Posted on 01/11/2006 8:28:26 PM PST by saalebhosdike
A few thoughts regarding the recent foolishness in the courts of Pennsylvania over Intelligent Design:
A pertinent question is why the curricula of the schools should be the concern of judges, who are little more than the enforcement arm of the academic and journalistic elites, imposing on Kansas what could not be legislated in Washington. I see no evidence that judges deploy intelligence, knowledge, or any other qualification other than boundless belief in their unlimited jurisdiction.
Another question is precisely what is meant by Intelligent Design. The answer is not easily divined by reading newspapers: The press have many virtues, but facility in communication is not among them. Reporters, whose thinking is tightly templated, seem to think that Intelligent Design has something to do with Christianity. I know many who suspect intelligent design, but are not religious. This idea is too difficult for reporters, and too dangerous for Darwinists. If one heresy may be discussed, so may others be, and the cracks in the foundations become evident.
It is interesting to put the matter in historical context. To simplify exuberantly, but not inaccurately for present purposes: People long ago saw the world in (I hate words like this one) non-mechanistic terms. They thought that events occurred because Someone or Something wanted them to occur. They believed in dryads and maenads, sylphs and salamanders, gods and demiurges. It can be debated whether they were foolish, or responding as in a fog to things real but intangible.
They thought more about death in those days, perhaps because they saw more of it, and wondered. Existence was to them more moral than physical, and more often seen as a passage from somewhere to somewhere. Come Christianity if not much earlier, they accepted Good and Evil, upper case, as things that actually existed. In the cosmic order as they understood it, mind, intention, will, and consciousness trumped the material.
Then in roughly the fifteenth century a shift began to a mechanistic view of the world. Next came Newton. There were others before him, but he, though he was himself a Christian, was the towering figure in the rise of mechanism, the view that all things occur ineluctably through mindless antecedent causes. He said (remember, I’m simplifying exuberantly) that the physical world is like a pool table: If you know the starting positions and velocities of the balls, you can calculate all future positions and velocities. No sprites, banshees, or Fates, no volition or consciousness. He invented the mathematics to make it stick, at least for pool tables.
This notion of mechanism spread to other fields. Marx said that history was a mechanical unfolding of economics, Freud that our very personalities were a deterministic result of strange sexual complexes, Darwin (or more correctly his disciples) that we were the offspring of purposeless material couplings, first of molecules and then of organisms. Skinner made us individually the will-less product of psychological conditioning. Sociology did much the same for groups, giving rise to the cult of victimhood: I am not what I am because of decisions I made, but because of social circumstances over which I have no influence. Genetics now seeks to make us the result of tinker-toy chemical mechanism.
No will, free or otherwise. No good or evil, right or wrong. Consciousness being an awkward problem for determinists, they ignore it or brush it aside. Death is harder to ignore, but accepted only as a physical termination. One says, “John is gone,” but does not ask, “Where has John gone?” The world offers no mystery or wonder. All questions come down to no more than a fine tuning of our analysis of Newton’s pool balls. (Again, I am exuberantly….)
These two views, which reduce to the age-old puzzle of free will and determinism, can be endlessly argued, and have been. Mechanism prevails today because, within its realm, it works, and perhaps also because it does not suffer from the internal contradictions of religion. Technology, almost the only advance made by our otherwise unimpressive civilization, produces results, such as iPods and television. It does not answer, and cannot answer, such questions as Where are we? Why? Where are we going? What should we do? So it dismisses them. Mechanists are hostile to religion in part because religion does not dismiss these questions, but harps on them.
The two conflicting schemes attract adherents because mankind always seeks overarching explanations, particularly regarding origin, destiny, and purpose. Some of us are willing to say “I don’t know.” Others, well denominated True Believers, have to think that they do know. The country is replete with them: Feminists, Marxists, Born-Agains, rabid anti-semites, snake handlers, Neo-Darwinists. They care deeply, brook no dissent (a sure sign of True Belief), and have infinite confidence in their rightness (or perhaps don’t and pretend certainty to ward off a disturbing uncertainty).
In re Intelligent Design, the Darwinists have pretty much won. Their victory springs not so much from the strength of their ideas, but from their success in preventing Intelligent Discussion. They control the zeitgeist of the somewhat educated, as for example judges. It is enough.
Evolution is one of the three sacred foundations of political correctness, along with the notions that there can be no racial and sexual difference in mental capacities, and that religion is unprogressive and should be suppressed, Yet these are delicate things all three, and cannot well bear scrutiny. Thus the various determinists grimly avoid examination of their ideas.
The lacunae are nonetheless obvious. All is material? If I were to talk to a Neo-Darwinist, I might proceed as follows. “One day you will die. Where will you then be? Yes, yes, I know. We do not speak of this. Yet death does seem to be a bit of a reality. Do you never wake up at three in the morning and think, ‘Where in the name of—in the name of Logical Positivism, I suppose you would think—are we?’ If not, you are a great fool.
“Let me put the matter differently. Either you believe that there is life after death, or you believe there isn’t, or you aren’t sure—which means that you believe that there may be. If there is, then there exists a realm of which we know nothing, including what if any effects it exerts on this passing world. If there is nothing beyond the grave, why do you care about anything at all? You’ve only got a few more years, and then—nothing.”
Or I might say, “You don’t mind if I boil your young daughter in oil tonight, do you? The world being purely material, the only effect would be to interrupt certain chemical reactions conjointly called ‘metabolism’ and to substitute others. You cannot object to such a small thing. She will not mind: Consciousness not being derivable from physics, she cannot be conscious. Boiling children cannot be Wrong, as the term has no physical meaning, and in any event all my actions follow inexorably from the Big Bang. I am only doing as blind causality instructs me.”
In truth we know very little about existence, neither you nor I nor biochemists nor even federal judges. We defend our paradigms because we crave a sense of understanding this curious place in which we briefly are. We do it by ignoring the inconvenient and by punishing doubt. Thus the furor over Intelligent Design.
Bye.
What ticks me off to the greatest extend is just like the republican party, we are cowtowing to the tirrany of the minority. We are letting evolutionists and God haters of all stripes dictate their version of the beginning of the world to us.
Intelligent Discussion?
That's a laugh. I have never seen so many deliberate distortions of science than those used to promote ID.
Any question you can't answer, default to--the designer did it (but we can't say who the designer is, 'cuz we can't get into the science classes if we do, but we all know who the designer really is but don't tell, wink, wink).
Reminds me of Clarke's Third Law:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Source.
Wow, that is so well put!
Man is the only animal, only lifeform, that needs religion. Regardless of his acceptance or rejection of one "theory" or another, he will still and always need religion. Why these theorists many times attempt to use their pet "theory" of the times to subtract/knock away man's religion is plumb silly. Grown people ought to know better.
"Don't mention the Designer. I mentioned Him once, but I think I got away with it"
Thanks. I enjoy reading Fred.
You know what? I am a Christian, and a conservative. Most scientists are too. But I want science taught in a science class. Intelligent design isn't science. Don't teach it in a science class.
If I were a highschool student about now the biggest question I'd have about this whole deal is what the hell it was that the evolution types were so afraid of.
Fred's just an excellent author all around. I like his take on this
"It doesn't matter if God is Dead" - Michael Behe
God made all things. The question is, how did He do it? Why is it not "Godly" for Him to have performed the creation of life by using evolution through natural selection? Do people not have enough faith in His power to believe that He could set up a scenario perfectly enough so that the outcome, over any time-span He wanted, could have been the image of His own will? What could be more elegant and fitting of God than creation of ALL life, the formation of every living thing, following a single, simple process?
If you are not completely put off by this idea, and wish to examine it in detail (in particular, for the theological aspect), see the essay Evolutionary Creation.
Indeed. Thanks for the ping!
People who say stupid things like this are degenerates working underhandedly to make conservatism appear synonymous with dismal ignorance. This conservative shuns them.
Evolution is one of the three sacred foundations of political correctness, along with the notions that there can be no racial and sexual difference in mental capacities, and that religion is unprogressive and should be suppressed, Yet these are delicate things all three, and cannot well bear scrutiny. Thus the various determinists grimly avoid examination of their ideas.
Furthermore, The politically correct have a hard time reconciling evolution with the overwhelming feel-good glorification of the Blank Slate, proposed by Locke, which proposes the mind is conceived as a tabula rasa; it contains nothing at birth. Most PC's have to change hats between science class and social science class and claim the hat change never really took place
I had a wonderful opportunity I'll never forget to watch a liberal engage in "higher debate" one day on campus in some comm. theory course years ago and later expose his hypocrisy. In retropect it was probably more his indoctrination. In an open nuture vs. nature discussion, we were tossing around ideas leaving open the possibility of intelligence being hereditary, or even some of it; can we consider this new Bell Curve publication with the critical minds of university students? etc., suddenly this little pantywaist (never forget his name-Steffan,with the f's emphasized) had a complete meltdown and finally caused the class to screech to a halt with these high pitched screams of "Your point is moot! Your point is moot! It just is!
I saw Steffan in the library paking lot later that day, the veins having settled back in to his neck and his cognitive dissonace attack subsiding, getting in to his beat up Volvo with the Walking Darwin Fish sticker prominently displayed. I just shook my head when the irony finally struck me.
What you have said in your post #13 is probably very close to what I believe....thanks for the additional link, it looks like a long read, but read it I will do, probably tomorrow.....again thanks...
What prevented Behe and the ID crowd putting on some intelligent discussion in court? Zeitgeist?
Agreed. Methinks the Freeper Darwin Brain Trust doest protest too much. The reactiony s**t hits the fan pretty quickly here and selective perception tends to rear its head... Reed's not even addressing a specific person believing in evolution or the merits of ID. He is simply stating that evolution is a sacrement to the left and used as a political tool in a far more egregious manner than most others.
Overturning the view of Ptolemy (the war of Joshua 10:13, if anything), spanned from 1543 to 1750. All the same pronouncements of abandoning God and going against scripture were adopted. Copernicus' work contradicted then-accepted religious dogma - some took it to mean that, if true, there was no need of God, that science could explain everything that was attributed to Him. Osiander (Lutheran theologian) even proclaimed that the heliocentric account of the earth's movement was a mere mathematical hypothesis - that it was not the Truth, that it was just simply too unlikely to be true.
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