Why intelligent design proponents are wrong.

NY Daily News ^ | 11/18/05 | Charles Krauthammer

[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

[Gumlegs]

I'm so relieved to hear Bryan didn't come up with the free coinage of silver plank in the 1896 party platform. It makes all the difference. And he delivered his "Cross of Gold" speech just to be polite.

I haven't bothered with "Inherit The Wind" in many years, and I'm not foolish enough to think any movie has any more than a coincidental relationship to actual history.

Bryan's foolishness truly made him stand out in the first twenty-five years of the twentieth century. Your attempt to exonerate him for his ardent advocacy of bad ideas is just as illogical as your attempt to connect the Theory of Evolution to the Nazis. Using the same "logic," one could say that, really, Hitler wasn't such a bad guy ... after all, he didn't actually write the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Bryan was the sort of officious busy-body who perfectly fitted the definition of the prohibition movement: he lived in fear that someone, somewhere might be having a good time. When Will Rogers visited France in the 1920s, he appeared in a newsreel "toasting" Americans with (IIRC), a glass of beer. Bryan's response was to try to get a law passed to make it illegal for Americans to consume liquor while overseas. Exactly how this would have been enforced is something of a mystery.

Bryan seemed to have a soft spot for unenforceable laws; he advocated a system of International Arbitration to prevent war. How this would have worked is anybody's guess. He was Wilson's Secretary of State, from 1912 - 1915, but left when it became clear that Wilson's sternly-worded response to the Lusitania sinking might hurt German feelings.

Bryan was also a shameless huckster for Florida real estate.

But go ahead and claim him for your side. You're more than welcome to him.

I'll grant that Hitler twisted the Theory of Evolution to suit his own purposes. How about responding to this image from an earlier post:

Has God caused Hitler yet?

[Gumlegs]

Yes, but Darwin's Theory only caused those things for the Amish because the Amish think they're bad.

If you're a beer-lover, Darwin's Theory caused near-beer. You know what near-beer is? Mark Twain once observed that the man who named it was a poor judge of distance.

If you're conservative and a Catholic, Darwin's Theory caused Kennedys.

[furball4paws]

Divine Decadence

[ml1954]

I was talking about Bryan and his experience. Social Darwinism was an influencial theory developed by Herbert Spencer BEFORE Wallace or Darwin came to public attention. He used Darwin's theory to buttress his theory which found much favor among the Anglo-Saxon elites. Darwins' biological theory was widely applied to make social and political points, none of which had an NECESSARY connection with the biology. It was even used to justify good things, like the notion of the White man's Burden. White people, as the superior race, were obliged to take care of their inferiors.

Saying Darwin is in part responsible for WWI and Spencer's ideas and the wacko ideas of racists is like saying Einstein is responsible for the extreme left wing PC postmodern decontructionists on todays campuses, in the MSM, and the DIM party. It's misleading at best, and basically outright dishonest.

[ml1954]

You know what near-beer is? Mark Twain once observed that the man who named it was a poor judge of distance.

LOL. I'll have to remember that one.

[Gumlegs]

[Stultis]

Social Darwinism was an influencial theory developed by Herbert Spencer BEFORE Wallace or Darwin came to public attention.

Yeah, but Spencer's "theories" of social evolution were also developed before Spencer himself knew anything of Darwin's ideas about biological evolution. (Spencer would insinuate himself into the "Darwin Circle" but he was a late addition.) IOW "Social Darwinism" -- certainly the original Spencerian version thereof -- is logically independent of Darwinian evolution. The only real connection is the incorporation of Darwin's name.

Look, here's Spencer's Law of Universal Evolution. You tell me if you think it has anything to do with Darwin. Or anything to do with anything for that matter:

Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion; during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity; and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.

This prop-wash is typical of Spencer. The trumped-up, bloviating idiot had a "law" for everything. William James quoted a biting parody of Spencer's law of evolution by a mathematician named Kirkman:

Evolution is a change from a nohowish untalkaboutable all-alikeness to a somehowish and in general talk-aboutable not-all-alikeness by continual stickingtogetherations and somethingelseifications.

William James in his own words derided Spencer for his "dry school-master temperament ... his preference for cheap makeshifts in argument, his lack of education even in mechanical principles, and in general the vagueness of all his fundamental ideas, his whole system wooden, as if knocked together out of cracked hemlock boards." Charles Darwin made similar (if less unfriendly) comments about Spencer in his correspondence. (As I recall he complained that Spencers ideas were "purely deductive" and failed to usefully engage or organize facts.)

[Stultis]

Did Clinton give up Montagu's notion of the equality of the races?

Uh, do you think he SHOULD have?

[furball4paws]

Come to the Cabaret.

[Gumlegs]

Thanks for a great tag-line.

[Stultis]

BTW, even writing as late as 1870 (when he commited that nonsense I qouted to paper) Spencer himself claimed that his "law" of evolution was derived not from Darwin, but from the laws of thermodynamics.

[Luke21]

I like that. "Monkey and pond scum" forebearers.

We could put a piece of dirt or a clump of sand in a time capsule and open it many hundreds of years later. Would still be dirt. If humans had evolved from apes, there wouldn't be any more apes. They'd all be human, or Democrats.

This really isn't hard.

[ml1954]

If humans had evolved from apes, there wouldn't be any more apes.

In case you didn't know and aren't just trolling, this is lie that creationists constantly repeat. Humans didn't evolve from apes. Humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor.

[CarolinaGuitarman]

" If humans had evolved from apes, there wouldn't be any more apes."

Ah, no. But thanks for partaking of the creationist troll toolkit. :)

"This really isn't hard."

It's a little harder than you thought.

[Gumlegs]

Can you prove that when Luke21 was born, everyone who was alive at the time didn't die out? (I won't get into causation).

[furball4paws]

Do you mean that if apes evolved from humans why are there still humans?

[GregoryFul]

ID is not about God. Many main stream physicists speculate about some ID that set the initial conditions of the Universe that we exist in. Even to the point that some prior advanced civilization, seeing the universe collapsing, engineered a solution that caused the reemergence of a universe capable of genesis.

It is a matter of belief. Do you believe that accidental combinations of materials and circumstance can result in unique prevailing conditions that can support biological life that evolves into complex self-reflective beings, or do you believe that some design guided the process (evolution vs. ID)? Crick believed in pan-spermia to explain DNA, thinking that there was not sufficient time in Earth's history to explain such a complex self-replacting molecule. Many physicists believe that the extraordinarily precise values of fundamental constants that give rise to an interesting universe belie accident.

Look around yourself in the complex world - the pat explanation of chaotic expression moderated by survival of the (sexually isolated) mutants does not make sense. Neither does the idea of a progenitor intelligence. The question is unanswered. We should keep an open mind, and foster the question into the future.

I believe that we will soon be confronted with a huge clue in the emergence of apparent intelligence from the computational systems we are designing and building. Or not, the absence of intelligence from comparably complex assemblages of materials will be as bewildering as not, to me.

Quite beyond materialistic interactions, to me, the warp and woof of life suggests a maker with unfathomable grasp of the past, the future, the anvil of being, and the hammer of time and events, on human souls.

[ml1954]

ID is not about God.....Quite beyond materialistic interactions, to me, the warp and woof of life suggests a maker with unfathomable grasp of the past, the future, the anvil of being, and the hammer of time and events, on human souls.

Duh.

[Gumlegs]

You want to live like hu-man??? Then die like hu-man!!! < /bad movie dialogue >

[GregoryFul]

Can you reply with something more interesting than a Duh?