It is almost unbelievable to me that I am finding on this list the same kind of happenings that I always seem to find whenever I look into Marxist politics. Because of my dear father, I always try to give Marxists the benefit of the doubt. And, every time, it's the same. First, Louis and others expressed themselves with what I have found to be typical Marxist uncouth. Then Louis "split" from the list having done his damage. And, in the aftermath, a fine man, Rakesh (whom, if I remember correctly, survived a consideration of his own excommunication from the list when Doug solicited private votes up or down on his presence) decided he couldn't take it and left. I've never encountered a group of Marxists where this kind of nonsense was not happening, and I believe it has something to do with Marxism itself on a very fundamental level. As such, I struggle against concluding that Marxism's role in the movement for justice and freedom and all the rest has been overall very negative and pathological. Marxists could indeed learn a lot from the Christian Left.
Now, the posts on the anthropic principle have referred to the idea of creation by design, and I hope you will enjoy an excerpt from one of my favorite books, which I heartily recommend for pleasure in thought and style, namely "The Seven Mysteries of Life - An Exploration in Science and Philosophy" by Guy Murchie.
The issue of course is fundamental to religion and philosophy. And it makes me think of a story about Charles Boyle, the fourth Earl of orrery, who flourished in southern Ireland early in the eighteenth century - and of the theorem that bears his name. Having heard of Kepler's famous discovery of the laws of planetary motion and of Newton's recent work on gravitation, Lord Orrery had a working model of the solar system built inside his castle. It was an extraordinary, dynamic and up-to-date piece of clockwork with orbital hoops and a brass sun in the center plus smaller globes representing Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn slowly revolving around it, even a moon circling the Earth and four little ones going around Jupiter.
But it seems that Lord Orrery had an atheist friend who had an utterly materialistic outlook and thought of the universe as just an immense moving system of natural machinery that somehow coasts along, blindly but automatically maintaining itself without benefit of consciousness, mind or intelligence of any kind. So when the friend heard tell of Orrery's new and wonderful machine, he lost no time in going to the castle to see it. Entering the great hall where the model was in operation, the atheist's eyes widened with awe and the first question he asked Lord Orrery was: "Where did you get this magnificent thing? Who made it?"
But Orrery, remembering previous arguments with the atheist about creation, surprised him by replying, "Nobody made it. It just happened."
"How could that be?" retorted the atheist. "Surely these intricate gears and wheels couldn't create themselves. Who made them?"
Lord Orrery stood his ground, insisting that his model of the solar system had just happened by itself. Meantime the atheist worked himself into a state of hysterical frustration. Then at last, judging the time was ripe, Orrery let him have it. "Up to now," he declared, "I was testing you. Now I am going to offer you a bargain. I will promise to tell you truly who made my little sun and planets down here as soon as you tell me truly Who made the infinitely bigger, more wonderful and more beautiful real sun and planets up there in the heavens."
The atheist turned a little pale and, for the first time, began to wonder whether the Universe could really have made itself, or possibly be running all this time automatically and unguided by the slightes twinge of intelligence. And this was the origin of the Orrery Theorem which says: "If the model of any natural system requires intelligence for its creation and its working, the real natural system requires at least as much intellignece for its own creation and working."(611)
Quincy