Posted on 01/18/2006 3:09:20 PM PST by xzins
Vatican Paper Hits 'Intelligent Design' By NICOLE WINFIELD ASSOCIATED PRESS
VATICAN CITY (AP) -
The Vatican newspaper has published an article saying "intelligent design" is not science and that teaching it alongside evolutionary theory in school classrooms only creates confusion.
The article in Tuesday's editions of L'Osservatore Romano was the latest in a series of interventions by Vatican officials - including the pope - on the issue that has dominated headlines in the United States.
The author, Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Bologna, laid out the scientific rationale for Darwin's theory of evolution, saying that in the scientific world, biological evolution "represents the interpretative key of the history of life on Earth."
He lamented that certain American "creationists" had brought the debate back to the "dogmatic" 1800s, and said their arguments weren't science but ideology.
"This isn't how science is done," he wrote. "If the model proposed by Darwin is deemed insufficient, one should look for another, but it's not correct from a methodological point of view to take oneself away from the scientific field pretending to do science."
Intelligent design "doesn't belong to science and the pretext that it be taught as a scientific theory alongside Darwin's explanation is unjustified," he wrote.
"It only creates confusion between the scientific and philosophical and religious planes."
Supporters of "intelligent design" hold that some features of the universe and living things are so complex they must have been designed by a higher intelligence. Critics say intelligent design is merely creationism - a literal reading of the Bible's story of creation - camouflaged in scientific language and say it does not belong in science curriculum.
Facchini said he recognized some Darwin proponents erroneously assume that evolution explains everything. "Better to recognize that the problem from the scientific point of view remains open," he said.
But he concluded: "In a vision that goes beyond the empirical horizon, we can say that we aren't men by chance or by necessity, and that the human experience has a sense and a direction signaled by a superior design."
The article echoed similar arguments by the Vatican's chief astronomer, the Rev. George Coyne, who said "intelligent design" wasn't science and had no place in school classrooms.
Pope Benedict XVI reaffirmed in off-the-cuff comments in November that the universe was made by an "intelligent project" and criticized those who in the name of science say its creation was without direction or order.
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Science uses the scientific method. Science looks for the simplest relationships between the observables. It never goes beyond what it can examine in the observables. Once the relationships are known and the phenomena are understood, that's the end of the science.
"Some philosophers posit the existence of a soul,... as part of the explanation of the difference between human thinking and animal instinct It rests on philosophical reasoning.
When science demonstrates that such things as instinct and rational intelligence arise out of natural causes. The soul appears as an extra scientific driving force. It is above and beyond the understanding of science. Logically, there is no need to describe one force, with an equivalent force. Historically, the role of soul as a life giving force has been greatly diminished. Notice you said "part of the explanation". As more knowledge and understanding is gained, there is less room for the animations of soul.
What I believe is that the soul is an individual's heavenly body. I take my direction on what it is from the Bible, not philosophy. There is no contradiction in that, with regards to Biblical meaning, because the soul refers to the person. It does not refer to an animating force.
"ID... deserves a hearing from both scientists (strictly speaking) and philosophers of science and general philosophers and theologians. They all ought to be engaging it, pointint out its flaws. "
ID already got it's hearing. It was quickly dismissed. Even the models are bad, because they don't represent reality. I realize that some folks can't grasp the underlying science and think the various ID claims are scientific and reasonable, but they are neither scientific, nor reasonable. They are not reasonable, because there is no justification for applying an arbitrary philosophical force on top of one that can be demonstrated to be real.
[in reference to your previous remark: “The physics for all possible worlds always existed.” ]
Moreover, since the measurement of the cosmic microwave background radiation back in the 60’s it has been consistently established that there was a beginning of real space and real time in this universe. There are no Lorentz transforms without space.
We ought not to declare what is possible vis-à-vis other worlds. After all, our vision and minds are limited to four, seemingly arbitrarily selected, perceptible dimensions although we can surmise the likelihood of additional spatial and temporal dimensions through mathematics.
You ask what I mean in saying that " the beginning of real time is the metaphysical naturalist objection to all cosmologies."
In sum, the metaphysical naturalist (or atheist) view relies on the plentitude argument, that anything that can happen, did. A finite past destroys that argument and they are left with the anthropic principle, that the past was sufficient though finite. Even so, a finite past means there was a beginning – and for that they have no rebuttal at all because there can only be one uncaused cause of all that there is, i.e. God.
Some physical cosmologies impose this universe’s space/time, physical laws, energy/matter and physical causation on previously existing worlds - that is their fatal flaw. Moreover, whereas infinity is a very useful construct in mathematics, it does not translate well to the physics. For more on that: Rudiger Vaas, “Time before Time.”
Artificial intelligence, computer and communications systems made of “dead” things do not occur naturally.
Or to put it another way, successful communication (information) requires message, source, encoding, channel, noise, decoding and recipient. In nature, when such communications successfully occur there is life. When they no longer occur – or never could occur naturally – there is non-life and/or death.
Your objections to Schneider’s use of a coin as a simplified (binary) example are noted – but again, I wonder just how much of Schneider you have read.
In the following article, Schneider goes into a more thorough explanation of Shannon entropy v thermodynamic entropy and how they relate to one another: Sequence Logos, Machine/Channel Capacity, Maxwell's Demon, and Molecular Computers: a Review of the Theory of Molecular Machines.
You cannot grasp that everything you say is already premised on a philosophical axiom. You are doing philosophy when you define science as explaining by itself the absence of "non-scientific" reality. We are talking two different languages, you are fully satisfied with your own and cannot imagine the alternative I am proposing. So I leave you to your narrow world of science.
re: But for centuries now, science has claimed on the popular level, the role of queen of knowledge.)))
You know, this is a point I've been trying to make on other threads--that a scientist is still human and mortal and flawed. You should see the reaction it gets. It reminds me of the popular vision of the artist about a hundred years ago--the title "artist" conveyed what was assumed was a natural ascendancy. Being an artist just meant you were more sensitive, more poetical, attuned to beauty...
Now the word "scientist" has a heroic connotation of Holders of the Truth--like a priesthood.
You may see it that way, but science does not. That nature is governed by the laws of physics and is a complete theory, is a concluison based on the evidence. It is not in any way axiomatic.
" You are doing philosophy when you define science as explaining by itself the absence of "non-scientific" reality."
Science views the absense of observables as just that. If it can't be seen, the logical concluison is that it does not exist.
I hope he gets better soon!
Wherein "we know not what we do." This ties into another sidebar I've seen running around hereabouts, that looked into the "evolution" of language.
C. S. Lewis indicates (in The Abolition of Man) that every person now living or who has ever lived or ever will live properly owes gratitude and duty, not only to God, but to his immediate forebears, and to his decendents -- and to each of the latter equally.
It seems useful to note in this juncture that historically, education meant the transmission of one's society's hard-won and well-tested experience. Such a reconsideration evokes the names of great men, of many different fields of human intellectual and spiritual endeavor -- the giants on whose shoulders we the living now stand, and from thence unto the next generation -- to our children.
But the modern educational model suggests the public schools are in the main business of social adjustment, not of acquisition of knowledge about the world, let alone of one's own native, traditional culture. Which apparently has been transmuted by the dreams of dreamers, who conjure second realities at the drop of a hat, simply because they detest the reality into which they were born and so seemingly resent. Maybe because it lets them live? Self-reprobation, self-detestation, various expressions of "guilt," inceasingly seem to be a preoccupation of the fashionable Left these days....
Two thoughts here. First, it seems that language begins to lose its historical meaning when the history of its own development is lost. When you don't teach the culture, you inevitably lose the language sooner or later.
Second, the Progressive Left well knows that "who controls the language, controls the debate." They also have noticed the intimate ties between historical experience and language; and so figure they can fiddle with the mix by rewriting history.
While at the same time coming at the same problem from a different side: the side that gobucks described in his recent astute critique of "dictionary writing."
Must run for now, but will be back later with the link to gobucks!
Thank you so very much, dear sister, for your superb essay/post!
Thank you so much for your kind thoughts!
And your point about utterly failing to teach the culture is spot-on. There is only a veneer of knowledge.
bump to your post and big time dittos about 'second realities' bb and thank you;
and I look forward to the link ....;you were referring to the side bar about the evolution of language if I understood what you meant.....
The claim that "science is a complete theory" is a philosophical, not a scientific statement. It involves asserting that non-empirical/non scientific explanation does not exist. It reduces philosophy to (empirical) "science." It may indeed be a true claim, but it cannot be tested from within science, by empirical methods. One either believes it by faith/philosophical conviction/philosophical reasoning to be true or believes it to be false by philosphical reasoning.
You are certainly free to believe what you asserting but you cannot enlist science to prove it. To prove it you are already arguing philosophical/religious questions, and doing so rather badly, because by claiming you believe this on a scientific basis you are acting in blind faith that empirical data and scientific analysis of empirical data (scientific explanatory models) explain everything. They clearly explain a lot But whether they explain everything or whether religion and philosophy explain things unknowable by science, that is a philosophical question. If one answers it yes, one is a believer/philosopher--that's you. If one answers it no, one is a philosopher/believer. That's me.
Sadly, you don't even realize that you are already doing philosophy in the claims you make about scientific explanation. That means inevitably you'll do both bad science and bad philosophy. But you'd have to learn some philosophy of science first before you can even grasp that you are doing bad science and very bad philosophy.
Far too many scientists don't have elementary understanding of philosophy of science. Some do. They need to take their colleagues back to grade school in philosophy of science.
The whole debate over ID could be resolved quickly and it could stand or fall on both its scientific and philosophical merits and demerits if both scientists and philosophers would find at least a common set of presuppositions about what their fields can and cannot do.
But the immense confusion over the explanatory power of science ever since Galileo, has made intelligent conversation on these issues next to impossible. Galileo made some tentative missteps--in good faith, he was honestly exploring new isses in philosophy of science--but his defenders over the last 400 years, instead of acknowledging his missteps and reopening the entire question of philosophy and science, went on in far too many instances to claim far too much explanatory power for empirical science.
Descartes, Hume, Kant and others were all arguing about these issues. It would be nice if scientists at least had a smattering of philosophical education. They could then do their wonderful scientific research and contribute to all of society in cooperation with, not animosity toward, philosophy and religion. But too many are defensive and thin-skinned and bluster about claiming more explanatory power than their research can provide and poisoning the conversation before it can even start.
Some of the greatest scientists understood and understand this. Some don't. I won't name names here. Many of the epigones, the less-great scientists and scientist-wannabees, are badly confused on these matters.
A lot of religion and philosophy types also are confused. Most young-earth creationism is confused on the boundaries between science and philosophy too. It would be good if religion advocates had an elementary education in philosophy of science. But ID is not young-earth creationism and it's advocates are better trained and more thoughtful in philosophy of science than are most run-of-the-mill scientists and most creationists. By "creationist" I mean those who wish to treat the Bible as a scientifically authoritative book, which is bad science and bad religion. One can believe in creation without being a creationist; one can believe in creation and do absolutely top-notch science and philosophy of science. Or one can believe in creation and do lousy in both. Or one can disbelieve in creation and be lousy in both.
Or one can cover all bases and miss them all.. Are we talking baseball here?..
You like to write cryptic little blurbs. The trouble is they don't signify. Please use a few more sentences and ask your question in a way that makes clear what question you are asking. Then I'll answer.
I see, you got my point..
"You were referring to the side bar about the evolution of language...."
Yep, taking a page from this link:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1560560/posts?page=166#166
Which is from you, gobucks!
In regard to dictionaries in general, I think a good rule is: if the dictionary doesn't give word etymologies, pass it by and find one that does. Only then can we have some assurance that the writers of the dictionary appreciate that language has an historical dimension; and that historical dimension is the source of a word's perduring meaning. That is, language is not a purely instrumental thing, the meanings of which are determined as it were by a public opinion poll.
I wrote that modern public education was in the social adjustment business, not in the business of transferring cultural knowledge or of liberating the human mind by exposure to the great achievements of the human cultural past. The social adjustment emphasis ought to be obvious -- what with the current emphasis on diversity training, and the preoccupation with sexuality issues at even the early grades. But more ominous to me is the seeming emphasis (since John Dewey) of the public schools on transferring skills, not knowledge or wisdom, or the cultivation of the mind -- skills necessary to fitting individuals into the workplace, whereby they are enabled to become taxpayers. I swear this is how the public schools understand their mission these days.
Sounds pretty cynical, I'm sure. Still, it seems clear to me that what once was known as "a liberal education" is not what the public schools are selling these days. FWIW
Thanks so much for your astute comments, gobucks!
You are welcome, and thank you back for this one ...
"...whereby they are enabled to become taxpayers."
And of course, given how ridiculous the tax code is, why, it seems as if they, the tax code authors, have delighted in creating something that encourages a vast attitude of cheating on one's taxes at every turn.
And once you start cheating on your taxes, why, that means you are a cheater. And once you are a cheater, and share your 'cheating knowledge' with all the others in the same boat as you, that means the 'moral ground' is more like quicksand for everyone.
So, in short, government schools create governable drones that confront a world that basically rewards and encourages cheating, such that government is profoundly needed to govern the .... cheaters.
What a system. However, there is hope. I have close relatives who are government school employees. Copies of a Purpose Driven Life are actually being read. Captivating, Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman's Soul is also being reviewed, looked at, by this 'government employee'. I would never have guessed such possibilities would be realize, but God is bigger than my low expectations....
Stating that a theory is complete is based on the evidence, it is not philosophical. Also, science itself, is restricted solely to those matters which can be studied by the scientific method. That automatically excludes anything not amenable to the method.
"The whole debate over ID could be resolved quickly and it could stand or fall on both its scientific and philosophical merits and demerits if both scientists and philosophers would find at least a common set of presuppositions about what their fields can and cannot do.
As I said, ID already fell. It is not science.
"Sadly, you don't even realize that you are already doing philosophy in the claims you make about scientific explanation. That means inevitably you'll do both bad science and bad philosophy.
Philosophy is the love of knowledge. The scientific method excludes ID and that has been proved in post #57. The stating point of that proof is with facts not assumptions. The only thing implied was the body of evidence supporting choice #1. Note that I gave Matt 12:37-38 in that post. That is an absolute statement of fact from God. It also means ID is an empty claim. That can deduced from the statement, because the absolute truth of the statement was given by God and are His own words. There is nothing ANY Christian can say, to overrule God, regardless of claim. That will always be true, because the claim can only be supported by illogical reference to something less authoritative and principle of lower standing.
"...by claiming you believe this on a scientific basis you are acting in blind faith that empirical data and scientific analysis of empirical data (scientific explanatory models) explain everything."
Science can explain everything amenable to the scientific method. There is no faith required, blind, or otherwise. Reason addresses all the rest.
From Hutter above...
Napoleon: How is it that, although you say so much about the universe, you say nothing about the Creator?
Laplace: No sire, I have no need for that hypothesis.
Lagrange: Ah, but it is such a good hypothesis: it explains so many things!
Laplace: Indeed Sire, Monsieur Lagrange has, with his usual sagacity, put his finger on the precise difficulty with the hypothesis: it explains everything, but predicts nothing.
-Conversation between Laplace and Lagrange mediated by Napoleon.
Note that I gave Matt 12:37-38 in that post. That is an absolute statement of fact from God. It also means ID is an empty claim. That can deduced from the statement, because the absolute truth of the statement was given by God and are His own words. There is nothing ANY Christian can say, to overrule God, regardless of claim.
I had meant to address this earlier ...Matthew 12:38 Then certain of the scribes and of the Pharisees answered, saying, Master, we would see a sign from thee.The sign Jesus is speaking of here ... refers particularly to a sign showing that He was the promised Messiah of Israel.
39 But he answered and said unto them, An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas:
It does not speak to the broader use of signs by God, ... as God used many in the Bible (i.e. the rainbow, the Star, Gideon's fleece, etc.)
Further, Paul states that nature does give testimony to the existence of God ...Romans 1:20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:
You fail to address the issue I've raised for four or five posts now: how can one, from within empirical science, prove the absence from reality of all non-empirical-science elements in explaining reality?
One can, (1) assume such an absence, a philosophy called materialism. But that assumption cannot be verified by scientific evidence. Or, one can (2) place empirical science alongside philosophical/religious knowledge as two totally unrelated ways of knowing. That too is to embrace a philosophical position. Its truth cannot be verified by scientific data or scientific analysis. Or one can (3) assume that both empirical and non-empirical, non-measurable, non-scientific elements are involved in explaining how things are and why they are. That too is a philosophical/religious position and it too cannot be verifed by science alone.
To claim that science can offer a full explanation of all reality is not being "very scientific" but bad science--it is an embrace of a philosophical position (naturalism or materialism). It has a long and distinguished philosophical pedigree. I think it doesn't fit both empirical and non-empirical data we collect from our lives, including our interior lives of thought and freedom. But those who believe in it have a long record as philosophers.
I cannot tell, because you give such scant attention to how you use words like "facts," whether you follow (1) or (2) above. It seems likely that you do not follow (3). But all three are philosophical choices and you are doing philosophy, even if you think you are only doing science.
Your reasoning is incoherent, both scientifically and philosophically. But since you cannot even recognize the existence of the question, you cannot see how incoherent you are. So, I leave you to your incoherence. I wish you well in living out your philosophy, whatever it may be.
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