Friday, September 25, 2009

The True Evil Doers


http://www.rense.com/general79/tril.htm

By this method, the trillionaire masters of the universe remain hidden whilst Forbes magazine poses lower ranking billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett as the richest men in the World. Retired management consultant Gaylon Ross Sr, author of Who’s Who of the Global Elite, has been tipped from a private source that the combined wealth of the Rockefeller family in 1998 was approx (US) $11 trillion and the Rothschilds (U.S.) $100 trillion. However something of an insider’s knowledge of the hidden wealth of the elite is contained in the article, “Will the Dollar and America Fall Down on August 19?..” on page 1 of the 12th July 2001 issue of Russian newspaper Pravda. The newspaper interviewed Tatyana Koryagina, a senior research fellow in the Institute of Macroeconomic Researches subordinated to the Russian Ministry of Economic Development (Minekonom) on the subject of a recent conference concerning the fate of the U.S. economy:


posted to WPA June 28, 2009

“Money is power or shall we say, the monopoly to create credit money and charge interest is absolute power” : Alex James

“Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who makes its laws”: Amschel Bauer Mayer Rothschild, 1838

Letter written from London by the Rothschilds to their New York agents introducing their banking method into America: “The few who can understand the system will be either so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favours, that there will be no opposition from that class, while, on the other hand, that great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that Capital derives from the system, will bear its burden without complaint and, perhaps, without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.”

Nathan Rothschild said to the Commons Secret Committee on the question early in 1819: “In what line of business are you? – Mostly in the foreign banking line. “Have the goodness to state to the Committee in detail, what you conceive would be the consequence of an obligation imposed upon the Bank [of England, which he owned] to resume cash payments at the expiration of a year from the present time? – I do not think it can be done without very great distress to this country; it would do a great deal of mischief; we may not actually know ourselves what mischief it might cause. “Have the goodness to explain the nature of the mischief, and in what way it would be produced? – Money will be so very scarce, every article in this country will fall to such an enormous extent, that many persons will be ruined.”

The director of the Prussian Treasury wrote on a visit to London that Nathan Rothschild had as early as 1817: “.., incredible influence upon all financial affairs here in London. It is widely stated.., that he entirely regulates the rate of exchange in the City. His power as a banker is enormous”.

Austrian Prince Mettemich’s secretary wrote of the Rothschilds, as early as 1818, that: “… they are the richest people in Europe.”

Referring to James Rothschild, the poet Heinrich Heine said: “Money is the god of our times, and Rothschild is his prophet.”

James Rothschild built his fabulous mansion, called Ferrilres, 19 miles north-east of Paris. Wilhelm I, on first seeing it, exclaimed: “Kings couldn’t afford this. It could only belong to a Rothschild!”

Author Frederic Morton wrote that the Rothschilds had: “conquered the World more thoroughly, more cunningly, and much more lastingly than all the Caesars before…”

As Napoleon pointed out: “Terrorism, War & Bankruptcy are caused by the privatization of money, issued as a debt and compounded by interest “- he cancelled debt and interest in France – hence the Battle of Waterloo.

Some writers have claimed that Nathan Rothschild “warned that the United States would find itself involved in a most disastrous war if the bank’s charter were not renewed.” (do you see the similarities here? If you don’t play the game an economic disaster will fall on you and you will be destroyed.)

“There is but one power in Europe and that is Rothschild.” 19th century French commentator.

Lord Rothschild (Rockefellers and Rothschilds’ relatives) in his book The Shadow of a Great Man quotes a letter sent from Davidson on June 24, 1814 to Nathan Rothschild, “As long as a house is like yours, and as long as you work together with your brothers, not a house in the world will be able to compete with you, to cause you harm or to take advantage of you, for together you can undertake and perform more than any house in the world.” The closeness of the Rothschild brothers is seen in a letter from Soloman (Salmon) Rothschild to his brother Nathan on Feb. 28, 1815, “We are like the mechanism of a watch: each part is essential.” (2) This closeness is further seen in that of the 18 marriages made by Mayer Amschel Rothschild’s grandchildren – 16 were contracted between first cousins.

“Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.” The Communist Manifesto. In the case of the Bolshevik revolution, Rothschilds/ Rockefellers’ Chase Bank owned the state. In the US, the FED owners “own” the state.

Rothschilds’ favorite saying who along with the Rockefellers are the major Illuminati Banking Dynasties: “Who controls the issuance of money controls the government!”

Nathan Rothschild said (1777-1836): “I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the Empire. The man who controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire and I control the British money supply.”

Rockefeller is reported to have said: “Competition is a sin”. “Own nothing. Control everything”. Because he wants to centralize control of everything and enslave us all, i.e. the modern Nimrod or Pharaoh.

The Rothschild were behind the colonization and occupations of India and the Rothschild owned British Petroleum was granted unlimited rights to all offshore Indian oil, which is still valid till this day.

“Give me the control of the credit of a nation, and I care not who makes the laws.” The famous boastful statement of Nathaniel Meyer Rothschild, speaking to a group of international bankers, 1912: “The few who could understand the system (cheque, money, credits) will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favours, that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.” The boastful statement by Rothschild Bros. of London.

These people are the top masterminds and conspired for the creation of illegal FEDERAL RESERVE BANK in 1913: Theodore Roosevelt, Paul Warburg – Representative Of Rothschild, Woodrow Wilson – U.S. President Signed FED Into Act, Nelson W. Aldrich – Representative Of Rockefeller, Benjamin Strong – Representative Of Rockefeller, Frank A. Vanderlip – Representative Of Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller – Rockefeller Himself, Henry Davison – Representative Of J. P. Morgan, Charles Norton – Representative Of J. P. Morgan.

In the last century, members of the British Fabian Society dynastic banking families in the City of London financed the Communist takeover of Russia. Trotsky in his biography refers to some of the loans from these British financiers going back as far as 1907. By 1917 the major subsidies and funding for the Bolshevik Revolution were co-ordinated and arranged by Sir George Buchanan and Lord Alfred Milner. [no doubt using money from Cecil Rhodes' South African gold and diamond legacy - Ed] The Communist system in Russia was a “British experiment” designed ultimately to become the Fabian Socialist model for the British takeover of the World through the UN and EU. The British plan to takeover the World and bring in a “New World Order” began with the teachings of John Ruskin and Cecil Rhodes at Oxford University. Rhodes in one of his wills in 1877 left his vast fortune to Lord Nathan Rothschild as trustee to set up the Rhodes Scholarship Program at Oxford to indoctrinate promising young graduates for the purpose, and also establish a secret society [Royal Institute of International Affairs RIIA, which branched into the Round Table, the Bilderbergers, the CFR, the Trilateral, etc -- Ed] for leading business and banking leaders around the World who would work for the City to bring in their Socialist World government.

Rothschild appointed Lord Alfred Milner to implement the plan.

Benjamin Freedman (Friedman) said this in 1961, Washington (he was a millionaire insider in international Zionist organizations, friend to 4 US presidents, and was also part of the 117-man strong Zionist delegation at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 where Germany was forced into bankruptcy to the Zionist BankLords and social chaos): “Two years into WW1, Germany, which was then winning the war, offered Britain and France a negotiated peace deal, but German Zionist groups seeing the opportunity made a deal with Britain to get the United States into the war if Britain promised to give the Zionists Palestine.”

In other words, they made this deal: “We will get the United States into this war as your ally. The price you must pay us is Palestine after you have won the war and defeated Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey.” They made that promise, in October of 1916. And shortly after that — I don’t know how many here remember it — the United States, which was almost totally pro-German because the newspapers and mass communications media here were controlled by the Zionist bankers who owned the major commercial banks and the 12 Federal Reserve Banks (the original Stockholders of the Federal Reserve Banks in 1913 were the Rockefeller’ s, JP Morgan, Rothschild’s, Lazard Freres, Schoellkopf, Kuhn-Loeb, Warburgs, Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs, all with roots in Germany’s Zionists like the British Royal family, J.P. Morgan, Carnegie, Bush, Rumsfeld, Clintons, the Nazis that were brought into the CIA, etc. http://land.netonecom.net/tlp/ref/federal_reserve.shtml ) and they were pro-German because they wanted to use Germany to destroy the Czar of Russia and let the Communists whom they funded take over. The German Zionist bankers — Rothschilds, Rockefeller, Kuhn Loeb and the other big banking firms in the United States refused to finance France or England to the extent of one dollar. They stood aside and they said: “As long as France and England are tied up with Russia, not one cent!” They poured money into Germany, fighting with Germany against Russia, to lick the Czarist regime. The newspapers had been all pro-German, where they’d been telling the people of the difficulties that Germany was having fighting Great Britain commercially and in other respects, then after making the deal with the British for Palestine, all of a sudden the Germans were no good. They were villains. They were Huns. They were shooting Red Cross nurses. They were cutting off babies’ hands. And they were no good. The Zionists in London sent cables to the US, to Justice Brandeis: “Go to work on President Wilson. We’re getting from England what we want. Now you go to work, and you go to work on President Wilson and get the US into the war.” And that did happen. Shortly after President Woodrow Wilson declared war on Germany.

The power of the Rothschild family was evidenced on 24 Sept 2002 when a helicopter touched down on the lawn of Waddedson Manor, their ancestral home in Buckinghamshire, England. Out of the helicopter strode Warren Buffet, – touted as the second richest man in the World but really a lower ranking player- and Arnold Schwarzenegger (the gropinator), at that time a candidate for the Governorship of California. Also in attendance at this two day meeting of the World’s most powerful businessmen and financiers hosted by Jacob Rothschild were James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank and Nicky Oppenheimer, chairman of De Beers. Arnold went on to secure the governorship of one of the biggest economies on the planet a year later. That he was initiated into the ruling class in the Rothschilds’ English country manor suggests that the centre of gravity of the three hundred trillion dollar cartel is in the U.K. and Europe not the U.S.

A recent article in the London Financial Times indicates why it is impossible to gain an accurate estimate of the wealth of the trillionaire bankers. Discussing the sale of Evelyn Rothschild’s stake in Rothschild Continuation Holdings, it states: …[this] requires agreement on the valuation of privately held assets whose value has never been tested in a public market. Most of these assets are held in a complex network of tax-efficient structures around the World.

Queen Elizabeth II’s shareholdings remain hidden behind Bank of England Nominee accounts. The Guardian newspaper reported in May 2002 … “the reason for the wild variations in valuations of her private wealth can be pinned on the secrecy over her portfolio of share investments. This is because her subjects have no way of knowing through a public register of interests where she, as their head of state, chooses to invest her money. Unlike the members of the Commons and now the Lords, the Queen does not have to annually declare her interests and as a result her subjects cannot question her or know about potential conflicts of interests…” In fact, the Queen even has an extra mechanism to ensure that her investments remain secret – a nominee company called the Bank of England Nominees. It has been available for decades to the entire World’s current heads of state to allow them anonymity when buying shares. Therefore, when a company publishes a share register and the Bank of England Nominees is listed, it is not possible to gauge whether the Queen, President Bush or even Saddam Hussein is the true shareholder.

By this method, the trillionaire masters of the universe remain hidden whilst Forbes magazine poses lower ranking billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett as the richest men in the World. Retired management consultant Gaylon Ross Sr, author of Who’s Who of the Global Elite, has been tipped from a private source that the combined wealth of the Rockefeller family in 1998 was approx (US) $11 trillion and the Rothschilds (U.S.) $100 trillion. However something of an insider’s knowledge of the hidden wealth of the elite is contained in the article, “Will the Dollar and America Fall Down on August 19?..” on page 1 of the 12th July 2001 issue of Russian newspaper Pravda. The newspaper interviewed Tatyana Koryagina, a senior research fellow in the Institute of Macroeconomic Researches subordinated to the Russian Ministry of Economic Development (Minekonom) on the subject of a recent conference concerning the fate of the U.S. economy:

Koryagina: The known history of civilization is merely the visible part of the iceberg. There is a shadow economy, shadow politics and also a shadow history, known to conspirologists. There are [unseen] forces acting in the World, unstoppable for [most powerful] countries and even continents.

Ashley Mote (EU): “Mr President, I wish to draw your attention to the Global Security Fund, set up in the early 1990s under the auspices of Jacob Rothschild. This is a Brussels-based fund and it is no ordinary fund: it does not trade, it is not listed and it has a totally different purpose. It is being used for geopolitical engineering purposes, apparently under the guidance of the intelligence services.” “I have previously asked about the alleged involvement of the European Union’s own intelligence resources in the management of slush funds in offshore accounts, and I still await a reply. To that question I now add another: what are the European Union’s connections to the Global Security Fund and what relationship does it have with European Union institutions? “Recently, Ashley Mote of the European Union (EU) asked this volatile question in a public EU meeting, a question never answered, as Mr. Mote, merely by asking this question, was immediately scratched from the White House Christmas card list and placed on its top ten hit list. The Illuminati’s cash cow, grazing freely on the World wide pasture of greenbacks, isn’t called “Elsie” but instead is called the Global Security Fund, a name actually meaning in the secret cult’s language Global Terrorist Fund. In simple terms, it’s a gigantic illegal trust fund, estimated by undercover overseas financial investigators at 65 trillion dollars, set-up for “Illuminati rainy days” and established when it is desperately needed in a pinch for bribery, assassinations and sponsoring World wide terrorist activities to divert attention from their banking mafia. Although the fund is cloaked in secrecy and made possible by the Western civilization’ s Federal Reserve banking system, investigators trying to pry into the Illuminati’s secret treasure trove have uncovered some interesting facts.

http://www.rense.com/general79/tril.htm

This is a comment which I just received posted as is....:

......The cia overthrew the shah with the intention of eventually putting someone like khomeini in power. They helped put saddam in power and then put him in the kuwait trap by somewhat forcefully convincing the kuwaiti gov to indirectly take oil from iraqi wells on the borders and provoking him to attack kuwait thus letting him invade the area and give the Americans a justification to get into the GCC and stay there. It’s all a very detailed and precise plan that is being implemented(like a chess game except you know most of the moves of the other players in advance; if not all). It is all a game with one purpose in mind. The NWO(New World Order). It is not a conspiracy theory as many people dismiss it as. It is why the protocols of zion were written and are being implemented in order to achieve. The end justifies the means. A one world government run by criminals who will eventually create their eugenics project and deal with the masses of the earth the way they see fit. Population reduction…complete control…anything they want. I do not want to get into all the details but research it if you want to inquire. Hezbollah’s intentions are not bad. Israel is carrying out orders of its leaders in zionist run america and the Rothschilds to be specific. They officially own 80% of all Israel by the way. My assessment is that israel will be used as a pawn to be destroyed by iran(england and russia are even helping them develop nuclear capabilities). Well russia officially while england unofficially. Basically they want iran to be perceived as a threat big enough that it would almost justify the multiple nuking of the country(like the atomic bombs in hiroshima and nagasaki). All they need is one more big enough global calamity which will spark WWIII. And WWIII being the war to end all wars resulting in all nations seeking peace and accepting a One World Government run by the zionists and neo-cons in the US. This is all real my friends. Took me many years of research to understand what is actually happeninig. WWI created the league of nations. WWII the eugenics project and holocaust along with israel. Once israel was created it paved the way for initiating WWIII. Once WWIII is made a big enough disaster and the world has had ENOUGH. They believe we will all submit to having a new world order under a one world government run like the united nations except america being in control of it with the zionists in contorl of america. It is like how the americans blindly accepted the patriot act and invasions of countries that had nothing to do with 911 during that time due to desperation and confusion. The government created a 2nd pearl harbor(911) and this gave them a blank check to do whatever they want… Which is implementing the steps towards achieving the NWO(new world order).
Technically, these people would even support Hezbollah or their enemies to practically advance this goal. They have no moral authority or guidelines except the protocols of Zion. Protocol means the proper way of behaving. Zion=Israel If you want to know how they work then read the book. You can find it on www.scribd.com See how demented and twisted these people really are.....

When I come here defending Hezbollah. I do not do so because of a religious obligation. I am from a Christian background as many of you guys know. But Israel has decided to completely destroy Lebanon. How can I not support my fellow countrymen who are our only line of defense against those plans?


Saturday, September 19, 2009

A Grand Bargain Over Evolution


A Grand Bargain Over Evolution...

THE “war” between science and religion is notable for the amount of civil disobedience on both sides. Most scientists and most religious believers refuse to be drafted into the fight. Whether out of a live-and-let-live philosophy, or a belief that religion and science are actually compatible, or a heartfelt indifference to the question, they’re choosing to sit this one out.

Still, the war continues, and it’s not just a sideshow. There are intensely motivated and vocal people on both sides making serious and conflicting claims.

There are atheists who go beyond declaring personal disbelief in God and insist that any form of god-talk, any notion of higher purpose, is incompatible with a scientific worldview. And there are religious believers who insist that evolution can’t fully account for the creation of human beings.

I bring good news! These two warring groups have more in common than they realize. And, no, it isn’t just that they’re both wrong. It’s that they’re wrong for the same reason. Oddly, an underestimation of natural selection’s creative power clouds the vision not just of the intensely religious but also of the militantly atheistic.

If both groups were to truly accept that power, the landscape might look different. Believers could scale back their conception of God’s role in creation, and atheists could accept that some notions of “higher purpose” are compatible with scientific materialism. And the two might learn to get along.

The believers who need to hear this sermon aren’t just adherents of “intelligent design,” who deny that natural selection can explain biological complexity in general. There are also believers with smaller reservations about the Darwinian story. They accept that God used evolution to do his creative work (“theistic evolution”), but think that, even so, he had to step in and provide special ingredients at some point.

Perhaps the most commonly cited ingredient is the human moral sense — the sense that there is such a thing as right and wrong, along with some intuitions about which is which. Even some believers who claim to be Darwinians say that the moral sense will forever defy the explanatory power of natural selection and so leave a special place for God in human creation.

This idea goes back to C. S. Lewis, the mid-20th-century Christian writer (and author of “The Chronicles of Narnia”), who influenced many in the current generation of Christian intellectuals.

Sure, Lewis said, evolution could have rendered humans capable of nice behavior; we have affiliative impulses — a herding instinct, as he put it — like other animals. But, he added, evolution couldn’t explain why humans would judge nice behavior “good” and mean behavior “bad” — why we intuitively apprehend “the moral law” and feel guilty when we’ve broken it.

The inexplicability of this apprehension, in Lewis’s view, was evidence that the moral law did exist — “out there,” you might say — and was thus evidence that God, too, existed.

Since Lewis wrote — and unbeknown to many believers — evolutionary psychologists have developed a plausible account of the moral sense. They say it is in large part natural selection’s way of equipping people to play non-zero-sum games — games that can be win-win if the players cooperate or lose-lose if they don’t.

So, for example, feelings of guilt over betraying a friend are with us because during evolution sustaining friendships brought benefits through the non-zero-sum logic of one hand washing the other (“reciprocal altruism”). Friendless people tend not to thrive.

Indeed, this dynamic of reciprocal altruism, as mediated by natural selection, seems to have inclined us toward belief in some fairly abstract principles, notably the idea that good deeds should be rewarded and bad deeds should be punished. This may seem like jarring news for C. S. Lewis fans, who had hoped that God was the one who wrote moral laws into the charter of the universe, after which he directly inserted awareness of them in the human lineage.

But they may not have to stray quite as far from that scenario as they fear. Maybe they can accept this evolutionary account, and be strict Darwinians, yet hang on to notions of divinely imparted moral purpose.

The first step toward this more modern theology is for them to bite the bullet and accept that God did his work remotely — that his role in the creative process ended when he unleashed the algorithm of natural selection (whether by dropping it into the primordial ooze or writing its eventual emergence into the initial conditions of the universe or whatever).

Of course, to say that God trusted natural selection to do the creative work assumes that natural selection, once in motion, would do it; that evolution would yield a species that in essential respects — in spiritually relevant respects, you might say — was like the human species. But this claim, though inherently speculative, turns out to be scientifically plausible.

For starters, there are plenty of evolutionary biologists who believe that evolution, given long enough, was likely to create a smart, articulate species — not our species, complete with five fingers, armpits and all the rest — but some social species with roughly our level of intelligence and linguistic complexity.

And what about the chances of a species with a moral sense? Well, a moral sense seems to emerge when you take a smart, articulate species and throw in reciprocal altruism. And evolution has proved creative enough to harness the logic of reciprocal altruism again and again.

Vampire bats share blood with one another, and dolphins swap favors, and so do monkeys. Is it all that unlikely that, even if humans had been wiped out a few million years ago, eventually a species with reciprocal altruism would reach an intellectual and linguistic level at which reciprocal altruism fostered moral intuitions and moral discourse?

There’s already a good candidate for this role — the chimpanzee.

Chimps, some primatologists believe, have the rudiments of a sense of justice. They sometimes seem to display moral indignation, “complaining” to other chimps that an ally has failed to fulfill the terms of a reciprocally altruistic relationship. Even now, if chimps are gradually evolving toward greater intelligence, their evolutionary trajectory may be slowly converging on the same moral intuitions that human evolution long ago converged on.

If evolution does tend to eventually “converge” on certain moral intuitions, does that mean there were moral rules “out there” from the beginning, before humans became aware of them — that natural selection didn’t “invent” human moral intuitions so much as “discover” them? That would be good news for any believers who want to preserve as much of the spirit of C. S. Lewis as Darwinism permits.

Something like this has been suggested by the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker — who, as a contented atheist, can’t be accused of special pleading.

Mr. Pinker has noted how the interplay of evolved intuition and the dynamics of discourse tends to forge agreement on something like the golden rule — that you should treat people as you expect to be treated. He compares this natural apprehension of a moral principle to the depth perception humans have thanks to the evolution of stereo vision. Not all species (not even all two-eyed species) have stereo vision, Mr. Pinker says, but any species that has it is picking up on “real facts about the universe” that were true even before that species evolved — namely, the three-dimensional nature of reality and laws of optics.

Similarly, certain intuitions about reciprocal moral obligation are picking up on real facts about the logic of discourse and about generic social dynamics — on principles that were true even before humans came along and illustrated them. Including, in particular, the non-zero-sum dynamics that are part of our universe.

As Mr. Pinker once put it in conversation with me: “There may be a sense in which some moral statements aren’t just ... artifacts of a particular brain wiring but are part of the reality of the universe, even if you can’t touch them and weigh them.” Comparing these moral truths to mathematical truths, he said that perhaps “they’re really true independent of our existence. I mean, they’re out there and in some sense — it’s very difficult to grasp — but we discover them, we don’t hallucinate them.”

Mr. Pinker’s atheism shows that thinking in these cosmic terms doesn’t lead you inexorably to God. Indeed, the theo-biological scenario outlined above — God initiating natural selection with some confidence that it would lead to a morally rich and reflective species — has some pretty speculative links in its chain.

But the point is just that these speculations are compatible with the standard scientific theory of human creation. If believers accepted them, that would, among other things, end any conflict between religion and the teaching of evolutionary biology. And theology would have done what it’s done before: evolve — adapt its conception of God to advancing knowledge and to sheer logic.

But believers aren’t the only ones who could use some adapting. If there is to be peace between religion and science, some of the more strident atheists will need to make their own concessions to logic.

They could acknowledge, first of all, that any god whose creative role ends with the beginning of natural selection is, strictly speaking, logically compatible with Darwinism. (Darwin himself, though not a believer, said as much.) And they might even grant that natural selection’s intrinsic creative power — something they’ve been known to stress in other contexts — adds at least an iota of plausibility to this remotely creative god.

And, god-talk aside, these atheist biologists could try to appreciate something they still seem not to get: talk of “higher purpose” is not just compatible with science, but engrained in it.

There is an episode in intellectual history that makes the point. It’s familiar to biologists because it is sometimes used — wrongly, I think — to illustrate the opposite point. Indeed, that use is what led Richard Dawkins, one of the most vocal atheist biologists, to allude to it in the title of one of his books: “The Blind Watchmaker.”

The story involves William Paley, a British theologian who, a few years before Darwin was born, tried to use living creatures as evidence for the existence of a designer.

If you’re walking across a field and you find a pocket watch, Paley said, you know it’s in a different category from the rocks lying around it: it’s a product of design, with a complex functionality that doesn’t just happen by accident. Well, he continued, organisms are like pocket watches — too complexly functional to be an accident. So they must have a designer — God.

As Mr. Dawkins pointed out, we can now explain the origin of organisms without positing a god. Yet Mr. Dawkins also conceded something to Paley that gets too little attention: The complex functionality of an organism does demand a special kind of explanation.

The reason is that, unlike a rock, an organism has things that look as if they were designed to do something. Digestive tracts seem to exist in order to digest food. The heart seems to exist in order to pump blood.

And, actually, even once you accept that natural selection, not God, is the “designer” — the blind watchmaker, as Mr. Dawkins put it — there is a sense in which these organs do have purposes, purposes that serve the organism’s larger purpose of surviving and spreading its genes. As Daniel Dennett, the Darwinian (and atheist) philosopher, has put it, an organism’s evolutionarily infused purpose is “as real as purpose could ever be.”

SO in a sense Paley was right not just in saying that organisms must come from a different creative process than rocks but also in saying that this creative process imparts a purpose (however mundane) to organisms.

There are two morals to the story. One is that it is indeed legitimate, and not at all unscientific, to do what Paley did: inspect a physical system for evidence that it was given some purpose by some higher-order creative process. If scientifically minded theologians want to apply that inspection to the entire system of evolution, they’re free to do so.

The second moral of the story is that, even if evolution does have a “purpose,” imparted by some higher-order creative process, that doesn’t mean there’s anything mystical or immaterial going on. And it doesn’t mean there’s a god. For all we know, there’s some “meta-natural-selection” process — playing out over eons and perhaps over multiple universes — that spawned the algorithm of natural selection, somewhat as natural selection spawned the algorithm contained in genomes.

At the same time, theologians can be excused for positing design of a more intentional sort. After all, they can define their physical system — the system they’re inspecting for evidence of purpose — as broadly as they like. They can include not just the biological evolution that gave us an intelligent species but also the subsequent “cultural evolution” — the evolution of ideas — that this species launched (and that, probably, any comparably intelligent species would launch).

When you define the system this broadly, it takes on a more spiritually suggestive cast. The technological part of cultural evolution has relentlessly expanded social organization, leading us from isolated hunter-gatherer villages all the way to the brink of a truly global society. And the continuing cohesion of this social system (also known as world peace) may depend on people everywhere using their moral equipment with growing wisdom — critically reflecting on their moral intuitions, and on the way they’re naturally deployed, and refining that deployment.

Clearly, this evolutionary narrative could fit into a theology with some classic elements: a divinely imparted purpose that involves a struggle toward the good, a struggle that even leads to a kind of climax of history. Such a theology could actually abet the good, increase the chances of a happy ending. A more evolved religion could do what religion has often done in the past: use an awe-inspiring story to foster social cohesion — except this time on a global scale.

Of course, religion doesn’t have a monopoly on awe and inspiration. The story that science tells, the story of nature, is awesome, and some people get plenty of inspiration from it, without needing the religious kind. What’s more, science has its own role to play in knitting the world together. The scientific enterprise has long been on the frontiers of international community, fostering an inclusive, cosmopolitan ethic — the kind of ethic that any religion worthy of this moment in history must also foster.

William James said that religious belief is “the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.” Science has its own version of the unseen order, the laws of nature. In principle, the two kinds of order can themselves be put into harmony — and in that adjustment, too, may lie a supreme good....