Posted on 08/17/2005 4:37:36 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
Care to point them out?
I listed all three in the post. Since you committed the inductive fallacy twice in your own tag line (as well as the abusive ad hominem), I'll let you meditate on it for awhile.
Indeed, science today often uncritically accepts the materialist presupposition -- although it has never as far as I know been subject to experimental test
How could materalism be tested experimentally? In it's general use it is a philosophical perspective, not a scientific theory that is falsifiable by empirical evidence. What kind of test would you have in mind?
I would also point out that Darwin's theory maintains that a random process can give rise to purposeful biological outcomes. There are logical objections that can be made against this supposition. In any case, I am not aware that the theory itself has ever taken a serious look at whether randomness is something (objectively) real or something (subjectively) apparent to an observer.
I think you're succumbed to a (common) misinterpreattion about randomness as conceived of in Darwinian evolution.
When randomness is talked about in evolutionary theory, all it means is that the mutations in an individual's genome happen in a 'blind' manner. That is, they do not disproportionately favour changes to an individual's genes that would improve that individual's biological fitness. If that assumption weren't the case then we would have to infer that mutations were in some way guided to produce improvements in the individuals they occured
But in all other respects mutations are assumed to be non-random, i.e. they are the direct, predictable effects of various physical interactions on DNA molecules. So Darwinism makes no commitment to randomness being 'objective' or 'subjective', as you put it. The term is used simply as an assertion that mutations are not 'guided' to favour improvements in the genome when statistically they shouldn't.
Since you did not specify which of my statements in my post you objected to I will consider both.
Are we talking about the average crevo debate on the Web or in some statement made by a credentialed scientist? If you suggesting that someone, somewhere said such a thing I would have to agree, just about everything that can be said has been said on the Web. The author of the Web page I addressed made a over-generalization with an accompanying free hand in assigning motivation (unfounded) to the statement. Since trying to address an over generalization is virtually impossible and indeed useless, I took him to be specifically concerned with the views of respected scientists and educators whose publications are accessible by the average non-scientist. In no argument that I have witnessed or read has an evolutionary scientist ever discounted another scientist because of his faith. They have been discounted because their credentials give no authority in biology or their statement is based on their religion/beliefs rather than science.
The second question I addressed was whether or not theistic doctoral candidates were rejected because of their religious beliefs. As stupid as the professor in your example is, the example is not a case of degree granting turned bad.
The Web page author jumped to a conclusion that since the candidates were religious and they were rejected that it must be the case that their rejection was a result of that belief system. Post Hoc ergo Propter Hoc reasoning. He then over generalized it to apply to all other cases of religious candidates being rejected. He took great care to avoid the mention of those religious candidates who were successful on their initial or subsequent tries. His obvious intent was to colour all institutions with the same misguided brush (Category error).
js1138, I think you are conflating ID and creationism here. The former is science, the latter theology. ID does not say, for instance, that the Universe "is not much older than ten thousand years."
And the former is science because is stands "for an organized body of knowledge, and an organized set of methods and procedures for acquiring and testing knowledge." The method is the scientific method; nothing has changed here from "regular" or conventional science, except the materialist presupposition.
You wrote: "I would be really excited by a statement from knowledgeable ID proponents outlining what they would teach as the content of science classes."
Well I don't know whether you would regard me as knowledgeable or not; but I gave my view of that in my last. Thanks for writing, js1138!
Late today, a reporter called NCSE and, asking for comment, told us that the U.S. Office of Special Counsel had dropped Richard von Sternberg’s religious discrimination complaint against the Smithsonian Institution. The short version is that Sternberg, as an unpaid research associate at the Smithsonian, is not actually an employee, and thus the OSC has no jurisdiction. This was not particularly surprising, considering that PT contributer Reed Cartwright noted way back on February 2 that exactly this might happen.
Legally, this appears to be the end of things. However, as the Panda’s Thumb has documented over the past year (Meyer 2004 Medley, google search), the Meyer/Sternberg/Smithsonian affair has been a piece of politics from the beginning. The OSC’s opinion guarantees it will be politics to the end.
In essence, the OSC opinion, authored by Bush appointee James McVey, seems designed to give the religious right another talking point about how any criticism of ID or the ID movement’s actions amounts to religious discrimination by the evil secular scientific establishment, even though ID is allegedly science, not religion. Somehow, it manages to do this (1) while telling Sternberg that OSC doesn’t have jurisdiction, (2) without any contrasting opinion from the accused parties, and (3) without documenting any actual injury to Sternberg, who still has his unpaid research position, an office, keys, and access to the collections. The opinion is therefore a pretty strange document to read. (We will see if we can post it on the web; it contains internal Smithsonian emails, which may make it confidential.)
There are a number of other details worth discussing, so I am sure there will be more post-mortem of the Meyer/Sternberg affair here on PT. There is already a pretty obvious campaign by the religious-right echo chamber to spin Sternberg’s loss — see Klinghoeffer’s latest screed at the National Review, and this not-exactly-fair-and-balanced news piece from the Washington Times.
However, one particularly entertaining part of the opinion occurs when NCSE’s advice to Smithsonian staff is discussed. Among the Smithsonian staff, there was evidently a fair bit of outraged email discussion of Sternberg’s actions — Sternberg had, after all, just involved the PBSW and the Smithsonian in an internationally-noticed scientific scandal, and had guaranteed that the PBSW and Smithsonian would now have their good names put on Discovery Institute bibliographies and talking points for the foreseeable future. In NCSE’s limited contact with individuals at the Smithsonian, we gave our usual advice (also found in the PT critique of Meyer’s paper), namely: don’t overreact, and instead focus on criticizing the scientific problems with Meyer’s article and Sternberg’s editorial decisions. In the OSC complaint, this gets portrayed as some kind of scandal. Keeping in mind that these sentences seem to involve the dubious procedure of the OSC somehow reading the minds of a group of people, I quote the OSC opinion:
Eventually, they [the Smithsonian higher-ups] determined that they could not terminate you [Sternberg] for cause and they were not going to make you a “martyr” by firing you for publishing a paper on ID. They came to the conclusion that you had not violated SI directives and that you could not be denied access for off-duty conduct. This was actually a part of the strategy advocated by the NCSE. (OSC opinion, p. 5)
How devious of NCSE, recommending that Sternberg not be fired from his unpaid position! Even more devious, the Smithsonian appears to have taken this advice! Will the crimes of NCSE never cease?
End quoted material
Where would they be without the abusive ad hominem and the misuse of induction?
"I listed all three in the post. Since you committed the inductive fallacy twice in your own tag line (as well as the abusive ad hominem), I'll let you meditate on it for awhile.
That is listing them out? Come on, you can do better than that. Which of them is a hasty generalization, false analogy, exclusion, unrepresentative sample or slothful induction? Where exactly in my sig is the argumentum ad hominem?
That sounds to me like saying lightening is not much different from lightening bug.
Presuppositions aside, is there some methodology distinctly associated with ID? Could you give me an example of an ID line of research?
The inductive fallacy? Perhaps you'd care to be specific - there are lots of inductive fallacies, after all.
Are you saying that materialism is a basic supposition of science? Then we are in trouble, as idealist phuilosphers like Berkeley showed a long time ago, "matter" does not exist. "Things" but not "matter."
I've been pondering this for several minutes now, and the more I think about it the more it bothers me. As a child of the 60s, it sounds so familiar, so much like the New Age crowd I went to college with.
I'm trying to think of a specific bit of science that could be done that is not, at some level, materialistic.
Perhaps you are referring in some way to information, but I don't see how it would be relevant. Information is just a tokenization of material transactions.
We've been round and round on this without any satisfaction. My position is that anything that interacts with material is material. Spirits, fields, God, whatever. The problem is not with material, but with an arbitrary and false definition of material that excludes important properties.
You think so? Here are some instructions you could disobey. Let me know how it works out.
He wanted to make sure he covered all the bases.
Policy, however, is never explicit. Because it is written by lawyers, there is always the fudge factor called discretion. They know that no law is self-enacting
BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHA!
I don't have any kind of test in mind, moatilliatta, and for the reason you give: materialism is a philosophical "opinion," or doctrine, and therefore is not something that can be subjected to empirical test. Yet this is the very "opinion" that lies at the root of so-called scientific materialism, or metaphysical naturalism -- and consequently, of neo-Darwinism.
You wrote: "When randomness is talked about in evolutionary theory, all it means is that the mutations in an individual's genome happen in a 'blind' manner. That is, they do not disproportionately favour changes to an individual's genes that would improve that individual's biological fitness. If that assumption weren't the case then we would have to infer that mutations were in some way guided to produce improvements in the individuals they occured."
Jeepers, you're making my point for me, moat. The randomness of Darwinian theory IS the very "assumption" on which the theory rests. But it seems to me science must be very careful what it "assumes," for assumptions end up getting fed into conclusions. If an assumption is faulty, then anything built on it is probably faulty, too.
Thank you for your thoughful post....
Bring a twelve-inch hunting knife on a plane, and then tell me policy is never explicit. I don't want an argument, I want proof. Have a friend videotape your discussion with the TSA, since you may be incommunicado for a while.
Randomness in not an assumption in evolution. It is (so far) an observed fact.
As the granularity of biochemistry improves, and precision increases, we may find deterministic processes, even something analogous to thinking going on in the genome. Do you really think mainstream science is avoiding this? A Nobel prize awaits anyone who discovers that genetic variation has a significant non-stochastic component.
Why would there be articles in Scientific American that include such phrases as "learning to evolve". The implication is that evolution itself has produced mechanisms that make variation more likely to produce favorable outcomes. This is the kind of thing being studied. What would you study?
Indeed, I was....
....but I don't see how it would be relevant. Information is just a tokenization of material transactions.
Are you sure that Shannon information can profitably be understood as a "tokenization of material transactions?" Are the physical laws themselves of this same character? How about logic?
You wrote: "The problem is not with material, but with an arbitrary and false definition of material that excludes important properties."
Okay, I'm game: How do you define "the material" and what are its important properties?
I was a child of the '60s, too. Lotsa flakes running around back then. My favorite was the freak who kept saying, "I am God." But to speak of a "materialist presupposition" or predilection, or bias, or opinion, or whatever you want to call it simply refers to the widely-held view today that matter alone (in its motions) is "all that there is." Everything that exists is completely reducible to matter -- because there is nothing else in the Universe.
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