Posted on 01/26/2006 1:47:10 PM PST by jennyp
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Third, complexity does not imply “design.” One of Adam Smith’s most powerful insights, developed further by Friedrich Hayek, is that incredible complexity can emerge in society without a designer or planner, through “spontaneous order.” Hayek showed how in a free market the complex processes of producing and distributing goods and services to millions of individuals do not require socialist planners. Rather, individuals pursuing their own self-interest in a system governed by a few basic rules—property rights, voluntary exchange by contract—have produced all the vast riches of the Western world.
Many creationists who are on the political Right understand the logic of this insight with respect to economic complexity. Why, then, is it such a stretch for them to appreciate that the complexity we find in the physical world—the optic nerve, for example—can emerge over millions of years under the rule of natural laws that govern genetic mutations and the adaptability of life forms to changing environments? It is certainly curious that many conservative creationists do not appreciate that the same insights that show the futility of a state-designed economy also show the irrelevance of an “intelligently designed” universe.
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Evolution: A Communist Plot?
Yet another fear causes creationists to reject the findings of science.
Many early proponents of science and evolution were on the political Left. For example, the Humanist Manifesto of 1933 affirmed support for evolution and the scientific approach. But its article fourteen stated: “The humanists are firmly convinced that existing acquisitive and profit-motivated society has shown itself to be inadequate and that a radical change in methods, controls, and motives must be instituted. A socialized and cooperative economic order must be established to the end that the equitable distribution of the means of life be possible.”
Subsequent humanist manifestos in 1973 and 2000 went lighter on the explicit socialism but still endorsed, along with a critical approach to knowledge, the kind of welfare-state democracy and internationalism rejected by conservatives. The unfortunate historical association of science and socialism is based in part on the erroneous conviction that if humans can use scientific knowledge to design machines and technology, why not an entire economy?
Further, many supporters of evolution were or appeared to be value-relativists or subjectivists. For example, Clarence Darrow, who defended Scopes in the “monkey trial” eight decades ago, also defended Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. These two young amoralists pictured themselves as supermen above conventional morality; they decided to commit the perfect crime and killed a fourteen-year-old boy. Darrow offered the jury the standard liberal excuses for the atrocity. He argued that the killers were under the influence of Nietzschean philosophy, and that to give them the death penalty would hurt their surviving families. “I am pleading for life, understanding, charity, kindness, and the infinite mercy that considers all,” he said. “I am pleading that we overcome cruelty with kindness and hatred with love.” This is the sort of abrogation of personal responsibility, denial of moral culpability, and rejection of the principle of justice that offends religious conservatives—in fact, every moral individual, religious or atheist.
In addition, nearly all agnostics and atheists accept the validity of evolution. Creationists, as religious fundamentalists, therefore see evolution and atheism tied together to destroy the basis of morality. For one thing, evolution seems to erase the distinction between humans and animals. Animals are driven by instincts; they are not responsible for their actions. So we don’t blame cats for killing mice, lions for killing antelope, or orca whales for killing seals. It’s what they do. They follow instincts to satisfy urges to eat and procreate. But if human beings evolved from lower animals, then we might be merely animals—and so there would be no basis for morality. In which case, anything goes.
To religious fundamentalists, then, agnostics and atheists must be value-relativists and subjectivists. Whether they accept evolution because they reject a belief in God, or reject a belief in God because they accept evolution, is immaterial: the two beliefs are associated, just as are creationism and theism. By this view, the only firm basis for morality is the divine edicts of a god.
This reflects the creationists’ fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of morality.
Morality from Man’s Nature
We humans are what we are today regardless of whether we evolved, were created, or were intelligently designed. We have certain characteristics that define our nature.
We are Homo sapiens. Unlike lower animals, we have a rational capacity, an ability to fully, conceptually understand the world around us. We are self-conscious. We are the animal that knows—and knows that he knows. We do not survive automatically, by instinct, but must exercise the virtue of rationality. We must think. We must discover how to acquire food—through hunting or planting—how to make shelters, how to invent medicines. And to acquire such knowledge, we must adopt a rational methodology: science.
Furthermore, our thinking does not occur automatically. We have free will and must choose to think, to focus our minds, to be honest rather than to evade facts that make us uncomfortable—evolution, for example—because reality is what it is, whether we like it or acknowledge it or not.
But we humans do not exercise our minds and our wills for mere physical survival. We have a capacity for a joy and flourishing far beyond the mere sensual pleasures experienced by lower animals. Such happiness comes from planning our long-term goals, challenging ourselves, calling on the best within us, and achieving those goals—whether we seek to nurture a business to profitability or a child to adulthood, whether we seek to create a poem or a business plan, whether we seek to design a building or to lay the bricks for its foundation.
But our most important creation is our moral character, the habits and attitudes that govern our actions. A good character helps us to be happy, a bad one guarantees us misery. And what guides us in creating such a character? What tells us how we should deal with our fellow humans?
A code of values, derived from our nature and requirements as rational, responsible creatures possessing free will.
We need not fear that with evolution, or without a god, there is no basis for ethics. There is an objective basis for ethics, but it does not reside in the heavens. It arises from our own human nature and its objective requirements.
Creationists and advocates of intelligent design come to their beliefs in part through honest errors and in part from evasions of facts and close-minded dogmatism. But we should appreciate that one of their motivations might be a proper rejection of value-relativism, and a mistaken belief that acceptance of divine revelation is the only moral alternative.
If we can demonstrate to them that the basis for ethics lies in our nature as rational, volitional creatures, then perhaps we can also reassure them that men can indeed have morality—yet never fear to use that wondrous capacity which allows us to understand our own origins, the world around us, and the moral nature within us.
Edward Hudgins is the Executive Director of The Objectivist Center.
Interesting discussion. I see models as less formal than hypotheses, so your suggestion of modeling a test for a hypothesis could certainly fit. You could probably come up with multiple models.
I see models as based on most anything; they are often vastly simplified (oversimplified) so they can work with subsets of data and provide some kind of test. They can stem from laws and theories, but are generally much simplified. If, when tested, they are supported it does not prove anything of course, but may lead to more robust, focused, or precise models, and you can build up from there.
I did modeling in my dissertation, and worked with simplified models from about five diverse fields--and they all pointed in the same direction!
Well over 20 years later we are working with better data and have refined a lot of the hypotheses, but we are still pointed in the same direction! Lots of fun.
ID claims nothing of the kind. Neither does evolution claim proof of any non-existence of a "Greater Power." The proper role for any observer is, "'A' may be right. 'B' may be right. I will consider the evidence as it comes my way." Neither the principle of intelligent design nor the principle that all we observe is the product of unintelligent non-design, nor any combination of the two is wholly beyond reasonable discourse. At the same time, none of these three principles constitutes empirical science.
The objective reality is, that science requires the use of the scientific method. That's the way it is now and has always been. The matter has never been negotiable, nor will it ever be.
I've not questioned that science requires the scientific method. For better or for worse, humans do not engage science with scientific method and leave it at that. They make leaps of faith based upon the evidence, and those leaps of faith are subjective. Not only so, but they make leaps of faith before the first hypothesis is created or written.
Neither do I understand why it is totally beyond the comprehension of most evolutionists that someone could look at the fossil evidence and find it lacking and then go on to conclude that there has to be more. There is always the implication that one doesn't accept the ToE because they just don't understand it, or they're ignorant of what it really says. If someone REALLY knew all the facts, they would find the evidence so compelling that they would have no choice but to have to believe that it's true.
I am convinced that if tomorrow I got on a evo thread and claimed that I now believed/accepted the ToE there would be rejoicing at Darwin Central. But what would the difference really be? Would it be that I understood it better? No. It would simply be that I stated that I accepted it while my knowledge of it would not have changed one iota. The rejoicing wouldn't be that I thought it through or increased my knowledge of it, it would be that I finally agreed with the ToE, even if I still didn't understand it any better.
Analogies are just that; analogies, and nothing more. If you claim otherwise, then you would have to accept the assembling of the parts of a watch as evidence of intelligent design and creation. Are you willing to do that?
Quite frankly, neither analogy is valid. They are nothing more than analogies, or illustrations; and both are bad ones.
They're a representation of an object, or process. If it's a real object, then a 2d model would be a drawing. 3d models could be constructed and even 1d might work. If it's a real process, it would have to be based on theory, and law. A hypothesis would take the place of theory when appropriate. The range for process models runs from the simple, to any degree of accuracy required to obtain accuracy and precision of results. A model is like a bluprint for the system and is analytical if the bluprint is given in mathematical representation.
They do. It's required.
So, were/are airplanes created, or are they the result of random chance?
So who decides what is extraneous? The scientist is then setting up conditions on the experiment that HE thinks are necessary and that biases the experiment. His assumptions are his own and therefore subjective. There is no truly objective science that can be done. All the data is interpreted based on the particular scientists observations and presumptions. If he doesn't observe something properly or misinterprets it, then the experiment is usless.
Your statement that ID and creationism are extraneous are your opinion only. There is no objective standard to which you can appeal to support your statement. You're presuming that the naturalistic approach to science is neutral and unbiased, but it's not because you are starting with an assumption reflecting your world view.
Check out This thread
And specifically this from the article
"In that book, Schwartz hearkens back to earlier theories that suggest that the Darwinian model of evolution as continual and gradual adaptation to the environment glosses over gaps in the fossil record by assuming the intervening fossils simply have not been found yet. Rather, Schwartz argues, they have not been found because they don't exist, since evolution is not necessarily gradual but often sudden, dramatic expressions of change that began on the cellular level because of radical environmental stressors-like extreme heat, cold, or crowding-years earlier.
Can't you evolutionists come up with a united front. The problem with evolutionists is that they can't agree on hardly anything about how evolution actually works, if it works at all.
It's sort of like trying to nail Jello to a wall.
But our most important creation is our moral character, the habits and attitudes that govern our actions. A good character helps us to be happy, a bad one guarantees us misery. And what guides us in creating such a character? What tells us how we should deal with our fellow humans?
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If we can demonstrate to them that the basis for ethics lies in our nature as rational, volitional creatures, then perhaps we can also reassure them that men can indeed have morality—yet never fear to use that wondrous capacity which allows us to understand our own origins, the world around us, and the moral nature within us.
The author apparently hasn't worked out a basic contradiction in these statements; first claiming that morality is our "creation", then declaring that it "lies in our nature as rational, volitional creatures."
Of course, if morality "lies in our nature", then man has not created morality; it is simply something he was born with. It would be much like claiming that man created his intelligence, his ability to see and his ten fingers and ten toes.
A common debating tactic by theists is to point out that without a Divine source there is no real basis for obeying our moral impulses. A few atheists, when challenged on this, simply concede the argument and grant that according to their philosophy there is no basis for morality. This is very rare though. It is much more common that they simply do not see the problem.
This is Hudgin's problem. He wants us to believe that the source of morality is ourselves. "We need not fear that with evolution, or without a god, there is no basis for ethics. There is an objective basis for ethics, but it does not reside in the heavens. It arises from our own human nature and its objective requirements."
I'll, disregard the part about evolution (partly because I think his point here regarding some fundamentalists' motivation for rejecting it is probably correct, and mostly because it is not relevant to my point). Hudgins is saying here that there need be no spiritual basis for morality; that the source is "our own human nature" and that this is enough.
The raises the question of what to do with someone with no or very few moral impulses. If there is no morality external to man's nature, then on what grounds do we judge the morality of a man who does not posess this trait? If morality is simply part of man's nature, then what makes one man's nature better than another? We would have to appeal to something outside man to make the call.
This is generally not a problem, since nearly all men acknowledge virtually the same morality, with the deviations among cultures and individuals being in the details. Examples of people with no sense of morality are very rare. But when they appear there is no means of measuring the "rightness" of one man's nature without an appeal to some kind of objective standard outside of man.
I'm not using this argument to prove the existence of God, because I don't think it does, but it is very problematic for those who claim that no source of morality external to man's nature is needed.
P-Marlowe is one of the most intelligent, rational and thoughtful posters on FR. For that reason, and others, you ought to reconsider your views of evolution.
It was certainly discussed as part of evolution when I took 9th grade biology, but that was before micro and molecular biology clearly proved that abiogenesis is impossible. It's sort of like a pink elephant in a room full of evolutionists. They all know its there but no one is willing to talk about it.
Wrong. Science is objective, because the data are open for anone to look at. The data can also be reproduced if desired.
"that ID and creationism are extraneous are your opinion only. There is no objective standard to which you can appeal to support your statement."
The scientific method is the objective standard. ID and creationism can not be subject to the scientific method. In fact, they conflict with science. They are in contradiction with science. they are hypoothesis, with no support of any evidence at all.
"You're presuming that the naturalistic approach to science..."
Nothing is presumed. If the matter can be examined with the scientific method, it will be, otherwise if it can't, then it's not science.
"The scientist is then setting up conditions on the experiment that HE thinks are necessary..."
The experimental conditions go with the results and conclusions. That's required for both the scientific method and publication.
A brief bio on Hudgins. Not exactly a scientist, so his opinions about science need to be heavily discounted.
Edward L. Hudgins
Executive Director
Edward Hudgins, formerly director of regulatory studies for the Cato Institute and editor of Regulation magazine, is an expert on the regulation of space and transportation, pharmaceuticals, and labor. He served as a senior economist for the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress and was both deputy director for economic policy studies and director of the Center for International Economic Growth at the Heritage Foundation. He has testified on many occasions before Congress. His opinion writing has been published in the Wall Street Journal, Houston Chronicle, USA Today, Philadelphia Inquirer, Journal of Commerce, and Aviation Week & Space Technology. He is the author of Freedom to Trade: Refuting the New Protectionism and the forthcoming Space: The Free Market Frontier. He has appeared on NBC's "Dateline NBC," National Public Radio, PBS, Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC and Voice of America. Hudgins has a bachelor's degree from the University of Maryland, a master's from American University, and a doctorate from Catholic University. He has taught at universities in the United States and in Germany.
That's a scary thought. But with enough time, yes they will. As surely as the major parties will undergo major realignments & flip major parts of their platforms, like they have done more than once in our history already.
Marron, you don't belong here. You're much too even-handed. :-)
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