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
The Basques are an interesting case of this. They have the highest concentration of Rh-negative blood in the world. Since there is a tendency for Rh-positive Rh-negative crosses to miscarry (details), this is a step on the way to speciation.
These "pre-biased speculations" often give rise to "predictions". For example the using the theory of evolution we make predictions of what we'll find in the fossil record and the molecular record. When we investigate such predictions they come true; again, and again, and again. Curiously they never seem to fail. That is what science is, and why ID and creation science aren't science.
He is a her BTW.
But my point is that guesses are stil guesses...not science.
I'm thinking of the wild speculations made regarding the "piltdown" man until it was revealed to be a fraud. Obviously good data and a sound inductive/deductive reasoning process can lead one to make good guesses...but until the science catches up...they are only guesses and "not quite" science. And your source material from which you gather data had better be real, not fraudulately manufactured.
Inspiration often takes us beyond where reason and logic fails us, this is not science but it is often true!
NYC evolves humans into Godless Libertarians.
What were these then? Presumably you are referring to the numerous "wild speculations" right from the start that Piltdown Man was in fact a fraud. Piltdown Man was eventually discredited because it didn't fit with the pattern of other finds; as the decades rolled on it came to appear more and more as an irrelevant/embarrassing anomaly that didn't match anyone's predictions of what ought to be found.
My point was less about the Pilt down man but more about the process of "leaping" where logic can't quite carry us...even intelligent "leaping" is not quite "science", in terms of how the process of science is carried out.
And I do challenge your notion that every "guess" based on observations of fossil records and molecular study have always panned out positively...even respected evolutionists are arguing over "long process vs punctuated process" where conflicting views of where the data are leading them have yet to be resolved.
I'm arguing that there is no shame for the scientist to admit that he borrows from the "imaginitve inspirational" process the same way a soccer mom might when she suspects her child has told her a fib...she is also often right but she still investigates because she occaisionally has been wrong and wants to give the child the benefit of the doubt.
The investigative process can be guided by inspirational thought but that pathway closes when the data turn sour(as in the case of the piltdown man).And that's my point, science often starts from a biased view which may turn out correct or incorrect depending on experimentation. It is human nature to "fill" in the gaps where science and reason have not gone, much like the early explorers who assigned the term "here be dragons" to territory not yet explored.
This process is not exactly scientific but can provide emotionally needed coherence until the science catches up. And I do mean EMOTIONAL....since most humans can't stand gaps in their personal world views!
Interesting, but pointless ... unless you think this somehow discredits religion:
We must not forget that Darwin's kinsman invented eugenics and that his son was a sponsor.
The ancient Spartans practiced eugenics. Which of them were Darwin's kinsmen?
And why should your argument from adverse consequences be less of a logical fallacy than any other's argument from adverse consequences?
Animals might be, but not man says the Bible, thus validating the creation, the Word, which then gets lost."
What you said (I think)
Agreed that Haeckel was a large influence in the German world, but not without, and as to the reason for the later: because "normal" people's eyes either glaze over, or rollup into their skulls, when some German starts in about "Monads" and other idealistic geehaas.
The point is that he became, by 1900, THE authority on biology.
We are not talking about practice, but theory. The MODERN eugenics movements was begun by Darwin's cousin. Eskimos were known to put old people on ice rafts and let them die. That has nothing to do with the right-to-die movement.
You're later point is correct, but I think your first is in error. At least I'm not aware that anyone (early on) suggested Piltdown was a fraud. There were however those who correctly argued that the jaw was from an ape and the skull from a human but, precisely because this was considered to be a fortuitous association, the hoaxer was able to quell this criticism by engineering an additional find. (That is one such association might be coincidence, but not two.)
Well, the root is the problem IS not that the public schools are government agencies but that education is a political rather than private and religious matter. Frederick the Great started state schools to inculcate loyalty to the regime. The French revolutionaries followed his example, and it has spread to the rest of the western world.
My understanding is that it was criticized becuase it claimed that many things -- in the realm of behavior and social organization -- are biologically determined that many would like to believe are contingent social "choices". It has also been deemed sexist by some. But where do you get the racial aspect?
And whether you're talking about the practice or theory of any social movement, it has nothing whatever to do with a scientific theory about the origin of species.
Please try again.
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