Please allow me one more post on the subject of DaveScot's comments about guided vs unguided evolution. This is a familiar refrain from ID advocates, what we might call "ID minimalism" - the position that even if the theory of common descent is absolutely true and all modern life forms are related via descent with modification, that descent was guided by God (no, I'm not going to engage in their ridiculous sophistry of calling it "the intelligent designer" - they're talking about God, they know it and so does everyone else, and there is no reason to play pretend in this regard). Here's how Dave put it:
They know full well that any honest examination of the evidence will support natural selection changing the size of finch beaks and color of moth wings, that the fossil record and common genetic code among extant creatures strongly implies a deep common relationship among all species living and extinct, but that there is no empirical evidence that these relationships are without purpose, thought, or design.
Of course, he doesn't spell out what possible empirical evidence there could be for such a negative statement. What evidence would he accept for such a proposition? My guess is that there is no evidence because it is nearly impossible to prove a negative. It's a bit like someone claiming that there is an invisible leprauchan that makes it rain; we can point to all sorts of "naturalistic" theories and the data that support them on how rain is produced, but the question will still remain, "Well, what evidence do you have that the invisible leprachaun doesn't guide the whole process?" And the answer is "none", because there is no hypothetical evidence to prove such a negative - there just isn't any reason to believe it to be the case, and Occam's razor would certainly be germane here.
Still, I think we can go further than this. We can at least ask certain questions and make reasonable predictions based upon the answers. For example, we could ask ourselves questions like these: What sort of evidence would we expect to see if the evolutionary history of life on earth was an unguided but contingent process? What would we expect if the evolutionary history of life on earth was instead guided with a specific purpose in mind? And what might that purpose be? And here I think we can come up with some reasonable answers and compare them to the evidence that we do have.
For example, if the history of life was guided for a purpose, why would the creator that guided it be so wasteful and go down so many obvious dead ends? The vast majority of species that have ever lived on this earth have gone extinct. For every lineage that continues on and splits off into species that continue to be viable and alive, there are innumerable lineages that simply die out. Furthermore, they often tend to die out in painful ways, through the spread of disease, hunger, excessive predation, floods, earthquakes, meteor impacts, volcanic eruptions, and so forth. For what possible purpose would a designer bring about so many millions of species only to have his handiwork destroyed or his creations prove inadequate to survive?
At least 5 times in the earth's history there have been catastrophic extinctions that killed off untold millions of species comprised of trillions of individual organisms. In some cases, whole ecosystems were virtually wiped clean and started anew, with new life forms developing from those that survived the extinction and radiating out to fill the niches vacated by the dead. Is this the result of the designer "shaking the etch-a-sketch" and starting over? Surely a designer powerful enough to create and sustain life would not be so wasteful.
Or perhaps is this the result of a limited or very poor designer tinkering with things until he gets it right? I doubt any ID advocate would accept such a notion, not for real. They might pretend that it's acceptable to avoid admitting that they're talking about God, but that's a transparent ruse. If anyone really believed that their arguments were really in favor of that sort of designer, all of their support would dry up immediately and they know it. That's why it must be said with a smile and a nod - "We can only detect that life was designed, we can't say anything about the nature of that designer....wink, wink."
One might also ask why the designer would have created in such an exceptionless order both between and within lineages. If he wanted to create mammals, why did he wait some 400 million years while tinkering with millions of long-extinct species that were wiped out long before mammals got here? If the purpose was to bring about human beings, as I'm sure virtually every ID advocate believes to be true, why did he spend so much time on dead ends and appear to be so limited in how he could bring about new organisms? Why, indeed, did he first bring about a series of almost-almost-humans, then almost-humans, then finally humans, as though he was building up to it as he got better at his job?
Why do the first of each type of organism to appear look like a slightly modified version of its ancestral species? The first amphibians look almost identical to the lobe-finned fishes they evolved from, and over time they become progressively less primitive (that is, less like those ancestors) and more modern looking, as each new species of tetrapod expands the biodiversity within that class of animals. That exceptionless order, if it is the product of any sort of purpose or design, only speaks to a designer who is limited in his abilities and can only tinker slightly with his previous designs. That's exactly what we would expect to see if life evolved as a result primarily of natural selection and speciation gradually resulting in new and slightly different species; it's not at all what one would expect if they believe in a powerful designer acting with purpose and forethought.
If the history of life is guided for a purpose, then one is left in quite a quandary as to what that purpose might be and why the designer was so meandering and apparently random in terms of which species would live and which would die. If the natural history of life on earth speaks to a designer, it could only speak to a designer of very limited ability and power, one that appears to have been constrained by the limitations of his previous designs. If one assumes that evolution is unguided, those patterns make perfect sense; if one believes that evolution was guided by God for a purpose, all of that evidence cannot be explained, it can only be explained away.
Now, an ID advocate might well respond by saying that we simply don't know the purpose of the designer, so we can't make any such predictions. We know they don't mean that, of course, but that is the stock argument. But then you're still left with two possible explanations. No, we can't prove that evolution was unguided, but the evidence of the earth's natural history fits perfectly with that explanation without any need for ad hoc rationalizations. The opposing explanation, meanwhile, can only explain away that evidence by reference to the inscrutable purpose of an unidentified designer. And when you compare that evidence with their actual beliefs about the nature and purpose of the designer, then those patterns make no sense whatsoever.
Thus, the conclusion that the evolutionary history of life on earth was in all likelihood unguided is a perfectly reasonable proposition and one that flows logically from the nature of the evidence. All the other side has are vague rationalizations based on the undefined purpose of a designer no one has ever seen or encountered. In other words, they are in precisely the same position as someone who says that it rains at the whim of an invisible leprauchan.
- Log in to post comments
Could somebody please clarify for me, once and for all (!?) what the "official position" is of ID regarding common descent?
Is it a part of the ID story or not? Is it generally accepted amongst ID'ists or not?
Thanks
"...any honest examination of the evidence will support natural selection changing the size of finch beaks and color of moth wings."
Not according to Man Coulter's new book, which rehashes the creationist peppered moth myth. Dave Loves Man - is she telling lies, Dave?
I would like to point to a major "religious" problem in ID/creationism.
Let's start assuming that IDers and creationists are right.
Let's assume that, in fact, abiogenesis is truly physically impossibile (whatever this means).
(I know, abiogenesis and evolution are two different beasts, but let's play by their rules just once).
Now, both the theory of evolution and creationism/ID deal with the physical structures of the living beings.
The main reasoning of ID/creationism is that abiogenesis is impossible, therefore someone must have created all living beings and, ultimatly, us.
But now we have a little problem (which is THE problem for ID). Performing the creation of the physical structures of a living being is an engineering feat.
And an engineering feat don't require a god. It simply require a skilled enough engineer.
So, if we assume that abiogenesis is impossible AND that it didn't happened, we can conclude that God exists BUT NOT that God created us.
In this hypotesis the creation of man has been "outsources" by God to aliens (which are not mexicans, this time).
But if we assume that abiogenesis is impossibile BUT NEVERTHELESS it happened, isn't this a true miracle?
If it is so, to perform a miracle an engineer is not enough. You need a god.
Funny how the best prove that God created us is that abiogenesis really took place, isn't it?
Regards, Diego
Dembski himself has commented that Occam's Razor eliminates ID - but ONLY if evolutionary mechanisms can be shown to produce 'information' or 'biodiversity' or whatever.
That's the sticking point for Dembski (and, I would suspect a great many theists) - they don't believe, and will not accept on the same grounds that a scientist would, that evolution can deal with significant morphological change.
That's all.
And you're right about the negative; I think it was Popper (or some bright guy like that, Quine, or Kuhn or somebody) who pointed out that you CANNOT prove a universal negative. And that's what Dave Springer-Spaniel Scott is claiming.
You will never change the minds that believe 6000 years ago, dinosaurs walked hand in hand up a gangplank to board Noah's ark.
Lonestar Limey wrote:
There isn't one. Behe accepts it, as long as God did something at some time to help it along. Nelson and Pearcey reject it completely. Dembski vacillates. But all of them, with the possible exception of Behe, make arguments that only make sense if one rejects common descent, even while claiming that ID is theoretically consistent with it.
All of which points up a problem I have long pointed out about ID - there is no ID model. That's why ID is so much less coherent than young earth creationism, which at least had a model of the natural history of life on earth, a model from which one could derive testable hypotheses. They actually came out and made empirical claims that could be tested, like the claim that the earth was 6000 years old and the claim that there was a global flood that wiped out almost all life on earth and is responsible for most of the geological record. Those claims are false, of course, utterly contradictory to the evidence - but at least they made them. It's at least a coherent narrative. ID does nothing of the sort, it merely claims that some unnamed and unknown "designer" with unknown abilities and unknown purpose did something (no one will say exactly what) at some point (no one will say when). ID, as I've said many times, is creationism with all the testable statements removed so as to make it as small a target as possible. The focus is solely on making arguments against evolution, with no model to replace it other than the one they carefully try and hide from everyone except those who send them money.
There's a certain sense in which posts like this always annoy me, in that invariably when I explain the evidence for evolution to a religious audience, someone responds, "Evolution is just a tool to justify atheism, and here's a post to prove it."
And yet, it's no more unacceptable for me to discuss how I think certain evolutionary ideas fit well with a belief in God than for others to discuss how evolution fits well with their lack of belief (or belief in a different, uninvolved sort of God.)
The trick is, of course, to recall what one is doing when making these kind of statements: engaging in metaphysical or theological reasoning or speculation, not science. The problem with the ID crew (in addition to the fact that their science is bad and their methods disingenuous) is that they routinely fudge the distinction between their metaphysical interpretation of scientific evidence and 'scientific proof' (a term which itself is problematic in reference to nearly anything).
On your argument itself -- I tend to think that the universe is a large and complex enough place that there are at the same time elements of it which (if viewed a certain way) point to the existence of an all powerful and benevolent creator God, and others that point to a meaningless and undirected existence. The trick is, of course, in what one takes at the subject of analysis, and what one chooses to make of it. Which is not to say that the question of God's existence cannot be tackled rationally, but rather that there are multiple rational answers depending on what data you choose to consider and what assumptions you choose to grant.
"And you're right about the negative; I think it was Popper (or some bright guy like that, Quine, or Kuhn or somebody) who pointed out that you CANNOT prove a universal negative. And that's what Dave Springer-Spaniel Scott is claiming."
Uh, can you prove that?
http://www.discord.org/~lippard/debiak.html
A God yes, other versions are a tougher sell. Despite the bill of goods some try to spew I find myself often on the side of the ID crowd in that I find the folks who try and blend evolution with the religion of their upbringing 'muddled'. Evolution is a continuum and nothing I have read even remotely make sense without rationalizing so much that one might as well be a YEC except for the fact that they are wrong.
Life is never meaningless. No matter what people may say. Superstitions don't give our lives meaning, well maybe for some they do. If one needs to resort to that type of thinking I feel the problem comes from within not without.
DarwinCatholic wrote:
Except that I'm not an atheist and I haven't the slightest interest in justifying atheism, nor did I make any argument for atheism in this post (or anywhere else, for that matter). The argument that I made can still be consistent with a certain type of Christian theology (though clearly not with all of them), such as Ken Miller's, who argues that the very contingency that I spoke of is required for there to be free will in God's creation. And even aside from Christianity, it can still be consistent with a wide range of theistic but non-Christian views. So it's not necessarily an argument for atheism, merely an argument that this particular process on this particular planet appears to be guided only by contingent events, not by any teleological entity or process. Personally, I have no problem at all with the notion that god (uncapitalized because I don't see any reason to believe any claimed revelations or specific conceptions of such) created the universe itself, or even placed the first life form on earth. If those things are true, it doesn't bother me in the slightest, nor does it change the validity of the argument I laid out above. So the point is, please do not confuse what I've written with an argument for atheism; it is nothing of the sort.
It should just be pointed out that although I really like Millers science I find his theology well, weak. But it is an interesting thought. It just seems like such a huge and I mean HUGE waste of time and life to get to a point that may not be the end result(your just assuming we are it) when in all likelyhood the world will look radically different 100 million years from now.
Not to mention the fact that Millers view also, I feel, denigrates the very essense of the religion itself. The actual reason for salvation. I understand it works for him, but he was raised RCC and IMHO has simply tried to justify keeping his childhood faith with what he knows to be true. I have no problem with that but always relate that type of thinking to Shermer's 'Why smart people believe wierd thing'. Simply the defend things they arrived at for non-smart reasons. I've always felt Miller and his theology fit this better than just about anything else.
I would also ask how an intelligent designer would go about such things, because I definitely can't.
Kele -
Maybe if you were transcendent and disembodied you'd know how. :)
All very true, but it does make me wonder why you're a deist, Ed. If Occam's Razor applies to teleology in evolution, surely it applies to teleology in cosmology too.
I'm an architect so I tend to infer the hand of the designer within a design. There's a fancy word for that, but I forget.
If I apply Occam's razor I end up at pantheism - the universe itself is alive and IS 'God'. And if that God wanted to guide evolution, it would do it the way we see it - beams from outer space intersect with DNA in just the right way and at just the right time to cause a change.
Why experiment with dinosaurs? Isn't it odd that we have this pool of liquid stored energy under our feet? Or is that by design?
Why then are we here? For that I turn to fractals where the pattern in the micro is repeated in the macro. The pattern of life seems to be to make more life. If a universe wanted to survive its death, then maybe it has a plan to return. So it might create 'intelligent life' that would recognize the greater goal.
The only question then is: Is the current universe the chicken or the egg?
;-)
The liquid energy isn't from dinosaurs, well perhaps less than 1% is. And just to point out a current new and interesting theory on the origins of oil has it forming as a byproduct of bacteria growth. Not conclusive by a long shot but it does explain a few things that as of now have been thought curious.
And your being selective:
But your ignoring the many rays which cause harm.
Except that I'm not an atheist and I haven't the slightest interest in justifying atheism, nor did I make any argument for atheism in this post (or anywhere else, for that matter). The argument that I made can still be consistent with a certain type of Christian theology (though clearly not with all of them), such as Ken Miller's, who argues that the very contingency that I spoke of is required for there to be free will in God's creation.
Actually, I hesitated over that formulation for a while when writing the comment, because I thought I recalled that you were a theist. The reason I eventually left it as is was that I suspect that many religious people wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Many Christians (it may well not be the same for other religions) tend to equate a denial of God's power or providence (unless a thesis of deism is actively stated) to be a denial of God entirely.
The whole question of purpose in the universe can get terribly muddled terribly quickly. I would tend to agree with Change that Ken Miller's theology is a bit clumsy (in part, it seems to me, because he seems not to have spent enough time with some of the classic discussion of contingency and providence by Augustine and Aquinas).
I would tend to agree with Miller (and thus I guess you, from what you say) that the universe itself has a certain degree of free will -- in the sense that God does not 'intervene' to avoid the messy implications of the physical processes and laws that he created.
However, while a contingent process has an unexpected outcome from a human (or more generally speaking, from a temporal) perspective, I would tend to take Augustine's route in reconciling providence with contingency by saying that as an eternal being, God is outside of linear time and perceives all events as occuring simultaneously. By that formula, God may be said to know and intend the effect of an action without predestination, in that from his perspective the cause and effect are simultaneous.
Dumb as he is, Davetard is a friggin genius compared to some of his colleagues at that site. One of whom recently asked, "I can feel the designer in my heart, why shouldn't this be considered scientific evidence for design??!?!!?"
I was using 'dinosaurs' as a shorthand:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum
Yep, life seems very wasteful and inefficient.
Sorta like politics.
Crud, I guess my attempt at quote tags didn't work.... The first paragraph of the above is Ed's.
DarwinCAtholic wrote:
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "fits well", but clearly, if we are making comparisons, young earth creationism "fit's less well" with evolution than does, say, atheism.
In a broader sense though, it is not unacceptable to discuss how various fields in science fit with our various philosophical beliefs: in fact that's exactly what we should be doing. And is in fact what the Catholic Church, for example, has done numerous times in the past and is indeed what they have done with evolution.
The real rub is being able to change your philosophical beliefs when they turn out to be discordant with well-established facts (or what I like to call reality).
Leni wrote:
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "fits well", but clearly, if we are making comparisons, young earth creationism "fit's less well" with evolution than does, say, atheism.
I guess our confusion is a little mutual... Young earth creationism is just plain wrong, on every level, it seems to me. There's no question of it fitting more or less well with reality. YEC not only flies in the face of scientific evidence, but in order to explain away the evidence makes theological statements that are also wrong.
What I was trying to say was that while some people might interpret the competition and extinction inherent in evolution as evidence against God, others might make the opposite interpretation, either looking at other aspects of the history of the Earth and the structure of the universe, or interpreting those facts differently.
As you say, the most basic element of any coherent philosophy must be that truth does not contradict truth. Which means that contemporary Christians must take into account what we have learned about the history of the Earth, not simply ignore it.
DarwinCatholic-
I'm not an atheist, nor am I a theist; I am a deist. That's strictly my best guess at the moment. I don't pretend to know that it's true, which is why I never bother to defend it or convince others of it. I fully admit that I know as little about how existence came to be as you do, or anyone else does.
"If the natural history of life on earth speaks to a designer, it could only speak to a designer of very limited ability and power, one that appears to have been constrained by the limitations of his previous designs."
Precisely. In fact, the ID model of designer/engineer is so flawed that it produces a model of a god that is essentially incompatible with the religious beliefs of many Christians. I think the problem also exists with the whole analogy of "purpose" as engineering intention.
If one must use an analogy to human activities, I wonder if it might be a little less misleading to use the artist (for whom no brushstroke, however limited in length, is wasteful and for whom the process is a part of the product). Of course, there is also the common religious analogy of the parent. My daughter told me yesterday that she let her little boy climb the stairs alone for the first time. Has his freedom of action increased his chances of falling and injuring or even killing himself? Certainly. Is that proof that my daughter is incompetent or unloving or involved with the child she brought into the world? Certainly not.
None of these analogies work very well, but it seems to me that the ID vision of the designer leads to the model of a particularly unpleasant god.
Of course I meant "UNinvolved with the child." Sorry.
I was going to college in Arkansas in 1980 when that state passed Act 590 to mandate "equal time" for the teaching of creationism in public schools. Interesting side note for those who stereotype Christianity: I was attending a private Methodist college at that time, and the Methodist Church opposed 590. I ended up taking part in those debates, so I'd like to offer a little history and perspective as someone who has been in the Creationism Wars for almost 30 years now.
Back in the day we called this "guided evolution" business "theistic evolution." Ironically, it was bitterly opposed by most creationists as an unacceptable compromise with the theory of evolution. As I look at the field of battle today I'm actually encouraged. Science has steadily pushed creationism back into a smaller and smaller defensive area. Young earth creationism is now almost extinct, as geology and cosmology have made it unsustainable. Intelligent Design is itelf a form of creationist surrender: a recognition that the movement simply can't talk about God any more if they want to be taken seriously. And now theistic evolution is coming back.
To my way of thinking, theistic evolution is the next best thing to unconditional surrender by creationism. It doesn't even bother me, as long as the "evolution" part remains strictly scientific. If someone wants to see the "hand of God" in the structure of the world as discovered by science I think that's harmles enough. Religion is only intrusive when it actually intrudes.
All the discussion of guided evolution begs the question of whether the evolutionary processes are guidable at all. Have any of the ID proponents of this guided evolution shown any evidence that evolution is guidable at all?
As far as I understood it, trying to guide a (admittedly generalised) complex adaptive system was considered a bad idea and most likely an exercise in futility.
They would really have to show that it is possible to externally guide evolution processes for that idea to hold any water with me.
Behe accepts it, as long as God did something at some time to help it along.
"Black box is a whimsical term for a device that does something, but whose inner workings are mysterious -- sometimes because the workings can't be seen, and sometimes because they just aren't comprehensible." -- Michael J. Behe
And, of course, where's the best place to find the "Designer"? That's right -- inside that black box, riding the invisible unicorns and the little trucks and busses, and doing all sorts of mysterious incomprehensible "thingies." Why the "Designer" doesn't want to be outside the black box, I dunno.
But this is an argument based on nothing. Nothing at all. It's ones right to believe it but it is simply one assumption built upon another. I often think Augustine is given more credit than he deserves. He presupposes far to much. I don't think God can be outside of linear time, especially considering Augustine wrote this before a more modern understanding of what constitures time was available. I'll bet his views would be different today.
I think this is just hand waving to get an omnibenevolent version of God of the hook. It simply doesn't work.
1. I agree with you about TEC
2. I disagree with you that a theological statement can ever be 'wrong'. Or right for that matter.
Of course, but then to take these events and try to blend them into the religion of ones childhood and pretend they fit neatly is also rather odd. Again, IMHO trying to fit evolution into most religions is putting a band aid on a sucking chest wound. It creates more problems than it solves and in some ways(even though they are wrong) creationists are more coherent in their argument than those who accomadate the views.
If thats the case their are many, many aspects of religion that will fail. Not just evolution. In the above your again assuming any religion even has the remotest idea of a truth claim. The only truth in this discussion is that evolution occurs and is occuring. Everything else is simply belief of a variety of sorts.
Most religions will lead to that thought eventually without the help of ID.
I agree.
I'm never sure what to make of the phrase "theistic evolution". I've heard it used in two ways that may be roughly distinguisted as:
a) The process that scientists call evolution is in fact a long series of tiny miracles performed by God that give the appearance of a natural process of evolution.
b) The beliefs held by someone someone who both considered evolution to be a scientifically accurate theory and also that God created and sustains the universe.
The fact that these two positions are so incredibly different and yet often referred to by the same word makes the word next to useless. Of the two opinions, a) strikes me as odd from a theological point of view and both anti-intellectual and useless from a scientific point of view.
I hesitate to turn Ed's blog into a philosophical battleground over beliefs only tenuously related to the post, so I'll let most of what Chance said along, though I'd tend to disagree with his dismissal of Augustine. However, I'm a little perplexed by two points that seem a little closer to topic:
Again, IMHO trying to fit evolution into most religions is putting a band aid on a sucking chest wound.
Do you say this based upon the fact that most religions (indeed, any worth bothering about) originate long before anyone knew anything about evolution, and so their primary writings assume a non-evolutionary worldview? If so, unless one takes the preaching of a non-evolutionary worldview to be one of the central tenets of these religions, how is the fact relevant?
In the above your again assuming any religion even has the remotest idea of a truth claim. The only truth in this discussion is that evolution occurs and is occuring. Everything else is simply belief of a variety of sorts.
Perhaps we are playing with different definitions of "truth" and "truth claim". It seems to me that evolution is by far the most useful and predictive description of how life developed on this planet. That is what makes it such a brilliant and useful scientific theory. Thus, it seems accurate to say that it is "true" in the sense that it is a very well tested and supported scientific theory.
However, your distinction between 'belief' and 'truth' escapes me. Most beliefs are in some sense a truth claim. If someone tells me "Jesus rose from the dead" he is asserting that this statement is a true description of something that happened. Now, it may be a hard claim to assess, and impossible to assess using the tools of science. But that doesn't mean it isn't a truth claim. Similarly, "There is no God but Allah and Mohammad is his prophet" is a truth claim -- though one I happen to think is false.
Ahh, but perhaps the one you dismiss so casually is the correct one:-)
Certainly, one may state that something is true regardless of whether it is nor not. Thus, one could speak of a false 'truth claim'.
I would say that 'truth' is when a statement that attempts to make a truth claim correlates with reality. Thus, evolution is true to the extent that it correllates with everything we currently know about biology and the history of the Earth. In theory, it's possible that some later theory would explain things even better, but given the current weight of evidence that seems quite unlikely.
The question, it seems, is whether it is possible to investigate reality by any means other than 'science' in the modern sense. I would say that one may apply reason and experience to seek after the nature of reality in ways that would not traditionally be labeled as 'science' and that one could thus use philosophy/theology/whatever-one-calls-it to determine whether a statement such as "There is no God but Allah and Mohammad is his prophet" is true.
One could not reach absolute 100% armor plated certainty in such a quest, but then, one doesn't reach that in science either. Indeed, probably the only thing one may know with complete and utter certainty is something which is either true by definition (most mathematical truths) or about one's self (I think therefore I am).
I think your really playing word games here. I agree anyone can make a truth 'claim' look at this Gribbitts fellow in the other thread. But you have to be abvle to verify this 'claim'.
The real question is why people think there is a better way with better results than science.
I disagree with you. Theology is a wasteland of unproven ideas, presumptions, and assumptions. I consider it specious and of little value in determining any thing remotely truthful. As such I don't think the above statement has an honest of of being disproved or proved.
however using reason and experience in reality as you propose it would be more likely your prior statement about Jesus would be false. Which is why it is a faith tenet that goes against reality, reason, and experience. The 'allah' question in effect would be much more compatible as a truth claim much like deism.
Ed, Thank you for responding to my question! (up top).
Does anybody remember that cartoon that circulated around the blogosphere about a year ago that featured God creating the universe. It had a lot of purple/violet in it and was featured on a purple/violet blog. It showed God as a kid throwing a fit and stomping on his creation.
Damn, I wish I could find it.