Three Takes on a Common Theme

The first, from the ever cogent Mike Flynn, writing in response to this:

A physicist named Victor Stenger seems willing to contribute to the mounting pile of evidence that those trained in the metrical properties of physical bodies can't do metaphysics for dog barf. We will try to accommodate him.

Yes, it's the auld God-does-not-exist-and-I-can-prove-it foolishness through *Science!*

Believe it or don't believe it, sez I; but don't believe you don't have to believe it.

Like many narrowly trained, he extends his own tool kit into domains of discourse for which it is not suited, much like a plumber who comes to counsel your teenager on his anxieties. In particular, terms are always to be understood in the casual ways in which he understands them. Dr. Stenger would not tolerate this sort of thing if the subject were physics. "Dark Matter? Well, dark means it's not lit up, so if we shine a light on it, we should see it." This would induce a similar eye-rolling to some of the usages in the essay.

But in any case, said essay provides a number of tasty tidbits for our intellectual noshing.

A. Absence.

Lets start with his title: Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence. Apparently, he believes that believers believe this as an explanation for "why there is no scientific evidence of God." (Hey. It couldn't possibly be because God is not a physical body and his existence is not a metrical property. Could it?)

Later, Flynn writes:

The notion that the God supposed by the Christians wrote his "plan" down as a set of instructions, rolled them up and stuck them inside the ur-block, that these instructions must be physical, and so that there is no "room" for "God's Plan" in the initial universe simply misses the point. The God of the Christians is not "in" the universe any more than Shakespeare is "in" Hamlet.

The second, from a new blog called BadCatholic:

The most laughable statement I've heard from atheists - and that includes their origin-of-the-universe theories - is that religion is an opiate, a crutch, a delusion created by a bunch of saps looking for something to hope for, a celestial pie-in-the-sky. To this idiocy I can only offer a short transcript that, for good reasons, was never found by anyone, ever.

Caveman 1: Bro, these mammoths are frightening, and I don't know why it rains.
Caveman 2: Yeah, sounds like we need some supernatural explanation for natural phenomena for which we are not yet advanced enough to understand.
Caveman 1: Right. So we'll need a god...
Caveman 2: Nice.
Caveman 1: And let's have no adultery with beautiful women...
Caveman 2: Uh-
Caveman 1: And in with the concept of eternal, unimaginable torment-
Caveman 2: Slow down-
Caveman 1: And moral obligations, and no more of this survival of the fittest. We'll not be able to lie, or steal, or cheat, or masturbate-
Caveman 2: Are you sure you-
Caveman 1: Or eat too much, or drink too much, or be lazy, or be prideful...

And the third:

"Why Evolution and Creation Cannot Contradict Each Other"

That's the title of one of the headings in a smashingly good post by Mike Flynn entitled "The Evolution of Evolution".

Check thou it out.

Everything You Know about the Catholic Church, Science, and the Middle Ages Is Wrong

Mark Shea introduces this post, titled "The Age of Unreason", thusly:

Mike Flynn is like a walking encyclopedia of arcana about medieval science and philosophy. Yesterday, I read aloud to my wife and son most of his reply to some dude who was emitting the normal credal agitprop about the Dark Ages and Christian hatred of science and reason. If it had been a boxing match, the ref would have stopped the fight. You come away, not just laughing, but shsking your head thinking, "Poor Mr. Walker really deeply believes in his own intellectual superiority. Yet... how? What conceivable reason can he have, if he read Flynn's evisceration of his astoundingly ill-argued regurgitation of Atheist Triumphalist Talking Points, to feel anything but humiliation, embarrassment, and a driving urge to remove that wretched excuse for an essay from the web and recant in sackcloth and ashes for the sin of just pure ignorant wrong dumbness and arrogance?

My 14 year old is taking a writing class. He asked, "Why do I need to know how to argue about stuff?" I tell him, so you won't serve as a warning to others like Mr. Walker here. The man's gutted corpse is hanging from a tree branch and he's still talking as though he is Way Smarter Than You. You don't want to look a fool like that.

Thou wouldst do well to read it.

I must admit that I laughed out loud when I read that Flynn characterized Giordano Bruno as "the L. Ron Hubbard of his day". I also had to chuckle at one of the comments posted by someone else:

You didn't mention St. Macrina and automata.

I love St. Macrina. As she was on her deathbed, she cheered up her little brother, St. Gregory of Nyssa, by holding a Socratic dialogue with him. He later recorded this as "On the Soul and the Resurrection", as well as in The Life of St. Macrina.

Anyway, in the middle of all this, St. Greg points to how atheists of his day said automata proved there wasn't God or a soul, and St. Mac went into how automata indicated there was. Awesome moment in girl geek history.