Two Options

Biological animator Drew Berry gave a TED talk in 2011 in which he described his work. In the lecture he displays some of his breath-taking animations of processes that occur around the clock in every cell of our bodies.

Keep in mind as you wonder at the precision and complexity of these molecular machines and the operations they perform that there are only two viable explanations for how they came to be. Either blind forces and chance mutations resulted in these amazingly choreographed molecular dances or they were intentionally designed by an intelligent agent:

The only reason anyone would opt for the first explanation, in my opinion, is that they've ruled out a priori the possibility of there being an intelligent agent capable of having directed the creation of life. Moreover, the primary reason, perhaps, for ruling out such an agent a priori is the fact that one simply doesn't want such a being to exist.

Philosopher Thomas Nagel provides a clear example of this when he writes the following in his book The Last Word:

I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.

I suspect that most people, believers and non-believers alike, hope that God exists or that he doesn't. What I don't understand is why people like Nagel would hope that he doesn't.

Gutter Politics

It's sad, but we've come to expect high stakes political campaigns to be pretty sleazy. We expect character assassination, libel, and other offenses against propriety and civility. What we don't expect is that private, tax-exempt organizations will undertake, for political reasons, the systematic destruction of a television news network by any means that lies at hand. This is, however, what the progressive organization Media Matters for America (MMFA) has undertaken to do to Fox News.

The Daily Caller has been running a series of articles based on revelations from employees and former employees of MMFA detailing exactly what and how they're trying to smear and discredit Fox News and the lengths to which they're willing to go to harass and intimidate Fox's employees.

It's a pretty sordid tale but then the MMFA folks are progressives, after all, and progressives, or at least many of them, are firm believers in the principle that the end justifies the means.

The DC exposé makes for fascinating reading for those familiar with some of the players, and it's certainly important that people be aware of the sorts of things that are being done to insure Mr. Obama's reelection. Liberal lawyer Alan Dershowitz even observed that all of this is going to backfire and that MMFA will single-handedly cause Mr. Obama's defeat in November because he'll inevitably be associated with, and soiled by, MMFA's squalid tactics. We'll see.

Meanwhile, check out the series at the Daily Caller website. The links to the installments are below the picture of MMFA president and founder David Brock at the top of the DC home page.

UPDATE: The Daily Caller's page has changed so the best way to access their series on MMFA is to go here.