Don’t Tread on Faith

I hope that I am not repeating others here, since I came into this debate only recently after reading one of Roger's latest reviews and finding this thread was still active.

Having said that, I would like to offer the following.

I have heard the debate from every possible angle and any argument with people of faith ends in those people saying: "That's where faith comes in." In other words, the debate ends, no matter how logical, when the faithful cannot come up with any more logical explanations.

The debate about the big bang is one of them. The faithful love the argument that if you look at a chair (or a watch, or a car) you have to know that it was created by something intelligent. So, therefore, everything is created by intelligence. The logical conclusion of this argument therefore is that even the creator had to be created and His creator had to be created and so ad infinitum.

Eugenics is just a modern word for what humans have been doing forever. We pick the best and the smartest to mate with. We also try to pick from other tribes so we don't end up looking like the English Royal Family. This was happening long before Darwin or Little Adolph. Therefore, we are such a mongrel species that no amount of breeding could make us a Master Race. The irony is that because Jews and Gypsies were so marginalized by religious and racial prejudice, they are probably much "purer" genetically than any European race. In any event, Jews were the main target of Hitler, everything else was just a way to justify his hatred. The fact that a Jew would even make this argument is the most despicable thing. It says he believes that there was some kind of reasoning behind the murder of so many innocent people. There was no justification; there was no reason other than the mindless hatred of a monstrous human being!

Let's get back to the actual movie. What was Ben Stein's motive for making it in the first place? He is a smart man, he knew that IDers would lap it up and those against it would loathe it. He knew he wouldn't win any converts. The fact that he is a Jew and not an evangelical Christian (evangelism is frowned upon by Jews) confirms that he wasn't trying to save souls. I think the main reason for the movie was to show off how smart he thinks he is and how dumb the rest of us are. After all, look at all the evidence out there for ID. Even the intelligent, well-spoken, Harvard-educated George W. Bush believes in it! Stein is the same man who thinks that Woodward and Bernstein should be burned at the stake, that Nixon would have prevented holocausts.

If the Church (in the western world at least) were still in charge of society, we wouldn't even have this debate. It would be heresy and the non-believers would be hunted down. Religion has feared science forever, because it has always known that reason is the ultimate enemy of faith. The one thing about science is that it requires no faith - it doesn't care about humans or our opinions. It doesn't need to burn a DNA helix in a piece of toast to keep us believing in it.

What amazes me is that America is so proud and so paranoid about religion. Your founding motto was "Don't Tread on Me!" not "In God we Trust!" The fact is that in America, an atheist still can't get elected President, yet your founding fathers were ambivalent towards religion (to say the least)