It seems important to lose things.

Not keys.

Not forgetting the name of the officer that just arrested you for indecent exposure. But – THINGS. ALL THINGS.

That is why Facebook Mania became a Facebook Fast. That is why my blackberry has been so busy sending and receiving messages multiple times every hour. But pardon me while I fart.

Another way of expressing it is that accumulating things will make you very heavy. You need to be nimble, light on your feet, ready to pounce, ready to run. Ready to empty your mind in the face of the Noisy One. On the grand path to the Nameless One. PERFECT. (There is such a thing as “perfect” and I can prove it in three minutes.)

Here I am at one of the most famous facilities for operating on hernias in the world – the Shouldice Hospital which is located in the York Region of Ontario in Canada. Come here and put on the fancy blue hospital outfit. Get a shave from one of their expert nurses. They will shave the hair from your groin area all the way up to your navel. Then go down into the cold room with all the beds and allow the mind altering drugs to take effect as you wait for the experienced surgeon and his knife.

Don’t panic. They have done it thousands of times before. Yes, in a way you are a piece of meat on an assembly line; in a way the surgeons don’t care about you any more than they do the dried skin off the bottom of the heel of a remote relative. But, hell, they sure do seem to know what they are doing. And the food is better than the average hospital fare.

Some sayings and parables come to mind at this time – a time of morphine and middle-aged gentlemen (very few ladies). Please ignore errors to do with grammar or meaning.

In a world where constipation is the norm, even a small amount of flatulence is considered a victory.

I stink and that is a signal from the healing angels that I should get on with that sponge bath.

My parents were not religious and did not understand the laws of the Covenant. That is why I received a circumcision every eight days until I reached my Bar Mitzvah.

A man must master the art of dodging bullets. Nary a fool taketh a sponge bath in the hospital of his choosing than doth the wicked man cobble an unusual shoe.

Suppose a slush fund or an offshore account were offered ye. Would you not accept it with gratitude or would the offer become like a fish caught in the woolly hairnet of your moral quandaries?

There were many more but they were far less worth repeating than these.

Warning! This video contains a lot of red colours.

We, here at Design Argument, have come to realize that the spiritual crisis we are undergoing will not end by simply producing better content for our blog posts. Nor will it be alleviated by improving our search engine ranking or even by increasing blog traffic to the point where Google Ads are actually useful. The time to act is now and that is why we have hired Rabbi Emmanuel Rabinovich as our spiritual guide and keyword adviser. What may come as a surprise to many of you is that we have also retained the services of Rose Rabbinovich (2 b’s).

Although the primary goal is to upgrade our spiritual quotient on the blog, we are proud of the business opportunities that this new synergy will grow and sprout, unveil and reveal, and release into the web 6.0 environment. We are also pleased that Rabinovich and Rabbinovich are both actual fictional characters that can be looked up on Wikipedia. This is a first for Design Argument. Although we have created many fictional characters from scratch, this is the first time that we are using pre-existing fictional characters.

The environmental benefits of recycling fictional characters are significant and we are doing our part to reduce, re-use, and recycle.

By way of introduction, Rabbi Rabinovich is a non-existent figure conjured up by anti-semites for propaganda purposes. He is probably most famous for his speech “Our Race Will Rule Undisputed Over The World” which he delivered to the Emergency Council of European Rabbis in Budapest, Hungary on January 12, 1952.

Rabbi Rabinovich’s speech invoked The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as proof of Jewish global conspiracy and appeared in the well-respected early 1950s right-wing newsletter, Common Sense – A Newspaper Upholding Christianity and Patriotism.

The Rabbi Rabinovich speech is often distributed online with a cover letter by Rose Rabbinovich (two b’s – who has graciously offered to work with us on our reputation management crisis). Rosie states that the speech was found on her Rabbi’s favorite website, Radio Islam, which is a sweet twist.

So we give a hearty welcome to Rabbi Emmanuel Rabinovich and to Rose Rabbinovich (two b’s)! We look forward to the progressive changes that they will bring to our blog. We are pleased to use and transform a character created by vile human beings in a way that will bring joy, happiness and memories of fresh daisies to the eyes of our readers and the staff here at Design Argument.

Warm Regards,

Martyne Glodsten, CFO

Hope you enjoy this meditation and yoga video.

Watch for the addition of an exciting Design Argument outreach Rabbinical staff member coming very soon. This Rabbi will lead us into the great future that we are embarking upon. Making all his nowhere plans for nobody.

This is all from Ebonmusing. It is a addressed to Creationists but essentially Aish HaTorah and Chabad, Kiruv.com and all the other outreach manufacturing plants practice a form of sophisticated Creationist voodoo.

In his 1983 book The Intelligent Universe, astronomer Fred Hoyle wrote the following infamous passage:

“A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there? So small as to be negligible, even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe.” (p.19)

Though Hoyle actually intended this as an argument against abiogenesis, the creationists have since assimilated it and used it against evolution. In creationist literature, this argument has mutated into a diversity of forms: setting off an explosion in a print shop to produce a dictionary, disassembling a watch and shaking up the pieces in a box to reassemble it, and so on, building a bicycle by applying a blowtorch to a pile of bicycle parts, and so on. No matter what form the analogy takes, however, creationists have promoted it as a common-sense proof of the impossibility of evolution producing complex, highly ordered forms. There is even a creationist book titled Tornado in a Junkyard.

This essay will show that this analogy is not an accurate representation of how evolution (or, for that matter, abiogenesis) works. In fact, it is a straw man, a ridiculous caricature that bears no resemblance to what the theory actually says. However, it is first helpful to establish a few things about the credentials of its author. Fred Hoyle was an astronomer, and whatever the validity of his professional opinions on astronomy, he was not trained in biology, paleontology, genetics, or any other field having to do with evolution. He was no more qualified to make pronouncements about evolution than any layman, and indeed his comments demonstrate a profound misunderstanding of the theory. Nevertheless, whatever he was, he was certainly not a creationist.

“The creationist is a sham religious person who, curiously, has no true sense of religion. In the language of religion, it is the facts we observe in the world around us that must be seen to constitute the words of God. Documents, whether the Bible, Qur’an or those writings that held such force for Velikovsky, are only the words of men. To prefer the words of men to those of God is what one can mean by blasphemy. This, we think, is the instinctive point of view of most scientists who, curiously again, have a deeper understanding of the real nature of religion than have the many who delude themselves into a frenzied belief in the words, often the meaningless words, of men. Indeed, the lesser the meaning, the greater the frenzy, in something like inverse proportion.”
–Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Our Place in the Cosmos (1993), p.14

“We are inescapably the result of a long heritage of learning, adaptation, mutation and evolution, the product of a history which predates our birth as a biological species and stretches back over many thousand millennia…. Going further back, we share a common ancestry with our fellow primates; and going still further back, we share a common ancestry with all other living creatures and plants down to the simplest microbe. The further back we go, the greater the difference from external appearances and behavior patterns which we observe today…. Darwin’s theory, which is now accepted without dissent, is the cornerstone of modern biology. Our own links with the simplest forms of microbial life are well-nigh proven.”
–Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Lifecloud: The Origin of Life in the Universe (1978), p.15-16

We turn now to the tornado in the junkyard. This analogy says nothing about the validity of evolution, or for that matter abiogenesis, because it fails to represent them in four crucial ways.

1. It operates purely according to random chance.
2. It is an example of single-step, rather than cumulative, selection.
3. It is a saltationary jump – an end product entirely unlike the beginning product.
4. It has a target specified ahead of time.

The first point is the most important. The tornado in the junkyard is an example of an intricate, complex and highly organized form being produced by nothing more than random chance. But evolution is not chance. (See this article for more on this.) Rather, it operates according to a fixed law – the law of natural selection – which favors some assemblages over others; it preferentially selects for those adaptations which improve fitness and selects against those that do not. The tornado, by contrast, slams parts together and tears them apart with no preference whatsoever, thus completely failing to represent natural selection, the central force which drives evolution. To more accurately represent evolution, one would have to grant the tornado some power to recognize assemblages of parts which could serve as part of a 747 and prevent it from tearing them apart.

Second, the tornado analogy is an example of single-step selection – in one step, it goes from a random pile of parts to a fully assembled airliner. This is completely unlike evolution, which operates according to a process of cumulative selection – complex results that are built up gradually, in a repetitive process guided at each step by selective forces. To more accurately represent evolution, the tornado could be sent through the junkyard not once, but thousands or millions of times, at each step preserving chance assemblages of parts that could make up a jumbo jet.

Third, in relation to the point above, the tornado in the junkyard is an example of saltation – a sudden leap in which the end product is completely different from the beginning product. Evolution does not work this way; birds do not hatch out of dinosaur eggs and monkeys do not give birth to humans. Rather, species grow different over time through a process of slow change in which each new creature is only slightly different from its ancestor. Evolution forms a gradually shading continuum in which any two steps are almost identical, though the creatures at the beginning and end of the continuum may be very different indeed. If we sent a tornado through a junkyard once, we would not expect to see a complete airplane; but if we repeated the process thousands or millions of times, at each step preserving useful assemblages, we might see a jumbo jet gradually taking shape out of slowly accreting collections of parts. The idea is the same with living things. We do not see complex new creatures appearing suddenly in the fossil record; rather, we see them gradually forming by a process of modification from a line of increasingly dissimilar ancestors.

Finally, the tornado analogy fails to represent evolution in one more significant way: it has a target specified ahead of time. Evolution does not. Natural selection is not a forward-looking process; it cannot select for what may become useful in the future, only what is immediately useful in the present. To more accurately represent evolution, we might add the additional stipulation that the tornado be allowed to assemble, not just a jumbo jet, but any functional piece of machinery.

A tornado racing through a junkyard hundreds of thousands of times, at each step somehow preserving rather than tearing apart functional assemblages of parts, with the aim of ultimately producing some sort of working machine, be it a 747, a station wagon or a personal computer – this is still not a very good analogy to describe evolution, but it is far better than the implausible caricature of random, single-step saltation with a predetermined target the creationists put forth. This analogy completely fails to represent evolution in every significant way.

Why do rational people lie to themselves?

I am happy if you wish to read the original Aish HaTorah article on the Design Argument. I am equally happy if you don’t.

Imagine, if you will, that you are walking in a bad neighbourhood where the houses are neglected, there is a lack of education, and a lot of dangerous gangs. You suddenly come across two small stones in close proximity to each other. Most probably, you would think nothing of it unless you needed one of the stones for a particular purpose, perhaps to defend yourself from someone. Two stones randomly sitting beside each other is not such a big deal. No need to sweat it.

You continue your stroll through the neighbourhood and stumble upon three piles of human corpses piled up in a brick-layer fashion. Chances are you would quickly surmise that someone was here and arranged these bodies in this manner. It didn’t just happen. A shock for sure but still really no big deal and nothing to sweat about.

You continue your walk and happen to find a dead puffin lying in the middle of the road. Would you suspect that a windstorm somehow threw the puffin pieces together and randomly created a puffin?

Somebody gave birth to that puffin. It didn’t just happen. A creature implies a mother.

Alternatively, say you didn’t see a puffin at all but instead you came across a Patek Phillipe watch, say model 4907/ij. You will surely notice that it celebrates the 10-year triumph of the famous Twenty~4® collection. Patek Philippe was likely not involved in the design of this model directly and it was probably the work of many different people having different levels of expertise – certainly not just one designer! You already know, just by looking at the complexity of this watch that it had more than one designer to deal with the different aspects of functionality, colour and style. You would also know that there would be a marketing section of the Patek Phillipe company that would be on the look out for trends to determine what styles would likely do well with high end consumers. They would have also had an enormous impact on the look of this particular model.

By handling this watch and examining it you might then ponder as to whether it would work as an analogy for the design of the universe proving that God is One – an Indivisible Creator. You would realize that the watch proved nothing of the sort but rather it might “prove” that the universe – even if it could be analogous to a watch at all, and that is not likely – was designed by several gods, some involved with creating the suns, some determining which animals would exist (and which would uselessly become extinct), some involved with answering the petitions of Olympic curlers, and some designing the potato bug.

You would note that the universe bespeaks timeless elegance, the new model universe in yellow gold would be the first unset version without a diamond-set case. You would note that three color choices are available for the universe: “Night Glow” and “Autumn Brown” – two hues created especially for this yellow-gold universe – and, of course, the endearingly classic “Timeless White“. If you bought into the design argument you would expect to have a selection of universes to pick from perhaps.

Did the universe have a designer or group of designers that must have also been designed ad infinitum?

David Hume may I say is calling?

The intricacy of design in our world, when intoxicated, is staggering — infinitely more complex than a gang related pile of corpses in a bad neighbourhood, a puffin or a Patek Phillipe watch. Therefore the team of designers for the universe must have been considerable and who could have afforded to pay them all in this economy?

Now I am going to commence to use really large numbers to give you a sense of being a little out of control. Here goes: There are 10 billion nerve cells in the brain. Each of the 10 billion cells sprouts between 10,000 to 100,000 fibers to contact other nerve cells in the brain, creating approximately 1,000 million million connections, or, 10 to the 15th power. Are you shvitzing?

Here I come now with some really enormous numbers. Serious serious numbers. Behold! There are 10 billion nerve cells in the brain with approximately 1,000 million million connections.

It is hard to imagine the multitude that 1015 represents. On and on I go. Take half of the United States, which is 1 million square miles, and imagine it being covered by forest, with 10,000 trees per square mile. On each of the 10,000 trees, which are on each of the one million square miles, there are 100,000 leaves. That is a whizbang bulbous amount of leaves. I take it you are still with me and feeling the groove of the number thing I am doing to your head. You see sir, that’s how many connections are smashed inside your brain. And they’re not just haphazardly thrown together by an impostor God or a monkey washing a cat. They form an incredibly intricate network system that has no parallel in the military industrial complex or in the other brands of universes that have been designed by other manufacturers.

Imagine walking by that in the seedy neighbourhood! The natural response when perceiving design of such mind-boggling complexity is to conclude that there must be a huge team of busy, possibly amoral, designers, behind everything that created this model of universe. Not to mention the team of designers that created the team that designed the team that designed the universe that you may be wearing on your wrist right now.

To be continued…

Say you want

a nice long headline

but you haven’t decided what to write yet.

Should you wait until you have content? Shouldn’t you have the idea of the article and then come up with the headline afterwards?

We, at Design Argument and Goldstein Auto, Goldstein Solutions (Classical Mechanics), and Goldstein Subaru emphatically say NO to these two questions. In fact we believe that you don’t need to know anything at all about what you want to write before you begin to write.

God willing we are going to produce 180 articles full of excellent content on the subject of why you should write when you have nothing to say.

You will all to become good monster writers by reading these here articles.

Keeping relevance to a minimum may be important sometimes: Aish Bible Code proving that Paul is dead!