Creationism: God's gift to the ignorant (Religion bashing alert)

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

That reply made absolutely no sense at all.

Maybe not for someone intent on naural selection, random mutations, etc. as the only explanation for the presence of intelligent beings and the goods that intelligent beings produce. You tell me. How do you know there is such thing as intelligence? Where do you look for it?

Are you off your meds or something?

Don't take meds unless I have a cold or the flu, but as my screen name, rambling sentences, contorted grammar, and frequent mispellings might suggest, cheap beer is my elixer of choice. At the present moment I look forward to popping open a cold one in about 30 minutes.

They correctly apply the numbers based on the field of probability and statistics.

But where did they originally derive the numbers?

Intuitively, a person knows that my car (a complex thing) didn't just accidentally happen. My brain is far more complex than my car.

Your brain also came into existence through a process that is decidedly different than the process that brought about your car. Specifically, it came about because other things that have brains similar to yours are able to produce imperfect copies of themselves. You are one of the imperfect copies. Automobiles don't tend to make imperfect replicants of themselves, thus the analogy fails.

Life itself is far more complex than anything....so much so that they don't even have a description of what it is.

You are aware that there's not even a consensus on what constitutes life, aren't you?

If you don't think so, then find a corpse and ask a scientist to describe in detail what it is that left that used to be there.

What left? Action potentials within the brain stopped for one reason or another (the reason is typically lack of a chemical -- sodium or potassium -- to maintain their occurance) resulting in cellular death. Without the brain being alive, no signals were sent to maintain the other functions within the body, so they shut down and the cells there died also.

They correctly apply the numbers based on the field of probability and statistics.

How do you correctly apply numbers to unknown conditions with an unknown number of variables occurring over an undetermined period of time and claim the result is anything other than nonsense?

Intuitively, a person knows that my car (a complex thing) didn't just accidentally happen.

My brain is far more complex than my car.

I will take your word for it -- it's only true of certain people.

But be that as it may, your example is nothing more than bait and switch.

Were it not for the fact that this book was received also among those in the church, who in that day were nearly the sole supporters of scientific endeavor, your statement would almost make sense.

Well no, on examination my statement stands up pretty well on it's own. Were I you, I wouldn't be overly proud of the fact that, in a regime where if you are literate, chances are the Pope paid for your schooling, and where not to be Catholic or to disagree with the Papal version of science gets you burned at the stake like Geordono Bruno, or sentenced for life like Galileo, or hounded into exile like Spinoza, that pretty much everybody is officially catholic, and officially agrees with the Pope and the head of the inquisition wholeheartedly.

I also could officially win every argument on FR, and and ban whoever I wanted, if I was allowed to threaten my opponents and the FR classroom monitors with burning at the stake. And then FR would be officially donh'ish, and then I could constitute the reading and thinking population of FR, and be officially offended everytime a modern Galileo tried to post here.

Your underlying fallacy here is essentially an argument from incredulity: I can't think of a way for evolution to have happened naturally, therefore it must have been designed.

It is not essentially an argument from incredulity, and even if it were, it makes sense. Is it "arguing from incredulity" when one argues that Mount Rushmore must be the result of intelligent design because of the number of chisel strokes evidenced on its face? Yes. But it is a reasonable argument nonetheless.

The numbers and probabilities involved with the amount of information currently bouncing around in the universe in such organized fashion as to be able to a.) comprehend it, b.) organize it to some degree, and c.) communicate about it, speak for themselves. Incredulity has no effect on plain numbers and probabilities, and that is what the proponents of ID are working with.

I can't think of a way for evolution to have happened naturally, therefore it must have been designed.

The fact is, I can easily think of a way for evolution to have happened, but I am disinclined to bring the baggage of "naturally" as germane to studying the processes available for observation and testing. That little purse seems to fit you comfortably and you wear it proudly. Some of us can do without it.

You described the shutdown. You didn't describe "what left."

Also, the analogy does hold. An extremely complex system doesn't just happen. Suggestions that reproduction gets us out of the dilemma simply ignores that the extremely complex biological system includes an extremely complex reproductive system. It's like saying that because the car comes from a factory that makes cars then it could have made itself, or that because it includes a repair code system within its computer memory, then that means it ACTUALLY COULD have made itself."

C'mon now. :>)

You described the shutdown. You didn't describe "what left."

Nothing really "left". The same elements are all still there, it's just that the chemical reactions that made the cells "alive" have ceased. Once this happens, the cells quickly start to decay, but there's no supernatural transformation.

An extremely complex system doesn't just happen.

You're right, but no one suggests that it "just happened". This is a creationist strawman.

Suggestions that reproduction gets us out of the dilemma simply ignores that the extremely complex biological system includes an extremely complex reproductive system.

Which earlier generations of life forms didn't have. No one suggests that sexual reproduction just spontaneously occured.

Ultimately your argument is one from incredulity. You don't understand how it could have come about, so rather than research the given explanations, you throw up your hands and say "It must have been designed!" That isn't science.

ID is appeal to a mathematical model of probabilities and improbabilities about the likelihood of complexity occuring randomly in nature.

Horse manure. It is the postulate (it doesn't even rise to the level of "theory") that, as the name "Intelligent Design" explicitly states, some (unspecified) form of (unspecified) intelligence added some (unspecified) amount of (unspecified) "design" into life on Earth at some (unspecified) time(s).

Any "model of probabilities and improbabilities" employed by the IDer's is done solely in support of their attempts to "prove" that certain aspects of life "could not have" evolved. The purpose of this is to try to bolster the credibility of "intelligent design" as the "obvious" alternative, but they obviously aren't clear on how science works. Weakening one theory in no way supports a different hypothesis. ID is not the "default" explanation which "wins" by eliminating the competition. Mankind outgrew that particular fallacy centuries ago.

So please stop repeating nonsense like trying to claim that Intelligent Design "is" an "appeal to a mathematical model of probabilities", as if it's nothing more than a particular analytical method. Instead, probability calculations (usually naive and bogus ones) are just one of the *tools* they attempt to employ in order to flail about for "support" for what ID actually *is* -- the notion that life was "designed", that it was CREATED. In short, creationism by another name.

Creationism is a theory of origins that posits God bringing about, in 6 days as per the judeo-christian bible, all that we see in the universe.

So you're claiming there's no such thing as an "old Earth creationist"? Are you remarkably naive, or just dishonest?

Yes, young-Earth Biblical creationists are one *kind* of creationist. But there are many other kinds. By definition, anyone who posits that an act of conscious creation was involved in the formation of life can fairly be classified as a "creationist", although obviously there are many different "flavors". One of those flavors is the pseudo-scientific postulate of "ID".

It is not essentially an argument from incredulity, and even if it were, it makes sense.

Well, I'm afraid it is. And that you think it would make sense if it were a logical fallacy indicates you not only don't know what I'm talking about, you don't know what you're talking about.

Is it "arguing from incredulity" when one argues that Mount Rushmore must be the result of intelligent design because of the number of chisel strokes evidenced on its face? Yes. But it is a reasonable argument nonetheless.

There are other lines of evidence (pun intended), to follow in the Mount Rushmore case. It's not an argument from incredulity, although someone profoundly silly could convert it into one. ("No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people" - H. L. Mencken).

Incredulity has no effect on plain numbers and probabilities, and that is what the proponents of ID are working with.

They're making up numbers to suit themselves and applying them to a situation no one knows anything about. They then use the numbers to bolster ... an argument from incredulity.

If we go back in time to your great-great-grandparents, the odds against your being born are astronomically against. Unless you want to argue that you don't exist, you're not going to get very far.

Come to think of it, you'll probably get a lot farther arguing you don't. Makes for better conversation at cocktail parties.

What's the scientific test that would demonstrate the supernatural?

That little purse seems to fit you comfortably and you wear it proudly. Some of us can do without it.

And some of us feel the same way about smothering science with either nonsense (in the case of ID), or religion.

And please don't attempt to convert this into an argument against religion. It's not. It's an argument against religion restricting science.

My car is complex, and it's obvious that it didn't make itself.

It's "obvious" because we know that people make cars.

The Hawaiian Islands are highly complex -- and they *did* "make themselves".

Complex things *can* be the product of intelligent design. They can *also * be the product of natural processes.

So I'm afraid that the entire "argument" of ID ("it's complex, therefore it must have been designed, QED") just falls flat on its empty-headed face.

Also, the analogy does hold. An extremely complex system doesn't just happen.

Many do, actually.

Suggestions that reproduction gets us out of the dilemma simply ignores that the extremely complex biological system includes an extremely complex reproductive system.

So start with a simpler one. Duh.

It's like saying that because the car comes from a factory that makes cars then it could have made itself,

It's nothing at all like saying that. You obviously don't understand the position you're (poorly) attempting to critique.

or that because it includes a repair code system within its computer memory, then that means it ACTUALLY COULD have made itself."

Again, no.

You haven't described what left. Materialists try to formulate a theory of life, but refuse to define life. Sounds pretty backward to me. "We don't know what it is, but here's how it came about? (Uhhhh, how what came about?) "Well, how life came about." (What is this life that you're trying to look like an expert on?) "We don't know. (Then how in the world can you describe how it came about?) "Because....because we're scientists, and we're allowed to do that." (Riiiiggghhhht!)

Materialists do say that it just randomly came about. You remember....Maybe lightening...maybe protein soup...maybe a snowball in a hot place.... Sheesh.

It's obvious that my car is a complex system and that it didn't make itself. It is not illogical at all to apply that same observation to other complex systems.

Earlier generations of life forms DID HAVE reproducing/replicating systems. Otherwise, you wouldn't be talking about them.

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