At the end of the interview Dr Behe explains the presence of malaria as being part of God’s plan . . . sort of. Listen and see what you think. But it brought up another question in my mind:

In public at least most ID proponents shy away from too much discussion of the designer or the designer’s methods, timing and motives. But most Christians are very happy to argue ad infinitum about other aspects of God’s history. I don’t think I will ever understand the Holy Trinity or why God chose to brutally murder his son. (Even though he did come back to life, if he wanted to forgive mankind its sins why not just forgive them?) My point is NOT to discuss those things here but to point out that there is no injunction against discussing those actions ascribed to God . . . why not talk about his possible reasons for designing Malaria or the laryngial nerve or men’s nipples or the remnants of legs inside of whales or wings on flightless birds or the inverted retinal cells or men’s prostates or marsupials or why not give humans a different genetic code so they had a harder time picking up viruses from animals or . . . lots of other stuff.

I’m not trying to get at anyone, I’m just trying to understand the reasons for talking about one and not the other.

I would just love to discuss them all, but it’s bad netiquette to explode a thread into four different topics. If anybody with posting privileges would be so kind as to start a thread on any or all of those three topics, please do so. I strongly disagree with just about everything KF has written above and I’d love to respond.

“One of the cranial nerves, the vagus (the name means ‘wandering’ and it is apt), has various branches, two of which go to the heart, and two on each side to the larynx (voice box in mammals). On each side of the neck, one of the branches of the laryngeal nerve goes straight to the larynx, following a direct route such as a designer might have chosen. The other one goes to the larynx via an astonishing detour. It dives right down into the chest, loops around one of the main arteries leaving the heart (a different artery on the left and right sides, but the principle is the same), and then heads back up the neck to its destination.”

So we have four nerves leaving the brain for the larynx. Two connect directly to the larynx on each side of the neck, but one of each pair takes a long detour down into the chest before heading back up to the neck and eventually reaching the larynx.

Dawkins then goes into a couple of pages explaining how this all happened, as some fish gradually lost their gills and evolved into animals with necks, changing their anatomy greatly in the process. This dragged two of the poor RLNs, which happened to pass on the wrong side of major blood vessels, around Robin Hood’s Barn in the process while keeping their connections to the brain and the larynx throughout.

You make as good a defense of the RLN as I’ve ever heard, but you can’t get past the fact that some nerves from the mammalian brain go directly to the larynx while their otherwise identical twins have to go all the way down to the heart, passing the larynx as they travel down and then they have to go all the way back up the neck before finally connecting to the larynx which was their destination all along.

So, there’s no doubt that a direct path is possible – two nerves actually take the direct route. An intelligent designer could easily have made the other two nerves take the direct route instead of sending looping them around the heart.

But an unintelligent designer, such as evolution, can’t do that. It has no way of “unhooking” the nerve from the brain or larynx, routing it directly, and reattaching it, so it’s forced to take the long, unintelligent route instead.

Let’s parse.

“The nerve starts in the head.” No, it doesn’t. The recurrent laryngeal nerve is a branch of the vagus nerve arising at the aorta. Most organs served by the vagus nerve are served by branches of the nerve. This enables the designer to use one main nerve to serve many organs, much as a plumber would design a home plumbing system to economize on pipes.

“The end organ is the larynx.” No, it isn’t. Several “end organs” are served by the recurrent laryngeal nerve, in spite of its name, including the esophagus, trachea and pharynx. Indeed, the RLN arises from the aorta because it supplies parasympathetic innervation to the heart, the first stop on the branch. Probably even chatty Richard would agree that parasympathetic regulation of the heart rate is more vital than the ability to speak.

“Instead of going straight there…” Don’t fret, Richard. The superior laryngeal nerve does go straight there. It too is a vagal branch. The larynx is innervated from two vagal sources, just one of countless examples of beneficial redundancies in the body. In fact the larynx is quite capable of functioning without the RLN, albeit somewhat gruffly.

Personally, we are rather fond of the RLN and its aortal route to the voice box. Gives new meaning to the expression “speaking from the heart”…

Much of Nazism was precisely driven by the great German apostasy premised on elightenment rationalism, empiricism and idealism, then Darwinism as it developed and spread across Germany through the work of Haeckel and those who followed him. It also drew on the occultism that rose in the aftermath of the general discredit that was heaped on the Gospel and the Bible through selective hyperskepticism, so triumphant by the 1840′s that Marx began his remarks on Fuerbach by saying that he criticism of religion in Germany was essentially over.

The warnings on its consequences by Heine et al proved all too prophetically apt. Heine, 1831:

Christianity — and that is its greatest merit — has somewhat mitigated that brutal German love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered [the Swastika, visually, is a twisted, broken cross . . .], the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. …

The old stone gods will then rise from long ruins and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and Thor will leap to life with his giant hammer and smash the Gothic cathedrals. …

… Do not smile at my advice — the advice of a dreamer who warns you against Kantians, Fichteans, and philosophers of nature. Do not smile at the visionary who anticipates the same revolution in the realm of the visible as has taken place in the spiritual. Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder. German thunder … comes rolling somewhat slowly, but … its crash … will be unlike anything before in the history of the world. …

At that uproar the eagles of the air will drop dead, and lions in farthest Africa will draw in their tails and slink away. … A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll. [Religion and Philosophy in Germany, 1831. HT: Commenter, Tribune7 at UD.]

Hitler drew on the streams of apostasy and arrogantly selective hyperskepticism, and his antisemitism is not simply Lutheranism or Luther in a brown shirt; a false impression and attempted turnabout accusation too often communicated nowadays by those who would shamelessly indict the Christian faith as a whole for the holocaust.

Neatly forgetting Darwin’s legacy in Descent of Man chs 5 – 7, esp 6:

Man is liable to numerous, slight, and diversified variations, which are induced by the same general causes, are governed and transmitted in accordance with the same general laws, as in the lower animals. Man has multiplied so rapidly, that he has necessarily been exposed to struggle for existence, and consequently to natural selection. He has given rise to many races, some of which differ so much from each other, that they have often been ranked by naturalists as distinct species . . . .

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.

Saint Charles’ halo is a bit tarnished.

Here is Hitler in Mein Kampf bk 1 Ch X:

Any crossing of two beings not at exactly the same level produces a medium between the level of the two parents . . . Consequently, it will later succumb in the struggle against the higher level. Such mating is contrary to the will of Nature for a higher breeding of all life . . . The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he after all is only a weak and limited man; for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable higher development of organic living beings would be unthinkable.

The consequence of this racial purity, universally valid in Nature, is not only the sharp outward delimitation of the various races, but their uniform character in themselves. The fox is always a fox, the goose a goose, the tiger a tiger, etc., and the difference can lie at most in the varying measure of force, strength, intelligence, dexterity, endurance, etc., of the individual specimens. But you will never find a fox who in his inner attitude might, for example, show humanitarian tendencies toward geese, as similarly there is no cat with a friendly inclination toward mice . . . .

In the struggle for daily bread all those who are weak and sickly or less determined succumb, while the struggle of the males for the female grants the right or opportunity to propagate only to the healthiest. [That is, Darwinian sexual selection.] And struggle is always a means for improving a species’ health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher development.

If the process were different, all further and higher development would cease and the opposite would occur. For, since the inferior always predominates numerically over the best [NB: this is a theme in Darwin's discussion of the Irish, the Scots and the English in Descent], if both had the same possibility of preserving life and propagating, the inferior would multiply so much more rapidly that in the end the best would inevitably be driven into the background, unless a correction of this state of affairs were undertaken. Nature does just this by subjecting the weaker part to such severe living conditions that by them alone the number is limited, and by not permitting the remainder to increase promiscuously, but making a new and ruthless choice according to strength and health . . .

Not much wiggle room there.

DM is correct in his summary that specifically atheistical regimes in the past century, premised on evolutionary materialism in various forms [which rose to prominence in our time through Darwin] have been responsible for well over 100 million democide based deaths through preying on their own populations. That can be seen by simply counting up the toll of the Russian and Chinese Communist revolutions, plus a few others, without counting say the American Abortion holocaust, now at 50 mn or so and mounting at a 9/11 or so a day.

GEM of TKI

By adulthood, however, he had turned against the Catholic church, regarding it as a foreign controlled organization.

Hitler developed a deep appreciation of Martin Luther, Originator of Protestantism, 100% German and a Jew hater, just like him. (Google “On the Jews and Their Lies” for a sample of Luther on Jews.)

Let’s not forget that Germany was also a Christian country and home of Protestantism. Almost all of the soldiers who enthusiastically did Hitler’s bidding were Christians and they even wore belt buckles that said, “God With Us” if there were any doubters.

You also missed the first of the mass murderers, a Chinese man named Hong Xiuquan. He led the Taiping Rebellion, a 14 year civil war that led to about 20 million deaths. He was not only a Christian, he thought he was Christ, returned to earth to bring justice.

I’d also like to point out that Mao and Stalin’s atheism had nothing to do with their murders, which were political and military in nature, but Hitler’s hatred of Jews was religiously based. Christianity split off from Judiasm in the first century, with enduring rancor between Christianity and Judiasm that lasts until this day.

We are told that ID is based on recognising design in nature. And we recognise it because we ourselves create designed things. Engineers seem to feature quite heavily here, because they know when something is designed and when it isn’t.

But then having recognised design based on this premise you want to throw your hands up and refuse to comment on whether it is good or bad design.

To me that seems inconsistent. You use one standard to recognise the design but then refuse to apply that standard to say whether the design is good or bad. Then you get into slightly ludicrous territory trying to speculate that there must be a good reason why a nerve doesn’t go directly between two points.

-”Evolutionism “has no problem with evil” because evolutionism denies that there even are such things as good and evil … until, of course, it’s time to beat up on God for allowing evil to exist.”

Or when they want to remind everyone of all the “evils” of other religions, while conveniently forgetting how the trifecta of atheism/materialism/nihilism lead to 100 million deaths during the 20th century.