Posted on 08/01/2005 10:58:13 AM PDT by wallcrawlr
The half-century campaign to eradicate any vestige of religion from public life has run its course. The backlash from a nation fed up with the A.C.L.U. kicking crèches out of municipal Christmas displays has created a new balance. State-supported universities may subsidize the activities of student religious groups. Monuments inscribed with the Ten Commandments are permitted on government grounds. The Federal Government is engaged in a major antipoverty initiative that gives money to churches. Religion is back out of the closet.
But nothing could do more to undermine this most salutary restoration than the new and gratuitous attempts to invade science, and most particularly evolution, with religion. Have we learned nothing? In Kansas, conservative school-board members are attempting to rewrite statewide standards for teaching evolution to make sure that creationism's modern stepchild, intelligent design, infiltrates the curriculum. Similar anti-Darwinian mandates are already in place in Ohio and are being fought over in 20 states. And then, as if to second the evangelical push for this tarted-up version of creationism, out of the blue appears a declaration from Christoph Cardinal Schönborn of Vienna, a man very close to the Pope, asserting that the supposed acceptance of evolution by John Paul II is mistaken. In fact, he says, the Roman Catholic Church rejects "neo-Darwinism" with the declaration that an "unguided evolutionary process--one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence--simply cannot exist."
Cannot? On what scientific evidence? Evolution is one of the most powerful and elegant theories in all of human science and the bedrock of all modern biology. Schönborn's proclamation that it cannot exist unguided--that it is driven by an intelligent designer pushing and pulling and planning and shaping the process along the way--is a perfectly legitimate statement of faith. If he and the Evangelicals just stopped there and asked that intelligent design be included in a religion curriculum, I would support them. The scandal is to teach this as science--to pretend, as does Schönborn, that his statement of faith is a defense of science. "The Catholic Church," he says, "will again defend human reason" against "scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of 'chance and necessity,'" which "are not scientific at all." Well, if you believe that science is reason and that reason begins with recognizing the existence of an immanent providence, then this is science. But, of course, it is not. This is faith disguised as science. Science begins not with first principles but with observation and experimentation.
In this slippery slide from "reason" to science, Schönborn is a direct descendant of the early 17th century Dutch clergyman and astronomer David Fabricius, who could not accept Johannes Kepler's discovery of elliptical planetary orbits. Why? Because the circle is so pure and perfect that reason must reject anything less. "With your ellipse," Fabricius wrote Kepler, "you abolish the circularity and uniformity of the motions, which appears to me increasingly absurd the more profoundly I think about it." No matter that, using Tycho Brahe's most exhaustive astronomical observations in history, Kepler had empirically demonstrated that the planets orbit elliptically.
This conflict between faith and science had mercifully abated over the past four centuries as each grew to permit the other its own independent sphere. What we are witnessing now is a frontier violation by the forces of religion. This new attack claims that because there are gaps in evolution, they therefore must be filled by a divine intelligent designer.
How many times do we have to rerun the Scopes "monkey trial"? There are gaps in science everywhere. Are we to fill them all with divinity? There were gaps in Newton's universe. They were ultimately filled by Einstein's revisions. There are gaps in Einstein's universe, great chasms between it and quantum theory. Perhaps they are filled by God. Perhaps not. But it is certainly not science to merely declare it so.
To teach faith as science is to undermine the very idea of science, which is the acquisition of new knowledge through hypothesis, experimentation and evidence. To teach it as science is to encourage the supercilious caricature of America as a nation in the thrall of religious authority. To teach it as science is to discredit the welcome recent advances in permitting the public expression of religion. Faith can and should be proclaimed from every mountaintop and city square. But it has no place in science class. To impose it on the teaching of evolution is not just to invite ridicule but to earn it.
Sure.
Or....
The Prius will result in the NEW Ford Viron!
:>)
Be careful with your terminology. Probabllity zero isn't the same as impossible. The probablity of a rational number being chosen from a Gaussian distribution is zero, but there are infinitely many rationals.
Drinking rum and CocaCola? Are you working for the Yankee Dollar?
Darwin never asked the question - and most biologists today, if they ask it at all, will usually answer themselves with long lists of properties. Such lists are invariably subjective especially concerning the enigmas (prions and viruses, etc.)
A model like Shannon's, OTOH, is unambiguous and ideologically neutral so that we can test both the alternative theories of abiogenesis as well as the model itself.
There is far more evidence that life begins at conception than there is evidence proving evolution. Try teaching life begins at conception in a public shool and see how fast the left goes insane.
The 'problem' is not with things which are non-physical, but rather with things which are non-testable. What sort of "scientific method" could provide a means to empirically test that which is supernatural or non-physical? If it is testable, at least in principle, then it is within the scope of 'science'. If not, then it isn't.
Physicists and mathematicians deal with non-physicals every day. After all, physical laws and theories are universal and non-corporeal per se - and every time a mathematician puts a variable in a formula he admits to a universal, a non-corporeal.
Well, I'm not a Platonist. ;o) Depending upon your definition of "physical", I'd dispute the notion that physicists are dealing with the non-physical.
Mathematics is a different story. But mathematical truths are different from scientific truths. Mathematics relies upon induction and deduction, and produces conclusions which are proven true. Science may use induction and deduction for the purpose of framing testable hypotheses, but the process of the scientific method is empirical. The process generates evidence to support or refute a particular hypothesis. As is said so often on these threads, nothing in science is ever proven true, in the mathematical sense. We rather accept certain conclusions as true because of the overwhelming weight of the evidence we've accumulated, and because there is no better explanation available.
In effect, the biologists (and most metaphysical naturalists) are thrilled that they find physical answers to their questions. To the rest of us it is a yawner - of course they find physical answers, that is how they framed their questions and it is the only place they looked.
What would a non-physical answer look like? How would the question be framed? And how would one go about determining the truth of such a hypothesis?
I am less concerned with what we label living (prion, virus, rabbit) than with what is that stuff that oozes out of the living human that leaves in its wake a dead human.
What is that stuff?
Is a sperm cell alive? Is it human?
Is an unfertilized egg cell alive? Is is human?
I find it amusing you both are so entertained by a point originally raised by Richard Dawkins.
Is neither the sperm nor egg living then?
Fill a can with that missing stuff of which we speak and you have a "Can of Life."
Aerosol or liquid?
What is it? Do you know?
If we examine different virii, we see a range of DNA sequences that all support life. We also see different sequences in other organisms. From this we know there is more than one specific string out of all possible strings of a given length that would be successful. The probability of a successful string then becomes the same as the probability - potential successes/all possible, in the case of my example, 8/16.
So you're saying getting an honest congressman from Rhode Island would require divine Providence? ;o)
For instance, the Miller/Urey experiments proved that zapping certain basic elements would cause amino acids. But their work made no substantial gains thereafter. OTOH, their work proceeded the boom of DNA knowledge in the community.
More recently, the Wimmer experiment was much more successful: creating the polio virus in the laboratory. His group started with a message (what would be broadcast “noise” in the Shannon mathematical theory of communication) which was RNA. Since RNA cannot be synthesized, they converted an RNA sequence into DNA which could be synthesized back to RNA. They then put the RNA (“broadcast message” in Shannon lingo) - in a cell free juice whereupon the virus built itself. The juice was a human cell shredded up with the nucleus, mitochondria and other large structures removed.
In the Shannon model, the RNA is broadcast “noise” in the channel which can either result in a successful or unsuccessful altered message to the receiver. In evolution lingo, “noise” is “mutation”. In abiogenesis theory under this model, at some point, these “broadcast” messages in the RNA world became autonomous DNA messages in the molecular machinery. (Rocha et al)
Where that sustaining (autonomous) successful communication is established, there is life. Where there is no successful communication, there is non-life or death. The DNA per se survives death but no longer is an active message – because DNA is autonomous communication and not broadcast (as in viruses, prions, etc.).
Thus, the Shannon model gave us a theoretical model for evaluating abiogenesis theory without any bias as to ideology.
I have a computer in the next room that won't boot. What's the vital spark that's missing?
I have some hair as well. I keep it on my hair brush.
In order to fix it, you need to know, don't you?
In fact, in order to say anything about it you need to know.
I imagine that with your computer a tech could troubleshoot it and let you know.
But what's that stuff that's missing for a dead human that it had just moments before as a live human?
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