Posted on 05/25/2005 3:41:22 AM PDT by billorites
Science feeds on mystery. As my colleague Matt Ridley has put it: “Most scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance that drives them on.” Science mines ignorance. Mystery — that which we don’t yet know; that which we don’t yet understand — is the mother lode that scientists seek out. Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a very different reason: it gives them something to do.
Admissions of ignorance and mystification are vital to good science. It is therefore galling, to say the least, when enemies of science turn those constructive admissions around and abuse them for political advantage. Worse, it threatens the enterprise of science itself. This is exactly the effect that creationism or “intelligent design theory” (ID) is having, especially because its propagandists are slick, superficially plausible and, above all, well financed. ID, by the way, is not a new form of creationism. It simply is creationism disguised, for political reasons, under a new name.
It isn’t even safe for a scientist to express temporary doubt as a rhetorical device before going on to dispel it.
“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.” You will find this sentence of Charles Darwin quoted again and again by creationists. They never quote what follows. Darwin immediately went on to confound his initial incredulity. Others have built on his foundation, and the eye is today a showpiece of the gradual, cumulative evolution of an almost perfect illusion of design. The relevant chapter of my Climbing Mount Improbable is called “The fortyfold Path to Enlightenment” in honour of the fact that, far from being difficult to evolve, the eye has evolved at least 40 times independently around the animal kingdom.
The distinguished Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin is widely quoted as saying that organisms “appear to have been carefully and artfully designed”. Again, this was a rhetorical preliminary to explaining how the powerful illusion of design actually comes about by natural selection. The isolated quotation strips out the implied emphasis on “appear to”, leaving exactly what a simple-mindedly pious audience — in Kansas, for instance — wants to hear.
The deceitful misquoting of scientists to suit an anti-scientific agenda ranks among the many unchristian habits of fundamentalist authors. But such Telling Lies for God (the book title of the splendidly pugnacious Australian geologist Ian Plimer) is not the most serious problem. There is a more important point to be made, and it goes right to the philosophical heart of creationism.
The standard methodology of creationists is to find some phenomenon in nature which Darwinism cannot readily explain. Darwin said: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” Creationists mine ignorance and uncertainty in order to abuse his challenge. “Bet you can’t tell me how the elbow joint of the lesser spotted weasel frog evolved by slow gradual degrees?” If the scientist fails to give an immediate and comprehensive answer, a default conclusion is drawn: “Right, then, the alternative theory; ‘intelligent design’ wins by default.”
Notice the biased logic: if theory A fails in some particular, theory B must be right! Notice, too, how the creationist ploy undermines the scientist’s rejoicing in uncertainty. Today’s scientist in America dare not say: “Hm, interesting point. I wonder how the weasel frog’s ancestors did evolve their elbow joint. I’ll have to go to the university library and take a look.” No, the moment a scientist said something like that the default conclusion would become a headline in a creationist pamphlet: “Weasel frog could only have been designed by God.”
I once introduced a chapter on the so-called Cambrian Explosion with the words: “It is as though the fossils were planted there without any evolutionary history.” Again, this was a rhetorical overture, intended to whet the reader’s appetite for the explanation. Inevitably, my remark was gleefully quoted out of context. Creationists adore “gaps” in the fossil record.
Many evolutionary transitions are elegantly documented by more or less continuous series of changing intermediate fossils. Some are not, and these are the famous “gaps”. Michael Shermer has wittily pointed out that if a new fossil discovery neatly bisects a “gap”, the creationist will declare that there are now two gaps! Note yet again the use of a default. If there are no fossils to document a postulated evolutionary transition, the assumption is that there was no evolutionary transition: God must have intervened.
The creationists’ fondness for “gaps” in the fossil record is a metaphor for their love of gaps in knowledge generally. Gaps, by default, are filled by God. You don’t know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don’t understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don’t go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God. Dear scientist, don’t work on your mysteries. Bring us your mysteries for we can use them. Don’t squander precious ignorance by researching it away. Ignorance is God’s gift to Kansas.
Richard Dawkins, FRS, is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, at Oxford University. His latest book is The Ancestor’s Tale
It does happen, however, your example notwithstanding.
So if a human didn't observe it, then evidence of something isn't enough?
Well that would prevent you from believing a lot of things. Like whether OJ did it.
I have to agree with you. You would, in my humble opinion, not have all that much more luck finding a "simple-mindedly pious audience" in Kansas than in any other sizable region in the world.
In fact, theres more likelyhood of finding an audience that at least appears simple-mindedly pious in places like Turkey, where standing up to argue a scientific viewpoint in the wrong company is more likely to result in physical violence and even death threats than in Kansas, where the likely results of arguing evolution's case with its opponents are frustration and incredulity at displays of wilful ignorance.
If you are applying the standard of observation to creationism then why not evolution? LOL but look at what you just said. 'If a human didn't observe it, then evidence of something isn't enough'. Wow hey that's what I've been saying all along about creation and the existence of God. Thanks for saying that.
"The standard methodology of creationists is to find some phenomenon in nature which Darwinism cannot readily explain."
It's not evolution, but I am still seeking a scientific explanation for the Big Bang. How could all the matter in all the galaxies and the universe come from a single point, the size of the head of a pin?
Creation makes more sense to me.
Yeah, I've read that explanation before, and I'm not buying it. It's an erotic love poem, one of the most beautiful ever written, but a lot of people need to see it as something else simply because they're uncomfortable with anything so frankly sensual being in their bible. Those folks need to stop and think-- God created us as sexual beings. God likes sex-- after all, he invented it. ;)
Isn't the trend from order to disorder? At least it is in my desk drawers :-)
They are not in any way the same.
First, there isn't nearly as much evidence to back up GW as evolution. And much of that is contradictory, whereas there is really no genuine evidence in favor of any theory other than evolution.
Second, there is a power constituency for GW. Just one example is the UN, which has discovered that it can use GW as an excuse for extortion of money from the West.
There is no constituency that seeks to profit from evolution, except perhaps the people who are fighting it and taking money from the collection plates on Sunday morning to support their effort.
True, but his attitude is not just a random daily function. At least, I don't think so.
Science doesn't have an "explanation".
God did it.
"Could you point me in the direction of this research? And what, exactly, would this data look like?"
Yes, read some of Michael Behe's work in microbiology and biochemistry. How familiar are you with DNA structure and function and the processes by which DNA/RNA is transcribed for polypeptide/protein production?
One of the things that folk like Dawkins do is obsfucate on the meaning of the word 'evolution'. At one moment they will use it to mean that allele frequency is subject to dynamics (an observable and undoubted fact) with its corollary that phenotype frequency is subject to dynamics, at another they mean the theory of common descent (which is as well-verified a scientific theory as can be at the level of grand explanations in a domain where experiment is essentially impossible, and thus also counts as a fact), at another they use it to mean the claim that the neo-Darwinian synthesis provides a complete account of all observed organismic traits and all biological diversity (a much shakier claim, particularly, if, like Dawkins you want 'random' variation to mean ontologically random, not just 'governed by laws we don't understand').
Now, as I am wont to point out, the idea that a stochastic model, or even stochatic elements in the dynamics of a system imply that the system or its dynamics are not the result of intent is simply false. (A futures market with a single founder and director who can call trading halts still has a dyanmics best modeled by Black-Scholes; in annealed metal crystal sizes are increased by a thermal process, but here (bizarrely, when one hears both Dawkins and the creationists natter on) the presumption is that a bit of annealed metal is an artifact.) Dawkins invokes this assumption to reason from Darwinism to atheism; creationists invoke the contrapositive to reason from theism to the falsity of evolution (which they, too muddily fail to define). Both lines of reasoning are false because the implication they take as an axiom is false.
Now something on the lighter side...
I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying, Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.
I have put off my coat; how shall I put it on? I have washed my feet; how shall I defile them?
(5:2-3)
Translation: "Not tonight, dear... I have a headache."
And how did you arrive at this transparently false conclusion?
I'm familiar with Behe's work, but I fail to see how it in any way helps to "prove" Creationism.
It's true that not every theory withstands the test of time and goes on to be considered a fact by nearly all of the scientific community, but evolution is one that has.
I will not argue the fact that all evidence so far has pointed to evolution as fact. However , I wonder why evolutionists are unwilling to admit they don't have all the answers and they could be wrong. It wouldn't be the first time science made a mistake. After all we are only human.
Not only did the Fathers of the Church regard creation as beginning with something smaller than a mustard seed, the Jewish scholar Nachmanides, was of the same view.
Now, if you are a short-canon protestant, you are under no compulsion on the basis of the Scriptures to believe in creation ex nihilo (since the only Scriptural basis for the doctrine is in Second Maccabees, in the exhortation of Solomonia to her sons to accept martyrdom rather than renounce the Torah), but most Christian and Jews accept the doctrine. I would point out that the most refined theoretical model of the Big Bang, Hawkings null initial condition model, looks remarkably like a mathematical model of what a universe created ex nihilo, with time itself created, would look like from the inside.
I of course said no such thing, nor was my comment dependent upon any such assumption. Narby, as I said, you are only inviting more such red herrings by engaging in discussion with people whose purpose is to troll these threads instead of engaging in honest discussion.
Did you read the article? Researchers do admit they don't have all the answers; however, they are reluctant to do it in public because your average creationist charlatan (the ones who make money off the gullible) will jump on the statement and say, "see, they can't answer it, therefore Goddidit."
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