God, Darwin and My Philosophy Class

I don't take quite the same tack in my Philosophy classes as David Barash takes in his Biology, but he's right that Design has been discredited. And yet, Paley's Watch keeps on ticking. It just won't go away.

"As evolutionary science has progressed, the available space for religious faith has narrowed: It has demolished two previously potent pillars of religious faith and undermined belief in an omnipotent and omni-benevolent God.

The twofold demolition begins by defeating what modern creationists call the argument from complexity. This once seemed persuasive, best known from William Paley’s 19th-century claim that, just as the existence of a complex structure like a watch demands the existence of a watchmaker, the existence of complex organisms requires a supernatural creator. Since Darwin, however, we have come to understand that an entirely natural and undirected process, namely random variation plus natural selection, contains all that is needed to generate extraordinary levels of non-randomness. Living things are indeed wonderfully complex, but altogether within the range of a statistically powerful, entirely mechanical phenomenon..."

God, Darwin and My College Biology Class - NYTimes.com

Why We Walk

no one reason, but...

Walking is the Western form of meditation: “You’re doing nothing when you walk, nothing but walking. But having nothing to do but walk makes it possible to recover the pure sensation of being, to rediscover the simple joy of existing, the joy that permeates the whole of childhood.” There’s a reason... that a dominant school of philosophy in the ancient world, revived in the medieval, was called the “peripatetic.” In Raphael’s great fresco of assembled ancient philosophers, conventionally called “The School of Athens,” Plato and Aristotle are shown upright and in movement, peripatetic even when fixed in place by paint, advancing toward the other philosophers rather than enthroned above them. Movement and mind are linked in Western thought. The Cynic philosophers of antiquity, in contrast, were often merely “circumambulant”—walking around and around the same few blocks in order to annoy other people..." 'Why We Walk

Toast! (And the climate crisis)

One good comic deserves another...

and another.

Beam us up

You're right, @tomtomorrow: our technology is definitely outstripping our maturity.


Dailykos

Walking to work

I usually begin my school day, the moment I step out of the car after my daily driving commute down I-24, with a stroll around campus. Like D.B. Johnson's Henry, I prefer walking to work.

Unlike Henry, I'm not usually hyper-observant of detail during my morning ramble. I tend to be focused on whatever subject awaits classroom discussion, or unfocused and wool-gathering.

But yesterday, for whatever reason (or none), I found myself attending closely to the words at my feet in front of the Student Union. Decade by decade, they record chiseled highlights of the history of our university. I didn't slow long enough to take them all in, but I've decided from now on I'll register a bit more of them each day. Eventually I'll ingest it all, and I'll be just a bit smarter about the institution that butters my bread.

You never step in the same river twice, and there's no reason why you have to cross the same campus twice either. Attention is its own reward: behold, our esteemed president's John Hancock etched in stone. "Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" And smile, Ozymandias.