Expelled: “Reason!” and “Evidence!” Report to the Principal’s Office

In response to a friend’s Facebook posting of the film trailer, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, I composed what is about to follow, with a few amendments and afterthoughts. Additionally, this post contains several quotations--some rather lengthy, yet all good reads.

Here is my reply:

Debate in science is fine; it is, in fact, encouraged. For without it, there ceases growth and maturity of the scientific disciplines. Organizations, like the Discovery Institute, exist and their work is judged by the scientific community for what it is and what it is not.

In economics, a similar argument occurs by the Marxists, as in the Intelligent Design camp, alleging that the Capitalists, as do Evolutionists, judge their ideas out of the debate. The facts explicitly and continuously demonstrate that collectivism and Intelligent Design cannot withstand the over-whelming evidence in support of free market enterprise and biological evolution. One hardly passes hours awaiting the diminuendo of these two. (See 1a & 1c quotations.)

The supernatural cannot be measured or studied in a scientific manner, and ergo, to say it can, negates the supernatural label itself, bringing phenomenon into the natural realm. In so doing, science explores its new jurisdiction, as it does all that which falls into natural heavens. (See 3a quotation.)

Difficult, life is not. All the four elements for life are found in nature: Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen. Science is about harmony, where the supernatural--including, therefore, religion--is dysfunction and deconstruction of said harmoniousness. (See 1c, 1d, & 2a quotations.)

Science is not stepping on supernatural toes; it is the supenaturalists that attempt to force the natural sciences into the corner by decrying reason and evidence. (See 1b, 2a, & 3a quotations.)

Evolution explains all life on this plant in a very graceful and poetic manner. Also, to say that evolution is life by mere chance insults the biological sciences and the evidence that supports the theory of evolution, or in layman, the fact of evolution. (See 3b & 3c quotations.)

The thing about science is that it has to agree with itself. The theory of gravity cannot only work under certain conditions; that is, it must work at all times, in all places. The theory of germs and countless more theories must be multi-communital for them to hold true.

As a student of economic science, I discovered early that Capitalism and Evolution share the same basis: natural selection. Businesses and individuals succeed and thrive do to their abilities to adapt to the economic climate in which they find their given state of affairs, and the same holds for living species on a biological level.

In saying this, I draw the strengthen of reason between the two;--that is, the evolutionary survival behaviors we possess, may not be the must divine in manner, yet to put it succinctly, the socio-economic system cannot rest its endurance on the noblest motive, yet must utilize the strongest motive in the most efficient ways manageable. (See 5a quotation.)

The motive, above here mentioned, is simply personal self-interest, on a conscious or a cellular level. For without self-interest, as an individual's sole purpose, we all pass into extinction and the dusty unfriendly pages of history. (See 4a, 4b, & 5b quotations.)


Quotations 1’s, by John Stuart Mills, Economist and Philosopher
Quotations 2’s, by Sam Harris, Neuroscientist and Philosopher
Quotations 3’s, by Richard Dawkins, Evolutionary Biologist
Quotations 4’s, by Adam Smith, Economist and Philosopher
Quotations 5’s, by John Maynard Keynes, Economist


1a: “Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.”

1b: “Miracles have no claim whatever to the character of historical facts and are wholly invalid as evidence of any revelation.”

1c: “It is accordingly on this battlefield [that is, religious belief], almost solely, that the rights of the individual against society have been asserted on broad grounds of principle, and the claim of society to exercise authority over dissentients openly controverted. The great writers to whom the world owes what religious liberty it possesses, have mostly asserted freedom of conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that a human being is accountable to others for his religious belief. Yet so natural to mankind is intolerance in whatever they really care about, that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realized, except where religious indifference, which dislikes to have its peace disturbed by theological quarrels, has added its weight to the scale. In the minds of almost all religious persons, even in the most tolerant countries, the duty of toleration is admitted with tacit reserves. One person will bear with dissent in matters of church government, but not of dogma; another can tolerate everybody, short of a Papist or an Unitarian; another, every one who believes in revealed religion; a few extend their charity a little further, but stop at the belief in a God and in a future state. Wherever the sentiment of the majority is still genuine and intense, it is found to have abated little of its claim to be obeyed. ”

1d: “On religion in particular, the time appears to me to have come, when it is a duty of all who, being qualified in point of knowledge, have, on mature consideration, satisfied themselves that the current opinions are not only false, but hurtful, to make their dissent known.”

2a: The “problem with arguing for the truth of religion is that the evidence for our religious doctrines is either terrible or non-existent. And this subsumes all claims about the existence of a personal God, the divine origin of certain books, the virgin birth of certain people, the veracity of ancient miracles, all of it.

“Consider Christianity, the entire doctrine is predicated on the idea that the gospel account of the miracles of Jesus is true. This is why people believe Jesus was a son of God, divine, etc. This textual claim--this textual claim is problematic because everyone acknowledges that the Gospels follow Jesus' ministry by decades and there is no extra biblical account of his miracles. But the truth is quite a bit worse than that.

“The truth is even if we had multiple contemporaneous eyewitness accounts of the miracles of Jesus it still would not provide sufficient basis to believe that these events actually occurred. Why not? Well, the problem is that first-hand reports of miracles are quite common even in the 21st-century.

“I have met literally hundreds at this point of Western educated men and women who think that their favorite Hindu or Buddhist guru has magic powers. The powers ascribed to these gurus are every bit as outlandish as those ascribed to Jesus. I, actually, remain open to evidence of such powers. The fact is that people who tell these stories desperately want to believe them. All to my knowledge lack the kind of corroborating evidence we should require before believing that nature's laws have been abrogated in this way. And people who believe these stories show an uncanny reluctance to look for non-miraculous causes.

“But it remains a fact that yogis and mystics are said to be walking on water and raising the dead and flying without the aid of technology; materializing objects, reading minds, foretelling the future. Right now, in fact all of these powers have been ascribed to Satya Sai Baba, the South Indian guru by an uncountable number of eyewitnesses. He even claims to have been born of a virgin, which is not all that uncommon a claim in the history of religion or in history generally. Genghis Khan, supposedly, was born of a virgin, as was Alexander. Apparently parthenogenesis doesn't guarantee that you're going to turn the other cheek....

“...You can even watch his miracles on YouTube; prepare to be under-whelmed. Maybe it's true that he has an Afro of sufficient diameter as to suggest a total detachment from the opinions of his fellow human beings. But I'm not sure this is reason enough to worship him; in any case.

“So, consider as though for the first time the foundational claim of Christianity. The claim is this that miracle stories of a sort that today surround a person like Satya Sai Baba become especially compelling when you set them in the pre-scientific religious context of the first century Roman Empire, decades after their supposed occurrence. We have Satya Sai Baba's miracle stories attested to by thousands upon thousands of living eyewitnesses. And they don't even a merit an hour on the Discovery Channel. But you place a few miracle stories in some ancient books and half the people on this earth think it a legitimate project to organize their lives around them. Does anyone else see a problem with that?”

3a: “Either Jesus had a father or he didn't. The question is a scientific one, and scientific evidence, if any were available, would be used to settle it. The same is true of any miracle--and the deliberate and intentional creation of the universe would have to have been the mother and father of all miracles. Either it happened or it didn't. It is a fact, one way or the other, and in our state of uncertainty we can put a probability on it--an estimate that may change as more information comes in. Humanity's best estimate of the probability of divine creation dropped steeply in 1859 when The Origin of Species was published, and it has declined steadily during the subsequent decades, as evolution consolidated itself from plausible theory in the nineteenth century to established fact today.”

3b: “In 1859, Charles Darwin announced one of the greatest ideas ever to occur to a human mind: cumulative evolution by natural selection. Living complexity is indeed orders of magnitude too improbable to have come about by chance. But only if we assume that all the luck has to come in one fell swoop. When cascades of small chance steps accumulate, you can reach prodigious heights of adaptive complexity. That cumulative build-up is evolution. Its guiding force is natural selection...

“Natural selection is quintessentially non-random, yet it is lamentably often miscalled random. This one mistake underlies much of the skeptical backlash against evolution. Chance cannot explain life. Design is as bad an explanation as chance because it raises bigger questions than it answers. Evolution by natural selection is the only workable theory ever proposed that is capable of explaining life, and it does so brilliantly.”

3c: “Natural selection is not just an alternative to chance. It is the only ultimate alternative ever suggested. Design is a workable explanation for organized complexity only in the short term. It is not an ultimate explanation, because designers themselves demand an explanation. If, as Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel once playfully speculated, life on this planet was deliberately seeded by a payload of bacteria in the nose cone of a rocket, we still need an explanation for the intelligent aliens who dispatched the rocket. Ultimately they must have evolved by gradual degrees from simpler beginnings. Only evolution, or some kind of gradualistic 'crane' (to use Daniel Dennett's neat term), is capable of terminating the regress. Natural selection is an anti-chance process, which gradually builds up complexity, step by tiny step. The end product of this ratcheting process is an eye, or a heart, or a brain--a device whose improbable complexity is utterly baffling until you spot the gentle ramp that leads up to it....

“Contrary to what is sometimes alleged, evolution is a predictive science. If you pick any hitherto unstudied species and subject it to minute scrutiny, any evolutionist will confidently predict that each individual will be observed to do everything in its power, in the particular way of the species--plant, herbivore, carnivore, nectivore or whatever it is--to survive and propagate the DNA that rides inside it. We won't be around long enough to test the prediction but we can say, with great confidence, that if a comet strikes Earth and wipes out the mammals, a new fauna will rise to fill their shoes, just as the mammals filled those of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. And the range of parts played by the new cast of life's drama will be similar in broad outline, though not in detail, to the roles played by the mammals, and the dinosaurs before them, and the mammal-like reptiles before the dinosaurs. The same rules are predictably being followed, in millions of species all over the globe, and for hundreds of millions of years. Such a general observation requires an entirely different explanatory principle from the anthropic principle that explains one-off events like the origin of life, or the origin of the universe, by luck. That entirely different principle is natural selection.

“We explain our existence by a combination of the anthropic principle and Darwin's principle of natural selection. That combination provides a complete and deeply satisfying explanation for everything that we see and know. Not only is the god hypothesis unnecessary. It is spectacularly unparsimonious. Not only do we need no God to explain the universe and life. God stands out in the universe as the most glaring of all superfluous sore thumbs. We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can't disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But, like those other fantasies that we can't disprove, we can say that God is very, very improbable.”

4a: “It is not not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

4b: “He... neither intends to promoting it... he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote and which was no part of his intention.”

5a: “Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.”

5b: “In the long run, we are all dead.”


I understand that some of the quotations might not have aligned themselves strictly with the paragraph in my reply, yet I find the essences there, nonetheless. The only fitting way to draw this lengthy post to a close to paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, journalist and author: what in any holy scripture could not have been written that by man at the period in history in which it was penned?

No "Amazing New Way" to Cure Higher Gas Prices

A Facebook group, “Amazing new way to lower gas prices”, came to my attention last week, when a hometown friend invited me to join. After viewing this group, I found that it has been a source of false and misleading information for more than 458,000 Facebook users. What follows is the exchange of wall posts between my friend and I:

Parsons: Thanks for the invite to "Amazing new way to lower gas prices", yet economically speaking, it will not change prices, only cause higher unemployment, as ExxonMobil lays-off hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals from its 84,000-plus workforce.

Also, less than 1% of ExxonMobil is owned by Executives, 49% is owned through the stock market by the average person making money for buying food, clothes, home repairs, etc.; the other 50% is owned by pension funds and mutual funds, things that take care of our grandparents and help us through college. One more thing, trying to hurt ExxonMobil is trying to hurt ourselves;--ExxonMobil is an American company. Why on earth would we, as Americans, be against an American company making money, which turns around and provides for us, in ways I pointed out above?

Friend: So, what do you propose we do?

Parsons: Most will not like this, but let the markets work it out. Mother Earth loves every dime the price of oil or gas rises. The incentive to move into cleaner fuels never appeared so strong. America needs to take the reins in this case and show the world that we are the Captain of the Global movement towards of a better tomorrow. Change is the American way. We must display our compassion for all of our biological cousins, i.e. birds, fish, reptiles, mammals, trees, plants, etc. The high prices make us rethink transportation and the resources we use to fuel it.

Supply and demand factors need to be recognized, as India and China develop, as well as other countries and economies. More demand with the same supply output shifts the demand curve to the right and thus the equilibrium finds itself at a new higher price.

Many environmentalists and economists still see the price at the pump too low. According to some oil experts, the global oil supply will peak in 2010. This is not saying drilling in Alaska and/or off the coast and/or any other place and we can delay the peak in this natural resource market. This 2010 peak takes into account all the crude the planet has to offer. Yet, we have heard these estimates and forecasts afore; however, to what degree can we count on the trajectory of technology to keep pace with demand? So, then, we must draw into this equation all information, and this is a piece.

Also, here is why journalists need to register for a few basic economic courses before spouting out asinine and misleading statements. Before adventuring forward, it needs to be stated that it is not incorrect to call the record energy prices inflation. However, I find a misconception in the word usage which many people may mentally embrace. The prices, presently, are not what is known as core inflation--that is, the general idea of inflation as it relates to other commodities, such as guitars, comic books, and knives. They are the examples of a very elastic market. This is, also, why food, not only energy, is not calculated into the core inflation rate. These markets’ volatility exhibits poorly the inflation rate according to real income over a great time period. After the last oil crisis, prices drop to $11 or so a barrel;--that is textbook deflation. Though conversely, America has not experienced deflation in the core inflation rate--on the macro-scale--since the Great Depression. If deflation had occurred, the economy would have reacted like a combustion engine without motor oil.

Another thing that makes the price at the pump appear so high compared to the late 90’s and early 2000’s is that today's weak dollar buys less globally. This weak dollar occurs from the FED trying to lessen the severity of the Recession (pending or real;--more so real). To lower interest rates, the FED prints more money; thusly, to raise interest rates the FED prints less.

Also, another factor in the weak dollar is the current account deficit. We need to balance the budget for a few years (at the bare least) along with an economic boom, which will allow the FED to raise the interest rates. So, the weak dollar is cured for that times’ being. The ecological nature of the economy presents our system (still the most efficient, there is) with a thing called the “Business Cycle”;--that is, the ups and downs, less downs than ups, of course.

Friend: So, basically, we, as consumers, can only limit the amount we buy and show interest in alternative fuels and the rest is up to the government and the economy, as it ebbs and flows?

Parsons: Firstly, the manner in which you phrased your question leads me to gather you view us as somewhat victims or at least as a less powerful entity than the government or the economy. All I can reply with is that we are the government and we are the economy. We cast ballets for our representatives and we do the same each time we purchase a commodity or service. This is a similarity that cannot be overlooked in the intentions of our Founding Fathers;--a Republic through Democratic Representation and a Free Market Economic Enterprise. Each of these complements the other in such a Classical Liberal modus operandi.

Secondly, we can demand of our representatives to subsidize alternative fuel sources, yet this will limit government spending on some programs, raise taxes, or restrict tax cuts. Some Democrats proffer an idea of windfall profit taxes and/or cutting tax breaks to oil companies, like ExxonMobil; however, it is not mentioned by the advocates of such plans that they will raise oil prices in the short run and promise such perpetuation into the long run. Think of it in this light: if a company does not need to pay its light bill, then it will use that money in Research and Development, as well as being able to thusly expand, creating jobs and higher wages for its employees.

If we can recall, or if not, then research the last energy crisis of this sort, we implemented windfall profit taxes, had rationing and price controls, and it is viewed by many economists in retrospect that these steps only disrupted the markets and prolonged the crisis. This is the reactionary mentality that leads to the same asinine measures we find before us this day.

Yet, for the cut in spending, I would rather eliminate some out-of-date programs. Like last year, we, as taxpayers, funded a dozen programs that no longer existed. The large scale of our present day government, due to its bureaucratic fashion, runs behind an even faster moving world and economy.

However, I will not be a one-armed economist--that is, subsidizing one type or a group of energy alternatives will simultaneous sanction the others not subsidized and out of which may be the fuel we run on tomorrow. Furthermore, when could people predict the future of their own lives, let alone the market, in such a manner?

Thirdly, if we, as citizens, desire a balanced budget, we have to accept that we must choose whether certain projects and programs remain more vital than a squared budget. Possessing a large Balance of International Indebtedness compares with a wrong turn on the highway; whereas the Current Account Deficit represents the miles per hours on the automobile, as we head in that not-so-fortunate direction. Wherein we slow the MPH’s or even reverse the direction, we find our global friends more trusting of our driving and decision capabilities and, ergo, more willing to ride shotgun.

Additionally, when America comprises only 4% of the global population and possesses 29% of the world’s wealth, it stands only to reason that America will be the world’s largest debtor. Yet, a good rule of thumb endures: debt for investment is fine and will pay itself back in time, yet debt accumulated for consumption leaves one no payoff. Think of college: going into debt to attend classes and purchase books can only add to one’s future earnings; taking on debt to get plastered or stoned each weekend leaves one with only a hangover or morning buzz and no method unto which to amortize the said debt easily. Thusly, from the hard won earnings, it must be reimbursed.

Fourthly, within our economic system, we can embolden our goals and visions for a particular market or cause by becoming an entrepreneur and entering the system as a leader for the change for which we pine, ergo, finding our niche market and maximizing benefits, along with minimizing costs. If we find it too risky or untimely, we can then invest in someone else’s entrepreneurial spirit.

Fifthly, an individual on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange stated that he believed oil prices may lower to the $80 range within the next three months. Oil prices--that is, coupled with all the other reasons I stated so far within our discourse--also rose to unprecedented heights, due to a slowing economy, where individuals found it safer to invest in the energy markets (and in some cases, actually buying oil and storing it, as one would precious commodities, such as gold and sliver) and in return oil gained in price, which made other markets slow, ergo, more individuals ran to the safe bet, Energy Stocks, because they remained rising.

So, besides the few individuals hoarding barrels of oil, oil skyrocketed by a somewhat false demand. A group of traders--not in an arrange manner, of course--moved the value of the stocks upwards, by believing that the stocks were going in that direction and so invested. This happens, for example, in the currency exchange markets as well;--the overvaluing or undervaluing of a specified currency. One could argue that our dollar has been treated in that way, of late.

It needs noting that the threefold increase in trading on the future markets, as most of the trades are, have little to do with the price in the present. The metal, nickel, for the same period of time as the rise in oil, has been traded on the future markets just about as much; however, the price of the nickel lowered in said time.

Finally, the reason for the price of oil, in addition with other goods, is one comprised of a myriad of factors. No one action will change the pain at the pumps, or in words, the salvation of the planet, herself. It will take several such key actions in a very sensitive equation of variables to redirect the prices downwards. However, if many experts are correct when oil prices do lower, we will no longer be craving the resource (simple supply and demand), as we are presently; we will have moved beyond such a high quantity demanded.

The “Amazing new way to lower gas prices” has nothing new or amazing about it; it belies a simplistic step to solve numerous factors with detailed complexities. I will add, that these complexities of factors safeguard us from one individual or a small group of individuals controlling our lives, as a possible puppetry.

Finding the Economic I.Q. of the average American to be abysmal, I outline several pressing factors to demonstrate that the proposal set out by this group remains strongly misunderstood, as well as highly damaging to the state of our current affairs. I left another dozen or so factors off the list, due to the reader's time and more importantly to my time in breaking down the complexities of this situation into layman's terms.

A Decry for the Rational World

Last week I happened to run across an Op-Ed Piece in the Marshall University’s campus newspaper, The Parthenon. I replied to this piece, for the blatant support of ignorance eats away at society and any form of progress.

I navigate my existence on this planet by Reason. To paraphrase Sam Harris, a philosopher and author, if my reasons and arguments are better than yours then you will helplessly give yours over to mine; that is, what it means to be a rational person. And, of course, vice versa.

Here is my reply:

You say, “I Believe in God because I want to.” Why is it so hard for people to give themselves some credit and find inside their being their own strength and believe in themselves, instead of an absentee father-figure.

People take the internal creation of an abstraction, a deity that can fully understand their woes and who might even give a damn, and move it outwardly to be an external force and then decry their own weaknesses, and in so doing, bring the now external abstraction back to an internal one, only to possess the moral firmness to face the bloody day.

“Just that I want to believe in something bigger than me.” That is a purely romantic viewpoint. You are forcing a mystery where one does not need to be; we, as mankind, have enough as is.

Basically, you are spitting in the face of reality. And all that is Reason. But, of course, you and billions of others do not play inside the realm of evidence and, as you say, “logical reasoning”. Talk about the blind leading the visually impaired.


The rational world loathes the irrational one; thusly, I felt a deep calling to decry the barefaced injustice to the logical members of the former. I will add, the perception is sometimes more of a problem than the obvious. Let us hope that the problems lays in the perception.