Warning: This is your mind on creationism!
Posted on 05/25/2005 3:41:22 AM PDT by billorites
Science feeds on mystery. As my colleague Matt Ridley has put it: “Most scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance that drives them on.” Science mines ignorance. Mystery — that which we don’t yet know; that which we don’t yet understand — is the mother lode that scientists seek out. Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a very different reason: it gives them something to do.
Admissions of ignorance and mystification are vital to good science. It is therefore galling, to say the least, when enemies of science turn those constructive admissions around and abuse them for political advantage. Worse, it threatens the enterprise of science itself. This is exactly the effect that creationism or “intelligent design theory” (ID) is having, especially because its propagandists are slick, superficially plausible and, above all, well financed. ID, by the way, is not a new form of creationism. It simply is creationism disguised, for political reasons, under a new name.
It isn’t even safe for a scientist to express temporary doubt as a rhetorical device before going on to dispel it.
“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.” You will find this sentence of Charles Darwin quoted again and again by creationists. They never quote what follows. Darwin immediately went on to confound his initial incredulity. Others have built on his foundation, and the eye is today a showpiece of the gradual, cumulative evolution of an almost perfect illusion of design. The relevant chapter of my Climbing Mount Improbable is called “The fortyfold Path to Enlightenment” in honour of the fact that, far from being difficult to evolve, the eye has evolved at least 40 times independently around the animal kingdom.
The distinguished Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin is widely quoted as saying that organisms “appear to have been carefully and artfully designed”. Again, this was a rhetorical preliminary to explaining how the powerful illusion of design actually comes about by natural selection. The isolated quotation strips out the implied emphasis on “appear to”, leaving exactly what a simple-mindedly pious audience — in Kansas, for instance — wants to hear.
The deceitful misquoting of scientists to suit an anti-scientific agenda ranks among the many unchristian habits of fundamentalist authors. But such Telling Lies for God (the book title of the splendidly pugnacious Australian geologist Ian Plimer) is not the most serious problem. There is a more important point to be made, and it goes right to the philosophical heart of creationism.
The standard methodology of creationists is to find some phenomenon in nature which Darwinism cannot readily explain. Darwin said: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” Creationists mine ignorance and uncertainty in order to abuse his challenge. “Bet you can’t tell me how the elbow joint of the lesser spotted weasel frog evolved by slow gradual degrees?” If the scientist fails to give an immediate and comprehensive answer, a default conclusion is drawn: “Right, then, the alternative theory; ‘intelligent design’ wins by default.”
Notice the biased logic: if theory A fails in some particular, theory B must be right! Notice, too, how the creationist ploy undermines the scientist’s rejoicing in uncertainty. Today’s scientist in America dare not say: “Hm, interesting point. I wonder how the weasel frog’s ancestors did evolve their elbow joint. I’ll have to go to the university library and take a look.” No, the moment a scientist said something like that the default conclusion would become a headline in a creationist pamphlet: “Weasel frog could only have been designed by God.”
I once introduced a chapter on the so-called Cambrian Explosion with the words: “It is as though the fossils were planted there without any evolutionary history.” Again, this was a rhetorical overture, intended to whet the reader’s appetite for the explanation. Inevitably, my remark was gleefully quoted out of context. Creationists adore “gaps” in the fossil record.
Many evolutionary transitions are elegantly documented by more or less continuous series of changing intermediate fossils. Some are not, and these are the famous “gaps”. Michael Shermer has wittily pointed out that if a new fossil discovery neatly bisects a “gap”, the creationist will declare that there are now two gaps! Note yet again the use of a default. If there are no fossils to document a postulated evolutionary transition, the assumption is that there was no evolutionary transition: God must have intervened.
The creationists’ fondness for “gaps” in the fossil record is a metaphor for their love of gaps in knowledge generally. Gaps, by default, are filled by God. You don’t know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don’t understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don’t go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God. Dear scientist, don’t work on your mysteries. Bring us your mysteries for we can use them. Don’t squander precious ignorance by researching it away. Ignorance is God’s gift to Kansas.
Richard Dawkins, FRS, is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, at Oxford University. His latest book is The Ancestor’s Tale
In my way of thinking, all theory is conjecture, but not all conjecture is theory. Do we agree?
Sheez. One need look no further than a museum of modern "art."
Yes, a few. But I have not seen a textbook that presents the contents of thousands of paleological sites in a graphic manner so as to allow the reader to interpret the evidence on his own. If you know of such a textbook I would like to check it out, and I will be the first to point out those cases where the author made assumptions that cannot be proven by science.
You assert that the intolerance for intelligent design hypotheses is because they do not result in testable or observable predictions. I cannot speak for the fellows at Discovery.org - but I have been offering one around here for a couple of years which is both observable and falsifiable:
The Euclid algorithm includes processes, symbols, decisions and recursives and is purposeful. Decision making, awareness and purpose are properties of intelligence - therefore such properties existing at the inception of a thing (whether entirely internal as in initial rules for self-organizing complexity or whether externally interfaced as in communications) indicates an intelligence causation.
Falsifications: (a) evidence that there is no algorithm at inception, (b) evidence that there was no inception, (c) evidence that decision-making, awareness and purpose are not properties of intelligence.
Concerning life v non-life/death in nature, evidence one way or the other will emerge from the current research in self-organizing complexity and information theory (successful communications) in biological systems: e.g. what are the minimum rules, state changes, mathematical structures, geometries and whether they have [Euclid] algorithmic properties of decision-making including purpose and awareness.
That's because hardly anyone would buy such a book. Paleontological archives aren't state secrets though. You should have little trouble gaining access to the records you seek.
and I will be the first to point out those cases where the author made assumptions that cannot be proven by science.
That should be pretty easy, since there is no such thing as a proof in natural sciences.
Still going with the Creationist Big Lie approach I see. Well I knew you were full of it from the beginning. So I emailed Professor Dawkins and asked him directly if he favors banning religion. He emailed back and said it is a "preposterous lie." I think that makes you a preposterous liar.
I'll definitely keep a link to this thread. When you make another preposterous lie, I can simply link the lurkers to it. Way to flush your credibility down the toilet. Keep it up. You're doing wonders for your cause.
Why do creationists always insist on changing the meanings of words? Why can't you just use them to mean what everyone else does? RWP is right, a scientific conjecture is far weaker than a scientific theory.
However, as I understand it, there are literally thousands of fragments and much work and time is necessary to translate them. Where they all are, I don't know.
The last books that I read on the subject of the Dead Sea Scrolls, were of the opinion that the scrolls were hidden at Qumran as the people fled Jerusalem, not that they were necessarily written there. The sections that have been studied are copies of the bible 1000 years older than any previous copies, and amazingly, they are the same as what we have today.
The Isaiah prophecy of a Messiah is preserved, as well as some chapters of Habbakuk. Also, fragments of every Biblical book except Esther have been found, as well as many other non-Biblical texts.
Probably most interesting, for those who are New Testament scholars, it appears that the community at Qumran was extraordinarily interested in things of the last days, as well as in the coming of the prophesied Messiah, whose kingdom they foresaw as drawing close to earth, which is exactly what Jesus claimed.
Yes, but you need to correctly identify the random piece in order to discuss whether there are alternatives to its randomness other than intelligence. If the random piece is genetic mutation within the given biosphere, then yes, if you hypothesize that randomness is an inadequate explanation for the results, then intelligence is not the only direction one need look toward. Two directions you can look toward are external sources of biotic information (e.g., panspermia) or external forces of influence (e.g., morphic fields). Neither of those are inherently intelligent design as they're formulated, although one might hypothesize a source of intelligence to account for them (just as one might hypothesize a source of intelligence to account for natural selection alone).
You are layering unproven hypothesis atop unproven hypothesis, but that's nonetheless the answer to your question. If randomness is inadequate, intelligence is not the only potential resolution.
There's yet another solution off the top of my head: the perception of randomness is an illusion; the universe is deterministic. That doesn't require intelligent cause either.
Were the universe to be deterministic and not of an intelligent design, then one must posit the universe itself as some prior, highly organized entity that spawns highly organized subsystems. That would beg the question, too, of the first organized universe, or the organizing principle that underlies it.
Some would posit that the ultimate organizing principle that underlies the universe is the Theory of Everything (hence, the name..) but I guess we can't be sure unless and until we discover it!
I recall this being discussed a few months a go. Some of our more math-literate posters really tore into it. I'm not qualified to re-create what they said, and I didn't fully follow the discussion. My vague recollection is that even an undirected process can be described with an algorithm, so the existence of such wouldn't be persuasive. But I may have that wrong, so I'll leave it to the others to deal with.
Falsifications: (a) evidence that there is no algorithm at inception, (b) evidence that there was no inception, (c) evidence that decision-making, awareness and purpose are not properties of intelligence.
As for these falsifications, I don't think (a) or (b) really test anything, and (c) doesn't do much for me. This whole area needs work. And I'm pretty much out of the ID game, for reasons stated earlier in the thread.
Which gives me more time to extend [hugs]!
Just because one word is stronger than another does not mean it carries an entirely different meaning. It is not that creationists wish to change the meaning of the word "theory," only that they wish to remind science of its limitations. Get used to it and get over yourself. You are dealing with a universe upon which you and all science is continually thrusting conjecture. There is neither harm nor shame in that.
Do you believe the earth travels around the sun because you've observed it with your own senses, or do you believe it because someone told you so? Doubltess there are a handful of people who have been given to observe it with their own senses. When they report to the rest of us, they are preaching a truth to hearers who must weight for themselves whether what they are hearing is true or not.
Based on the heliocentric theory's effect on mankind at the time it was preached, I'd say human reason is gullible, and fully capable of deceiving itself. I don't believe human reason has evolved much in 400 years, only that the amount of information available for consideration has grown immensely.
If one desires evidence that human reason is sorely lacking in judgement to this day, one need only observe the fact that William Jefferson Clinton served as President of the United States for two terms.
PS. The so-called "cosmic ancestry" hypothesis is a subset of this formulation.
And, as an idle aside, although in a much less methodical way than I intend to do so in our framework debate, I've here demonstrated the error that Alamo-Girl was expounding earlier: That any proposed solution to any given objection to the modern synthesis theory of genetic evolution is "intelligent design"...
Oh, and once again, that error is the fallacy of the excluded middle.
Among other things, you are confusing scientific theories with reality.
Eh? In what manner?
Intelligent Design: A hypothesis that given features of life v non-life are explained by an intelligent cause, rather than by an undirected process such as natural selection.
We are almost there, but I want to reconsider one final component of the definition. That is the phrase "life v non-life"; I'd like to see in your own words what you mean by that. I've been taking it in the sense of 'why are things this way, and not that way' .. in other words, any feature of existence or of reality can be deemed a "feature of life v non-life" in some sense or other. Stated yet differently, everything is life or non-life or some variation/subset/quality thereof.
But, it occurred to me that you may intend to signify something more narrow by this contrast. So, I want to see what precisely you mean by "life v non-life" (and, for that matter, I'd like to know why you generally phrase it "life v non-life/death in nature").
If we can dispense with this issue for the purposes at hand, then we can finally move to defining "panspermia" and onward.
I'd say rather that it was a weaker theory - more qualitative logic than quantitative.
The question wasn't "how strong was the theory?"--the question was "was there an evolutionary biological science before Fisher-Haldane?".
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