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
No, science is not about majority rules.
Science is an iterative process of observation and theory formation. Theory formation, followed by confirming or disconfirming observation, is what separates science from all other means of acquiring knowledge. Consensus or majority opinion are just politics. Every instition has politics, but science lives outside and beyond politics. Political errors are eventually corrected by observation and theory formation.
Sensory data is refined, extended and corrected by the iterative process of theory formation and observation. It is the theory formation and testing -- the iterative process -- that gives science its power.
What kind of evidence does science have to work with other than sensory data? Granted, sensory data does not fit into a theory until it is run through logical processing, but at bottom, and especially with regard to evolution, sensory data is the first line of information for human reason to deal with.
Is it reasonable to postulate that there can be no theory without observation, and there can be no observation without sensory data? I mean, I've never considered science to be purely Platonic in nature.
In reality, naturalism is bootstrapped from experience. It begins when we discover, as infants, that we can act and often predict the results of our actions. It continues, when we discover, both from our own experience and from the experiences of others, that a world model based on our own experiences and those of others, and including only natural causes and effects, works.
I've said this before; but what the hey: the most religious people in the US today are hardline naturalists compared with the natural philosophers of four centuries ago. My churchgoing neighbors, if their soybeans get rust, blame fungus and spray with a fungicide. Four centuries ago they would have blamed a supernatural cause and prayed. If their kids get sick, they blame a microorganism and go to a doctor; four centuries ago they would have blamed a supernatural cause, and prayed. Thank heavens, over the last four centuries, we didn't have a movement to resist the search for natural causes for soybean rust or disease.
We are all naturalists nowadays. The distinction is only between the 99% naturalists, the 99.9% naturalists, and the 100% naturalists. As for Johnson's book - I've read bits (couldn't make it the whole way through, and didn't see why I should, once I'd gotten the point) - and he doesn't understand the mechanics of science.
No. There's a fundamental difference. I'm sorry if you don't see it. Post #2618 is as simple as the concept can be stated in English.
What makes science fundamentally different from other ways of obtaining knowledge is its iterative process of forming theories to explain observed phenomena, testing the theories with experiments and further observations, refining the theory, and repeating the process indefinitely.
The distinction is not artificial.
The natural order includes every phenomenon that can be put to the test, directly or indirectly.
It is religion that insists that its key phenomena shall not be put to the test.
No human being starts with a philosophy. We start with the observation that when we scream our tiny lungs out, our mother comes running.
Philosophy is the post hoc rationalization of what we already think.
And after she comes running once, the post hoc rationalization begins.
One, I object to the suggestion that things are being "slipped under the table." This implies dishonestly. Science is a tool for describing the physical world in concrete terms in such a way as to produce repeatable results. Science cannot and should not address the supernatural.
Two, the argument you are making is epistemological in nature. There is nothing with the study of epistemology. Questions such as 'what is knowledge' and 'how do we know what our senses tell us is true' are all very important questions. It is, however, not relevant to the issue at hand because epistemology is a branch of philosophy.
This sort of thing is endemic to creationism/evolution debates. It is not that the objections creationists have with evolution are invalid. It is just that they are philosophical in nature, and as such, non-scientific.
I have no problem with someone who has philosophical objections to evolutionary theory. If they believe that the wonder of existence implies the Creator, this is well and good. I have no problem with this. If someone chooses not to believe evolution occurs, this is fine. If someone chooses not to believe the evidence, this is fine, too. But I have a problem when people imply there is massive fraud perpetrated by the scientific community in supporting evolutionary theory. I believe that this type of supposition borders on being a paranoid conspiracy theory.
But this postulate is unnecessary. Nothing in nature has been observed that would make this a productive hypothesis.
Virtually every phenomenon from volcanos to disease has been postulated as the result of intervention. Once you allow this hypothesis you are finished with your research.
I don't see how this follows. One can assume supernatural causes behind the physical and still explore the physical - what it is, and to some degree, how it works.
I'm not so sure about that. I suspect most of us start with the observation that when we scream our tiny lungs out a nipple pops into our mouths.
Sadly, that doesn't work for adults. =(
Your insight is most perceptive, chronic-loser.
There seems to be a colossal "refusal to apperceive" on the part of the "metaphysical naturalists" (a/k/a/ scientific materialists) out there -- a refusal to recognize the existence of the issue of most central concern to ID investigators.
Scientific materialists (e.g., Lewontin, Dawkins, Monod, Wilson, Pinker, et al.) demand to START with matter, and then let everything flow (in a "trial-and-error" process) from that start, to be "organized" by the effects of random collisions (in later times, by random mutation/natural selection). After some 15 billion years or so of random collisions, we neatly obtain the Universe we see all around us -- which is "the way it is and not some other way," as Leibniz put it. Yet as materialist theory goes, this result was allegedly obtained by virtue of a 15-billion-year-old chain of accidents.
Such eminent thinkers as Hoyle and Penrose have stated that the odds the Universe is the product of random chance, that it actually occurred in the fashion the scientific materialists say it did, are astronomically improbable, as I recall something on the order of 1055 to one. (That number is 10 with 55 zeros following it.)
Yet it's these kinds of odds that the scientific materialists are placing their bets on. It just doesn't seem rational to me. What am I missing here?
It seems to me matter cannot be sui generis: If it exists in space and time then it is most likely the the result of a cause, of something else; and its motions governed by something more fundamental than itself, which constitutes the principles by which it is governed. The laws of physics themselves are not material things. Further it is difficult to conceive of a "law" as a random production by definition. "Randomness" and "law" are terms that couldn't be more antithetical, mutually-exclusive even.
It's as if the metaphysical naturalist comes into a movie already run half-way through, and is not the least bit curious about or interested in what happened at the movie's beginning. But he's confident he understands its ending regardless.
Now we need not necessarily be talking about a temporal beginning here, though it is virtually certain the Universe had a beginning in time. We are talking about the first link in the causal chain on which everything else depends. This is a logical problem -- with profound ontological and epistemological implications for absolutely everything that exists in the Universe.
Sigh. It seems the scientific materialist/metaphysical naturalist simply refuses to see that physical and natural laws, naturalistic/materialist philosophies (including the one he himself espouses), consciousness/intelligence/information, the very idea of science as a discipline are "supernatural" things -- in the sense that "matter in its motions" cannot exhaustively account for them. It seems life itself is "supernatural" in this sense.
Thank you so much for your perceptive post, chronic_loser.
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