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You are home.

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Image source: NASA (Suomi Satellite, January 4, 2012)

Science is not merely about discovering continuities in nature that can be described by a seamless naturalistic story. Sure, areas of science are like that. But science also presents us with discontinuities that resist naturalistic just-so stories. The most widely cited of these is the singularity of the Big Bang. A singularity is a discontinuity for which explanations in terms of ordinary physical processes break down.

It’s not that scientific investigation stops at a singularity. It’s just that the usual way of doing science, looking to ordinary processes that we’ve seen active in other contexts, no longer works. Granted, it is no explanation of a singularity merely to say “God did it.” But a singularity can be studied on its own terms, and the natural forces that may have played a role on either side of it may be studied and their inability to bridge the gap may also be assessed. Such singularities, proponents of intelligent design argue, have happened throughout the history of life. Life presents us with numerous singularities, everything from the Cambrian explosion to the emergence of some (but not all) novel proteins.

I think that William Dembski’s observations here are fair ones. There are moments in history where jaw-dropping disjunctures occur (the Big Bang itself, life, and consciousness are three obvious ones). They arrive unexpected and seem to be products of unique, even otherworldly (transcendent) processes.

In fact, there’s something downright messianic about some past events. Were there John the Baptists preceding these, we would not have believed any of them:

• “Prepare ye the way, for a big bang cometh nigh!”
• “Behold, as water to wine or lead to gold, humdrum chemistry shall turn to biochemistry!”
• “Look, the kingdom of self awareness, reason, imagination, and language is at hand! The planet of apes you now see shall birth on this round globe—Shakespeare!“

These are such things as DMT-induced psychedelic trips are made on, but they all came to pass; they really, really happened. For Dembski, these historical disjunctures make the resurrection of Jesus seem downright plausible.

It’s nice to think the universe might not be done delivering flabbergasting surprises. Those who have dialed into DMT report that their consciousness appears to be taken out of their bodies to exotic cosmic realms. And I can’t help but think of Steve Jobs’s dying words:

Oh, wow! Oh, wow! Oh, wow!

What makes you so sure there’s only one world?

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Maybe hope—even hope that death is not the last word—should “spring eternal” because the cosmos itself springs.

As a liberal who plans to vote for President Obama in November, I nevertheless can’t think of anything that Governor Daniels says here that isn’t reasonable.

Why didn’t this guy run for President of the United States? I didn’t even know there were such sane Republicans in leadership anymore.

Behold a Republican making a speech devoid of Obama hatred, gross distortions, craziness, and indecency. How curiously odd.

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My guess is that, if Mitt Romney manages to con enough red meat conservative primary voters to vote for him and not Newt Gingrich, and wins the nomination, that he’ll immediately tack “left” and start talking exactly like Mitch Daniels does here.

Romney will do this calmly, systematically, repeatedly. It’s quite obvious that, if he does, he’s got a high probability of winning.

The weak Republican field and ridiculous beliefs of the Republican base voters obfuscate the real political climate for 2012. Not until watching Governor Mitch Daniels’ speech have I really absorbed just how vulnerable President Obama is to a crushing electoral defeat in November. Independents will salivate to a Daniels-like message. Mitt Romney knows this. It’s why he’s trying so hard to win the Republican primary. Newt Gingrich, were he to win, might very likely blow the lay up.

What would Freud say? Here’s the Boston Globe this morning:

I wonder whether this was done in Boston by an anti-religion zealot or just a thoughtless teen out and about for kicks. Maybe somebody lost his wife or children in a car accident and is mad at God, but it’s hard to believe that the target was picked completely at random.

If it was, then why not just choose a storefront sign to knock down? Why Jesus?

We live in a time where a lot of people (not without justification) are pissed at the stupidity and politicized rancor and violence that goes with so much contemporary religion. Thus, this could be the work of a particularly coarse and inarticulate atheist.

Or it might be the product of an internal religious dispute: a Protestant or Muslim attacking a Catholic Church. It’s not an unknown phenomenon for monotheists to break each other’s stuff. Here’s a drawing, for example, of Calvinists gleefully “cleansing” a Catholic Church in Geneva in the the 16th century:

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When we think of iconoclasm, we perhaps first imagine the destruction of temples or the smashing of idols, as in the following fearful gesture of iconoclasm, under the Taliban-like reign of the zealous monotheist Jehu, recorded in the Bible, in II Kings 10:26-27:

And they brought forth the images out of the house of Baal, and burned them.

And they brake down the image of Baal, and brake down the house of Baal, and made it a draught house unto this day.

A “draught house” is a polite way for the King James translators to tell us that the ruins of Baal’s temple were used by the Judeans as a place to take a piss.

But before non-monotheists get too smug here, it should be remembered that iconoclasm has disturbing precedents not just on the “Jerusalem” side of Western cultural history, but also is represented on the pagan “Athens” side as well, as when Aristophanes, in his comic play, Clouds, ends it with the burning of the school of Socrates. Plato famously attributed at least part of the reason for Socrates’s death to the popular prejudicial passions inflamed against him by Aristophanes’s play.

History suggests that the destruction of cultural symbols typically forebodes, not just the end of civil dialogue, but the marginalizing and destruction of people.

This is why we need to find out the person(s) who did this and why they did it.

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And don’t forget the end of George Bush’s sanctioning of torture. That’s a big one.

Approving indefinite detention of American citizens, however, is a historic blunder of this president. But maybe Chris Hedges will fix that one:

I know that Lincoln is oversized on the Mall, but there’s just something wrong about this King depiction. I can’t put my finger on it.

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Image source: Wikipedia Commons.

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UPDATE: Curiously, the sculptor is Chinese, not an American. His name is Lei Yixin. And he went to art school in the years immediately following the Cultural Revolution. Here’s the sculptor before his totalitarian-feeling, overwrought production.

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Can we start over?

Image Source: Wikipedia Commons.

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UPDATE II: I think I’m able to articulate my objection to the memorial a bit more clearly after letting my repulsion percolate a bit:

King looks like he has a police state backing him rather than before him.

Put another way, King looks like the static guarantor of a new, officially sanctioned and monolithic, status quo, not the contrarian outsider that he, in fact, was, stepping forward against an unjust system. This is King appropriated by bureaucratic elites tone deaf to both art and nonconformity; the overpowering guardian of a closed door, blocking it; not one who persistently sought entrance.

King’s models were Tolstoy, Thoreau, Gandhi, and Jesus. Can anyone imagine these figures memorialized in such a pose and on so ridiculous a scale? The sculptor’s own casual and human stance in the above photo is much more in keeping with King’s general demeanor than the statue itself.

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And calling into Rush Limbaugh’s radio program today, a hysterical Rick Santorum supporter had this exchange with him:

I feel like he [Rick Santorum] is the true conservative.  I am from Pennsylvania, and they are rooting for him up there because they know that he truly lives and breathes conservatism through his whole life.

RUSH:  Yeah.

CALLER:  I’m so disappointed at these South Carolinians for being snowed by the media, and I fear for my one-year-old and two-and-a-half-year-old, and I feel like — and maybe it’s a conspiracy theory — but if Obama wins in November, that this country will fall into communism.  Maybe it’s being too fearful, but I can expect anything.

RUSH: You ought to get my buddy Mark Levin’s book, Ameritopia.

CALLER: Oh.

RUSH: His point is we already have.

CALLER: Absolutely.

The leaders of the modern conservative movement—Limbaugh, Santorum, Gingrich—don’t correct this kind of stupidity, but passively ride atop it as a means to greater power—or even feed it (as Limbaugh does above).

But this is the soulless path of the demagogue. And it’s what the declining and decadent phase of what was once a romantic movement now sounds like. This is not Barry Goldwater’s movement; it’s George Wallace’s. It has no sense of proportion; no real interest in reason or truth.

If Santorum or Gingrich achieve the Republican nomination, may they be repudiated by the broader electorate at the polls in November. It will take a couple of election cycle losses before the Republican Party starts easing its way toward sanity (and even basic decency) again.

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In the context of this post, the above Amadeus clip should make sense momentarily. But what I really want to direct your attention to, after you read my set up comments here, is the below video by Massimo Pigliucci.

Pigliucci does an admirable job explaining why it’s important, when arguing, that you keep an eye on your coherence.

If, for example, you argue for the existence of ESP (extrasensory perception), one would also hope that you have some plausible physical theory that accounts for it.

For instance, let’s say you believe that a gifted psychic, using her ESP, can know, at this very instant—and by intuition alone—an event going on in Mongolia. Let’s also say you believe that nothing, including information, can travel faster than the speed of light. If so, you had better think again about the truth of either:

• your claim that ESP is real; or
• your belief that the speed of light in inviolable.

If you don’t, you’re not being especially coherent in your beliefs; you’re treating them as one would a visit to a buffet. You’re mesmerized by the sight of a little of this, a little of that, but in no particular order:

Why can’t I have two mouths? I like the look of the salad and the dessert and—however inelegant—I want to hold them both right now, on the same plate!

Of course, if you don’t have the energy for reconciling your desires or beliefs with one another, there’s always that universally human and ever handy device for being happy anyway: cognitive dissonance.

And masturbation.

Here’s Pigliucci: