Posted on 06/09/2003 6:07:51 PM PDT by Mr. Silverback
In the years that BreakPoint has been on the radio, I've had some strong words about our nation's public television broadcasting system, PBS. Two years ago, for example, I criticized PBS's airing of a deeply flawed series on the theory of evolution. That series was inaccurate and one-sided, leaving out any mention of the scientific evidence that supported the theory of intelligent design.
But today I've got good news about PBS to report. And this is news where you can make a real difference.
Over the past few weeks, here and there around the country, some PBS stations have been broadcasting the one-hour science documentary "Unlocking the Mystery of Life." This program tells the story of the biological theory of intelligent design. Using interviews with scientists and philosophers, computer animation, and location footage -- from such sites as the Galapagos Islands -- "Unlocking the Mystery of Life" describes the emergence of an alternative theory to strictly naturalistic evolution.
Naturalistic evolution, you see, credits all the amazing diversity and complexity of life solely to mindless natural causes, and that's how PBS science programs usually explain biology. That's "usually" as in "the sun usually goes down at night." You'd search fruitlessly if you tried to find PBS presenting the scientific case for a different viewpoint than Darwinian. And so airing "Unlocking the Mystery" points to a significant breakthrough.
The documentary tells such a good scientific story that, earlier this year, PBS made the program available to all of its national affiliates. Local stations could download the program from a satellite link, and -- if they so decided -- put it into their schedules.
Stations in Oklahoma and Michigan have already done so, and in a couple of days, PBS affiliates in Maryland, Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, and Texas will broadcast the program as well. You can contact BreakPoint (1-877-3-CALLBP) for the days and times of these broadcasts.
Airing "Unlocking the Mystery" on taxpayer-supported public television is great news for intellectual freedom and openness in science. Most Americans learn about new developments in science from TV -- shows like the long-running PBS series NOVA. A well produced TV documentary can take complicated scientific theories and make them accessible and easy to understand -- even fun to watch. For young people, science that might be boring in the classroom becomes fascinating when presented imaginatively on television.
But TV can also exclude scientific ideas if they're deemed too controversial or likely to upset the scientific establishment. Challenges to Darwinian evolution have been seen just that way, religiously motivated and therefore suspect. But science suffers as a result, because there is plenty of evidence that does challenge Darwinism, and the public needs to hear both sides.
So here's what you can do. Call your local PBS station if it hasn't scheduled "Unlocking the Mystery," and encourage it to show the program. Send them an e-mail. If they've already shown it, let them know you appreciate their willingness to present alternatives to Darwinian evolution -- and that you'd like to see more of such programming in the future.
There are many rational models of inquiry, science is but one of them. Science lacks the ability to inquire about God. Science is a method, nothing more or less. It's "explanations" are actually guesses or hypotheses (e.g., evolution), subject to empirical test. Science does not purport to explain everything, only that which can be subjected to the scientific method.
Thus, science appropriately does not consider God.
Intelligent Design doesn't presuppose God! What it does is make evidence-based arguments that blind random selection is insufficient to explain the full diversity and complexity of life that is observed. "Design" here means "not randomly caused", but no assumptions are made about the identity of the "designer" -- it could be a technological civilization from elsewhere in the galaxy for example. The core technical concept is that random variation has its limits, which can be characterized mathematically, and that certain conditions on a system allow one to deduce that the probability it could have been created by random-mutation-driven evolution is vanishingly small.
Thank God for natural selection!
Evolutionary theory is also a lousy guide to making a really good souffle, it sucks at illustrating the workings of an internal combustion engine, and it's damn-near impossible to use it to translate Egyptian hieroglyphics. What's your point?
my actual quote was if God exists then God must be considered in any ‘rational’ explanation of existence.
I believe science is trying to explain existence. Therefore if God or (gods) exist it is unscientific to deny God; in the same way it was unscientific to deny the existence of germs before that was proven.
The jury is still out on the IDers "irreducible complexity" arguments, but they're not unscientific. I just want you to admit the LOGICAL POSSIBILITY that deep analysis of a system could show that it was designed rather than evolving by a sequence of small changes to systems each of which had a function.
It's not really a "third possibility;" it's essentially crypto-creationidiocy repackaged in a shiny new box in an attempt to try to sneak creationism into schools under the radar.
Of course, there's still a group of fanatical Young-Earth Creationidiot types that don't particularly like ID, but actually probably even the majority of Creationidiots have managed to finally figure out that Young-Earth Creationidiocy and absolute Biblical literalism is too obviously stupid to try to sell, at least immediately.
As is usual in a lot of scientific threads, I don't think people grasp how incredibly tiny the ID community is among legitmate scientists. (In contrast, the number of legitimate meteorologists and climatologists that question "Global Warming" theory is quite large, it's just that the media doesn't like them.) It's a tiny group who are continuously cited and re-cited. I'm aware that some of them claim not to be particularly religous but their proselytizers and the people buying their books certainly are.
And of evolutionists probably MOST are religious to some degree, with many thousands being churchgoing Christians and of course many thousands of agnostics or atheists; however, you'll look a long time before you find an atheist creationist; if it truly was such an attractive theory there would be some SOMEWHERE.
And are the probably 40-50,000 other scientists in the world with similar educational credentials that ARE evolutionists stupid?
If you're going to start stacking up scientists and degrees one-for-one as some sort of test of the validity of creationism vs. evolution you do realized you're going to get absolutely destroyed in spectacular fashion, don't you?
Just out of curiosity, are any of his degrees in biology or paleontology? I've noticed the handful of creationist scientists with actual real degrees that get trotted out (a great many others have fake degrees from microscopic fringe Christian college diploma mills)regularly routinely have degrees that SORTA seem to have to do with the nuts and bolts of evolution or the lack thereof (like physical organic chemistry), but they really don't....
Strictly speaking, that would just show ID us unnecessary, but that's as good as false.
You are actually arguing that ID cannot be VERIFIED, not that it cannot be falsified -- but that is not a problem for a scientific theory, all good theories are provisional and remain susceptible to refinement or refutation by further experimental investigation.
Suppose they decode some of the "junk DNA" all human genomes carry, and find that it is a "signature" -- a set of coordinates relative to galactic clusters that identifies a solar system, say, or a chapter from Genesis. I think this is extremely unlikely, but it is LOGICALLY POSSIBLE and would constitute good enough proof that an intelligence had designed (part of) our genome. Therefore even the criticism that ID is not VERIfiable is not correct, though it may never actually be verified and it MAY be falsified (it would be falsified if we could figure out how all the "irreducibly complex" systems could have come into being by Darwinian natural selection, but this is also far away).
it would be falsified if we could figure out how all the "irreducibly complex" systems could have come into being by Darwinian natural selectionNo it wouldn't. That's just an argument to rack down on evolution - ID doesn't stand or fall with it. It would still be possible to say "goddidit" or "purple space aliens from Orion did it".
Only certain aspects of whatever "existence" means.
To begin, we need an operational definition of existence.
On the contrary. ID is falsifiable, you just have to show that the actually existing biological systems could have evolved by natural selection, BY SHOWING A PATHWAY INVOLVING A SEQUENCE OF SMALL CHANGES TO FUNCTIONING SYSTEMS. This has been done in many cases of macro-evolution, but the situation is much different in the realm of complex biochemical reactions and "molecular machines" like the bacterial flagellum; for many famous examples there no remotely plausible path has been proposed. Strictly speaking, that would just show ID us unnecessary, but that's as good as false.
I think you're illustrating why ID is not falsifiable: You say we have to show that "the actually existing biological systems could have evolved by NS". But then you say that this has only been done for some molecular systems, but not for system X. But there must be millions of possible systems you could come up with, between all the different cellular mechanisms of different levels of complexity, and ditto for organs, multiplied by all the different genera, each one of which would have a slightly different system that an ID'er could demand is just different enough that it too needs to be explained. As long as you can paint one of these millions of variations as a significant unsolved problem, you can still claim that ID hasn't been falsified yet.
Suppose they decode some of the "junk DNA" all human genomes carry, and find that it is a "signature" -- a set of coordinates relative to galactic clusters that identifies a solar system, say, or a chapter from Genesis. I think this is extremely unlikely, but it is LOGICALLY POSSIBLE and would constitute good enough proof that an intelligence had designed (part of) our genome. Therefore even the criticism that ID is not VERIfiable is not correct, though it may never actually be verified and it MAY be falsified (it would be falsified if we could figure out how all the "irreducibly complex" systems could have come into being by Darwinian natural selection, but this is also far away).
This junk-DNA-as-steganography hypothesis is another example of an unfalsifiable claim. If we show that our junk DNA sequence does not correspond to any known map or text, you could say that we haven't found the right encoding code, or the right decryption key (out of the astronomical # of possible keys). Again - how is that kind of claim falsifiable?
Come to think of it, I think the claim that there is at least one solution that will never be completely explained by RM&NS would always be unfalsifiable, wouldn't it? As long as there are gaps in knowledge, there's your "out".
Those with whom I'm familiar are working scientists and, as such, consider matters of faith or divine influence outside the realm of science.As a matter of faith! If divine influence exists, it must be considered scientifically; it cannot be wished away. If God exists then God must be considered in any ‘rational’ explanation of existence. It is not scientific to say ‘I don’t believe in that so I wont consider it.’
The nature of science is that it depends on nature's regularities. (Water always freezes at 0c at 1 atmosphere, etc.) In fact, nature's regularity has to be axiomatic for science. But the nature of God is that He puts His finger on the scales once in a while ("performs miracles"). That's what makes him God, and not just some really smart guy.
When a scientist finds an anomaly, she assumes this is due to a regularity of nature that is currently unknown. It's the anomalies that point the way to new discoveries about the natural world. A scientist can't just say "this anomaly I've found could be either a new aspect of nature, or it could just as easily be a miracle". Where could she go from there? Why bother investigating the anomaly if, at every step of the way, the answer could just as easily be "it's a miracle"?
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