Saudi Man Sentenced

Mohammad al-Harbi has been sentenced to jail and flogging, apparently for being too ecumenical towards Jews.

RIYADH (Reuters) - A court in Saudi Arabia sentenced a teacher to 40 months in jail and 750 lashes for "mocking religion" after he discussed the Bible and praised Jews, a Saudi newspaper said on Sunday.
Al-Madina newspaper said secondary school teacher Mohammad al-Harbi will be flogged in public after he was taken to court by his colleagues and students.
He was charged with promoting a "dubious ideology, mocking religion, saying the Jews were right, discussing the gospel and preventing students from leaving class to wash for prayer", the newspaper said. It gave no more details.
Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, strictly upholds the austere Wahhabi school of Islam and bases its constitution on the Koran and the sayings of Prophet Mohammad. Public practice of any other religion is banned.
A U.S. State Department report criticised Saudi Arabia last week, saying religious freedoms "are denied to all but those who adhere to the state-sanctioned version of Sunni Islam".
The newspaper said Harbi will appeal against the verdict.

Amazon Outrage

I'm never sure how angry to get about these kind of things, because on the one hand I'm pretty sure that Amazon sells a lot of stuff that they themselves consider offensive, at least to an extent. Nonetheless, I think this crosses the line into the territory of stuff they just shouldn't be selling: Bumper stickers that say "My Catholic Priest is Dating Your Son". (Do a search for "Catholic" under the automotive catagory and it's the top thing you get.)

Now, to be fair, Amazon is not the actual seller for these items, it's one of their vendors BumperArt. So it's possible that Amazon doesn't actually know BumperArt put these up. If that's the case, it would seem that it's time for them to find out and do something about it.

More on Faith and Science

I feel like I've been doing the evolution/ID thing too much lately, so I'm going to move on and leave that one alone for at least a week or so, but before leaving I really should link to a couple really good posts I read today.

Bearing Blog writes about how science, revelation, philosophy and technology fit together.

John Farrell has an open letter to Mark Shea up on his blog on science, reason and the problems with intelligent design as science.

Finding the Designer

An anonymous commenter asked the following in the comments about evolution at the polls below:

But I do have a question for any critic of ID: do you believe that is even possible that any kind of evidence could exist that would prove ID? If so, what sort of evidence would that be? If not, then it is irrelevant to the question of whether ID should be taught, if there is no scientific evidence to support it; for if science is incapable of proving ID even if it is true, then we should not be interested in limiting ourselves to science. What matters is the truth about the world, not just a limited portion of truth selected by some arbitrary principle.

I think this highlights one of the important reasons why ID has such a popular following among those interested in Catholic apologetics, and I think it deserves an good answer.

The first issue in dealing with his question is to figure out what exactly he means by "ID". There are two things which people often mean by the term, and they are frequently switched back and forth, adding confusing to an already difficult debate.

First, "Intelligent Design" refers to the body of theories supported primarily by fellows of the Discovery Institute. These theories generally center around the theory of Irreducible complexity first described by Behe and the theory of Specified Complexity described by Dembski. While these theories suggest that some sort of intelligent being or force was involved in creation/manufacturing certain biological systems, these theories do not attempt to say who this designer might have been. Indeed, in the attempt to make ID "science not religion" its proponents have insisted that although their theories show that someone designed certain elements of life, it could have been aliens, angels, demons, God, gods, or some other thing which we cannot imagine.

Second, "Intelligent Design" is used to refer to the idea that the world and/or life specifically was created by God. When Mark Shea says, as he does every couple of weeks, something along the lines of:

It *does* sound rather like Benedict is re-iterating the old apostolic teaching that "Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made."

And that, in turn, sounds rather suspiciously like a precise for Intelligent Design.

This is why I just don't get the problem. I'm beginning to suspect I never will.

Shea clearly isn't talking about something that could have been created by any old intelligent creature sitting around with a flagella-making machine of an evening. He's talking about clear evidence of the existence and nature of God of the sort St. Paul said the pagans would be held eternally accountable for ignoring.

Now, to get back to the question that Anonymous asked: I think that you might possibly be able to prove that the first definition of ID was true scientifically, but you could not prove that the second is. To prove ID in the sense that Behe, Dembski and co. talk about it, they would first need to make a prediction that both they and their opponents were willing to agree followed from their proposal (that some intelligent being was responsible for making certain biological systems "by design") and then that prediction would have to be shown to be true. The problem is that right now there isn't agreement that their predictions (only objects of design will ever display specified complexity or irreducible complexity) follow. I tried to cover a bit of that here and here.

However, the latter definition of ID (which I think is the one that most Christians are actually interested in) is not something that science can address. Modern science is not capable of proving that God exists, or even that God did something in particular. (When scientists are brought in to verify a miracle, they verify that they cannot explain how it happened, not that God did it or that it was in fact a miracle.)

Anon says "for if science is incapable of proving ID even if it is true, then we should not be interested in limiting ourselves to science." To which I can only say a big "Amen!" Science is a useful discipline for telling us lots of useful and interesting things. But in the truly important things in life, science is totally useless.

Which of the following can be answered by science:

1. Is this the person I should marry?
2. What happens to us after death?
3. Is there such a thing as 'good' or only that which someone prefers?
4. If you drop a six pound weight from a 200ft building, with what force will it hit the ground?
5. Does God love us?
6. Is it wrong to wage nuclear war?
   

Science can only address question number four. And while that's interesting to know, it's certainly not the most important question in the list. The theology and philosophy can answer questions 2, 3, 5, and 6. For number one, you're on your own.

So in answer to Anon's question, of course we shouldn't limit ourselves to science. Limiting our knowledge to what we can know from science is one of the greatest heresies of our age. I'm dead against it. Indeed, one of my problems with Intelligent Design is that it seems to grant science too much power -- giving the impression that science could prove or disprove the existence of God. Science can do some amazing things, but it just can't answer questions like "Is there a God?" or "Did God make this?"

Why? If God made the world, doesn't it make sense that we could find something that we could prove God made? The thing is, science isn't strictly speaking in the "truth" business. Science is in the business of making descriptive observations and verifiable predictions. Science can't speak to God's involvement in things because science can't observe how God does things or predict what He will do. Without knowing how God does things or what causes Him to do things, science could not look at a biological structure and say, "Ah, God must have created this, because God always does things this way" or "God always creates new things under the following conditions, therefore God was probably responsible for that piece of creation which took place under similar conditions."

Even if it were the case that God specifically created an adam and eve creature to start every single species in the history of the earth, and all of these species had unique, totally unrelated DNA (no signs of common descent) science still wouldn't be able to say "God created each species" is a positive fashion. The best science could say is "We are absolutely unable to find any kind of physical process that could produce the species we see."

Instead of putting all this effort into intelligent design, let's get Plato put into every high school curriculum. Then students will have real tools to tackle the question of who they are and where they came from.

France Burns: The Musical!

An excerpt from Iowahawk's failed musical, Les Risables. This selection is in honor of my sister, who is performing in Grease this weekend.

ACT III

Streets of Paris. The toughs strut along the streets of the banlieu coming their hair, carrying bottles of gasoline.

TARIQ
How about this one guys?
KHALIL
That rusty hunk of junk? It’ll never make the TV news!
HASSAN (excitedly)
Why… this car is automatic! It's systematic! It’s flambee-matic! Why… it's a greased Peugeot!

TOUGHS CHORUS
We'll get some Molotov cocktails and some 2 euro Bics oh yeah
(Keep talking whoa keep talking)
Start a fire burnin’ like a pair of cheater slicks oh yeah!
(I'll get the petrol I'll kill to get the petro)
With a thunderous sound it’s gonna burn to the ground!
It’s gonna explode by the side of the road, a greased Peugeot!
Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go!

Look for parodies of The Music Man, Les Miz, Oklahoma, West Side Story, and more.

The More You Know...

MrsDarwin has been reading the elder monkey Little House in the Big Woods. After the monkeys were down last night MrsDarwin started doing some research on the Ingles Wilder family, trying to straighten out the timeline, which Laura adapted a bit in writing the books. In the process we ran across an interesting fact: Laura's daughter Rose Wilder Lane (who was actually a more famous writer back in the 30s than her mother) turns out to have been a vocal early luminary in the libertarian movement in the 40s.

Now I think about it, I could see how that might be reflected a bit in the Little House books. Interesting stuff.

Vocational Exhaustion

One of the things that the 1969 vintage priests of Married to the Church talk about a lot in their interviews is that people "only see the priest, not the person" and that they "never have any time off". (This morning I made it through about eight more pages between when we finished serving the girls breakfast and when they managed to reduce each other to tears over some tussle or other and were dragged off for their morning bath before church.)

I think one of the key problems here is that they're thinking of the priesthood as a profession rather than a vocation. My profession is being a database programmer and marketing analyst. I do that anywhere from eight to twelve hours a day. It pays the bills and is fairly intellectually stimulating. And given that I've built a few web applications that people seem to like and my weekly reporting deliverables track sales compensation programs that pay two thousand sales reps each month, I guess it's fairly useful work as well. But when the work gets to heavy, I can take a vacation (unless that would mean people not getting their payouts, in which case it's no so much of an option) and when I'm sick I can take the day off. When the hours get too long I can tell my supervisor that I'm fed up and need someone else to take the load off me. Since "work/life balance" is a corporate value (or so we're told) it's part of his job to make sure that I get home to see my family and have time to keep up with my hobbies.

However, my vocation is being a husband and father. I do not get time off when I'm sick, or when I'm tired of children bouncing on my head at 6:30am (as they did this morning). I do not get to take a vacation away from the kids for a week when I'm burnt out -- because there's no one else whose responsibility it is to be a father to our two little monkeys (and one seamonkey on the way). My only backup, as a parent, is MrsDarwin -- and I can hardly ask her to take over for a few days while I chill out, because she already holds down the fort much more of the time than I do.

I think the analogy to being "married to the Church" is probably accurate in that the priesthood seems to be the same kind of 24-7 job that being a parent is. A number of the priests interviewed in Married to the Church complain that "not everyone's cut out to be a priest forever" and wish that you could be a priest for a limited term instead. I'm not sure that makes any more sense than being a limited contract parent, though.

Certainly, like parents priests need time to themselves once in a while and hobbies and such. But like a parent, these are conditional on keeping essential responsibilities covered. MrsDarwin or I can't schedule "time off" without making sure the monkeys will be in good hands first, and if they come down sick or are having a really bad day, it still may not work out. Nor can we head off for a weeklong vacation with the kids -- at least not till they're a lot older. With three monkeys under four, we'll have pretty much committed to not having weeklong vacations for a minimum of three to four more years -- and that's assuming we have family available to take the kids for that long and no more monkeys in the meantime. It's an insanely exhausting job. It's not always fun. Sometimes is aggravating as hell. But that doesn't make it any less our responsibility. We can't go to our manager and say, "Hey, the kids have been an awful lot of work lately. The house is a mess. I think you need to assign someone else to the team or else redefine the responsibility set a bit."

Certainly, the types of pressures and commitments on priests are different than on parents, but I think they're similar in a number of ways in their strength and all-consuming nature. Indeed, it seems to me that's probably the best reason for not having a married priesthood -- because you can't do two 24-7 jobs at once and be fair to both.

Perhaps the breakdown in understanding of the priesthood for these priests goes hand-in-hand with the breakdown in American marriage over the last fifty years. In the section I was reading this morning, one of the priests was complaining that the Church was unwilling to adapt it's understanding of marriage to fit 'the reality' that many American Catholics no longer see marriage as an all or nothing package encompassing things like fidelity, procreation, permanence, etc. Some people just want one or two of these, but not all three, he explained, and the Church needed to adapt to modern understandings. Perhaps for a person with that kind of approach to the vocation of marriage, the priesthood really does seem like it should be a profession rather than a vocation.