Posted on 05/08/2006 2:04:49 PM PDT by balrog666
Intelligent Design is only one of many “alternatives” to Darwinian evolution
There is rich irony in how the present battle over Creationism v. Darwinism has taken shape, and especially the ways that this round differs from previous episodes. A clue to both the recent success — and the eventual collapse — of “Intelligent Design” can be found in its name, and in the new tactics that are being used to support its incorporation into school curricula. In what must be taken as sincere flattery, these tactics appear to acknowledge just how deeply the inner lessons of science have pervaded modern culture.
Intelligent Design (ID) pays tribute to its rival, by demanding to be recognized as a direct and “scientific” competitor with the Theory of Evolution. Unlike the Creationists of 20 years ago, proponents of ID no longer refer to biblical passages. Instead, they invoke skepticism and cite alleged faulty evidence as reasons to teach students alternatives to evolution.
True, they produce little or no evidence to support their own position. ID promoters barely try to undermine evolution as a vast and sophisticated model of the world, supported by millions of tested and interlocking facts. At the level that they are fighting, none of that matters. Their target is the millions of onlookers and voters, for whom the battle is as emotional and symbolic as it ever was.
What has changed is the armory of symbols and ideas being used. Proponents of Intelligent Design now appeal to notions that are far more a part of the lexicon of science than religion, notably openness to criticism, fair play, and respect for the contingent nature of truth.
These concepts proved successful in helping our civilization to thrive, not only in science, but markets, democracy and a myriad other modern processes. Indeed, they have been incorporated into the moral foundations held by average citizens, of all parties and creeds. Hence, the New Creationists have adapted and learned to base their arguments upon these same principles. One might paraphrase the new position, that has been expressed by President Bush and many others, as follows:
What do evolutionists have to fear? Are they so worried about competition and criticism that they must censor what bright students are allowed to hear? Let all sides present their evidence and students will decide for themselves!
One has to appreciate not only irony, but an implied tribute to the scientific enlightenment, when we realize that openness to criticism, fair play, and respect for the contingent nature of truth are now the main justifications set forward by those who still do not fully accept science. Some of those promoting a fundamentalist- religious agenda now appeal to principles they once fiercely resisted. (In fairness, some religions helped to promote these concepts.) Perhaps they find it a tactically useful maneuver.
It’s an impressive one. And it has allowed them to steal a march. While scientists and their supporters try to fight back with judicious reasoning and mountains of evidence, a certain fraction of the population perceives only smug professors, fighting to protect their turf — authority figures trying to squelch brave underdogs before they can compete. Image matters. And this self-portrayal — as champions of open debate, standing up to stodgy authorities — has worked well for the proponents of Intelligent Design (ID). For now.
Yet, I believe they have made a mistake. By basing their offensive on core notions of fair play and completeness, ID promoters have employed a clever short-term tactic, but have incurred a long-term strategic liability. Because, their grand conceptual error is in believing that their incantation of Intelligent Design is the only alternative to Darwinian evolution.
If students deserve to weigh ID against natural selection, then why not also expose them to…
1. Guided Evolution
This is the deist compromise most commonly held by thousands — possibly millions — of working scientists who want to reconcile science and faith. Yes, the Earth is 4.6 billion years old and our earliest ancestors emerged from a stew of amino acids that also led to crabs, monkeys and slime molds who are all distant relatives. Still, a creative force may have been behind the Big Bang, and especially the selection of some finely tuned physical constants, whose narrow balance appears to make the evolution of life possible, maybe even inevitable. Likewise, such a force may have given frequent or occasional nudges of subtle guidance to evolution, all along, as part of a Divine Plan.
There is one advantage — and drawback — to this notion (depending on your perspective): it is compatible with everything we see around us — all the evidence we’ve accumulated — and it is utterly impossible to prove or disprove. Not only does this let many scientists continue both to pray and do research, but it has allowed the Catholic Church and many other religious organizations to accept (at long last) evolution as fact, with relatively good grace.
2. Intelligent Design of Intelligent Designers (IDOID)
Most Judeo-Christian sects dislike speculating about possible origins of the Creator. But not all avoid the topic. Mormons, for example, hold that the God of this universe — who created humanity (or at least guided our evolution) — was once Himself a mortal being who was created by a previous God in a prior universe or context.
One can imagine someone applying the very same logic that Intelligent Design promoters have used.
There is no way that such a fantastic entity as God could have simply erupted out of nothing. Such order and magnificence could not possibly have self-organized out of chaos. Only intelligence can truly create order, especially order of such a supreme nature.
Oh, certainly there are theological arguments that have been around since Augustine to try and quell such thoughts, arguing in favor of ex nihilio or timeless pre-existence, or threatening punishment for even asking the question. But that’s the point! Any effort to raise these rebuttals will:
1. make this a matter of theology (something the ID people have strenuously avoided). 2. smack as an attempt to quash other ideas, flying against the very same principles of fair play and completeness that ID proponents have used to prop up this whole effort.
IDOID will have to be let in, or the whole program must collapse under howling derision and accusations of hypocrisy.
3. Evolution of Intelligent Designers
Yes, you read me right. Recent advances in cosmology have led some of the world’s leading cosmologists, such as Syracuse University’s Lee Smolin, to suggest that each time a large black hole forms (and our universe contains many) it serves as an “egg” for the creation of an entirely new “baby universe” that detaches from ours completely, beginning an independent existence in some non-causally connected region of false vacuum. Out of this collapsing black hole arises a new cosmos, perhaps with its own subsequent Big Bang and expansion, including the formation of stars, planets, etc. Smolin further posits that our own universe may have come about that way, and so did its “parent” cosmos, and so on, backward through countless cycles of hyper-time.
Moreover, in a leap of highly original logic, Smolin went on to persuasively argue that each new universe might be slightly better adapted than its ancestor. Adapted for what? Why, to create more black holes — the eggs — needed for reproducing more universes.
Up to this point we have a more sophisticated and vastly larger-scale version of what Richard Dawkins called the evolution of evolvability. But Lee Smolin takes it farther still, contending that, zillions of cycles of increasingly sophisticated universes would lead to some that inherit just the right physical constants and boundary conditions.
Conditions that enable life to form. And then intelligence … and then…
Well, now it’s our turn to take things even farther than Smolin did. Any advocate of completeness would have to extend this evolutionary process beyond achieving mere sapience like ours, all the way to producing intelligence so potent that it can then start performing acts of creation on its own, manipulating and using black holes to fashion universes to specific design.
In other words, there might be an intelligent designer of this world … who nevertheless came into being as a result of evolution.
Sound a little newfangled and contrived? So do all new ideas! And yet, no one can deny that it covers a legitimate portion of idea space. And since “weighing the evidence” is to be left to students, well, shouldn’t they be exposed to this idea too? Again, the principles now used by proponents of ID — fair play and completeness — may turn around and bite them.
Which brings us to some of the classics.
4. Cycles of Creation
Perhaps the whole thing does not have a clear-cut beginning or end, but rolls along like a wheel? That certainly would allow enough macro-time for everything and anything to happen. Interestingly, the cyclical notion opens up infinite time for both evolution and intelligent designers … though not of any kind that will please ID promoters. Shall Hindu gurus and Mayan priest kings step up and demand equal time for their theories of creation cycles? How can you stop them, once the principle is established that every hypothesis deserves equal treatment in the schools, allowing students to hear and weigh any notion that claims to explain the world? 5. Panspermia
This one is venerable and quite old within the scientific community, which posits that life on Earth may have been seeded from elsewhere in the cosmos. Panspermia was trotted out for the “Scopes II” trial in the 1980s, when Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinge were among the few first-rank scientists to openly disbelieve the standard Origins model — the one that posits life appeared independently out of nonliving chemicals in Earth’s early oceans. Their calculations (since then refuted) suggested that it would take hundreds of oceans and many times the age of the Earth for random chemistry to achieve a workable, living cell.
Alas for the Creationists of that day, Hoyle and Wickramasinge did not turn out to be useful as friendly experts, because their alternative offered no comfort to the biblical Genesis story. They pointed out that our galaxy probably contains a whole lot more than a few hundred Earth oceans. Multiplying the age of the Milky Way times many billions of possible planets — and comets too — they readily conceded that random chance could make successful cells, eventually, on one world or another. (Or, possibly, in the liquid interiors of trillions of newborn comets.) All it would take then are asteroid impacts ejecting hardy cells into the void for life to then spread gradually throughout the cosmos. Perhaps it might even be done deliberately, once a single lucky source world achieved intelligence through … well … evolution. (Needless to say, Creationists found Hoyle & Wickramasinge a big disappointment.)
So far, we have amassed quite a list of legitimate competitors … that is, if Intelligent Design is one. Now a cautionary pause. Some alternative theories that I have left out include satirical pseudo-religions, like one recent internet fad attributing creation to something called the “Flying Spaghetti Monster.” These humorous jibes have a place, but their blows do not land on-target. They miss the twin pillars of completeness and fair play, upon which promoters of Intelligent Design have based their attack against secular-modernist science. By erasing all theological details, they hoped to eliminate any vulnerabilities arising from those details. Indeed, since the Spaghetti Monster is purported to be an Intelligent Designer, they can even chuckle and welcome it into the fold, knowing that it will win no real converts.
Not so for the items listed here. Each of these concepts — adding to idea-space completeness and deserving fair play — implies a dangerous competitor for Intelligent Design, a competitor that may seduce at least a few students into its sphere of influence. This undermines the implicit goal of ID, which is to proselytize a fundamentalist/literalist interpretation of the Christian Bible.
There are other possibilities, and I am sure readers could continue adding to the list, long after I am done, such as…
* We’re living in a simulation… * We’ve been resurrected at the Omega Point… * It’s all in your imagination … and so on.
I doubt that the promoters of Intelligent Design really want to see a day come when every biology teacher says: “Okay, you’ve heard from Darwin. Now we’ll spend a week on each of the following: intelligent design, guided evolution, intelligent design of intelligent designers, evolution of intelligent designers, the Hindu cycle of karma, the Mayan yuga cycle, panspermia, the Universe as a simulation…” and so on.
Each of these viewpoints can muster support from philosophers and even some modern physicists, and can gather as much supporting evidence as ID. In any case they are all equally defensible as concepts. And only censoring bullies would prevent students from hearing them and exercising their sovereign right to decide for themselves, right? Or, perhaps, they might even start private sessions after school, to study the science called … biology.
A day may come when the promoters of Intelligent Design wish they had left well enough alone.
What a steaming pile. Your idiotic argument is nothing short of psychotic. But I guess that's a consequence of equating your religion with "Western Civilization".
You have provided no justification for ruling out the possibility that the bible is composed of both historical fact and myth. Perhaps you've never considered this possibility.
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To the contrary. The context of my statement was a true dichotomy, i.e. that the Bible is a historically reliable document, or it is not. If the Bible is myth combined in historic fact, then it is a fiction, possibly based on historic fact. If it is a historically reliable document, that does not make it definitive, i.e. it does not rule out other rational inquiry, but it does merit more consideration than evolutionists allow.
Again, at issue is the view of what "truth" is. I maintain that relative truth represents no truth at all.
The whole context of my original statement which was challenged, was that both Biblical creation and evolution are BOTH based on claims from HISTORY. Evolution is not a repeatable science. Evolution is based on evidence and history. So is Biblical Christianity, and the Christian's understanding of Creation.
I maintain that Evolution and atheists begin with the non-sequitur, there is no divinity, or if there is, it's impossible to rationally or empirically arrive at an understanding of such divinity. Then the Bible is weighed against that logical fallacy. Obviously, if there is no such thing as divinity, or the divine is outside the domain of "scientific" or rational discussion, then any consideration of "Creation" as science is ludicrous. From that perspective, at LEAST the account of creation must be myth. But Evolution is based upon the same standard, i.e. history and evidence, as the claim of "Creation Science", yet evolutionist exclude the Biblical account as "unscientific".
I could write volumes in defense of Christianity's factual basis in history, but that has already been done. Nothing I write will overcome the original bias against the supernatural or divinity of the honest atheist or dishonest agnostic. I would add the "theistic evolutionist" to that heap, because whatever god he may attribute evolution to, it is not the God as revealed in the Bible.
SFS
Perhaps you could actually offer an argument to support the claim of truth of Genesis, rather than simply asserting that evidence exists.
Nothing I've written or say could be so construed.
This is false. Truth is that which conforms to reality.
Whose reality? How do you define it?
This is false. I do not understand the source of your claims.
No it is not. You are unwilling to deal with the argument I provided.
To discount the Biblical account of creationism, the Bible itself must be determined to be a non-historical, or at the very least, an unreliable historical document.
Actually, all that need be done is demonstrate that observations of physical evidence contradict the Biblical account of creationism. Other historical claims in the Bible may still be accurate.
Do you recall my original statement that you challenged, before you started this intellectual little game?
" I'm willing to admit that there are elements of both history and faith in my support for Biblical Creationism. If only the Darwinian secularists were as honest."
I certainly don't dispute the fact that ANY history (which is based upon evidence) that contradicts the Bible invalidates the Biblical view of creation. However, the Bible is not simply about creation, or good morals, or evil, or Israel, or Jesus Christ, or the first century Christian church. It is in context about all of the above. The Bible makes claims for itself as divine revelation. If it is not historically reliable in context, then neither is it from the God as described by the document. Your charity that "Other historical claims in the Bible may still be accurate" is a farce. After you've ripped the guts from the Bible (without documentation), you allow Christians that the balance of their fairy tale may be in some parts accurate.
Yet, evolutionists maintain a farce of historicity and evidence for their religion that cannot be supported, though of course, you will contest this.
As I said before, go play this dishonest game of "honest inquiry" with someone else. You knew your answers before you ever opened your first Biology text.
I will note that you have not, in any of your statements above, provided any evidence that the Genesis account of creationism is accurate. It appears as though you are trying to claim that if any one part of the Bible is accurate, then the entire collection of writings must be accurate. This is not true.
I never made that claim. I will note that you are not honest about your biases.
My question was not rhetorical. When you claimed the existence of historical evidence, I was under the impression that you believed that physical historical evidence existed supporting the creation account of Genesis. I was asking for you to elaborate on such evidence, if that is in fact what you meant.
Archeology and the antiquities count as "historical evidence".
I am not attempting to make pejorative statements. …. Then you are simply wrong. I am not attempting to "evangelize".
But of course you are. You've invested a lot of time to do so. You're just intellectually dishonest about your goal.
SFS: What level of evidence would be required for you to believe in the God of the Bible, that he created man with a specific purpose, or to overthrow entirely the notion that man is merely a genetic variance, an accident of fate, an evolved species?
Evolutionist: "This is a false dichotomy".
False choice? Of course it is not, and I'll note that you refused to address your standards of evidence. By implication, some evidence is more "special" than other evidence.
I will note that you have still not supported any of your previous claims with evidence.
That is the pot calling the kettle black.
I do not understand why you have gone to such trouble to avoid actually demonstrating that your claim of "historical fact" is in fact true.
And I do not understand why it is so important to you to deny that both evolution and creationism have elements of both history (i.e. evidence) and faith. Your faith in evolution is already on open display.
As I said originally, go play with someone else. You've just wasted a few hours of my time. You obviously do not work for a living, or have your living funded by an academic or government institution.
Gee, what was the article in this thread all about anyway. In countering your religious zeal, I seem to have forgotten.
Perhaps getting an education that includes history helps.
And rewriting of history is definitely a common liberal tactic.
And a fundamentalist one as well.
AHA! So you do believe in whole-y ghosts.
Well, that's obvious. Sufis can write volumes about the transcendental truth's revealed to them by spinning around until they get dizzy and pass out. More power to all of you, so long as the 1st Amendment is still in force.
Oh, shucks. Maybe we got our openness to criticism and sense of fair play from the christians who imprisoned Galileo, and burned Geordono Bruno, jews anabaptists, and pretty much anyone else with whom they had philosophical disagreements.
Actually, obeying the law of gravity is more likely to kill you :-Þ
Fine, as long as we agree that it probably was the attitudes of the devout christians who ran the christian world of the Reformation that can be credited with brutally suppressing the scientific/philosophical thought of such as Galileo, Spinoza, Bruno, and any number of old female alchemists/chemists.
Apparently science and history do not mix, because scientists seem unable to grasp any understanding of the history of civilizations and cultures. It must be that pesky postmodern reductionism that prevents them from seeing how mankind has slowly culturally evolved over time. For them it is all darkness before Enlightenment, and all darkness since.
Your rude arrogance on this subject is only matched by your ignorance. Most scientists have a pretty refined sense of history, and since their educations generally include a history of science and technology series, virtually none of them are of the opinion that "all is darkness" before the enlightenment. Probably with a great deal more demonstrable precision than your average creationist can argue the point.
That is evidence that science, though good for many endevours, is worthless when trying to analyze things that cannot be broken into little pieces and still have meaning.
No doubt. However, concerning those things which can be piecewise analyzed, science has no peer.
On the contrary, you should note that your continued repetition of the claim of "false" does not change the fact that the claims of ID, insofar as they attribute the presence of organized matter that performs specific functions to intelligent design, are reasonable and within the bounds of scientific inquiry. BINGO!
The same way you test your own inferences that an intelligible universe may be a product of non-intelligent non-design. Do you not realize that all science begins with untestable assumptions? If not, then you have adopted an untestable assumption of your own.
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