Re:Why Intelligent Design Is Going to Win
« Reply #45 on: 2005-11-04 12:56:04 »
Indeed from this moment forward, I dub the war in Iraq >>BUSH'S WAR<<
The other night I had a a bit of a chat with Salamantis in #virus and it seems that among his repertoire of well memorized Neocon apologies was this idea that because of some particular screwups in the first gulf war back when daddy was prez, that we needed to invade Iraq. So daddy made me do it! That actually made more sense than I cared to admit at the moment, so that made me come up with the idea for the name, since it dealt with the war in such a father/son sort of way. Bush's War . . . . . . I like it. It's short, its sweet, and reads about right for the history books.
Religious fundamentalism in the form of evangelicals and american baptists uniting behind the republican party is the real threat to America. Islam is a convinient distraction from their overt power grab. The goal of islamic fundamentalism may be to destroy the infidel. But realistically they have little power to damage us. Rather, the islamists are unwittingly duped into being a tool for christian fundamentalism's crusaid for world domination. Every time the right wing power grab is questioned by the public, they simply rattle the Islamists cage.
This is very close to how I see it. I wouldn't however call the Islamic Jihadists the dupe in this equation. We provide them with a powerful, yet compliant enemy, and a theme for recruitment. One might feel tempted to say that the Bush administration was the duped one, however as individual people they seemed to have managed to personally enrich themselves even while selling out basic American interests and security in a global sense. Meanwhile security in the homeland looks ominous as well since the administration seems incapable of planning or competantly responding to even the most basic and predictable of natural disasters not to mention man-made ones. Somebody is certainly the chump here, and I think it is us, the US citizenry who are being played willingly or not.
The problem in Gulf War I is that we listened to the UN and stopped once we expelled Saddam from Kuwait, rather than continuing on to Baghdad and deposing him, and abandoned the freedom-desiring indigenous Iraqis, who answered our call to revolt against his bloodthirsty rule, to Saddam's tender mercies - and even let the Republican Guard tanl battalions return to Iraq unmolested, where they, of course proceeded to slaughter those Iraqis who answered our call, unimpeded by us until hundreds of thousands had been massacred and the no-fly-zones were imposed. NO WONDER they had a hard time trusting us this time!
As to this being just a Bush or Republican thing, history belies this statement. The first jihadic actions began during the Clinton administration, with the seizure of the US Embassy hostanges, continued through the Reagan administration, with the bombings of the US Embassy and Marine Barracks in Beirut, and continued on through the Clinton administration with the attack on the USS Cole and the truckbombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The Al Qaedan terror flyers were recruited, financed, trained and inserted into the US during the Clinton administration, and Clinton was in office when Bin Laden issued his fatwa against the US. This is about the growth and spread of a violent and virulent memeplex, not a particular political party or presidential personality.
To refer to the facts I cite and logic I employ concerning them as neocon or republican 'talking points' is to engage in an ad hominem intended to facilitate dismissing or ignoring or belittling history you cannot deny and logic you cannot refute. The facts are either true or they are not; if they aren't true, then prove them false by counterfactual example; if they are true (and they are), then admit them. The logic is either valid and sound or it is not. If it is not, then refute it; if it is, then accept it. It's pretty cut-and-dried once you lift the reality-distorting veil if anti-Bush emotionalism and truly allow yourself to objectively look at a problem that is much older than the present administration and much more important than any political party. Although to ask Jake to lift such a veil is really unfair to him; his self-definition these days seems superglued to being a fanatical Bush-hater, and nothing more, so I sincerely doubt that he possesses the capacity to go beyond that and admit that the personality he so zealously loathes just might possibly be doing something right - or, at least, not demonically wrong, - any more than republican Clinton-haters could admit that he took the proper fiscal path with regard to the deficit and debt (a path that, unfortunately, neither Bush nor Kerry were willing to pursue). Clinton's great failing was his failure to take the Al Qaedan threat seriously enough to take Bin Laden when the Sudan offered him to us, not office nookie; Bush's deficit and domestic social agenda failings do not mean that his aggressive campaigns against terrorists and totalitarians are not the proper course to pursue. As far as to HOW he has pursued these campaigns, well, mistakes are made in any such endeavor (just check history), yet 50 million people have been freed at the cost of less US lives than were lost in 9/11, and there have been no more 9/11's in the US - facts that probably induces reverse shadenfreude in Jake, because they removes further opportunities for him to condemn the despised Dubya. The fact that mistakes may be made in an endeavor's pursuit does not mean that the endeavor's pursuit was itself a mistake.
Either the jihadists really are crazy or they apparently think that they have a shot at destabilizing, or at least winning concessions from, the United States, Europe, India, and Russia all at once.
Apart from the continual attacks on civilians by terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the West Bank, there have now been recent horrific assaults in New Dehli (blowing up civilians in a busy shopping season on the eve of a Hindu festival), Russia (attacking police and security facilities), London (suicide murdering of civilians on the subway), and Indonesia (more bombing, and the beheading of Christian schoolgirls). The loci of recent atrocities could be widely expanded (e.g., Malaysia, North Africa, Turkey, Spain) — and, of course, do not forget the several terrorist plots that have been broken up in Europe and the United States.
The commonalities? There are at least three.
First, despite the various professed grievances (e.g., India should get out of Kashmir; Russia should get out of Chechnya; England should get out of Iraq; Christians should get out of Indonesia; or Westerners should get out of Bali), the perpetrators were all self-proclaimed Islamic radicals. Westerners who embrace moral equivalence still like to talk of abortion bombings and Timothy McVeigh, but those are isolated and distant memories. No, the old generalization since 9/11 remains valid: The majority of Muslims are not global terrorists, but almost all such terrorists, and the majority of their sympathizers, are Muslims.
Second, the jihadists characteristically feel that dialogue or negotiations are beneath them. So like true fascists, they don’t talk; they kill. Their opponents — whether Christians, Hindus, Jews, or Westerners in general — are, as infidels, de facto guilty for what they are rather than what they supposedly do. Talking to a Dr. Zawahiri is like talking to Hitler: You can’t — and it’s suicidal to try.
Third, there is an emboldened sense that the jihadists can get away with their crimes based on three perceptions:
(1) Squabbling and politically correct Westerners are decadent and outnumber the U.S. Marines, and ascendant Islamicism resonates among millions of Muslims who feel sorely how far they have fallen behind in the new globalized world community — and how terrorism and blackmail, especially if energized by nuclear weapons or biological assets, might leapfrog them into a new caliphate.
(2) Sympathetic Muslim-dominated governments like Malaysia or Indonesia will not really make a comprehensive effort to eradicate radical Islamicist breeding grounds of terror, but will perhaps instead serve as ministries of propaganda for shock troops in the field.
(3) Autocratic states such as Pakistan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran share outright similar political objectives and will offer either stealthy sanctuary or financial support to terrorists, confident that either denial, oil, or nuclear bombs give them security .
Meanwhile, Westerners far too rarely publicly denounce radical Islam for its sick, anti-Semitic, anti-female, anti-American, and anti-modernist rhetoric. Just imagine the liberal response if across the globe Christians had beheaded schoolgirls, taken over schoolhouses to kill students, and shot school teachers as we have witnessed radical Muslims doing these past few months.
Instead, Western parlor elites are still arguing over whether there were al Qaedists in Iraq before the removal of Saddam Hussein, whether the suspicion of WMDs was the real reason for war against the Baathists, whether Muslim minorities should be pressured to assimilate into European democratic culture, and whether constitutional governments risk becoming intolerant in their new efforts to infiltrate and disrupt radical Muslim groups in Europe and the United States. Some of this acrimony is understandable, but such in-fighting is still secondary to defeating enemies who have pledged to destroy Western liberal society. At some point this Western cannibalism becomes not so much counterproductive as serving the purposes of those who wish America to call off its struggle against radical Islam.
Most Americans think that our present conflict is not comparable with World War II, in either its nature or magnitude. Perhaps — but they should at least recall the eerie resemblance of our dilemma to the spread of global fascism in the late 1930s.
At first few saw any real connection between the ruthless annexation of Manchuria by Japanese militarists, or Mussolini’s brutal invasion of Ethiopia, or the systematic aggrandizement of Eastern-European territory by Hitler. China was a long way from Abyssinia, itself far from Poland. How could a white-supremacist Nazi have anything in common with a racially-chauvinist Japanese or an Italian fascist proclaiming himself the new imperial Roman?
In response, the League of Nations dithered and imploded (sound familiar?). Rightist American isolationists (they’re back) assured us that fascism abroad was none of our business or that there were conspiracies afoot by Jews to have us do their dirty work. Leftists were only galvanized when Hitler finally turned on Stalin (perhaps we have to wait for Osama to attack Venezuela or Cuba to get the Left involved). Abroad even members of the British royal family were openly sympathetic to German grievances (cf. Prince Charles’s silence about Iran’s promise to wipe out Israel, but his puerile Edward VIII-like lectures to Americans about a misunderstood Islam). French appeasement was such that even the most humiliating concession was deemed preferable to the horrors of World War I (no comment needed).
We can, of course, learn from this. It’s past time that we quit worrying whether a killer who blows himself up on the West Bank, or a terrorist who shouts the accustomed jihadist gibberish as he crashes a jumbo jet into the World Trade Center, or a driver who rams his explosives-laden car into an Iraqi polling station, or a Chechnyan rebel who blows the heads off schoolchildren, is in daily e-mail contact with Osama bin Laden. Our present lax attitude toward jihadism is akin to deeming local outbreaks of avian flu as regional maladies without much connection to a new strain of a deadly — and global — virus.
Instead, the world—if it is to save its present liberal system of free trade, safe travel, easy and unfettered communications, and growing commitment to constitutional government—must begin seeing radical Islamism as a universal pathology rather than reactions to regional grievances, if it is ever to destroy it materially and refute it ideologically.
Yet the antidote for radical Islam, aside from the promotion of democratization and open economies, is simple. It must be militarily defeated when it emerges to wage organized violence, as in the cases of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Zarqawi’s terrorists in Iraq, and the various killer cliques in Palestine.
Second, any who tolerate radical Islam should be ostracized. Muslims living in the West must be condemned when they assert that the Jews caused 9/11, or that suicide bombing is a legitimate response to Israel, or that Islamic immigrants’ own unique culture gives them a pass from accustomed assimilation, or that racial and religious affinity should allow tolerance for the hatred that spews forth from madrassas and mosques — before the patience of Western liberalism is exhausted and “the rules of the game” in Tony Blair’s words “change” quite radically and we begin to see mass invitations to leave.
Third, nations that intrigue with jihadists must be identified as the enemies of civilization. We often forget that there are now left only four major nation-states in the world that either by intent or indifference allow radical Islamists to find sanctuary.
If Pakistan were seriously to disavow terrorism and not see it as an asset in its rivalry with India and as a means to vent anti-Western angst, then Osama bin Laden, Dr. Zawahiri, and their lieutenants would be hunted down tomorrow.
If the petrolopolis of Saudi Arabia would cease its financial support of Wahhabi radicals, most terrorists could scarcely travel or organize operations.
If there were sane governments in Syria and Iran, then there would be little refuge left for al Qaeda, and the money and shelter that now protects the beleaguered and motley collection of ex-Saddamites, Hezbollah, and al Qaedists would cease.
So in large part four nations stand in the way of eradicating much of the global spread of jihadism — and it is no accident that either oil or nuclear weapons have won a global free pass for three of them. And it is no accident that we don’t have a means to wean ourselves off Middle East oil or as yet stop Iran from becoming the second Islamic nuclear nation.
But just as importantly, our leaders must explain far more cogently and in some detail — rather than merely assert — to the Western public the nature of the threat we face, and how our strategy will prevail.
In contrast, when the American public is still bickering over WMDs rather than relieved that the culprit for the first World Trade Center bombing can no longer find official welcome in Baghdad; or when our pundits seem more worried about Halliburton than the changes in nuclear attitudes in Libya and Pakistan; or when the media mostly ignores a greater percentage of voters turning out for a free national election in the heart of the ancient caliphate than during most election years in the United States — something has gone terribly, tragically wrong here at home.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.
Apparently, the Iraq Liberation Act, which was passed by the US Congress in 1998 and signed by the Clinton administration, fails to penetrate jake's partisan blinders. Memetic filtering is nothing new, of course, but it's sad to see someone who should be aware of it be nevertheless so grievously afflicted, and, rather than logically and evidentially deal with the points which I and the essayist make, find himself driven to resort to the same tired old and, for 2500 years, logically illegitimate name-calling canards (see the Greek Ad Hominem Fallacy re: "neocon memetic masters"). The merits of a contention should be objectively and dispassionately considered, quite apart from one's dislike of a particular individual or administration, but, as I stated before, this feat apparently seems to be woefully beyond Jake's present capabilities. Thus it is a good thing that he will not deign to contribute to a critical memetic analysis of the violent and virulent Al Qaedan Wahhab/Qutb memeplex; he clearly has his own memetic us-them demons with which to deal, and unless and until he does so, their thrall would fatally color and compromise any analysis he might care to submit.
And rating systems are only as objective and veridical as the people who employ them; they are, at their roots, opinion beauty contests. If ten people were on an island and nine of them were cannibals, meridion and karmic systems designed to ascertain whether or not it was ethical to eat the tenth would indubitably be illegitimately skewed against both the non-cannibal and his contentions. Likewise with a system employed in a venue rife with those who cannot bring themselves to look beyond their Bush-hatred blinders, and thus feel compelled to both condemn any and every thing Bush does regardless of any objective merits, and also to condemn those who might dare to possess the integrity to consider issues absent personality considerations, and thus find themselves logically led to publicly support some of Bush's actions on the basis of those same merits.
[Blunderov] It seems debatable that humouring ID in the interests of promoting scientific enquiry amongst the superstitious would be a harmless concession. IMO it would be downright contradictory and its fruit would be a generation of soothsayers-with-calculators.
ID is the old cosmological argument newly come to town as a sharp-dressed man. If ANY 'irreducibly complex' system must have been designed, then so too must the cosmos. Whatever its merits or lack thereof, this ancient argument has nothing to do with science. It is a philosophical question.
(Interesting though is the tell-tale tang of relativism that hangs in the air like cordite.)
Will ID win though? Very likely. Horoscopes are still published in most newspapers.
Abracadabra.
I think belief in horoscopes is intellectually simpler than belief in "Intelligent Design", and hence often gets passed off as harmless. If somebody tells me about irreducible complexity, it advertises not only 1) that they are creationists, but 2) that they are really serious it. Time to turn on the air filters. Horoscopes don't seem to raise that much of a response, more likely harmless than not.
Re:Why Intelligent Design Is Going to Win
« Reply #50 on: 2005-11-09 06:57:23 »
Apparently the Kansas Board of education has voted in an "Intelligent Design" curriculum for that state. On the other hand Voters in Pennsylvania soundly rejected similar republican moves by a school board there. Apparently the Kansas board of education isn't up for election this time, but neocons pushing ID everywhere should take note of this voter repudiation. Excerpts below the links. More material at links.
All eight members up for re-election to the Pennsylvania school board that had been sued for introducing the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in biology class were swept out of office yesterday by a slate of challengers who campaigned against the intelligent design policy. ... The election results were a repudiation of the first school district in the nation to order the introduction of intelligent design in a science class curriculum.
(AP) Voters came down hard Tuesday on school board members who backed a statement on intelligent design being read in biology class, ousting eight Republicans and replacing them with Democrats who want the concept stripped from the science curriculum.
In an election in Pennsylvania this week, voters tossed out eight members of the Pittsburgh school board who wanted Intelligent Design theory to be taught alongside evolution in school. But should Intelligent Design -- the theory that living organisms were created at least in part by an intelligent designer, not by a blind process of evolution by natural selection -- be taught in public schools? In one way, the answer to this question is simple: if it's a scientific theory, it should; if it's not, it shouldn't (on pain of flaunting the Establishment Clause). The question, however, is whether Intelligent Design (ID) is a scientific theory.
Opponents dismiss ID's scientific credentials, claiming that the theory is too implausible to qualify as scientific. But this reasoning is fallacious: a bad scientific theory is still a scientific theory, just as a bad car is still a car. There may be pedagogical reasons to avoid teaching bad scientific theories in our public schools, but there are no legal ones. The Constitution contains no interdiction on teaching bad theories, or for that matter demonstrably false ones. As long as theory is science and not religion, there is no legal barrier to teaching it.
To make their case, opponents of teaching ID must show not just that the theory is bad, but that it's not science. This raises a much more complicated question: What is science? What distinguishes genuinely scientific theories from non-scientific ones?
In one form or another, the question has bothered scientists and philosophers for centuries. But it was given an explicit formulation only in the 1920s, by Karl Popper, the most important 20th century philosopher of science. Popper called it "the problem of demarcation," because it asked how to demarcate scientific research and distinguish it from other modes of thought (respectable though they may be in their own right).
One thing Popper emphasized was that a theory's status as scientific doesn't depend on its plausibility. The great majority of scientific theories turn out to be false, including such works of genius as Newton's mechanics. Conversely, the story of Adam and Eve may well be pure truth, but if it is, it's not scientific truth, but some other kind of truth.
So what is the mark of genuine science? To attack this question, Popper examined several theories he thought were inherently unscientific but had a vague allure of science about them. His favorites were Marx's theory of history and Freud's theory of human behavior. Both attempted to describe the world without appeal to super-natural phenomena, but yet seem fundamentally different from, say, the theory of relativity or the gene theory.
What Popper noticed was that, in both cases, there was no way to prove to proponents of the theory that they were wrong. Suppose Jim's parents moved around a lot when Jim was a child. If Jim also moves around a lot as an adult, the Freudian explains that this was predictable given the patterns of behavior Jim grew up with. If Jim never moves, the Freudian explains -- with equal confidence -- that this was predictable as a reaction to Jim's unpleasant experiences of a rootless childhood. Either way the Freudian has a ready-made answer and cannot be refuted. Likewise, however much history seemed to diverge from Marx's model, Marxists would always introduce new modifications and roundabout excuses for their theory, never allowing it to be proven false.
Popper concluded that the mark of true science was falsifiability: a theory is genuinely scientific only if it's possible in principle to refute it. This may sound paradoxical, since science is about seeking truth, not falsehood. But Popper showed that it was precisely the willingness to be proven false, the critical mindset of being open to the possibility that you're wrong, that makes for progress toward truth.
What scientists do in designing experiments that test their theories is create conditions under which their theory might be proven false. When a theory passes a sufficient number of such tests, the scientific community starts taking it seriously, and ultimately as plausible.
When Einstein came up with the theory of relativity, the first thing he did was to make a concrete prediction: he predicted that a certain planet must exist in such-and-such a place even though it had never been observed before. If it turned out that the planet did not exist, his theory would be refuted. In 1919, 14 years after the advent of Special Relativity, the planet was discovered exactly where he said. The theory survived the test. But the possibility of failing a test -- the willingness to put the theory up for refutation -- was what made it a scientific theory in the first place.
To win in the game of science, a theory must be submitted to many tests and survive all of them without being falsified. But to be even allowed into the game, the theory must be falsifiable in principle: there must be a conceivable experiment that would prove it false.
If we examine ID in this light, it becomes pretty clear that the theory isn't scientific. It is impossible to refute ID, because if an animal shows one characteristic, IDers can explain that the intelligent designer made it this way, and if the animal shows the opposite characteristic, IDers can explain with equal confidence that the designer made it that way. For that matter, it is fully consistent with ID that the supreme intelligence designed the world to evolve according to Darwin's laws of natural selection. Given this, there is no conceivable experiment that can prove ID false.
It is sometimes complained that IDers resemble the Marxist historians who always found a way to modify and reframe their theory so it evades any possible falsification, never offering an experimental procedure by which ID could in principle be falsified. To my mind, this complaint is warranted indeed. But the primary problem is not with the intellectual honesty of IDers, but with the nature of their theory. The theory simply cannot be fashioned to make any potentially falsified predictions, and therefore cannot earn entry into the game of science.
None of this suggests that ID is in fact false. For all I've said, it may well be pure truth. But if it is, it wouldn't be scientific truth, because it isn't scientific at all. As such, we shouldn't allow it into our science classrooms. At least that's what the Constitution says.
The writer teaches philosophy at the University of Arizona.
Re:Why Intelligent Design Is Going to Win
« Reply #52 on: 2005-11-14 15:30:17 »
Religion will continue because it is just too convinient to have all the answers provided in one little book. It's not important that it's wrong. It's important that it's easy. Science is too hard for the intellectually lazy.
Religion will continue because it is just too convinient to have all the answers provided in one little book. It's not important that it's wrong. It's important that it's easy. Science is too hard for the intellectually lazy.
Is it intellectual laziness or lack of education? If the latter there is still hope for the future.
Re:Why Intelligent Design Is Going to Win
« Reply #54 on: 2005-11-14 21:14:27 »
Intelligent Design or Insidious Design...?
Today, some read the evidence of nature and find no evidence for the existence of a Deity. Richard Dawkins, the contemporary biologist, notorious atheist, penned a book with the title "The Blind Watchmaker". He argues that "The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference". In the context of the warfare between evolution and creationism in the United States, the problem is perhaps less with believers who read the Bible as a literal account of Creation and more with believers who read Richard Dawkins as a literal account of evolution. The metaphor of nature as a watch, and God its watchmaker is perhaps one of the most famous metaphors in the philosophy of science and haunts us to this day, as we see in the current debates about 'equal time' for Intelligent Design Theory in the science curriculum of public schools.
Intelligent Design advocates argue that random genetic drift and natural selection alone cannot account for the 'irreducible complexity' in certain natural phenomena. The classic example of this is the human eye, to which Charles Darwin himself called attention. How could such a complex mechanism with so many independent parts have arisen by gradual incremental changes, when the mechanism would not function without all of the parts working together? Intelligent Design advocates argue that some outside agency would be needed to 'specify complexity', though they do not define who or what the 'designing' agency is. This can be seen as a new version of the God-of-the-Gaps argument and suffers from all of the earlier attempts to insert God as an explanatory fix in science's progressive history of accounting for the unknown. Besides, God is either everywhere present in all processes of creation or God might as well be nowhere.
So if God is everywhere, then why is God so hard to perceive? One could imagine a God who would be more like a Chairman Mao or a Comrade Stalin. This God would have designed a universe with photographs of himself hung everywhere in nature. We would be compelled to believe in the existence of this God, because everywhere we turned with our microscopes, telescopes, and other devices, there would be both the evidence for his existence and of course also the secret police to enforce our acknowledgment. Everything in the universe would occur by divine order, micromanaged in five-year plans and designed in a command economy. We might wonder whether such a dictator God would be worthy of our admiration and love, but there would be no doubt, no uncertainty. Of course, science is yet to find an unequivocal "made by God" label attached to nature.
If the only other choice we have is the literal reading of Richard Dawkins, however, then maybe we should stop teaching evolution altogether. Mere survival and reproduction do not provide adequate purposes for human aspirations. Too much of this kind of "truth" may not be wholesome for our children or society. The core of the evolution wars is whether a scientific understanding of biology allows room for religious and philosophical commitments to purpose in human life, purposes that somehow also must connect to the unfolding history of the universe. While scientists often wax poetic about nature, evoking wonder, awe, and indeed reverence, they mostly lack philosophical and theological language to contextualize such feelings and motivations as continuous with perennial spiritual quests. The public voices of "science" are more often than not promoting atheism, confusing the boundaries between science and scientism.
The history of the anti-evolution debates in the United States is less about biology and more about morality. Going back to the 1925 Scopes Trial, the progressive politician, William Jennings Bryan, got involved largely because of his objections to Social Darwinism and Eugenics, which at the time were widely used to justify any number of social injustices. Thirty states had eugenics laws. Indeed, the "science" most used to justify Nazism was first published in the peer-reviewed journals of the United States.
Today, the anti-evolution arguments are quite similar -- evolution equals materialism equals atheism equals nihilism equals immorality. The last Supreme Court case to examine this question, the 1987 case Edwards v. Aguillard ruled against Creation Science not on the basis of the science, but that it was a sectarian religion and thus could not be taught in the public schools. The anti-evolution forces regrouped, reorganized, and united around a 'science-only' tactic - calling evolution 'just a theory' and requesting equal time for Intelligent Design Theory. The old Creation Science arguments have been resurrected, but without mention of the Bible or officially naming the reputed designer. Almost ostensibly like a conspiracy for insidious influence and own personal design. But i wont be bias here.
School boards, educators, scientists, clergy and concerned citizens could quickly resolve the debate by first focusing on what happened when instead of getting dragged into the how and why debate. It is vital that we separate known natural history from the interpretation of that natural history. We can debate the meaning of the Cambrian Explosion, but we should not be denying that it happened. Scientific evidence for a long and evolving natural history of life on this planet has grown dramatically and profoundly in last two centuries.
The term 'evolution' appropriately applies also to this known natural history of the planet. Since Darwin's time, we know a lot more about this natural history, such that even responsible Intelligent Design advocates admit to a long Earth history. These ID advocates rarely talk about natural history, however, because they do not want to alienate the Young Earth Creationist who constitutes the base of their movement. We should not conflate the "what and when" questions with the "how and why" questions.
There is nothing necessarily scientifically wrong with believing that God, by whatever name and by whatever means, is actively involved in the entire four billion year life drama and the even longer and much larger cosmic adventure. Based on current science, we would have to say that God reuses DNA, hemoglobin, cell parts, developmental processes, skeletal structures, organ processes, and much more. God creates by recycling. And the building blocks are shared between humans and even very remote species, as in the human eye, which adapts plant technology to do its light detection work. Scientifically, there would be no necessary problem believing in such a Creator, as long as we acknowledge that the process took a very long time relative to our human life span. Species have come and gone and here we are. How does God accomplish this? Well, we would not know, but it certainly seems likely that God also made important use of some random processes and natural selection; t he latter we shall re-contextualize at the Great Eucharistic Law - eat and be eaten. And yes, there is a profoundly sacrificial dimension to life, so our gratitude is justified, especially for the food we are about to receive.
To focus on natural history, what happened when, is to separate the more responsible Intelligent Designers from the Young Earth Creationist extremists. As long as we are not denying natural history, then we can entertain and excite our students with lots of debates within biology about how and why. Young people get very excited by examining the meaning and purpose of their lives, a personal discussion that needs to be contextualized within an entire universe, which of course, is exactly what Richard Dawkins is also trying to do. Atheism also has a place at the round table of plausible worldviews, but it cannot simply claim to be 'scientific'.
There are many purely scientific debates about whether random genetic drift and natural selection are really adequate to account for the florescence of life forms found in nature. Developmental systems theory, mathematical patterns, convergent evolution, symbiosis, multi-level selection theory, genetic bureaucracies, niche creation, and most importantly for humans, Lamarckian patterns of cultural evolution, are just some of the hot debates in contemporary biology and anthropology that relativize Intelligent Design Theory as a narrowly partisan movement within science (and religion). It would be great if our children got excited about these debates within the sciences and mysteries of life.
The problem, however, is not with the term 'intelligent'. The "intelligence" of nature is not in the eye of the scientific beholder, it is in the phenomena themselves. This 'intelligibility' is the precondition for science. The metaphor of 'design', however, is much more problematic. Why should we limit God's generativity to a term taken from human architecture and engineering? There are much more interesting metaphors for God - artist, lover, friend, parent, teacher, motivator - all of which are also ultimately inadequate in describing that which transcends all and is also everywhere present.
Part of the problem is that we do not teach our children about religion and philosophy in the public schools. There are no Constitutional barriers to such curricula, as long as we are not sectarian. The solution to the evolution wars proposed above is itself recycled medieval Muslim, Jewish, and Christian theology, but that is another story waiting to be taught and debated anew.
Re:Why Intelligent Design Is Going to Win
« Reply #55 on: 2005-11-15 14:24:46 »
Fox,I suggest that reading Dawkins is vastly healthier and infinitely more inspiring than reading any number of religious tracts. Religion never inspires thought, it terminates it by giving god as an answer to every question, and utterly disallowing the queriant from peeking behind the tattered curtain or tracking patterns of thought dogmatically held to be immoral. Then too, like claims that religion is required to teach the mass "morality" - which is in fact an inversion of reality, see e.g. Virian Ethics: The End of God Referenced Ethics and possibly Virian Ethics: The Soul in the Machine and the Question of Virian Ethics, "Irreducible complexity" is an invalid myth - and its supporters know that. True "Irreducible complexity" might cause some explanatory challenges if a valid example of it could be found. But no example has yet been produced (although some putative examples have taken more thought than others to refute). Take for example, the eye you mentioned as an example. We know that many forms of eye have developed over the years, genetic evidence shows that this occurred independently long after we broke away from our cabbage forefather, and we know enough about the physiological process to model these developments and show that "blind" evolution and natural selection are sufficient to explain this development (although, of course, they don't prove that the eye developed in exactly the same way as the model) without introducing a Deus ex Machina which has no explanatory or predictive power, evidence necessitating its existence, place for it to be hiding or mechanism through which it could operate. Which is why an 650 year dead monk, William of Ockham, compels us to prefer Darwin to Deus. Claims made about "irreducible complexity" as it applies to the eye prove only that the person attempting to make the argument is insufficiently educated.
Surprise! The gradual paths to Irreducible Complexity
SPOCK: "He's intelligent, but not experienced. His pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking..." Kirk looks at him, smiles. [ Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan ]
First, let's be clear about something. Michael Behe has not created a "Theory of Intelligent Design" (ID). He offers no general laws, models, or explanations for how design happens, no testable predictions, and no possible way to falsify his hybrid evolution/ID hypothesis. He is simply claiming that design is a fact that is easily detectable in biochemical systems. The real science of ID is yet to come, and Behe just wants to wedge the door open a bit. So what does this magic Intelligent Design Detection Kit look like? Basically open the box and all it contains is a tweezer. Use it to pluck out any part of a system, and if the system stops functioning properly, it must be the product of design. Why? Because it proves that the system was "Irreducibly Complex" (IC)...
"By irreducible complexity I mean a single system which is composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced gradually by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, since any precursor to an irreducibly complex system is by definition nonfunctional." [Behe]
But read this argument carefully. Behe is not offering a way to detect design, he is offering a way to falsify gradual Darwinian evolution, and by elimination, conclude design. But there is one big problem- his falsifier has been falsified. The conclusion that an "irreducibly complex system cannot be produced gradually by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system" is simply wrong. There are at least three different ways that an IC system can be produced by a series of small modifications: 1) Improvements become necessities, 2) Loss of scaffolding 3) Duplication and divergence. By Behe's definition, many systems we see around us are IC, and yet have developed gradually. Think of the chaotic growth of towns into large cities, the self-organizing forces behind market economies, and the delicate causal webs that define complex ecosystems. Evolutionary algorithms run on computers routinely evolve irreducibly complex designs. So given an IC system, it could either be the product of coordinated design, or of a gradual, cumulative, stochastic process. The truth is, we should expect Darwinian evolution to produce such systems in biology, and not be surprised to find them. The underlying processes are called co-adaptation and co-evolution, and they have been understood for many years. Biochemical structures and pathways are not built up one step at a time in linear assembly-line fashion to meet some static function. They evolve layer upon layer, contingency upon contingency, always in flux, and retooling to serve current functions. The ability of life to evolve in this fashion has itself evolved over time. Detecting IC does not indicate design, and therefore Behe's hypothesis collapses. H. Allen Orr says it best in his perceptive review:
"Behe's colossal mistake is that, in rejecting these possibilities, he concludes that no Darwinian solution remains. But one does. It is this: An irreducibly complex system can be built gradually by adding parts that, while initially just advantageous, become-because of later changes-essential. The logic is very simple. Some part (A) initially does some job (and not very well, perhaps). Another part (B) later gets added because it helps A. This new part isn't essential, it merely improves things. But later on, A (or something else) may change in such a way that B now becomes indispensable. This process continues as further parts get folded into the system. And at the end of the day, many parts may all be required."
"The point is there's no guarantee that improvements will remain mere improvements. Indeed because later changes build on previous ones, there's every reason to think that earlier refinements might become necessary. The transformation of air bladders into lungs that allowed animals to breathe atmospheric oxygen was initially just advantageous: such beasts could explore open niches-like dry land-that were unavailable to their lung-less peers. But as evolution built on this adaptation (modifying limbs for walking, for instance), we grew thoroughly terrestrial and lungs, consequently, are no longer luxuries-they are essential. The punch-line is, I think, obvious: although this process is thoroughly Darwinian, we are often left with a system that is irreducibly complex. I'm afraid there's no room for compromise here: Behe's key claim that all the components of an irreducibly complex system 'have to be there from the beginning' is dead wrong."
The Fallacy of Conclusion by Analogy
When it comes to explaining science to the public, analogies and metaphors are essential tools of the trade. We all can better understand something new and unusual, when it is compared to something we already know: a cell is like a factory, the eye is like a camera, an atom is like a billiard ball, a biochemical system is like a mouse trap. An A is like a B, means A shares some conceptual properties with B. It does not mean A has all the properties of B. It does not follow that what is true for B is therefore true for A. Analogies can be used to explain science, but analogies cannot be used to draw conclusions or falsify scientific theories. Yet Behe commits this fallacy throughout his book. For example:
1. A mousetrap is "irreducibly complex" - it requires all of its parts to work properly. 2. A mousetrap is a product of design. 3. The bacterial flagellum is "irreducibly complex" - it requires all of its parts to work properly. 4. Therefore the flagellum is like a mouse trap. 5. Therefore the flagellum is a product of design.
Where d'you get those peepers?
Creationist claims that organs like eyes are too complex to have evolved naturally are way wide of the mark, says Richard Dawkins. In fact, eyes have evolved many times, often in little more than a blink of geological history
Creationism has enduring appeal, and the reason is not far to seek. It is not, at least for most of the people I encounter, because of a commitment to the literal truth of Genesis or some other tribal origin story. Rather, it is that people discover for themselves the beauty and complexity of the living world and conclude that it "obviously" must have been designed. Those creationists who recognise that Darwinian evolution provides at least some sort of alternative to their scriptural theory often resort to a slightly more sophisticated objection. They deny the possibility of evolutionary intermediates. "X must have been designed by a Creator," people say, "because half an X would not work at all. All the parts of X must have been put together simultaneously; they could not have evolved gradually."
Thus the creationist's favourite question "What is the use of half an eye?" Actually, this is a lightweight question, a doddle to answer. Half an eye is just 1 per cent better than 49 per cent of an eye, which is already better than 48 per cent, and the difference is significant. A more ponderous show of weight seems to lie behind the inevitable supplementary: "Speaking as a physicist, I cannot believe that there has been enough time for an organ as complicated as the eye to have evolved from nothing. Do you really think there has been enough time?" Both questions stem from the Argument from Personal Incredulity. Audiences nevertheless appreciate an answer, and I have usually fallen back on the sheer magnitude of geological time.
It now appears that the shattering enormity of geological time is a steam hammer to crack a peanut. A recent study by a pair of Swedish scientists, Dan Nilson and Susanne Pelger, suggests that a ludicrously small fraction of that time would have been plenty. When one says "the" eye, by the way, one implicitly means the vertebrate eye, but serviceable image-forming eyes have evolved between 40 and 60 times, independently from scratch, in many different invertebrate groups. Among these 40-plus independent evolutions, at least nine distinct design principles have been discovered, including pinhole eyes, two kinds of camera-lens eyes, curved-reflector ("satellite dish") eyes, and several kinds of compound eyes. Nilsson and Pelger have concentrated on camera eyes with lenses, such as are well developed in vertebrates and octopuses.
How do you set about estimating the time required for a given amount of evolutionary change? We have to find a unit to measure the size of each evolutionary step, and it is sensible to express it as a percentage change in what is already there. Nilsson and Pelger used the number of successive changes of x per cent as their unit for measuring changes of anatomical quantities.
Their task was to set up computer models of evolving eyes to answer two questions. The first was: is there a smooth gradient of change, from flat skin to full camera eye, such that every intermediate is an improvement? (Unlike human designers, natural selection can't go downhill not even if there is a tempting higher hill on the other side of the valley.) Second, how long would the necessary quantity of evolutionary change take?
In their computer models, Nilsson and Pelger made no attempt to simulate the internal workings of cells. They started their story after the invention of a single light-sensitive cell--it does no harm to call it a photocell. It would be nice, in the future, to do another computer model, this time at the level of the inside of the cell. to show how the first living photocell came into being by step-by-step modification of an earlier, more general-purpose cell. But you have to start somewhere, and Nilsson and Pelger started after the invention of the photocell.
They worked at the level of tissues: the level of stuff made of cells rather than the level of individual cells. Skin is a tissue, so is the lining of the intestine, so is muscle and liver. Tissues can change in various ways under the influence of random mutation. Sheets of tissue can become larger or smaller in area. They can become thicker or thinner. In the special case of transparent tissues like lens tissue, they can change the refractive index (the light-bending power) of local parts of the tissue.
The beauty of simulating an eye, as distinct from, say, the leg of a running cheetah, is that its efficiency can be easily mea-optics. The eye is represented as a two-dimensional cross-section, and the computer can easily calculate its visual acuity, or spatial resolution, as a single real number. It would be much harder to come up with an equivalent numerical expression for the efficacy of a cheetah's leg or backbone. Nilsson and Pelger began with a flat retina atop a flat pigment layer and surmounted by a flat, protective transparent layer. The transparent layer was allowed to undergo localised random mutations of its refractive index. They then let the model deform itself at random, constrained only by the requirement that any change must be small and must be an improvement on what went before.
The results were swift and decisive. A trajectory of steadily mounting acuity led unhesitatingly from the flat beginning through a shallow indentation to a steadily deepening cup, as the shape of the model eye deformed itself on the computer screen. The transparent layer thickened to fill the cup and smoothly bulged its outer surface in a curve. And then, almost like a conjuring trick, a portion of this transparent filling condensed into a local, spherical subregion of higher refractive index. Not uniformly higher, but a gradient of refractive index such that the spherical region functioned as an excellent graded- index lens.
Graded-index lenses are unfamiliar to human lens-makers, but they are common in living eyes. Humans make lenses by grinding glass to a particular shape. We make a compound lens. like the expensive violet- tinted lenses of modern cameras. by mounting several lenses together, but each one of those individual lenses is made of uniform glass through its whole thickness. A graded-index lens, by contrast, has a continuously varying refractive index with in its own substance. Typically, it has a high refractive index near the centre of the lens. Fish eyes have graded-index lenses. Now it has long been known that, for a graded-index lens, the most aberration-free results are obtained when you achieve a particular theoretical optimum value for the ratio between the focal length of the lens and the radius. This ratio is called Mattiessen's ratio. Nilsson and Pelger's computer model homed in unerringly on Mattiessen's ratio.
And so to the question of how long all this evolutionary change might have taken. In order to answer this, Nilsson and Pelger had to make some assumptions about genetics in natural populations. They needed to feed their model plausible values of quantities such as "heritability" . Heritability is a measure of how far variation is governed by heredity. The favoured way of measuring it is to see how much monozygotic (that is, "identical") twins resemble each other compared with ordinary twins. One study found the heritability of leg length in male humans to be 77 per cent. A heritability of too per cent would mean that you could measure one identical twin's leg to obtain perfect knowledge of the other twin's leg length, even if the twins were reared apart. A heritability of 0 per cent would mean that the legs of monozygotic twins are no more similar to each other than to the legs of random members of a specified population in a given environment. Some other heritabilities measured for humans are 95 per cent for head breadth, 85 per cent for sitting height. 80 percent for arm length and 79 per cent for stature.
Heritabilities are frequently more than 50 percent, and Nilsson and Pelger therefore felt safe in plugging a heritability of 50 per cent into their eye model. This was a conservative, or "pessimistic", assumption. Compared with a more realistic assumption of, say, 70 per cent, a pessimistic assumption tends to increase their final estimate of the time taken for the eye to evolve. They wanted to err on the side of overestimation because we are intuitively skeptical of short estimates of the time taken to evolve something as complicated as an eye.
For the same reason, they chose pessimistic values for the coefficient of variation (that is, for how much variation there typically is in the population) and the intensity of selection (the amount of survival advantage improved eyesight confers). They even went so far as to assume that any new generation differed in only one part of the eye at a time: simultaneous changes in different parts of the eye, which would have greatly speeded up evolution, were outlawed. But even with these conservative assumptions, the time taken to evolve a fish eye from fiat skin was minuscule: fewer than 400,000 generations. For the kinds of small animals we are talking about, we can assume one generation per year, so it seems that it would take less than half a million years to evolve a good camera eye.
In the light of Nilsson and Pelger's results, it is no wonder "the" eye has evolved at least 40 times independently around the animal kingdom. There has been enough time for it to evolve from scratch 1,500 times in succession within any one lineage. Assuming typical generation lengths for small animals, the time needed for the evolution of the eye, far from stretching credulity with its vastness, turns out to be too short for geologists to measure! It is a geological blink.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
The time has come to be blunt. The problem with Intelligent Design is not that it is false; not that the arguments in its favor reduce to smoke and mirrors; and not that it's defenders are disingenuous or even duplicitous. The problem with Intelligent Design is that it is dumb. I would contend that ID is dumb biology; even if it is on to something, what it is on to has no connection and does no meaningful work in biology (or physics). However, and more significantly, ID is dumb philosophy.
First, and despite the claims of its defenders, ID is a position in natural theology. And, despite its name, natural theology is not a branch of theology or of science, but of philosophy.
Natural theology lives on the boundary of natural philosophy (science) and metaphysics. The fundamental question of natural theology is: given what we know about the world from natural science, is the best available metaphysical picture of the universe one according to which the objects of natural science form a closed system or, alternatively, one according to which at least one entity fundamentally different from the objects of natural science is required to explain the structure of the natural world.[1]
Once we recognize that ID is a metaphysical position, we can recognize that ID has two principle competitors: metaphysical naturalism and global non-naturalism. Both of these frameworks compete with ID as fundamental perspectives for understanding the world.
First, let us consider metaphysical naturalism. Roughly, a metaphysical naturalist claims that the world per se is roughly the way that the world is portrayed in the natural sciences. The first, but not principle advantage, of naturalism is its profoundly elegant simplicity; at its heart rests the intuition that the world simply is the way that it seems to be. However, to really understand the power of this intuition pursued to a philosophical conclusion we must be willing to embrace its power to drive David Hume's war against superstition and moral privilege. The power of the tools that naturalism puts at our disposal for understanding who we are and why we are the way we are; for understanding the real place of human beings in the cosmos; and for elevating the dignity of the ordinary, both ordinary human beings and the ordinary world, cannot be overestimated. If you don't feel the pull of naturalism, then even if you ultimately find it inadequate, as I do, you just don't get it.
On the other hand there are a wide variety of non-naturalist cosmologies. General characterizations of non-naturalism fall together much less straightforwardly than do such characterizations of naturalism. This is, at least in part, because of the much greater historical depth of non-naturalism. Although, today, naturalism does feel like the default metaphysical position for those who begin their metaphysics with natural science, that is a quite recent phenomenon. Unfortunately, not being naturalists is about the only thing that the various non-naturalists have in common.
Fortunately, the virtues of non-naturalism can be usefully characterized as just the opposing virtues to those of naturalism. The best non-naturalist cosmologies derive from a very real sense on the part of their defenders of the messiness of the world; a sense that, contrary to naturalist expectations, things don't come together when we look deeper. That is, naturalism seems to require that there be a scientific picture of the world. Instead, claim their opponents, things just get weirder. Whether we are looking at quantum theory; at the strange fact that stars ever manage to light their fusion engines; at the weird and totally unexpected patterns that crop up in the fossil and evolutionary record; how can anyone who really digs down, even if they don't ultimately agree, fail to feel the pull of a metaphysical picture, which, at least, explains how all of this weirdness manages to fit together into a WORLD?
And, what do the ID types want to set against these? Some kind of bastard child of naturalism and non-naturalism. According to ID, the world perked along perfectly fine for several billion years according to the rules of physics. Over most of space-time the naturalists have it basically right, things just sort of go the way they seem they should. Then, a couple of billion years ago, along came The Designer, not itself the product of those processes. It showed up and decided to take a bunch of these otherwise perfectly natural chemicals and put them together to make bacteria and then designed in a replication system. Then it left it alone for another several million years and decided, "Hey, I've got these bacteria around, let's collect them into these other things." And, so forth.
But, this is just dumb! It takes the real virtues of both real alternatives and turns them on their heads. If naturalists value metaphysical simplicity, the simplicity of ID becomes simplemindedness. The ID theorist response to any puzzle is to demand a simple solution, even if the simple solution amounts to deus ex machina. This isn't just lazy philosophy; it's lazy fiction. On the other hand, if non-naturalists have a valuable sensitivity to the messiness of the real world, the ID theorists goal is to make that messiness go away. Pointing at every gap in our understanding and saying, "See there goes God, or whoever." isn't sensitivity to complexity; it's just stupidity.
Consider one of the most fully developed alternative evolutionary cosmologies; that of Teilhard de Chardin.[2] De Chardin, one of the most celebrated paleo-anthropologists of his generation, noticed certain patterns in the evolutionary record available to him. In particular, he noticed what seemed to be patterns in the evolutionary record related to the evolution of central nervous system complexity, i.e. thought, that seemed to be surprising if the only constraints operating on biological evolution were basic physics, the physical boundary conditions and natural selection.
Trying to summarize his conclusions from this is just about as possible -- that is, it's not possible to do fairly -- as would be attempting to summarize, for example Richard Dawkins' attempt at an evolutionary account of vision. However, what follows should at least give the reader a taste.
Teilhard thought that he could "derive" the operative constraints on evolutionary systems necessary to generate the patterns he discerned. He argued that those constraints pointed to a global teleological structure for the entire universe. Roughly, these constraints are equivalent to postulating the evolution of conscious awareness, the noosphere, as a cosmological endpoint for all natural processes.
This is probably wrong, but it is real philosophy; you could spend years struggling with everything you need to really get a handle on in order to see where Teilhard goes wrong.
And this is the first thing to notice; unlike ID, Teilhard's cosmology is not a shortcut to anywhere. Teilhard's cosmology does not close off questions; it opens them up. And, if it is right, it really does help us make metaphysical sense of everything about the universe without having to abandon real science at any point in the process. That is, for Teilhard, as much as for any naturalist, we understand the universe by looking at the universe; not outside of it. In Teilhard's universe there are no dei ex machina; things happen in the universe because that's the way they happen in this universe. The difference is that this universe is not quite as straightforwardly self-subsistent as the naturalists would have it be.
And instead of attempts to really work through these problems, we are offered ID.
Consider the following example. Imagine yourself as a visiting alien; when surveying "Africa" you discover large termite mounds. Most of the crew gets right down to the business of studying termites and figuring out how they manage to produce their nests. But, a few make a different claim. Given that the termites are clearly not sentient, they decide that the termites could not possibly have built their nests in the absence of an independent sentient nest designer -- The Termite Farmer. Therefore, they take off and go looking for The Termite Farmer instead of studying what termites actually do.
Among what I would call "real" termite biologists there can be both naturalist and non-naturalists. That is, some of them think that what you see is what you get; others think that there is something more subtle going on with the termites. However, unlike the design theorists, they both think that you learn about termites by studying termites. Not, by wandering around looking for hypothetical termite designers. However, it's actually worse than that. It's as if the believers in termite-mound designers didn't just go around being pains in the neck to real biologists by pointing out the places they don't quite understand yet; problems with which the real termite biologists are, of course, already perfectly familiar. Instead of either getting down to work or getting out of the way, they go around crowing that termite biologists get it all wrong because the termite-designers tried to make it look as if they, the designers, didn't exist. That is, ID theorists need to claim that, although life looks like a fundamentally natural process subject to natural explanation, that naturalness is an illusion. But, this isn't just bad science or bad philosophy; it's a conspiracy theory fit for The X-files, and thus, while it may not be religion, it certainly is just dumb!
The author is Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy Department at Loyola University, Chicago.
NOTES
[1] There is another branch of "natural" theology, one that operates from an a priori basis. This family of arguments attempts to prove that possession of certain concepts or the ability to make certain judgments implies the existence of a "divine" being. Anselm's argument, what Kant calls the Ontological Argument, is the quintessential example.
2 Despite the claims of many naturalists, de Chardin does not make an argument from design in the sense at issue here. See Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea : Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).for an example of this mistake. See Stephen Toulmin, The Return to Cosmology for a (roughly) naturalist engagement with Teilhard which avoids this mistake.
Because every few years this country, in its infinite tolerance, insists on hearing yet another appeal of the Scopes monkey trial, I feel obliged to point out what would otherwise be superfluous: that the two greatest scientists in the history of our species were Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, and they were both religious.
Newton's religion was traditional. He was a staunch believer in Christianity and a member of the Church of England. Einstein's was a more diffuse belief in a deity who set the rules for everything that occurs in the universe.
Neither saw science as an enemy of religion. On the contrary. "He believed he was doing God's work," James Gleick wrote in his recent biography of Newton. Einstein saw his entire vocation -- understanding the workings of the universe -- as an attempt to understand the mind of God.
Not a crude and willful God who pushes and pulls and does things according to whim. Newton was trying to supplant the view that first believed the sun's motion around the earth was the work of Apollo and his chariot, and later believed it was a complicated system of cycles and epicycles, one tacked upon the other every time some wobble in the orbit of a planet was found. Newton's God was not at all so crude. The laws of his universe were so simple, so elegant, so economical and therefore so beautiful that they could only be divine.
Which brings us to Dover, Pa., Pat Robertson, the Kansas State Board of Education, and a fight over evolution that is so anachronistic and retrograde as to be a national embarrassment.
Dover distinguished itself this Election Day by throwing out all eight members of its school board who tried to impose "intelligent design" -- today's tarted-up version of creationism -- on the biology curriculum. Pat Robertson then called the wrath of God down upon the good people of Dover for voting "God out of your city." Meanwhile, in Kansas, the school board did a reverse Dover, mandating the teaching of skepticism about evolution and forcing intelligent design into the statewide biology curriculum.
Let's be clear. Intelligent design may be interesting as theology, but as science it is a fraud. It is a self-enclosed, tautological "theory" whose only holding is that when there are gaps in some area of scientific knowledge -- in this case, evolution -- they are to be filled by God. It is a "theory" that admits that evolution and natural selection explain such things as the development of drug resistance in bacteria and other such evolutionary changes within species but also says that every once in a while God steps into this world of constant and accumulating change and says, "I think I'll make me a lemur today." A "theory" that violates the most basic requirement of anything pretending to be science -- that it be empirically disprovable. How does one empirically disprove the proposition that God was behind the lemur, or evolution -- or behind the motion of the tides or the "strong force" that holds the atom together?
In order to justify the farce that intelligent design is science, Kansas had to corrupt the very definition of science, dropping the phrase " natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us," thus unmistakably implying -- by fiat of definition, no less -- that the supernatural is an integral part of science. This is an insult both to religion and science.
The school board thinks it is indicting evolution by branding it an "unguided process" with no "discernible direction or goal." This is as ridiculous as indicting Newtonian mechanics for positing an "unguided process" by which Earth is pulled around the sun every year without discernible purpose. What is chemistry if not an "unguided process" of molecular interactions without "purpose"? Or are we to teach children that God is behind every hydrogen atom in electrolysis?
He may be, of course. But that discussion is the province of religion, not science. The relentless attempt to confuse the two by teaching warmed-over creationism as science can only bring ridicule to religion, gratuitously discrediting a great human endeavor and our deepest source of wisdom precisely about those questions -- arguably, the most important questions in life -- that lie beyond the material.
How ridiculous to make evolution the enemy of God. What could be more elegant, more simple, more brilliant, more economical, more creative, indeed more divine than a planet with millions of life forms, distinct and yet interactive, all ultimately derived from accumulated variations in a single double-stranded molecule, pliable and fecund enough to give us mollusks and mice, Newton and Einstein? Even if it did give us the Kansas State Board of Education, too.
Fox,I suggest that reading Dawkins is vastly healthier and infinitely more inspiring than reading any number of religious tracts. Religion never inspires thought, it terminates it by giving god as an answer to every question, and utterly disallowing the queriant from peeking behind the tattered curtain or tracking patterns of thought dogmatically held to be immoral. Then too, like claims that religion is required to teach the mass "morality" - which is in fact an inversion of reality
From what I am aware the Church of Virus is validly described as a religion, do you include all religions in any of your above verses or statement? or do you place the suggestion primarily upon, 'Religion', in respect to those based on the faith of God(s) without perception of axiomatic evidence or the axioms of science? I pray you forgive my ignorance, but you were not very specific with your notion of ' Religion' or to which 'Religion(s)' you refer. But then truley defining the word religion is fraught with difficulty as all definitions contain at lest one deficiency.
I would argue that it is human dogmatic religions which never inspire thought and that terminate it with God, through self made ideals of pride and glory. It is controling and dominating religions such as these which indeed bear an appearence of wisdom in promoting self-made faith of asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of sin.
Teaching the mass morality is an inversion of nature, not reality as such. Reality is the chemical and genetic strain of natural precursors, through evolution consisting of electrical singnals and neurons based of genetic coading which we mentally interpreate through our own set of ideals of accepted faith/weyken, whichever they may lie in or be. Faith without works is dead. This world was never intended to be created fair, and it certainly has not evolved as such. It is the yearning temptations of natural genetic instinct which is that human will should be taught and placed against, If not for God then for each other. Though the 'reality' of doing so is far greater a challenge then to simply proclaim with words. But then human nature is not left completly to despair, but merely, as most things, a conflict between two seperate truths. Tainted nature and Pure nature, though both are needed and that which makes us irrevocably human, they are both inextricably linked within us, as conflict, as virtue and sin, as right and wrong, as good and evil. Choice is one of the greatest and compelling fates to consist in man, his world, his reality, his nature, his life...now we must choose, for even if we do not choose we have still made a choice, by not to. The fate of choice and is inexorable, it can not be assiduously avoided. so if we have choice then there must be something fundermentally to choose between instead of, at bottom, there being no purpose, no good no evil. Natural instinct and nature can be shunned and thus sin erased through forgivness and compassion. Its all to easy to simply give into lust, Greed and Wrath; what is harder is to avoid them and thus grow in understanding, to flower in virtue. All it takes is one persons sheer force of love and will, upon the arduous and burdensome path of faith. Of course the word weyken is interesting, but it is to easy to attain in comparison with faith.
If you propose that reading pityless indifference, purposelessness, and that the origin of humans is a random, unplanned event of nature that serves no purpose other than to fill a niche in the ecological scheme, and that this is healthier and more inspiring then reading tracts based on love and peace, meaning and hope for one and eachother...then that is your own prerogative and reality. I thank you for your suggestion none the less though.
Claims made about "irreducible complexity" as it applies to the eye prove only that the person attempting to make the argument is insufficiently educated.
I was making no claims about 'irreducible complexity' in respect to the eye, I was merely emphasising example over opinion, not opinion its self.
I conclude and emphasize that I have nothing personal against Dawkins or evolution. Indeed i admire there logic and diligence into the complex works of life. But like so many other things the awnsers lie not with one side alone...General relativity and Quantum Mechanics is a good example...prehaps a little less hostile and tumultuous then creationism and evolution but analogous none the less. I do not doubt natural selection, but the universe is to orderly and to well put together for random and unplanned selection alone, driven by nothing more then sheer chaos.
But then this is but my humble opinion, I am but a sapling amongst the trees compared with most here. I inspire all to simply take it as they will.
I do not doubt natural selection, but the universe is to orderly and to well put together for random and unplanned selection alone, driven by nothing more then sheer chaos.
What exactly is it about the universe that you think cannot be explained as the product of natural processes?
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