Posted on 04/15/2006 11:44:16 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
Posted: April 15, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2006 WorldNetDaily.com
I suggested here last week that the established authorities of every age act consistently. They become vigilantly militant against non-conforming dissidents who challenge their assumptions.
Thus when the dissident Galileo challenged the assumptions of the 17th century papacy, it shut him up. Now when the advocates of "intelligent design" challenge the scientific establishment's assumptions about "natural selection," it moves aggressively to shut them up. So the I.D. people have this in common with Galileo.
I received a dozen letters on this, three in mild agreement, the rest in scorn and outrage. This calls for a response.
Where, one reader demanded, did I get the information that 10 percent of scientists accept intelligent design? I got it from a National Post (newspaper) article published two years ago, which said that 90 percent of the members of the National Academy of Science "consider themselves atheists." Since if you're not an atheist, you allow for the possibility of a Mind or Intelligence behind nature, this puts 10 percent in the I.D. camp.
I could have gone further. A survey last year by Rice University, financed by the Templeton Foundation, found that about two-thirds of scientists believed in God. A poll published by Gallup in 1997 asked: Do you believe that "man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process, including man's creation?" – essentially the I.D. position. Just under 40 percent of scientists said yes. So perhaps my 10 percent was far too low.
Two readers called my attention to a discovery last week on an Arctic island of something which may be the fossil remains of the mysteriously missing "transitional species." Or then maybe it isn't transitional. Maybe it's a hitherto undetected species on its own.
But the very exuberance with which such a discovery is announced argues the I.D. case. If Darwin was right, and the change from one species to another through natural selection occurred constantly in millions of instances over millions of years, then the fossil record should be teaming with transitional species. It isn't. That's why even one possibility, after many years of searching, becomes front-page news.
Another letter complains that I.D. cannot be advanced as even a theory unless evidence of the nature of this "Divine" element is presented. But the evidence is in nature itself. The single cell shows such extraordinary complexity that to suggest it came about by sheer accident taxes credulity. If you see a footprint in the sand, that surely evidences human activity. The demand – "Yes, but whose footprint is it?"– does not disqualify the contention that somebody was there. "Nope," says the establishment, "not until you can tell us who it was will we let you raise this question in schools."
Another reader argues that Galileo stood for freedom of inquiry, whereas I.D. advocates want to suppress inquiry. This writer apparently did not notice what caused me to write the column. It was the rejection by a government agency for a $40,000 grant to a McGill University anti-I.D. lobby to suppress the presentation and discussion of I.D. theory in the Canadian schools. Suppressing discussion is an odd way of encouraging "freedom of inquiry." Anyway, the I.D. movement doesn't want to suppress evolution. It merely wants it presented as a theory, alongside the I.D. theory.
Why, asked another reader, did I not identify the gutsy woman who stated the reason for the rejection, bringing upon herself the scorn of scientific authority. That's fair. Her name is Janet Halliwell, a chemist and executive vice president of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council. She said that evolution is a theory, not a fact, and the McGill application offered no evidence to support it.
The McGill applicant was furious. Evolution, he said, needs no evidence. It's fact. Apparently Harvard University doesn't quite agree with him. The Boston Globe reports that Harvard has begun an expensive project to discover how life emerged from the chemical soup of early earth. In the 150 years since Darwin, says the Globe, "scientists cannot explain how the process began."
The most sensible letter came from a research scientist. "I think that the current paradigm of evolution by natural selection acting on random variation will change," he writes. "I think that evidence will accumulate to suggest that much of the genetic variation leading to the evolution of life on earth was not random, but was generated by biochemical processes that exhibit intelligent behavior."
Then he urges me not to disclose his identity. Saying this publicly would threaten his getting tenure, he fears. Galileo would understand.
More depth: You can't logically use the theory of evolution to justify suppressing or killing others because "you can't get from 'is' to 'ought.'"
This idea was developed by David Hume. He noticed that people often made a leap in reasoning where they would start by describing the way things are and then suddenly start saying because of this things ought to work in such a manner with no justification. So we can say that without outside help those who are weaker or less intelligent are less likely to survive than those who are strong and smart. However, leaping from this to saying that therefore we ought to either not help the weaker or kill them is a logical fallacy.
Anti-evolutionists continually say that without God there can be no morality and anarchy would reign. However, many agnostic evolutionists realize that the way nature works is often brutal and arbitrary and see no reason why we should be complicit with it.
Our idea of fairness and justice arose as self-preservation method--an emotional response to another being wronging us can discourage the other from doing that again and can encourage us to distrust that other. Cooperation arose as a form of kinship selection and then acquired usefulness in the larger group due to its mutually beneficial nature. So evolutionarily we are equipped with the ability to know when we are being wronged and to feel guilty when we wrong another, but we are also equipped with the tendency to limit moral dealings to those in our group.
We know we are inclined to limit cooperation and moral dealings to those of our group (our nation, race, religion, etc.) We also know that we are all humans and that there is no logical reason that our particular interests or desires should triumph over those of another. So our innate emotional responses can couple with logic to give a morality that is the essence of the golden rule--Do unto others as you would have done to you.
Most people don't have a lot of trouble distinguishing a visible phenomenon from divine intervention. There is always the possibility that every atom and molecule is connected at all times by puppet strings to the deity, but this is not the common assumption.
True belief is like an electron orbit, jumping from one state to another without traversing any intermediate states.
I preferred it when you were saying that females were gods.
First of all, chance and females are both known to exist. God is not.
Secondly, the complaint against arbitrariness is not necessarily because God is out there doing kind of random and nonsensical things in spite of supposedly being an intelligent designer. My objections based on arbitrariness are more due to the arbitrariness of the creationists. For instance, they accept speciation until it hits their Variation Acceptibility Limit--which varies widely depending on who you're talking to.
Thirdly, some of the complaint is due to the fact that creationists' arbitrariness unintentionally depicts God as being quite arbitrary. Once again, many creationists accept a certain amount of speciation. However, most of these also have the (unfounded) belief that new genes cannot arise and that all must have been present intially. So you would think that God would have created an initial kind of frog that would speciate into all of our modern frogs. However, frogs secrete antibacterial peptides onto their skin, and there are several different families of genes coding for these peptides that show up in different genuses. In order to have no new genes arise, God would have had to create perhaps half a dozen initial kinds of frogs. Yet most agree there was only one initial feline. Why the discrepancy? It would be much more rational and aesthetically satisfying if there were only one initial kind for each type of animal.
uhh... because he was a liar?
Trying to make himself look learned, when in fact he was pretty much an uneducated thug?
Obviously, the lesson didn't stick with him, or he wouldn't have promoted Lysenko over the legitimate biologists like Vavilov.
I don't believe you are willing to read and be instructed. You show no evidence of having any knowledge of the subject or its history, except perhaps what you have read on web sites that publish superficial criticisms.
Natural selection is not a visible phenomenon. Only its results are visible, and the ascriptions made to the results are arbitrary. They cannot be empirically handled, but applied in retrospect. Substitute "nature" for "God," and ***POOF!*** we're pure scientists, freed from philosophy; incapable of biases and subjectivity.
You can say water runs uphill with a straight face.
There are subtleties involved in selection, and not everything we humans would like to categorize as a superior trait will in fact result in more offspring. And traits that were previously favorable can become unfavorable.
But in any case, traits are visible and catalogable, and the number of offspring is visible and countable.
Gravity is not a visible phenomenon. Are you familiar with intelligent falling?
First you said people don't change their beliefs and I demonstrated that you were wrong.
Now you ask if I am willing to modify my beliefs after i already said I have. I never once imagined I would enjoy dancing, but I sure do now.
I also modify my beliefs about God as I learn more about Him from others and reading the Bible. It hasn't changed my understanding about the basic truths of the Bible, because all Christians agree of the basic truths of Christianity.
It is my opinion that Christians who believe in Christianity are simply uninformed about the lack of scientific support for evolution.
What does "allegory" mean?
In what sense (of the five or six ways it could be used) is the word "evolution" used in this context?
Cordially,
Silly! Song of Solomon is not about sex but is an allegory about the relationship between God and the church. However, Genesis 1-2 is not an allegory about the relationship between God and creation, but a scientific report.
Sorry. Those derisive snorts were mine.
I am stating that the long term historical debate over Darwin has been over Evolution's displacement of the idea of an immortal soul by inference.You have still not demonstrated that any such inference exists.
The inference is ubiquitous and unavoidable.
"Through no fault of our own, and by dint of no cosmic plan or conscious purpose, we have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to such responsibility, but here we are."
Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo's Smile
The notion that the human soul is the result of "no conscious purpose", the product of some "glorious evolutionary accident" is by any lights antithetical to any traditional Jewish or Christian concept of "immortal soul".
If evolution is held to be progressive, then it is all too easy to see it as being directed, following an arrow of improvement through time. And that is all too redolent of the notion of "divine" design of pre-Darwinian days.... "There is a profound unwillingness to abandon a view of life as predictable progress . . . because to do so would be to admit that human existence is nothing but a historical accident. That is difficult for many to accept."
R. Lewin, "A Simple Matter of Complexity" in New Scientist 141 (1994) 40.
Cordially,
D'oh! I'm so embarassed!
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