our evolution is rather unlikely. In fact, the timing of events is consistent with it being very rare indeed.”

His logic is so flawed it’s hard to know where to begin: with an example in front of him in which life naturally arose very early in the planet’s formation – less than 500m years – he feels this is an improbable event.  The more obvious conclusion is that it is a natural event, aided by Nature, promoted by the existence of a sun, and by every helpful step along the way.  In fact the only sensible conclusion must be that life arises very early in a planet’s career, and therefore may well have done so in every solar system throughout the universe – virtually thousands of billions.

What he is really saying is that he doesn’t know how life evolved, that he doesn’t understand the mechanisms, and so can’t see it as a natural process; all he sees are the difficulties, instead of life’s colossal and repeated successes in the face of difficulties.  His randomisation has pushed even his own existence – already an obvious reality – into the nether regions of impossibility.  It is such a strange way to view life.

Prof Watson suggests the number of evolutionary steps needed to create intelligent life, in the case of humans, is four. These probably include the emergence of single-celled bacteria, complex cells, specialized cells allowing complex life forms, and intelligent life with an established language.

“Complex life is separated from the simplest life forms by several very unlikely steps and therefore will be much less common. Intelligence is one step further, so it is much less common still,” said Prof Watson.

Remember in his sample of one, he has already seen all these steps proceeding naturally, in order, despite the odds against them – indicating not that the sequence is unlikely, since it has already happened naturally, but that the Universe must be somehow slanted towards life!  The only unlikelihood I can see is that this professor at the School of Environmental Sciences would be able to teach anything of any real use.  I can imagine sittnig through one of his dreary lectures after another, having the idea hammered home that life is a random and unlikely event.  What a terrible way to waste some of the most fertile years of one’s brain.

His model, published in the journal Astrobiology, suggests an upper limit for the probability of each step occurring is 10 per cent or less, so the chances of intelligent life emerging is low – less than 0.01 per cent over four billion years.

Each step is independent of the other and can only take place after the previous steps in the sequence have occurred.  They tend to be evenly spaced through Earth’s history and this is consistent with some of the major transitions identified in the evolution of life on Earth.

(..http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080416110124.htm)

Our telescopes are becoming more sensitive to the tiny fluctuations around stars, indicating planetary orbits; to the astonishment of astonomers, planets of all kinds seem to be common all through our galaxy.  They’re part of the overall pattern – if you don’t like the word “design” !  And therefore common throughout other galaxies too, of which there are at least a hundred billion.

Either way, one thing we know from our telescopes is the Universe does things in a big, big way; something else we should know from life on Earth is that it does them with infinite beauty and uncanny precision, and endless patience.

“If you could fly to France in one minute, you could go straight into the sunset, right from noon. Unfortunately, France is too far away for that. But on your tiny planet, my little prince, all you need do is move your chair a few steps. You can see the day end and the twilight falling whenever you like…

“One day,” you said to me, “I saw the sunset forty-four times!”

And a little later you added:

“You know — one loves the sunset, when one is so sad…”

“Were you so sad, then?” I asked, “on the day of the forty-four sunsets?”

But the little prince made no reply.

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Rebranding Atheism

The atheist movement has become politically charged in an impressive way with the entrance of Sean Faircloth.  This likeable politician has tried to harness and redirect Richard Dawkins’ efforts, which began to founder, perhaps for want of tangible long-term goals other than publicly scorning the spiritual nature of mankind, and perhaps also from the backlash this habit generated.

This irritation had become such a crowd pleaser in the media that new appearances by Dawkins were no longer seen on their own merits but as a fresh opportunity to revenge all the old ones.  When stores from bored journalists pointing out that the Dawkins estate was built from slave money, and gleeful headlines like Atheist Richard Dawkins Forgets Full Title of ‘On the Origin of Species’, Invokes God for Help (Urban Christian News, Feb 2012) began to appear, the rebranding must have been confirmed as the right move at the right time.

Faircloth’s conversion of the classic “bitter atheist” moniker to the newly minted “affable atheist” is a much needed step, because at heart Dawkins is a likeable mix of elaborate intellect and a surprising naiivete, genuinely hurt to find people choose their own spiritual value over  molecules.  The political arena now offers a potential mass distribution of his ideology but also demands simplification, trimming and focusing just as manufacturing calls for design compromises to render Heath Robinson ingenuity into a safe, sturdy and palateable reality, for the litigation-prone masses and their heedless ways.

Ingenious ideas and mass production are two completely different things (illustration: W Heath Robinson)

The bottom line in politics is that ideas, promises – and threats – need to be memorable, for a mass mind with a short attention span, and this calls for drama and simplifcation.  Existentialism was always going to be a harder sell to the public than Read My Lips: No New Taxes or the playground chant of Drill, Baby Drill! That chant fell silent after the Gulf spill, will soon be back; the mass mind also has a short memory.  So short that no sooner had newspapers stopped reporting on the Pacific’s sea of plastic waste – twice the the size of the American continent – people assumed it must have somehow floated off into outer space.

Faircloth’s credentials are impressive – rather than act, like many in Congress, as a well-paid pimp for the weapons boys, a floating turd in the drinking bowl of global culture -  his time in American government seems to have been spent improving the lot of children – throwing out schools’ lucrative fast food mentality in an effort to reduce obesity, protecting them from abusive adults via new laws, and establishing the Maine Discovery Museum among other achievements, including winning Legislator of the Year.  In short, a committed politician but also apparently an individual of principles, a man able to get things done.  His vision is of a Jeffersonian America, in which church and state are separated.  Interestingly, Jefferson had an affinity to Christianity, divested of illogical or superstitious claims, and to this end made his own Bible by cutting and pasting sections to create what he considered a logical narrative.

Maine Discovery Museum: kids get a lot out of these experiences.  There’s nothing comparable in London as far as I know, but I took my son at age 4 to the Science Museum, which thrilled him.  To the amusement of a small crowd observing a demonstration, he learned enough about aerodynamics to grasp and then run off with a brightly coloured beach ball which had hovered educationally atop a jet of air

Jefferson’s intellectual stature shows that, even to the incisive mind, Christianity has an appeal unrelated to fanciful embellishments, and to judge it solely by them shows a superficial approach to the important role religion plays in the mass mind.  This approach which Dawkins has publicly sworn himself to also fails to take into account the colossal hurdles overcome in creating a system of morality and spiritual tracts that appealed to the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions of people over the centuries.  The same problems exist now as did then in creating global movements; if anything, it should be easier today when the race has developed a more acute appetite for facts and a network of communications delivering them to millions within the day, but time honoured concepts persist, much to the frustration of those with a new and better vision.

Fighting intolerance, through, um, intolerance?  “I also think humans should be treated with respect”.. Richard Dawkins in discussion with Wendy Wright.  But he saw fit to publish this anyway, no doubt seeing it as a bit of fun.  But it is this insensitivity which is at the heart of their image as people not in connection with the rest of humanity.  Wright must have been shocked to see it, and found it confirmation of everything she previously thought true of atheists.  It didn’t have to end this way..

Dawkins was exceptionally polite during an interview with Concerned Women for America’s Wendy Wright, and gave an engaging account of his position.  Both grew defensive within moments: Dawkins seemed irked by her presention of the idea of a soul – something which should never form a debate for intellectual argument, as the concept itself is part of a personal worldview highly resistant to laboratory proof.  He was also up-ended by her reference to science’s prejudice in preserving their own view of evolution, many points of which are still unclear, not least the origin of the whole thing.   His rather uncalled for gambit was to expose her lack of scientific training as making her unsuited to comment, which gave the whole game away – since he must have known in advance who she was -  and in any case would have been the worst possible thing to say to a woman defending herself.  His reluctance to engage her as a person with a view to protect generated by observing the debate from the outside – the like of which there must be billions of in the world – confirmed her belief that scientists were arrogant self-admirers.

Dawkins was measured in his response, but failed to deal with her defensiveness.  She made some fair points, only asking that the debate be taight rather than the theory in isolation – whatharm could there be in that? – and he could have conceded this without diminishing his belief in any way.  She wanted humans to be treated with respect and dignity, but he interrupted defensively, “so do I, of course,” as if her stance somehow was an accusation.  Instead, he could have said, “you’re entirely right, I’m glad we agree on something!”  A subtle difference, but one not likely to be lost on a woman.  Dawkins refused to accept that a jump from one species to another was a significant enough step to warrant an injection of additional information from somewhere; the micor-changes within a species do not alter its fundamental architecture, and nor can they, as this requires concurrent adjustment to vast numbers of systems.

A genuine Jeffersonian vision would need to include the dismantling of corporate ownership of the government. The presidential candidates, like brightly coloured American wrestling opponents baying for blood, while actually being close friends and part of the theatrical nature of the sport, are both offered by the same corporate sources. They are depicted as bitter rivals to engage the public’s imagination that an exciting choice is available; once elected, they soon toe the party line when the childish excitement and playground chants of the elections are forgotten.  Obama, while campaigning, raised cheers by accusing Bush of planning a war with Iran. “You do not have the support of the people!” he affirmed with his measured, resolute theatricality, like David taking on Goliath.  His latest plan is a war with Iran, through the intermediary of Israel, whose power in America is enshrined in America’s own statutes and protected by a vast web of corporate wealth

Evolution is clearly a fact, but the mechanism is a mystery; species can remain static for huge spans of time, and therefore require some kind of force yet undocumented to increase their complexity; even physics states that a body will remain at rest until acted on by an external force.  Biology is far from at rest: the smallest components move with terrific speed and purpose, so there was plenty of room to compromise.

His self-made difficulty was understandable, but his irritation was amplified in his supporters, one of whom made a less than compassionate sketch (above), convinced that her rejection of Dawkins made her unworthy of respect.  What was worse, Dawkins actually published it.  While evolution itself cannot be a danger for anyone, this kind of certainty is the trigger for dangerous problems, and ironically, actually illustrates Wright’s point.

Dawkins has often said he cannot see any line that connects atheism with terrible acts, but the line is drawn not from theories but from certainty in their superiority, and the first confirmation of this is a spiteful view of others as unworthy.  Compassion means seeing others as equals – you cannot have it both ways.  As an illustration of this, in February I heard an atheist say that people who have had too many babies should be allowed to starve to death, along with their wretched children, to bring the population down.  His friends concurred sagely.  It was their own damn fault, and facts were facts.  Their irritation blinkered them to the fact that allowing anyone, but especially a helpless child, to starve to death is an act of murder, diminishing one’s own humanity – whether at a distance or not.

Reasonman and his sidekick, IntolerantGit: some less than respectful views of humanity – well, enemeies of atheist reason, anyway – rather give the game away.  Compassion is, at the moment, simply a political expedient ( http://richarddawkins.net/discussions/469811-richard-dawkins-tribute-art)

Maslow’s Hire Archie

The atheists attempt to sway the same mass mind which is drawn to spiritual values, and it is significant that their first step was the introduction of compassion.  Compassion and humility are the primary elements in all scriptures – a fact that cannot be lost on either Dawkins or Faircloth.

Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs: certainty is second only to physical survival.  But notice also how many needs are met either by spiritual discipline and the larger arc of its mass produced form, religion, and the benevolent social structures it creates.  While abuses in the name of religion are as reprehensible as abuses made under the guise of parenthood or acts of mass murder under the protection of superior technology, and deserve to be stamped out, how many of these needs can be satisfied by a belief that we are lifeless machinery existing solely to propagate our randomly mutating genes?

The ten point plan for Secular America neatly sets out its stall by labelling religion’s “seductive simplicity of certainty” as an odious flaw.  But certainty is a quality of the mind not tied to logic and reality – in fact logic is probably the least powerful motivation for any human with emotion, and that will include most people – and all humans gravitate to certainty, even trying to reason it into existence when facts fly in the face of it. As for simplistic, there is nothing finding a berth among the entire mass of mankind that is not, in some way, simple; simplicity is even the essence of beauty itself.  We want certainty about our home, so we purchase a mortgage and pay a vast sum over the odds for the certainty of a roof over our head, despite the precarious state we inhabit, having borrowed up to the limit for the next 25 years.  We want the certainty of having our one and only soulmate, despite the almost random nature of a selection from a handful, out of millions more who will never even know of our existence.

We spend two thirds of our days at a job for the certainty of solvency, knowing the fragile nature of commerce, yet spending whatever we earn so that we are never more than two paydays away from our sworn enemy, destitution; we vote for politicians who generate the greatest certainty, knowing all the while that these people are attracted only to power and have no interest in our welfare other than buttering us up just before elections (mindful of our short attention span and limited memory) for the certainty of staying in power.  Beyond all these human foibles, certainty is the fundamental appeal of atheism itself: an atheist refuses to rely on faith because of its uncertain nature – he wants facts: certain facts, theories proved with certainty.  Any argument with an atheist is futile if, armed with his books and facts and theories and geological samples, he is already certain that you are mistaken!  In fact, how can atheists even be sure of their superior philosophy, unless they too are partaking of certainty?

Amidst the clamour to attach certainty to every conceivable surface of our life, and finding it offered at a modest fee by those who want the certainty of our money, it’s hard to believe a politician can be surprised if mankind desires certainty about its own spiritual existence: as Jefferson shows, this trait is pronounced even in the most intelligent minds.  In fact this affinity to ideas of the spirit partakes of an element so massive within the mind that it can overwhelm even than the procreative urge, itself buried deep enough within the psyche that for most, abandoning it would be a biological and emotional impossibility.  Those able to take risks and rise above certainty are indeed admired, but we also know that anyone who promises to replace our flawed certainty with a better one of their own is not to be taken seriously.

Jefferson Bible: his view of Christianity was based on the life, example and morality of Jesus, a sturdy component of Christianity and a fitting backdrop to a vision of America in which superstitionhad no place

The rebranded union might seem an odd alliance – a politician sensing a new tsunami to ride, and an academic known mainly for his blistering attacks on the faithful.  But the whole movement is a paradox in many ways, and no element more so than Dawkins himself: a man on the one hand seeking to dismantle religion on the basis of science, and on the other dismissing all laboratory research proving neurotransmitter and cortical benefits afforded by spiritual practices; an incisive mind mustering all the intelligence it can to grapple with the complex problems of biology but writing off its ingenuity and causative layers as lifeless flukes; a Humanist denouncing the most human sentiment of all: spirituality – the sole aspect setting humanity apart from the animal world.  And lastly, despite offering a scientific modus operandi as evidence of his respect for truth, Dawkins tries to strip away the one thing humans have built solely to encourage a union with the still mysterious depths of the Universe, as if he deals with beasts.

And it does seem strange to see Dawkins appear on stage to assure the crowd of natural selection’s central role after one of Faircloth’s rousing performances.  Not only has NS been long discredited as a shaping force by genetic SNP research, and abandoned by those with mathematical skills, common sense, or both, but it’s a little like watching the sophisticated Segovia calmly take to the stage, after The Who have torn the place to pieces.

Star names are for sale, and apparently the Moon, too, at $45 per acre.  It is only slightly less absurd that the entire Earth has also been bought up – along with all its oceans, freshwater and vegetation, despite being a resource nobody can claim to have made by their own hands, and one remaining completely out of the control of its human owners, each prepared to fight to the death over their claim.

But Faircloth is quick to praise Dawkins’ efforts, assuring the audience his place in history is guaranteed by his scientific reputation, and that he and his book, The God Delusion (available at the back) represent “a humanitarian effort for which the world will thank him for generations to come.”  His appeal once again to a certainty which nobody can yet be sure about shows his political nature but also that Faircloth may not completely grasp the problem, as whatever sympathy Dawkins generates from the progeny is unlikely to be based on The God Delusion, a book so flawed even he has been seen to distance himself from in debates with intelligent Christians; it is even less likely to result from trying to tear the age-old spiritual wisdom of religion to shreds, using a kind of vitriolic loathing of faith, with the afterthought of “compassion” scribbled on a napkin and sellotaped on top, but even so, the sincerity of the tribute can’t be doubted.

Or perhaps for politicians, like those who sell stars to the wealthy, the future is a little too easy to be generous with, and has the handy quality of being available in any imaginable form and colour; anyone in need of certainty is most welcome to vast helpings of it, in exchange for relinquishing a modest claim on the present.

Sean Faircloth – Day of Reason

The rallies might be a little predictable – borrow from JFK speechcraft, paint the shadowy religious bogeymen in monstrous colours – religious childminders who leave children in their own feces, religious parents who torture their children to death, religious chemists who refuse drugs to dying sinners – all mentioned in the book Attack of the Theocrats, by the way – impressing people with the need for their time, effort and money to eliminate these dangerous non-humans.  Yes, it does all sound eerily familiar, and as usual the religious character forms a generous-sized screen for projecting fears, whether you’re an ex-WWI corporal channeling the self-loathing of a country on the hard working Jewry, or an OPEC baron plotting a course for foreign oil, after the resistance of those to whom it belongs is dealt with using crushing force and monstrous savagery, to be chuckled at over celebratory press dinners.   Of course, religious abuses do exist, and Faircloth’s point – that in some cases they are protected by law from being investigated, and in other cases are enshrined somehow within the law itself – must be a sound one and worthy of support.  Even so, it seems a somewhat trivial goal, a matter of legislation and generating popular support, but then to a man with a hammer, every problem resembles a nail!

What is much less sound for a long-term movement is taking religion to task instead of human weakness itself: the same old sinners exist in every field of human endeavour and will not perform to order just because they’re presented with a new list of rules.  Power attracts the power hungry, and power tends to corrupt.  And once religion is gone, what to do about greed, moral decline, and human weakness itself, the root of the whole problem?  Or would all that magically disappear with religion?  To judge by the escalating cruelty of rich nations towards poorer ones, accompanied by an utterly repulsive callousness, this is a hard idea for anyone to believe.  Only to someone who blames religion for all the flaws in man, must it be a foregone conclusion.

War: Terrorism with a Much Bigger Budget

An eager journalist once asked Gandhi, “well, what do you think of Western Civilisation?” to which one of the most compassionate humans ever to walk this Earth replied, “I think it would be a very good idea.”  Human rights have been established and supposedly protected by every leading nation, but mentioning his own country only because it is the one he needs to galvanise, America is at the root of as much, or more, social inequality, imprisonments, executions, drug abuse, support for terror, rigged courts, rigged elections, racism, political nepotism, police brutality, widespread disillusionment, corruption, stock market greed and corporate-induced third world slavery as any other nation is or ever has been.

“Birth defects” doesn’t quite do justice to the reality of American savagery.  Not content with killing women and children, they mutilated a generation yet to be born.   Depleted uranium bullets, or “novel weapons” as the fawning American media describe them, were used freely.  Americans gladly paid the tax dollars, the Pentagon happily took the profit, Halliburton slyly awarded themselves the rebuild contracts, and Bush’s cronies got the oil.  But babies paid the price

This grotesque Frankenstein, together with its hunchbacked, fawning assistant NATO,  must also be responsible for more invasions, wars, threats of dreadful mass flayings and boilings alive via nuclear weapons, birth defects (whether from Agent Orange as reported by Christopher Hitchens himself, or depleted uranium, used in Fallujah and causing a massive proportion of deformities in the months after the slaughter, and still deforming 15% of all subsequent ones years later – in a country formerly so advanced medically that it carried out the world’s second heart transplant) and sheer human misery than any other country on Earth, and certainly more military spending than the rest of the planet combined.  Hatred for America is usually branded “terrorism” but it isn’t – it’s unvarnished revulsion.

Victims of “novel American weapons” in Fallujah: “..what we did in Iraq was the right thing to do. We got rid of one of the worst dictators of the 20th century.. a man who’d used weapons of mass destruction.” (Feb 17, 2010, This Week).  What Chene fails to mention is that Saddam – a sadistical, bungling assassin – was supported by America, and a grinning Rumsfield even shook hands with him after his gassing of Kurdish villages, advising him to keep quiet in case even the supine American media was critical.  George Bush Sr encouraged the Kurds to “rise up” against Saddam – then removed all Western support, allowing Saddam to freely massacre at least 200,000 of them.  All this apart from sanctions which ex-CIA Susan Lindauer confirms killed at least one million children – the UN only bothered counting the half a million children under the age of five.  When asked if half a million infants killed were a price worth paying to remove Saddam, a smiling Madeleine Albright said, “yes, I think so.”

It is into this blistering inferno that the atheists aim to prod still-maturing olive branches of intelligence and compassion, and seeing as these are the two features most lacking on the global stage, every sane person must wish them all the luck in the world.

Parent and child Fallujah victims of American invasion:
Reporting on massacres is sanitised for the American public.  After their helicopter attack near the village of Djila, the US military claimed it killed 11 among “a group of men planting a roadside bomb.” Only later did they acknowledge six dead civilians, but local residents claimed many more than 11 died, and that all were farmers or their children.  A disinterested media seeing foreigners as subhuman means these atrocities are seldom reported.  After massacres, the military blame “bad apples” and order the media to lay low to dull the focus.  This was the case with one of the worst mass murders in recent years – 16 sleeping villagers shot through the head by a disgruntled marine.  He compounded the atrocity by slicing off a woman’s hand as a souvenir, and trying to burn the children’s bodies.  His defenders manfully pleaded for compassion on the grounds of stress – a compassion never extended to any bereaved who want revenge.  They are rebranded as “insurgents” and the solution is made simple: kill them all

Enmeshed in politics and well aware of what is practical and what is not, Faircloth is careful not to demonise the weapons business, responsible for the largest still unaccounted-for heist in all of human history, that is, $2.3 trillion stolen by the Pentagon, or the guzzling of the planet’s resources by terawatt-bulb cities and massive SUVs, or for that matter the wrecking of its ecosystems.

Some might assume all these issues would naturally sort themselves out, if only the wretched religious types were restrained by flawless secular reasoning, but that reasoning is itself as unsound as expecting the Pentagon to remorsefully hand back all the money Rumsfeld admitted they stole; such simplistic reasoning might be the only way to market a polotical group to the masses, but is certainly a bad sign in a group devoted to the power of the intellect.  For example, abuses such as the experimentation on living black and Hispanic orphans by drugs companies in places such as the Incarnation Children’s Centre in New York are not pilloried in the ten point vision of secular America, because they are carried out on financial grounds, not religious ones.  Perhaps this is fair enough; reason and humanism cannot be inexhaustible resources, or their political forms all-powerful.  And probably at this entrenched stage, only a thorough shaking by Nature could release any privileged society’s ferocious throttling of the rest of the planet.

But in that case, perhaps the flags and disguises under which the abusers operate are not actually as relevant as the genetic decline the country as a whole finds itself in, where such abuses blossom unchecked, so that attempting to outlaw the symptoms using a piece of paper stamped with a Congressional Seal while leaving the actual causes free to fester is a futility that, contrary to the banner, fails to use any reasoning at all, on this day or any other.  One may as well demand that, in order to turn things around, the orchestra sliding down the deck of the Titanic must play a secular tune instead of that hymn.

NATO’s bombing campaign in Libya left 72 civilians dead last year, a leading human rights group said Monday, accusing NATO of failing to even acknowledge the deaths.
In a 76-page report, Human Rights Watch urged NATO to provide compensation to families for the civilian deaths, injuries and loss of property. HRW’s investigation at the sites of eight NATO air strikes found that 20 women and 24 children were among the 72 people killed.
“To date, NATO has failed to acknowledge these casualties or to examine how and why they occurred,” the New York-based group said in the report.

Religion: the Oxytocin of the Masses

Pedantic criticism aside – and I realise I am overly critical by nature, but Hell is no place for timid politeness – the attempt to rebrand atheists as affable and compassionate is long overdue, as most of them are as put off as everyone else by the angry stereotype bashing and mocking the faithful, first making a stupid cartoon of their beliefs, or attaching religion to acts of destruction which they can plainly see to be political in origin.  My experience of atheists generally bears out this more genial view; of course, some can be abrasive but others are warm and conscientious, human beings along the same lines as everyone – good, great, or indifferent.  If they are now all about compassion, who can fault it?

A step in the right direction: oxytocin molecule

We know these newly branded emotions of compassion – gratitude, forgiveness, love of your fellow man, generosity and the like – generate oxytocin, a highly complicated neurotransmitter manufactured consistently by a relatively small (and therefore well researched) group of neurons in the supraoptic nucleus, buried deep inside the brain, above the pituitary gland.  This single molecule is medically so important for every major bodily system, especially the brain, that any trend increasing its production must be a valuable contributor both to robust health and the essential hygiene of the brain.  A recent clinical trial of a cholesterol inhibitor deliberately sabotaged a protein in the cholesterol production chain, but the trial had to be called off when the patients started dropping dead at double the untreated rate.  The reason was probably that the same protein they sabotaged turned out to have a role in oxytocin delivery: someone might have saved tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of lives, if they had only bothered to do a little research.  Oh well – they were scientists and they meant well, so that’s alright then.

19th Century manuscript of the Bhagavad Gītā (Sanskrit: भगवद्गीता,  ˈbʱəɡəʋəd̪ ɡiːˈt̪aː Song of God), thought to date as early as 3000 BC.  Considered so important that in an age before widespread literacy, it was committed to memory and transmitted orally by each generation.  It was literally the mental cradle of later civilisations

A gift is pure when it is given from the heart to the right person at the right time and at the right place, and when we contemplate nothing in return. —The Bhagavad Gita

But apart from bodily health, the lack of oxytocin is a main factor responsible for, or possibly the result (nobody is too sure yet if its deficiency is the result of a genetic parameter, and if so, how flexible that parameter is) of human cruelty, a diluted form of which is the scorn and bitterness which atheists are understandably now trying to distance themselves from.  Therefore the essence of their movement is down to neurotransmitters, which is particularly ironic, as neurotransmitter manipulation is one of the principle aims of spiritual practices.

The Gandhāran Buddhist Texts circa 100 CE (British Museum Library).. earliest version of the Dhammapada Sutta

“Generosity, or dana in Sanskrit, is a power. Traditional teachings tell us that a life of generosity forms the ideal foundation for all other spiritual growth. We nourish this power when we offer a gentle word, an open mind, or a gift of food or money. Dana flowers when we are content with things as they are, when we let go of what is not needed, and when we do not take what is not freely given to us.” [www.opendharma.org]

To this end they might also be interested in trying meditation, which thickens the cortex, and dramatically sharpens the perceptive ability of the amygdala.  It also releases telomerase, which rebuilds the telomeres capping our chromosones, extending their copyable lifespan and therefore, our own.   Fasting may be a staple of religions but with good reason – it boosts the signalling capacity of neurons, though nobody is yet sure exactly why, but this is why apostles fasted before making decisions.  Another approach would be to visit awe-inspiring sights: architecture or sculpture intended to generate a soaring feeling of grandeur within the mind, tends to subdue the ego and accelerates the development of compassion: La Sagrada Familia and Cologne Cathedral come to mind, but the Spring Temple Buddha and Christ The Redeemer inspire the same emotions, as does the Statue of Liberty.

Aramaic extract from the Syriac Bible, circa 1216 (Bible Society, London / Bridgeman Art Library)

1. Matthew 5:42 – Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.
2. Matthew 23:23 – Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices – mint, dill and cummin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law – justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former.
   
3. Luke 19:8 – But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.”

Sights of natural beauty have a similar effect, activating wider areas of the brain simultaneously, causing the “big ideas” which occur on holiday in places of scenic beauty.  Reason dictates that if you need humanistic values, you need to consider the brain: methods to extend the various axes of our flexible brain capacity on which we hang the fabric of our personality, must surely be welcomed by atheists seeking to increase the compassionate value of their brand.

Would an atheist go to a religious building to help develop compassion? Probably not.   To appreciate the soaring architecture inspired by religious sentiment, then?  Certainly

One last idea won’t be of interest, but is nonetheless useful to know – trying to formulate one’s own idea of divinity, and attempting to keep it in mind during the scrum of life seems to expand mental calm, intuition, and perhaps by a strange form of osmosis, the gradual development of altrusitic traits within one’s own personality – all the well-known icons of divinity in human form enconpass altruism.

Mocked though they were by atheists before the rebranding, these icons nevertheless serve an essential purpose – planting an appealing ideal of mental perfection, subject to the varying capacity of every brain, drawing it by fits and starts to that evolutionary end.  This process is as certain as an anxious accountant drawn by his constant focus on the bottom line to ever more miserly acts, because of a law of the brain: like it or not, the mind becomes a mirror of whatever concepts it habitually dwells on, and though subject to upheavals and abuses like all harnesses to power, religion has formed a handy bulwark against despair and amorality over the centuries.

One of the original (Noble version) texts of the Qur’an

Whenever Prophet Muhammad met a miserly person, he advised him to be more generous and charitable.  Ibn `Abbas said that he heard Prophet Muhammad say, “The believer is not the one who eats when his neighbour beside him is hungry,” another companion heard the Prophet say, “The believer is simple and generous, but the wicked person is deceitful and ignoble.”

Shorn of lofty ideals, shorn of benevolent neurotransnmitters, the brain quickly falls prey to materialism, cynicism, selfishness, suspicion and hatred, and the 20th century is as good an example of this as we are ever likely to see, except perhaps for the 21st century.  An added benefit of developing positive characteristics is the increased expectation of these same traits in others – seen as equal members of the same universal consciousness – all of which adds, however gradually or imperfectly, to one’s optimistic social outlook, improving society a little, however slightly.  But that’s enough religious proposals – let’s not push our luck!

So, while compassionate atheists should be welcomed all over the world, the same welcome must be extended to any school of thought fostering such compassion – since compassion is compassion whether expressed by an atheist or the Mujahedin.  Such schools of thought would include those based on mankind’s scriptures, all of which – without exception, and regardless of abuses committed by those seduced away from them by politics and greed – emphasise the importance of cultivating that most important and highly regarded of all human qualities.

An atheist religion – who knows? It just might catch on!

The Impressionable Mind

After the collapse of the USSR, the Pentagon was faced with an embarrassing problem for the war business: the sudden absence of an enemy.  Accordingly, the CIA put great effort into funding and training new bogeymen, one of which became Al Qaeda.  But as Pentagon experts pointed out in 1999, a vague threat from dissenters somewhere in a foreign land would never be enough to convince contented Americans that colossal sums of money must be continually diverted to the war machine.

It was therefore proposed that a massive incident be engineered, to coincide with “terrorist exercises”, and thereby rely later on blaming confusion for the lack of any defensive action.  As a smiling Nick Rockefeller confided to the late Aaron Russo late in 2000, Americans would soon see the presentation of a massive hoax, namely the “war on terror” in which US soldiers would pointlessly search for “terrorists” in caves, and a fearful public would back any repressive measures at home and abroad.

The WoT was worded vaguely enough to be applied in any direction, for decades, with never any conclusion – the ideal environment for the war business – with the added benefit of being applicable against American citizens, perhaps those protesting against global murder, resisting crackdowns, or simply thinking for themselves.  All that was lacking was a memorable “attack” which would sear itself onto the public mind, generating sympathy at home and abroad, and one which could be pointed to again and again as a justification for warmongering, and of course for stealing billions of dollars.  See also 9/11: When Religion Becomes the Patsy.

Harley Guy and Friend waiting for their cue as Fox reporter Rick Leventhal sets the scene with a description of what the whole world just saw. Notice HG never takes his eyes off Leventhal; when he turns slowly as if to cue the start of the interview, HG reacts immediately, ready to step forward, then relaxes as Leventhal keeps talking

Within moments of the first explosions, hired actors were on the streets giving interviews including the puzzling “Harley Guy” – supposedly a Fox staffer named Mark Walsh, armed with a stilted script and theatrical arm waving (“..and then I witnessed both towers collapse.  One first, and then the second – mostly due to structural failure because the fire was just too intense”), who never stepped forward later to explain how he managed to present virtually the entire 9/11 Commission Report’s conclusion only moments after the event, while experts were still scratching their heads about the first time a steelframe building had totally collapsed through fire, even after airplane collisions.  Walsh also seems enthused about the action-packed nature of the event, as if his excited speech was rehearsed well away from the horror suffered by victims.

Leventhal then reminds him of this, the most important part of the whole story, and the one most frequently relied upon as justification for years of invasions, kidnappings, torture, removal of human rights around the globe, and constitutional rights within America, and of course vast military spending (at a time when American society is facing internal collapse and widespread poverty ) later on.  The acting was so bad that various C-list actors came under suspicion as having stood in for Walsh, but all that was needed was a reasonable memory, some improv skill and common-man appeal, and an American manufacturer patriotically displayed on the t-shirt woudn’t hurt.

Equally strange is Mark Walsh’s “roommate” (second arrow) who lurks in the background before, during and after the interview, with nothing to say and no body language connection at all to Walsh – despite supposedly being a roommate and both men presumably being united as witnesses to the biggest attack since Pearl Harbour – and completely disinterested in the events unfolding around him.  All other bystanders are staring down the street and reacting instantly to events around them, but the roommate never takes his eyes off the interview, during part of which he leans in close, which Leventhal seems unprepared for and surprised about.  A more indepth analysis exists on this street theatre, pointing out the MIB roommate’s links with other agents on the street, as they reach for ear pieces at the same time and manouevre Leventhal out of the way, presumably in response to external prompting.

As Scientific American pointed out in a recent article, initial impressions are almost impossible to dislodge once accepted.  In one experiment, a group of university students was told a bus full of old and disabled people had crashed; the students were then asked to propose logical reasons why passengers found themselves unable to leave the bus.  Predictable causes such as bad hips, difficulty walking, poor eyesight, lack of wheelchairs, etc were all given.  The students were then told that a mistake had been made – that in fact all the  passengers were young, healthy athletes.  What reasons could now be given to explain their inability to leave the bus?  Almost the same answers were offered by the students, despite their seeming absurd in the context of the new information.   After a powerful first impression, the human mind will go to any lengths – even defying common sense – to preserve what it has already accepted as reality.

The same pattern is seen in cases of abuse, where an initial fond, optimistic impression is clung to in spite of devastating experience to the contrary.  The phenomenon of imprinting, in which famous faces seem familiar, and therefore trustworthy, is continually used by advertisers but its effect is also well known to dictators.  In Saddam’s Iraq, it was illegal not to have a picture of Saddam Hussein displayed prominently in every place of business.  The effect is to insinuate and reinforce a sense of trustworthiness and legitimacy – even on behalf of demented psychopaths – into the mass mind.

All these pretences supporting the WoT seem obvious now in retrospect, but the paranoid anti-Islamic sentiment it stirred up – gleefully boosted by enemies of religion such as Richard Dawkins (Alien and Earthly Rubbish) – also seeped into some susceptible trigger-happy minds of the military brass, to whom every difficulty calls out for a murderous solution.  Of course, resistance in Iraq and Afghanistan is pointed to as a reason for more military action, but such resistance against the West is very easy to explain – since we invaded and bombed their countries.  But common sense has long been abandoned in the hype and media circus. Often the argument against religion fallen back on by atheists is that only the religious would embark on acts of mass destruction “just like they did in 9/11″.  What is never explained is how any followers of religion would see mass murder as helping their cause.  Time and again, the enemies of religion point to the twin towers.  What they should actually be pointing to is the Pentagon, and the trillions of unaccounted dollars stolen from the American people.

The horrendous consequences of the manipulation of the human are illustrated in the following article by David Usborne, in today’s Independent, which shows how appalling massacres are presented as legitimate steps just as much today as they ever were in the past:

A red-faced Pentagon has conceded that an instructor at its Joint Forces College in Virginia for military officers was until recently teaching a course advocating “total war” with Islam that could require obliterating the holy cities of Mecca and Medina without concern for civilian deaths.

The material in the course, which officers could elect to take but was not obligatory, flew in the face of repeated assertions by the Obama administration that the war on terrorism is just that and should under no circumstances be read as an assault on a religion observed by 1.4 billion people around the world.

Details of the course were obtained by a blog on Wired.com, drawn from a presentation given by the teacher, Lt. Col. Matthew Dooley, in July last year.  He suggested that destroying Islamic holy sites would follow the precedents of the nuclear strike by the allies on Hiroshima in World War II and the firebombing of Dresden. His course was called ‘Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism’.

It was suspended in April after the Pentagon received a complaint from a student and Lt. Col. Dooley, while still at the College, no longer has any teaching duties.  The FBI, meanwhile, has revealed that it too has recently been forced to revise some of its instructional materials to excise references that could have been insulting to Islam.

“It was just totally objectionable, against our values, and it wasn’t academically sound,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Martin Dempsey, said at a press conference at the Pentagon. “This wasn’t about … pushing back on liberal thought; this was objectionable, academically irresponsible.”

Dooley offered a theoretical war plan based on the need for “a direct ideological and philosophical confrontation with Islam”. In his presentation, he said: “They hate everything you stand for and will never coexist with you, unless you submit”. He added that as America waged that war it would be free to ignore provisions of the Geneva Convention that sets the rules for armed conflict as “no longer relevant”.

“This would leave open the option once again of taking war to a civilian population wherever necessary (the historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki being applicable…).”  Saying Islam has already declared war on the US, Dooley called the current American stance of seeking common ground with Islamic leaders around the world as “illogical” and the better option was “waging ‘near total war’”.

“We have now come to understand that there is no such thing as ‘moderate Islam’,” Dooley said in the July presentation. “It is therefore time for the United States to make our true intentions clear. This barbaric ideology will no longer be tolerated. Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction.”

Offered five times a year for groups of 20 at a time, the course may have been taught to as many as 800 mid-level and senior US military officers before the Pentagon closed it down.  Lt. Col. Dooley was himself a highly decorated officer who had served in Iraq, Bosnia and and Kuwait among others.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/pentagon-instructor-urged-total-war-with-islam-7737807.html

Truth: A Strange Substance

I remember Gopi Krishna once saying that truth is a strange substance, that it grows stronger in adversity and enlarges itself in the face of opposition.  With this in mind I have confidence that the hijackings which took place on 9/11 – by that I mean, the hijacking of civil rights, the hijacking of trillions of US tax dollars, the  hijacking of foreign governments, the hijacking of foreign energy reserves, and the hijacking of religion as a patsy – by a colossal war machine which needs new armed conflicts like a shark travelling through water to stay alive, will fail to have a permanent effect on the human race.

The stated desire for the American world order is indeed to gain control of cyber space, control of the air, control of energy reserves, and even control of outer space.  Kissinger once said that just because a country was starving was a poor reason to send food aid.  He has come to symbolise the old mentality, as he is viewed with mounting distaste even by the American media, who now realise his views no longer carry authority and are actually unpalatable even to the mainstream viewer.  In the end, the one thing which no authority can completely gain control of is the fast rising consciousness of the mass mind.

The mass mind, and every generation alive today, now has access to tools which 60 years ago nobody could even dream about.  When hundreds of thousands of completely innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were cremated in nuclear ovens, the publishing of photos of the victims was forbidden for 12 years, for fear that public opinion would turn against America.  The world’s media tamely kept silent, publishing instead pictures of ruined buildings.  I have included some of these photos in The Scient-Autist At Work: In the Slaughterhouse, and even now, 67 years later, people write that they have never seen them before.  Why?

When hellish weapons are used these days – or even when localised acts of police or military brutality take place -  even a single mobile phone can records the damage, and within moments the footage is on the internet for millions to see.  This is partly why atrocities carried out in the modern age hit the modern mind with much more force.  Not only has there been a moral elevation, due to the gradual trend of evolution, producing an ever larger segnment of the race unwilling to permit mass devastation of foreign countries, but there has been an increase in perceptive ability too: people today are much more aware that media spins and glib, smiling crooks dressed in sharp suits, are to divert funds away from the common man and into the pockets of the elite.

As a reaction to the horrors of global inequality and the sheer pointlessness, beyond a certain point, of material possessions, there is even a movement is gaining strength in which people are abandoning the race for possessions, choosing instead a life devoted to inner development and altruism.  This itself is the core of spirituality, and religion is the evidence of its development in many forms, through the mass mind in all of history.  Even among the militant atheists, the tendency has had its effect, and instead of beating up religion, many meetings are now devoted to a more humane and equal social order, based on reason rather than priviledge.

This heightened sense of awareness and justice can be seen among the rank and file shareholders of major corporations, who no longer consider their own needs as subservient to the mania of the directors:

Aviva has been dragged into the firing line after dishing out pay packages worth up to £5.2million to its chief executive Andrew Moss and £4.2million for his Australian right-hand man Trevor Matthews, who only joined the firm in December. This included a ‘controversial’ £2.5million ‘golden hello’ payment.

Almost 60 per cent of votes failed to back the insurer’s remuneration report, which sanctioned the payments. Some 54 per cent – which came from private shareholders and giant pension funds – actively protested against the insurer’s multi-million pound bonuses. Aviva, which has 14million customers in the UK after swallowing up Norwich Union, joined the ranks of state-backed Royal Bank of Scotland and oil giant Shell which both faced rebellions at the height of the financial crisis in 2009.

Lord Oakeshott, the Liberal Democrat peer who has campaigned against excessive pay in the City, said the move showed the need for government reforms which will give shareholders formal power to stop excessive pay deals. Currently, companies can ignore shareholders’ pleas for restraint.

But Lord Oakeshott added: ‘A tsunami of shareholder anger is now hitting overpaid and underperforming big businesses. Although Barclays boss Bob Diamond is “Mr Greedy” personified, the revolt is rightly going wider.’

(..James Salmon, MailOnline)

Because of these three factors: a more global awareness, an increasing number with heightened morality, and increased technology – itself a necessary companion to the other two – it has become harder and harder to flatten dissent, since once crushed in one area, it soon springs up in a dozen more.  This is the reason why increased armaments and military actions are required, along with the cancelling of civil liberties, under the handy banner “the war on terror”.

In fact the war is not on terror, but on resistance, as a glance over the last ten years will amply show.  This war on resistance will need to be upgraded sharply if it is to deal with the widespread use of modern technology and the growing conscience to use it to spread feelings of outrage.  Recently a documentary on Joseph Kony went from a handful of views on YouTube to 112 million within a single week.  My children and their friends were swept up in this trend, and spoke at length about what they had seen.  This could never have occurred at any time in the past, because the most sensitive and morally alert brains, those of the children, were always several steps removed from even the sanitised view of the world presented to the adults.  This represents a change with massive potential, as a rising generation now sees the world for what it is, and not for what it pretends to be.

Often we sense the birth of an idea or sentiment from our own awareness, and are surprised when we find that many others are behaving and thinking in the same way, independent of any contact with us.  Because of the idea that minds are separate, we dismiss it as coincidence – our single answer to all the complexities of mind – but in fact it shows a greater movement of new concepts throughout a large number of minds more or less simultaneously.  The most sensitive are the first to sense it and act upon it, appearing as a curiosity to others who are otherwise engaged mentally or who have reasoned away their own impressions.

In the days of the Colisseum, a visiting monk, appalled at the bloody carnage, leapt into the ring to attempt to stop it.  The furious crowd stoned him to death.  But less than fifty lyears later, popular sentiment had caught up with his advanced sensitivity, and the mass which had demanded their bloodlust be satisfied now recognised the inhumanity of the spectacle.  The only way to account for this is a gradual development of the mass mind, which in evolutionary terms, has become extremely rapid today.

Only yesterday a commenter on the Independent mentioned with fury the billion people starving on the planet, and received jibes from those who regarded his “perma anger” as amusing.  In the days of witch burning or public torture, crowds who felt no pang of conscience at the pointless horror also looked on with amusement at those who were sickened by it.  We give thanks today for the centuries which stand between us and medieval times; it is safe to say our descendants will be grateful for the gulf of years between them and us.

The heartening aspect of all this is that no matter the outrages perpetrated in the name of aggression, mass consciousness will have the last word.  The more people care, the more they are willing to recognise internal dissent within their own selves, and stand up for what they feel inside to be true, the faster the movement will spread, and the less power the aggressors will have, and the less damage overall they will cause to the human race.

The same patterns of dissent appeared in the past, when ruling nations became so corrupted that aggression began to outweigh altruism.  In fact a visiting monk, horrified at the carnage, once leapt into the Colisseum to protest the slaughter, and was stoned to death by the crowds for so doing.  But fifty years later, the Colisseum’s bloody sports were brought to an end by the same popular opinion which condemned the well-meaning and morally alert Christian to death in the heat of their bloodlust.

The brain always has the last word: at a certain point, societies ruled by despots refused to tolerate their growing sense of injustice, simply because their consciousness enlarged to where the needlessly subservient nature of their own position dawned on them, and they felt as strongly about ruling their own lives as they had previously felt about the need for external authority.

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An excellent film by the German company NuoViso sums up the events leading up to 9/11 and the aftermath; it is the most lucid and coherently presented summary I have ever seen of the attempt to hijack the planet based on a fictional aggression, and which I hope will one day garner as many viewers as the documentary based on the Kony outrages:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWcg4BqO96k&feature=player_embedded#!

The eagerness to co-opt science and, of course, morally bankrupt scientists in order to accelerate global aggression is summed up in the following extract from a 1999 document prepared by a director of US defence policy, rather misleadingly called Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century.

The appalling mindset of those in charge of American foreign policy prior to 9/11 is shown by their view that every possible theatre of war should be considered viable, and no expedient overlooked, including even racial genocide – enthusiastically presented as a useful political tool:

Although it may take several decades for the process of transformation to unfold, in time, the art of warfare on air, land, and sea will be vastly different than it is today, and “combat” likely will take place in new dimensions: in space, “cyber-space,” and perhaps the world of microbes.

Air warfare may no longer be fought by pilots manning tactical fighter aircraft sweeping the skies of opposing fighters, but a regime dominated by long-range, stealthy unmanned craft. On land, the clash of massive, combined-arms armored forces may be replaced by the dashes of much lighter, stealthier and information-intensive forces, augmented by fleets of robots, some small enough to fit in soldiers’ pockets.

Control of the sea could be largely determined not by fleets of surface combatants and aircraft carriers, but from land- and space-based systems, forcing navies to maneuver and fight underwater. Space itself will become a theater of war, as nations gain access to space capabilities and come to rely on them; further, the distinction between military and commercial space systems – combatants and noncombatants – will become blurred.

Information systems will become an important focus of attack, particularly for U.S. enemies seeking to short-circuit sophisticated American forces.

And advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.

..Thomas Donnelly, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, 1999.

From 1995 to 1999, Donnelly was policy group director and a professional staff member for the House Committee on Armed Services. Mr. Donnelly also served as a member of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.  He is a former editor of Armed Forces Journal, Army Times, and Defense News.

Worlds Within Worlds

This morning a reader in Arizona kindly sent me an excerpt from Hidden Beauty: Microworlds Revealed, by France Bourély.  This book seems to be one which, like The Science Delusion and The Machinery of Life should be on everyone’s bookshelf, recommending as it does a much wider and view of evolution, and one more in accordance with observed fact.

This marvellous essay from it – embellished with a few purely random photos from my files – is called “Chance or Beauty”:

Why, if beauty is universal, would it not have played a role in evolution?  yet, not one university has proposed to conduct a scientific study.  Differing from the Darwinists, I do not believe that life can be reduced solely to competition between species that are more or less adapted.  It is time to bring a few “mutations” to this theory that is significantly more stable than the “variations” on which it is based.  Symbiosis, cooperation, and interdependence also deserve to be acknowledged as engines of evolution.  However, more than chance, they obey beauty.

Beauty is indeed a powerful force and a law of life.  A billion years ago, the first “organised” living beings were born from a combination of numerous individual cells that joined forces and combined their abilities to meld into a new being from which emerged new talents that until then were unknown.  These original qualities gradually favoured the adaptation of the new organism.  Forms of life that were progressively more sophisticated developed, and natural selection eliminated those less able.  If there is strength in unity, it is indeed innovation that maintains it. 

Darwin, the youngest son of an Anglican pastor, befroe establishing himself as a naturalist of genius proportions, experienced the rivalries within his own family, as he later would the secret tensions in his parish and those more public between individuals in his village.  His acute observations of nature would always retain this idea of competition.  Struggle, conflict, and above all, survival are weapons of Darwinian strategy. 

In the context of England as a colonizer, and in the throes of the Industrial Revolution, the weak were held in contempt and Darwin eased the conscience of the strong.  I refuse to reduce life to the principles of war.  Einstein said, “God is subtle but not malicious!”  No, even if it is true that life, the eternal pioneer, likes border disputes, it cannot be reduced to a factory managed by military leaders who would manufacture “weakness” to fill the ranks.

Life is above all an artist who, in keeping with creative desire, takes the time to invent.  Over millions of years, it has created union, symbiosis, cohabitation, and interdependence, and for weapons, it has provided love and beauty.

It is high time we bestow upon science more femininity, so that we finally recognise that, within nature, there is a form of ceullular affinity and attraction.  Life’s favourite assistance is not chance.  More than the risks of variation, the allies that it cherishes are bonds, coupling, and the union that precedes all birth.  The universe has been pairing electrons within atoms since their inception.  There are duos in every fundamental stage of the living.  Is not DNA itself, with its paired chromosones, an alliance of two complementary chains that in addition to the close bond of their links, interlace into a double helix suggesting a ritual between two serpents in love?

The first bacterium that dared to unite with another instead of killing it and absorbing it did more for the evolution of the species than all mutations in the world.  I like to think that a certain form of beauty, even archaic, played a role in this primordial affinity.  Symbiosis is a sacred bond that unites often profoundly different beings.  Despite Darwin’s views, life, like the woman who bears it, will always prefer marriage to war.

..France Bourély, translated by Laurel Hirsch

 

The illusion of a Crumbling Worldview

“Scientists don’t have a clue how life began..  geologists, chemists, astronomers and biologists are as stumped as ever by the riddle of life.”

(..Science journalist John Horgan, February 28, 2011 (former senior writer at Scientific American) after the Origins Project Conference, Arizona State University.)

“We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality”

(..Eric Bapteste, evolutionary biologist, Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris)

“The tree-of-life concept was absolutely central to Darwin’s thinking, equal in importance to natural selection.  Without it the theory of evolution would never have happened.”

(..W. Ford Doolittle, biologist, Dalhousie University, Halifax)

“We’ve just annihilated the tree of life.  It’s not a tree any more, it’s a different topology entirely.  It is clear that the Darwinian tree is no longer an adequate description of how evolution in general works.”

(..Biologist Michael Syvanen of the University of California)

“The tree of life is politely buried, we all know that. What’s less accepted is that our whole fundamental view of biology needs to change.. biology is vastly more complex than we thought.”

(..Michael Rose, evolutionary biologist,  University of California, Irvine)

It is hard to understand how someone who once said “I despise faith” can admit he relies on it to support a scientific theory.  What is the difference between something which only has the appearance of faith, and faith itself?

A 2003 interview with Richard Dawkins in the BBC’s Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief contained the following strange logic:

Three minutes into the embedded interview, in speaking of the purported instances of irreducible complexity in nature, Richard Dawkins succeeds in decimating any pretense to neo-Darwinism’s status as a falsifiable proposition.

“There cannot have been intermediate stages that were not beneficial.  There’s no room in natural selection for foresight.. it doesn’t happen like that. There’s got to be a series of advantages all the way.. if you can’t think of one, then that’s your problem, not natural selection’s problem.”

Is Richard Dawkins suggesting that the purported explanatory adequacy of neo-Darwinism is not a testable proposition? If there are no biochemical systems which cannot be accounted for by NS, then how to evaluate Darwinism’s explanatory adequacies? At what point is one justified in saying, ‘NS is inadequate.. and we must hence search for an alternative’?

“Well, I suppose that it is a sort of matter of faith on my part since the theory is so coherent and so powerful.”

EvolutionNews.org

But what exactly is so coherent and so powerful?  His unshakeable faith, certainly.  But if he means the efficiency of the mechanism, and its infallible progress across all planes of biology, then that is what he is obliged to demonstrate.

The irreducible complexity argument is well known, and stands to reason, but to get around it, vast treatises are produced desperate to explain away what is clearly a well ordered mechanism.   I once saw a 27 page dissertation explaining how the bacterial flagellum could have arisen by several hundred flukes.  A moment’s thought shows every stage of the conversion of matter to life to be irreducibly complex.  There is no stage from which one can extrapolate random behaviour into a path to the next higher level, and the simple reason is that each requires a decisive shift in direction and a greater order of complexity than before.

The illusion of purposeful design with zero component wastage, as distinct from actual purposeful design with zero component wastage

The atoms require an external injection of order to form a set of amino acids, each with specific qualities.  Can we demonstrate this process blindly by chance?  No, because left to themselves, the atoms remain whatever they have always been, with no particular purpose in mind.  The amino acids require massive organisation to form working machinery: can we demonstrate this assembly by blind chance?  No, because left to themselves, the amino acids remain what they are: strangely shaped molecules which, like bricks, have no particular use apart from a specific role in a rigidly defined structure that does not yet exist.  Where is that structure kept?  In the DNA.  But from where does this information come from, and can we demonstrate its collation by random factors?  Absolutely not: there is no room for spanners thrown casually into a gearbox where machinery works at millions of cycles per second: the result would be a disaster.

In fact the machinery seems configured to prevent errors, works to stamp them out, and where this fails, perhaps due to external attacks, other intricate machinery steps in to repair the damage.  It is impossible to imagine this collection of ingenuity as a hive of errors.

So it quickly becomes obvious why faith is required to bridge gap after gap.  Never mind a “God of the gaps” – this is a theory to deal only in gaps.

“The number of intermediate varieties which have formerly existed on Earth must be truly enormous.  Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links?  Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory.”

(..C Darwin, On the Origin of Species)

The emergence of species over time from simpler to more complex seems a certainty, but the cause behind lifeless, aimless atoms becoming purposeful, determined creatures remains a matter of faith: there are gaps in evolution handily filled in by continuous lines on a chart, but where are the missing pieces?  Mostly, they exist in the minds of the faithful; the reason given being that intermediate forms do not survive for long.  In that case, how can they be called a successful base for future models, and why are species divided rigidly into discrete, consistent forms, and not a gradual blend of countless intermediaries?  Natural selection.

Atlas moth, illusion of a snake's head disguise

At the lowest level of machinery, how do proteins find their way to the exact spot where they are needed?  Natural selection.  How is physical energy converted into thought?  Natural selection.  How does the body know to grow a thin layer of hair in a last ditch attempt to keep warm?  Natural selection.  Why do mothers hold their babies with the head facing to the left?  Natural selection.  Why does the mother’s internal hip have a corkscrew shape built in to turn the baby’s head on exit from the womb?  Natural selection. How is it that the large scale structures of the body seem to shape themselves to a precise pattern so strong that it survives – consistently and completely intact – the death of countless individuals manifesting it over spans of hundreds of millions of years?  Natural selection.

Eyed Hawk moth, illusion of a fox disguise

How is it that in every organism not a single part is extraneous to the overall design and how does every cell respond to the needs of the organism as a whole, living on a level which it – being aimless matter – can have no knowledge of?  Natural selection.  Why does all life have a certain purpose which they adhere to, come what may?  Natural selection, silly!  The phrase can be used left right and centre, morning, noon and night.  It is like listening to an orchestra which only plays one note, at full volume.  But is natural selection a force, a mechanism, a theory, a result of mechanical processes or a fantasy?  Nobody can say.

Butterfly leaf - completely convincing illusion of disguise. But is the disguise a lucky illusion, or is it the illusion of a lucky disguise? It gets confusing

Besides all this, there is a gulf in scale of dozens of orders of magnitude between a perfectly working molecular machine and a functioning organism.  Next to a cell, the organism is a lumbering colossus of titanic proportions and requires a different massing of order and timing, and a different set of defences and precautions than any of the molecular components working at staggering speeds – performing actions up to ten million times per second – simultaneously within trillions of cells.  Even at rest, we recline on a universe of bustling energy, the scale of which is far beyond imagining.

We draw a straight line from the molecular level to the familiar human world it produces.  But where are the intermediary determinants of order governing the precise form of specialised systems such as the liver, the heart, the brain, or the cochlea? These large scale organs are comprised of billions of cells, no single one of which has the least control over or interest in the organ as a whole – and other than the imaginative characteristics we drape them with, like the selfishness of genes or the malevolence of viruses, they can have no interest in a level of existence completely out of their scope of activity,  any more than a grain of sand looks after a sandcastle.  The links must exist, but their nature is still unknown, and so certainty must be a sign of pretence, or of faith.

The high prices charged for works of art often benefit from industry hype, but sustained over long periods they acknowledge that making memorable impressions on our senses requires unusual skill; they also treat the illusion of design as design itself

Richard Dawkins often states that nature continually shows the illusion of design; he said this only recently at a Rally for Reason in America.  In fact molecular biologists freely admit they remind themselves every day that the illusion of design cannot be design, for they do not see any designer, and nor can imagine one capable of the feats they observe.  Thus their position arises as much from a sheer lack of imagination as from faith.  An atheist told me only three days ago, “of course I’m an atheist, and it’s because I can’t believe that some old man on a mountain created the Universe.“  You start to see the problem with this kind of restricted mind.

But concerning the evidence in front of us, what we need to know is how the difference between a thoroughly convincing illusion of design and design itself, can be measured?

If I construct a painting which consistently maintains the illusion of being great art, down to the placement, tone, value and chroma of every last molecule of paint, is it not then by definition, the same thing exactly as great art?  If the idea that such a work can emerge from my hands without any effort on my part appears to be absurd, is this not reasonably convincing evidence that it may well be an impossibility?  If on the other hand we so quickly discard the impressions of our own intelligence, what is the point of having it in the first place, or claiming it to be a trustworthy sense when making proclamations about theories?

The Gecko takes advantage of nanoscale engineering to create superb, flexible adhesive grip. Why doesn't every animal have it? Hmmm, I think I'm going to say.. natural selection!

If an author were to write a book which had the illusion of being well thought out, beautifully illustrated and soundly reasoned, which met all challenges and outlasted all the endless carping and whining of critics, perhaps remaining in circulation for decades, does it not mean it must in fact be all of these things, or every bit as good as if it were?  It is to find flaws in an apparently perfect system that randomisers try to find flaws in the illusion of design, but so far they have come up short.  Tonsils, “junk” DNA, the appendix, and the backwards facing retina are all now known to be instances of far more complex design considerations, ironically bringing attention to deficiencies in the materialistic theories instead.

When a woman goes to a glittering event presenting the illusion of being well made up, the illusion of being perfectly dressed, and the illusion of being punctual, gracious, impeccably behaved, polite and well mannered, what else can we conclude except that she must be all of these things, or at the very least, so aware of their determining factors that she can summon them at will, and is prepared to do so when called for, or that they are convincing elements of her own personality?  How do we establish with certainty the difference between this impeccable illusion of class, and class itself?

Were she to commit some slip of etiquette we might realise that the illusion is not as perfect as we thought.  But would a normal human being grasp in desperation at any perceived error – inventing or presuming them if none couldbe found – in order to loudly denounce her to the world as a worthless outcast, unless the aim was to make themselves look good by comparison?

The deceptive appearance of taste and colour had absolutely everybody fooled. They were, in reality, nothing but only colourless, tasteless, unappetising atoms - as proved by science! The shame of it - how could we have been duped for so long?!

Lastly, suppose one constructs a mechanical device or speech or book or theory which has the illusion of being sloppy, weakly designed, badly thought out and full of dreadful oversights, should we not conclude it must be formed of precisely these qualities, or of ones so similar in the impression made on our mind that we can dismiss it as if it were?  How else could such an illusion appear?

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were staggered to be toldby scientists investigating the composition of their house that it was nothing more than worthless bricks, held together with a filthy mixture of sand and cement. To make matters worse, what they had assumed were beautifully polished mahogany floors and windowsills were in fact just organic materials cut from dead trees

If any of the above are in the least true, it indicates that if the illusion of design is  indistinguishable from design itself, this is precisely the evidence needed that design is in fact present.

Beyonce maintained the illusion of being well dressed while accepting the illusion of an award for a record which somehow appeared to be a best seller. She later maintained the illusion of being pregnant, and followed this impressive feat with the illusion of producing a newborn baby. Impressive - but I hope nobody was fooled by such shenanigans!

I can’t imagine a spider with a disordered half-working silk spigot making much progress as a spider or a half-constructed hemoglobin molecule doing anything useful as a carrier of oxygen in a fluid.  I can’t imagine half an ATP synthase motor or any part of it working apart from the whole to create ATP.  All these weird imaginings have the illusion of being a mess.  Would they not, therefore, be a mess every bit as messy as the illusory state of messiness they present to our senses?   Of course, if all this disordered stuff blindly assembled itself into a supremely ordered state, would that not be an even more remarkable thing than anything religion ever suggested?

In the highly demanding field of molecular biology, imagination is needed as well as intelligence.  Without it, how can we ever move exccept in the same old rut?  Appealing to faith instead of hard, solid proposals is not what you would expect from an enemy of faith itself, especially one who maintains the illusion of being the champion of random.

“Zombie science is science that is dead but will not lie down. Zombie science is supported because it is useful propaganda. Zombie science is deployed in arenas such as political rhetoric, public administration, management, public relations, marketing and the mass media generally.  It persuades, it constructs taboos, it buttresses some kind of rhetorical attempt to shape mass opinion.  Indeed, zombie science often comes across in the mass media as being more plausible than real science.”

(..Bruce G Charlton, 2008  Medical Hypotheses, Vol. 71, pp. 327-329.)

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Introductory quotes originally from New Scientist 21 Jan 2009. Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life, by Graham Lawton and concluding quote sourced from  John Michael Fisher’s excellent article on evolution:  http://www.newgeology.us/presentation32.html

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