On Creation and Evolution

I saw a post over at sikkdays and had to respond. I ended up putting essentially a blog post together, so I thought I'd re-post here. The original post at sikkdays was regarding the new Michigan Legislation that is working it's way through the State House and Senate regarding the teaching of Intelligent Design as a challenge to Evolution.

---

The thing that frustrates me is that after over 100 years of having this theory, we’re no closer to reconciling it with our faith. I personally believe that it’s very easy to believe in both Evolution and the Bible, and here’s the hint: most of the details in both are wrong, especially when interpreted by the layperson.

Evolution as a process and as a theory is still not greatly understood. We don’t really know how or why DNA mutates, or how genes split and become 2 genes in the following generation. We’ve got experiments that show that these things happen, but aside from random chance, we haven’t discovered all the mechanisms that make Evolution actually work. All we know for sure is that natural selection happens, and it operates to create enhancements in species over time relative to environment.

The Bible is far from well-understood. It’s been well-studied (much like Evolution), but there seems to be little consensus on what the damn thing actually says. Ask ten different pastors from ten different denominations what the most important verse of the Bible is, and you’ll get ten different answers. If not twenty. But ask them what Jesus stood for, and you’ll get the same things: forgiveness, compassion, understanding, and sacrifice.

The Devil is in the details. Literally, folks. As Christians, we can easily get caught up in who begot whom, and exactly how much pork we can eat and on which days during Lent. We almost always seem to forget the important stuff like love and grace. We argue about the details so much, that when some “jerk like Darwin” comes along and says something that’s “so obviously not in the Bible,” we all gang up like Greek City-States against the Persians.

Believe me, the important parts of the Bible are not the details. They are the truths. If you read a verse, and you can’t say, “this is self-evident, and thus Godly,” then it’s probably editorial written by some guy who’s been dead between 6,000 and 2,000 years who had an axe to grind, and should be taken in that context.

To bring this rather lengthy response back around, Evolution has absolutely zero conflict with the Bible. The only argument that can be made is the Literal Genesis argument, that presumes that God is some cheap magician that pulled Light, Land, Sea, Time, Life, and Humanity, out of a hat, one (1) day (not exceeding 24 hours) each, starting at 9 AM, October 17, 4004 BCE. (I have yet to see an “on this date: Oct 17, 4004 BCE: World created. Rejoice.” on the last page of “Popular Science.”)

I’m not saying God couldn’t do it, but why would he? Doesn’t it make more sense, if you’re going to make faith something of any real import, to create a world where the existence of God could be shadowed by the natural and logical? Wouldn’t God create a system where his very presence was either completely apparent or completely unnecessary depending solely on faith?

I can believe in Evolution, and I can believe in God. I can believe these things because while I believe in truth that is scientifically tested like natural selection, I also believe in truth that is spiritually tested, like the teachings of Christ. These things shall not be foreign to me simply because they hadn’t been discovered when the Bible was written.

Net Neutrality? How 'bout Channel Neutrality?

Inspired by Sikkdays' post about Net Neutrality, I though I'd put my 2 cents in regarding another, related issue.

Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality is tiered service based not on the money you pay your ISP, but based on the money a service provider (like Google, Yahoo, Blogger) pays that ISP. Usually, as an ISP, you would do this if you had a competing service. For example, Comcast might want to put a speed limit on Skype, because Comcast has their own digital voice service. AT&T would do the same, in favor of selling you a phone.

The Internet was never designed that way. It was designed to be egalitarian. Bits are bits, and the Internet sends every bit just as fast as it can, regardless of protocol, port number, or packet size.

I want my bits to be equal. The ISP's argue that these services are 'Piggy-backed' on "their" internet access. In reality, each of the aforementioned services pays a rather large fee to have their connection - they pay their ISP just like you do, and I guarantee they pay a heck of a lot more.

Clearly, nobody saw the Internet coming. We're seeing disruption in all kinds of industries, especially information industries. Video, music, communications, they will all have to adapt to a world where units of information is bought at a flat fee.

Channel Neutrality

So here's where I transition to the new topic: Channel Neutrality. Many people know that I used to work at a public access TV station. Cable companies are required by law to provide community access, if one exists in your community, on every plan - even basic cable.

Here's where it gets interesting: AT&T "Advanced TV." AT&T argues that it is not a "cable company" - they aren't stringing coaxial cable into your house, just good old-fashioned copper wire. So, since they aren't a cable company, they don't have to provide PEG (Public Access, Education, and Government) access channels. So very likely, you simply won't get them. (Take that, First Amendment!)

But it gets better! If your local PEG Channel decides that they want to pay AT&T to be sent to your TV, (which costs them well over $5,000, and likely upwards of $10,000, according to my old boss) they get siphoned into a separate "PEG Channel Area." They're no longer "Channel 25." They're "PEG Channel 2" in the "Channel 99 PEG Area." It's hard to describe this correctly, so here's a video of what PEG access looks like on AT&T U-Verse:

There is one advantage of this setup that AT&T is quick to point out: you can see PEG channels not just from your community, but from your neighboring communities as well. This was always a problem when I worked at BCTV, because one of the school districts we covered was not in our viewership - they were in WKTV's.

Still, the decision to "block off" PEG into it's own section is a curious one. The video makes no mention of if it's possible to DVR record the PEG either.

It gets better yet! Because AT&T has been so successful not carrying PEG, the cable companies are now getting into the act!

Huh?

I'm not going to say this has anything to do with our politicians, except that it is just plain ignorance. Most people care less about their public access than they do about Google loading fast. But to me, this is a clear erosion of our freedom of speech.

So write letters. I think Americans need a new Freedom of Information Act, one that ensures that content produced by the people, for the people, gets to the people.

Breakage! Exploding laptop!

Okay, so that was a bit of a sensationalist title. My laptop has not yet exploded.

Here's the deal. I applied the 10.5.3 update to my MacBook a few days ago, when it was released. It took a moment, rebooted, and I was back up and running. Nothing bad seemed to have happened. At least, for the first five minutes.

Then my fan started a-crankin'. For no apparent reason. Now, sometimes that'll happen when Spotlight re-indexes, or when Time Machine says "I'm backin' up, and nothing on earth will stop me!" So I didn't think too much of it. Half hour goes by, and now I'm a bit concerned.

I took a gander at the MacRumors forums, which is a great place to look for mac help. A few people had issues with 10.5.3, but nobody really had my issue. So, I put up with it for a few days - this wasn't hindering my use of the computer, it didn't seem to slow anything down. Activity monitor didn't show anything obvious, either. And even at its loudest, the MacBook isn't very loud.

Typically, I use it plugged in, so battery life is not an issue. But this weekend, I was carrying the 'book around the house with me. I expect it to usually get around 4 hours of battery life.

With the fan crankin', I got less than 2. Something is definitely up.

Checked the forums again, checked Activity Monitor again. Nothing obvious. So I did a quick

ps aux

Right at the top of the list, pid #85, was the IPSecuitasDaemon, trying to start up - and eating 94% cpu, whenever I wasn't doing anything! OS X clearly knew that that was not a particularly important process, but it was a constant process. According to ps, it had tried to launch at startup. Now, Activity Monitor wasn't showing me that daemon in it's default view, but I'm sure I could have tweeked it and found the right screen.

So I run

sudo kill 85

and sure enough, the fan noise fades itself out. And my battery life index jumps significantly.

Point of caution: Be careful with that sudo. su-DON'T use it unless you know what you're doing. The '85' comes from ps, it's the pid, or Process ID. And kill terminates the process - the UNIX equivalent of Force Quit (in fact, often works better than Force Quit if something is really misbehaving).

Well, that was an extraordinarily geeky post. Rock & Roll all!