Three-sentence Inglourious Basterds review August 21, 2009
Posted by Evil Bender in arts and culture, Film.add a comment
Quentin Tarantino loves movies. Watching his movies reminds rekindles my love of movies. Inglourious Basterds is no exception, and has bonus killing of Nazis.
[Bonus 4th sentence: Highly Recommended, and not for the faint of heart.]
Beards are proof of evolution is false? August 10, 2009
Posted by Evil Bender in Origins, Science, wingnuts.1 comment so far
So says “Brian Thomas, M. S.“:
On the other hand, if everything was created by a God who exists outside the physical world, there is a ready answer, one with broad application: beards present a certain appearance. Aesthetic features were emplaced by Someone who knew how things look in addition to how things work. Beards do not confer any selectable survival advantage to humankind, but they do serve to add distinction to men, perhaps as different features distinguish women.
It would be consistent to think that it simply pleased the Creator to outfit humans and other creatures with certain visually appealing characteristics. “But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him” (1 Corinthians 15:38). The study of purposes is called apobetics, and beards are evidence that God designed certain features simply with aesthetics in mind.
I’ll just point out that this is actually a pretty decent argument when compared to the ICR’s usual tripe. Which means, naturally, that it’s only embarrassing, not shockingly embarrassing.
Right up until the end of the piece, that is:
Researchers have not yet found a metaprogram in this universe that guides clouds of space dust into raw functional, let alone variously aesthetic, forms. After all, what does the impersonal universe care about beauty? A Creator God who appreciates beauty and wants others to appreciate His handiwork must be responsible for the origin of aesthetic features. Men have beards–some thick, some sparse–because it pleased God to adorn them so.
Don’t you love it when Creationists think they’ve just indicted science for points that scientists long-since have considered and dealt with? It’s almost as funny as their pathetic misunderstandings of evolutionary theory. Seriously, have these people ever heard of sexual selection? Genetic drift? For that matter, are they really so stupid that they can’t think of a more plausible reason that beards aren’t in favor than that A Magic Man Gave Them To Us But We’ve Lost Our Way? (Hint to Creationists: when is a beard more important? when you’re in a cave or your parents’ nice warm basement?)
