Posted on 11/23/2004 9:53:55 PM PST by nickcarraway
Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing
Edited by William A. Dembski
(ISI Books, 366 pages, $28; $18 paper)
WACO, Texas -- At one time, the debate over Darwin's theory existed as a cartoon in the modern imagination. Thanks to popular portrayals of the Scopes Trial, secularists regularly reviewed the happy image of Clarence Darrow goading William Jennings Bryan into agreeing to be examined as an expert witness on the Bible and then taking him apart on the stand. Because of the legal nature of the proceedings that made evolution such a permanent part of the tapestry of American pop culture, it is fitting that this same section of the tapestry began to unravel due to the sharp tugs of another prominent legal mind, Phillip Johnson.
The publication of his book, Darwin on Trial, now appears to have marked a new milestone in the debate over origins. Prior to Johnson's book, the critics of evolution tended to occupy marginalized sectarian positions and focused largely on contrasting Darwin's ideas with literalist readings of the Genesis account. Johnson's work was different. Here we had a doubter of Darwin willing to come out of the closet, even though his credentials were solid gold establishment in nature. He had attended the finest schools, clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, taught law as a professor at highly ranked Berkeley, and authored widely-used texts on criminal law. Just as Darrow cross-examined the Bible and Bryan's understanding of it, Johnson cross-examined Darwin and got noticed in the process. He spent much of the last decade debating the issue with various Darwinian bulldogs and holding up his end pretty well.
PHILLIP JOHNSON, AND a number of others, raised enough doubts about the dominant theory to cause a number of intellectuals to take a hard look, particularly at the gap between what can be proven and what is simply asserted to be true. Since that time, authors with more technical backgrounds, like mathematician/philosopher William Dembski and biochemist Michael Behe, have published books providing even more powerful critiques of the neo-Darwinian synthesis based on intelligent design theory. Behe's work has been particularly disturbing to evolution advocates because he seems to have proven that organic machines at the molecular level are irreducibly complex and therefore could not have been the products of natural selection because there never would have been any intermediate working mechanism to select. Now, the two team up as Dembski edits and Behe contributes to a bracing collection of controversial writings titled Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing.
Dembski displays the intellectual doggedness of the group of contributors when he uses his introductory essay to ruthlessly track down and scrutinize the footnotes offered by those who would refute Behe's case. Reference after reference claiming to have decisively defeated Behe turns out to be inadequate to the task. What passes for refutation is instead a collection of question-begging and "just-so stories." Right away, Dembski sets the tone for the book. Nothing will be uncontested. The pro-evolution community will be made to fight for every inch of intellectual real estate without relying on the aura of prestige or the lack of competent critics to bolster their case.
The best way to read the book is by beginning at the end and perusing the profiles of the contributors. There, the reader will be able to select essays from representatives of a variety of disciplines, including mathematics, philosophy, biochemistry, biophysics, chemistry, genetics, law, and medicine. The most enjoyable in terms of sheer brio are the essays by Dembski, Behe, Frank Tipler, Cornelius Hunter, and David Berlinski. Tipler's essay on the process of getting published in a peer-reviewed journal is particularly relevant and rewarding because it deals with one of the biggest strikes against Intelligent Design. ID theorists have had a notoriously difficult time getting their work published in professional journals. Tipler, a professor of mathematical physics at Tulane, crankily and enjoyably explains why.
TOP HONORS, HOWEVER, go to David Berlinski's essay, "The Deniable Darwin," which originally appeared in Commentary. The essay is rhetorically devastating. Berlinski is particularly strong in taking apart Richard Dawkins' celebrated computer simulation of monkeys re-creating a Shakespearean sentence and thereby "proving" the ability of natural selection to generate complex information. The mathematician and logician skillfully points out that Dawkins rigged the game by including the very intelligence in his simulation he disavows as a cause of ordered biological complexity. It's clear that Berlinski hits a sore spot when one reads the letters Commentary received in response to the article. Esteemed Darwinists like Dawkins and Daniel Dennett respond with a mixture of near-hysterical outrage and ridicule. Berlinski's responses are also included. At no point does he seem the slightest bit cowed or overwhelmed by the personalities arrayed against him.
For the reader, the result is simply one of the most rewarding reading experiences available. Berlinski and his critics engage in a tremendous intellectual bloodletting, with Berlinski returning fire magnificently. In a particularly amusing segment, Berlinski, constantly accused of misperception, writes, "For reasons that are obscure to me, both [Mr. Gross] and Daniel Dennett carelessly assume that they are in a position to instruct me on a point of usage in German, my first language." Though his foes repeatedly accuse Berlinski of being a "creationist," the tag has little chance of sticking to a man arguing for little more than agnosticism on the question of origins and who disavows any religious principles aside from the possible exception of hoping to "have a good time all the time." One suspects that the portion of the book occupied by the Berlinski essay and subsequent exchanges will gain wide currency.
For far too long, the apologists for Darwin have relied on a strategy of portraying challengers as simple-minded religious zealots. The publication of Uncommon Dissent and many more books like it, will severely undermine the success of such portrayals. During the past decade, it has become far too obvious that there are such things as intellectuals who doubt Darwin and that their ranks are growing. The dull repetition of polemical charges in place of open inquiry, debate, and exchange may continue, but with fewer and fewer honest souls ready to listen.
Hunter Baker is a Ph.D. student at Baylor University and contributes to the Reform Club.
ID'ers are cowardly creationists.
I think it's funny (tragic really) to see Creationists try to tell God how He should have done things.
ID is much better at supporting the argument that the Universe was created, or that there is purpose to it, rather than disproving evolution.
It's also amazing that our species probably only numbered in the dozens at one time, and that most of the other similar species died out. Then combine that with the possibility that planets with evolved life of any sort are extremely rare.
We can say that the creator is refining gold in the furnace of affliction. Greatness comes through trial. So does the knowledge of the faithful. Love is proved and matures through trial. If you never suffered loss you could not understand the wonderfulness of life, loving and being loved. How intense love grows as one lives a life for the LORD.
No, because that's not how science is done. A courtroom (or a popular election) is not the proper forum. Besides, elections sometimes go wrong (e.g., Clinton) and trials can produce the wrong result (e.g., OJ is free).
The value of the theory of evolution is already solidly established among educated people who understand the evidence, and overwhelmingly among scientists in the biological fields, so the pathetic struggle of the creationoids to gain respect for their creation "science" is about a century out of date. It's an old, long-decided issue, all the creationoid talking-points have been refuted long ago, and nothing remains to be done except to improve our educational system -- which is obviously failing a whole bunch of people.
I've got a zillion really useful evolution links at my freeper homepage, if you scroll down a bit to find them. Check them out.
In a sense you are right except it does not speak of numerous designers but rather of the Trinity of God. Nothing exists as a single but rather as a melding of more than one to make a one. All of creation attest to the concept of unity, more than one to make a one which is really a unified one. For instance you have a proton, electrons and nucleus that make up one atom. Our bodies are formed by countless individual cells that make up our one body. All of design does reflect a God that is more than a singular one but rather a unified one.
Theories, in science, never become laws. Laws are descriptions of phenomena, often couched in mathematics that explain what is happening. Theories, on the other hand, are frameworks based on evidence (including the aforementioned laws) that describe why the phenomena happen the way they do. Creationists are forever getting this one wrong, proving they are scientifically illiterate and incapable of commenting on any scientific subject knowledgeably.
For instance it is well known in the occular sciences that the human eye could not have evolved to its current state.
Bull puckey. Even Darwin, 150+ years ago, showed the extent gradations of the eye from the simple light-sensitive organ to the full-blown eye complete with focusing lens. You're research is a bit behind the times, don't you think?
Another problem is that none of the fossils from the "missing link", that is the creature that is supposed to have come betweeen [sic] the chimpanzee and man, have ever been found.
First off, we didn't come from chimps (another common creationist misconception). We and the chimps came from a common ancestor. VadeRetro occasionally publishes his link to an image showing the smooth transition of hominid skulls to modern humans.
It seems odd that teaching evolution in schools is such a priority when basic English and Math skills are so far behind.
Evolution (and by extension, Biology) is under assault by the scientifically ignorant, whereas English and Math are not. However, from the quality of posts on these threads of late, the latter two are not being taught all that well, either.
BTW, I, and several other folks here, are veterans of a thousand crevo wars. You would do well to do some research before posting the same-old, worn-out, thrice-refuted creationist canards on these threads.
I can't speak for anyone else (and neither should you), but I learned science by carefully examining the evidence, and understanding how work progressed from point A to where we are today. It is my observation that the results speak for themselves, evolution best explains what we see in nature, which is EXACTLY what a scientific work is expected to do. Pretty simple really.
Has anyone invited Willie Green to this thread?
As an aside, maybe evolution is how G_d outsourced the creation of humans. ;-)
There. Not a troll, merely a thread-arsonist, I was.
Don't know if that's true. Some of the other hominid species, such as Neanderthals, may have given that some thought before they went extinct.
The theory of evolution is just a theory
The word theory means something different in science than it does in common usage. Theories are the result of a hypothesis, or educated suggestion, being tested and found to be consistent with observation. A theory coherently explains a large range of observations. It is in contrast to a law which simply expresses a regularity seen in observations without attempting to explain that regularity. Theories do not become laws. Laws are not somehow more certain than theories. Both are on equal footing in science.
There's no way life could have arisen from non-living chemicals/There's no way to get from the big bang to humans
Neither the origin of life nor the big bang is covered in the theory of evolution. Evolution only applies once life has begun. It makes no difference how life began.
The second law of thermodynamics makes evolution impossible
The second law of thermodynamics states that IN A CLOSED SYSTEM, entropy always increases. The earth is not a closed system. The earth receives energy from the sun. This release of energy from the surface of the sun at a temperature of 6000K to space at a temperature of ~3K represents an enormous increase in entropy. Therefore, even taking evolution into account, the entropy of the earth/sun system does indeed increase over time.
Creationism is just as valid a theory as evolution/Evolution is not really science
To qualify as a theory in science, an idea must explain observations in such a way as to be falsifiable. This means that it must predict something and finding that this prediction is not true would require abandonment or serious modification of the theory. Evolution meets this requirement. For example, evolution predicts that in billion year old rock layers, no fossils of modern humans will be found. It predicts that all organisms on earth will have nucleic acids as their genetic material. It predicts that it will be possible to observe changes in the genepool of organisms. All of these predictions have been borne out by observations. If any of them are not, then evolution would have to be seriously modified or abandoned. I am sure that someone with more knowledge of biology could provide many more such examples. Creationism, on the other hand, by its very nature can offer no such predictions. The most basic premise of creationism is that there is an omnipotent God who created the universe. By virtue of God's omnipotence, there is no possible observation that could falsify this premise. God could have made the universe appear any way He wanted it to appear.
Evolution has never been provenNeither has quantum theory, or relativity, or any other scientific theory or law. Science never offers proof, merely strong evidence for an idea. Evolution is backed by a large amount of observational evidence.
This is a list of the worst arguements I have encountered over my six months or so on these threads. Hopefully this will head off some of these bad arguments so we can further the debate in an intelligent manner. Any suggestions for additions to these are appreciated.
That particular careful reading is a reading that saves his rhetorical questions to the reader and discards his answers. Not very good scholarship.
He just tried it. The fraud was obvious.
You also protest too much about what you're not, while rejecting vast categories of evidence offhand.
....simple-minded religious zealots....
Excellant summation that pretty well describes the dissent
Any anti-Darwin book is bound to have a large audience, and if an author has any claim of authority, well, why not?
Maybe I should write one. I need a retirement stake. [/sarcasm]
You're right, there is no absolute proof of Evolution. Just a vast preponderance of evidence.
As for Gods hand, there is no scientific evidence one way or another. Science can neither prove, or disprove God. You have to believe in Him on faith.
I personally think that God is powerful enough to have created Evolution itself. A grand invention.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.