Posted on 10/19/2005 11:23:30 PM PDT by nickcarraway
No sooner had the Darwinists ended their 80th anniversary celebrations of the Scopes trial than they turned their attention to conducting censorship trials of their own. The ACLU has gone from defending teachers to prosecuting them. In a federal courtroom this week, the ACLU argued that science teachers in the school district of Dover, Pennyslvania, are not free under the Constitution to question evolutionary theory. That the Dover school board has to defend the constitutionality of its science curriculum before a federal judge is one more illustration of the insane First Amendment jurisprudence of the last 50 years.
The elite, sensing a chance to score a victory against critics of Darwinism, are watching the trial breathlessly. Slate has assigned famed correspondent Hanna Rosin to cover the trial; the New York Times dispatched Laurie Goodstein -- note that she is a religion not science reporter for the paper -- to cover it. There is an all-hands-on-deck feel to the reporting, which has been made even more critical by the presence of the Dover school board's star witness, Lehigh university biochemist Michael Behe. A dreaded scientist who perversely refuses to accept the overwhelming and obvious "consensus" in favor of Darwinism.
While neither Rosin nor Goodstein are up to the task of explaining evolutionary theory convincingly, they do realize the sacred duty of stopping this scientist. He's wandered much too far on to the Darwinists' turf.
Garbling the elite's dogmatic schema, Goodstein, in the Wednesday edition of the Times, had Behe challenging the "Darwinian theory of random natural selection." Random natural selection? No, no, Ms. Goodstein, nature selects not randomly but necessarily, choosing random mutations that happen to prove useful, under Darwin's theory. What is nature? And how does it choose with such incredible precision and marvelous efficiency? Well, that's not important and certainly not within the province of science, even if Aristotle, who probably believed in Gods and went to temple, did consider these questions in The Physics and concluded that nature requires an intelligent cause.
Goodstein doesn't have the Darwinian terminology down, but she is keenly aware of the elite's favorite argument for evolutionary theory: the scientific establishment says it is so and no reasonable person would question these omniscient scientists. Here's how she presents that point: "Scientific critics of intelligent design -- and there are many -- have said for years that its proponents never propose any positive arguments or proofs of their theory, but rest entirely on finding flaws in evolution." What delightful casualness.
Never mind that through history scientists -- and there are many -- have considered it "science" to examine a theory and find it inadequate if it couldn't explain the facts they did know, such as that beings in nature contain awe-inspiring intricacy, beings they couldn't replicate with their own intelligence. But then what do they know next to the scientific experts at the ACLU?
Aristotle was one of those creationists in a cheap toga who concluded that the abundant design in nature points to an intelligent cause even if that cause isn't visible. "For teeth and all other natural things either invariably or normally come about in a given way; but of not one of the results of chance or spontaneity is this true," he wrote in The Physics, a book that the ACLU would argue violates the separation between church and state.
Though Darwinism resembles an astonishing fable of chance -- the Greek mythmaker Empedocles, not Darwin, deserves credit for launching the idea that nature is undesigned and the product of genetic happenstance -- Goodstein feels confident enough to lampoon Intelligent Design as no more scientific than "astrology." She provides no proof in her story, but leads with the claim that Behe "acknowledged that under his definition of a scientific theory, astrology would fit as neatly as intelligent design." Doesn't Goodstein know that astrology is one of her secularist audience's favorite hobbies?
The problem with Behe's testimony for Hanna Rosin was not too little scientific explanation but too much. She found it all very taxing.
"The courtroom, it turns out, is a poor place to conduct a science class. Behe runs through specific examples of 'irreducible complexity' -- his idea that certain biochemical structures are too complex to have evolved in parts: blood clotting cascades, the immune system, cells," she writes. "He claims his critics have misread crucial bits of data. To a nonscientist such as myself (and presumably the judge), this is like Chinese: I recognize the language, but I have no idea whether the speaker is faking it. I have no context, no deeper knowledge of the relevant literature. The reporter seated next to me has written only four lines of notes for three hours of testimony. The mere fact that the trial is being conducted in such highly technical language means, for the moment, ID is winning."
Nevertheless, she is sure Behe's wrong, and adduces herself as evidence that intelligent design is impossible, "I need look no further than myself for counter-evidence: weak ankles, diabetes, high probability of future death. If there is a designer, she doesn't seem so intelligent."
Scientists who stood alone used to inspire a little more deference in the left. But Michael Behe is one nonconformist they won't defend. The silencers of unpopular science once feared ACLU lawyers. Now they retain them.
George Neumayr is executive editor of The American Spectator.
Nevertheless, the stimuli do have to be transmitted in order to feed your "qualia." So there are at least three things here: the change itself, the means of transporting a stimulus (to the right place), and the qualia (qualium?) itself -- which in turn leads to a response of some sort.
That's a whole lot more than just a simple genetic change, which goes to point out that there are system-level things going on here that the debate (at least at FR) seems to leave out.
What a revealing sentence I AM is! What a magnificient meditation. It's a breath-taker.
Did the murderer have a choice? We as a civilized society evidently believe that he did or else our putting him to death is truly a failure of reason.
Then again, what would be the purpose of reason at all - or morals - or laws - if all decisions are the involuntary consequences of the physical brain?
Getting back to observation though - many (if not most of us) observe that we and others exercise free will. And not only creatures with brains, but creatures without brains also make choices.
> The ultimate arrogance is membership in a 'scientific' establishment which does not tolerate objections or dissent.
Uh-huh. Let us know when you actually find such a mythical establishment. Science is all about dissent... *scientific* dissent.
> What's fascinating to me was God's revelation of his identity to Moses. He said --- "I AM."
Whoa, dude, that's like... deep, and stuff.
This assertion is unqualified. How do you know when you are observing "free will"? What measure are you using?
It is particularly disingenuous to use human unpredictability as evidence of this when we can prove mathematically that strictly deterministic humans must have this property as well. Both non-deterministic and deterministic humans will defy prediction by humans as a necessary mathematical consequence, so observations of non-predictability and apparent liberty in choice are NOT evidence of "free will", as ALL systems will have this property in a similar context. You will need a much stronger measure, but you won't be able to provide it.
If your correspondent believes that "all that there is" is "matter in all its motions" then every non-corporeal whether mathematical structure, geometry, information, form, etc. are all "off the table". To him, they don't exist at all and neither do you as a person, but then again neither does he - because autonomy is also non-corporeal.
[A tidbit: a man stays the same man even though every molecule in his body is replaced every seven years.]
My favorite irony of this "second reality" is that they have bet the farm on matter, when matter is yet neither observed nor made - and indeed, 4D matter may actually be a shadow of the trajectories of massless particle(s) in a 5th dimension. LOL!
OTOH, if your correspondent allows for some corporeals but no transcendent One - then whereas he might accept mathematics, geometries, etc. - he will not accept Spiritual revelations at all as knowledge. These are the "doubing Thomases" - but then again, doubting Thomas was an apostle, too.
And, naturally, there are a lot of correspondents with their own quirks and prejudices.
Thus we've spent a lot of time trying to get to know one another better - exploring worldviews and epistemology - to improve our debates.
This isn't rocket science.
Sure, using complex system theory one can predict markets and other such patterns of behavior. It is predictable because people are predictable, but that doesn't mean that people do not make choices, or that dogs don't make choices or that albatrosses don't make choices.
That the live albatross would choose to fly away instead of dive bombing into the pavement is a pretty solid prediction, but it doesn't mean it is strongly determined by his physico-chemical makeup or DNA. If it were, the dead albatross could have made a choice, too, not to go *splat*.
Likewise, that the dog prefers Alpo over rice is also a pretty solid prediction. But change the freedom of choice to Alpo v. Kibbles n bits and it might be a toss up. Then again, my dog will eat neither one no matter how hungry he is. But that's his qualia at work and his free will.
Even cells make choices. And as the McConnell experiments show, the regenerated half of the flatworm which had no brain remembers the same stimulus as the regenerated half which did - choosing to scrunch up rather than being zapped when exposed to light.
And likewise, 100 army ants on a flat surface will walk in a circle until they die of exhaustion. But put a million of them together and they form a colony, conduct raids, keep a geometry, a calendar and a constant temperature in the nest.
These are all manifestations of decision-making and awareness - free will - in nature.
>>>Science is all about dissent...<<<
Yea, unless the dissent comes from scientists who challenge the so-called Big Bang and Evolution, the gods of the scientific establishment.
Examples are not metrics, and in this case the examples are particularly meaningless. How do you know the dead albatross and the cannonball did not choose to fall? What objective measure are you using to determine whether or not a choice is being made? You are glossing over the hard questions with vague assertions and intuitions.
All you have observed is that one albatross flew away, one did not, and nothing more. You can say nothing more, unless you are claiming omniscience of the internal state of these objects (which incidentally, would make them deterministic and remove all possibility of objective Free Will).
You will never come to a useful or valid conclusion about Free Will if you play fast and loose with terms like "choice". The truth, at least as far as mathematics is concerned, is pretty simple and well defined but you do not like the consequences and so you keep trying to define terms that you can hide those consequences in. Definitions are not reality, and just because I can define a relationship that is mathematically invalid does not give that relationship any kind of reality -- to be real, the mathematical inconsistencies still have to be resolved first.
By that simplistic (and ironically deterministic) definition of "choice", then there a multitude of examples of purely mechanical contraptions that also make choices.
It seems you have reduced "choice" to meaning change.
ROFL!!! Would you like me to post, say, several hundred examples of shrill creationists?
Come back when you can argue this issue on the evidence, instead of just make childish taunts.
But the problem is that all his arguments in support of this idea (that natural selection is unable to account for such complexity) are deeply and fatally flawed.
Behe is a legend in his own mind -- and in the minds of the creationists who desperately want to cling to any pseudoscientific "disproof" of evolution they can find.
Behe can claim that all he wants, but until he can actually demonstrate it, he's just hand-waving.
Meanwhile, when rates of evolution versus the historical record *have* been compared in countless different studies, in scores of different ways, they've been found to be in good accord.
"Must be"? Now *that's* dogmatism.
How about something to do with the "awareness" of life? We could hypothesize "awareness selection" instead of "natural selection."
You can hypothesize anything you like, including Invisible Pink Unicorns(tm).
And so far, all "ID" has is the hypothesis, and some fallacious attacks on evolutionary biology, and a whole boatload of propaganda and PR.
Because that's not *all* it does. Dishonest much?
Evolutionists are trying to censor the ONE paragraph that mentions alternative opinions exist.
Nice misrepresentation you've got there. Someday, I hope to meet an *honest* creationist.
And you're considering THIS as censorship by Creationists?!
Yes. Because it is. And because it's a deeply dishonest and error-filled paragraph, which lies to students about science, and does so for dishonest purposes:
He also said that school children should be taught that the Designer might not exist. He bases this on the fact that he has seen no evidence of ID in the last few hundred million years.
There are additional hard questions for which the answers are merely being presumed, not ascertained.
Does the live albatross actually make a "choice", or is the flap response a reflex? I have yet to see a dropped bird "choose" to fall. Is there really a "choice" involved?
If the live albatross's wings are clipped, does it now fall because it no longer makes a "choice"?
How about if the live albatross is anesthetized?
Conversely, does the dead bird fall because it has no "choice", or because (like the wing-clipped live bird) it chooses to fly but has been rendered physically unable to?
If the cannonball (or the dead albatross) are tied to a large enough helium balloon, do they now rise because this gives them the "choice" not to fall?
Mere presumptions of "choice" being the factor, or even the key factor, in the fall/not-fall results bring about several kinds of contradictions and counterexamples.
You're confused with Plato? The gods are immanent in Aristotle. And they have nous. You know? Hard to forget.
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