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
Utilitarian solutions do not reach to the problems of the human soul, but I appreciate them very much all the same. There is room for all of us, it seems. A scientist will work out the calcs that the engineer will use to design the stuff that another guy will build that we all will use.
The ultimate "why" and "wherefor" usually doesn't get addressed during the workday of any of us, except in the quiet times, since most of us have our hands full with the needs of the moment and those quiet times are few and far between.
The pure theorist you refer to is another breed. The guy who spends his time staring into the dark at the edge of the camp isn't always respected by the people who tend the campfires, but there is room for a few of these guys, and even a crying need for them, but its not work everyone is capable of. You can be a mediocre scientist, or engineer, or plumber, and still do valuable work. The mediocre visionary isn't much use to anyone.
Some people are simply drawn to it, they can't help themselves. Its pointless to complain that there aren't more of them.
The scientific explanations for what we see do not exclude the possibility that God is ultimately responsible for the universe. You might be amused to know that Catholics who hold otherwise, are in conflict with church doctrine and committing apostesy. Most catholics can manage to hold on to their faith in the face of science, and it strikes me as showing little confidence in God, to imagine that you somehow need to defend Him from science.
Which, to wrap up my aside, is another reason why I express such disdain for religion: if all such creativity and ingenuity were harnessed toward achieving scientific progress, we'd be so much further along than we are to date.
But in the nexus between science and religion, science is the long-range, generational endeavor; whereas, religion is the immediate, personal coping mechanism in a hostile universe. The saving grace for religion is the solace and structure it provides for the interim, but I have a hard time looking beyond the modern-day drawbacks to that.
If religion did not impede science, which is an unfortuitous consequence of the particular religion that happened to prevail in the civilization that has been at the vanguard of science, then it would not concern me in the slightest.
It does so by Scientists allowing for that to be a possible conclusion.
Let's go back to a scientist who witnesses a man walking on water. He investigates the water and finds nothing solid just below the surface that could have supported the man. He investigates the man himself and finds nothing in his bodily make-up (natural bouyancy, etc) which would allow the liquid to have supported him. As much as he is able, he investigates the body of water to discover whether some denizen of the deep could have been floating just beneath the surface for the entire course of the walk and can not find any evidence of any, nor can he hypothesize any. What does he do? Does he conclude that what he saw never happened? What if there are 2, 5, 50, 100 people who saw the same thing? Does he conclude that they were all hypnotized?
Is he forced to avoid the conclusion that he witnessed a miracle? Is that not an option for him?
In order to be honest, the miracle must be an option for him. He should be skeptical of that conclusion, perhaps even more than an atheist. But he must be allowed to conclude it once he has exhausted all else.
Shalom.
The honest problem with your exemplar is that no scientist has observed a man walking on water.
I just realized that you are arguing at the same
time, that scientists do, and don't, have absolute
convictions of certainty. Hard to lose an argument
that way, eh?
Your assertion that my purpose is to uncover God is false on the face simply because you cannot read my mind.
Further, I testify that ‘uncovering God’ is not my purpose – I neither desire nor need to uncover the Person in whom I live and Who lives in me. We are on a first name basis. He gives me understanding freely as I ask it or as I need it.
Of a truth, my interest in science is inspired by Him (Psalms 19, Romans 1) and facilitated by Him – but it is not to “uncover” Him. That is impossible per se.
I also object to your characterizing my interest as “pseudoscience” especially considering the scientists and mathematicians whose work I hold most illuminating: Cumrun Vafa, Max Tegmark, Gregory Chaitin, Claude Shannon, Tom Schneider, Luis Rocha, Chris Adami, Jurgen Schmidhuber, Roger Penrose, Albert Einstein, Lisa Randall, P.S. Wesson, Paul Steinhardt, Burt Ovrut, H.H. Pattee.
you: Not really. The latter is a 'meta' question with no real practical bearing. It serves to pass the time of philosophes and mystics, but achieves little more.
AFAIK, the Shannon definition offered at post 2034 is the only mathematical definition of life v non-life/death in nature. Without such a definition, I would never seriously entertain any theories of abiogenesis, near death experiences, etc. With it, I am able to evaluate alternative theories, observations and the ilk.
Thanks.
If you think that is the writing of a man in favor of religious liberty, you're whacked. But perhaps you should ask Dawkins if his evil twin wrote it?
That says nothing about his wanting to ban it though, just that he doesn't like it much. I think you are reading too much into it.
At bottom, conjecture is all anyone has. My conjecture is not that conjecture paralyzes brains, but that it logically results in an "anything goes" set of postulations. Science ought to be able to operate with as much, but it is indeed strange to see science occasionally omit altogether any propsitions that might issue forth from a text several millennia old.
It is common for most people who do not live in a vaccuum to understand that some facets of objective reality are more consistent, persistent, and verifiable than others. Science too often asserts certitude when it is lacking. Bias is inherently blind to itself.
It does the heart good to see you point out that what most people call a "fact," namely "1 + 1 = 2," contains a host of assumptions behind the scenes, or denotes a set of conventions that may be outside of standard practice, of which most people are typically unaware. I tend to think lower education classes should cut to the chase, present things more easily ascertained by reason, and leave the semantic monkeyshines to the perfessers.
It also does the heart good to see certain scientists, when asked what they think about the bigger picture, to attribute an orderly universe to intelligent design.
Yes, that tends to be the way they present themselves. When someone makes a statement without qualifiers, what does that make the statment? A "fact?" What unnamed assumptions are behind that statement? Every declarative statement carries a certain burden of proof, and a certain degree of assumption. It is no shame to science that it carries varying degrees of certitude in the staements it makes, but it is a shame they maintain an air of certitude as if their statements are wholly matters of fact.
But I would not be right to paint all scientists with the same brush. Dogmatic evolutionists exist, they have their convictions, and I am happy to hear them speak their convictions in the public arena. Far be it from me to accord them a sole voice.
Your equation included more operations than just addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, under which the set of rationals is indeed closed. It included the operation of infinite summation under which the set of rationals is most definitely NOT closed. Any infinite, nonrepeating decimal is an example of an infinite summation of rationals that yields an irrational result, for example.
The calculation terminates. The result is a rational number truncated to the accuracy of the machine on which the program is implemented. 1000 is a bit short of limitless.
Your desert of information requires no comment other than calling it what it is, a desert of information. No refutations just grousing.
That is false bravado.
Obtuse as usual I see. How do you get along in life? Do they keep you in a special environment?
How does that change my question?
Shalom.
No, but there is something very wrong with, "I don't know, but I know there is a natural explaination."
Shalom.
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