- Gross Liberal Media Bias – Why is it that the MSM almost totally ignored the story of the former Virginia ACLU President who was arrested on child porn charges? Do they care that he was coaching child sports teams? Compare/contrast to the Ted Haggard story, which was all over the news. I realize that Ted was a little higher profile, but you can hear the crickets chirp over the sound of the media on this scandal.
- Dilbert on Intelligent Design – Dilbert creator Scott Adams makes some common sense observations about atheistic illogic, and addresses objections.
I take the practical approach – that something is intelligent if it
unambiguously performs tasks that require intelligence. Writing Moby
Dick required intelligence. The Big Bang wrote Moby Dick. Therefore,
the Big Bang is intelligent, and you and I are created by that same
intelligence. Therefore, we are created by an intelligent entity.I don’t see how an atheist can think otherwise.
Me neither.
"The Big Bang wrote Moby Dick. Therefore, the Big Bang is intelligent, and you and I are created by that same intelligence. Therefore, we are created by an intelligent entity."
Everything Scott says in this post, and the previous one, about deterministic mechanisms and ultimate causes is essentially correct. His problem lies in an inability to tolerate arbitrary semantic connotations. He appears unable to accept any definition of "intelligence" which cannot be strictly identified with a non-arbitrary test.
He's asking for something which he cannot have, and his response is to reject the notion of intelligence entirely. There's a fairly simple resolution to this pseudo-problem, however:
Intelligence is not a quality, it is a behavior. And largely it is the behavior of humans, or animals that behave similarly to humans. As Scott notes, intelligence is emergent; there are no "intelligence molecules", and it is not a field of force like electromagnetism. To say it doesn't really exist, or to claim that it should be redefined to meet some arbitrary, cosmic requirement, is to forget that it's a word developed by humans to describe their own behavior. If Scott wants to apply it to the Big Bang, or to a coin-sorting machine, he's free to do so, but he's throwing out all the connotation and meaning of the original word.
People are constantly getting tripped up this way with definitions. It's almost as if we feel like our words have a single correct meaning, which only careful effort can discern. The reality, of course, is that our words have only the meaning we apply to them in our brains.
There is no single meaning of the word "intelligent". It's meaning is determined solely by our usage, and our usage does not typically reflect ultimate, cosmic causes. It reflects behavior at a human-level in the universe, and rarely anything more. By claiming that the Big Bang is intelligent, Scott is really claiming that most everyone else has a bad definition of "intelligence", which is a proposition of nonsense.
The former president of the Virginia ACLU is a nobody that nobody had ever heard of before his arrest. If he's guilty, he deserves time – happy now? Meanwhile, Haggard was a ridiculously high-profile Christian preacher spewing venom at gays while being gay himself. That's a story because of the shameful hypocrisy of it all. It has nothing to do with any "liberal" bias.
Evidence of Sam's point is that no one has bothered mentioning the name of this former Virginian ACLU president (Charles Rust-Tierney, by the way) because no one has ever heard of him. He is not now, nor has he ever been, a nationally recognized figure.
I'm sure that members of the ACLU in Virginia are scandalized, but why should it register anywhere else?