* Intelligent Design

INTELLIGENT DESIGN is simply anthropomorphic circular reasoning, a projection of homocentric notions of "intelligence" and "design" upon an utterly alien (non-human) universe. For instance, the organization of, say, quartz crystals is really NOT analoguous—at least in the way meant by the intelligent-design people—to a child's propensity to draw circles and squares on a piece of construction paper. . . .

I've also always been tickled by the proof of "God" as "First Cause": for the universe to have begun, the argument goes, there must have been some "someone" (presumable an anthropomorphic deity) prior to its existence who created it. But then, who created that 'someone"?! The argument that "HE" had always there, for all time, could be more reasonably extended (cf. Occam's Razor) to the cosmos itself. (Moreover, the whole argument is based upon a culturally specific Western rationalism, with its privileging of origins and cause-and-effect as fundamental tools with which to attempt to explain anything.)

Quots. of the Day:

"God? . . . who the hell is he? There is nothing here, at the moment, but me and the desert. And that's the truth. Why confuse the issue by dragging in a superfluous entity? Occam's razor. Beyond atheism, nontheism. I am not an atheist but an earthiest. Be true to the earth."
    --Edward Abbey

"If a man's imagination were not so weak, so easily tired, if his capacity for wonder not so limited, he would abandon forever such fantasies of the supernal. He would learn to perceive in water, leaves and silence more than sufficient of the absolute and marvelous, more than enough to console him for the loss of the ancient dreams."
    --Edward Abbey