Agnosticism is also not a method of argument

I know I bang on about my two favourite subjects, but I like them so there :-)

Last Thursday Radio 4's thought for the day was by John Bell of the Iona Community.

It was only the last bit that really caught my ear, but having listened to it again I was also struck by:

"And in the end of the day you can't dissect a mystery, you can only embrace it..."

ARRGH NOO! You fecking limp lettuce hippy permanent agnostic waste of space! Of course you can dissect a mystery, that's what being a detective or a scientist is all about! A rainbow is no less wonderous for knowing how it's made!...

Ahem, anyway, the last bit was a poem by Lucien Zell:

"I used to believe in God's plan
until I arrived at a great surprise:
God has no plan -
he prefers to improvise."

Which is almost, but not quite, correct.

It should of course be:

I used to believe in God's plan
until I arrived at a great surprise:
There's no need for a God that plans
when evolution can improvise.

[That's enough seriousness for one month: ed]

Fibbing is not a method of argument

Radio 4's Today programme this morning included an interview with Eugenie Scott (very patient) and John Henry (blithering idiot) * and an extract from a pro intelligent design DVD:

"Consider the difficulty of generating just two lines of Shakespeare's play Hamlet by dropping scrabble letters onto a table top...."

It's easy to find fault in an idea if one misrepresents it but, in this case, it's easy to fix. Are you watching carefully?

"Evolution is randomness"

"Evolution is small random change plus selection"

The first version is not correct, the second one is. It's a surprisingly small difference, but one that IDers seemingly find hard to grasp.

* Me? Opinionated? :-)

last minute...

So the local card shop at lunchtime today was *packed* - queues for the tills stretching the entire length of the shop with gruff businessmen in grey suits clutching lickle ickle teddy bears with "I Wuv You" on the front...