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.
What IF?... many of the stories/tales/object lessons in the Bible are metaphorical.. either wholly or partially or the literal having metaphorical content..
I noticed many brush aside an obvious metaphor biblically or not(other sources) and take the literal meaning.. or worse morph the metaphor into the literal.. Some things are literal some are not and some things are BOTH literal and metaphorical.. There are "types" and even archetypes in written and spoken communication.. that can cross language and cultural lines.. Which is only one of a metaphors purposes.. The other purpose is to HIDE the truth in plain sight.. For the lazy and/or corrupt will not decrypt a metaphor.. they prefer the literal..
The bible is full of Megaphors and microphors and macrophors..
Maybe..
I have no problem with that.
Thank you oh so much for posting this "state-of-the-art" compendium of what science knows at present about these "matters." It will certainly be interesting to see whether the Higgs will be found at CERN next year....
Here's what I'm wondering about. We have three things here that are used to define or describe one other. While descriptions generally are made in terms of other things, these three things are evidently closely associated with one another, and yet each is distinct in its own right. It seems we are "suspended in language" here, as Bohr might put it. For it seems, assuming one buys into the idea that the Universe is One, then Timaeus's logic is reasonable:
Are we then right to speak of one universe, or would it be more correct to speak of a plurality or infinity? ONE is right, if it was manufactured according to its pattern; for that which comprises all intelligible beings cannot have a double. There would have to be another being comprising them both, of which both were parts, and it would be correct to call our world a copy not of them but of the being which comprised them.We are suspended in language because we see "as if through a glass, darkly." We cannot see the first principle involved but only indirectly, through its observable manifestations. In short, we see the surface of things, and not their principal causes. Perhaps the one principle that reconciles mass, matter, and energy will remain a mystery. After all, we are all "merely human, and should not look for anything more than a likely story in such matters," as Timaeus says.
Lest anyone consider that statement anti-science, bear in mind that science cannot get a "picture" of the singularity that is thought to have "seeded" this universe for the simple reason that the physical laws completely break down at spatiotemporal sizes smaller than Planck length and Planck time. That is evidently a physical limit that scientific technique cannot overcome. Something like that may apply in questions relating to mass, matter, and energy and their evidently mutual relations.
But then again, perhaps not. It's just a thought I've been turning over in my mind -- struggling with is more like it....
Thanks again, dearest sister in Christ, for your wonderful essay/post!
Some days we are Nominalists.
Analogy is not proof. That's an heuristic rule. It's tragic that physics grabbed some perfectly good words and labeled some of their analogies with them as if that meant the mathematical description of mass or electric charge or inertia had something to do with matter. The analogy has nothing to do with matter.
Even Einstein looked around for something to call his mathematical construction and stole 'relativity' from the social sciences and ultimately from Aristotle's categories. Go through physics and find something that isn't an analogy with a name tacked on that has nothing to do with the genus.
Thank you so much for including me in your discussion, your musings, dear betty boop and Alamo-Girl.
That may be true and it may not. It is certainly not an axiom that you can draw conclusions from.
Well said.. On one hand I have held a bowling ball in my hand and used a winch to move other heavy mass.. and yet Jesus is said to have walked on unfrozen water and challenged "us" to do it to.. and photons don't seem to HAVE weight/mass..
What is matter?... is indeed a pregnant question.. Jesus walking on water must be a metaphor/object lesson to tell us something.. The mass of matter could be a form of energy.. like solid, liquid, gas are forms of something.. Wonder what is the metaphorical message of the physics and cosmology of Jesus walking on water?..
Which goes to show that language has direction and focus. Analogy does have to do with matter, when, like a good arrow, can be well-aimed and on target in the hands of a good shooter.
Those are words, true.
This is not about the formulation of axioms. This is about what can be directly observed. It is the scientists who tell us that the singularity -- which current-state science assumes -- cannot be directly observed, and the reason why that is so.
Astutely noted, dear 'pipe! Not to mention I totally agree with your observation.
Well that would certainly be helpful. There's just too much arrogant, self-satisfied "puffery" in the world as it is. A certain child-like simplicity is highly recommended as an antidote.... FWIW
Wonderfully and truly said, cornelis. All three of your aspects go to the heart of the observer problem; but the most challenging and disturbing to me is your third aspect, in italics above. (My bolds added.)
Thank you so much for your insightful and incisive essay/post!
Amen! Thank you for your most perceptive insight Texas Songwriter!
I thought the point of Einstein's theory of special relativity was to show that space and time are inseparable. How can there be a "solution space" absent or part from the corresponding time of the solution?
And then of reflection.... There can be no articulation in language prior to reflection that could make any sense at all.
Or alternatively, the threat could come from people wielding political/social power who wish to censor free scientific inquiry. It all depends on your point of view.
As you are an observer, you are entitled to see "bullshit," if that's the best interpretation of your experience WRT ID that you can come up with. That doesn't necessarily make the "conjecture" you impute to A-G bullshit WRT ID. For your observation is necessarily limited to what you observe. If your field of view is subjectively narrowed, you must experience it as limited by the restricted field of view you have chosen to allow. And your descriptions of it will be likewise narrow and partial (the latter in a double sense).
A world-class tweak that bears repeating, dear 'pipe! (Though probably evolutionists will find fault with it.)
Dear GGG, now if there really is a mystery in this world, the above italics would seem to perfectly capture it.
That is, the mystery of man willfully turning away from his creator, his bountiful source and sustainer, and the creator of the beauties of nature and the universe at large, in which man has been placed according to divine love, wisdom, and justice.
And for what purpose would a man divorce himself from what has created him and which continually sustains him in every way, physically, intellectually, and spiritually??? Ah, that would seem to be the "mystery."
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