politburo diktat 2.0

Not to go all-out on this, but a few more interesting evo items popped up today.

First, John McCain, the very model of a moderate rational, secular Republican, says of Intelligent Design, “let the student decide.” *sigh* Steve Benen, at The Washington Monthly adds, “In related news, McCain said he’d like to see students decide whether to believe the earth is flat, the South won the Civil War, the value of pi is exactly 3, and one can contract the AIDS virus through tears and sweat.”

William Demski “mothballs” his blog “Uncommon Descent.”

I’ve decided to put Uncommon Descent into mothballs indefinitely. Although I’ve enjoyed blogging, I find it distracts from more pressing work that I need to get done.

I doubt Demski stopped blogging because of the Dover decision, but it’s interesting. (Clenched fist salute: PZ Myers).

Cdr. Salamander, sends this excerpt of Michael Behe on Hannity and Colmes:

COLMES: Who’s the designer?
BEHE: Well, as I’ve said since 1996 when I published “Darwin’s Black Box,” I’m a
Catholic. I think a good candidate for the designer is God. But that is not straight —
that’s not a conclusion that you come from, from the structure of the bacterial flagellum.
COLMES: What would be the other options if it’s not God?
BEHE: Well, you know, other things that would strike us as, you know, as pretty exotic,
you know. Space aliens or time travelers or something strange.
…
COLMES: What about any of this is scientific?

BEHE: I’m sorry?

COLMES: What about any of this is scientific?

BEHE: What’s scientific is the structures of what we have discovered in the cell. In the cell there are molecular machines. They work by grabbing things, pushing them. Just like the machines in our everyday experience.

The old “my analogy is science” defense.

PZ Myers also quotes this statement on evolution from the Rabbinical Council of America:

Judaism affirms the idea that God is the Creator of the Universe and the Being responsible for the presence of human beings in this world. Nonetheless, there have long been different schools of thought within Judaism regarding the extent of divine intervention in natural processes. One respected view was expressed by Maimonides who wrote that “we should endeavor to integrate the Torah with rational thought, affirming that events take place in accordance with the natural order wherever possible.” (Letter to the Jews of Yemen) All schools concur that God is the ultimate cause and that humanity was an intended end result of Creation.

For us, these fundamental beliefs do not rest on the purported weaknesses of Evolutionary Theory, and cannot be undermined by the elimination of gaps in scientific knowledge.

Judaism has always preferred to see science and Torah as two aspects of the “Mind of God” (to borrow Stephen Hawking’s phrase) that are ultimately unitary in the reality given to us by the Creator. As the Zohar says (Genesis 134a): “istakel be-’oraita u-vara ‘alma,” God looked into the Torah and used it as His blueprint for creating the Universe.

Myers: “That’s a standard statement of theistic evolution with a Jewish twist, something I think we could all live with.”

I’ve been meaning to do a post on theistic evolution; this is a useful view of it.