12.18.05
The Cosmic Landscape
I was browsing at Barnes & Nobles for an Xmas book (for myself, among others) and narrowed the list down to a mere hundred finalists, two in particularThe Cosmic Landscape : String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design, by Leonard Susskind,
and…
Did God Have A Wife? Archaeology And Folk Religion In Ancient Israel – by William G. Dever; Dever’s book is about the traces of the cult of Asherah in the Old Testament and should prove most fascinating.
Get one, and speedread 99 for free, furtively lurking in the isles of the terrific B&N superstore where everyone looks the other way. I have always wondered why they don’t just throw me out of the store, due to the brazen appropriation of information. Anyway…
The Cosmic Landscape, despite its take on Darwin’s theory, is a terrifically interesting book, with a lot of interesting material you won’t find anywhere else. There is also an interesting review (first in the list) at Amazon, at the book’s webpage there, link above. While the spectacle of a string theorist endorsing Darwin might seem the end of the matter to many, I merely enjoyed the book, disregarding that aspect of the argument. Nor do I take the bait on Anthropic Theory as an adjunct to my persistent Darwin criticism, although it certainly raises the pitch of the question of ID. Still, one needs to fall back to ‘regroup’, as they say.
One is left in a strange position. Once you know natural selection is off mark, viz. using the eonic data as an indirect falsification, one starts to get curious as to just where these physicists are going wrong. Time to brush up on string theory (almost a 100%). Keep in touch.
Actually, ‘natural selection’ is, or might be, the answer, but not Darwin’s theory of such. ‘Natural selection’ (which is actually design language) requires something natural that can ’select’ something.
In the eonic model we can see the ‘evolution’ in the sense given must ’select’ regions on the surface of a planet in non-random fashion!!
Which brings us to the book on the Old Testament. How do we go about explaining the evolution of religion? Two religions suddenly appear in tandem during the Axial Age. One is theistic, one non-theistic. Much that appears in these was there before, but gets recycled in a new and energized form. So clearly nature can select cultural strains and reamp them, tossing them back into the culture stream. It does this in a fashion dialectically indifferent to content.
Thus Darwinists have appropriated the terminology and given it an incorrect usage. Time to take back the Old Testament from religionists, and ‘natural selection’ from Darwinists.