A matter of compatibility

Someone who blogs under the name “whyevolutionistrue” goes to great pains to make sure that Richard Dawkins is absolutely opposed to any kind of religion other than atheism, in case any of us thought otherwise, and at the end writes this:

Now that Dawkins has verified this, it would be nice to see Rosenau, Mooney, and Kirshenbaum correct their postings. And they need to stop pretending that the existence of religious scientists and religious people who accept evolution proves that science and faith are compatible. We settled that issue long ago. The issue is philosophical compatibility. Is that really so hard for anyone to understand?

What he fails to understand is that far from being incompatible, science needs religion–or more precisely, needs God the Creator of the Universe.

It boils down to this: if there is no God, then the universe is simply an accumulation of matter that at its core is utterly random and chaotic; what came to be, came to be simply by pure chance and accident, and the apparent orderliness which we perceive is simply an illusion, an island of order in an megaocean of chaos. Sheer probability will tell us that in a sufficiently large area of chaos, there will appear small areas of apparent order. (And we won’t get into the ramifications of the fact that probability itself assumes a fundamentally ordered universe.)

But science is based on the premise that the universe is indeed ordered, that it can be coherently investigated and explained–and that therefore it was created.

Along the same lines we can make an updated version of Pascal’s wager: if there is no God, then any order and meaning we give to it is arbitrary and imposed on existence by our minds, and not by any internal characteristic of existence. Therefore, we may as well believe in God, since if we are wrong, we are merely adopting one out of a number of possible arbitrary impositions of meaning.

O SOLO mio

I have been tracking, mostly for the amusement value, Mr. Beck’s latest argument with the Sense of Life Objectivists–needless to say, finding myself agreeing with him much more than with them, even if, apparently, my own musical tastes align more with Mr. Perdigo than Mr. Beck. However, I don’t intend to comment there. It seems at the very least impertinent, if not downright rude, to enroll in a forum for the sole purpose of berating the other members. However, the SOLOists seem to breaking down into two camps, the symbol of which is Frank Zappa, so I suppose we can call them, for handy reference, the Zappatistas and the anti-Zappatistas. On the one hand, there is Mr. Perdigo and his minions (actually, he seems to have only minion, but in terms of SOLO it’s an important minion) declaiming they know what Good Music is, and that Zappa (and certain others, like Boulez, Slayer and Nirvana) are not Good Music. In fact, not only are they not Good Music, but they are Evil Music. Their standard of reference for Good Music is Ayn Rand’s ideal of Romantic Music (incarnated in terms of her novels in a concerto by the character Halley)–but they, no more than she, can explain why any particular piece of music is Romantic, and therefore Good, and why another piece of music is not Romantic, and therefore Not Good. Furthermore, they think that taste in music not only reveals the character of the individual, but can be used to label that person as good or bad. Rand herself never quite took it this far–while anecdotal evidence indicates she tried to impose her tastes in art and music on those around her, she at least had the grace to admit in writing that she could not objectively prove any piece of music was superior to any other.

David from non Standard positions

Sparked by this post, and for the benefit of Grandmere Mimi, here are two pictures of Michelangelo’s David.