More from The Times and The Post

• Another bit of Tartuffery from a creationist made news in the NY Times, this time a book by a Muslim has been sent to a number of leading scientists at Universities in America. You need know little more about it than that Mr. Yahya, the author, calls Darwin’s theory "a feeble and perverted ideology contradicted by the Koran." The Koran contradicts it, what a spectacularly convincing piece of evidence that Evolutionary theory is false....Anyway it's unclear what this Yahya (sounds like an alternate for Yahoo, which might be a good way to describe this clown) is trying to achieve by sending this to evolutionary biologists and the like. Perahps simply for publicity as the Scientists were likely perplexed, and if so he's achieved his goal evidenced by the story being in the NY Times' "most e-mailed".
• Space travel and colonization should be a focus of ours, according to this article in the NY Times which I'm not sure how to approach, other than to say that it is notable this blog's creators by virtuing of it's author (a Tierney) and the Professor it focuses on (a Princetonian).
• And finally, the Washington Post story we've commented on by Gerson "What an Atheist can't answer" has in fact been answered by the one and only Christopher Hitchens. The upside to Hitchens' piece is that as always he employs some enjoyable bombast when talking about God, such as the term "celestial dictatorship." The downside is that Hitchens is a little heavy on rhetoric and a little light on substance. He interprets Gerson in such a way as to create a straw man, specifically by dealing with the argument that one needs religion (or belief in God) to behave morally. Hitchens can shoot down this argument easily, as can anyone, so he chooses to focus on it and come across as superior by doing so. But, by doing so he fails to take a hard look at Gerson's more important point, which is that a world sine religio might be one where contemplation regarding the purpose of life would lead directly to Nihilism. Would a an intellectual position which acknoweledges the truth of Nihilism lead to nihilistic behavior? As stated in a previous post, the answer is unclear. On one hand I tend to believe strongly that intellectual positions do not influence our passions and emotions, and therefore do not have great effect on our behavior. On the other hand, it's hard to imagine a world where every man, woman and child is convinced that we are merely "sophisticated meat machines" with no hope of an afterlife, and yet despite this knowledge they behave precisely as they do now, as if there are moral absolutes and as if we should judge actions in regard to their morality. One thing we might predict is that larger sectarian conflicts would be minimzed without religion, and that would be great - but that doesn't get to the question of individual and consequently societal behavior operating under the assumption that nihilism were true.