Creationism: God's gift to the ignorant (Religion bashing alert)

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

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?

Calculations of a priori probabilities of this sort are completely specious? And that even if they weren't, they're the sort of odds we find against everyday occurences?

Take Boltzmann's equation S = k ln W. Now invert it: W = exp(S/k). Take a process whose entropy is -100 J/K. With Boltzmann's constant k = 1.3 X 10^-23 J/K, that gives you a probability of the process of exp(-10^25) or so; in other words, about 1 in 1 followed by 5 X 10^24 zeroes, give or take a factor of 10.

That's the a priori probability of a couple of ice cubes forming from water in your freezer after you've filled the trays up with water. You could either learn to love luke-warm drinks, like the English, or be skeptical about a priori probability calculations.

The problem is you see intervention as somehow at odds with what you can observe. I reject utterly the notion that there is some kind of "natural" universe which left to itself chugs along, and only needs "intervention" for a virgin birth, a resurrection, or some other puzzlement.

Then, when one of your children gets sick, why seek medical treatment, when clearly direct intercession with the primum mobile would eliminate all that intermediate futzing around with the here-and-now?

I do hope you're not one of those hypcritical anti-naturalists who turns his key in the ignition rather than praying for the divine spark.

It is clear from your response that ONE of us is confused about what the other is saying. Since if you are confused, it means I did not do a good enough job explaining myself. You ask: Then, when one of your children gets sick, why seek medical treatment, when clearly direct intercession with the primum mobile would eliminate all that intermediate futzing around with the here-and-now? In doing so, you make the same disjunction that I emphatically deny (or at least I THOUGHT I emphatically denied) exists. A materialst starts with matter alone and builds his construct of the universe from there. To ask me why do I work, study, think, etc. since my worldview supposedly demands that I conjure the divine for activity means he doesn't understand that I reject emphatically this bifurcated world of "natural and supernatural."

....I do hope you're not one of those hypcritical anti-naturalists who turns his key in the ignition rather than praying for the divine spark.
Indeed, why bother with this post but rather just "pray" that God will "enlighten" you? The problem is that you are like a person who holds up an orange and says "the half of the orange you see is ALL THERE IS"( or all that can be meaningfully spoken about ) and if someone argues with you that the other half truly exists...., it is out of our field of view, you posit that they are saying THE SAME THING YOU ARE, just substituting the "other" half of the orange. As a matter of fact, I have been known to pray that my car would start. Sadly some of them have not been "good" prayers.... (like 'God, please start this damn car!") but I still prayed as I turned the ignition. A naturalist would tell me to save my breath, but he is just one more person telling me that there is only half an orange.

Please "stupid proof" your calcs here for me if you would. I confess I did not understand the mechanics of your argument, though I did get the picture of what you are saying. My problem comes in trying to use Boltzmann to define probabilities is something as dense as water. Be gentle with me please. It has been almost 30 years since PChem. My (very limited) knowledge here translates to a rough approximation of "Bolzmann is great when it comes to ideal gasses but his equation is less and less accurate as higher density materials are in view" (don't bother googling for that..., no one else is so thickheaded to put it in such crass terms). Again, this may just be that I dont' understand Boltzmann. If so, my ego is not on the line here, and I can take correction.

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.

I maintain that epistemology and science have a great deal to do with one another, and that to deny one on account of the other is to place unnecessary constraints upon the conquest of ignorance. One's fundamental assmptions about reality are sure to be a factor in the application of logic to the evidence at hand. At the same time, I welcome a process of science that focuses upon strictly material concerns while leaving philosophical concerns in the background.

How our senses function is a material issue that holds tremendous sway in what is understood and spoken in the scientific world. How our reason functions is critical to the assmuptions we make and the conclusions we draw. Neither of these will assist in arriving at absolute Truth, and so science, strictly speaking, is left to deal with relative truth.

I'd be curious to know if science can quantify the amount of information needed to construct a functioning strand of DNA using basic elements as the building material. A strand of DNA is finite, and we are dealing strictly with material. Can a strand of DNA exist without intelligent, i.e., informational, input? I'm inclined to think most people would answer "no."

Or, I suppose we could make it simpler. How much information is needed to put together one atom of hydrogen? No intellectual capacities, cause, purpose, or design needed?

It seems logical to me that intelligent design must be behind the universe as we know it if only because intellegence must be involved in observing and sorting it out in measurable, material terms.

That philosophy is not science.

Tell that to the scientific materialists. Materialism is, after all, a "philosophical opinion."

Check this out: according to the American Heritage Dictionary, materialism is "The philosophical opinion that physical matter in its movements and modifications is the only reality and that everything in the universe, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of physical laws." [Except on this definition the physical laws themselves.]

Here's the authoritative Oxford Dictionary of the English Language: Materialism is "philos. The opinion that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications; also in a more limited sense the opinion that the phenomena of consciousness and will are wholly due to the operations of material agencies."

Here's Websters: "a theory that physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and that all being and processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter."

The first two dictionaries explicitly refer to materialism as a philosophy. The third refers to it as a theory.

Respecting the third case, it was recently pointed out to me that in the entire history of science, at no time has there ever been a formal investigation as to whether matter is the only thing in the Universe. That is why materialism is either a "philosophy," or a "theory" -- which has never been empirically validated, just simply taken for granted, one gathers, because the theory is "friendly" to one's philosophical presuppositions/predilections.

Thus materialists are all "closet philosophers" in any case. So please don't tell me that philosophy is not science. I already know that, just as science is not philosophy. Tell it to the scientists who are at the same time practicing philosophers. You want, I gather, a hard and clean, total "Cartesian split" between the disciplines. But as a practical matter, this never happens.

Furthermore, as I pointed elsewhere recently, to say that there are only material causes in the Universe is to load the conclusion in in one's premise; which makes for a circular argument.

This is simple logic. And the fact is, science can get absolutely no where without logic. And logic isn't something that one can just "pick and choose" -- that is, to employ in just some cases, but not in all cases.

Think about it.

Thanks for writing.

"Many supporters of ID hope that the existence of God -- or at least an entity or entities with super-human intelligence -- can be proven through their work."

Found the above statement out there. I wonder what the author means by "many." Whoever they are, I am not one of them.

Frankly, it would be unreasonable to expect science to prove the existence of God. In fact, I would consider it an abuse of reason to expect as much. Science has yet to "prove," in an absolute sense, the Law of Gravity, let alone explain what makes it tick.

OTOH, it is not unreasonable for science, through its observations, to lend credence to the assmption that the universe demonstrates attributes of intelligence and design by means of its orderly arrangements and functions.

I count it as less than helpful that so many people make scientific statements without admitting to their underlying assumptions. What little I've read regarding the overall efforts of man to obtain knowledge leaves me unimpressed in view of the object involved.

Take the discipline of paleontology, for example. How many observers have had the benefit of directly viewing the evidence in 3D? Very few, and the few there are have only seen a tiny fraction of it. As for myself, I have to take their word for it, when they write their books, that their observations, interpretations, and 2D representations are accurate.

In pointing this out I am in no way suggesting the pursuit of knowledge is useless. I am only calling attention to the fact we do not know as much as we often claim, and that what we often claim as "knowledge" is less direct than we might care to admit.

what else constitutes scientific evidence if it is not what manifests itself to the senses either directly or indirectly?

I thought I'd explained this already. A fact/phenomenon/whatever X is evidence for a scientific theory if it follows from that theory. For X to be evidence, the theory must explain X. It must not be the case that both X and not X are consistent with the theory.

I consider it an illogical proposition to suggest a universe unfolding without intelligence or design yet producing an intelligent observer.

Why? Has the concept been disproved? Is it contradictory? It sounds perfectly logical to me. To illustrate, are you familiar with the multiverse interpretation of QM? In this interpretation is is supposed that every possible outcome of every "measurement" takes is an actual outcome in some fraction of the multiverse - every possibility, no matter how remotely unlikely, is realized. Without any intention or design, it is *certain* that there will a universe like this one with me typing this post to you.

Now, is that *true*? I don't know. But there is nothing illogical about it.

do you think the amount of information needed to design and build a viable strand of DNA can be quantified?

That would depend on what you mean by "amount of information" and "viable" and "viable DNA." In complexity theory, the amount of information in X is the length of the smallest program that can calculate X. I suppose the biological equivalent would be the shortest molecule that can perform biological function X.

I assume by viable you mean stable and self-replicating. DNA cannot exist on its own and relies on an organism for its propagation so it is probably more interesting to consider self-replicating RNA or proteins. I recall mention on some other thread of a self-replicating peptide in the some tens of amino acids long, let's say 30 for argument's sake. Letting there be 20 different amino acids (let's call that five bits), I make that to be 150 bits. I'd consider that an upper bound on the minimal amount of information needed for viability.

can the chances of doing so without the aid of intelligence or design be quantified?

"Chances" can only be calculated relative to some definite stochastic process. I assume you mean the chances in our universe, so you'll need a complete description of all ways to achieve viability. Furthermore, as Dembski often warns (but just as often ignores his own warning), you must give an independent specification of "viability." Those two requirements make the problem quite daunting.

Should you choose not to interact, that will be fine. I am actually delighted by your response as it is usually a sign that a materialist for the first time understands the nature of a true Christian worldview. The real issue here is NOT over some weird literalism by fundamentalists which results in a whole spate of bizarre doctrinal issues, from the age of the earth to how special creation occurred to some goofy "left behind" series of millenial screeds. These are "family feuds" within Christendom and while they can be annoying, are not the REAL cause of all the caterwauling and howling. People just don't get pissed off enough about stuff like that to make the kind of effort and display the kind of emotions you see on these and other boards. The kind of "culture war" you see over "evolution" is really about the conflict of these two worldviews.
The mistake many Christians make is to cede the idea that one can start out legitimately from a materialist base and build a coherent and intellectually satisfying worldview. It cannot be done and leads to alot of the silliness you see in the crevo debates. Again, my contention is that the materialist CANNOT build an intellectually coherent nor a personally coherent worldview on rank empiricism. As a matter of fact, you may be surprised at how selective your statement is that our worldviews have no point of intersection. If you wish, we can discuss my root contention with the empiricist, which is that a materialist borrows from a theistic worldview constantly in both your professional (or "scientific") life and your personal life. This borrowing is usually unaware, but always unacknowledged. My contention is that science, divorced from the metaphysical constructs that Christianity originally provided, simply slits its own throat and becomes nothing more than a statitics keeper. The ability to make meaningful statements about the nature of the universe or the reliability of the data collected is contingent on principles of uniformity. The materialist can only arrive there by climbing onto a big soapbox full of nothing. He only has statistics and a heritage that he is doing his best to stab to death while he is sitting on its shoulders announcing the "results of his research."

If you choose not to respond at all to me in the future that will be fine, although disappointing to me. Should our paths cross, I won't be able to jump into some discussion on potassium argon dating, or "transitional forms" or red shifts or any such crap without asking the question "What are we REALLY arguing about here?"

At any rate, you have been civil to me and your brief response, if curt, was not demeaning or hateful. That beats the hell out of most responses on these threads, from theists or non. Thank you.

Whether the philosophical underpinnings of the materialist or Christian actually provide sufficient underpinnings for science, and the complete life of the scientist doing them is the basis for my posts on all these threads.

Now, is that *true*? I don't know. But there is nothing illogical about it.

Once one assumes an infinite number of possibilities for the combination and interaction of matter, any outcome is a possibility, so yes, this is not illogical, as you say. Actually there are at least two unprovable assumptions involved here: 1.) Enough time has transpired to allow for all the combinations to come about so as to produce the universe as we know it, 2.) the elements are capable of self assembly without the aid of intelligent design.

At the same time, with these two assumptions in hand, why could not all the right combinations occur to produce a universe as you know it, complete with the appearance of age, but only produced the day you were born? In view of a range of infinite possibilities, this is not illogical either.

At bottom it seems the conclusion is assumed on account of these two assumptions, and the evidence will always fit both. At bottom it is a reasonable faith to maintain and support. It remains to be seen how firmly that faith is rooted in reality.

Yes it could. I mean yes it would. So long as it didn't violate any conservation laws that is.

Keep in mind though that multiverse outcomes, even though all are realized are not uniformly distributed but obey a probability distribution - more likely outcomes out number less likely ones. Consequently, should one observe a universe whose present state is like ours, it is vastly more probable than not that the apparent past is real.

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.