Posted on 01/06/2005 7:39:47 AM PST by PatrickHenry
Bellyfull doubleplus good!
He's also famous as the author of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.What's that??
Cool, it's on the web! The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism
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FreeRepublic unrestricted chess and bowling tournament, placemarker.
Dr. Richard Lewotnin was speaking of the importance of keeping supernaturalistic explanations out of science, because science can't work if you start allowing for any suspension of the fundamental properties of the universe to circumvent difficult questions.
As a side bar, a good discussion of causation vs correlation would also be useful. But as you point out, some topics can only really be discussed in a more advanced setting than high school. But this point is one that could be discussed and has broad implications for all science topics.
Note that things like dust undergoing Brownian motion are "uniformitarian" in that they are the results of many small effects but they also perform seemingly "large" jumps. Or as in your example, asteroid collisions may be uniformly distributed over a scale of billions of years but seem occur completely at random over a scale of centuries.
I've heard Behe lecture on ID. He made no sense whatever. He did make a personal attack on some computer scientist (but he didn't present any artuments about this) and he did emphasize the he (Behe) was a Charistian. He did get paid so I guess the lecture was a success.
Many of us do know how peer review works. Your statements are simply incorrect.
I would second Dimensio's view of Lewontin's statement. God, by definition, is supernatural. Science, on the other hand, deals with the natural world.
It also indicates that a different worldview could lead equally valid science.
No. Science is the investigation of the natural world. God is, by definition, supernatural. You could take God into consideration when trying to answer a question about the natural world, but you wouldn't be doing science, but theology. And the result you obtained would be a valid answer, but a valid theological answer, not a scientific one.
But it cleared up one thing for me, which is that if I held his worldview, I agree that evolution becomes more compelling, and I can see why people with that worldview would think of it as fact. It also becomes obvious that those who do not have that worldview do not believe in evolution and for the very reasons Dr. Richard Lewotnin says "no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated".
Actually, when you look at this quote in context, he is really making the point that one of the difficulty science has in educating people is the fact that some things which are true seem to lack "common sense" to those who don't know science. Nonetheless, they are true. Thus, Lewontin is really saying, is, essentially, that people have difficulty believing in science because they are ignorant of how science works. What he is saying is that the fact that science is "counterintuitive... [and] mystifying to the uninitiated" simply means they don't understand it, and scientists have to do a better job in teaching it.
From the article:
With great perception, Sagan sees that there is an impediment to the popular credibility of scientific claims about the world, an impediment that is almost invisible to most scientists. Many of the most fundamental claims of science are against common sense and seem absurd on their face. Do physicists really expect me to accept without serious qualms that the pungent cheese that I had for lunch is really made up of tiny, tasteless, odorless, colorless packets of energy with nothing but empty space between them? Astronomers tell us without apparent embarrassment that they can see stellar events that occurred millions of years ago, whereas we all know that we see things as they happen. When, at the time of the moon landing, a woman in rural Texas was interviewed about the event, she very sensibly refused to believe that the television pictures she had seen had come all the way from the moon, on the grounds that with her antenna she couldn't even get Dallas. What seems absurd depends on one's prejudice. ...Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism....
I see this all the time on these boards, when people say, "I don't believe in evolution because it just doesn't make any sense to me..." That something appears to go against common sense is no proof that it is not true.
I just never realized before that the worldview used going into the science really determines the outcome more than anything else. I thought maybe the science filtered it out somehow.
I've seen this happen when people refuse to believe in evolution because it contradicts their religious beliefs. That is their right, of course, but they are doing religion, not science.
You have suggested observations that prove that there IS a God. To be scientific, however, you must suggest observations that would prove that there IS NOT a God, and show that these observations are not, in fact, observed. If you (and I don't necessarily mean you personally) can suggest an observation that would prove that there is no God (or no designer) then creationism or ID would be scientific. I would contend that this is impossible, in principle, because the designer, if he/she/it actually designed life, would be presumably be able to design life in such a way that any observation could be accounted for. If you grant that designer=God, then this is easy to see, since God is omnipotent. However even if the designer is not God (although there are other logical arguments to suggest that some form of deity is necessary for ID) it would be impossible for us to say that any observation was absolutely not the result of design. ID is therefore not falsifiable, and hence is not science. Evolution, on the other hand, does meet this requirement. There are numerous observations that would prove that evolution couldn't be true. I will admit that it seems unlikely that any of these will ever be actually observed, but that's why scientists hold evolution so strongly. Examples: find an organism with something other than polynucleotides for genetic material, find a fossil of a complex, multicellular organism that is reliably dated to an age of 1 billion years, find a mechanism that would prevent speciation as a result of genetic variation, etc. (I'm sure a real biologist could provide many more; that is not my area of expertise.)
It's anti-christian to say that the variation of allele frequencies in the gene pools of populations of organisms is sufficient to cause speciation? Where does that statement conflict with the statement that Jesus was the Messiah and died to redeem us from our sins?
Don't confuse the science with the scientist. That's one scientist's opinion. He's correct when he says that science must assume a lack of divine influence. That's because in order for science to work, there must be regularity in nature that would be disturbed by interference from God. For example, if, every so often, God changed the force of attraction between the earth and an apple, Newton would never have been able to formulate the law of gravity. We can't know, however, that God doesn't do this, so it is an assumption. This assumption goes by the name of methodological materialism. That is required to do scientific research, but philosophical materialism is not. That is, a scientist can believe in God, but must assume that God doesn't interfere with whatever phenomenon that he/she is studying. Therefore, scientists who study evolution must do so starting by assuming that God is unnecessary to explain where the diversity of life came from. This is different from a philosophical materialism which states that only what is material exists. Philosophical materialism is contradictory to the existance of God, but that's not required to do science. Any scientist who says that there must be no God is either doing a poor job of explaining methodological materialism or is injecting his/her own personal belief system. No scientific theory could ever show that God doesn't exist (or that He does). God is outside the scope of science.
You certainly are a good example og ignorance.
Why don't you find out what I.D. actually is?
Talk about 'forcing down throats', what about the non-science of dogmatic darwinites?
Yeah, you know how to criticize creation...wow!
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