I visited Auckland’s Stardome planetarium tonight, something I’ve been meaning to do for a few weeks now, and although it wasn’t as enthralling as I always imagine such things should be, it was kind of nice… Why do I get such a kick out of that feeling of utter insignificance you get from realizing just how mindbogglingly small our world is compared to the rest of the cosmos, and for what an astoundingly short period of time our species has walked upon this tiny speck?

Anyhow, all that thinking about the big picture reminds me that the intelligent design bozos have just lost a major court case in the US, and I have to smile… munce, even.

Ha-ha!

I would apologize for gloating, but this is not the time for rational people to be polite about the religious nutjobs’ new front in their ongoing war against common sense. The leader of the free world himself tacitly endorses teaching ID as part of a science curriculum, so we really do have something to worry about.

You know what an interesting scientific question isn’t? It sure isn’t: "How can such a complicated and amazing universe exist without a creator?"— That’s a tedious, metaphysical question. An interesting scientific question is: "How does this complicated and amazing universe work?" because it opens up a million avenues of actual research, every single one of which will expand our understanding of the cosmos, and perhaps even one day answer that first question without us even expecting it.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 23rd, 2005 at 12:33 am and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.