Misleading Edge -- Intelligent Thought: Science Versus the Intelligent Design Movement

When sixteen leading Darwinists write essays on a crash schedule to get a book out by the end of the school year, you might suspect a sense of urgency, and indeed, editor John Brockman opens Intelligent Thought with a plea for his colleagues to defend Darwin-based civilization from “the Visigoths at the gates,” the proponents of Intelligent Design, “whose only interest in science appears to be to replace it with beliefs consistent with those of the Middle Ages” and who pose “the gravest of threats to the American economy.”

Brockman, a literary agent who went from pop publicist to managing popular science writers like atheists Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, has a long history with this particular body of “preeminent thinkers,” as his book boasts. He publishes Edge: The Third Culture, an online salon where the authors claim to offer a new culture of intelligentsia who are interested in “thinking smart” and not in “the anesthesiology of wisdom.”

On this site, Brockman shared an e-mail sent to him from a Darwinian who teaches freshmen at Columbia, who was concerned that students aren’t rejecting Intelligent Design for the right reasons, but “merely because the religious and conservative stripes of ID can sometimes look a little uncool.” He and his colleagues wrote Intelligent Thought to present the public, especially students, with scientific reasons to reject Intelligent Design.

The book is published as a collection of essays from sixteen of Brockman’s Edge contributors, including Dawkins and Dennett, Harvard’s Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne, professor in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, and Scott Atran, research director in anthropology at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris.

Despite the promise of the subtitle, much of Intelligent Thought is devoted not to scientific but to philosophical and especially

I'm not exactly sure how the word "darwinist" is a pejorative, particularly when coupled with "cretard" as comparison, but I'll take your word on it, and avoid the use of either.

However, now that I think twice upon it,
I HAve lost count of the number of threads that quickly strayed from discussing the info in a posted article, and went to the divisiveness of name calling, of posing and posturing, bringing out other perceived differences or grievance. I've seen 'darwinist' used in context of crude insult, but it is sort-of news to me, that the word itself is offensive. Maybe it is, at least in part, because of the way the word has been used/abused? I could see that, if that goes somewhat towards the 'why', of it being offensive.

Shoot, I'm sort-of doing it right now [discussing issues not narrowly related to the article posted, but sans insult, or even the desire to 'insult'].

Typical FR thread-hijaking I'm indulging in, I guess ;)

For the longest time, science advocates have held that science isn’t deliberately launching targeted attacks against religion, but rather simply calling the evidence as it sees it. However, it is beginning to appear that there is a growing scientific mindset preparing to mount a direct assault in response to the increasing tempo of attacks being brought by their religious adversaries.......

What exactly does science mean? Now it is under the supposed science realm that global warming has been conceived, and further science also heads the minds of the concept of cloning. The scientific community seeks to give the appearance of riding shepherd over the high ground, above all. The scientific community demands, and requires control with their system of educating the very young to wall out the Heavenly Father from their high estates, called public schools.

They use government to collect their tithes that maintains their apparent stature of fittest to survive. They believe they are 'gods'. That other religion spoken of in Genesis, 'you know' the god of knowledge.

What exactly does science mean? Now it is under the supposed science realm that global warming has been conceived, and further science also heads the minds of the concept of cloning. The scientific community seeks to give the appearance of riding shepherd over the high ground, above all. The scientific community demands, and requires control with their system of educating the very young to wall out the Heavenly Father from their high estates, called public schools.

Science - pure science - is neither moral nor immoral. It is amoral. It has no concept of right, wrong, good, or evil. It just observes physical phenomena, predicts and tests its behavior to measured conditions, and studies the results. On the other hand, scientists (and the scientific community which they make up) are human, and subject to the same motivations and biases as the rest of us. It would be just as disingenuous to claim that science could never be abused as a tool for selfish and dangerous reasons as it would to claim the same of religion.

You mention global warming and cloning as examples to make your point. As such, I'll also use them to make mine:

Scientifically speaking, there is little doubt that the Earth's climate is entering into a period of elevating temperature. While the duration, amount of increase, and rate of change are legitimately being challenged and debated, the underlying actuality that it is happening is pretty much indisputable. Where the real controversy lies is in measuring (and reversing) the contribution to global warming by human actions. At that point it tends to cease being 'pure' science and becomes a political entity that is no more 'above all' than the people that are using it to further their own agendas.

And as for cloning - it is not science that chooses to pursue it or not. It is individuals with their own ethical standards, with the encouragement (and limitations) of the public will. Science itself does not judge the benefits, nor does it weigh the ethical consequences of this pursuit. Frankly, it doesn't care. There are new phenomena to be observed, new results to study, new data to learn. Whether the result of cloning research is exploited, or if it is even pursued at all for that matter, is a question that is wholly external to the science itself.

No 'high ground'. No 'riding shepherd'. Science simply does.

Many entities seek government sponsorship, bluntly because it has the deepest pockets around. However, in some cases it is not automatically a bad thing. There can be gains made on both sides of the purse - the grant recipients get resources that make possible avenues of development they could never dream of otherwise. And hopefully the public that gave the money through their government will reap the rewards of a better quality of life, advancements in their production ability (and thus their ability to create wealth themselves), and an increasing understanding of the world around them and how it can be used, preserved, and improved for their overall benefit.

Of course this system can be exploited and abused by scientists as easily as by any other charlatan, regardless of their cover story.

Oh, and if I were of a cynical mind, I might interpret your reference to knowledge being a false god as an attempt to defend a position that can only be preserved by keeping the masses immersed in ignorance. It suggests that any wielder of religious power that advances the idea that knowledge is evil fears that the more their subjects learn, the harder it will be to convince them that they are the sole holders of all God's truths. But that's just if I were to apply a cynical filter to your comment.

Science - pure science - is neither moral nor immoral. It is amoral. It has no concept of right, wrong, good, or evil. It just observes physical phenomena, predicts and tests its behavior to measured conditions, and studies the results. On the other hand, scientists (and the scientific community which they make up) are human, and subject to the same motivations and biases as the rest of us. It would be just as disingenuous to claim that science could never be abused as a tool for selfish and dangerous reasons as it would to claim the same of religion.

My Webster's New Collegiate dictionary, 1973 science (n)[ME, fr. MF, fr. L scientia, fr. scient-,sciens having knowledge, fr. prp. of scire to know; akin to L scindere to cut --- more at SHED] 1 a : possession of knowledge as distinguished from ignorance or misunderstanding b : knowledge attained through study or practice 2 a : a department of systematized knowledge as an object of study b :something (as a sport or technique) that may be studied or learned like *systematized knowledge* c : one of the natural sciences 3 a : knowledge concerned with the physical world and its phenomens: NATURAL SCIENCE 4 : a system or method based or purporting to be based on scientific principles 5 cap: CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

So I think the designers that design the systematize knowledge are very much under the microscope of good and evil. Back to that Genesis knower, he knew very much of the knowledge of good and evil, and the result of that 'garden party' left two in human flesh with the knowledge that they were without clothing and thus they sewed fig leaves together to cover their nakedness. No the event did not occur (no matter what the religionists claim) in an apple orchard, but a fig grove.

So I think the designers that design the systematize knowledge are very much under the microscope of good and evil.

I see we are in agreement, then. Scientists (your 'designers', I'm assuming), being human, are as subject to Santa's naughty and nice lists as the rest of us. Science (your 'systemize knowledge') doesn't care in the least about whether we think the knowledge gained through it is good or evil. Thinking otherwise is tantamount to expecting facts to be guilted into changing themselves so that they match what we want them to be instead of accurately depicting what is.

Back to that Genesis knower, he knew very much of the knowledge of good and evil, and the result of that 'garden party' left two in human flesh with the knowledge that they were without clothing and thus they sewed fig leaves together to cover their nakedness. No the event did not occur (no matter what the religionists claim) in an apple orchard, but a fig grove.

I honestly have no idea what point you are trying to make with that paragraph.

Santa is a good symbol to describe the idea of evolution. Yes, I know that is not what you intended me to take from using Santa, but it sure works, given the myth of Santa.

I am saying specifically that the designers of the systemize knowledge commonly referred to as the Theory of Evolution are not the least bit interested in depicting what is. The designers have a vested interested in protecting their system, cleverly labeled as science. Their system is what keeps them fittest in the process of surviving same as many in the religious sphere taking a few scriptures or portions thereof to maintain their survival. The TOE system is god of their own divining and no other gods shall come before them, not even the Creator of their very souls.

That is their choice and not really my objection, what I do object to is their tyrannical control over what we the tax payers are required to tithe so their houses of their god can be funded, the public school system. There is no one above them to ever hold them to account for what the public school system produces. These fittest will willingly ignore all manner of perversion and degradation within their house of worship so long as they maintain their funding.

The big deception is that evolution got a classification as legitimate science, or what some consider intelligent thought. I do not mean to excluded other prominent deceptions, say that some claim the Bible dates this earth at 6,000 years, when in fact no such scripture exists, and the whole Book points out continually that this earth is very very old. I could list many other deceptions that are simply not found to be what is within the Bible, I just selected one that is on topic. I mentioned what the Bible says in Genesis of the knower of the knowledge of good and evil because it also rarely gets an accurate depiction of what is actually said.

Science - pure science - is neither moral nor immoral. It is amoral.

What does that really mean? Is rape amoral, moral, or immoral according to “Darwinian” science?

A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion

Is this textbook statement amoral, moral, or immoral according to “Darwinian” science?

Darwin showed that material causes are a sufficient explanation not only for physical phenomena, as Descartes and Newton had shown, but also for biological phenomena with all their seeming evidence of design and purpose. By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous. Together with Marx's materialistic theory of history and society and Freud's attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, Darwin's theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of mechanism and materialism…
---Douglas Futuyma's Evolutionary Biology (1998, 3rd Ed., Sinauer Associates), p. 5

Is “Darwinian science” - ‘pure science’ or can you name another branch of science taking a position on human morality that doesn‘t involve evolution?

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