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
The University of Bologna was the preeminent Catholic university of its era. Its administration was led by bishops and cardinals; the papal legates were its supreme authority (source: New Advent). So, there is no clear basis that I can see to conclude that this G.A. Magnini is a "secular party" unless there's something more to go on. The text linked above does appear to suggest that Prof. Magnini had not viewed Jupiter through a telescope, for whatever that's worth..
Whatever the case may be, this G.A. Magnini is a rather flimsy basis upon with to make such a sweeping insinuation. LOL
"We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged."
Hmmmm...I see there are quite a few scientists listed who are from Biology departments. Guess they just haven't visited Talkorg. or PH's links enough and don't know any better.
I see. and was Aristotle, whose philosophy was the standard point of reference of the day, also an employee of the church?
Aristotle did not scorn Galileo.
Evolutionary algorithms (computer or natural) can be more efficient that one might assume. The selection phase converges exponentially fast to the (currently active) fitness function. The drift (mutation) phase moves rather fast too. While the average drift motion increases proportional to Sqrt(Time), the extremes go like Time. There are drifts that move so fast that the have infinte variation and average; these cover regions that are far apart; bees searching for flowers for example. I don't know if any such drifts occur in genetics, though.
Excellent! I enjoy posting it once in a while if just for the title. =)
That essay once used to be part of a much broader and very entertaining website that I stumbled across back in 1999 iirc, but which sadly vanished some while ago into the ethers of cyberspace. =(
Kinda like the good ol' days of the ALS and Jesse Show for a bit there, yes.
The proponents of his philosophy did.
The said proponents of his philosophy were agents of the Church.
Recto sounds too much like rectal. I'd use another one.
I disagree. If the Bible is the word of God, then why would God lead us to believe that pi=3? Why give exact dimiensions, instead of saying clearly that its "a bit more than" whatever number is given for the dimensions? Even 400 years before the Greeks determined pi accurately, surely God knew that the correct value was not 3, right?
Unless God changed the value of pi in the interim.
I'm impressed you can see anything from your vantage point. Isn't it dark in there? :-)
And now let's hear from combustion computationalist Dr. McIntosh...
there is no hard evidence for molecules-to-man evolution.
What does Macintosh think we're make of? Quark gluon plasmas? We are made of molecules.
Dawkins has long touted stories on how the eye and other organs came into being by supposed slow evolutionary processes, but there is no experimental evidence, even if one did accept the fossils as a record of such changes.
Well, yes there is. Just a mere hundred miles or so south of Dr. McIntosh, in fact, they're examining the evolution of human visual pigments at a molecular level.
Any serious thinker knows that the fossils of the “Cambrian Explosion” period, near the base of the geological column, include some of the most sophisticated eyes ever known to have existed — the compound eyes of trilobites have double calcite lenses, which defeat any slow evolutionary explanation, and, what is more, they have no precursor in the rocks
Actually, 'any serious thinker' knows trilobite eyes evolved; the earliest lenses being simple prisms; the later ones being more complex; and eventually, some trilobites lost their eyes altogether.
Trilobites appear first in the fossil record in the Cambrian. That does not mean that trilobites first appeared in the Cambrian; it means they first developed fossilizable exoskeletons in the Cambrian. Those exoskeletons were made of what? Calcite! So having evolved an adaptation to deposit calcite on their exterior, how implausible is it they also evolved the ability to deposit tiny calcite crystals over their compound eyes to act as lenses.And remember, we're talking compound eyes here; all the lens does is concentrate light; it is not responsible for creating an image. The compound eye would simply work less efficiently without a lens, but it would still work.
What do you make of these two letters?
If creationists didn't talk nonsense, they'd have nothing at all to say?
Most, but not all.
At any rate, here we see that the Church fully supported science, and Galieo had many friends in the church. Were it not for the support of the church, perhaps the Heliocentric Revolution would have happened later in history. Here we see a few stubborn clerics were unwilling to yield to scientific knowledge out of ignorance and fear, much as dogmatic evolutionists cling to their theory for the same reasons.
The faith of the inventor of science, the inventor of calculus or any other prominent scientist is irrelevant to the question of whether there's a place in scientific inquiry for the supernatural, however. Where in Newton's work is there a requirement for a deity, for example. Newton describes the laws of motion and gravity without any reference whatsoever to the supernatural. Similarly, Linnaeus when classifying organisms did so without any reference to a deity. He classified them based on shared morphological characteristics that were observable by him. Similarly, there are many scientists today who both work in evolutionary biology and are Christians. Yes, despite the protestations to the contrary that are often heard on these threads, it is possible to be both an evolutionist and a Christian. However, the faith of these scientists, similar to Newton, Linnaeus, etc., plays no role in the work that they do as scientists.
Mind naming one who wasn't?
The molecular structure of each different type of tRNA is such that it bonds preferentially to a particular amino acid.
And, in fact, it's possible to fiddle with tRNA at the level of DNA so that it will not only accept a different amino acid, but you can also get it to accept an "unnatural" amino acid.
You seem to confuse whether the Bible is the Word of God with the existence of God. The former could quite well be false without any bearing upon the latter. For instance I could very well believe in a personal God, and still consider the Bible to be the work of men.
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