Arden Chatfield
Posts: 6657 Joined: Jan. 2006
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In the discussion of how Behe fucked up his discussion of malaria, I came across this quote from his book:
Quote | "Here’s something to ponder long and hard: Malaria was intentionally designed. The molecular machinery with which the parasite invades red blood cells is an exquisitely purposeful arrangement of parts." |
Tho I know it's a minor point, this made me wonder just what Behe thinks the religious significance is of the Disembodied Telic Entity facilitating what might be the worst disease in human history. Then I came across this interesting comment by Larry Gilman at PT:
Quote | I don’t have Behe’s new book, but what he’s almost certainly implying is that malaria is Satanically designed—that it is a bioweapon created by a supernatural enemy. This is yet another reason why the argument from “bad” design (i.e., the argument that design that’s “bad” by human standards disproves ID) is a weak reed, even though one form of it has given this excellent website its name: Creationists can always attribute harmless natural oddities like the panda’s thumb to divine whimsey, not-so-harmless phenomena to prehistoric sabotage by demonic forces. And so they do. The idea of demonic sabotage of the natural order has, as far as I know, been little or not at all taken up by mainstream Christian theologians—it smacks of Manicheism and has no scriptural basis. But the IDers, whose theology is as twisted as their pseudoscience, are forced by their assumptions to cross the line.
The deep craziness of the inevitably resulting worldview needs no emphasis on this forum.
Larry |
(my boldfacing)
This is interesting, since maybe I haven't been paying enough attention, but this idea had never occurred to me before: that malevolent (but still 'intelligent'!) design, by Old Scratch hisself, is fair game for the DIY, non-centralized Protestant theology of ID advocates.
So, the obvious question at this point: did the Debbil fuck up the design of the prostate and the urinary tract as well? Is Beelzebub ultimately responsible for my lower back pain?
-------------- "Rich is just mad because he thought all titties had fur on them until last week when a shorn transvestite ruined his childhood dreams by jumping out of a spider man cake and man boobing him in the face lips." - Erasmus
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