Happy 2006

A couple of quickies...

Rolf gives a Happy New Year to all fundies where he discusses the writings of early fathers of the Christian church, and in particular Origen:

Origen explains that to those "not altogether blind the gospels are full of passages of this kind," which are "recorded as actual events, but which did no happen literally." He quotes as an example the story of Jesus being tempted by the evil. Jesus is taken up a high mountain where he is shown all the kingdoms of the world, which the Devil offers him if he will only fall down and worship him. Origen pours scorn on the idea that anyone could actually see all the kingdoms of the world from the top of a mountain and affirms that this is meant to be understood allegorically. He tells us:

"The careful reader will detect thousands of other passages like this in the gospels."

Also check out Andrew's excellent Handling Challenges to Evolution, the TalkOrigins post of the month for November 2005, where he discusses a superb talk on evolution by a high school biology teacher:

"What a scientific theory is is the explanation which fits all observable facts. If you perform an experiment which contradicts your theory, the theory is changed to explain this new data. The theory of evolution has been changed and added to countless times since Darwin first proposed it; it will be changed and added to countless times in the future, the day may come when many of Darwin's ideas will be seen as absurd by the scientific community; but at this moment, the theory of evolution is the only scientific theory that explains all the observable data we have in our hands right now."

"Is evolution a theory? Absolutely. Does this mean that we're not sure that it's true? Absolutely not."

On a side note, it appears that Darrick Dean's woeful IDiotic blog ScienceWatch seems to have vanished. Maybe he's seen the light? ;>