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Thanks I needed some orientation this afternoon, hung over, running around shopping, cleaning the place... thinking too much. Anyway, why read the spoof, when you can have the real thing, right? So thanks to Dwayne we now know that if you lift up any rock in the universe there will be a poisonious little neocon critter under it...
One on One: Faith in Hierarchy An Interview with George Gilder
Gilder, whose lengthy and diverse resume includes his having been a fellow at the Kennedy Institute of Politics at Harvard (from where he graduated), serving as a speechwriter for Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon and receiving the White House Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence from president Ronald Reagan, says that everything he has examined points to the same "top-down" model.
"The universe is hierarchical," says Gilder, with the intensity of someone racing to keep up with a mind constantly in overdrive. "And hierarchy points to a summit. The summit remains enclosed in fog, but this doesn't exclude the possibility that behind the fog is a divinity that we, through our faith, might worship."
It is this view that led the churchgoing, married, father of four from Massachusetts - a contributing editor of Forbes and frequent writer for The Economist, The American Spectator, The Harvard Business Review and The Wall Street Journal - to espouse the "intelligent design" movement.
In an hour-long interview with The Jerusalem Post, Gilder clarifies how his scientific reasoning, political positions and religious faith are not only consistent with one another, but converge in a way that makes sense out of life - and makes life make sense.
You're a scientist who questions evolution. Can you explain that?
The Darwinians essentially uphold that the human brain is all the intelligence in the universe. I say that this is an improbable proposition. Evolution happens in various limited ways, and explains very little about the world and the universe in which we live.
I arrived at this from economics. Even the most aggressive free-market theorists, such as Paul Romer - who is on track for a Nobel Prize - identify the entrepreneur as someone who reassembles chemical elements. His great breakthrough was to show that the entrepreneur has a tremendous amount of freedom, because there are so many chemical elements and so many ways they can be combined. In other words, the fundamental thing is matter, and the entrepreneur can rearrange the matter in different ways. But no novelty or innovation or idea-based invention is really acknowledged, even by Romer, who goes beyond the Austrian economists, who are supposed to be real specialists in human action. They see the entrepreneur as an opportunity scout. He looks out there at the material world and sees ways to reconcile price differentials by arbitrage. This is really a residue of Marxism and dialectical materialism. It seems that Darwinian materialism is the kind of hard science that all the social theorists use to justify their blindness to creativity or ideas or mind. It's a blindness that covers the whole intellectual world in the aftermath of Marx and the other materialist theories that have afflicted this
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God can you stand it? The entrepreneur as chemical engineer of the universe and Darwin refuted by what? Oh, yeah an economist. Sure thing dude...
CG