Forms Most Beautiful

A poem by Mary Oliver

2009-11-20T23:41:00.001-05:00

The Summer Day
By Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Vermont school gets smart

2009-11-11T18:49:00.002-05:00

A town in Vermont has placed the Pledge of Allegiance out of classrooms? Watch Michael Newdow work the Faux News anchor on the topic despite the interruptions.

Thoughts?

Confluence of fun! Comfort comes when there is a lecture on teaching creationism

2009-11-11T18:26:00.003-05:00

This is too good to be true. On the day that Comfort's and Cameron's no-talent retrograde moron show comes to campus to sling lowest-common-denominator mud about evolution, two professors from Penn State's own political science department will be lecturing on what biology teachers actually teach, who influences what's taught, and how this plays out politically. Come on out!

Good without God

2009-11-06T06:12:00.004-05:00

Austin Dacey has written a blogpost, "Putting God out of the Ethics Business," at Psychology Today on the "good without God" posters up in New York City. For the secularists, skeptics, and Unitarians among us, this is a no brainer in most ways. Dacey Writes,

By now you may have heard about or seen the "good without God" posters in the subways of New York City and elsewhere. Media outlets from the New York Times to Fox News have characterized them as ads promoting atheism. Yet while the campaign aims to reach out to nonbelievers, it also raises a broader issue--something most people seem to have missed.
The obvious meaning of "good without God" is that atheists can be good people. But a closer look reveals a more universal message: people can be good regardless of their beliefs about God. From this perspective, the ad was not about atheism, but about the nature of morality. (I'm writing this blog post along with Michael De Dora, Jr., a spokesperson for the New York City campaign.)
When we act ethically, our reasons are usually nothing transcendental, just simple respect and compassion for others.

This is a strong point to keep in mind. In our proverbial hearts and minds we consider other people because we are social animals and rational animals. Obviously, some of us more social and/or rational than others. Our moral notions rest in our consideration of others. No single principle exists outside of human action and experiences that dictates whether or not an action is good or bad. We humans are the arbiters of our own actions.

Some will say that we need to look outside of ourselves when we act. We do. We look to and at one another and weigh consequences to ourselves and others in relation to ourselves. What occurs is both a deeply selfish act in many cases and an act of compassion - suffering with. It can result, and we might say should result, in placing one's self to the best of one's ability in another's position. But we can't help but escape that our understanding of others' positions rests in the theater of our own brains and experiences. And yet, this evolved capacity creates much of our richest experiences.

No God or transcendental experiences need enter there to show us that we make decisions based on our understandings of our social interactions in a natural environment. Consequences show us justice. Angels do not. Pain and joy teach us about mercy and generosity. Spirits do not. We do this together. This is plainly naturalist phenomena in a natural world.

God(s) and its/their commandments muddle the picture with dogma. As Dacey writes, "No set of commandments is self-authorizing. It cannot tell us why we should follow it, rather than some other set. Of course, it would be no help to add an Eleventh Commandment: Thou Shalt Follow Commandments since the same question would arise about that commandment."

Commandments fail because they are overly rigid. In our fluid social, cultural, and ecological milieu, morality must also be somewhat fluid. But our evolved capacities at any time are not sieves through which anything can or ought to simply cascade and run empty. Rather, it is like a a slowly changing stream bed down which we and our morality travels.

We can and should be "good without God."

How Christian of you to help the poor

2009-10-27T22:15:00.003-04:00

This is when I want to go ballistic. The Worldview Times says:

Environmental alarmism is being exploited to chip away at national sovereignty. The latest threat to American liberties may be found in the innocuous sounding Copenhagen Climate Treaty, which will be discussed at the United Nations climate-change conference in mid-December. The alert was sounded on the treaty in a talk given by British commentator Lord Christopher Monckton at Bethel College in St. Paul, Minn., on Oct. 14. Video of the talk has become an Internet sensation.

The treaty's text is not yet finalized but its principles are aimed at regulating all economic activity in the name of climate security, with a side effect that billions of dollars would be transferred from productive countries to the unproductive.

Because it's all their fault that their land was raped by the good and white Christian people and then they get to pay for our transformation of the climate. Repulsive. How's the compassion working over there? Is there any wonder that sane people think that Christianity is a blanket for economically criminal people? As if creationism weren't bad enough they have to be ecologically retarded, invested in the exploitation of "unproductive" countries and their people, and addicted to the growth economy which makes everyone ecocidal and pro-slavery.

Way to love your neighbors guys. Don't forget: Jesus loves you.

Freshwater Redux

2009-10-23T20:29:00.004-04:00

Quite a while back I posted some stuff about an Ohio "science" teacher who was teaching creationism and allegedly abusing students with a Tesla coil. In my original post I said he is worse than the most diehard Slayer fan. They just mutilate themselves (pictures at right). This guy thinks it's a holy duty to brand students with crosses. As someone with tattoos and has had multiple piercings, I am not opposed to marking myself. But it's me. Don't scar others. Didn't you hear that bit about doing unto others in your Bible? Oh yeah. God's bidding and all that.

Before anyone gets on me about using Freshwater as an "example" let me say something. I think he has other issues at play here. Maybe even pathologies. I can't way what they are because I don't know him and haven't looked at a professional psychological evaluation. However, he was pretty functional - pathologies or no - and he made bad choices. Really bad choices. Let's just face that the motivator here was his religion. It is pretty clear that the viral nature of his religion mandated that he spread it and that he took that to heart.

There is way too much to go into at this point. But I invite you all to read about the extraordinary and embarrassing lengths John Freshwater has gone to in order to defend himself. The Panda's Thumb has an incredible group of posts available HERE. Suffice it to say, he is losing ground and credibility.

Nature reviews The Greatest Show on Earth

2009-10-09T15:38:00.004-04:00

I've just gotten my copy Dawkins' new book, The Greatest Show on Earth and haven't gotten more than two chapters in. But I just thought I'd fan the flames for good reads by posting Lawrence Hursts' review in Nature (also reviews Carl Zimmer's new book).

Advertising in the matrix

2009-10-08T10:29:00.003-04:00

I hate the growth economy. Hate it.

There. I've said it. I think it disrupts happiness, destroys communities, and demolishes ecosystems. And I hate a lot of the things associated with it including all of the niche advertising and the weird shadow techno-bureaucracy that's been built up around it on the internet.

While a lot of people might not despise the cancerous globalized economy as much as I do, they don't want it tracking their every move. The New York Times reports:

ABOUT two-thirds of Americans object to online tracking by advertisers — and that number rises once they learn the different ways marketers are following their online movements, according to a new survey from professors at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley.
The professors say they believe the study, scheduled for release on Wednesday, is the first independent, nationally representative telephone survey on behavioral advertising.
The topic may be technical, but it has become a hot political issue. Privacy advocates are telling Congress and the Federal Trade Commission that tracking of online activities by Web sites and advertisers has gone too far, and the lawmakers seem to be listening. Representative Rick Boucher, Democrat of Virginia, wrote in an article for The Hill last week that he planned to introduce privacy legislation. And David Vladeck, head of consumer protection for the F.T.C., has signaled that he will examine data privacy issues closely.

Good. I am tired of having corporate interests governing us. If we are a nation of individuals, then let us make up our own minds about things instead of being narrowed and winnowed by technocrats into becoming ever more mindless consumers of ever more stuff. We need to recover from our "affluenza," not have the fever kicked higher.

I find it so odd that there are people who will argue about this as an arm of the alleged free market - that this will give people more of what they want. Look behind the curtain and you find a wizard of command economies controlling you. It's a consumerist Big Brother. It's not the government. It's worse. It's a thing that tells you that it fulfills your desires with flash and pizazz and black top and plastic and shiny gold and lots and lots of beautiful sounds. And all of it leads you straight away from your neighbor, your family, good soil, clean water, and fresh air. It's as if the simple fulfilling of immediate desires with material objects is going to satisfy our hopes, our social commitments, or our desire for meaning. In this most Christian of nations (as some wish us to believe) we are crammed full of more unnecessary garbage in a socially Darwinian rat race that pits us all against one another.

Will the FCC actually work for us or will they work for the corporate matrix? Does the matrix already have them? [Is that link just me catering advertising to myself?] I'll take the red pill please.

Or does the matrix have me anyway?

And Louisiana goes down and down and down...

2009-09-30T23:10:00.002-04:00

I hope to do a more extended post on this later.

Louisiana Coalition for Science has a new post up that is simply appalling in how far creationists have gotten in their push to undermine good science education there. The creationists of the Louisiana Family Forum seem to have gotten rules rewritten so that good teachers complaining to good people in the state apparatus will be thwarted so that "the prerogative of [Department of Education] professionals to handle the review process and make a recommendation to [Board of Elementary and Secondary Education] has been seriously undermined."

I'll say. There seems to be nothing to prevent total charlatans from the review panels. Total yahoos free of scientific evidence and the weight of reality can attack biology curriculum with impunity.

What I find interesting in this post, though, is that the climate change part of SB 733 hasn't been latched onto by the Luzianna Fam Forum. Wonder why.

R. Crumb's take on the Genesis

2009-09-29T20:50:00.003-04:00

My wife is going to go bananas for this. She loves R. Crumb (image at right courtesy of dgtweb's site on R. Crumb). I think there's a festivus present in this.

PARIS — Subversive US cartoonist Robert Crumb, whose take on the Bible is about to be released worldwide, says people are "totally nuts" for taking the book so seriously for so long.
"I grew to hate the Bible," he told a press conference for the international launch of "Robert Crumb's Book of Genesis", which he called a "gruelling" four year project. The book hits bookshelves in late October in Europe, Brazil and the United States.
"The idea of millions of people taking this so seriously is totally nuts," he added. "The Bible doesn't need to be satirised. It's already so crazy."
Crumb's 220-page epic take on the Book of Genesis painstakingly mirrors every twist and turn, from God's Creation of the world through the meanderings of Noah's Ark and the adventures of Jacob of the "coat of many colours".

Worst politician in America.

2009-09-26T20:17:00.002-04:00

Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma). Just watch the video at this link and marvel at his pernicious lunacy. It is a spectacular level of willful ignorance to say, "The science really isn’t there" about climate change. Sorry bud. You need to go the way of the dinosaur. Like 20 years ago.

Teabaggers to attack "Darwin-lovers?"

2009-09-25T14:43:00.004-04:00

Is there going to be a "tea party" at Southern Methodist University over the Darwin celebrations this year? The Texas Freedom Network reports that Bill Dembski, "cdesign proponentsist" extraordinaire, wants his students to stick it to the "Darwin-lovers."

(1) For extra credit I'd like you to go to SMU on September 24th. On that day there are two back-to-back events at SMU celebrating Darwin -- go to smu.edu/smunews/darwin/events.asp and scroll down to September 24th. I don't want you going there merely as spectators but will indicate in class how you might actively participate and engage the Darwin-lovers you'll find there.

Tea party or bust?

Better yet, maybe he should get his teaching assistant to help him with all of that grading he'll need help with.

(2) I keep trying to reach our grader, but so far with no success. I'm not hearing back from him by email or by phone, and his voicemail indicates he's going to be incommunicado till September 21st. I don't know why this should be. In any case, please keep working on the precis statements. They need to be turned in and you need to try your best, but I will cut you all some slack on the grading until we get into a regular routine.

Hey Dembski. I have been a college lecturer for 5 of the last 6 years and an active teaching and research assistant too for 4 of the last 10 years. Want some help? I'm sure I can grade those papers and you won't have any of that silly theological hocus-pocus to worry about either. What do you say? I know it can be hard to get in the swing of things but isn't it about time now? It's almost October. But let me know.

Maybe I can fly down for some observations on how well your students teabag those silly Darwin-lovers too. Those sillies.

Oh Kirk. Give it up.

2009-09-24T21:09:00.006-04:00

It's hard to wrap my head around such totally infantile thinking as Kirk Cameron's. See, he and his numbskull buddy Ray Comfort are releasing a "special edition" of Darwin's Origin of Species 3 days before its 150 anniversary release date. And Ray has written a very "special" introduction for this edition. Short bus anyone?

But inquiring minds want to know...or something. You can read some real zingers in a new article on Cameron's crusade in People magazine (thanks Pam).

"You can see where [Hitler] clearly takes Darwin's ideas to some of their logical conclusions and compares certain races of people to lower evolutionary life forms," Cameron says. "If you take Darwin's theory and extend it to its logical end, it can be used to justify all number of very horrendous things."

Whose logic is this? And what are the values behind the so-called logic of these actions?

You mean like all those pogroms that Christians across Europe and Russia had organized for all those centuries because of their reading of the Gospel of John justified further by Jesus saying that he comes with a sword? Oh yeah. Those Jews were really sad about the Darwinian blood libel.

And all of that Darwinian thinking that has created racism since the kings of Europe sent out all of those explorers in the Age of Discovery to forcefully convert the indigenous people of South America. Definitely from The Origin of Species.

Or how about when the first tribes fought?

Oh wait! People are violent tribal animals who use mental tools available to them to justify their actions.

How does he breathe with that brain?

But I like Christine's takedown. Plus! Her accent is sexy.

Creation gets a distributor

2009-09-24T17:38:00.001-04:00

NCSE reports today that Creation, the new movie about Darwin, has found a U.S. distributor. Hoorah.

Amazing handmade aeroplanes

2009-09-23T07:28:00.005-04:00

My acquaintance Ondrej Mitas makes airplanes from balsa wood, paper, acrylic enamel, steel, and aluminum. The shapes are amazing! Watch them fly!

You can see them at Webster's Bookstore & Cafe in downtown State College, Pa.

THE END IS NIGH!!!

2009-09-23T06:32:00.005-04:00

Apparently we atheists and god-haters think the end of the world is coming because of the Mayan calendar. Or says World Nut Daily.

How can a world filled with secular humanists, atheists, and just plain God-haters be pondering the end of the world? They are embracing what is found in the mystical Mayan calendar that has the world ending on December 21, 2012. And has the media taken notice! The History Channel, Fox News, U.S. News & World Report, ABC News, USA Today, and more are talking or writing about it. Books on the topic are flying off the shelves.

Repent! The end is nigh!

Will the 'nones' have it?

2009-09-23T05:38:00.003-04:00

We've been saying that there are fewer religious people in the U.S. than the holy rollers would lead you to believe. But it's true. Recent social surveys have been showing that 15%-16% of the U.S. do not affiliate with religious groups, though about half of them identify themselves as believing in a "higher power." Now we have some more mainstream media coming on board.

USA Today reports "Nones are not a fringe group anymore and are now part of Middle America. They're present in every socio-demographic group."

Wait. I'm not a freak waiting to eat his own kid?

Metal Post! Black metal + bikes = Antitron

2009-09-17T19:27:00.003-04:00

This is just too awesome. Antitron, black metal lord of urban bike assaults!

I hope that Abbath (at right) from Immortal gets to see this. Abbath usually looked like some stupid pro wrestling goon. This kid...it doesn't matter what he looks like because he kicks so much ass on his bike. Move over Ryan Leach (okay...maybe not) because darkness has a new look and it's stalking on a bike.

Maybe Antitron will do some bangin' bunny hops over Abbath's flames at next year's Waacken Open Air Festival. That would be from beyond.

It's the plebes too

2009-09-17T06:58:00.006-04:00

Rep. Shimkus' climate change denial is bad. But how does someone on the ground who hates "big government" say they don't believe in climate change? Like this.

Hmmm. So God is engineering climate change? So he gets the blame for all of the species that go extinct then and the displacement and deaths of poor and indigenous people the world over? What a strange thing to lay at your master's feet in thanks and praise.

Thanks to Keith for the photo.

Titanic stupidity

2009-09-16T19:04:00.003-04:00

I had almost forgotten about this piece of horrific lunacy when I decided it was a good time to go look up some fundamentalists denying climate change. Who comes to my rescue but Rep. John Shimkus (R-Illinois). Watch as he reads from the Books Genesis and Matthew and uses them to deny climate change, the sixth extinction (my words not his), and ecocide. You know why? Because the Bible is the infallible word of God. This is lunacy.

Not an ounce of ignorace here.

2009-09-16T17:50:00.001-04:00

Do these people huff glue before they talk? Or do anything at all?

Don't forget that Jesus is our king in this country.

On Darwin's loss of faith

2009-09-15T15:00:00.001-04:00

A commenter (Steve of the SENTinel) on my last post about the new movie on Darwin, noted the following: "Darwin's loss of faith was driven more by his daughter's death than by his science. Maybe the science gave him an intellectual footing, but his daughter was the emotional & volitional impetus." I don't think that this is the case given what I have read of his autobiography.

For a man as minded to the cultivation of evidence as he was, the feeling of anger or repudiation of a God that he had grown up with and minded as a voyager on the Beagle would not be enough. His daughter's death may have provided him late in life with some conviction or, as Steve calls it, "emotional & volitional impulse," about his agnosticism; perhaps it would be something to the effect that he would believe that a God such as the one who created and ruled over a universe such as ours is a monster (and I don't say that he said or believed this). But evidence would inevitably be the thing that persuaded him, and much of that would have to deal with the absence of any independent evidence for any particular religion, that the argument from design was flawed and that natural selection accounted for the variation of life, and much evidence that there was nothing like justice to be found in nature outside of human culture. In what follows, I will paraphrase some of Darwin's points from some of his Life and Letters.

While he was aboard the Beagle for two years, he thought much on religion. He started as a scripture-quoting youth (was even mocked for it some) who ended up doubting. Why should we believe in Christianity when we don't believe in the visions or revelations of "Hindoos?" Like David Hume, Darwin wondered why we should accept at all that miracles which are the basis of the Christian faith. As total violations of "the fixed laws of nature" there remains no good reason to believe. He wrote, "But I found more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress."

But it was not just this lack of evidence for the texts themselves. Darwin well-knew William Paley's argument from/to design whose antecedents go back to at least the Greeks. In short order, Darwin relegated them to the dustbin of history. He wrote, "There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, that in the course which the wind blows." Though design may be lacking, and with it we might think purpose, that did not relegate happiness to the abyss. He believed that it followed from sentient beings' existences and survivability "that all sentient beings have been formed [by natural selection] so as to enjoy, as a general rule, happiness." In short it seems that survival of sentient species correlates with pleasure and happiness such that the subjective experiences of pleasure and happiness accompany survival. But what of suffering?

Darwin was well-acquainted with suffering. His own daughter died very young. However, he saw suffering that extended well beyond his own life. Every day humans experience anguish. This, he argued, has been seen as means for the moral improvement of us and our fellow people. In the day-to-day observation of our world, though, we seem to be the only ones who might be improving, so to speak, from what we learn from the experience of suffering. In the long scheme of history and pre-history, no species seems to have been sapient (knowing) of their own senescence. Their suffering has served no moral purpose nor some sort of meaning. In a way, all of prehistory has been in vain to the human observer. If we are made in God's image, then God seems to have spent an awful lot of time building a quite tortuous planet (not to mention practically a whole universe inhospitable to humans).

He also dispelled the notion that one's subjective feelings about God are no indication of God's actual existence. They are, quite simply, subjective feelings and "inner convictions." The power of one's passion for something is no piece of evidence for whether it is real or not. I was the line party organizer in my area for the Lord of the Rings Trilogy releases. Yes. I am that big of a dork. :-) But I can assure you that my love for Middle Earth does not have anything to do with its existence as a thing outside of my imagination, the shared imagination of other fans, or of Tolkien's writings.

Quite naturally, this subjective feeling of God's existence is concomitant with their belief in immortality of the soul. Darwin found this equally unlikely as God's existence.

Finally, he seemed to find some possibility that there was a God of the "First Cause." He neither embraced nor totally rejected this possibility, writing,

I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.

So it would seem that the volitional impulse was not merely Emma's death but the long acquaintance with the myriad complications of life. Clearly he wondered about suffering and happiness and how that might relate man to God, man to nature, and nature to God. He also, though, very clearly looked at the ethical aspects of nature noting that it lacked the subjective/intersubjective qualities that human beings so desire. Certainly the long sweep of the Earth's existence held no evidence of a God because it was full of a) meaningless suffering and b) was accomplished by the course of natural selection. Individual human experiences remained unable to show that God existed because they were either prone to error (miracles), personal delusion (inner convictions), or a lack of evidence (belief in immortality or of any god vs. another or others).

To close, I would say that given his arguments as I know them, it doesn't really matter what the volitional impulse was because it doesn't make his argument. Darwin was a master of integration who refused simple explanations. Having rejected others' personal "inner convictions" regarding faith I suspect that he wouldn't allow his own to color things too much either. His case for agnosticism is strong and built on reason, evidence, and the believer's lack of both.

Darwin is to American psychotic evangelicals what depictions of the Prophet Mo' are to psycho Muslims...or something

2009-09-15T13:52:00.007-04:00

Creation, a new movie about Darwin, has no American distributor. Yep. Apparently distributors in America are such pansies when it comes to anything not in line with absolutely insane lunatic religious zealotry that no one will pick it up. People here have made fun of the "Muslim world's" reaction to the Danish cartoon controversy. Now we have a case of self-censorship in our own media outlets because of the lunatic fringe.

Really?

Is it really so ridiculous as that?

Is it because of assault-weapon-wielding whack-a-moles who might show up at a screening toting signs that say, "Who was the monkey? Yer momma or yer poppa?" or (ironically enough) "Darwin = Hitler." Who knows?

I have some skepticism that it really is as bad as this. But the longer it takes for an American outlet to pick this up, the more sissified I think our big gun, big oil, big car, big war, big religion, big bag of wind Christo-nationalists have cowed us into becoming.

The land of free and the home of the brave sure isn't looking so brave when it's a fear-mongering quivering pile of simpering jerks who bend over for the Sarah Palins, James Dobsons, and Ken Hams of the world, people so out of touch with anything resembling reality that they actually praise the Lord by building Creation "museums" where truthiness reigns.

Well, I'm not alone in thinking that this is a big quack-a-doodle-dumbster. Even Kent Jones on Rachel Maddow's show at MSNBC has gotten in on it. Maddow ends it right when she ask Jones whether we should be worried about a country that stops believing in/denying things that have long been proven.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

PZ has a post that's a little less screeching than mine (how'd that happen?). He suspects it might just be a little too controversial and not big enough to really be worth it in the world of Michael Bay films.

But, we might have a lot to worry about here when the power of feeble-minded blinder religion controls what I'm allowed to watch because of a perceived threat. That's sad.

Creation: A new movie on Darwin

2009-09-11T20:26:00.003-04:00

Now we have a movie about Darwin called, The Creation. Over at The Panda's Thumb (a blog named loosely after an essay, "The Panda's Peculiar Thumb," by Stephen Jay Gould) they've posted a review (click HERE) by Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education. I'm really looking forward to seeing the movie which is being shown at the Toronto Film Festival.

Scott writes:

I and NCSE staff were invited to view the new Jon Amiel movie, Creation, starring Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connolly. I believe it to be a thoughtful, well-made film that will change many views of Darwin held by the public—for the good. The acting is strong, the visuals are wonderful, and it treats with loving care the Victorian details of the furnishings at Down house and other sites (such as Malvern), and the local church.

The movie takes place after Darwin has returned from the Beagle voyage, and has settled down with his wife, Emma. It concentrates on their relationship, on the growth of their family, and of course, on the production of his most famous scientific work, On the Origin of Species. It looks hard at Darwin’s growing disenchantment with Christianity, especially the concept of Providence, and how poorly it fits Darwin the naturalist’s knowledge of a very unpeaceable kingdom. Darwin’s frequent illness is portrayed with brutal honesty. Sometimes pale, nauseated, unable even to eat dinner with his family, much less work on his science, Darwin is shown suffering from vague symptoms which he attempts to cure with what we would recognize as quack treatments.

A centerpiece of the movie is the death of Annie, the Darwins’ beloved 10 year old daughter, and how it affected the relationship of Charles and Emma. Much of the movie takes place as flashbacks to when Annie was alive; much takes place after her death, when her father imagines conversations with her. In some reviews the later Annie is described as a ghost. Not really. Creation is not a ghost story. Rather, the filmmakers are taking dramatic license to make Darwin’s thoughts about her visible to us. Also given much attention is Darwin’s reluctance to set down his scientific ideas on evolution and natural selection for fear of upsetting the devout Emma, and society in general. Huxley and Hooker encourage him to publish, but Darwin procrastinates.

This is the 200th b-day year for Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, or, as my father-in-law calls it "the good book." So the flood of Darwiniana has been incredible. Festivals and happiness. Hell, I got an email today that asked e to help book a hip-hop artist who does stuff on evolution. I'm game.

I think that we should note that Darwin wrote a lot of other books. The second most famous is The Voyage of the Beagle wherein his travels and collections take life and we can see his genius as a naturalist integrating his ideas. He wrote The Descent of Man wherein he agreed with Smith and Hume that our sympathies as social beings lead us to do good. In part, our evolution as social beings has created our concept of good. This has of course affronted many a religous person because it suggests that impersonal natural sources have "given" us our morality/ies and that God has not. There is no one law but a window that indicates what is good for survival.

Morality is an indicator of survival. In today's day and age, that's hard to swallow for the totalitarian.

But there has been the backlash. While it is most heartening to see is that there is a concerted effort in the broader scientific, artistic, philosophical, and humanities fields to really work toward effective understanding of what evolution actually is and why Darwin was instrumental though far from the end of the story, the religious right is out there in force to quash it.

There have been those forces in the "armies of the night" who have fought to caricature our respect for Darwin as a cult of personality but I think that it is largely a failure. Unlike the cult of Stalin or Mao or the religion of Christianity, the movement that surrounds evolution comes from the power of the idea to describe, explain, and predict the real material universe and not to deify the man who did it. Unlike Stalin who believed that the spirit of history would move us to a socialist state, Darwin was under no such compulsion. Evolution is as yet to be disproved while Stalinism is an abject human failure that has created tremendous suffering. In fact, evolution is practically mathematically proven while the systems that have followed Stalin, who rejected the Darwinian account for Lysenkoism, failed. Awfully. But our reverence for a powerful theory is, I think, easily misconstrued by creationists and those who don't take the time to learn about evolution as a theory and a fact. Experiencing awe because an idea hitches integrates other ideas and facts is part of being a human. It just so happens that evolution is perhaps the greatest idea human have ever created. It integrates more than anything else in descriptive, explanatory, predictive, and meaningful ways. Sorry creationists. You lose.

Darwin did not come up with evolution willy-nilly. The materialist philosophers of Rome had some inklings about the recombination of matter and energy. If one reads Lucretius's De Rarum Natura (On the Nature of Things) you will have a sense of what I mean. Much much later, David Hume had very similar conclusions to what Darwin would actually explain and describe. Erasmus Darwin had similar though incomplete ideas. Then came Charles whose life we can read as being about evolution. And for those of us who revere and use evolution for what it is, we thank him and might think of him narrowly. But that is not the whole story.

He was a human with the quibbles we have. He lost his daughter Annie. He loved. He wondered how his work affected his family. His health was quite awful. People around him who loved his idea pressured him to do more. There were those who villified him. I think, he was like most of us but vaulted onto a huge stage because his genius was nearly incomparable because of his ability to integrate information.

What I hope can happen in the wake of this film is a humanization of the man who galvanized evolutionary theory and our understanding of biology. I'll follow Scott on this one and try to do the following:

By telling an interesting story, and making Darwin human, Creation will I think encourage some viewers to find out more about the historical Darwin and his ideas. From my standpoint as director of NCSE, that’s useful, indeed. The more people know about evolution and its most famous proponent, the less they will fear it. I’d like to see this movie get distributed in the US. Unfortunately, although Canadians and British will see it, there is not yet a US distributor. We can only speculate why, but the well-known American nervousness about evolution is probably and unfortunately part of the mix.

This movie deserves to be seen in movies, not relegated merely to Netflix on DVD. I hope the reviews following the North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 10 are good, and also the reviews following the British premiere October 25. If a bomb like Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed can get a distributor, a well-made movie with an excellent script, actors, direction, and cinematography like Creation surely should.

Maybe people who care about science should do what the promoters of Expelled did: get lots of people to show up on opening weekend to give the movie a big ratings boost.

Of course, it has to get a distributor first, and there isn’t a lot we can do about that. If anyone has contacts with someone associated with movie distribution, send them to Creation!

I am about to call my local indie theater.

Roger Ebert's ode to his post on Expelled

2009-09-07T08:12:00.004-04:00

You guys remember Expelled, that steaming pile of film excrement that attacked evolution as a conspiracy by some scientific cabal? Oh yeah. Don't forget that it tried to link all of us evolutionists to Hitler. Pay no attention to the fact that most of the Germans were Lutherans entrenched in a history of Christian anti-semitism. It was a wicked movie.

Last year Roger Ebert flushed it down the toilet in grand style. The discussion on that thread went to incredible length and the Sun Times finally had to clip it. Now Ebert's revisited it in an ode to that thread's evolution? Or has it been...ahem...intelligently designed?