I looked at the date and thought, quite a lesson from history, and a follow up from those of 9/11.
Summer, 1940, when The Few in their Hurricanes (mostly!) and Spitfires stood between civilisation, however flawed, and a nightmare of aggressive barbarism, with the peak being Sunday, Sept 15, 1940. (That day and date thing caught my eye.)
Vid:
(And while the narrator has a point on broader themes, if Fighter Command had been knocked out, the Germans would have been able to dominate the battle from the air, and would have won. More thoughts here.)
A lesson for us as we stand in the gap today, against fairly long odds.
And, coming off a shower, let me add some notes on those lessons.
First, the key victory was a force in being success. As long as Fighter Command was a viable force, Hitler could not invade Britain with confidence. So it is significant that Sept 15 was the original target landing date.
Just so, as long as the design movement has a viable inductive argument and a significant number of competent people able to support it, it provides a base for the overwhelming number of people who recognise from the world that — despite the talking points to dismiss it — there are strong signs of it being designed, long run, we win.
And the objectors know that, they must sweep the field clear of the idea that there are signs in our world that on a reasonable examination in accord with sound inductive reasoning and historically valid scientific methods, point to design.
They obviously cannot overwhelm those signs unless they inject the Lewontinian a priori materialism that Philip Johnson so aptly rebuked:
For scientific materialists the materialism comes first; the science comes thereafter. [[Emphasis original] We might more accurately term them “materialists employing science.” And if materialism is true, then some materialistic theory of evolution has to be true simply as a matter of logical deduction, regardless of the evidence. That theory will necessarily be at least roughly like neo-Darwinism, in that it will have to involve some combination of random changes and law-like processes capable of producing complicated organisms that (in Dawkins’ words) “give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”. . . . The debate about creation and evolution is not deadlocked . . . Biblical literalism is not the issue. The issue is whether materialism and rationality are the same thing. Darwinism is based on an a priori commitment to materialism, not on a philosophically neutral assessment of the evidence. Separate the philosophy from the science, and the proud tower collapses. [[Emphasis added.] [[The Unraveling of Scientific Materialism, First Things, 77 (Nov. 1997), pp. 22 – 25.]
Hence some of the desperation of opponents to dominate institutions and the resort to censorship and smears.
Which, so long as we are not cowed, is ultimately as self defeating as attacking London was for Hitler’s bombers.
And so we come right back to the challenge that science is not properly to be equated to applied materialist ideology, and that on billions of observed cases without effective exception, FSCO/I is best explained by design.
The cosmos is full of signs of complex fine tuning that organises a cosmos supportive of cell based life. When an agnostic like Hoyle is the one who has led the charge on the point, that says something.
Similarly, on the world of life, we have yet to see an actual, non question-begging, observationally warranted reason to accept that blind watchmaker forces of chance and necessity in a warm pond or the like, threw up code using, algorithm using life. Then, onwards, body plans dozens of times over, that require increments in FSCO/I of 10 – 100+ mn bits.
In short, 150 years later, the very first icon of evolution, the tree of life, remains its Achilles heel:
In that context the ongoing resort to smears, deliberate misrepresentations calculated to stir up hostility and trigger legal or administrative actions, career busting and censorship are the strongest — if inadvertent, and painful — proof that the ideological materialists know the pivotal challenge they face.
Namely, a significant body of scientific evidence and associated cogent inductive reasoning that backs up the intuitive sense that the world around us reeks of design.
So, let us take heart and let us stand. END
PS: Images are giving me a warm time this morning . . .