Posted on 06/23/2007 12:21:46 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
Pro-Darwin Biology Professor Laments Academia's "Intolerance" and Supports Teaching Intelligent Design
Charles Darwin famously said, "A fair result can be obtained only by fully balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question." According to a recent article by J. Scott Turner, a pro-Darwin biology professor at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York, modern Neo-Darwinists are failing to heed Darwin's advice. (We blogged about a similar article by Turner in The Chronicle of Higher Education in January, 2007.) Turner is up front with his skepticism of intelligent design (ID), which will hopefully allow his criticisms to strike a chord with other Darwinists.
Turner starts by observing that the real threat to education today is not ID itself, but the attitude of scientists towards ID: "Unlike most of my colleagues, however, I don't see ID as a threat to biology, public education or the ideals of the republic. To the contrary, what worries me more is the way that many of my colleagues have responded to the challenge." He describes the "modern academy" as "a tedious intellectual monoculture where conformity and not contention is the norm." Turner explains that the "[r]eflexive hostility to ID is largely cut from that cloth: some ID critics are not so much worried about a hurtful climate as they are about a climate in which people are free to disagree with them." He then recounts and laments the hostility faced by Richard Sternberg at the Smithsonian:
It would be comforting if one could dismiss such incidents as the actions of a misguided few. But the intolerance that gave rise to the Sternberg debacle is all too common: you can see it in its unfiltered glory by taking a look at Web sites like pandasthumb.org or recursed.blogspot.com [Jeffry Shallit's blog] and following a few of the threads on ID. The attitudes on display there, which at the extreme verge on antireligious hysteria, can hardly be squared with the relatively innocuous (even if wrong-headed) ideas that sit at ID's core.
(J. Scott Turner, Signs of Design, The Christian Century, June 12, 2007.)
Turner on the Kitzmiller v. Dover Case
Turner sees the Kitzmiller v. Dover case as the dangerous real-world expression of the intolerance common in the academy: "My blood chills ... when these essentially harmless hypocrisies are joined with the all-American tradition of litigiousness, for it is in the hand of courts and lawyers that real damage to cherished academic ideas is likely to be done." He laments the fact that "courts are where many of my colleagues seem determined to go with the ID issue” and predicts, “I believe we will ultimately come to regret this."
Turner justifies his reasonable foresight by explaining that Kitzmiller only provided a pyrrhic victory for the pro-Darwin lobby:
Although there was general jubilation at the ruling, I think the joy will be short-lived, for we have affirmed the principle that a federal judge, not scientists or teachers, can dictate what is and what is not science, and what may or may not be taught in the classroom. Forgive me if I do not feel more free.
(J. Scott Turner, Signs of Design, The Christian Century, June 12, 2007.)
Turner on Education
Turner explains, quite accurately, that ID remains popular not because of some vast conspiracy or religious fanaticism, but because it deals with an evidentiary fact that resonates with many people, and Darwinian scientists do not respond to ID's arguments effectively:
[I]ntelligent design … is one of multiple emerging critiques of materialism in science and evolution. Unfortunately, many scientists fail to see this, preferring the gross caricature that ID is simply "stealth creationism." But this strategy fails to meet the challenge. Rather than simply lament that so many people take ID seriously, scientists would do better to ask why so many take it seriously. The answer would be hard for us to bear: ID is not popular because the stupid or ignorant like it, but because neo-Darwinism's principled banishment of purpose seems less defensible each passing day.
(J. Scott Turner, Signs of Design, The Christian Century, June 12, 2007.)
Turner asks, “What, then, is the harm in allowing teachers to deal with the subject as each sees fit?” ID can't be taught, he explains, because most scientists believe that "normal standards of tolerance and academic freedom should not apply in the case of ID." He says that the mere suggestion that ID could be taught brings out "all manner of evasions and prevarications that are quite out of character for otherwise balanced, intelligent and reasonable people."
As we noted earlier, hopefully Turner’s criticisms will strike a chord with Darwinists who might otherwise close their ears to the argument for academic freedom for ID-proponents. Given the intolerance towards ID-sympathy that Turner describes, let us also hope that the chord is heard but the strummer is not harmed.
And I've answered. I don't know.
I know enough to grasp that no one really knows the answer to that question with enough certainty.
I'm not really interested in questions with no answer. You've proposed possible answers of "yes" and "no", so if you have some comment depending on which of those I pick, then give me both of your comments. Anything else is a waste of time.
I know enough to grasp that no one really knows the answer to that question with enough certainty.
Thank you for your answer. You do not know. Yet you denegrate those who have a rational answer, but one which you begin with excluding. It is irrational to make such declarations as you have on this thread and then say you do not know if the universe had a beginning. That is a sorry state of understanding of science to affirm all who believe otherwise than you are to be disregarded or better yet regarded as buffoons. You opinion is condensed to, "I don't know how or if the universe had a beginning. I reject any rational attempt to an explaination from the start because the notion that you know the answer to the question is offensive to my sensibilities. I am totally ignorant of a rational answer to the question, but your answer cannot be the answer."
Elitist bigotry is the only term for your position. You drape yourself in the mantle of science and then use your ignorance to excuse its' shortcomings. Son, stay in the shallow end of the pool. You don't belong here.
You may believe you have a rational answer, but I don't accept it because I don't believe anyone has a solid rational answer. In particular, I can't agree with your answer since you haven't given it to me, or your rational behind it.
It is irrational to make such declarations as you have on this thread and then say you do not know if the universe had a beginning.
What is irrational is getting on a thread about Intelligent Design and it's proposed opposition to biological evolution, and starting a discussion about the beginning of the universe. The two are not related.
Elitist bigotry is the only term for your position.
I smelled a trap when you first posed your question. You were seeking a way to pump your ego and "win a battle" by some method, and thought you could trap me by whatever answer I gave. It appears I was correct.
You drape yourself in the mantle of science and then use your ignorance to excuse its' shortcomings.
I believe that I understand evolution. I do not understand the beginnings of the universe. That you believe these two entirely different subjects are related is your ignorance and shortcoming.
Son, stay in the shallow end of the pool. You don't belong here.
And you call me an elitist bigot.
I've likely been on crevo threads longer than you've been on FR.
If you believe in the soul and believe in God, then appreciate evolution for what it is, one of God's first creations.
The creative process which God chose to give us our cosmos and our lives (including our souls) could hardly be thought of as soulless, by any stretch of intellectual honesty.
A cannot be made to mean not A.
Apt, IMHO, FWIW. Setting a few personal things in order I want to order your book, finally. I've already been suggesting it, so I'd better read it.
What is a term for attempting to extract some of what is and substituting it for what is, and thus, detatching from it's source? Selective contamination, maybe. Yet that doesn't quite work, because any such bad work is an act of destruction with universal consequences.
Second reality works, though. The fuzzy guy in Lewis' first space novel had trouble imagining such a ontological contortion and I think he came up with kind of an inadequate word, though another succinct and effective one: "bent."
Of course we have the phrase "vain imagining," already, too. The One who is Reality has yet more succinct terms -- more personal and relative terms, of course: "lie," for this process and "death," for the state of clinging to the lie. Ya gotta love a guy like that.
It's not really "darkness," but it's something of what hunches over in that inevitable ambient result.
May I suggest what I hope is a method by which to find a plausible answer to the above question, unspun?
I propose we begin with a "text," hopefully to get everybody on the same page at least initially:
In our capacity as political scientists, historians, or philosophers we all have had occasion at one time or another to engage in debate with ideologists -- whether communists or intellectuals of a persuasion closer to home. And we have all discovered on such occasions that no agreement, or even an honest disagreement, could be reached, because the exchange of the argument was disturbed by a profound difference of attitude with regard to all fundamental questions of human existence -- with regard to the nature of man, to his place in the world, to his place in society and history, to his relation to God. Rational argument could not prevail because the partner to the discussion did not accept as binding for himself the matrix of reality in which all specific questions concerning our existence as human beings are ultimately rooted; he has overlaid the reality of existence with another mode of existence that Robert Musil has called the Second Reality. The argument could not achieve results, it had to falter and peter out, as it became increasingly clear that not argument was pitched against argument, but that behind the appearance of a rational debate there lurked the difference between two modes of existence, of existence in truth and existence in untruth. The universe of rational discourse collapses, we may say, when the common ground of existence in reality has disappeared....[from "On Debate and Existence," in the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 12...., Ellis Sandoz, ed., 1990; but I added the bolds.]The Second Realities which cause the breakdown of rational discourse are a comparatively recent phenomenon. They have grown during the modern centuries, roughly since 1500, until they have reached, in our own time, the proportions of a social and political force which in more gloomy moments may look strong enough to extinguish our civilization -- unless, of course, you are an ideologist yourself and identify civilization with the victory of Second Reality.
And that is what we call a hypothesis. Now we have to test it.
Not to anticiate too much I hope, but it does seem to me that the people who flack Second Realities are not the most gracious or forthcoming folks on the face of the planet. And it can be shown that they "cheat" as often as possible, so long as it is "necessary" to uphold a doctine that does not at all appear helpful to human flourishing, let alone conform with direct human observation of the natural world....
But I'll leave it there for now, so other folks can weigh in on this question first....
This is old hat, narby. Something is eternal. You're not well-read on this kind of reasoning, or are you?
Both sides claim this, at yet they are at odds. I think some have taken a short-cut to obtain a common ground. To do so they have made reality common once by having the universe "sliced and diced," as you said, or shrunk into manageable parts. This is the problem with isms--in theology and science--where the part is substituted for the whole. There is no doubt that scientific thinking about reality is very, very productive. This is boon and bane at the same time. Nobody in their right mind denies its success. And yet, the tremendous impetus of this success can, as (tpaine cited from Koestler's) drive us to an "an excess capacity for fanatical devotion" at the expense of things in reality for which scientific thinking is less helpful. There is nobody in their right mind who can deny that there are aspects to reality for which scientific thinking must take second place. This is especially so for human nature, which is social and sovereign at the same time and demands a politics which must be grounded in a reality that is larger than what science illuminates.
In my view, methodological naturalism as used in sciences is not a poison pill to having a discussion with scientists concerning theology, culture, politics, philosophy, etc.
However, when the correspondent belives that "all that there is" is matter in all its motions, it is virtually impossible to find language - word concepts - for an effective dialogue.
It would be easier to discuss astrophysics with Geronimo.
No, we denigrate you for asserting your answer is rational.
Did the universe have a beginning?
What is the alternative?
I’ve seen people argue that God has no beginning. If this is accepted, then logic cannot compel that entities must have beginnings.
Why are you afraid of answering the question?
You haven't asked an answerable question. The question, as you asked it, contains innumerable hidden assumptions about the nature of time and existence.
The simple answer, according to physicists is that the observable universe has a point in its history beyond which the ordinary definition of time loses its meaning.
But physics also knows that it doesn't know everything and hasn't observed everything. There are observable effects on galaxies that imply we haven't observed or meaningfully described more than a fraction of what we call matter and energy.
So even at the level of observable, physical reality, your question is unanswerable.
Why are you afraid of answering my question?
Assume I answered no.
Let me expand on my answer. I personally accept Hawkings argument that the universe has no beginning. This is just an opinion. You asked something eqivalent to “THE” answer. I can only give you my answer.
Scientific thinking has to assume the uniformity of natural causes, if not eternal, at least holding true for the very present. Scientific thinking makes metaphysical assumptions concerning time. It seems that the point that betty boop has just raised concerns the variable scope of our common ground as opposed to the full extent of reality. Like good lawyers, a scientist with an ounce of metaphysical sense has the opportunity to narrow the scope to make their preferred determinations.
In consonience with rational thought and scientific thought how do you explain the scientific evidence for an expanding universe, the radioation echo, and the second law of thermodynamics? One of the laws of rationality is that all events or occurrances or things had a cause. Do you believe the universe is eternal and without cause?
To answer that question some words need definitions..
Time has not been defined.. What is TIME?..
In an "eternal" reality, time is nonsense.. The past, present and future are parts of the same thing.. if viewed in a linear way.. How can time be linear except in a second dimension?.. But there are more dimensions that that..
Eternity -OR- Infinity might be impossible for a human mind to compute.. ACCURATELY..
The answer to this question could be... The Universe always was and will be.. This Universe might be compose of "stuff" much greater than matter or even energy.. What "stuff"?.. Yeah! good question..
Monkeys considering a gold Rolex Watch with a leather band and precious stones presented artistically might be analogous to Humans defining TIME.. and by association this Universe.. Are YOU a Primate?..
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