Wishful thinking
It is becoming embarrassingly obvious lately that evolutionary science has truly gone the way of wishful thinking. With no recourse but materialism, scientists are forced to theorize – or perhaps more accurately, fantasize – on the origins of life with little to no basis in real evidence.
Today in Italy, at an annual conference of the world’s leading geochemists, Professor Steven Benner, a chemist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Florida, is presenting his “evidence” supporting a theory called panspermia, which maintains that life on earth actually originated from other planets. Despite monumental efforts and many years of trying, scientists have been unable to come up with a workable explanation for how life began on our planet without an outside source. So some propose a fortuitous journey through space of a primitive life form from Mars, which “may have” been hospitable to life at one time…billions of years ago, to jump start life on Earth. (But where did Earth and Mars and all the other planets and stars come from? Oh, yeah…nothing.)
Evolutionary scientists cannot allow the “divine foot in the door”1 so they concoct fanciful theories that appear more a denial of reality than an explanation of it. “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”2 So said famously virulent atheist Richard Dawkins. Yet he and most scientists today deny design anyway. And wishfully think of potentially plausible explanations for the appearance of design apart from any real evidence.
British astrobiologist Chandra Wickramasinghe, a panspermia advocate, admitted, “The emergence of life from a primordial soup on the Earth is merely an article of faith that scientists are finding difficult to shed. There is no experimental evidence to support this at the present time. Indeed all attempts to create life from non-life, starting from Pasteur, have been unsuccessful.” 3
To illustrate the ridiculousness of denying design even when beholding it, consider Darwinists’ theories for the origin of the human brain, which atheist Carl Sagan described as, “The circuitry of a machine more wonderful than any devised by humans,”4 when applied to some lesser creations.
Multiple universes. Maybe ours is the one in a billion where intricate designs come together by chance.
Originated from another planet. Random mutations resulted in favorable characteristics.
Nature finds a way.
Give time and chance a chance and some time.
Now consider the words of American evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin:
“Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover that materialism is absolute for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.” 1
1 Richard Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” The New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997, 31.
2 Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York; Norton, 1987), 17-18, 116
3 Chandra Wickramasinghe, interview by Robert Roy Britt, October 27, 2000. Posted online at http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc1963.htm
4 Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York, Random House, 1980), 278.
I am always astonished how people can keep repeating the same tired, long ago debunked arguments. Are you honestly that isolated from anyone who disagrees with you? Or do you know the counter-arguments to all of these and just not care?
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Hi there, agnophilo. Thanks for reading and commenting. Perhaps you could be more specific.
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First of all the scientific misconceptions, panspermia has nothing to do with evolution (or atheism) and isn’t an attempt to rationalize any worldview but simply to understand nature. We know life on earth started as single-celled organisms because the fossil record goes back 3.4 billion years and for almost all of that time there’s nothing but single-celled life. To suggest that that single-celled life may have originated elsewhere when organic molecules survive and fall to earth in meteors and large meteor impacts on planets (which we know occur regularly) have enough energy to propel objects into space and microbes can survive in space for decades without nutrients exposed to a wide range of temperatures and forms of radiation is not at all unreasonable. It’s an open question, not a dogmatic assertion. It’s following the evidence wherever it leads, not trying to make it conform to this or that ideology. The idea that science is anti-god or anti-religion or anti-christianity is also a misconception, most scientists in the US are christian and on supposedly “controversial” subjects like evolution there is no great divide between christian biologists and non-christian biologists. It’s only laymen who think these ideas are “dangerous” and it’s because they’ve been told to think that by fundamentalists. Science doesn’t refuse to entertain the idea of a god, it refuses to comment on the idea of a god because it is not empirically testable and therefore any claim of scientific proof one way or the other would by definition be a lie. There is no such thing as a creationist experiment. A god, if such a being exists, is not observable or subject to tests or predictions. It is not a subject honest scientists feel they can comment on, beyond giving their personal views. To say “science proves there is no god” or trying to introduce atheism into the science curriculum of schools would be met the same way creationism is, only no one is trying to do that.
As for the god arguments the watchmaker analogy was popularized by william paley in 1802, 23 years after it was given as an example of a bad argument by david hume. Hume pointed out that it was comparing apples to oranges, since we know by direct experience that things like watches are the product of intelligent design because we can watch them be built, and that this would only be a fair comparison if we similarly had experience with universe creation or life creation. But since we do not it is akin to saying “a car has complex, moving parts and it comes off of an assembly line in a factory and a flower has complex, moving parts so it too must come off of an assembly line in a factory”. When of course two things being similar in one respect does not mean they are similar in all respects, and we know living things are by definition self-organizing, they build themselves in other words, in stark contrast to man-made things. We also know now that they reproduce and spontaneously vary and that those variations are inherited at different rates depending on how they effect the survival and/or reproduction rate of the individual organism which changes the species collectively over numerous generations and that there is a wealth of evidence that this has been going on for some time and that living things were once much more simple than they are today.
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My point is that because science will not consider the supernatural as a possible explanation for the existence of all life, and denies the obvious design in even the simplest cell, it has to resort to theories like panspermia, which do not satisfy, are based on flimsy evidence and other unsubstantiated theories, and provide no workable explanation for how organic materials evolved into the complex building blocks of life.
You claim that a theory like panspermia is “following the evidence wherever it leads,” yet the most “evident” evidence that the intricacies of life present is intelligence, and modern science just won’t go there.
Your description of science as not excluding God but simply not entertaining the idea because his existence can’t be proven is, I think, misleading. If there is “no great divide between christian biologists and non-christian biologists,” it’s because the “christian” ones – and yes, I have to put it in quotes because not all who claim to be Christian are – come out on the side of evolution. If they don’t, and instead voice their belief that God created the world and every creature “according to its kind,” they would largely be marginalized and ridiculed.
As for the watchmaker analogy, I think it, and the smartphone analogy, the Sistine Chapel analogy, the Taj Mahal analogy, and the Mt. Rushmore analogy, are solid and powerful.
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“My point is that because science will not consider the supernatural as a possible explanation for the existence of all life,”
It does not reject it as a possibility (most scientists believe in some kind of creator), it simply does not lie and say that it can be empirically supported.
“and denies the obvious design in even the simplest cell,”
Science isn’t philosophy, it’s not scratching your head, coming up with an idea and then declaring it as fact. Science is the process of testing ideas, finding experiments and making predictions that have the potential to falsify them. And you cannot do that with invisible, un-detectable super-beings.
“it has to resort to theories like panspermia,”
It’s not “resorting” to anything, again you are pretending science has some ideological objective.
“which do not satisfy, are based on flimsy evidence and other unsubstantiated theories,”
Panspermia is hardly proven, but it is being proposed as an area for investigation, not trumpeted as fact. Show me any scientist saying it’s a fact that life came from mars. You can’t.
“and provide no workable explanation for how organic materials evolved into the complex building blocks of life.”
And do you provide a workable explanation for how ??? turned into a god? No? Then maybe you should be a little more humble about the question of origins. And we actually have learned a lot about how the building blocks of life form, from amino acids to the chemicals that make up RNA. Turns out they form spontaneously in a number of conditions.
“You claim that a theory like panspermia is “following the evidence wherever it leads,” yet the most “evident” evidence that the intricacies of life present is intelligence, and modern science just won’t go there.”
I’m talking about empirical evidence. It is perfectly valid to speculate about intelligent design or even argue for it as philosophy, but science is based on empirical tests, experiments and predictions. Show me an intelligent design experiment that has the potential to prove there is no god if it turns out a certain way and then we’ll talk. Until then it’s not science. It may be true, but it isn’t science.
“Your description of science as not excluding God but simply not entertaining the idea because his existence can’t be proven is, I think, misleading.”
How? And it’s because it can’t be tested empirically, not that it can’t be proven per se. Science is the branch of philosophy that deals with physical things. I can prove empirically that the earth is round or that a sample contains a certain radioactive isotope – I cannot empirically prove that the new star trek movie sucked compared to the original. I can believe it did, I can make a persuasive argument, and I can be right about it – but I can’t experimentally prove it because it is an abstract concept not something you can hold in your hand.
“If there is “no great divide between christian biologists and non-christian biologists,” it’s because the “christian” ones – and yes, I have to put it in quotes because not all who claim to be Christian are – come out on the side of evolution.”
Yes, they do.
“If they don’t, and instead voice their belief that God created the world and every creature “according to its kind,” they would largely be marginalized and ridiculed.”
You mean for instance if a scientist said something like this:
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
– Charles Darwin, On The Origin Of Species
Belief in a creator or even created “kinds” is not in any way in conflict with evolution. It contradicts with biblical literalism but that is a particularly narrow theology and is by no means synonymous with christianity or belief in god.
“As for the watchmaker analogy, I think it, and the smartphone analogy, the Sistine Chapel analogy, the Taj Mahal analogy, and the Mt. Rushmore analogy, are solid and powerful.”
You don’t even acknowledge my objections? You’re basically just saying “nuh uh”: It’s not a valid analogy, it’s comparing like with not like.
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This response is both for agnophilo and hatchetmaniac.
Agnophilo –
I feel like you’re equivocating in your assertion that science “does not reject (the supernatural) as a possibility” but “simply does not lie and say that it can be empirically supported.” Scientists may believe in a creator, but they don’t bring their beliefs into their work because science confines itself to only naturalistic explanations.
Necessarily so, one might add. Well…yes, only the natural world can be observed and measured, and that’s what science does. However, if our observations indicate the possibility of the supernatural, it should be allowed as a theory, even though it can’t be proven. And, at least within the scientific and academic communities, it’s not.
I do believe science has an ideology it seeks to support, as my final quote from Richard Lewontin indicates. Physicist Hubert Yockey, who worked on the Manhattan Project under Robert Oppenheimer, said this very thing: “The belief that life on earth arose spontaneously from nonliving matter, is simply a matter of faith in strict reductionism and is based entirely on ideology.”
I never said or implied that panspermia was being promoted as fact.
“Then maybe you should be a little more humble about the question of origins.” Do I seem arrogant? Forgive me if I do. I’m really not…just passionate about shining a little light on what I see as a great wrong – the exclusion of God in science and academia. Of course I can’t explain how God created anything, nor understand how it is that he always existed. But it can’t be otherwise. Comprehension implies equality or superiority, don’t you think? If we could completely understand God, we could conceivable be like him.
“You mean for instance if a scientist said something like this…” I mean for instance the case of evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg who “faced retaliation, defamation, harassment, and a hostile work environment at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History” because he authorized publication of an article presenting “scientific evidence for intelligent design in biology” in a journal he edited. You can read his account here: http://www.richardsternberg.com/smithsonian.php.
“Belief in a creator or even created ‘kinds’ is not in any way in conflict with evolution.” I know there are Christians who believe that God got the evolution process going and guided it, but I don’t believe that’s true, in part because of what the Bible teaches, which I won’t get into here. Nevertheless, that’s Intelligent Design, and we’re back to science’s refusal to consider it.
And recognizing that something that conveys complex information, like DNA, requires intelligence and design, because we intuitively recognize intelligence and design in our man-made world, is a valid analogy. Atheists since David Hume have sought to discredit it because it’s powerful evidence, but I don’t think his nor your criticism of it carries any weight.
Hatchet –
“…if God is out there and he acts in the physical universe, we can observe and measure him.” Observing and measuring the activities and involvement of a transcendent God is quite different from observing and measuring him. Though he did choose to inhabit the world he created for a time, in an observable form 2000 years ago, and we have evidence of that, he is a spirit. He transcends his creation but he also inhabits it, as he is omnipresent. But as a spirit, you can throw paint anywhere you want and you’re just going to make a mess.
Information is propaganda in one’s opinion when they believe it is deceptive and manipulative. You don’t buy into ID so to you it’s propaganda. I believe that much of what passes for completely objective and neutral science today is deceptive and manipulative propaganda. That’s my opinion.
And I respect the pope but I don’t follow him, and I don’t believe he should be held up as an example of what a Christian should believe, much to the dismay of some of my family members.
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“Agnophilo –
I feel like you’re equivocating in your assertion that science “does not reject (the supernatural) as a possibility” but “simply does not lie and say that it can be empirically supported.” Scientists may believe in a creator, but they don’t bring their beliefs into their work because science confines itself to only naturalistic explanations.”
Naturalistic explanations are currently the only ones that can be tested empirically. Supernatural things, if they exist, are not observable or subject to experimentation.
“Necessarily so, one might add. Well…yes, only the natural world can be observed and measured, and that’s what science does. However, if our observations indicate the possibility of the supernatural, it should be allowed as a theory, even though it can’t be proven.”
The term “theory” in science does not mean the same thing it does in everyday use, a hunch or a guess. That is closer to a hypothesis. But even a hypothesis must be testable. A theory is a hypothesis that has been supported by experiments and observations and is potentially falsifiable. Intelligent design cannot be tested and isn’t supported by experiments. It is perfectly valid to put forward as a philosophical argument, but it isn’t science (at least not at the moment, it could be someday).
“And, at least within the scientific and academic communities, it’s not.”
Scientists talk about god all the time, even agnostics like einstein and stephen hawking have invoked the word god to describe their awe at nature, from einstein’s “god doesn’t play dice with the universe” to hawking’s “then perhaps we shall know the mind of god” (last line of a brief history of time). Scientists talk about god all the time, they just don’t lie and claim they can prove it. It’s he same with atheism, it’s perfectly valid for a scientist to espouse his or her atheist views, but to claim that science empirically proves atheism is dishonest. No scientist, to my knowledge, is trying to get atheism taught in science class, or promoted as science.
“I do believe science has an ideology it seeks to support, as my final quote from Richard Lewontin indicates.”
You mean the one where he says we are compelled toward naturalistic conclusions not by scientific institutions but by experience? The quote only supports that view if you do not read it carefully or know what “a priori” means. And I looked up the context, just before the bit you quoted he was accusing himself and carl sagan of bias. You cite it as if it’s some ideological quote but in context it’s very even-handed in it’s criticism.
“Physicist Hubert Yockey, who worked on the Manhattan Project under Robert Oppenheimer, said this very thing: “The belief that life on earth arose spontaneously from nonliving matter, is simply a matter of faith in strict reductionism and is based entirely on ideology.”
It may have once been more philosophy than science, and perhaps to some degree it still is, but I don’t know that abiogenesis is even really promoted anywhere – the only people I really hear talking about it is evangelists who think it makes an easier target than evolution. I admit though I don’t know what science textbooks usually say on the subject of the ultimate origins of life. I imagine they probably say that it began around 4 billion years ago, but kind of gloss over it (at least in public schools) for first amendment reasons. But if you are saying that abiogenesis is more philosophy than science that’s a fair assessment. Or it may be, I’d have to be a biochemist to really assess the latest research, which is pretty inaccessible to the layman.
“Do I seem arrogant?”
People on the god side of this debate always seem to ask how the universe began in an accusing, condescending way, like we’re idiots for not having the answer, when in reality they don’t know any more than we do, they just ignore the question of how it began and replace it with “who” is supposedly responsible.
“Forgive me if I do. I’m really not…just passionate about shining a little light on what I see as a great wrong – the exclusion of God in science and academia.”
Is it a great wrong for poetry to be excluded from chemistry classes? Or for calculus to be excluded from ancient history? Science deals specifically with things that can be empirically tested, that’s it’s job. You seem to be angry at a hammer for not being a screwdriver.
This is the fox news “war on christmas” mentality that is all too common in american christians, the idea that it’s an outrage if there’s any tiny section of society that isn’t plastered with religious propaganda and all about christianity. Somebody calls a christmas tree a “holiday tree” or says “seasons greetings” and it’s the end of the world. At christmas you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting christian displays, you can’t walk a few blocks without seeing a church, but it’s the greatest injustice in the world that there isn’t a christian display (and only a christian display) in front of the post office.
This mentality, to an atheist or a member of any religious minority (who is used to seeing other peoples’ beliefs everywhere and never gets special priveleges) is absurd. Imagine if I was outraged that chess boards did not have statements about atheism on them, and thought it was terrible that atheism was being “excluded” from board games? Or if I tried to get atheism taught in science class. Or if I though I was being victimized because I can’t make everyone else’s kids repeat a statement every morning about how there is no god and religions are false? What would you think of me?
“Of course I can’t explain how God created anything, nor understand how it is that he always existed.”
It’s not necessarily a thing to be understood. It’s not as if we know that there is a god named yahweh and know he’s always existed.
“But it can’t be otherwise. Comprehension implies equality or superiority, don’t you think? If we could completely understand God, we could conceivable be like him.”
We can understand a lot that we didn’t used to understand, the weather used to be as mysterious and magical as the origins of the universe. The problem with understanding god is that he isn’t a phenomenon. He isn’t something that can be observed or studied.
“You mean for instance if a scientist said something like this…” I mean for instance the case of evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg who “faced retaliation, defamation, harassment, and a hostile work environment at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History” because he authorized publication of an article presenting “scientific evidence for intelligent design in biology” in a journal he edited. You can read his account here: http://www.richardsternberg.com/smithsonian.php.”
Actually the reason people were pissed at him is that he bypassed the normal peer review process to get a paper published that normally wouldn’t pass muster for personal and ideological reasons. He knew the author of the paper personally and should therefore not have been the one to decide if it got published, he handled the peer review process himself instead of using any other assistant editors and he either didn’t get any expert to peer review it (normally at least 3 experts have to review the paper) or he did so privately and refused to give their names (supposedly for fear of retalliation, but in reality the names probably either don’t exist or he cherry-picked them specifically because they agreed with the paper’s conclusions and wouldn’t be critical of them). He also claimed that he had been “fired” for publishing the article, when in reality he had given his resignation before he published it, etc. Look into it.
“Belief in a creator or even created ‘kinds’ is not in any way in conflict with evolution.” I know there are Christians who believe that God got the evolution process going and guided it, but I don’t believe that’s true, in part because of what the Bible teaches, which I won’t get into here. Nevertheless, that’s Intelligent Design, and we’re back to science’s refusal to consider it.”
Again, show me an intelligent design experiment and it’s science. Until then it’s not and to say so is dishonest. Is it really so horrible that scientists refuse to lie? And the bible is not a science textbook, the adam and eve story has elements like talking animals which are reserved for fables, allegories and other forms of non-literal story-telling. Or outright mythology.
“And recognizing that something that conveys complex information, like DNA, requires intelligence and design, because we intuitively recognize intelligence and design in our man-made world, is a valid analogy. Atheists since David Hume have sought to discredit it because it’s powerful evidence, but I don’t think his nor your criticism of it carries any weight.”
That it is equating two things that are meaningfully different and that the same logic can be used to reach faulty conclusions doesn’t carry any weight? Agree with the premise of the analogy if you want, but it’s a bad analogy.
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I disagree that “Intelligent design cannot be tested and isn’t supported by experiments.” I’m no scientist so I cannot confidently address the particulars, but ID theory makes predictions, based on observations, and supporting experiments would include “reverse engineering” machine-like irreducibly complex structures to test if they could be functional in “incomplete” stages, which Darwinism suggests.
So my point is certainly not that students of science should be taught that God created the universe. Only that intelligent design should be included as a theory, as well as the criticisms and weaknesses of Darwinism. Absolutely, the theory of evolution should be taught, but as theory and not fact. Because as the explanation for the origin of life and all its varieties and complexities, it cannot be proven. Or at the very least, has not been yet.
My objection, my complaint if you will, is that the scientific community has excluded ID on the basis that it’s not science, which isn’t true, ensuring that Darwinism will be the one and only explanation for why anything exists. I believe that’s dishonest.
I acknowledge your frustration as an atheist with the recurrent conflicts over Christian displays and expressions in the public square. But to label this discussion on origins “the fox news ‘war on christmas’ mentality” is a red herring. That’s a totally different topic.
As for Richard Sternberg, I did “look into it.” Naturally, opposing parties in a situation are going to present the “facts” differently. It all depends on your point of view and your biases (which we all have). You demonstrated that in your reply, “but in reality the names probably either don’t exist or he cherry-picked them.” (italics mine) You were deciding what was reality based on what aligned with your position.
It’s clear we’re not going to come to any agreement, but please know that I do appreciate your input. It helps me grow in my understanding and improve my communication of it.
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“I disagree that “Intelligent design cannot be tested and isn’t supported by experiments.” I’m no scientist so I cannot confidently address the particulars, but ID theory makes predictions, based on observations, and supporting experiments would include “reverse engineering” machine-like irreducibly complex structures to test if they could be functional in “incomplete” stages, which Darwinism suggests.”
It does make predictions and it’s claims can be tested, but that is misleading because what is being tested is evolution, not the idea of an intelligent designer. How science works is basically a scientist figures out what must be true and can’t be true if their hypothesis is correct, then either by direct experiment or observation or waiting for a discovery to be made that idea is tested for accuracy. So an evolution scientist might say before a genome is sequenced what must be in this genome and what can’t be in this genome. Or they might say that if a complex organ arose by natural selection it must have been in some sense fully functional at earlier stages. But that being false while it may disprove some or all of evolution theory does not have the potential to disprove the existence of an intelligent designer. Science does not work that way, debunking one idea does not automatically justify another idea. For instance many organs and cell pathways are known to be reducibly complex, that doesn’t prove there is no god does it? As for the claims that biological mechanisms cannot be broken down those predictions have been thoroughly debunked, often by simply looking at similar organs in other species or by looking for the same DNA in other parts of an organism which points to simpler forms of the cell structure or whatever in question that almost invariably already exists in the organism or some other species in some “reduced” form. The eye is often given as an example of irreducibly complexity based on mis-characterizing a quote from charles darwin in which he (if you stop the quote early) appears to be saying that the eye is un-evolvable. In reality he went on to explain why complex organs were evolvable and was using the eye as an example to illustrate the point. Here is a brief video which illustrates step by step how you can go from an extremely simple eye to one like ours, and not only that, it gives examples of species in nature that have each type of eye:
“So my point is certainly not that students of science should be taught that God created the universe. Only that intelligent design should be included as a theory,”
Again intelligent design is not a theory in the scientific sense. If there is an experiment or prediction with the power to test it I have not heard of it. I would be very interested to know if there is, but I don’t see how that is possible, logically speaking.
“as well as the criticisms and weaknesses of Darwinism.”
The “criticisms and weaknesses” of evolution are promoted almost exclusively by non-scientists motivated by religious belief rather than empirical evidence and often rely on bad information, outdated or out of context quotations and even outright fabrication. The “evolution vs god” movie is a prime example of this, shoving a microphone into the face of ignorant college kids and asking academics impossibly ambiguous questions then cutting their answer down to a sound bite and claiming to represent their view is to put it simply worse than anything micheal moore was ever even accused of doing. Demanding scientists show one “kind” of animal becoming another “kind” when “kind” could mean any of a hundred things is the same as what creationists did a few years ago back when they still denied natural selection was even possible, they went around saying no scientist could give an example of a mechanism that could introduce new “information” into the DNA of any species. When this challenge was first issued it was of course immediately answered – off the top of my head I know that endogenous retroviruses and gene duplication mutations commonly add new genetic information to the genome which is then shuffled around, switched on or off and modified by subsequent mutations. So what did creationists do? They just sat back and said “that’s not information”. So scientists gave more examples. That wasn’t “information” either. So they asked the creationists what they mean by “information” and got silence as a response. Demanding evidence that is impossibly vague and then saying “nope, doesn’t count” when it’s given to you is just nonsense. It’s the same with the “there are no transitional fossils” claim, I can show you dozens, hundreds of not just transitional forms but really important and dramatic and impressive ones. I can show you how turtles gradually evolved from having no shells to having shells but not being able to retract into them (and other things like teeth that modern ones don’t have) to being more like turtles are today, and that’s just one example. And that’s just one lineage in that example, we’ve got cousins of those species that developed differently than that too. But show that to a creationist and they’ll say “no that’s not a transitional fossil”. Then ask them what evidence they would accept and either they won’t be able to tell you or they will say something ridiculous like a dog giving birth to a monkey or some BS that has only ever been proposed by evangelists.
“Absolutely, the theory of evolution should be taught, but as theory and not fact.”
Theory is the highest form of proof in science outside of mathematics, theories unify and explain facts. The theory of evolution explains the fact of evolution the way the theory of gravity explains the fact of gravity. The word theory does not mean a guess or a maybe in the scientific sense any more than “law” in science means something that will get you thrown in jail.
“Because as the explanation for the origin of life and all its varieties and complexities, it cannot be proven. Or at the very least, has not been yet.”
What aspect of evolution has not been proven?
“My objection, my complaint if you will, is that the scientific community has excluded ID on the basis that it’s not science, which isn’t true, ensuring that Darwinism will be the one and only explanation for why anything exists. I believe that’s dishonest.”
The idea that evolution is somehow singled out for special protection simply isn’t true, it’s a conspiracy theory that creationists use to justify the overwhelming acceptance of evolution. Because even if you only asked christian biologists if evolution was a real, daily, observable part of life you’d get the same answer – yes, of course it is. And the only way fundamentalists can still attack it and not look foolish is to invent these scenarios where scientists are all in fear of their life from the science gestapo and blah blah blah. Even in countries where proclaiming your beliefs are punishable by death it still happens. It’s punishable in the US by what, people saying poopy things to you on the internet? Give me a break. Christians (which make up 3/4 of the country and the majority of scientists and academics) are not persecuting themselves.
“I acknowledge your frustration as an atheist with the recurrent conflicts over Christian displays and expressions in the public square. But to label this discussion on origins “the fox news ‘war on christmas’ mentality” is a red herring. That’s a totally different topic.”
I was not trying to derail the conversation, I was simply making an analogy. It’s not persecution that your belief system isn’t jammed into absolutely every sector of society, even where it isn’t appropriate. It’s not persecution that there aren’t scripture passages tattooed under everyone’s eyelids.
“As for Richard Sternberg, I did “look into it.” Naturally, opposing parties in a situation are going to present the “facts” differently. It all depends on your point of view and your biases (which we all have). You demonstrated that in your reply, “but in reality the names probably either don’t exist or he cherry-picked them.” (italics mine) You were deciding what was reality based on what aligned with your position.”
Actually it was based on my having heard the claim of his “persecution” in the unbelievably sleazy and dishonest movie “expelled: no intelligence allowed” where the scientist in question appeared and claimed to have been fired, which wasn’t true, and which attempted to claim darwin laid the basis for the holocaust and nazi eugenics by giving a quote about animal husbandry which was heavily edited – the original, in context quote said that forced eugenics would be “an overwhelming present evil” which is part of why darwin’s writings were actually banned in nazi germany. The ID organization “the discovery institute” which is leading the ID movement (through PR and political avenues, not scientific research) had leaked from their organization a memo which outlined their goals and ideology (which they admitted was authentic). Itmade similar but vague claims about the harmful effects of darwin and others like sigmund freud. In reality freud lived in germany during the holocaust where his writings were burned in the streets before he narrowly escaped with his life (his four sisters died in concentration camps) after being specifically hunted by the nazis.
The amount of sleaze and dishonesty in the ID movement is almost hard to believe, and when some guy drummed up by a movie like that says that he’s telling the truth and we have to take his word on it I’m sorry but I’m going to be skeptical.
“It’s clear we’re not going to come to any agreement, but please know that I do appreciate your input. It helps me grow in my understanding and improve my communication of it.”
Out of curiosity what do you see yourself getting out of it? When you say something like that I don’t know if you mean you have gotten actual information from me of if you mean you’re getting insight into the mind of perverse heathens or what. The comment I replied to before this one was from someone who thanked me for giving examples of “discrepancies” in scripture (in quotes). I get the feeling they’re trying to be polite but in a very brush-off way where it’s assumed before I even type anything that everything I say is wrong.
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Let me begin my response with where you ended yours. What I “get out of” our discussion is a better understanding of your position and of those who are like-minded. You haven’t persuaded me, but you have contributed to a clearer picture of the issues and arguments. I’m sure you’re right that many who have and will debate you on matters related to creation and faith have an attitude that you’re just wrong and that’s all there is to it. But I think you would agree that we find that attitude on both sides of the debate. We’re all quite passionate about our beliefs and quite sure we’ve got it right, so the other guy must be wrong. This is another way you have helped me – I don’t want to be like that. Your observations remind me to guard against it.
As for the science, I’m not conversant enough in it to confidently debate your claims, nor do I have the time to make myself so. It is clear though, from the research I have done, that there is enough science being done that supports ID to make it a valid consideration. But as I’ve said elsewhere, two scientists can look at the same evidence and deduce different explanations for it. Your blanket statement that, “The ‘criticisms and weaknesses’ of evolution are promoted almost exclusively by non-scientists motivated by religious belief rather than empirical evidence” is belied by the fact that hundreds of scientists have signed the Scientific Dissent from Darwinism.
You asked, “What aspect of evolution has not been proven?” First of all, I recognize that microevolution has been sufficiently proven. But macroevolution, the idea that all life forms arose from a single cell has not. Much less has anyone been able to produce real life from non-life.
And I haven’t seen the movies, but I wouldn’t question the likelihood that there was some manipulation involved for the purpose of conveying the desired message. But I don’t believe you could honestly assure me that the Darwinism camp has never engaged in a little manipulation of its own. My point is, scientists are human like the rest of us, and they have been known at times, some of them, to be less than honest in presenting their case.
Science is supposed to be neutral and objective in its assessment of what we observe in nature, but just as it’s nearly impossible for a news journalist to report from a strictly unbiased viewpoint, so it is that scientists have biases that naturally impact their work.
Sometimes I wish I had gone into biology after high school like I considered. There’s so much to know…amazing and wonderful facts about ourselves and the world we live in. But I know enough to believe that it couldn’t all come into being by unguided randomness.
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Let me begin my response with where you ended yours. What I “get out of” our discussion is a better understanding of your position and of those who are like-minded. You haven’t persuaded me, but you have contributed to a clearer picture of the issues and arguments. I’m sure you’re right that many who have and will debate you on matters related to creation and faith have an attitude that you’re just wrong and that’s all there is to it. But I think you would agree that we find that attitude on both sides of the debate. We’re all quite passionate about our beliefs and quite sure we’ve got it right, so the other guy must be wrong. This is another way you have helped me – I don’t want to be like that. Your observations remind me to guard against it.”
Thank you, that’s nice of you to say. And I am always skeptical of my own views and try to approach subjects without bias, regularly asking if I could be wrong about something.
“As for the science, I’m not conversant enough in it to confidently debate your claims, nor do I have the time to make myself so.”
You are conversant enough to conclude they’re wrong though.
“It is clear though, from the research I have done, that there is enough science being done that supports ID to make it a valid consideration.”
There is no science being done that supports ID. There is no such thing as an intelligent design experiment that does anything more than attack evolution. They never attempt to test their own hypothesis.
“But as I’ve said elsewhere, two scientists can look at the same evidence and deduce different explanations for it.”
As I believe I have said that’s not how science works, the prediction comes first and the test either supports or falsifies the hypothesis. It’s like when they test medication to see if it treats an illness, they do a double-blind controlled study and it either works statistically more often than the placebo or it doesn’t. There is nothing to interpret.
“Your blanket statement that, “The ‘criticisms and weaknesses’ of evolution are promoted almost exclusively by non-scientists motivated by religious belief rather than empirical evidence” is belied by the fact that hundreds of scientists have signed the Scientific Dissent from Darwinism.”
Their statement is so vague there is no scientist in the world that would disagree with it (a scientist’s job is to be skeptical of every idea in science, saying “we are skeptical” doesn’t mean “this is dubious” to a scientist). Moreover to illustrate how ridiculous this list of “dissenters” is the national centers for science education made their own list – only they a) had a statement that wasn’t ambiguous and b) only let people sign it who were named “Steve”. They got more signatures.
http://ncse.com/taking-action/project-steve
“You asked, “What aspect of evolution has not been proven?” First of all, I recognize that microevolution has been sufficiently proven. But macroevolution, the idea that all life forms arose from a single cell has not. Much less has anyone been able to produce real life from non-life.”
Macro evolution is evolution beyond the species level, which has been observed in nature (google observed instances of speciation or go to the wikipedia page for speciation for examples). As for universal common ancestry it is as well established that you and a tree have ancestors in common as it is that you and I have ancestors in common. That probably seems bizarre to you, and lets be honest, it is. But it’s also true. You and a tree share a great deal of DNA and anatomical similarity – it’s just on a cellular level so it isn’t plainly obvious. You and a reptile also share a great deal of genetic and anatomical similarity – you both lay eggs for instance. You may not think of a baby as growing in an egg but it is, the amnion it grows in is the same anatomically as the lining of a fish or reptile egg and it even has a yolk sac (I’m not kidding). We are astonishingly similar to other species when you actually take an inventory of our anatomical features. Bear in mind there was a time when people didn’t think blacks and whites were cousins, but through modern genetic testing we know better. The same genetic tests show universal common ancestry. You can deny both truths or you can deny neither, but you can’t deny one and accept the other – they are based on the exact same science and the exact same hereditary principles.
“And I haven’t seen the movies, but I wouldn’t question the likelihood that there was some manipulation involved for the purpose of conveying the desired message.”
I promise you there was.
“But I don’t believe you could honestly assure me that the Darwinism camp has never engaged in a little manipulation of its own.”
Why would they?: The vast majority of scientists who support evolution have no stake in it.
“My point is, scientists are human like the rest of us, and they have been known at times, some of them, to be less than honest in presenting their case.”
The beauty of science is that it doesn’t matter. Science is demonstrative, the same principles that keep ID out keep all manner of dishonesty out of science. You can either demonstrate something that can be repeated or you can’t. Every experiment ever conducted by every scientist can be repeated by any other scientist. What is there to fake? Any fraud in a system like that would be inevitably exposed.
“Science is supposed to be neutral and objective in its assessment of what we observe in nature, but just as it’s nearly impossible for a news journalist to report from a strictly unbiased viewpoint, so it is that scientists have biases that naturally impact their work.”
As I said science is designed to remove bias from the equation. Yes a scientist’s view can be skewed but an experiment supports his prediction or it doesn’t. As I said scientists don’t speculate about fossils once they’ve found them and claim they support this or that theory, they make predictions that have the potential to falsify their theory and let the chips fall where they may.
“Sometimes I wish I had gone into biology after high school like I considered. There’s so much to know…amazing and wonderful facts about ourselves and the world we live in.”
I agree.
“But I know enough to believe that it couldn’t all come into being by unguided randomness.”
Nothing of the sort is true. That is a mis-characterization of science. Natural selection is not random or un-guided. It isn’t random that the fastest gazelle gets away from the lion and passes on it’s genes, or that a white-haired bear survives better in the arctic while a brown haired one survives better in the forest.
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“You are conversant enough to conclude they’re wrong though.” Yes…I have enough information to make my decision on what seems the most likely explanation for the existence of life.
“There is no science being done that supports ID.” That’s simply not true. This page cites multiple peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals that support ID.
“It’s like when they test medication to see if it treats an illness, they do a double-blind controlled study and it either works statistically more often than the placebo or it doesn’t. There is nothing to interpret.” That’s directly observable and different from the issue being debated. Darwinism and intelligent design propose explanations for the origin of life and its diversity and complexity – “events” that occurred in the past and cannot be observed. So we examine the evidence after the fact, and work backwards to a likely scenario. That requires interpretation, which is subject to bias.
“Their statement [the Scientific Dissent from Darwinism] is so vague there is no scientist in the world that would disagree with it” I suppose then, that all the scientists named Steve, as well as their other-named colleagues, would be happy to sign it. Obviously, in light of the current debate, taking a stand that one is “…skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life” is demonstrating more than just a non-committal, professional, scientific skepticism. The fact that the NCSE, a “National organization devoted to defending the teaching of evolution in public schools, and keeping creationism out” got more scientists to sign their tongue-in-cheek list is irrelevant. As I’m sure you would agree, science is not a majority rules discipline.
As for observed instances of speciation, I have to just direct you here.
And homology is only evidence for Darwinism if that’s the way you’re leaning. It can be better explained by the recognition that an effective design will have multiple uses.
“The vast majority of scientists who support evolution have no stake in [manipulation].” Scientists, many of them, desire recognition, admiration, prestige, positions of power and influence, grant money. Some of those will dishonestly misrepresent evidence, findings, procedures, etc. in order to achieve or keep what they desire. And most scientists have a stake in ensuring that evolution continues to be promoted as fact…because it has been. If their claims are shown to be false, not only would it be embarrassing, but they would have nothing to substitute for it…no other theory for the origin of life besides ID, which they cannot endorse.
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“Yes…I have enough information to make my decision on what seems the most likely explanation for the existence of life.”
Do you see the problem here though, you are saying you don’t have enough information to agree, but you have enough to disagree. If you’re not informed enough on a subject to render an accurate verdict the proper thing to do is reserve your opinion is it not? You don’t feel this way because your opinion is not based on anything in the world of biology or genetics or what we are discussing, your opinion is based on theology. But it’s a bankrupt theology – stories with talking animals are not science textbooks, nor are they history books. They are parables, fables, allegories etc.
[“There is no science being done that supports ID.”]
“That’s simply not true. This page cites multiple peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals that support ID.”
No, it lists articles that criticize aspects of evolution, which is not the same thing. They pretend it is, but it isn’t. You can’t test or support hypothesis A by attacking theory B, that is pseudoscience. It’s like saying “we’ve proven that aspirin doesn’t work so that means tylenol is twice as effective!” It’s a non-sequiter.
“That’s directly observable and different from the issue being debated. Darwinism and intelligent design propose explanations for the origin of life and its diversity and complexity – “events” that occurred in the past and cannot be observed.”
We don’t have to directly observe them, we can make predictions and test them as new discoveries come to light. Every fossil unearthed, every genome sequenced is an experiment and every single one has the potential to falsify evolution.
“So we examine the evidence after the fact, and work backwards to a likely scenario. That requires interpretation, which is subject to bias.”
If it did I would agree with you, but that isn’t how science works. The prediction comes before the test, that is no small part of why science works. You have to be serious about your predictions because the ramifications are severe and you aren’t allowed to say “oh no, I meant to predict that that would happen” after the fact. That would be what you are talking about.
“Their statement [the Scientific Dissent from Darwinism] is so vague there is no scientist in the world that would disagree with it” I suppose then, that all the scientists named Steve, as well as their other-named colleagues, would be happy to sign it.”
While the statement itself is benign I think most people who are asked to sign it see the intent of the people asking them and realize how it will be used. Though there are apparently people who have been asked to be taken off of the list, and even some who claim they never signed the thing to begin with. And it’s also worth noting that most of the signers are not biologists, geneticists or paleontologists, and many of them have PhDs in fields completely unrelated to natural science like engineering or criminology etc.
“Obviously, in light of the current debate, taking a stand that one is “…skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life” is demonstrating more than just a non-committal, professional, scientific skepticism.”
No, the statement just uses terms that have multiple meanings and are misleading (which is kind of the point). It’s like when ken miller (christian cell biologist who testified at the dover evolution trial) was asked about “warning” labels in textbooks saying the students should be critical of evolution and approach it with an open mind etc, his response was that he loved the stickers but didn’t think they went far enough. He said they should read that they should be critical of everything in the book and approach all of science with an open mind etc. He said that to a teenager that sticker doesn’t say to be critical or open-minded, it says “we’re certain about everything in this book except evolution”. Which again is the point.
“The fact that the NCSE, a “National organization devoted to defending the teaching of evolution in public schools, and keeping creationism out” got more scientists to sign their tongue-in-cheek list is irrelevant. As I’m sure you would agree, science is not a majority rules discipline.”
I do agree, would you agree that your list is also irrelevant?
“As for observed instances of speciation, I have to just direct you here.”
The article has no teeth, it criticizes the FAQ without even saying their claims are necessarily wrong by saying that they don’t give examples of large scale change between species in their speciation FAQ when speciation doesn’t necessitate large scale change. And as for demanding it if people studied comparative anatomy they would realize that life really doesn’t change all that much, we are just not very observant and don’t realize the similarities in front of us. There are creationists who say humans and chimps are completely different when we share 95% of the same DNA. Is a dog completely different from a human? List ten traits you have that a dog doesn’t have some equivalent of, or visa versa. I don’t think you can. I can’t and I’m a huge nerd. Are you and a chicken completely different? The amniotic sac a baby grows in in the womb is essentially a big egg, it is anatomically the same as the lining of a chicken egg, and it even contains a yolk sac. We literally lay eggs, we just do so once they’ve begun to hatch inside of us. The creationist demand for a “completely different” species relies on the false assumption that different species are so different to begin with.
“And homology is only evidence for Darwinism if that’s the way you’re leaning. It can be better explained by the recognition that an effective design will have multiple uses.”
It is something that absolutely has to be the case if evolution is correct and doesn’t need to be true or false if intelligent design is correct. It is evidence for one and irrelevant to the other.
“The vast majority of scientists who support evolution have no stake in [manipulation].” Scientists, many of them, desire recognition, admiration, prestige, positions of power and influence, grant money.”
All of those motivators are omni-directional though, debunking evolution would actually give a scientist a great deal more prestige than supporting it. It would be like proving the earth wasn’t round.
“Some of those will dishonestly misrepresent evidence, findings, procedures, etc. in order to achieve or keep what they desire.”
The rare person who tries doesn’t get away with it though, that’s why we have peer review and why experiments must be repeatedly testable. No part of evolution is based on one person’s discovery or claim. Darwin predicted that if birds (that do not have separate digits) evolved from four-legged animals (which almost universally have five separate digits) then we should find bird fossils with separate digits. 2 years after he made the prediction we did. Lets say for the sake of argument that fossil (archeopteryx) was a forgery and somehow it went un-detected. Were the 11 other specimens other people discovered forgeries too? Were the early horse fossils which followed the same prediction (species without separate digits having to have once had ancestors with separate digits) all fake too? It would have to be a truly massive conspiracy, and everyone would have to be in on it for it to go undetected. I’m willing to entertain any idea, but I’m just not cynical enough to believe that.
“And most scientists have a stake in ensuring that evolution continues to be promoted as fact…because it has been. If their claims are shown to be false, not only would it be embarrassing, but they would have nothing to substitute for it…no other theory for the origin of life besides ID, which they cannot endorse.”
First of all scientists don’t sit up at night worried they might embarrass other scientists, they work around the clock to test and debunk and subvert each others’ theories, models and formulas. Every scientific theory is built on top of other theories which were in some sense revised, the idea that scientists couldn’t bear to do what scientists do as a profession just doesn’t make sense. Not to mention that evolution theory has actually changed a great deal since darwin’s time.
As for having nothing to replace it with when has that ever frightened scientists? Scientists love a mystery, it means something else to explain. You are projecting your fear of losing faith and all it means to you onto scientists and skeptics but they don’t think that way. And as for not being able to endorse ID, they can do whatever they like but they can’t call it science unless they can actually do some tests.
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Please see my response below.
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Agnophilo, thanks for an excellent post. I couldn’t say it better myself, literally. But I do have one point of contention with something you said.
“Science doesn’t refuse to entertain the idea of a god, it refuses to comment on the idea of a god because it is not empirically testable and therefore any claim of scientific proof one way or the other would by definition be a lie.”
I disagree entirely. Although SJ Gould was a hero of mine, his NOMA assertions were well off the mark. If something happens in the physical universe, it is measurable and observable, by definition. It may not be measurable or observable to us at this point in time, but there exists some method of measuring it. Contrary to popular opinion, science is not relegated to the laboratory and carefully designed and controlled experiments. Science, at its core, is the objective search for truth (or as close as a finite mind can get to it).
While I agree that we could never make a statement that “Science has proven god does not exist,” we can still expect to see a divine being (speaking of the personal god that acts in his creation), in the power he uses, the examination of acts that he supposedly does, and so forth. Its like throwing paint on the invisible man, we can’t see him, but we can see an approximation of him based on his involvement with the environment. Miraculous events are by definition the suspension of the laws of physics. In short, if God is out there and he acts in the physical universe, we can observe and measure him.
Again, great post. Thanks
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I think some religious ideas can be tested, but the idea of a deistic god, prime mover etc is not currently testable. It may be some day, but it’s not at the moment. Especially the idea of intelligent design because it is by definition arbitrary, an intelligent designer could, theoretically, design the universe any way it wanted, so there is nothing that must be true or cannot be true about any possibly created universe. And simply not knowing how something could occur naturally does not point to intelligent design because we used to not understand anything about nature. Ignorance is not an argument.
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Caroline, I enjoyed your post. But the lack of research and the enormous hole in your logic left me a little depressed. But the pretty pictures cheered me up! 😉
If you’re going to quote a scientist, at least have a general understanding as to what it is the book you’re quoting is about. One of your cited sources is Richard Dawkins’, The Blind Watchmaker. You assert that Dawkins doesn’t accept design in nature, but that’s what the entire book is about. Evolution is the designer and it is unintelligent an does not plan, therefore blind. Here’s another quote from that same book. From page 5.
“All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind’s eye. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose at all.”
Admit it. The only words you read from that book were the ones you cut and pasted from a Creationist website. Am I close?
The logic issue is one that is implicit in all Intelligent Design arguments. Its called the either/or fallacy. It goes something like this, “Scientists can’t answer x, y, or z. Therefore I am right.” That’s basically the entirety of ID in less than twenty words. Here’s the entirety of ID in exactly ten words: “God did it. I don’t care what the evidence says.”
Let’s talk more about it after you’ve read some science instead of ID propaganda.
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Hey, Hatchet. I’m glad you read my post, and are now following me (hoping for some more pretty pictures perhaps?), but your snide dismissal of Intelligent Design, and my argument, as illogical is really an unfair misrepresentation. ID is not propaganda any more than the theory of evolution is.
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Agnophilo, thanks for an excellent post. I couldn’t say it better myself, literally. But I do have one point of contention with something you said.
“Science doesn’t refuse to entertain the idea of a god, it refuses to comment on the idea of a god because it is not empirically testable and therefore any claim of scientific proof one way or the other would by definition be a lie.”
I disagree entirely. Although SJ Gould was a hero of mine, his NOMA assertions were well off the mark. If something happens in the physical universe, it is measurable and observable, by definition. It may not be measurable or observable to us at this point in time, but there exists some method of measuring it. Contrary to popular opinion, science is not relegated to the laboratory and carefully designed and controlled experiments. Science, at its core, is the objective search for truth (or as close as a finite mind can get to it).
While I agree that we could never make a statement that “Science has proven god does not exist,” we can still expect to see a divine being (speaking of the personal god that acts in his creation), in the power he uses, the examination of acts that he supposedly does, and so forth. Its like throwing paint on the invisible man, we can’t see him, but we can see an approximation of him based on his involvement with the environment. Miraculous events are by definition the suspension of the laws of physics. In short, if God is out there and he acts in the physical universe, we can observe and measure him.
Again, great post. Thanks
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Ha! Yes, the pictures sucked me in! I don’t mean to sound snide, although I’m sure I do. I enjoy intelligent conversation. But you have to understand that the ID community is being mislead in a very serious way. It is most certainly propaganda, and is most certainly not science.
I would urge you, again, to read some actual science. I know that Dawkins is the devil in the mind of Christians, but his examination of evolution is so thorough and well-explained that you would be doing yourself a disservice not to read him. Evolution is in no way the exclusive domain of atheists and agnostics. Many Christians accept the validity of evolutionary theory–including many Christians who are scientists as well. Heck, even the Pope accepts it. I’m just frustrated at what seems to be a willful ignorance that pervades our society, and it doesn’t have to be that way.
Thank you again for the post (and the pictures). I look forward to future discussions.
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This conversation is promising. Tell me what you think of my understanding of evolution as science, and help me understand a certain hang up better.
Hatchetmaniac, you don’t buy Gould’s NOMA-POMA distinction, and I don’t either. I agree with Agnophilo that modern science is a subset of Western philosophy, fully answerable to the logically rigorous Anglo-American or analytical tradition. Science is restricted to developing natural theories about physical phenomena, in other words, matter in motion. It must make use of observations that can be repeated so as to produce laws that can predict a future event with accuracy and precision.
What science cannot do so well is history. The universe only happened once. The fossil record only happened once. Taken as a whole, they are not objects amenable to empirical study.
But at least for cosmogeny, physics plays very well with mathematics. Einstein’s general relativity presaged the Big Bang theory even though it was unpopular among scientists. Hubble’s observations and the discovery of cosmic background radiation were confirmations of the theory of an expanding universe.
Now, what of evolutionary biology? There are microevolutionary changes observable within a species. But what kind of inference allows a scientifically legitimate extrapolation from micro- to macro- evolution? At this point we’re deep into philosopy of science, and appeals to empiricism won’t cut it. We have to make appeals to repeated and uniform experience, parsimony, explanatory power, and so forth.
Genetics has its own mechanisms, but that field is far from complete. What kind of process allows new phyla to come into being so abruptly? The molecular clock doesn’t allow enough time for fossils to transform as radically as they do in the Cambrian explosion.
I am not dismissing evolution in a false dichotomy with creationism. I am merely pointing out that, without the presupposition of metaphysical naturalism, evolution is incomplete. Only that philosophy allows an inference of universal common descent. A true scientist would keep the question open (science is never complete), rather than try to defend an orthodoxy that has long been imbued with political controversy.
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What an superbly written post. I won’t take the time to address all of your issues, mainly for time concerns, but also because there are some issues (the Cambrian Explosion, for example) upon which I am not conversant. I am a little fuzzy on whether you are questioning my materialistic approach or the theory of evolution in general. I assume the former and will therefore address one of your more telling assertions:
“Science is restricted to developing natural theories about physical phenomena, in other words, matter in motion. It must make use of observations that can be repeated so as to produce laws that can predict a future event with accuracy and precision.”
Perhaps you’re using a definition of the word “restricted” that I’m not familiar with? Please demonstrate to me something that exists that isn’t a physical phenomenon, and maybe we can talk about it further. When science addresses the entire Universe (and perhaps even hints at a multiverse), I fail to see much of a restriction in that.
What is of more import is that although technically true, when taken in context with the following statement, I have to question and disagree with your conclusion about what science actually is and how it works.
“What science cannot do so well is history. The universe only happened once. The fossil record only happened once. Taken as a whole, they are not objects amenable to empirical study.”
What I hear you saying is that unless we can replicate a phenomenon repeatedly, we are unable to observe it empirically and therefore the relics of past events are not the proper object of study since we can’t watch them evolving? What you don’t take into account is that we currently have millions of fossils catalogued and thoroughly studied. Every time a scientist makes observations on a Mammoth tusk, he is repeating empirical observations that have been made multiple times before by other scientists. He is measuring and observing. True, there are limitations to this approach. We don’t know what color the skin of a T-rex was, for example. But because a fossil doesn’t tell everything, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t tell us anything.
Respectfully, I submit that this is the first of two statements that lead me to conclude that you’re using fallacious reasoning in your criticism of science. You seem to be using the either/or fallacy (which is ironic since you end your eloquent post with a promise that this isn’t a statement about not “dismissing evolution in a false dichotomy with creation”). The second statement you made that leads me to this conclusion:
“Genetics has its own mechanisms, but that field is far from complete.”
I’ll leave aside that you very hastily just dismissed an enormous body of evidence with one sentence and note that it indicates your ideas about science and “completeness”. A science does not have to be complete (whatever you mean by that) in order to be of value. I submit to you that none of our sciences is complete. If there is one please name it. I don’t think you can, and I don’t expect to walk by a University chemistry lab any time soon and see a sign that says, “lab is closed because we’ve learned everything there is to know about chemistry”.
This is the either/or fallacy. If science can’t tell us everything, then we can’t accept anything. Or, to emphasize the paradoxical aspect: if we don’t know everything, then science can’t tell us anything.
As to materialism, I find arguments against it unconvincing because they inevitably stand on the type of logic elucidated above. I will make your work easier for you and stipulate that it is impossible for any scientific knowledge to be 100% “proven”. At its core, science is about probabilities. If we start with the assumption that anything is possible, then science is about finding the things that are most probable and determining the degree of probability. Evolution, gravity, germ theory, the round earth? All of these are at 99.99% probability because they have been demonstrated to be so correct so many times. But the possibility exists that the next time your pen rolls off the table it may float up instead of fall to the floor. The probability of this happening, of course, is very low; so low, in fact, as to justify a reasonable conclusion of “virtually impossible”.
And my final point: Philosophy loses sight of what’s important when it debates materialism, and for very good reason. All science and philosophy is based on principles of doubt and we reason from there to find apparent truths. Science reasons with evidence, examination, and experimentation. Philosophy reasons with thought experiments. But what scientists have on their side is that materialism—the physical, “material” Universe—is tangible and real. To counter materialism you would have to demonstrate something that was not tangible. Can you do this? Can you give me an example of something that we know exists but isn’t material? You can’t, because it is a trick question. Something without matter or energy that exists outside of space and time is synonymous with something not existing. If another mode of finding the truth about our Universe presents itself, I may change my views on this. But until then, I will continue observing, continue to take me where the evidence goes, and will refrain from pointless philosophical meanderings designed to demonstrate the undemonstrable to the overly credulous.
Thank you for such an interesting discussion.
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Your post is well-expressed, Hatch, and though I’m not as knowledgeable as the Duck to confidently answer your argument, I do have a question for you. You asked for “an example of something that we know exists but isn’t material.” What about the mind…thoughts? What about logic, reason, mathematics? Aren’t they all real, yet immaterial?
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Agnophilo – I thought it would be good to start a new “thread” so as not to have our discussion “squeezed” like on your latest blog post. 🙂
“Do you see the problem here though, you are saying you don’t have enough information to agree, but you have enough to disagree. “ When I say I have enough information, I’m referring to the whole body of evidence for design and against evolution: the fine-tuning of the universe, the specialized complexity of even the simplest cell, the Cambrian explosion, the fact that we have never observed life to arise from non-life, or intelligence from non-intelligence, etc. If I reserved my decision on what I choose to believe until I knew everything there was to know about a very complex physical and metaphysical world, I would remain uncommitted all my life.
And your assertion about what I base my opinion on is just the kind of unfair, uninformed generalization you would object to if it was coming from Christians about atheists, wouldn’t you agree? I don’t believe that’s the way you want to be. I think you’re better than that.
“No, it lists articles that criticize aspects of evolution, which is not the same thing.” If scientific observations and experiments reveal design and demonstrate that certain predictions or mechanisms of evolution are not tenable, that doesn’t negate them as science because they “criticize” evolution. You seem to have a very narrow definition of science. How would you define it?
“If it did I would agree with you, but that isn’t how science works.” I don’t understand why we can’t agree that when it comes to theories on the origin of life, because we can’t go back and observe the past, our theories will vary depending on our predilections and our worldviews.
“And it’s also worth noting that most of the signers are not biologists, geneticists or paleontologists…” Did you actually look through the list? I perused it just now and saw a lot of doctorates in biology and chemistry, some physics. But as I said before, majority does not rule in science. Yet I do not agree that “my” list is irrelevant, because it demonstrates that it is disingenuous to suggest, as some have, that Darwinism is a done deal and no scientist worth his or her salt would be skeptical of it.
Do you really believe that there’s not much difference between me (or you) and a dog? Or a chicken? Percentages of matching DNA do not transfer to phenotypic similarities. We apparently have more matching DNA with mice than with chimps. I know you are of much greater ability and worth than a mouse.
I stand by my belief that scientists, being human, are subject to the same foibles and fears as the rest of us. You talk as if you believe they are above temptation and always, always impartial and fair. Have you never encountered or heard of one who disappointed you with his or her failure to live up to the ideal of one who has chosen the sciences?
“You are projecting your fear of losing faith and all it means to you onto scientists and skeptics…” You don’t know me, friend. I have no fear of losing my faith. Do you fear losing yours? Perhaps you are so convinced that intelligence and design have no part in the existence of all that is that you can’t conceive of any reason apart from fear for anyone to believe it. I don’t expect to persuade you to believe that ID is the more likely explanation, but I do hope that you, and others who share your views, will someday grant it the respect it deserves by simply acknowledging it as worthy of consideration and discussion.
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“Agnophilo – I thought it would be good to start a new “thread” so as not to have our discussion “squeezed” like on your latest blog post. :-)”
Good idea.
“When I say I have enough information, I’m referring to the whole body of evidence for design and against evolution: the fine-tuning of the universe,”
This is a view common to people that build things for a living like engineers and people who study the non-living parts of the universe like physicists who don’t understand the basic concept of biology that species adapt to their environment, not the other way around. It is simply putting the cart before the horse, such as in the example of “puddle thinking”. To borrow a parable from douglas adams:
“Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact, it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the Sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be all right, because this World was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.”
“the specialized complexity of even the simplest cell,”
It’s mind-boggling due to the complexity of cells and the fact that we are not used to dealing with things on that scale but we know that cells vary and evolve too.
“the Cambrian explosion,”
The “cambrian explosion” is claimed by creationists to be the beginning of the fossil record and the moment of creation but it is actually a blip toward the end of the fossil record (which goes back 6 times as far as the cambrian period) signifying not the beginning of life or even the beginning of complex, multi-cellular animal life (there are precambrian fossils of that) but rather the sort of gap between multi-cellular, complex creatures and creatures with things like bones and exoskeletons which produce what are traditionally though of as “fossils” appearing in the fossil record. There is a similar gap between the spoken and written languages which is why the earliest written languages appear with a certain degree of complexity, they were spoken and developed before anyone thought to write them down. Some creationist websites also cite this as proof that languages were divinely created in a complex form. The cambrian “explosion” is a once apparent gap in the fossil record that was mistakenly seen for a brief time in the early days of paleontology as the beginning of the fossil record and which creationists still misrepresent that way.
“the fact that we have never observed life to arise from non-life,”
Depends what you mean by “life”. Even simple soap bubbles mimic the behavior of cells and can apparently pass on information, though I’m not knowledgeable enough to really examine the information I’ve read about it critically. That life would not evolve to anything like it’s current state from scratch is perfectly understandable, it would simply not be able to compete and would immediately become the food source of some germ that’s 4 billion years ahead of it.
“or intelligence from non-intelligence, etc.”
Depends what you mean by intelligence. Natural selection can make something more aerodynamic without having to know what aerodynamics is. The intelligence inherent in nature is in many ways less practical but more powerful than our own. It creates without the need to comprehend first. We need to comprehend why x airplane goes faster to build an even better one only because we do not have the resources (or the apathy) of nature. If we could build a million planes and vary them in different ways and test them all to see which ones were better than take the ones that performed best and make variations of those and so on we could design a better plane without science. But that would waste a vast amount of resources and get a lot of pilots killed, so we develop math and do small scale tests and build a symbolic understanding of the underlying principles.
“If I reserved my decision on what I choose to believe until I knew everything there was to know about a very complex physical and metaphysical world, I would remain uncommitted all my life.”
But it would have the merit of being true. “I don’t know” is less satisfying perhaps, but it’s reality. Isn’t that worth something?
“And your assertion about what I base my opinion on is just the kind of unfair, uninformed generalization you would object to if it was coming from Christians about atheists, wouldn’t you agree? I don’t believe that’s the way you want to be. I think you’re better than that.”
I’m not sure what you’re referring to.
“If scientific observations and experiments reveal design and demonstrate that certain predictions or mechanisms of evolution are not tenable, that doesn’t negate them as science because they “criticize” evolution. You seem to have a very narrow definition of science. How would you define it?”
You misunderstand my meaning, I wasn’t saying that something is not scientific because it criticizes evolution (which would be absurd) or even that those articles were not scientific. I was saying that they were not scientific tests of intelligent design, but rather tests of evolution. You support a theory by testing it, not by testing some other theory. And ID is not even a theory in the scientific sense.
As for my definition of science it is a verb, not a noun. What you get in science textbooks is not science, it is what science produces. Science is the activity of testing claims and ideas about nature by the scientific method, which is loosely 1) find something you don’t understand, 2) form a hypothesis that has the power to explain it or some aspect of it, 3) make predictions which have the potential to falsify your hypothesis, 4) find away to test those predictions, and then 5) submit your data for peer review so other experts can poke holes in it, come up with their own tests etc and see if your idea holds any water.
In short if you can’t test something it’s philosophy or faith or whatever but not science.
“I don’t understand why we can’t agree that when it comes to theories on the origin of life, because we can’t go back and observe the past, our theories will vary depending on our predilections and our worldviews.”
We can agree, you just never asked. And it’s not because we can’t go back and observe the past, it’s because there are no artifacts of the past with which to test predictions. We can test some ideas peripheral to abiogenesis like whether amino acids or the chemicals RNA are made out of can form spontaneously (they can, very easily) but even if we produced life in the lab somehow we would not have any fossil of the earliest life to compare it to to see if that’s where our ancestors came from. Now granted it would be reasonable to conclude that it’s likely how life began but technically it cannot be proven even under ideal circumstances. However ideas about how life has evolved over the last several billion years are highly testable because we find new fossils all the time and sequence new genomes all the time and can test the living crap out of our theories. The earliest life, if it arose by abiogenesis would not have left fossils for the same reason early cambrian life did not leave traditional “bone” like fossils – when cells fossilize the parts that survive are things like the fortified cell walls which, like bones, are strong enough to withstand the rigors of time. The earliest life would not have logically had such structures any more than it would have bones or exoskeletons.
“Did you actually look through the list? I perused it just now and saw a lot of doctorates in biology and chemistry, some physics.”
Chemistry and physics are peripheral to the subject at best.
“But as I said before, majority does not rule in science. Yet I do not agree that “my” list is irrelevant, because it demonstrates that it is disingenuous to suggest, as some have, that Darwinism is a done deal and no scientist worth his or her salt would be skeptical of it.”
The statement is, as I said before, toothless and deliberately opaque in it’s meaning. If they made a statement that said “it is highly unlikely that common ancestry or large scale evolution is true or that natural selection plays any real part in it” then yeah, it would mean something. As the NSCE statement says yes there is room for debate when it comes to evolution but that life evolves and has been evolving for a long time is beyond reasonable dispute.
“Do you really believe that there’s not much difference between me (or you) and a dog? Or a chicken?”
Depends what you mean by “much”. I think that anatomically there is not a great deal of difference between any two mammals, but that small differences can matter a great deal. A knife and a spoon are not very different but one certainly hurts a lot more if someone pokes you with it, and the other is not very good for eating soup. Small differences can still be meaningful.
“Percentages of matching DNA do not transfer to phenotypic similarities. We apparently have more matching DNA with mice than with chimps. I know you are of much greater ability and worth than a mouse.”
Actually they transfer extremely accurately. And we don’t have more matching DNA with mice than chimps, we have some genes that match more closely with mice than chimps. Whether you look at the whole genome or just active genes that code for something and chart them according to degrees of similarity you arrive at the same exact taxnomical “tree of life” pattern that was arrived at before the discovery of DNA by comparing species anatomically. While it’s true that small genetic differences can manifest in seemingly large differences, like say someone being a foot taller or weighing twice as much, this is due to cells repeating tasks different numbers of times or glands releasing different amounts of certain chemicals based on those small genetic changes.
“I stand by my belief that scientists, being human, are subject to the same foibles and fears as the rest of us.”
I agree. I just don’t think they can get away with much dishonesty. A system of organized belief is dramatically different than one of organized skepticism. In religion all the motivations are aligned toward agreeing and going along, in science they’re aligned the other way. There is no concept of heresy being sinful in science, every great scientist was a great heretic. Heresy is the whole idea. Contradicting ideas is not at all taboo in science, what is taboo is not being able to back it up with tests because that is quackery.
“You talk as if you believe they are above temptation and always, always impartial and fair. Have you never encountered or heard of one who disappointed you with his or her failure to live up to the ideal of one who has chosen the sciences?”
I don’t mean to give that impression and I believe I have stated the exact reverse of it at least a few times. Yes scientist can lie and have bad motives etc – but they can’t get away with it. I even walked you through an example and showed how literally everyone would have to be in on it because literally all the evidence in the world would have to line up neatly behind the lie in order for it to gain acceptance.
[“You are projecting your fear of losing faith and all it means to you onto scientists and skeptics…”]
“You don’t know me, friend. I have no fear of losing my faith. Do you fear losing yours?”
There you go doing it again… No, as I explained at great length, I do not. Nor do I engage in faith in the sense you mean.
“Perhaps you are so convinced that intelligence and design have no part in the existence of all that is that you can’t conceive of any reason apart from fear for anyone to believe it.”
You were talking about fear, not me. My response is that this is not how skeptics think. And I am not convinced that intelligence and deisgn have no part in existence, I have simply said that it can’t be empirically tested. And philosophically it is a dead end, because who designed the designer. Invoking a big brain in the sky just pushes the problem of where complexity ultimately came from back and ignores the huge problems created by doing so. So while there could be some kind of god (and I’d want to know if there was) if someone proved that my next question would be “so where did god come from?”
You are not satisfied by “I don’t know” and I’m not satisfied by “god did it”. I don’t think the latter explains any more than the former, I think the former is just more accurate.
“I don’t expect to persuade you to believe that ID is the more likely explanation, but I do hope that you, and others who share your views, will someday grant it the respect it deserves by simply acknowledging it as worthy of consideration and discussion.”
I already do. I believe absolutely every idea is valid for discussion and consideration. I mean read my comments, I’ve been considering the hell out of it. It’s just not science. It’s also not math or poetry or juggling. That isn’t me being biased against it or refusing to think about it. It just isn’t those things.
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Agno – it seems apparent that you are satisfied with your explanations of the evidences for intelligent design. I won’t try and persuade you otherwise. I just want to address a few of the things you said.
First – ID proponents do not equate with creationists. Intelligent design theory makes no claim about God. Secondly, neither ID proponents nor creationists claim the Cambrian explosion is “the beginning of the fossil record.”
Also, “’And your assertion about what I base my opinion on is just the kind of unfair, uninformed generalization you would object to if it was coming from Christians about atheists, wouldn’t you agree? I don’t believe that’s the way you want to be. I think you’re better than that.’
I’m not sure what you’re referring to.”
“You don’t feel this way because your opinion is not based on anything in the world of biology or genetics or what we are discussing, your opinion is based on theology.” This is what I was referring to.
Whether or not ID theory is scientific will continue to be debated. I believe it is. The problem, of course, is that it must allow for the immaterial, which the scientific community is largely unwilling to consider. Perhaps, as atheist Thomas Nagel proposes in his book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, it’s time to change that.
“And philosophically it is a dead end, because who designed the designer.” On the contrary, not a dead end but a never-ending road, for both of us. We all have to deal with the reality of eternity, even if you believe in the multi-verse theory. Where did they all come from?
I appreciate your largely respectful comments and input. You’ll be one of my go-to bloggers for an intelligent non-theist perspective.
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“First – ID proponents do not equate with creationists. Intelligent design theory makes no claim about God.”
Yes and no. While publicly the ID movement claims to have nothing to do with religion is privately is all about evangelism. This has been established a number of ways from the fact that it gets most of it’s support from religious groups to the fact that the outspoken proponents of ID and leaders of the movement often espouse a religious motivation to the documentation of the editing of creationist textbooks, books like “of pandas and people” were virtually unchanged from being “creationist” books to being “intelligent design” books, practically the only changes they made were to replace the word “creator” with “designer”. And then there’s the “wedge document”, the leaked manifesto of the discovery institute (the organization leading the ID movement) which states their goals and motivations which are all about christianity and nothing to do with science. So yeah, on paper ID is secular and supposedly scientific but in reality it’s anything but. The intelligent design movement was born literally the year creationism was ruled unconstitutional to teach in public schools. It’s just a re-branding of the same movement.
“Secondly, neither ID proponents nor creationists claim the Cambrian explosion is “the beginning of the fossil record.”
They really do, a lot. Maybe not all of them but it’s a very common misconception that is still common in creationist literature. It’s up there with claiming the big bang supposedly says there is no god.
[“You don’t feel this way because your opinion is not based on anything in the world of biology or genetics or what we are discussing, your opinion is based on theology.”]
“This is what I was referring to.”
I wasn’t saying that to stereotype you, I was saying it based on what you’ve told me. You said you don’t know enough about science to know if what I am saying is true, but you know that it’s not true. Are you saying your religious and cultural beliefs are not a part of your stance on this issue at all? I wasn’t trying to pigeonhole you or generalize, I try very hard to avoid doing that to anyone.
“Whether or not ID theory is scientific will continue to be debated. I believe it is.”
Show me one experiment that has the potential to test ID and I will agree with you.
“The problem, of course, is that it must allow for the immaterial, which the scientific community is largely unwilling to consider.”
Again, most scientists in the US believe in a god. It isn’t unwillingness to consider it or narrow-mindedness, it is simply part of their professional ethics that they can’t promote something as science that can’t be scientifically tested. Most scientists probably have opinions about what kinds of movies are good and bad and why they are good and bad, but if they want to claim this is science they need to do some actual experimentation and find a way to test their position empirically, because that’s what science is. Again you’re blaming a hammer for not being a screwdriver. And acting like someone who doesn’t use a screwdriver to drive in a nail is somehow narrow-minded. You can’t put god in a test tube. You can’t look at him through a telescope or a microscope. You can’t put morality in a test tube either. But things we learn in laboratories like that drinking while pregnant is harmful can help inform our morality and help us be better people. So too you can use the proceeds of science to inform your spirituality, philosophy and theology but it’s still spirituality, philosophy and theology, not science. The same way moral philosophy will never be science, but science can give us the raw materials to refine it.
“Perhaps, as atheist Thomas Nagel proposes in his book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, it’s time to change that.”
Why does he think that?
“On the contrary, not a dead end but a never-ending road, for both of us.”
I make no assumptions about the origins of the universe, and I don’t claim to understand it, which does not lead to infinite regression.
“We all have to deal with the reality of eternity, even if you believe in the multi-verse theory. Where did they all come from?”
I think the multiverse is a cop-out too. I also think it’s unnecessary to explain things like life. I think the universe has plenty of potential for complexity with it’s varied environments and elements that have different properties at different pressures, temperatures etc. We essentially already live in a multiverse. There are places in our own solar system where you could make a house out of bricks of solid oxygen. Why invoke another universe with different properties when we already have so many in our own universe?
“I appreciate your largely respectful comments and input. You’ll be one of my go-to bloggers for an intelligent non-theist perspective.
Thank you, I appreciate the compliment. And I appreciate your civility too.
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“(ID) gets most of it’s support from religious groups to the fact that the outspoken proponents of ID and leaders of the movement often espouse a religious motivation…”
The particular motivations of any theory’s supporters have nothing to do with the theory itself. I’m sure you would agree that it should stand or fall based on its merits alone. I admit that I sometimes fall into this unfair appraisal…evaluating Darwinism on the atheism of many of its proponents.
Certainly, we theists believe the intelligent designer is God and we want to see him get the credit he deserves. And if we are true believers, yes, we should be about evangelism…because those who refuse to acknowledge and trust in him will be forever separated from him and a blissful eternity. Isn’t it good and right that we should be about pointing the way to life and warning against the dangers of going the other way? We want to see ID promoted because we believe that it’s TRUE, first and foremost. But I make no apologies about desiring also that it brings glory to God and makes believers out of unbelievers.
And I think it’s undeniable that philosophical and ideological motivations sometimes override objective, scientific ones in those who promote Darwinism. The continued inclusion in textbooks of Haeckel’s fraudulent embryo drawings as evidence for evolution is a case in point.
“…it’s a very common misconception that is still common in creationist literature. It’s up there with claiming the big bang supposedly says there is no god.”
I haven’t seen any that claim the Cambrian explosion is the beginning of the fossil record…only that most of the major animal phyla first appear fully formed during that period. And I don’t know what literature you’re looking at, but everything I’ve read from theist ID proponents acknowledges the validity of the Big Bang theory. It is totally compatible with ID and the belief that God created the universe out of nothing.
“You said you don’t know enough about science to know if what I am saying is true, but you know that it’s not true.”
I believe you’re still misrepresenting me. Perhaps I didn’t express myself well enough. Based on what I do know about the physical world, as well as the historical, logical, and spiritual evidence for the existence of God, I believe that God created the universe and everything in it, and Darwinism as an explanation for the existence of life in all its varieties and complexities is false. I believe it so strongly that I can say I “know” it in that sense. But because plenty of folks don’t believe as I do, and I can’t prove it beyond the shadow of a doubt, I don’t “know” it in the sense that there can be no argument about it.
You identify as an atheist. Do you know that God doesn’t exist? Of course you don’t – you can’t possibly. You would have to know everything that can be known in every possible world and dimension to confidently conclude that there is no God. But you believe it anyway. Perhaps you will correct me and say that an atheist is one who doesn’t believe there is evidence that a God exists, but makes no ultimate claim about his existence. But it seems to me if that’s the case, you are an agnostic instead.
“Show me one experiment that has the potential to test ID and I will agree with you.”
Every experiment that fails to demonstrate that unguided, unintelligent, purely naturalistic processes can produce the results predicted by Darwinian hypotheses, test and give evidence for the counter-hypothesis, that intelligence is involved.
Thomas Nagel’s summary of his book can be read here.
“I make no assumptions about the origins of the universe, and I don’t claim to understand it, which does not lead to infinite regression.”
I believe the reality of eternity is incomprehensible yet undeniable, and that any investigation into and explanation of origins has to deal with it. And I believe that intelligent design theory, and much more, the belief that there is an eternal, transcendent God who created the universe, is the best way to reconcile the things that we instinctively discern to be true, yet instinctively recognize that we cannot understand.
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“The particular motivations of any theory’s supporters have nothing to do with the theory itself.”
In principle yes, but there is no scientific theory here. Fundamentalist can’t teach adam and eve as science so they invented “intelligent design” and called it science. But they forgot to do any actual science first.
“I’m sure you would agree that it should stand or fall based on its merits alone.”
I do.
“I admit that I sometimes fall into this unfair appraisal…evaluating Darwinism on the atheism of many of its proponents.”
A small minority of the people who accept evolution, even in a country as fundamentalist as the US, are atheists. Creationists try to promote the idea that evolution is atheistic but that is only to demonize it. People claimed abolitionism and feminism were atheistic back in the day too.
“Certainly, we theists believe the intelligent designer is God and we want to see him get the credit he deserves.”
But never the blame…
“And if we are true believers, yes, we should be about evangelism…because those who refuse to acknowledge and trust in him will be forever separated from him and a blissful eternity. Isn’t it good and right that we should be about pointing the way to life and warning against the dangers of going the other way?”
I have talked to one or two people who seemed genuinely worried about me going to hell (and actually found it very moving), but those encounters are very rare. Most people believe in things like hell “on paper” but their actions don’t reflect real belief. As one comedian said, if you believe death leads to eternal bliss why are you wearing a seatbelt? People may want there to be a heaven, think there might be, hope there is, and worry there might be a hell – but I don’t think many people are really sure. And I’m glad, because when people were sure they burned heretics to death to oppose what, if there was a hell, would be unimaginably dangerous and tortured us to “save” us from eternal damnation. Similarly when priests really believed the things pat robertson and jerry falwell said after 9/11 about god is punishing us and wants us to suffer, they would injure themselves and desecrate their flesh to try to end the suffering by appeasing god and taking the misery onto themselves. Instead they just bitch about “holiday trees” and abortion and christianity seems like more of a social club and an “us vs them” label than a belief system.
“We want to see ID promoted because we believe that it’s TRUE, first and foremost. But I make no apologies about desiring also that it brings glory to God and makes believers out of unbelievers.”
I believe you. But that’s not what science is all about. Science is about humility before the facts, and letting evidence determine what you believe. Not dogma or the pope or your upbringing, but evidence. In science the conclusion comes at the actual conclusion, at the end of the experiment. In religion it usually comes before we can even read and wright.
“And I think it’s undeniable that philosophical and ideological motivations sometimes override objective, scientific ones in those who promote Darwinism.”
I’m sure they do, scientists just have a harder time getting away with it.
“The continued inclusion in textbooks of Haeckel’s fraudulent embryo drawings as evidence for evolution is a case in point.”
I think that’s more a byproduct of laziness and ignorance than deliberate deception. Sadly textbooks contain many errors and outdated concepts, most of them not about ideologically charged subjects.
“I haven’t seen any that claim the Cambrian explosion is the beginning of the fossil record…only that most of the major animal phyla first appear fully formed during that period.”
I googled cambrian explosion creation (no quotes) and clicked one of the first few links:
http://creation.com/exploding-evolution
“Creationists have long pointed out the problem for evolution theory, namely that all the major groups (phyla) of life which we know today appear in the Cambrian with no evolutionary ancestors. This is why evolutionists refer to it as an ‘explosion’ of evolution. There are no groups which have been identified as ancestral to any of the phyla, and geologically these phyla ‘seem to have appeared suddenly and simultaneously’.”
For example. Though today they tend to imply that it was the moment of creation more than come right out and say it.
“And I don’t know what literature you’re looking at, but everything I’ve read from theist ID proponents acknowledges the validity of the Big Bang theory. It is totally compatible with ID and the belief that God created the universe out of nothing.”
It isn’t compatible with a literal interpretation of genesis though, which is why fundamentalists associate it with atheism the same way you associate evolution with atheism.
“I believe you’re still misrepresenting me. Perhaps I didn’t express myself well enough. Based on what I do know about the physical world, as well as the historical, logical, and spiritual evidence for the existence of God, I believe that God created the universe and everything in it, and Darwinism as an explanation for the existence of life in all its varieties and complexities is false. I believe it so strongly that I can say I “know” it in that sense. But because plenty of folks don’t believe as I do, and I can’t prove it beyond the shadow of a doubt, I don’t “know” it in the sense that there can be no argument about it.”
So emotional conviction with room for intellectual doubt?
“You identify as an atheist. Do you know that God doesn’t exist? Of course you don’t – you can’t possibly. You would have to know everything that can be known in every possible world and dimension to confidently conclude that there is no God. But you believe it anyway. Perhaps you will correct me and say that an atheist is one who doesn’t believe there is evidence that a God exists, but makes no ultimate claim about his existence. But it seems to me if that’s the case, you are an agnostic instead.”
The two are not mutually exclusive, and I am an agnostic atheist. Virtually all atheists are. I prefer the label atheist to agnostic because most people think an agnostic is simply a fence-sitter, whereas I believe the existence or non-existence of a god is unknowable, which is the real meaning of the term agnostic. I don’t believe there is no god, I simply don’t believe there is one. Similarly I don’t believe there are no unicorns, I simply have never found a reason to think they’re real. I have never found a reason that holds water to think the god of any religion is real and more abstract, intuitive notions of a god (like the god of deism) don’t make sense to me either.
[“Show me one experiment that has the potential to test ID and I will agree with you.”]
“Every experiment that fails to demonstrate that unguided, unintelligent, purely naturalistic processes can produce the results predicted by Darwinian hypotheses, test and give evidence for the counter-hypothesis, that intelligence is involved.”
First of all science, as I have mentioned, doesn’t work that way. No scientist has ever legitimized one theory by jumping up and down on another one. Einstein didn’t do that, newton didn’t do that, darwin didn’t do that. All scientists in order to gain acceptance of their theories have to test their theories, and invite others to do the same. If you wanted to test the idea that the grand canyon formed during a great flood simply create a scale model of it made of the same materials (rocks, soil, sand etc), make a scale flood and drain the water away various ways and and see what happens. If it makes a scale grand canyon your model has legs to stand on, submit it for peer review. If not, modify your theory or come up with a new one. That’s how science works. That is not what creationists and ID proponents do. They just engage in political and PR campaigns.
“Thomas Nagel’s summary of his book can be read here.”
Nobody understands how consciousness works. It’s not that the mind is in some special category apart from the rest of biology, it just requires more advanced technology than we have to really study. All we can do now with imaging technology is measure the blood flow in different parts of the brain to see which areas are active. We can figure out how bones and muscles work because we can observe them in still living creatures. We can’t take a brain apart while a person is alive. Not ethically. So rather than learn about higher consciousness through dissection and experiment we’ve had to learn from things like accidents. Someone gets shot in x part of the brain and can’t play the piano and has trouble performing everyday tasks – now we know what part of the brain controls muscle memory. Etc.
“I believe the reality of eternity is incomprehensible yet undeniable,”
I don’t know how you can say the first and conclude the second. To me claiming to know things I can’t even comprehend is by definition a lie.
“and that any investigation into and explanation of origins has to deal with it.”
The best ideas we can come up with about the origins of the universe is that something either existed forever or came into existence. Whether that is a multiverse or a god or the universe or matter or whatever. Neither of those makes any sense to me, I reject them both and await new information.
“And I believe that intelligent design theory, and much more, the belief that there is an eternal, transcendent God who created the universe, is the best way to reconcile the things that we instinctively discern to be true, yet instinctively recognize that we cannot understand.”
I don’t think it’s a good way to reconcile anything. I think we’re doing the same thing the greeks did with zeus and thor and the rest of their gods, just putting all our eggs in one basket and instead of making a god for this and a god for that we just make one big god and say it’s responsible for everything. Then when we explain something we say “ok, maybe he didn’t make lightning but surely he made this thing over here we can’t explain.” Then we explain that thing, and point to something else.
There’s a good video by neil degrasse tyson where he describes this in the history of science:
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“Most people believe in things like hell ‘on paper’ but their actions don’t reflect real belief.” I would agree with you here, and I addressed that in a recent post. Our actions (or inactions) are a more accurate expression of our true beliefs than are our words. Yet we need to be careful not to judge, because faith often starts out weak and grows stronger as it is tested. So, for example, early in my relationship with God, though I would have said I believed he would provide for me and my family, I still found myself worrying about it. Today, I still fall back into worrying sometimes, but not nearly as much as I used to. Because added to my tiny seedling of faith was years of experiencing him providing for us in a myriad of ways. And though my faith in God and in his promise of eternal life with him is strong, I don’t want to leave my family yet, and even more so, it’s too soon for them to lose me. So, yes…I wear my seatbelt.
Your impression of Christianity as divisive and “more of a social club” than a belief system is understandable. Believers are flawed, lost sinners who by grace through faith became flawed, saved sinners. Our flaws remain, but the Spirit of God given to us empowers us to live differently, to live like Jesus. The problem is, he doesn’t take control of our will – we still have to choose to stay “connected” and in tune with his Spirit. And we often choose to ignore him instead.
“To me claiming to know things I can’t even comprehend is by definition a lie.” Is this really what you meant to say? You had just stated, “Nobody understands how consciousness works.” But you believe that consciousness is a reality, though you don’t comprehend it. A lie is communicating something that you know is false. Perhaps you will insist that I maintain that eternity CAN’T be comprehended, but that doesn’t matter. I don’t understand eternity, yet believe it is undeniable, and you don’t understand consciousness, yet believe it is undeniable.
I watched the video you posted. Tyson is saying that intelligent design is no more than a “God of the gaps” theory for realities we don’t understand. It’s a “philosophy of ignorance” that has actually been around for centuries and has stymied the advance of knowledge. I took some notes.
• He mentions Galileo’s comment that the Bible tells how one goes to heaven but not how the heavens go, and seems to interpret that to mean that Galileo believed religion and science are mutually exclusive, or that there is a necessary division between them. But the fact that the Bible gives few if any details about the workings of creation does not support the idea that religion and science must be separate. It simply means it was given for a different purpose – that of revealing God and his plan of redemption for man.
• He hails Isaac Newton as the most brilliant of all scientists of any time who, unfortunately in his eyes, still believed in God. But he only mentions God, Tyson says, when describing something he doesn’t understand. Therefore, he implies, Newton believed God was uninvolved in the realities he did understand, because he figured them out. But as Newton himself said, “Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done.”
• Tyson bemoans that Newton’s and other great scientists’ “religiosity” stopped them from investigating and trying to understand other realities. On the contrary, their faith in God motivated them to explore and understand his creation, or at the very least did not hinder their curiosity. They did not begin their scientific disciplines as non-believers or skeptics, eager and relentless in their pursuit of knowledge, then find God and cease their explorations.
• Tyson’s mocking implication that President Bush was grossly uninformed when he quoted the Bible after 9/11 about who named the stars just had me shaking my head. If God created the stars and named each one, then he has naming rights over any of his creatures.
• His dismissal of the teleological argument for life on earth because most areas of the universe cannot support life is meaningless. The argument is for the existence of the universe as we know it in the first place, and the existence of life on this planet, not on others.
• He thinks that the reality of the universe eventually “winding down to oblivion” is evidence of “stupid design.” As well as the fact that our eyes can’t detect magnetic fields and such, and that we sleep 1/3 of our lives away. Really? It’s poor design that our bodies must rest? That we can’t keep going nonstop until we collapse in exhaustion, illness, injury or death? The same “hole” for eating, drinking, and talking…bad design. As well as the “entertainment complex/sewage system.” First of all, I would LOVE to see the best that any of these scientists could come up as a superior design for the human body. Secondly, a good design requires a goal…a purpose for the design. We humans think we know what that purpose is, but by-and-large we’re wrong. It’s not simply to enjoy our lives or even contribute to society. God has much more in mind than that and his design takes into account all that he intends for us. Particularly life with him in an incorruptible body, which requires that our corruptible one…corrupt.
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“I would agree with you here, and I addressed that in a recent post. Our actions (or inactions) are a more accurate expression of our true beliefs than are our words.”
Here are some bits of wisdom from one of my favorite philosphers, a zen buddhist. There are a few quotes where he deals with the whole belief/faith definition which are relevant. The rest is very good though and I recommend it highly.
http://mysite.verizon.net/vze1s8au/charlie/religion/watts.htm
“Yet we need to be careful not to judge, because faith often starts out weak and grows stronger as it is tested. So, for example, early in my relationship with God, though I would have said I believed he would provide for me and my family, I still found myself worrying about it. Today, I still fall back into worrying sometimes, but not nearly as much as I used to. Because added to my tiny seedling of faith was years of experiencing him providing for us in a myriad of ways.”
My best friend and roommate for the last few months is a born-again christian and I’ve seen this faith relationship play out for the last several years. From an outsider’s perspective it seems like basic positive and negative reinforcement psychology mixed with a little emotional gambling and selective memory. She forgets when things she thought god wanted ended up blowing up in her face and forgets when things come together in her life when she’s not all faithy-waithy. Right now for instance she feels very far from god, isn’t even sure if she believes in him anymore, but she just lucked into a teaching job (she has been trying to get her own classroom for literally years including years she was “on fire for god”). So the cause-effect relationship of faith, trust in god, prayer and good things happening (and bad things not happening) seems to this skeptic more of a story we weave for ourselves than the way the world really works. Good things happen to bad people, bad things happen to good people. Horrible things happen to the children of devout believers every day. They just tend to credit god with the good and blame themselves (or the devil or society or whatever) for the bad.
“And though my faith in God and in his promise of eternal life with him is strong, I don’t want to leave my family yet, and even more so, it’s too soon for them to lose me. So, yes…I wear my seatbelt.”
That is perfectly reasonable. I think people hope there’s a heaven but are rarely ever certain there is one. I think if your child or husband died tomorrow (which of course I hope does not happen and have no reason to think will) you would hope they were okay somewhere and happy, but I doubt you would have the same level of certainty as if you just sent them off to disney land.
“Your impression of Christianity as divisive and “more of a social club” than a belief system is understandable. Believers are flawed, lost sinners who by grace through faith became flawed, saved sinners. Our flaws remain, but the Spirit of God given to us empowers us to live differently, to live like Jesus.”
I’ve been told by several people I’m one of the most christ-like people they’ve met, and I’m no christian. I don’t think god enables people to be christ-like, I think people can be inspired by christ or faith, but like all inspiration they need to have some capacity in and of themselves. A sociopath is not going to model themselves after ghandi no matter how much someone sermonizes them about the merits of doing so. The capacity for love, self-sacrifice, courage, hard work etc that christians have is an organic part of being human, not something they get from their faith. It’s not like only christians love their kids or would jump in front of a bus for someone.
“The problem is, he doesn’t take control of our will – we still have to choose to stay “connected” and in tune with his Spirit. And we often choose to ignore him instead.”
It makes sense, we can no more feel one way all the time than we can do jumping jacks all day, we would become equally exhausted. All of our capacities and feelings and states of mind wax and wane.
[“To me claiming to know things I can’t even comprehend is by definition a lie.”]
“Is this really what you meant to say?”
Yes.
“You had just stated, “Nobody understands how consciousness works.” But you believe that consciousness is a reality, though you don’t comprehend it.”
There is no contradiction there, knowing something exists and understanding it are two different things. People 5,000 years ago knew the sun existed, even if they didn’t understand nuclear fusion and gravity.
“A lie is communicating something that you know is false.”
Yes, but it is also claiming something you don’t know is true. If I accuse you of murder but don’t know you didn’t murder someone is that not a lie?
“It is an established maxim and moral that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false is guilty of falsehood, and the accidental truth of the assertion does not justify or excuse him.”
– Abraham Lincoln
“Perhaps you will insist that I maintain that eternity CAN’T be comprehended, but that doesn’t matter. I don’t understand eternity, yet believe it is undeniable, and you don’t understand consciousness, yet believe it is undeniable.”
I have experienced consciousness. I have no experience with eternities.
“I watched the video you posted. Tyson is saying that intelligent design is no more than a “God of the gaps” theory for realities we don’t understand. It’s a “philosophy of ignorance” that has actually been around for centuries and has stymied the advance of knowledge. I took some notes.
• He mentions Galileo’s comment that the Bible tells how one goes to heaven but not how the heavens go, and seems to interpret that to mean that Galileo believed religion and science are mutually exclusive, or that there is a necessary division between them. But the fact that the Bible gives few if any details about the workings of creation does not support the idea that religion and science must be separate. It simply means it was given for a different purpose – that of revealing God and his plan of redemption for man.”
It’s not necessarily true that they must be kept separate (unless you’re talking about first amendment issues which is a whole different thing) so much as that they simply are separate. French cooking and plate tectonic theory are two different things. We don’t need to forcibly separate them, they’re just not the same subject. They deal with different concepts.
“• He hails Isaac Newton as the most brilliant of all scientists of any time who, unfortunately in his eyes, still believed in God. But he only mentions God, Tyson says, when describing something he doesn’t understand. Therefore, he implies, Newton believed God was uninvolved in the realities he did understand, because he figured them out. But as Newton himself said, “Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done.”
That is simply another example of newton doing the same thing, he didn’t understand what set the planets in motion. Ironically gravity actually does explain how what set the planets on their course, because their motion is caused by acceleration from debris falling into the solar system partially converted by countless impacts into rotational energy (any two objects that do not hit each other dead-on will translate some of their energy into spinning motion) and the paths of the planets is controlled by the gravity of jupiter (the largest source of gravity next to the sun) which tugs at each planet as it passes near to it, lining them up along the same plane. In fact as the plane of the orbit of jupiter wobbles over time the other planets are pulled along behind it, and we can measure this.
“• Tyson bemoans that Newton’s and other great scientists’ “religiosity” stopped them from investigating and trying to understand other realities. On the contrary, their faith in God motivated them to explore and understand his creation, or at the very least did not hinder their curiosity. They did not begin their scientific disciplines as non-believers or skeptics, eager and relentless in their pursuit of knowledge, then find God and cease their explorations.”
You could argue that faith did not hinder their exploration, but I think in the age of “evolution is just a theory” where evangelists are blaming the holocaust on science it’s fairly obvious that organized religion, somehow or another at least can in some incarnation be detrimental to the social and scientific progress of a culture.
“• Tyson’s mocking implication that President Bush was grossly uninformed when he quoted the Bible after 9/11 about who named the stars just had me shaking my head. If God created the stars and named each one, then he has naming rights over any of his creatures.”
His point was not about god, it was about bush’s using scripture to imply that our civilization is superior to theirs, as a launching point for another point which also was not to do with god.
“• His dismissal of the teleological argument for life on earth because most areas of the universe cannot support life is meaningless. The argument is for the existence of the universe as we know it in the first place, and the existence of life on this planet, not on others.”
The point he was making was that the universe did not appear to be here specifically for us, not that there is no god.
“• He thinks that the reality of the universe eventually “winding down to oblivion” is evidence of “stupid design.” As well as the fact that our eyes can’t detect magnetic fields and such,”
Your point?
“and that we sleep 1/3 of our lives away. Really? It’s poor design that our bodies must rest? That we can’t keep going nonstop until we collapse in exhaustion, illness, injury or death?”
Actually it’s more the exhaustion, injury and death part.
“The same “hole” for eating, drinking, and talking…bad design.”
Yes, no comment?
“As well as the “entertainment complex/sewage system.” First of all, I would LOVE to see the best that any of these scientists could come up as a superior design for the human body.”
Many scientists and doctors actually re-design the human body as their job. Dentists remove wisdom teeth which grow for no reason and do harm and no good, surgeons remove the appendix which serves barely any function other than to get infected in I think it’s 1 in 15 people, etc. Our bodies are jury-rigged and have been modified many times over the history of life which leads to many problems. For instance our ancient ancestors lived in the ocean and had bodies more like fish in which the testes are in the middle of the abdomen (inside the body). As mammals evolved and adapted to colder climates we had to get metabolisms that burn hotter (warm-blooded) to survive which meant the testes had to get closer to the surface (because heat is bad for sperm cells), such as in pseudo-mammals like platypus and eventually they had to actually descend and hang out of the body like in most modern mammals. This re-design is why men get hernias, as the testicles descend during development they punch through the abdominal wall while it’s still forming causing a weak spot. Later when we cough, pick up something heavy or flex our abdominal muscles that weak spot can rupture and fat or organs can leak out of our abdomen causing serious health problems and intense pain. If I designed the human body I’d just make the testes develop lower rather than starting higher like in fish descending, eventually punching through the abdominal wall while it’s still forming.
“Secondly, a good design requires a goal…a purpose for the design. We humans think we know what that purpose is, but by-and-large we’re wrong. It’s not simply to enjoy our lives or even contribute to society. God has much more in mind than that and his design takes into account all that he intends for us. Particularly life with him in an incorruptible body, which requires that our corruptible one…corrupt.”
Corruption implies it was once perfect. I know too much about biology and paleontology to agree.
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Friend (moving left here again) – I am enjoying the exchange of ideas, but it has gotten quite lengthy. Would you like to continue, or should we just agree to disagree? I’m willing to continue our discussion if you are, though my responses might be a little longer in coming. But could I at least have a name? Something to call you? Agnophilo is kind of…impersonal. Lover of agnosticism?
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Wow. I want to read all your posts Caroline as they are very interesting and thought-provoking thus far. However, this one post with all the commentary has taken me forever to read! I enjoyed the debate although really need to re-read when I have more time. Did all of you commenting watch The Bill Nye – Ken Ham debate last night? Unfortunately I didn’t get to see it in its entirety due to some internet issues. Will have to re-visit that too when I have lots of time…
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Thanks for reading, Kim. I didn’t see the debate, but there are plenty of recorded debates out there that would be worth watching.They’ll take some time too though…
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