What's So Great About Evolution?

Gordon J. Glover, who has the blog Beyond the Firmament and a book by the same name, has shared a series of videos offering intelligent, articulate and respectful explanations of evolution aimed at Christians who have heard it blamed for atheism and the evidence supporting it called into question. I am posting the first one here.



In other news, the blogosphere is responding to a story about someone at the Texas equivalent of the department of education who was forced to resign after forwarding information about a presentation by Barbara Forrest. Censorship is indeed a big issue, but it isn't the young-earth creationists and cdesign proponentsists who are the victims. You can learn more at The Austringer, Pharyngula, Panda's Thumb, Further Thoughts and Traveling from Kansas.

To cheer yourself up after reading that news, and in the process see a wonderful example of what living organisms have evolved to be capable of, take a look and see what this squirrel can do...

Finally, there is a new interview with Philip Pullman, the atheist author of a well-known series of children's books, one of which has been made into a movie about to be released in December. (Hat tip: Internet Monk and In The Open Space: God and Culture). Read it to find out what it means to him to be "a 1662 Book of Common Prayer atheist", what he thinks of Narnia and Lord of the Rings, and other interesting things he has to say. I haven't read any of the books so I won't be commenting until I've at least seen the movie, but I will note that there have been interesting suggestions that the deity that is the focus of the stories is essentially the Gnostic demiurge. There is a book about Pullman's books (i.e. another book I have not yet read) that apparently explores this theological aspect further, called Killing the Imposter God: Philip Pullman's Spiritual Imagination in His Dark Materials. A blog I just discovered called Asking the Wrong Questions has an amusing summary of the series, as well as commentary on other works of literature and television, including Battlestar Galactica: Razor, which I still haven't seen yet.