Does biological life have a purpose?

These kinds of questions (is there a designer, a purpose, etc.) are excellent questions. But the questions are fundamentally unscientific- they CANNOT be disproved. That doesn't mean they are not valid, or stupid, or even any more likely to be wrong than scientific questions (like did Neanderthals contribute significantly to the genetic legacy of modern humans, for example), they are just in a different field.

I have no problem with discussions like these, nor do most scientists and believers in evolution (I believe). They are just outside the realm of science, and many people don't seem to understand the boundaries of science, philosophy, and theology.

Earlier this month, John Lynch responded in a manner appropriate to this discussion to some Discovery Institute claims about a design argument:

The question remains as to how relevant it is to even identify design arguments outside of Christian apologetics. It is not surprising that various individuals have argued that design can be detected in nature; whether this design is real or apparent and whether it indicates the sort of designer that the individual wishes to exist, is another matter. Psychologists have discovered that humans in general – and children in particular – exhibit three innate biases:

Essentialist bias: all natural kinds have an immutable essence
Teleological bias: what they see must be purposeful and goal-orientated
Intentionality bias: actions and outcomes must be the work of an intentional agent

These biases are actually useful for children to make predictions in the world and are defaults that adults revert to at times. We clearly see all three at work in the design argument.

Biases aren't inherently wrong, but they can help you draw an erroneous or unwarranted conclusion.

I enjoyed Conway Morris's book, but it sounds from Rod's post that he may have tempered his enthusiasm for convergence since then.

I read Morris's book "Life's Solution" earlier this year. I do recommend it with some reservations. Its a fairly long read and is more technically detailed than most popular science books.

He takes the "design engineering" approach to evolution to explain way the actual number of functional proteins is a tiny subset of the total theoretical number of proteins if you assume random combination of amino acids. He uses this argument to postulate that the design space of biological organism is actually rather limited. He also talks a lot about convergent evolution and how certain characteristics, such as vision, evolved independently many times. I think he is correct on all of these points.

He does assume certain postulates of the "Rare Earth Hypothesis" that are increasingly likely to be wrong. However, this is not so significant to the theme of the book.

Where I differ with him is that he believes that the evolution of intelligence is a near certainty and that if humans did not evolved, that another species, perhaps dolphins, would have evolved tool making intelligence sooner or later. I think this unlikely. As he points out, dolphins have had complex neuro-structure far longer than humans (started about 35 million years ago) and seemed to have plateaued a long time ago. He also ignores the significant price paid for big brains such as long gestation period, 25% of life span spent in maturation, the fact that brains use 20% of our metabolism.

Another point he ignores is the fact that the last calm period between mass extinctions, the mesozoic, was 150 million years (our calm period is currently 65 million years), which was more than enough time for intelligence to evolve. Yet, none did. The dinosaurs had small brains, but the rest of their physiology was as complex as that of mammals. Also, contrary to popular conception, they were warm-blooded animals (this is significant because intelligence is metabolically intense. So, only a warm blooded animal can evolve intelligence).

The last part of his book is the worse. He appears to be peddling ideology as science. He wants to believe that evolution is directional and explains that there has to be a "hidden hand" guiding it because natural selection itself cannot provide the necessary directionality. He does cite examples of evolution being adaptive (which is true). But its a long leap to go from adaptiveness to the kind of directionality he clearly believes in.

Despite my differences, I still highly recommend Morris's book "Life's Solution".

A far better book on origin of life is Nick Lane's "Power, Sex, and Suicide, the Story of Mitochondria". Nick Lane presents a very compelling argument that the emergence of the Eukaryote is such an improbable event that it likely has happened only once in the entire galaxy. Both Simon Conway Morris and Nick Lane believe we are alone, at least in our galaxy. I believe this as well.

Freelunch - how about an insistence that non-human animals lack consciousness, or "real" emotion? I used to work in a research lab and the absolute insistence by the PhDs there that higher primates had neither,in the face overwhelming evidence, was astonishing.

freelunch - they had them. They just believed that what they experienced was on a lower level. Because you can't prove the existence of emotion or consciousness, it didn't exist. Not to mention that the idea of chimps having consciousness was awfully inconvenient to them.

First of all, Rod, I echo everything Freelunch said regarding the "cult of personality" approach towards Darwin that is employed by religious conservatives (in this case, you) and those trying to stroke their egos (in this case, Morris). "Darwin doesn't have all the answers!!!" only makes sense if you're a person who has devoted his entire life to worshipping the word of Moses or Odin, and who if the subject got something wrong it would make something about the universe untrue. But despite all the empty moral equivocation, science is not a religion, precisely because all claims are tested and those found to be wrong are revised or discarded. Any first-year biology major could cite numerous mistakes Darwin wrote down before he died a century ago, and anyone who completed that first year could explain in depth why they don't matter vis-a-vis evolution by natural selection.

Morris says:The science of evolution is incomplete. Understanding a process doesn't mean that you also possess predictive powers as to what might (or even must) evolve. Nor is it logical to assume that simply because we are a product of evolution, as patently we are, that explains our capacity to understand the world. Rather the reverse. But wait a moment; everybody knows that evolution isn't predictable.

Guh?! This is the most blatant case of straw-man slaughtering I've seen in weeks; once he even came out and acknowledged that his objections were ridiculous, he should have just stopped talking, but no, on came another 9 paragraphs of teleological sentimentalist mush.

Farewell bleak nihilism; the cold assurances that all is meaningless.

And that's an even bigger and more dishonest straw-man than the one that came before. The idea that an evolved universe has no value, and/or that atheists can perceive no meaning or value in anything, makes about as much logical sense as saying that a chocolate cake baked by a human that evolved from a primate wouldn't taste as good as one baked by an intelligently-designed baker, and/or that atheists cannot discern that chocolate cake tastes good.

This is what passes for conservatism nowadays, I guess: wistfully insisting that one's own ideas simply must be true by virtue of how beautiful and proud they are. Political correctness, nothing more.

And now for Grey:He regards atheism as a late Christian cult, based on the supremely Christian (and Marxist) idea that by changing people's beliefs, you change their behaviour.

So, not only has he failed to read any of the texts he targets, he fails to read, period. "Atheism" = "without god." People don't believe in god. Where does he get "changing other peoples' behavior" from that? Dawkins, Hitchens, etc. have mostly pointed out that there is no evidence for the supernatural, and the supernatural is not necessary for the existence of the demonstrated universe. These are intellectual propositions, yet Grey sees them as the same as Mormon missionaries knocking on your door trying to change your voting patterns. So in addition to political correctness, we see which side has adopted willy-nilly moral relativism and equivalentism.

Though, hey, just HOW is it "uniquely Christian and Marxist" to assert that changing beliefs can change behavior? Isn't that just, uh, called being a person? If someone "believes" tooth decay is painful, won't they behave differently by brushing their teeth? If they "believe" driving a car brings risks, will they behave by checking their seatbelts? Or are Toothbrushism and Seatbeltalai-Lamas now a religion too, in the ongoing postmodernist relativist effort to re-cast all positive human endeavor as uniquely supernaturalist and anything not involving the supernatural as wasteful or dumb?

Sorry, I have no idea why the first comment popped up. Musta been a cookie thing.

But it sounds like Rod is now beign exposed to real scientists who uniformly agree that the Discovery Institute version of Intelligent is garbage. Calling David Klinghoffer:

"Now, he was very, very clear at several points to say that he is not an exponent of Intelligent Design, and in fact he believes the ID crowd has it wrong. The point he wanted us to take away was that Darwinian evolution (which he accepts as a valid mechanism for describing how life develops over time) [is incmplete --parphrasing].

No serious scientist argues the evoluton is complete. Much work remains to be done and is being done today at thousands of universities and research labs across the world.

Intelligent Design research: Zippo

http://www.researchintelligentdesign.org/index.php/Main_Page {This page last modified 00:41, 19 July 2006}

ID Peer Review Journals: Zippo

http://www.iscid.org/pcid.php Volume 4.2 November 2005.

Interesting post. Thank-you so very much for taking the time to pass on your experiences in Cambridge to us. As jealous as it makes me of the wonderful time I'm sure you're having, it's really wonderful to hear about the lectures.

In an earlier discussion, I regretted the joining of the political sphere with the religious sphere, and suggested that that might be one cause for the lack of depth and substance in a lot of religious coverage in America today.

I'd suggest that the same is true of science (and atheism for that matter). Both causes have been drafted into the culture wars (largely to counter the presence of religion in politics) with the result that depth of understanding and nuance have been sacrificed in order to create persuasive political arguments. In particular, I think science has been ill-served by arguments that would seem to imply that we do in fact know all of the answers and have ready materialistic explanations for everything.

The long and the short of it is that Morris is quite right: there is a considerable amount of work yet to be done to fully understand evolutionary processes. There is indeed a great deal of uncertainty about just how new forms of life appear and old ones disappear (as an example, the idea that catastrophic events play a major role in causing extinction and allowing new species to step to the fore is one that's only really become widely held in the last 30 or 40 years or so). And we have precedents, some within the last 100 years, of major changes in how we understand the universe happening (the biggest one being the overthrow of classical Newtonian physics early in the 20 th century).

The big lesson that seems to get left out of the evolution vs. creationism vs. ID debates is that we really need to be teaching students how we know what we are teaching is true. We need to be teaching them to think and reason based on evidence and observation. Simply replacing one catechism (say, young-Earth creationism) with another (evolution) without explaining how we know that evolution is the better explanation (the scientific method) is counterproductive. By all means, let us teach students to doubt, to test, to reach tentative conclusions, and to reject those conclusions in light of new evidence. That thought process is the real lesson.

I'm not sure that I would necessarily read too much into the idea of convergence as an indication for some kind of design or purpose. The basic principles of natural selection tell us that an organ that allows us to see better will help us to survive. It may well be that the design of the eye is simply the best, most efficient means of detecting visible light. So it's not surprising that it might have evolved independently more than once over the history of the life on Earth.

I personally have never really seen the conflict between the existence of a Creator and the process of evolution. Genesis, after all, has nothing whatsoever to say about the mechanism God used to create life. And if I were creating my own universe and had absolute freedom to establish the basic principles however I wished, I probably would choose some form of natural selection.

Note too, that evolution works within the boundaries given. Our eyes have evolved to detect visible light and not other parts of the spectrum because of the kind of light that gets through the atmosphere (hence no creatures really look in the far ultraviolet or more energetic parts of the spectrum). Change the conditions (mean temperature on the planet, availability of water, air density, atmospheric composition, etc.) and you change the resulting life forms that evolution produces.

So perhaps there is a Creator that caused the planet to be placed just this distance from the Sun, with just these particular chemical components, and just this particular magnetic field. And perhaps there is a Creator that periodically sends an extinction event our way to nudge the process of evolution along (like the asteroid collision that we think ended the Mesozoic age).

The point is that enlisting science in the political fight against religion is not terribly useful. Science has very little to say about the presence or absence of God. We may be able to conceive of a purely materialist universe that doesn't require the presence of God, but that doesn't preclude God's existence.

The point is that enlisting science in the political fight against religion is not terribly useful. Science has very little to say about the presence or absence of God. We may be able to conceive of a purely materialist universe that doesn't require the presence of God, but that doesn't preclude God's existence.

True, but parsimony encourages us not to assume that any gods or creators or designers do exist. There is no evidence that such do exist and there is no necessity for them to exist, so the logically rigorous assumption is that such do not exist. Religion is based on faith and, since it wasn't developed from a scientific or logical perspective, it isn't likely to be demolished by those tools.

As for the answer to the title question, I would say, no, life itself does not have an inherent purpose, but because life exists, the purpose of life is to continue. At the personal level everyone is capable of giving their own lives purpose, whether they have religious beliefs or not.

Nate,

I encourage all who claim that there is only a choice between faith and nihilism or between God and sociopathy to continue to believe. No one wants people who have become disillusioned about their faith to become murderous fools.

The rest of your comments have already been addressed. They are neither logically supportable nor scientifically accurate.

Now that is a spiritual dynamic that one can really have fun with!

Cthulhu will be having a conversation with you, soon, Charles. Thanks for the laugh.

Wow. A completely different column must have popped up on my screen than on the screens of freelunch and others. I utterly fail to see how Rod is arguing against Darwin or supporting ID and such. I've read what Rod wrote twice and still can't find any such thing! What I hav e on my screen seems to me to be an interesting conversation about ideas which ome up when one looks at the design or underlying rules which seems implicite in evolution. This isn't emotional, anti-science stuff. In fact, completely contrary to freelunch's claim that Rod is bringing his religious leaders to a science fair, this is a scientist who accepts evolution which seems to have gotten people's dander up. The chasm between what Rod wrote and people's response to it is one of the most bizarre things I've seen in these comboxes - and they are regularly filled with wacko stuff. Perhaps we are seeing proof of hard materialist's hostility towards this discussion at work here. I always take such claims with a grain of salt, but if this is the sort of reaction that gets fired at people who engage in these conversations, maybe there really is a code of bias and bullied silence at work. Who knew?

At any rate, this matter of where evolution stops providing answers and what direction we go from there is very interesting and not one the lay person hears enough about. I've heard other scientist describe it as being like a tool box that nature seems to have supplied which can be used in a variety of ways but which is constrained by the tools available. Evolution points to the ways in which this tool box have developed and been applied. But it doesn't cover what is in the tool box, why those are the tools available, what the constrainsts and possibilities inherent in the tool box are and why they are so, etc. These are all things which - like evolution itself - neither confirms or precludes a designer and are completely legitimate lines of scientific inquiry. There are those scientists who insist that seeking these design principles is in conflict with the random nature of evolution, but I don't have a sense of how dominant they are. I for one appreciate this discussion. Very interesting and nice to see people putting in the work and thought to move beyond the ridiculous atheist-creationist-ID psuedoconflicts which normally dominate such discussions.

"...evolution tells us nothing about what that purpose is,"

If evolution is trying to say something it must be "grow, will you?" Be fruitful and multiply. Adapt! We are obsessed with the act and mechanics of sex, even when it doesn't result in procreation. Our number as a species waxes and wanes, but trends ever upward, over 6 billion now. And this universal imperative to grow leads us as both individuals and a species head-on into the need for limits.

Fortunately, there IS OBVIOUSLY (yes, shouting) design. Moreover, the atheist proposition that universes just create themselves out of nothing by accident is goofy and impossible to imagine much less embrace as fact.

Have you ever seen anything create itself out of nothing by accident? Has ANYONE ever seen ANYTHING create itself out of nothing by accident? Of course not. It doesn't happen in nature, and thus the origin of the universe was SUPRA-nature -- i.e., supernatural. Or, "goddidit."

Just because we don't see things on our scale spontaneously appearing and disappearing doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. At the quantum level, as I've observed before, any number of counterintuitive things seem to occur.

Quantum foam is one of the odder consequences of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. It allows for particle and anti-particle pairs to spontaneously come into existence and almost immediately mutually annihilate without any violation of the law of conservation of the mass-energy.

One rather odd presumably observable characteristic of quantum foam is the phenomenon of Hawking Radiation, where one of the two particles in the pair escapes from the event horizon of a black hole (and causing the eventual evaporation of the black hole assuming that it is not massive enough to continue drawing excess matter in to counteract the mass of the Hawking Radiation that is lost). There are some experiments currently underway to detect this radiation and confirm the theory.

Other forms of such "pair production" have been experimentally observed.

There is, in fact, one suggestion that the entire universe came into being through a similar process of spontaneous particle-anti-particle production (the so-called Chaotic Inflation theory).

As I stated above, none of this refutes the idea of a Creator. But it does help show how a Creator might not be necessary.

I'm in the camp that all living things have souls, otherwise they wouldn't be alive.

What do you mean by soul, then?

Max Schadenfreude,
I did not know that bacterium have souls? How did you come to this conclusion? How can I examine a bacterium to find such evidence?

Having a "soul" marker could be very beneficial in the determination of Viruses - are they life? Unlike all other known organisms, viruses do not self-reproduce, metabolize food, or move independently. Detecting the presence of a soul could provide the answer.

kurt9,
A surprising number of animals have developed tool using intelligence (dolphins, sea otter, chimpanzees (and a number of primates), ravens, crows, woodpecker finches, etc. Each animal has found a novel way to use sticks, stones, sponges, and other natural items from their environment to obtain food.

Now we have definitive proof that humans are not alone in making tools:

"We suggest that this is the first unambiguous evidence of animal insight because the rooks [member of the crow family] made a hook tool on their first trial and we know that they had no previous experience of making hook tools from wire because the birds were all hand-raised," said Dr Nathan Emery, Queen Mary University of London, in whose lab these experiments were performed.

These findings suggest that rooks' ability to use tools and represent the tools' useful properties may be a by-product of a sophisticated form of physical intelligence, rather than tool use having evolved as an adaptive specialisation, such as has been proposed for the tool using abilities of New Caledonian crows.
-- ScienceDaily, May 26, 2009

But let us suppose that the Creator has other ideas, that He really likes science and created it and the human brain in such a way as to use it, Charles - I had a nun as a physics teacher in high school who actually said precisely that to us - several times each class and threatened us with hell and damnation if we did not use said brains. Which God had given us precisely so we could learn physics. So your spiritual dynamic sounds perfectly reasonable to me. I think the whole Galileo thing really taught the Church a lesson and they aren't going to embarass themselves again by doing the whole anti science thing. It is a lesson the young earth crowd might consider.

I really do not get the whole religion versus science thing - they clearly are not incompatible. As Geoff said - science neither proves nor disproves the existence of a Creator. And the faith neither proves nor disproves evolution. I also do not see the need to use science as a way to justify faith. Scientists don't worry about faith justifying science. The whole discussion - while occasionally intellectually stimulating - is really silly.

What do you mean by soul, then?

Freelunch - you have clearly never listened to Otis Reading.

"Max Schadenfreude, I did not know that bacterium have souls? How did you come to this conclusion? How can I examine a bacterium to find such evidence?"

If bacteria are alive, then they have souls. Is a virus alive? I don't know, but have read that a virus is little more than a type of bundle of instructions that living cells can't help but follow.

Where did I get the idea that all living things have souls? I got the idea from reading Aristotle's "de Anima" also known "On the Soul". Note the etymological connection between "soul" and "anima" as in "animated" as in "living".

This post is just persistent wishful thinking by the religious that you can shoehorn God into the equation somehow. Our current understanding of evolution is able to explain ALL of the concerns that Christianity raises against it. Christianity has singled out evolution for attack. Why don't you go after gravity or relativity, it is simply because they don't threaten your world view as does evolution.

Darwin certainly had it right and that has been reaffirmed with hundreds of years of data and findings that have never once been at odds with the theory of evolution. To try to critique Darwin's findings now is like trying to critcize the Wright brothers for not making a very good airplane. We have come so very far since then.

One of the finest points of Darwinian evolution is that it is religiously neutral. Like all scientific inquiry it can be discussed by educated people in Tokyo just as easily as in the USA. Creationism and ID may be coy but they inevitably point to the Judeo Christian God.

Evolution is undeniable it happens every day all around us. It has no goal in mind other than to get the most offspring into the next generation as possible. This explains why animals will always fill an available niche given enough time which easily expalins cases of convergence.

This is just a case of Christians trying to fit evidence into their own world view. At the very least evolution shows that there is no need for a god or gods controlling the development of life on earth.

Neuroscientists now have pretty well pinned down why prople are religious and know both the chemical activities and the locations in the brain that are responsible for "god creation" There are several evolutionary adaptations that highly intelligent animals develop to deal with their world. A belief in God is merely a by product of these adaptations for other purposes

Nate-

First, I'm not an atheist. Second, did you even read what I said? NO scientific theory has God in it- the realm of God and the supernatural is outside of science. Evolution doesn't talk about God any more than gravity. Would you say that the Theory of Gravity is not valid unless it says at the beginning "God said that particles with mass shall attract other particles with mass (and light), and hence there is gravity"? I have no problem with theistic evolution as a philosophy. But it's not scientific.

By the way, explicitly atheistic evolution is not scientific either. It's as unscientific to say "evolution proves there is no God" as it is to say "the complexity of life proves there is a God".

Re: Where I differ with him is that he believes that the evolution of intelligence is a near certainty and that if humans did not evolved, that another species, perhaps dolphins, would have evolved tool making intelligence sooner or later.

I don't know about dolphins because I don't think life in the sea would be amenable to the development of technology-- how would fire-use work in the sea? But I think we should be open to the larger possibility above given that the only data point (Earth) we have affirms it-- and yes I know, one data point does not make an argument in favor, only refutes the categorical argument against. It is possible at least that intelligence (or more broadly, consciousness) represents an attractor state toward which life will tend to evolve, even though it may have to overcome some serious difficulties getting there (large brain size vs gestation, etc.).
The fact that dinosaurs did not evolve in that direction is no more an argument against this than the fact that several large and ancient phyla of living things remain purely sea (or at least water) bound would be an argument against life moving from land to sea being more or less inevitable.

"There is enough evidence for the following of social rules to agree that some of the stepping stones towards human morality can be found in other animals"

If we are just random bags of evolved protoplasm with no intended purpose for being, It doesn't matter if we "follow the social rules" or not. Who has the authority to say we ought to follow this rule or that rule when we have instincts that say otherwise? We really must stop criminalizing our evolutionary instincts to murder cannibalize steal rape etc. All animals do these things, and it's just...natural. We really should get our legal code back into harmony with our evolutionary instincts and stop criminalizing our instincts.

If chimps are often willing to help others, great. If they are ALSO willing to steal and kill and cannibalize, also great. Same difference. If not, why not? And who gets to say? See, the logical ramifications of atheism are that there's no one to say any of our instincts are "wrong" or "evil." They are simply natural, and we really should not create arbitrary legal codes so out of touch with our evolutionary instincts.

Yes, Nate, the other great apes are very much like the the most common great ape, H. sapiens, even in their behavior. You shouldn't be surprised at all.

thomas tucker,
Psychopaths (sociopaths) have "three overlapping, but separable, constellations of traits: interpersonal deficits (such as grandiosity, arrogance and deceitfulness), affective deficits (lack of guilt and empathy, for instance), and impulsive and criminal behaviors (including sexual promiscuity and stealing)." If you happen to be a Psychopath and the only thing keeping you in check is a belief in the soul, then I pity your plight but commend you for trying to restrain your penchant for violence and crime. Thankfully such people are rare.

Back when I was a right-thinking religiously raised person, I too used to puzzle over how there could be any morality with no Supreme Authority to make and enforce the rules! I have gradually come to understand that this mindset has been inculcated into religious people by a careful, years-long process of indoctrination. Of course they believe that there must be an authority who will reward and punish. That is the context in which they've lived their lives. Expecting them to take a larger view of things is like expecting a dog who has always been chained to understand that there are good reasons not to run into the road--not merely the fact that his chain won't reach that far. Learning to understand that morality is a social construct and that humans in community are restrained by things other than fear of divine retribution takes a long time.

In the religious mind, morality appeared ex nihilo, by divine fiat--it came down off the mountainside on tablets of stone! A look at history and ethnography suggests that the behaviors developed first, and the divine sanction and codification was put in place later, to reinforce what society had already decided was working pretty well. I have no doubt that the Babylonians had a well-developed system of social behavior and sanctions long before it was codified as the laws of Hammurabi. We live as we do because our social environment has taught us to behave that way. We enforce these laws on each other.

And then, every once in awhile, a psychopath kills one of us while he's enjoying his chocolate cake. Or attending church. And then the rest of us find him and lock him up, because we have achieved group consensus that it isn't safe for the rest of us to let him run around doing things like that. Sure, "divinely inspired" sets of laws are one of the way that we remind ourselves of what we've learned about how to live together in some degree of peace. And to that extent, they are useful and worth respecting. But they arose out of the shared consensus of our community. They didn't appear in a vacuum.

Do Christians really think this "only-my-piety-restrains-my-bloodlust" line of argument can ever convince anyone of anything?

It has taken me a long time, admittedly, but I think I finally understand what that's code for. After hearing it often enough.

I believe it's "if I don't have a guarantee of my personal immortality in Heaven, contingent on my good behavior and setting the world aright as desired, my set of rationalizations of my disappointing life (that are all reasoned backward from that individual immortality and individual joy in Heaven as its fundamental assumption) will all fail. I will then utterly despair of my miserable existence. Without reward , why should I do anything good? I will ultimately obey the strongest motivation left in my life, hate. And that means I will likely end up going murder-suicidal against the people I hate."

I don't know where to begin with the awfulness of this or what it says about the people who assert it. Isn't it an admission of moral bankrupcy?

Nate - I did check my trusty Britannica. Galileo was found "vehemently suspect of heresy", namely of having held the opinions that the Sun lies motionless at the centre of the universe, that the Earth is not at its centre and moves, and that one may hold and defend an opinion as probable after it has been declared contrary to Holy Scripture. Yes - the Church did finance his work. And it seems his big mistake was to make the pope who had supported him look like an idiot. But - he was not censored and put under house arrest because he published without proof - he in fact had used mathematical proofs - he was censured because he was deemed heretical and held an opinion contrary to scripture. In 1992 Pope JP II expressed regret for the Galileo situation and agreed the sun was at the center of the universe.

Yes, the Church learned not to leave the recall of history to idiots

Guess you are right on that one.

Seriously - not all religions are anti evolution. I actually don't know which religions are anti evolution. Mine isn't. As I said, since that Galileo business they have behaved much better about science - a priest even came up with the whole Big Bang theory. And he wasn't put in jail or excommunicated. So maybe we could qualify the all religious people are anti science.

I also really do not think that all religions believe that morality is only possible among the religious. Or that morality is only possible because one believes in God. First of all the premise is rather easily disproved. It isn't like one catches morality at the moment of baptism. Even a cursory understanding of human behavior includes the notion that children learn how to behave morally - that humans need to be taught moral behavior and there is that socialization thing going on. Seems if the only thing that motivates one to be moral is fear of retribution than one is not really very moral.

Charles - I must protest. Henry XIII was not a wise king. He was self indulgent and capricious. He dissolved the monasteries not out of some reformist zeal - but because he was bankrupt again and couldn't tax anymore without promoting revolt - so he went after the monasteries. The fool died thinking he was still a good catholic. He also dissolved a monastery that had just discovered how to make an effective blast furnace and in so doing delayed the industrial revolution by a couple hundred years. Not to mention all the books - thousands - that were destroyed and all that ancient knowledge lost.

I never said that my psychopathic tendencies are only held in check by a belief in the soul so you can put away that wilful misinterpreation, although it makes for a nice dodge.
You know the point, that without an objective standard, you have no inability label something as moral or immoral. If you do have an objective standard ( the most pleaure for the most people) please state it.
Otherwise, your use of terms like "awful", and "abnormal" are simply use of currency with no gold standard to back it up. you can do that as long as people agree to accept it, but the house of cards can fall quite readily.

"Atheism is Dead" has elucidated the difference between "purpose" and "meaning":
http://atheismisdead.blogspot.com/2009/04/atheism-and-meaning-and-purpose.html

I know this is a bit late to be posting another comment, but tonight, more out of boredom than curiosity, I aimed my telescope up at the moon and beheld the wonder of that little world that circles our own. Truly there can be no hell hot enough or deep enough for those who would have denied us the joy of that vision or the knowledge that has come from it.

One can only imagine what went on in the mind of Galileo when he first saw the craters and mountains, the sunlight reflecting off their peaks and the valleys deeper than the oceans.

May Roberto Bellarmine roast forever on the Devil's spit.

I'm jealous that you got to hear Simon Conway Morris in person. Ever since the Wittenburg Door's interview with him in the March/April 2007 issue, I have considered him the greatest scientific mind in Christendom. Incidentally, while it may not have come out in the presentation described here, he stated that he fully accepts both the Incarnation and the Resurrection. He also said disproving evolution is about as likely as disproving the existence of zinc. He is firm on what science can show, based on the evidence, without in the least doubting that there is a God revealed in the Bible, and that in subtle ways nobody in the "Creation Science" or "Intelligent Design" schools of fantasy have noticed, science does point to a purpose which transcends what we can establish by scientific research.