Which one's Jesus?
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
What's so great about #900?
Neither is your inability to learn.
Got those demonstrations for intelligence or design yet? (See post 869). You can't simply assume them and expect to be taken seriously.
You do not realize how willing I am to admit to ignorance, or how capable I am of demonstrating it. There's no reason I cannot engage in ignorance while pointing it out at the same time. It is ignorant to accept or present wild assertions as scientific fact when evidence has not been presented to back the claims. Evolutionists assert that information can arise and be communicated without an intelligent agent, but they have not demonstrated how this might happen other than by suggesting a process or two that, ipso facto, must be the cause. They defend this position with courts and judges. That's not only ignorant, but abusively so.
Sour grapes? Anyway, the true prize is 1,000. With some more trolling, and some unfortunately misguided responses, we may make it.
You're assuming lack of intelligent design while clearly demonstrating it.
PH owns it. Now we wait to see what sort of drivel he comes up with to get to 1000.
Right. Like the zot thread is going to be impressed.
I am not arguing that point. I'm not even interested in arguing that point. Why do you bring it up?
Shalom.
First Suggestion: keep Uncle Fester going. (Maybe Fester is the real Patrick Henry - jennyp said she was PH a while back, but you never know).
You're making the assertion that intelligent design exists. It's up to you to offer some evidence in support of your assertion. Until that time, you continue to beg the question.
No. I don't intend to. I know it to be true. I don't care if you are convinced or not. The big issue is that if you insist Science must deny the supernatural you must support the assertion that it does not exist. Proving a negative is impossible, so you are left in an untenable situation. The most you can say or do is assert that you don't intend to include the supernatural in your own worldview. That is your right. Insisting that there can be no place for the supernatural in scientific inquiry is not your right.
Shalom.
I have a terrier. The next one I get is going to called "Gummy" or some variation thereof.
Test it, but not observe it. If you had seen Jesus walk on water you would have observed the supernatural, but you would not have been able to test it.
That said, I agree that science is limited in its value precisely because it can not be applied to the supernatural, among other things. But to tell a scientist that he may not consider the supernatural is to limit him unfairly.
Doyle had Sherlock Holmes say something like, "When you have eliminated all the alternatives, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, is not only probable, but the solution." (Apologies to Doyle.) I would be very disappointed in a scientist who moved to the supernatural before exhausting all possible alternatives and without a healthy dose of skepticism. I would be very disappointed in a scientist who, when faced with the supernatural being the only explaination (Jesus walking on water, for example) he would refuse that answer.
Shalom.
... poor dog ...
You gotta teach it to wear a hat, btw.
The overhwelming evidence for it has been observed, yes, and has passed all verification tests and falsification tests.
Or was it imagined?
No, that's how the creationists arrive at their conclusions (for dozens of examples, just read this thread), not evolutionary biologists. That is, when the creationists aren't simply lying.
People have difficulty with "it evolved" because it goes against Scriptural teachings
One would think that "people" would have learned not to make this kind of error.
As the famous explorer Ferdinand Magellan said, in reference to a clash between the trustworthiness of direct evidence over dogma:
"The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church." (Ferdinand Magellan, from George Seldes, The Great Quotations, Secaucus: Citadel Press, 1983, p. 461.)And:
"To command the professors of astronomy to confute their own observations is to enjoin an impossibility, for it is to command them not to see what they do see, and not to understand what they do understand, and to find what they do not discover."Hint: Galileo was right -- because he followed the evidence where it lead. The Church, the Cardinals, and the Pope himself were wrong -- because they clung to their arrogant notions that they were unable to misunderstand Scripture.
-Galileo"By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox."
-Galileo"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."
-Galileo"It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment."
-Galileo"Nothing physical which sense-experience sets before our eyes, or which necessary demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called into question (much less condemned) upon the testimony of biblical passages."
-Galileo
Learn from their mistake.
and any "proof" is in the imaginations of it's believers.
I see -- so vast amounts of evidence supporting evolution, including just the tiny taste of it presented in post #661, is all just "imagination"? It's just made up? Someone fantasized all of it? Is that really the paranoid, slanderous, pig-ignorant position you want to put your name on?
I regret to inform you that your creationist sources have lied to you, and lied badly. And you have made the mistake of swallowing their lies whole.
For anything to "evolve", it must have a design/purpose/instruction.
It has to have a survival advantage. A "use" if you will. That is hardly synonymous with "design/purpose/instruction", although I know how much trouble creationists have gasping such simple distinctions.
Or on them -- consider his screen name.
You are really really good at this. Something I can agree with you completely.
Which one's Jesus?
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