Christopher Hitchens & Tony Blair Debate on Religion

In a civilized and thought-provoking debate that took place just this past week in Toronto, former British Prime Minister and recent Catholic convert Tony Blair defended the motion that religion is a force for good in the world. Opposing the motion with all his cerebral might was his compatriot, the journalist and public intellectual Christopher Hitchens.

As the eager audience seems to have correctly anticipated, the intellectual engagement was stimulating, challenging and amusing. Best of all, Hitchens and Blair both managed to steer away from cheap shots, ad hominem attacks and appeals to emotion (for the most part...). Their mutual respect for one another helped their arguments focus on the relevance of the ideas supporting their position, and the result was a highly entertaining and educational exchange.

Whatever side you agree with, you're in for a mental treat.

Check out more fascinating debates.

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The Awesomest Sentence I Read Today

I've totally neglected this type of blog entry for a while, but maybe now I'll get it started again. Anyway, this is from an essay on gay rights, written by Jonathan Rauch, quoting James Q. Wilson:

Of all the institutions through which men may pass--schools, factories, the military--marriage has the largest [domesticating] effect.

Rauch then argues that the domestication of men ought to be one of the top three social functions of marriage. Wow...

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Irreducible Complexity Cut Down to Size

Unless you live in hillbilly territory, it's difficult nowadays to be a creationist and not get immediately laughed at. So, what do you do if you believe in the half-baked idea that some designer designed biological organisms as they are? You dress it up with sophisticated-sounding technical terms like 'irreducible complexity', and you also make sure to surround its mention with liberal-sounding principles like tolerance of other views, teaching the controversy, keeping an open mind, or even --and this is as ridiculous as it can possibly get-- letting the children decide, as if empirical knowledge were a question of personal preference or popularity...

The fact is, however, that once you strip the intention behind irreducible complexity (lest you commit the circumstantial ad hominem fallacy), the idea, fancy as it may originally sound, is still ultimately nothing more than an argument from personal incredulity: taking your own inability to explain a phenomenon or process, or your lack of imagination, or simply your ignorance of the scientific literature, as the basis upon which to pretend to have found an answer that's just conveniently consistent with your religious beliefs.

And when it comes to evidence, even the examples shown by its proponents turn out, surprise surprise, not to be irreducibly complex...

And just remember that if you want to draw an analogy between a human designer and god as a designer, logical consistency requires that in both cases the designers must be more complex than their designs, in which case you'd be 'explaining' complexity by presupposing even more complexity.

Call me silly, but 'solving' a mystery with a bigger mystery only aggravates the problem, it doesn't solve it...

And if you're interested, here is a description of the self-assembly of the bacterial flagellum.

Update: QualiaSoup, the creator of this and other wonderful animations, has also produced a response to 'objections' creationists have voiced against his portrayal of irreducible complexity:

As one commenter said, you don't fuck with QualiaSoup :)
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