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.
We know.
Actually, if understand Kurt Godel correctly (one of the most significant logicians of all time), he showed that a combination of simple self-evident axioms demands that we acknowledge the existence of true ‘supernatural’ theorems whose truth can never be proven directly. If true, Godel has demonstrated that science can indeed study certain aspects of the supernatural. And as far as I know, Godel has not been disproven.
Which means what, in the context of testing observations? That we don't really test our observations, or that there's no more basis to trust the results of the test than there was to trust the initial observation in the first place? Something else altogther? Nothing at all?
On the sidebar that followed:
Truly, no one is exempt from the "observer problem." And that includes theologians who sometimes wander beyond the revelations of God, fabricating doctrines and traditions of their own imaginings.
Some of them are harmless - like the color of the carpet - or pointless, like ritual washing of dishes. But some of them can be very harmful indeed, especially when they direct hapless followers away from God.
The most common problem vis-à-vis God and the observer problem is the tendency of men to anthropomorphize Him.
For instance, they may insist that God must comply with Aristotlean Laws of Logic. They might say, by reason of the Law of the Excluded Middle, commandments or revelations in Scripture must be either/or and never both.
As another example, they may insist that God must abide by their own sense of an arrow of time and thus cannot judge a person before he comes into existence to say or do anything whereby he would be judged.
By anthropomorphizing God, they deny God who IS and create a smaller "god" of their own imagining, one they can comprehend.
Sure it can. Ghost hunters use thermal vision and thermometers to look for ghosts.
But, since there is no such thing ghosts, they have yet to come up with any scientific proof.
Cordially,
Get over yourself ... you’re starting to sound like (not be, but be like) Ichneumon the perfect (or was prefect?).
I've heard your argument on this before, and probably responded similarly before, but the special status you attribute to matter in this respect is arbitrary. ALL scientific concepts (certainly all significant ones) are theory laden in the same or similar respects.
I wasn’t talking about ghosts. Godel’s theorems prove that either the universe is infinite, or it is finite and infinity lies outside the universe (as theists maintain). And seeing that virtually everything we have learned about the universe suggests that it is finite, theists are on much more solid ground than philosophical naturalists when they claim a spiritual creator from outside the physical universe created the same.
Thank you for your insights, A-G.
I agree that information is present in life, yet, I do not think that information is life.
I am thinking that there actually is some essence that is life, that it is either on or off, full or empty, complete or broken....something like that.
For instance, they may insist that God must comply with Aristotlean Laws of Logic. They might say, by reason of the Law of the Excluded Middle, commandments or revelations in Scripture must be either/or and never both.
As another example, they may insist that God must abide by their own sense of an arrow of time and thus cannot judge a person before he comes into existence to say or do anything whereby he would be judged.
By anthropomorphizing God, they deny God who IS and create a smaller "god" of their own imagining, one they can comprehend.
It's also possible (and common) to err in the opposite direction: To over (or too exclusively) emphasize God's transcendence at the expense of his immanence in the world.
For instance if God is truly immanent in the world, then some aspects of God do exist within "the arrow of time". (Some, and of course not all, which would be pantheism as opposed to theism.)
Likewise if God is ALL knowing then he must know, in some genuine fashion, of phenomena such as discovering and experiencing new things. Therefore God must have aspects of or within himself that are NOT omniscient, if God in His completeness is omniscient.
Of course both of these aspects, among others, are found in God's incarnation as Christ.
Anyway this opposite error makes for a "big" God, but also one far too distant from his creation.
If I were using the spiritual language of Christians (I Cor 2) to address those issues - my correspondents who do not speak that language would not understand.
But if my correspondents do speak that language and are also interested in the math and science, then I speak both.
So be wary of making assumptions about what others are saying, especially if you don't know the speaker.... If in doubt, it's better to ask for an outright clarification of what they're saying rather than to assume you understand what they said.
Both philosophers/theologians and scientists are human beings, and both are just as likely to have opinions formed from their own (limited) knowledge and experience. Both may also have valuable things to say; and they are not necessarily "mutually opposed," but perhaps each represents a complementary view.
The best rule (it seems to me) is to listen to what people have to say, and avoid "attributing motives," or otherwise trying to make one's opponent "look bad" (such as attempting to disqualify one's opponent as not qualified to speak to an issue -- I see that one around here a lot -- or gratuitously redefining his argument in absurd ways).
Here's a great rule of thumb from Victor Davis Hanson:
"In writing opinion journalism ... it’s a good idea to follow two general rules: never gratuitously, maliciously, or unfairly personally attack anyone — and never let a serious attack against yourself go unanswered."At the end of the day it is always possible to disagree yet still be civil in one's disagreement.
Just my two cents worth, tacticalogic. Thank you so much for writing!
I don't get this. I'm not a mathematician, but I thought Godel's proof referred to formal systems, like rational (and in the event man made) systems of mathematics.
How does a proof that formal systems cannot be complete (generate proofs of all true theorems) say anything about the universe, let alone what's beyond the universe? After all it's possible (is it not?) to have infinities within mathematics, for instance an infinite number of integers, without the universe itself being spatially infinite.
I disagree.
I would say that there are far more people like myself who wonder why the God of the Bible (especially the Old Testament) seems to be archaically unsophisticated. God's endless blathering about how to grow your crops, treat your slaves, and run your small regional city states makes him seem like a local wise man squatting in an incense-filled lambskin tent rather than the incredible, timeless, all knowing ruler of the universe.
If God is so omnipotent and involved in the goings on of heaven and Earth, why does he limit his scripture's geographic reach to middle eastern backwoods? Surely there were righteous men and human upheavals happening elsewhere in the world that could have used his guidance.
His explanation of the creation time, space, and the Earth reads more like a big budget version of the story we tell children to explain where babies come from; instead of the stork delivering the baby to awaiting parents, we have God fashioning the universe in a few days like he's putting together a train set.
Why does God's words seem so caught up in the dated rituals and social norms of slavery and animal sacrifice that even the laziest and amoral of modern men have long abandoned?
The New Testament is somewhat of an improvement to the Pentateuch and later books of the Old, but it still doesn't do much to improve the ostensible impression that the God of the Bible is very much a being invented by Bronze age story tellers.
I think I've tried to do that. While sometimes it's a conscious effort to not attribute motives to some of the answers, I think in some ways it's more difficult to not attribute motives to failure to answer at all.
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