This Is No Time For The Monkey Dance

Big science in the Guardian today. There is an interview with Stephen Hawking, a report on the challenging of the teaching of intelligent design in US schools and something on scientific determinism, which I have not yet read. I want so much to pick over the idiocy of intelligent design; how it is almost an admission of the failure of pure creationism – it just seems pointless. Richard Dawkins always gives me the feeling that he is giving a platform to the creationists just by putting them down all the time, though I suppose if you do nothing, you will find that the un-scientific public will fall into believing what is taught to them. It is not enough to know that the vast majority of scientists in the field have no truck with the idea. Maybe we will have an sort of evolutionary division, with two sub-species of humans each of which believe the opposing views. I was going to give these two divisions names one being rationalists (I won’t give you the name for the others) but I have read a recent post that quite logically put it that you cannot be a rationalists and an atheist. The least you can be and still be a rationalist is an agnostic. I am sure that people with stronger views of the correctness of rational theories will disagree with this but I was prepared to take the idea on board – deities worming their way back in there I think. But back to rationalism. Intelligent design though! What mechanism do you have to have in place to keep that idea going? Where is evidence that comes close to matching that already present for pure evolution? Without faith, I am nothing.

I finished Atonement last night, having guessed (almost) the full picture some way before the end, though this fitted very well with my earlier idea about the author picking a way through a wider set of truths. No spoilers though; you will have to read it to get the full picture. It is excellent though. Read it!