Posted on 05/25/2005 3:41:22 AM PDT by billorites
The review is so shallow that it could not possibly have cost the reviewer more than ten minutes of his/her life. It picked off the author for saying things never said, totally misunderstood his elaboration of Gibbs energy and its role in biological systems, and then criticized the author for not taking into account chaos theory.
But chaos theory would be the last thing any intelligent reviewer would expect to find in an article exlicitly devoted to the explication of biological organizational principles. Any alert individual would probably instantly realize that chaos theory has practically zero role to play in such an investigation.
In my view this reviewer was not only lazy, but hostile to any and all insights that do not directly connect with his or her present concerns and/or previous commitments.
And on the strength of one inarticulate and nonresponsive review-cum-VETO, an excellent article has been condemned to oblivion. (At least for now....)
There is something really, really sick about this. I have no permission to publish my evidence. I hope that circumstance may change.
But until that time, I am not free to respond to further queries regarding this matter.
Sorry Doc. Thanks for writing.
I think Philosophy should be allowed to critique Science, and even to offer Philosophies that are hoped to someday be adopted into the world of Science.
Doc, I was so "carried away there" I didn't have the civility/decency to thank you for your offer of help. So please let me thank you for that here, and now.
Jeepers, you'd think the reviewer ought to at least describe the circumstances of his life and how much time he spent on it, e.g. the dog died this morning, I spent 10 minutes on the review.
I've read both articles. From the tone, the authors seem to be complaining that they were rejected, so instead of fixing up their research, they complain that other reject them. This isn't uncommon. As I haven't reviewed the papers that were rejected, I don't know if the authors of the articles you cited were justified.
Shoddy research is the third most common reason for rejection, ranking behind bad spelling and bad grammar.
What would be an intelligent cause that had no designer?
Practical old esheppa just wants stuff that works. ID and creationism don't meet the test.
Why? I would have expected such a reference. Just from what you wrote, it seems that the reviewed article put forth a suggestion without considering currently accepted theories; even if one is challenging current theory, it must be addressed even if to show its lack. (That's the way I got my new ideas into print; show why they are better.)
you: What would be an intelligent cause that had no designer?
I've offered three candidates for designer (intelligent causation): God, collective consciousness, aliens. I'm sure there are more, those are off the top of my head.
Collective consciousness is an example of a non-personified intelligence cause or "designer". In one view, intelligence (epiphenomenon) compiles and accumulates from the cellular level to the universe - a single consciousness. The basic notion is that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
In the top down view, the collective consciousness is timeless and permeates to the cellular level. Of course, the top/down, bottom/up can be combined as well without personifying it.
Hello dear marron! WRT the above: I strongly doubt a "real" scientist would have any problem with the fact that you or I or anybody else believes in a Creator God.
Of all humanity, scientists are thought (expected) to be the most "open minded." So if someone who claims to be a scientist shuts his mind against such views (and the people who hold them, which is the main case here it seems), then i would question that person's credentials as a scientist. I would suspect such a person was something else, promoting himself under the guise of science for non-scientific purposes.
ID is not at all interested (as far as I can tell) in proving the existence of God. ID more than Darwinists (I suspect) understands that this is not a proper scientific question at all.
Speaking for myself, a person who is NOT closely identified with ID (in my own mind, at least), I am interested in studying the DESIGN, recognizing that the "identity" of the designer is not the question under investigation. I am convinced there is design/form/purpose in universal nature. And I would like to understand it better. The best way to do that, it seems to me, is just to observe reality, and take it from there, wherever the trail leads....
You wrote: "Dawkins thinks that if he shows how it happened, he has disproven God, he thinks faith in God is dependent on "mystery".
Fascinating insight, marron. But if he wants to utterly 'demystify" the world, why, then, would he try to sell his "prescription for world-demystification" by resort to the rhetorical imagery of mystery?
This sort of thing makes my head hurt, makes me bleed through my ears. Truly, i do not understand such people at all. Hope that changes, though.
Thank you so much for your beautiful post, marron.
Whatta schlub. I'm embarrassed for him/her.
The unreasonable effectiveness of math - dualities and mirror symmetries - are like Las Vegas neon signs to me, saying as you have said: "there is design/form/purpose in universal nature."
Really? Do you consider the universe as described by Newton pretty much philosophically identical to that described by Einstein? Do you think it needs no explanation or thought that we continue to use Newtonian physics to get work done, even though we know it to be massively wrong? Do you think that the fact that we can't account for 90% of the gravity we can measure is pretty much philosophically mundane? Do you find it totally unremarkable that the universal law of gravity seems to be the biggest effect in the universe, at large scale, and technically undetectable at small scale?
Actually, this seems like a pretty odd question to me. Why would you think abstract scientific theories aren't philosophical entities?
1 the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence.As to your other questions. Yes, the philosophies behind Newton's and Einstein's theories are very similar. For example, they are both fully deterministic.
2 the theories of a particular philosopher.
3 a theory or attitude that guides one’s behaviour.
4 the study of the theoretical basis of a branch of knowledge or experience.
I think the general adequacy of Newton's theory is well explained and that is because it is not only not massively wrong, but is a very, very good approximation of reality within a wide range of conditions.
The inability to account for over 90% of the large scale gravitational effects observed in the universe is certainly fascinating. When we figure it out (I mean come up with a good theory to explain it) I'll be able to tell if progress was blocked by philosophical obstacles or not. I suspect that will turn out not to be the case.
Finally, what do you mean gravity is undetectable at small scale? Compared to the universe I and the chair I'm sitting are very small scale but the gravitational force holding me on it is quite detectable (and growing year by year). As I understand it, gravity plays a role, or at least must be taken into account, in atom traps so evidently even at that small scale it works the way we expect. Are you concerned that we don't have the equipment to measure the gravitational attraction between, say, two atoms?
Yes sir, and thank you.
As a youngster I was a member of a southern Baptist church -- literal Bible & 6,000 year-old earth (no snake-handling or speaking in tongues).
Long before high-school it was pretty clear to me that a 6 day creation and Noah's flood were myths on the order of Zeus and Odin. Disappointing, but as a Baptist the basis of my faith was in Jesus and his sacrifice, the New Covenant -- not in OT Jewish legends.
After school I went into the service and had the time and money to get books on the history and to expand on the Bible. Some of those contained the (then) new translations of the 1945 Nag Hammandi texts.
Well then! The Gospels (and the Church) was much more complex than what my Pastor had taught. The memes of Christian doctrine were scattered amongst the various sects. To consolidate, a Catholic (meaning universal) Church would've had to weed out "good"-acceptable doctrine from the "bad"-unacceptable. The Bible (& New Testament) that we have today is screened, filtered, and edited to suit the interests of the Church.
The point? (I didn't forget) is that Paul, by virtue of his 3 year-old vision of Christ, is not a reliable witness to Jesus. Why he occupies so much real estate in the Bible can only be explained by: it "suits the interests of the Church".
Thus, as an observer so far, I tend to lower the bar significantly where the supernatural is concerned. So much so, in fact, that a virgin birth, turning water in to wine, walking on water, rising from the dead, healing diseases, etc. is only slightly above the routine where the creation is concerned.
I don't. That I might win the lottery because a god diddled with natural probabilities doesn't strike me as a rational view. That a Jesus existed, stirred up some shi+, then was crucified -- I score that as probable. The rest of it is zero, creation included.
You:
That should include ideological bias as well. Nevertheless, it ought to be very straight forward to judge evidence without bias. Juries and judges do it every day - as has a previously very biased general public in recovering from centuries of racial bias. Sure, none of these have been perfect - but a good faith effort over all these years has served us very well indeed. In sum, it requires awareness, honesty and personal discipline to recognize when one is harboring a personal prejudice and then overcome it.
I can't go with this. Using lovely-sounding language ("good faith," "honesty"), plus a really neat analogy to racial bias, you are cloaking yourself in what you imagine is a guise of intellectual neutrality, and from that supposedly lofty position you are attempting to do what the Kansas school board is doing -- you want to change the very definition of science to include the supernatural.
As we've discussed many times before, science can't do that. It's not bias; it's reality. It's not philosophical materialism; it's the necessity of the workplace -- procedural materialism. The evidence that science works with was often neglected or misunderstood in pre-scientific times, because people were so preoccupied by thoughts of the supernatural that they neglected to investigate the natural world. Pre-scientific intellectuals usually had disdain for the natural world.
So into that scorned and neglected area came the grubby, getting-his-hands-dirty naturalist -- doing natural (not supernatural) philosophy. Science works, and works very well, because it's limited to searching out natural causes and explanations. It's got a niche and it stays there. A scientist can't do deity-research in the lab. There's no DeoScope, no DeoMeter, no deity scales or tools of any kind for a scientist to work with.
Call it an "ideological bias" if you like to feel victimized, but that's not what it is. It's the procedural method that makes science ... well, science. There's no way in this world you'll ever persuade the scientific community that unseen interventions by the unknown, un-evidenced, "green men from Uranus" have equal (or possibly superior) standing as the cause of anything.
It's more than that. See my post 1,779.
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.