One on One: Faith in hierarchy ("the universe is hierarchical, with creation at the top")

Jarusalem Post ^ | June 20, 2007 | Ruthie Blum

[GodGunsGuts]

George Gilder has been famous in the United States for more than three decades. Well, infamous would be a more accurate adjective - considering the political-cultural climate in which he emerged and to which he has devoted his life's research and writings.

In America in the 1970s, one couldn't publish anti-feminist books such as Sexual Suicide, Naked Nomads, and Men and Marriage and come away unscathed, after all. Nor could one turn against welfare and Keynesian economics without arousing the wrath of liberals none too fond of the philosophies of individual responsibility and creativity - though Gilder's best-selling Wealth and Poverty (1981) did just that.

Dozens of books, hundreds of articles, an influential newsletter and a think-tank later (the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which he cofounded with Bruce Chapman, who accompanied him on a trip to Israel earlier this month), the 68-year-old current expert in microchips is raising more eyebrows than ever. Being a techno-scientist who opposes Darwin's theory of evolution will do that.

Gilder, whose lengthy and diverse resume includes his having been a fellow at the Kennedy Institute of Politics at Harvard (from where he graduated), serving as a speechwriter for Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon and receiving the White House Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence from president Ronald Reagan, says that everything he has examined points to the same "top-down" model.

"The universe is hierarchical," says Gilder, with the intensity of someone racing to keep up with a mind constantly in overdrive. "And hierarchy points to a summit. The summit remains enclosed in fog, but this doesn't exclude the possibility that behind the fog is a divinity that we, through our faith, might worship."

It is this view that led the churchgoing, married, father of four from Massachusetts...to espouse the "intelligent design" movement....

[GodGunsGuts]

“Paganism is an earth based religion which lays emphasis on the worship of all aspects of nature.”

If the shoe fits...

[ChessExpert]

Thanks for the post. There is a lot of content in that interview.

I greatly enjoyed his “Wealth and Poverty” when I read it many years ago. He mentions the creative force behind markets. That seems right too. It also provides a unifying theme in his thinking.

If we really need multiverses to achieve the life we see about us, then naturalism is simply another faith. Perhaps its most distinguishing characteristics would be that it ignores morality and meaning in life.

[mjolnir]

But you see, when the sun comes out, ie, the light of empirical understanding, it pierces the fog revealing no object of worship at all, reminding us that throwing up our hands in the face of things we don’t presently understand and crying, “God did it!” leads to gods of gaps and the early truncation of inquiries that might have actually led to something worthwhile.

You're confusing natural theology with worship. The latter relies on resources beyond mere reason and observation, such as one's moral imagination and capacity for faith; the former does not. The fact that a scientist infers an intelligent designer or intelligent orderer from his reason and observation does not imply said scientist has truncated inquiry--- just the opposite.

For instance, Einstein inferred an ordering intelligence from the elegance of the physical laws he knew of, and based upon that conclusion inferred new laws that turned out to in fact reflect the way the universe actually is. In other words, one doesn't have to be religious to agree with Lewis or Gilder on this count. Einstein was no more religious than his hero, Spinoza, but both made the quite reasonable inference that a rational order, i.e. a logos, existed in nature.

The same inference was made by Locke, Newton, Galileo and continues to be made today--- in fact, the most prominent historical opponents of said inference, Hume and Kant, both praised it for its beneficial effect upon science throughout history, much as Charles Murray has today. Even Darwin did not take issue with the idea of an inference to such an intelligence--- he merely disagreed with the notion that such an intelligence must be moral. The theory that said inference promotes a woolly-eyed "god of the gaps" response is undermined by the actual empirical research of Charles Murray, not to mention the writings of Kant and Hume, who wrote with remarkable intellectual integrity in praising the historical benefits of an inference they themselves disagreed with.

[gcruse]

You're confusing natural theology with worship.

I was quoting from the article where he says --

"behind the fog is a divinity that we, through our faith, might worship."

The fact that a scientist infers an intelligent designer or intelligent orderer from his reason and observation does not imply said scientist has truncated inquiry--- just the opposite.

If we accepted that ID's 'irreducible complexity' of the eye precluded its having evolved, that it was created in the form we see before us, the entire line of research into the eye's development would be seen as unscientific and any medical benefits that might have arisen from the research would be lost.

who wrote with remarkable intellectual integrity in praising the historical benefits


Cultural benefits of religion aren't validations of the religion's beliefs. Mormonism produces exemplary behavior among its adherents, but not many outside the religion believe there were gold plates or magical translating lenses involved in writing the Book of Mormon.

[Matchett-PI]

Rarely seen Isaac Newton papers go on display in Jerusalem

POSTED: 1:46 p.m. EDT, June 18, 2007

Papers show Isaac Newton's religious side

[mjolnir]

Read Murray-— the “cultural benefit” he’s talking about is the benefit to the culture of science.

While you’re at it, you might re-read the line of Gilder that you quote. When he says “behind the fog is a divinity” he is inferring an intelligence behind the order of the universe-— just as Einstein did.

That the divinity is one to be worshiped is where his faith comes in. In other words, he and Einstein agree that there is a logos in nature from which an ordering intelligence may be reasonably inferred. Ever the rationalist (NOT an empiricist, despite his early admiration of Ernst Mach), Einstein denies that a personal God may be so inferred-— and Gilder does not disagree-— that is why Gilder invokes faith at that point.

Your notion of irreducible complexity, which you confuse for spontaneous generation and refers to the limits of natural selection rather than evolution in any case, is beside the point. The fact that the inference that the universe is rationally ordered and therefore amenable to discovery through the use of reason has been a boon to science has been historically documented by William Wallace, Pierre Duhem, Charles Murray and Rodney Stark among others.

[GodGunsGuts]

Your link doesn’t go anywhere. Could you repost it? Thanks—GGG

[gcruse]

“That the divinity is one to be worshiped is where his faith comes in.”

That’s the nub, isn’t it? Because the physical world seems to be understandable by our brains, never mind that this breaks down at the level of quantum mechanics, we assume something like us must have engineered it. I find this wholly unpersuasive but even if I believed it, it is too far big a leap to think the engineer can read my thoughts, make impossible things happen, and answer my pleas by changing the course of events. This is not to even address the problem of who engineered the engineer.

[Matchett-PI]

Sorry - try this:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/06/18/newton.papers.ap/index.html

[GodGunsGuts]

Wow. I heard about this, but hadn’t seen any of his manuscripts. Cool find!

[Matchett-PI]

“...This is not to even address the problem of who engineered the engineer.” ~ gcruse

Brains and Eggs

Or, A Quick Look at Some Insults to Our Intelligence
James Patrick Holding
http://www.tektonics.org/qt/smithg01.html

“...Smith’s argument against design is weak, and shoots itself in the foot when he asks “Who designed God?” First off, let’s assume that God is complex. (Actually, if Smith wanted to know about God, he could have checked a tome on Systematic Theology and found that an attribute of God is simplicity, meaning he has no parts.) What if we say “God doesn’t need a designer.”

Smith could say “Complex things need designers.” At that point, we have to ask who designed the complex universe. If he says “Okay, then complex things don’t need designers”, we can smile and say “Glad you agree. God doesn’t need a designer either.” ...”

[Matchett-PI]

“Because the physical world seems to be understandable by our brains, never mind that this breaks down at the level of quantum mechanics, we assume something like us must have engineered it. I find this wholly unpersuasive but even if I believed it, it is too far big a leap to ..” ~ gcruse

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1854297/posts?page=17#17

[LiteKeeper]

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