Jesus !

I'm absolutely thrilled about going to work and live in the US for a few months. This is a time that will go down in history, I can tell. I think the biggest thing is the so-called intelligent design debate. The war in Iraq, the deficit, the Supreme Court nominee, all of this are very significant events. But intelligent design is a civilisation defining issue. How can a country, in the 21st century, engage in this irrational debate?

This denial of facts, of science, is astonishing. If I were to meet a single person with those views outside of the US (maybe at the Vatican?), I would be in shock. But to think that a strong lobby and a freakin' majority of the people thinks it should be taught in class - I'm at loss. And now, the President. Good God! Make no mistake: the goal is to pretend that there is a debate, so Bush endorsement that he can't take side is exactly what the supporters of intelligent design want to hear.

The popularity of intelligent design makes so little sense to me that I want to talk to those people. I want to hear them, I want to debate them. No: just listen to them silently, trying to understand. This is the biggest case of group think I can think of.

In the long run, intelligent design proponents cannot and will not win the argument - their position is nonsense. The real question is: will they take the American empire down with them? Will they cause the empire to crumble down by throwing out reason and science? Will they erase in the US the values of the Enlightment and take a whole nation back into to dark ages? What will be the consequences for the rest of the world, especially the Western world?

Sheer force is nothing against reason. Humans are not the strongest animals, yet they are the most powerful on the planet, thanks to their brain. I don't fear for reason and that's why I don't fear that the rest of the world will fall into the intelligent design trap (here, the French expression "attrape-nigaud" lousely translated as "ninny-trap" is fit).

The US are to the Christian world what Iran is to the Muslim world: a self-centered and self-spinned religious regime supported by the people. They can no longer pretend to be the light of the world, the way Rome has been in the past. They are slowly turning into the Barbarians they are pretending to fight: narrow-minded, in denial of facts, religious zealots, and what more.

Some argue that irreductible complexity is an evidence of intelligent design. Since all the pieces have to be in place for a system to work, how could it have been created step by step? There are a lot of arguments out there, but here's my take. By coincidence, after a gazillion trials, I say. The elements fall into different combinations, to no results, during millions of years. At some point, they do fall in this magical combination and it produces something. Think about the lottery: only one combination of numbers can win the grand prize. Does the coincidence of having the exact combination is evidence that there's an intelligent person who chose the numbers?