Dissident Veteran For Peace: Dawkins on Alien Intelligent Designers

Dissident Veteran For Peace

"I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America." —Alexis de Tocquevile. Democracy in America, Book I, Chapter XV.

With a nod to the Most Rev. Dom Helder Camara: When I support Palestinians some call me an 'anti-Semite', when I try to explain why I stand in solidarity with Palestinians they call me a Nazi.

"WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." —Major General Smedley Butler, USMC (ret.)

"... no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end." —character of O'Brien in 1984, part 3, ch. 3 by George Orwell.

"Every prophet has realized that nobody loves you for being the enemy of their illusions. Every prophet has realized that most of us want peace at any price as long as the peace is ours and somebody else pays the price. That is why the prophet Jeremiah said, ' "Peace, peace," they say, when there is no peace,' ..." —The Rev. William Sloane Coffin. "Not to Bring Peace, But a Sword."

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Dawkins on Alien Intelligent Designers

I am a fan of neither Ben Stein nor Richard Dawkins but I recently watched Stein's snarky, controversial but worthwhile documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The film is about Intelligent Design (ID), a theory which "holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." More specifically, the premise of the film is that ID and its proponents have been excluded from the educational and scientific establishments based on ideological rather than scientific grounds. You don't have to agree with the filmmakers' point-of-view on ID or the fate of its adherents to find the film--like it's anti-ID counterpart Flock of Dodos--entertaining and thought-provoking.

Any way, what prompted this blog post was Stein's interview near the end of the film with Richard Dawkins. Starting at about 3:10 in the clip below is the following exchange:

BEN STEIN: What do you think is the possibility that Intelligent Design might turn out to be the answer to some issues in genetics or in Darwinian evolution.

RICHARD DAWKINS: Well, it could come about in the following way. It could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved, probably by some kind of Darwinian means, probably to a very high level of technology, and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet. Um, now that is a possibility, and an intriguing possibility. And I suppose it's possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry, molecular biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer.

BEN STEIN (in narrative voice): Wait a second. Richard Dawkins thought Intelligent Design might be a legitimate pursuit?

RICHARD DAWKINS: And that Designer could well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe. But that higher intelligence would itself have had to have come about by some explicable, or ultimately explicable process. It couldn't have just jumped into existence spontaneously. That's the point.