Creative Design: An alternative to Intelligent Design

By Aaron Sherman

Intelligent Design (ID) was, as I've covered here before, more or less a political effort to disguise a Christian, Young Earth Creationist document as a pseudo-scientific premise. It was so poorly constructed that, in court, evidence was presented from a word processor document that showed that the cornerstone of ID was, in fact, just a Christian Creationism document that had been edited to say "Intelligent Design" instead of "Creationism". But there's a problem. The idea of intelligent design predates the terrible and hackish attempt by a small group of American Christians to re-invent it. Thomas Aquinas's 5th way of demonstrating the existence of God was essentially Intelligent Design, and more broadly, there were many empiricists of the 17th and 18th century who worked on this idea as well, including Hume and Locke.

Bowler, in his book, Evolution: The History of an Idea makes it clear that as early as the 1860s, people were struggling with this idea with respect to evolution, and felt that the complexity and diversity of what we actually see in nature must imply the existence of a creator, and that that idea was not antithetical to the evidence of our senses combined with the power of reason (i.e. science). Whether you agree or disagree with that premise, it seems a worthy thing to come up with a term that we can use to refer to this concept.

More or less, the term for this class of idea is a teleological argument. However, that term narrowly refers to an a posteriori argument for the existence of God. I'm looking for a term which more broadly asserts the fundamental concept of intelligence in the act of creation.

This is my attempt to do so. Let's look at what we need to define and then we'll get to the definition.

Did religion slow the rate of human progress?

A scene from the TV show Family Guy,
as quoted on Google+

By Aaron Sherman

I'm going to spoil this one for you, on the topic of whether religion slowed the rate of human progress, I think the answer is clear: no, it did not. However, I also think that you can point to some serious "one step forward, two steps back" moments in history, especially as concern Europe and its recent (last 2,000 years) affair with the Christian faith.

It would be impossible to cover the entire history of the interaction of religion and human progress, but I do want to talk about some specific high (and low) points that I think make this topic a bit clearer. I should be up-front: I'm not a member of any religion, but I'm not an atheist. You can read more about my personal beliefs in my post about deism.

Let's get over Chained CPI

By Aaron Sherman

In the United States, we tie a number of entitlements programs like Social Security to inflation. This means that as goods become more expensive, those benefits go up. This makes good sense if you want those entitlements to adapt to the economic conditions (whether or not wanting that is a good thing is beyond the scope of this article). So, you may have heard of this thing called "Chained CPI" which some politicians argue amounts to a plan to cut Social Security benefits.

That's nonsense, and just so that you know where I'm going with this, anyone who says that is lying to you. Want to find out more, or are you already plotting my death because I'm clearly one of those people? (hint: I'm not)

Borderlands 2 and the Damsel in Distress

The painting, Chivalry, by
Frank Dicksee, 1885

By Aaron Sherman

The "Tropes vs Women in Video Games project" has a new video up about the damsel in distress concept in video games. While I agree with some of what the video has to say, there's an awful lot of cherry-picking going on, here. The video specifically calls out one game that I've played through and it strikes me as odd that the one example that I have plenty of context for seems to fall apart when viewed in the larger context.

Before I get into that, though, let me cover the disclaimer in the video. The narrator explains that it's not sufficient for violence against a woman to have context in the storyline of a video game. That does not excuse the act. I'm inclined to generally agree. Instead, violence against any character in a video game stands on its own as a positive or negative (or, importantly, neutral) beat in the overall story, and that's how I want to look at Borderlands 2.

Borderlands 2 is introduced because of the character "Angel." Now, to be fair, there are spoilers ahead. Angel is introduced in the beginning of the story as a helpful AI who will guide the player to their destiny. I'm going to talk about what Angel actually is, so if you plan on playing the game, you might want to stop, here.

Dawkins is wrong: you can't defend science with circular reasoning

By Aaron Sherman

Prof. Dawkins is a brilliant man, but he tends to take shortcuts in his reasoning when he thinks his audience isn't up for the harder answers. Such was the case recently, when he was asked why we should have faith in the scientific method. His answer was a common bit of circular reasoning that you hear quite often in answer to this question, but it's not any less wrong because it was Dawkins who was saying it.

So, here's the general form of his defense: we know that the scientific method works because we have so many wonderful advances that we've been able to make because of it. We have cars and drugs and exotic new materials and we can see into tiny spaces and gaze at the universe around us. Science just works! (Dawkins humorously punctuates this with "bitches" which I did chuckle at).

Deism

By Aaron Sherman

In a recent debate with an atheist I found myself explaining the difference between religion as an abstraction that we use to understand our world in ways which simple experimentation cannot and should not, and religion as a literal truth and map of history and the universe. I think I summed it up better than I have in the past, and I also don't think I've come out in this blog as specifically deist (though I've dropped some large hints), so let me share both with you, now:

What is a religion? What isn't?

By Aaron Sherman

Today, I tried to participate in a conversation where someone mistakenly asserted that atheism is a religion. Sadly, I didn't have enough time to truly engage the conversation, so let me address it here for posterity:

There are quite a few different definitions of religion, but unless you get into the really abstract sociological definitions, here are three common elements that almost everyone agrees on:

• A religion is a cultural context that...
• relates to a set of supernatural or spiritual beliefs and...
• asserts a means for connecting the two (e.g. through ritual, prayer, customs or other means)