Agylen

It’s interesting to see how normally smart people can be easily duped:

techno.blog(“Dion”): What the bleep do we know?: “I got to see a film that I have wanted to see for awhile now: What the bleep do we know?!.

This is part documentary, part story, part exploration.

It is my kind of movie. One where you are actually encouraged to THINK while you suck it all in. Imagine that.”

Sorry, Dion, you’re a very competent guy when it comes to Java and server-side programming in general, but you’ve been had. What the bleep do we know is not a documentary, it’s not a story and it’s not an exploration. It’s simply a very long infomercial for a cult:

Skeptico: What the (Bleep) Were They Thinking?: “I can answer that now. They were thinking that if they made a film using the word “quantum” a lot, plus plenty of feel-good drivel they would (a) make a ton of money (not that they are short of the stuff), and (b) gain more recruits to their loony-tunes cult. This is probably one of the few things they got right.”

Dion, I hope you’re a bit more skeptical when evaluating application servers or databases than you’ve been evaluating that film. Cheers.

Yesterday we chided Pope Ratzi for being a homophobic reactionary. Now it’s time, thanks to PZ Myers, to see how he stands on matters of science, especially in fields where science seems to be perfectly able to explain things like the evolution of living beings, without needing to resort to a lot of hand-waving about a “creator” or some kind of “intelligent design”:

It is the affair of the natural sciences to explain how the tree of life in particular continues to grow and how new branches shoot out from it. This is not a matter for faith. But we must have the audacity to say that the great projects of the living creation are not the products of chance and error…(They) point to a creating Reason and show us a creating Intelligence, and they do so more luminously and radiantly today than ever before. Thus we can say today with a new certitude and joyousness that the human being is indeed a divine project, which only the creating Intelligence was strong and great and audacious enough to conceive of. Human beings are not a mistake but something willed.

This is the same old pro-design argument that was first brought forward by William Paley more than two centuries ago and that has since been utterly refuted numerous times (see Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, for instance). You’d think Ratzi would know better than that.

Indeed, his predecessor JPII sounded a bit more informed than him:

Today, more than a half-century after the appearance of that encyclical, some new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than an hypothesis. In fact it is remarkable that this theory has had progressively greater influence on the spirit of researchers, following a series of discoveries in different scholarly disciplines. The convergence in the results of these independent studies—which was neither planned nor sought—constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory.