Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
PZ Myers is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris.
…and this is a pharyngula stage embryo.
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We may have faith in something, about something, even faith in spite of evidence for something, but if there is nothing existing in the first place to have faith about then the act of faith is not only ungrounded but completely misplaced and without content. Faith of itself does not provide supporting evidence for anything. It does provide such things as pyschological reassurances and attitudes to be taken towards things. It may provide perspectives from which to relate to events and people. But faith that Creation Ex Nihilo does take place cannot be had. There is nothing there in the first place to have faith in. If the attitude of faith is a supporting ground for the validity of an idea, then by the same token one can by faith give supporting ground to any notion whatever. By an act of faith God could be said not to Create Ex Nihilo, but He is Co-Eternal with the Universe. By an act of faith it could be said that God does not exist, or that many Gods exist, or that God isn't here yet, or that God passed out of existence many years ago. Unguarded, both the appeal to mystery and the appeal to faith tend to become arguments from ignorance or arguments to ease the burden of something unknown or unacceptable.
Peter A. Angeles, The Problem of God: A Short Introduction (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1986), p. 66.
Generating right-left asymmetries
Upstream plasticity and downstream robustness in evolution of molecular networks
I think I despise anti-environmentalists as much as I do anti-evolutionists
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Category: Art • Science • Weblogs
Posted on: January 25, 2007 5:30 PM, by PZ Myers
Chris Clarke has a new banner on Creek Running North, so of course he has to give us a grand tour of the Pleistocene. It's a Carl Buell original, you know — it's becoming quite the coup to get some Buell art on your blog.
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