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.
Science shouldn't be guided by politics. That's why ID isn't science.
Do you believe in Biblical Creation?
The entire theory is out of its current range. No one observed the assent of man, yet it is taught as a fact. Evolution is postualtion based on speculation and not observation. Abiogenesis is an easily proven theory. All one needs to do is to sterilize an environment in which life has never existed and add time and a little sunshine and see if life generates itself. No one is ready to even attempt that experiment as it is ludicrous.
If science finds that it can be applied, then it will be included.
Abiogenesis was taught as the FOUNDATION of Evolution when I was in high school. Now it is apparently gone and evolution is left with no foundation.
BTW I forgot that I left this thread. Please don't ping me back. Thanks.
ID is s sociopolitical theistic movement.
ID is, put most simply, PC. It dresses up in the name of science, but it's really about pursuing political goals first and foremost.
Let's see, on one hand we have a mountain of fossil evidence going back nearly 6 million years and an even bigger mountain of genetic evidence giving a detailed account of man's evolution from a primitive, ape-like critter to his present glory; on the other hand we have a creation story written down by goatherders 2500 years ago. Which one has more validity...
Evolution is postualtion based on speculation and not observation.
Bull puckey. Evolution, in action, has been observed in both the wild and the laboratory (evolution, remember, is a change in allele frequency within a population over generations). Evolution is tested every time a new fossil is discovered or another genome is sequenced.
You might actually want to learn something about the subject before spouting off on these threads.
So you would have no problem teaching id along side of evolution?
Yes I would.
I don't think religion should be taught in public schools by State employees, anymore that I believe that evolution should be taught by Sunday school teachers.
I'm tempted to say that if they did, they wouldn't be creationists....
A 'clean' 'untainted' origin? Hmmmm.
"The "origin of species" is rooted in the idea of a singularity: the mechanics of the DNA molecule. All species of Terran life has it. Like the singularity of the "Big Bang" theory, the two are categorically inseparable as immaculate conceptions. It only takes a mere application of logic.
While it is true that current life has DNA, it is not necessary for pre-life or proto-life to have DNA. All that life really needs is a container, a method of providing energy, a method of replication with inheritance, and the ability to change according to the environment. DNA happens to be the 'scribe' of choice in Earthly life but it is not the only method of transmitting 'information' during replication. RNA also fits the bill. The structure of crystals also can be used as 'information' to be transfered if coupled with a replicator.
"The perplexing question of human origin from a common ancestor to apes is even more problematic. According to evolutionary theory, humans (Homo sapiens) did not descend from apes, but from some "missing link."
Since the concept of an Ape is based on morphological similarities, the precursors (plural) can all be considered apes. There is no 'missing' link. All you have to do is check PatrickHenry's List-o-Links to find the collection of fossils stretching back almost to the common ancestor of chimpanzees and hominids.
Logically, all we need are two other hominids in our ancestral line to defuse the 'missing link' argument. We have fossils of those two hominids.
"Although Dr. Louis Leaky spent decades searching and found Zinjanthropus and Homo habilis, Olduvai Gorge gave no answers. Logic also suggests in order to "descend," there has to be something you descend "from" and something you ascend "to."
I'm not sure where you get the idea R. Leakey had problems, but he was/is not the only person looking for hominid fossils. Others have found many hominids that are in our line of descent.
"Evolutionary theory rooted in the universal human dissatisfaction for mortality is a vain search for human origin(s), an attempt to rationalize a yearning for connection to something eternal.
Evolutionary theory which is rooted in human curiosity and the desire to know our environment, including why we are as we are really has nothing to do with the desire for the eternal. If it were rooted in the desire for the eternal, science would have quite looking when it was found that humans are animals with an origin on Earth and the universe has an origin at the BB. There is nothing eternal in either beginning, despite your 'clean, untainted origin'.
"Now, since nobody knows the answers, it is only scientific method to consider all points of view on the issue in education. To do otherwise would be like students dancing around totems, with professors as witch doctors proclaiming intellectual taboos and making sacrifices.
This is quite the redefinition of the scientific method. Since when is it necessary to have all the answers? Science is about exploration using a well defined methodology. Allowing some other methodology such as the one the IDists propose would also allow the shamanism you rightfully abhor into both the education system and the science labs.
Good quote in a recent Science News, vol. 168 (Nos 26 & 27), p. 414:
What is intelligent design?It's the missing link between creationism and religious instruction masquerading as biology.
Bruce Bower
Well, there it is.
ID has nothing to do with Genesis-based Creationism.
Why We Care About Darwin Wars:
Darwinists say the evolutionary mechanism must be purely material. ID theorists find evidence in nature of an intelligent purpose shaping life's history. Which view we convey to our children may affect their adult lives.The scientific impact: Consider our country's role as the leading exporter of scientific ideas. Modern science from its start has been fueled by religious wonder. In his new book, "The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success," sociologist Rodney Stark points out that real science arose only once. That was in Europe at the hands of devoutly Christian scholars: "medieval scholastics, sustained by that uniquely Christian 12th-century invention, the university."
Unlike the ancient Greeks who believed the universe had no beginning and thus no designer, Christians and Jews read the opening chapters of Genesis as an affirmation that nature is God's handiwork. To understand Him, it helps to understand His creation. Writes Stark, "Newton, Kepler and Galileo regarded the creation itself as a book that was to be read and comprehended."
In erasing God's role from the history of biological existence, Darwinism erases a primary motivation to pursue scientific discovery.
The purpose of the rock is...well...just to be there until it isn't...and one day it'll all burn up.
One insight that verifies God is that the mechanistic route removes real meaning from life.
That's a load of crap. One does not need to believe in some an afterlife to have meaning in their present existence. To believe otherwise is self-worship of the most disgusting kind: you remove from others the value of their thoughts and replace them with your own.
An atheist may respond that your belief--that life without the self-delusion of religion is meaningless--is evidence that your view of life removes meaning from life. To them, since you believe that an eternity waits for you, there would be no point in valuing this time for itself, since it is an infinitely small percentage of your existence. Why should you care if you waste it?
To them, you literally throw away the only truely irreplaceable thing--time-- tossing away some of the precious few years of your existence in pointless prayers, study of irrelevant texts and meditation on non-existant entities, and miss the irreplaceable opportunity to use that time to live life to its fullest. That, to them, is a life without meaning, because you waste it chasing a dream that does not exist.
The peppered-moths were glued to the trees to get the result the guy who did the experiments (can't remember his name off the top of my head and I don't have the time to look it up just now) wanted.
Yes.
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