Posted on 11/18/2005 4:34:43 AM PST by StatenIsland
Why intelligent design proponents are wrong.
Because every few years this country, in its infinite tolerance, insists on hearing yet another appeal of the Scopes monkey trial, I feel obliged to point out what would otherwise be superfluous - that the two greatest scientists in the history of our species were Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, and they were both religious. Newton's religiosity was traditional. He was a staunch believer in Christianity and member of the Church of England. Einstein's was a more diffuse belief in a deity who set the rules for everything that occurs in the universe.
Neither saw science as an enemy of religion. On the contrary. "He believed he was doing God's work," wrote James Gleick in his recent biography of Newton. Einstein saw his entire vocation - understanding the workings of the universe - as an attempt to understand the mind of God.
Not a crude and willful God who pushes and pulls and does things according to whim. Newton was trying to supplant the view that first believed the sun's motion around the Earth was the work of Apollo and his chariot, and later believed it was a complicated system of cycles and epicycles, one tacked on upon the other every time some wobble in the orbit of a planet was found. Newton's God was not at all so crude. The laws of his universe were so simple, so elegant, so economical, and therefore so beautiful that they could only be divine.
Which brings us to Dover (Pa.), Pat Robertson, the Kansas State Board of Education and a fight over evolution that is so anachronistic and retrograde as to be a national embarrassment.
Dover distinguished itself this Election Day by throwing out all eight members of its school board who tried to impose "intelligent design" - today's tarted-up version of creationism - on the biology curriculum. Robertson then called down the wrath of God upon the good people of Dover for voting "God out of your city." Meanwhile in Kansas, the school board did a reverse Dover, mandating the teaching of skepticism about evolution and forcing intelligent design into the statewide biology curriculum.
Let's be clear. "Intelligent design" may be interesting as theology, but as science it is a fraud. It is a self-enclosed, tautological "theory" whose only holding is that when there are gaps in some area of scientific knowledge - in this case, evolution - they are to be filled by God. It is a "theory" that admits that evolution and natural selection explain such things as the development of drug resistance in bacteria and other such evolutionary changes within species, but that every once in a while God steps into this world of constant and accumulating change and says, "I think I'll make me a lemur today." A "theory" that violates the most basic requirement of anything pretending to be science - that it be empirically disprovable. How does one empirically disprove the proposition that God was behind the lemur, or evolution - or behind the motion of the tides or the "strong force" that holds the atom together?
In order to justify the farce that intelligent design is science, Kansas had to corrupt the very definition of science, dropping the phrase "natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us," thus unmistakably implying - by fiat of definition, no less - that the supernatural is an integral part of science. This is an insult both to religion and to science.
The school board thinks it is indicting evolution by branding it an "unguided process" with no "discernable direction or goal." This is as ridiculous as indicting Newtonian mechanics for positing an "unguided process" by which the Earth is pulled around the sun every year without discernible purpose. What is chemistry if not an "unguided process" of molecular interactions without "purpose"? Or are we to teach children that God is behind every hydrogen atom in electrolysis?
He may be, of course. But that discussion is the province of religion, not science. The relentless attempt to confuse the two by teaching warmed-over creationism as science can only bring ridicule to religion, gratuitously discrediting a great human endeavor and our deepest source of wisdom precisely about those questions - arguably, the most important questions in life - that lie beyond the material.
How ridiculous to make evolution the enemy of God. What could be more elegant, more simple, more brilliant, more economical, more creative, indeed more divine than a planet with millions of life forms, distinct and yet interactive, all ultimately derived from accumulated variations in a single double-stranded molecule, pliable and fecund enough to give us mollusks and mice, Newton and Einstein? Even if it did give us the Kansas State Board of Education, too.
Originally published on November 18, 2005
It is a hell of a post.
Have you actually looked at the history? It wasn't all that quickly. Scientific racists confronted with Darwinism tended to cling to preceding paradigms for some time, and in many cases for some decades. Haeckel in Germany, who set about recasting all his views in a Darwinian guise as early as 1864, is the only notable exception I'm aware of.
Many scientific racists didn't even begin to react until after the publication of The Descent of Man in 1872, where Darwin first publicly broached the topic of human evolution. Even at this late date Darwin found the anthropological debate over whether human races were separate species a current issue that had to be dealt with in some detail.
This delay response was especially pronounced in America where the Civil War understandably diverted attention from the Darwinian debates, and scientific racism tended to be tied to the more extreme "polygenist" view, that races were not just separate species but separate creations.
But even Alfred Rosenberg who I mentioned before (the Nazis' most important philosopher of race) wrote in the late twenties of each race being "created" with it's own unique "race soul".
The early reaction to Darwin not uncommonly (especially in the popular press) included some shock and concern over it's perceived tendency undermine or eliminate generally accepted racial prejudices of the time. For instance in 1866 the Pall Mall Gazette complained of Darwin associates Huxley and Lyell that their views on the "development of species" had "influenced them in bestowing on the negro that sympathetic recognition which they are willing to extend even to the ape as 'a man and a brother'." (Darwin, Desmond & Moore, pgs 540-41.)
In fact I'd say it wasn't until the late teens of the 20th Century that there was a resurgence of scientific racism equal to that of the pre-Darwinian mid 19th Century. (This resurgence was, I think not accidentally, coincident with historically unprecedented waves of mass immigrations hitting Western Europe and America.)
"People like this don't know their science and are atheists with an agenda that has been destroying America through political correctness, the public school system is dead because of such fools.
And they don't know the Lord God either."
The author is none of the above. He knows his science, being a trained medical doctor.
He is also a conservative.
He threw that out there to avoid answering the skulls question. ("Here, boy! It's your favorite ball! Go fetch!") By diverting the conversation down that well-beaten path, he thinks I'll stop pressing him for a clear answer.
But I'll continue to ask him: if someone accepts the skulls as largely accurate, can someone--how can someone--still deny the gradual evolution of hominids, from ape to man? What link is yet missing?
Where are you getting this notion? Sociobiology is controversial, but not because it's racist.
No, because she would still have understood their hand gestures.</un-pc stereotype>
....."purveyors of unknowledge"......
I still get a chuckle out of that line...
Best kind of fun isn't it?
Another self appointed spokesman speaks.
Do you similarly hand-wave away and ignore all critical analysis of other movements, like Islam, liberalism, communism, etc., as being merely that of "self appointed spokesmen"?
Is it really your position that the best and most accurate critique of a movement is from its *advocates*, and that analysis from outside observers is necessarily no better than "blah blah blah"?
Are you being intellectually honest here?
If that had happened, where would the "intermediates" be? There would probably be no "true" intermediate specimens; nevertheless, the different species of humans would have descended from a common ancestry. And so it is with all the species on earth.
"This might have taken a few thousand generations, or maybe more; but that is virtually no time, geologically speaking."
Still only pre-biased speculative reasoning not quite supported by science...though "scientifically" imagined...I'll give you that!
"Any normal person would have said something like "Oh my goodness! I had a quote from a racist author on my profile page? Sorry, I'll take it down immediately."
It's not just that the quote was from an author with questionable racial views. The quote itself was racial. It railed against race-mixing as an attack on *the culture*. If Francis had made reasonable statements about a different issue and Stingy posted that, not knowing his other statements, he could be forgiven his ignorance. But he chose to post an unambiguous quote about race-mixing. And he has said his homepage was where he wanted to have a summary of his beliefs,
I'm still waiting for Stingy Dog to explain the quote. It's not exactly confusing.
Instead of denouncing and insulting those of us who called you on that quote, Stingy Dog, why don't you explain how you could possibly have thought it was anything other than racist?
Why is it that you had no problem posting a rant against "race mixing" on your homepage in the first place, and why is it that you still don't see anything wrong with such a quote?
Same here.
Lovely. Isn't that special?
I just wish I could write that well.
"As Mr. Krauthammer asks, "Why should evolution be the enemy of God?"."
To destroy Christianity and hence its culture and its people.
After what you posted on your homepage, I'd be careful about using words like "cultural destruction" if I were you.
The creative powers of Guinness are an awesome thing to behold.
It is like Groundhog day, isn't it.
It is like Groundhog day, isn't it.
It is like Groundhog day, isn't it.
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