Where’s the gardener?
Anthony Gottlieb
The parable went like this. “Two people return to their long neglected garden and find, among the weeds, that a few of the old plants are surprisingly vigorous. One says to the other, ‘It must be that a gardener has been coming and doing something about these weeds.’ The other disagrees…They pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. The believer wonders if there is an invisible gardener, so they patrol with bloodhounds but the bloodhounds never give a cry. Yet the believer…insists that the gardener is invisible, has no scent and gives no sound. The sceptic doesn’t agree, and asks how a so-called invisible, intangible, elusive gardener differs from an imaginary gardener, or even no gardener at all.”
Gottleib does a smashing job surveying the battleground: we’ve got the “New Atheists”, e.g., Richard Dawkins
One trenchant critic of the New Atheists is Terry Eagleton, a leading literary critic (and Catholic), who defines God as “what sustains all things in being by his love, and…is the reason why there is something instead of nothing, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever.” Some find it comforting or inspiring to utter such statements. But unless they can explain what those ideas mean and how one might tell whether they are right (which Eagleton never does), this is a self-deluding comfort. A wiser response to the apparent inexpressibility of statements about God may be simply not to express them, and just get on with the gardening.
E.T. phone the Vatican
OK. Here’s more on the Vatican and space. This time a search for alien life.
In the interview last year, Funes told Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano that believing the universe may host aliens, even intelligent ones, does not contradict a faith in God.
“How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?” Funes said in that interview.
“Just as there is a multitude of creatures on Earth, there could be other beings, even intelligent ones, created by God. This does not contradict our faith, because we cannot put limits on God’s creative freedom.”
Funes maintained that if intelligent beings were discovered, they would also be considered “part of creation.”
Design arguments and Darwin
While we won’t be examining the “intelligent design” (ID) argument(s) in detail, there certainly is lot of debate on the argument. This especially is true with respect to ID and education. This NY Times review of four books caught my attention. (So many books, so little time!)
- Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul, Kenneth R. Miller
- Why Evolution Is True, Jerry A. Coyne
- Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons: Evolution and Christianity From Darwin to Intelligent Design, Peter J. Bowler
- Devil in Dover: An Insider’s Story of Dogma v. Darwin in Small-Town America, Lauri Lebo