A life with no purpose

[CHIMO]

A life with no purpose

Darwinism implies that the only eternal life we have is in the recycling of our atoms. I find that comforting

George Monbiot
Tuesday August 16, 2005
The Guardian

All is not lost in America. When George Bush came out a couple of weeks ago in favour of teaching "intelligent design" - the new manifestation of creationism - the press gave him a tremendous kicking. The Christian Taliban have not yet won.

But they are gaining on us. So far there have been legislative attempts in 13 states to have intelligent design added to the school curriculum. In Kansas, Texas and Philadelphia, it already has a foot in the door. In April a new "museum of earth history" opened in Arkansas, which instructs visitors that "dinosaurs and humans did coexist", and that juvenile dinosaurs, though God forgot to mention it, hitched a ride on Noah's Ark. Similar museums are being built in Texas and Kentucky. Some 45% of Americans, according to a Gallup poll last year, believe that "human beings did not evolve, but instead were created by God ... essentially in their current form about 10,000 years ago".

And not just in America. Last month Vienna's Catholic archbishop, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, asserted that "any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science". He appears to have the support of the Pope. Last week the Australian education minister, Brendan Nelson, announced that "if schools also want to present students with intelligent design, I don't have any difficulty with that". In the UK, the headmaster of one of Tony Blair's new business-sponsored academies claims that evolution is merely a "faith position".

It seems to me that we are the happy ones. We, alone among organisms, who perceive eternity, and know that the world will carry on without us.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1549878,00.html

[GoBlue]

1. Or a purpose with no life.

No thanks.

[bemildred]

2. "overwhelming evidence for design in biology"

This is simply gross ignorance. While there is plenty of evidence of order in biology, there is no evidence at all of design, rather the opposite.

[ixion]

3. exactly. just the opposite.

I guess I don't really care, on a personal level, what these people believe. Hey, it's a (supposedly) free country so you can believe what you want.

However, I draw the line at trying to pass that same belief off as practical scientific knowledge, which it obviously is not.