Of daemons, evolution and intolerance

It’s fairly common for Muslims to enounter the arrogance of a particular religious sect, which prides itself on its lack of “dogma” but in fact probably exceeds all other religions in its total contempt for the beliefs and sensibilities of followers of all other religions. That sect is, of course, secularism. There’s a letter from one of its members in today’s Guardian, about (what else?) evolution, and as ever, leaves the reader stunned at how puerile and transparent the arguments are.

First, we have Dr William MacIlhagga of Bradford University:

Those who believe in intelligent design (Religious right fights science, February 7) should look at the circus of freaks it has cast upon this earth. Would an intelligent designer force us to peer out of wet, slimy globes, cursed with optical quality worse than a disposable camera?

Well, the obvious answer to this is that, for most people, the eye works. If its optical quality really was “worse than a disposable camera”, then how would we be able to see things in minute detail, or indeed, tell the difference between the product of a disposable camera and a high-quality camera? Our “wet, slimy globes” may well be more comfortable than any solid optical device, and can’t break, unlike a glass lens (ouch!). And yes, it does break down sometimes, but this certainly isn’t evidence that a device can just develop by itself. We don’t assume of any man-made device that it must have just developed on its own if it breaks down.

Would an intelligent designer think that dolphins breathing air is a good idea?

Well, they’ve survived on air long enough!

Or make the female hyena’s genitals so masculinised (there is no vagina to speak of) that she tears them apart while giving birth?

Well, the birth process in all mammals, including humans, is difficult and often painful. The body is designed in such a way as to make the everyday things easy, and the occasional, but necessary, things possible. How many female hyenas die doing this I’ve no idea (though they’re a sociable animal, so it would probably make little difference), but perhaps it’s a way of keeping the numbers down?

Or create wasps that lay their eggs in bodies of caterpillars, consuming them slowly while the caterpillar is still alive?

Well, that’s one good thing about wasps, then, isn’t it? Saves gardeners having to do it.

None of this demonstrates that there is no intelligent design, or that “the workings of an intelligence cannot be found in the patterns of nature”. On the contrary, nature is very definitely a system, with each animal and plant having its place in the system. As is pointed out in the next letter down:

Furthermore scientists such as Cambridge mathematician Professor John Barrow have pointed out that the universe is very finely tuned to make life possible – slightly more or slightly less gravity and we’d just simply never have happened. It’s ill-advised to pretend to kids that science comprehends fully how we got here from stardust. There’s ample room to stick the boot in to American rightwingers without misleading people.

An unrelated discussion on the tech forums today demonstrated even more amply how blindly intolerant the irreligious or anti-religious can be. FreeBSD, an operating system similar to Linux, has long used a red “daemon” character as its mascot and logo; anyone would recognise it as a devil, with horns and a pitch-fork. Daemon is in fact an acronym, and refers to the processes known in Windows as services – programs for managing internet connections, doing certain jobs at certain times, and sending mail. A web server, like Apache, is also a daemon. The fork refers to the forking of a program (like a web server, in order to handle a new connection), by making a copy of itself.

Anyway, OSNews announced today that the FreeBSD team have decided to open up a competition to design a new logo, because, as Jun Kuriyama put it:

This character sometimes treated with misinterpreted in the religious and cultural context.

And this daemon character seems cute from somebody’s point of view, but somebody may think which does not suit for the professional products to indicate that are using the FreeBSD inside.

In other words, the logo was putting people off, and anyone with a religious commitment, or merely with any sensitivity towards other people’s religious commitments, would understand why. For one thing, however much they contend that a daemon is not the same thing as a devil anyway, that character clearly matches the popular idea of a devil. There is a story in The Complete FreeBSD by Greg Lehey about a woman who had one of these logos on her T-shirt, and offended some locals in Texas with it, and was kicked out of a diner. Not everyone takes religious symbolism quite so lightly as the people who use this logo.

And, as some might expect, there has been quite a reaction. There have been a few voices of reason too, but some quite vitriolic responses, including one (which was “moderated down”, i.e. moved to a separate page of excluded comments) calling the supposed objectors “unwashed, ignorant and intolerant religious bastards”, and one comparing the move to them going into a church and moving the furniture around. In fact, the idea seems to have come from within the project itself, in order to widen their system’s base.

An open operating system like FreeBSD needs to have a base of developers as wide as possible to be competitive. More eyes and ears means more people looking out for bugs, as well as adding things to the system. And you can’t achieve this by decorating your web page with a logo that many people find flatly offensive. But disappointingly, though not surprisingly, people react with outrage and blame religious people for an objection they never even raised. As I earlier noted, there’s no other sect with such contempt for the sensibilities of people of other faiths than this one.