I laughed out loud ...

... when I clicked on the link to where Bryan would like the complaints sent. Had to laugh at this, too: '... having just read English at Cambridge during the onset of the first wave of postmodern French “theory”, I had been effectively inoculated against literature for the entire decade. I did dip into one American “experimental” work. It was, unfortunately, John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, reading which is akin to being dead while watching paint dry and listening to You and Yours.' In fact, I just laughed reading it over.
At any rate, here's the link" Me, Me, Me 3: Pynchon and Hawking.

On a more serious note, this is very worth quoting: '...the basic assumption of science is not determinism, it is the efficacy of the experimental method. This is not quite the same thing. After all, it is perfectly possible that the experimental method could, one day, disprove determinism without necessarily damaging science itself. But determinism is Hawking’s basic assumption. And it is in this insistence on deterministic finality — on some kind of god — that he is at his most theological.'
This leads me to wonder if anyone besides me has thought that people like Dawkins and Hawking are closet Calvinists. There seems to be a type of human being strangely attracted - hard-wired perhaps by Almighty Evolution? - to some manner of predestination (often accompanied by a peculiar apocalyptism).

Finally, I believe that Bryan and I should together found The Failed Intellectuals Society.