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
You don't read much that's posted to you, do you?
No. Not at all. But I have heard serious reports that God created the heavens and the earth. Lo and behold, the heavens and the earth are present for my observation. Not a bad start. In view of the fact that I myself, as an intelligent agent, am totally incapable of building a tree that works, much less a silicon chip, it is not at all unreasable to assume an intelligent agent may be involved with this stuff. That is more than I can say for lizard people or whatever red herring you chose to throw into the mix, of whom there have only been patently ficitious accounts.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc, thy name is Fester.
Looks more like "begging the question", "circular reasoning", or even "affirming the consequent" -- although admittedly, when someone's claims get confused enough, it's so amorphous that it can qualify for more than one category of fallacy at the same time.
Furthermore, there really needs to be a name for a new form of fallacy often employed by creationists: The "it's irrefutably true because it's something I happen to believe" argument. Call it Argumentum Footstampus, perhaps, or "Argumentum Arrogantum.
Is pi complex?
Somehow I see a pattern where university and public school classrooms are concerned, natural selection and random mutation being the ultimate trump card that "wins every argument."
Many within the Catholic Church of Galileo's day welcomed his discoveries. I would not be surprised if he had more friends than enemies within the church. His enemies acted not entirely out of disrespect for scientific truth, and partly in response to Galileo's arrogant tone. To the end he maintained respect for the church, and for the universe he saw as a creation of God.
Your understanding of the studies, effects, and trial of Galileo is skewed from the inside. You would rather not admit that a.) the church was in large part a champion of science at the time, and b.) science was clinging to Aristotelian dogma like most of the rest of the world.
Great design. Where can we buy some? Tee shirts? Baseball style hats?
It'll sell like hot cakes.....
No. It's "stating the obvious."
Creationism is a particular school of thought, and it is as I described it.
Those who posit an old earth are not accepted into that school, and I'm really sure of that.
If you are using "creation" in a general sense, in that all who posit a creator God are therefore, "creationists," then there's nothing wrong with that so far as the English language is concerned that I can see.
Intelligent design, though, doesn't answer who or what is the intelligence behind the design. Nor does that intelligence have to be a god.
It really is a mathematical model speaking to the improbability of such a complex thing as living systems coming about accidentally, and therefore having had to have been designed.
You mean you can recognize intelligent design without arguing from incredulity? I thought so. Way to go.
No they don't. Please stop telling falsehoods.
Sounds pretty backward to me.
With your misunderstandings, it may well "sound" that way.
"We don't know what it is, but here's how it came about? (Uhhhh, how what came about?)
You are grossly misrepresenting a position you obviously don't know much about. Please consider going off and learning something about it before you try again.
"Well, how life came about." (What is this life that you're trying to look like an expert on?) "We don't know.
Please do not post your misconceptions as if they actually represented anyone's position. This is a "straw man" fallacy, and you're just being obnoxious -- not to mention bearing false witness.
(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!)
Now you're just being an insulting jerk by putting your lies in someone else's mouth. Stop it. No, that is *not* the scientific position -- not even remotely close.
Materialists do say that it just randomly came about. You remember....Maybe lightening...maybe protein soup...maybe a snowball in a hot place.... Sheesh.
You are obviously vastly ignorant of the state of the art in abiogenesis research. Not that this stops you from spouting off, I see...
It's obvious that my car is a complex system and that it didn't make itself.
Because we *know* how cars are made, and that we make them. This is *NOT* the case for the kinds of complex systems we find in nature, which are very *different* in countless ways from the kinds of systems that we *do* know were actually "made".
It is not illogical at all to apply that same observation to other complex systems.
Yes, actually it is. *Especially* when, as even the creationists are quick to point out, we *CAN'T* build functional living organisms. So by what bizarre line of "reasoning" do you therefore conclude that they "must" have been "built" at all?
Creationist "logic": "We know that cars are the kinds of complex things that are built, because people do build them. People can't build complex living things. Complex living things aren't at all like the kinds of things we know *are* built. Therefore, complex living things were built too. QED."
Sorry, not only do I not find that convincing, I find it jaw-droppingly illogical.
Looks like torture to me. I wonder if they were clean?
No. It's "stating the obvious."
Yes. Exactly the problem.
(Any bets on whether Fester manages to grasp the point he has accidentally stumbled over?)
I was thinking of Flip Wilson who had a bulldog named Chumley.
They are so complex that we can't build them, and therefore, that is evidence that they had to be built.
Intuitively, yes. It makes much more sense than "We can't build them, and therefore, that is evidence that they accidentally (mechanistically) came about."
The mathematical model supports the intuition. It does not support the fallacious reasoning that they accidentally came about.
But you haven't seen the ID. OTOH I've seen rain, and everytime I see it, do not reasonably assume there's a rain god behind it
Fester is PH? Fester is Southack without the irritating pictures in every post.
That's what Uri Geller thought before he went on the Johnny Carson show.
Such an argument would be very weak indeed.
As a biblical creationist I have not stated that my belief is "irrefutably true because it's something I happen to believe." I believe what I believe because the evidence supports it, beginning with the heavens and earth which, by virtue of the energy vested in them and the design vested in my reason and senses, communicate their existence. It is a set up no human intelligence has been able to duplicate, so it is not unreasonable for me to accept this as evidence of an Intelligent Designer. That is all.
Meanwhile, how many people will boast that they know for certain the earth revolves around the sun when all they've done is take someone else's word for it? It is not "natural" to believe the earth revolves around the sun until one learns for himself by experience or by the testimony of someone else that it does. My reason and senses do not tell me the earth is round, either. That had to be preached to me. I happen to be a believer in that regard.
The Apollo lunar landings, however, I know for a fact to have been staged. I worked on the set.
Well, PH it looks like you're going to get to 1000. Now let's not fight over it. Everyone be nice.
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