There was a debate last week hosted by the College of Communications at Boston University on the subject of whether Intelligent Design should be taught in public schools. Arguing for the affirmative were Ed Sisson, one of the attorney’s advocating for ID in the recent Dover School Board hearings, and William Dembski the leading theoritician in the field of ID.
Sadly, although I have an open mind on many of the views of the ID movement, I thought that the arguments of the affirmative side were largely hampered by painful incompetence. Overall I thought that the event illustrated with excruciating clarity the desperate failure of so much public discourse to move the state of public knowledge beyond entrenched pre-dispositions.
I am planning to provide detailed summary and assessment a little later, but in the meantime if you can bear it the whole thing (2 hours long) is available online in Realplayer format from this address:
http://realserver.bu.edu:8080/ramgen/a/v/av/greatdebate/gd110205.rm
Last night I watched the 1944 Hitchcock movie “Spellbound”. Frankly it was a bit disappointing. I’m a big Hitchcock fan, and I hadn’t seen anything with Ingrid Bergman in before but knew she had a great reputation. So I was pretty hopeful that this would be well worth watching. The movie was certainly entertaining to the degree that any formulaic mystery/romance is. And it was pretty clear early on why Bergman was such a big star. But I’m afraid the story was pretty hopeless. I found the instantaneous romance between Bergman and Peck (complete with violins, evidentally designed to make sure we didn’t miss it) just way too contrived, and I’m afraid the whole psychoanalysis thing was completely impossible to swallow. The best thing about the movie to be honest was the supporting role of Michael Checkov as Bergman’s mentor. He was really pretty funny and won an Oscar nomination for the role. Actually the movie as a whole took 6 nominations, including best picture and director. But I’m afraid I couldn’t rate it as highly as that result suggests.
James MacDonald’s comments on the emerging church have attracted the attention of Scot McKnight, once one of James’ professors at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. The debate about James’ article seems to have largely migrated to McKnight’s blog, Jesus Creed, with James himself showing up there to defend his views against some fairly scathing criticism from McKnight and others.
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A few weeks ago I read some comments by James MacDonald on the Emerging Church movement on the Walk in the Word website.
Not something I know a lot about, but today I discovered the same article, split into two parts, published on the Christianity Today blog Out of Ur :
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http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/010/35.26.html
Interesting article on a new archeological discovery in Jerusalem – the Pool of Siloam described in the Gospel of John.
I just spotted this banner ad today on stuff.co.nz and thought it was kind of cute.
The ad is for Frontline flea treatment and clicking it takes you to this promotion.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/AUTOS/funonwheels/10/06/future_of_mini/index.html
This is a few weeks old, but I haven’t had time to mention it before – a story in CNN that I thought was just a little amusing – the announcement of a “new” Mini station wagon –
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http://www.cnn.com/2005/HEALTH/10/21/brain.stem.cells.ap/index.html
This is a story from CNN about an experiment on the use of fetal (not embrionic) stell cells to treat a rare brain disorder. I couldn’t help wonder about the following -
“Stem Cells Inc., the Palo Alto, California biotechnology company developing the Batten disease treatment, said it receives its fetal tissue from a nonprofit California foundation that also collects tissue from miscarriages and other surgical processes. Stem Cells chief executive Martin McGlynn declined to name the foundation.” (emphasis added)
Now whatever you think about stem cell research, the origin of these cells is surely relevant to public discourse on this subject. Am I missing something, or are abortions not a possible source of fetal cells? If that’s true, isn’t the question of whether these cells came from aborted fetuses important to the public debate? So why didn’t CNN ask that question? It looks on the surface as if the question about the name of the foundation that supplied the cells is targeted at that issue, but why be so oblique about it? Can’t they ask Stem Cells Inc. whether these cells were abtained from aborted fetuses? To me this just looks like bad journalism.
It’s nearly 3.30 am and I’m supposed to be asleep. I actually went to bed early tonight, feeling tired after an arduous week, but I woke about 11pm and haven’t been to sleep since.
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