Posted on 06/23/2007 12:21:46 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
Pro-Darwin Biology Professor Laments Academia's "Intolerance" and Supports Teaching Intelligent Design
Charles Darwin famously said, "A fair result can be obtained only by fully balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question." According to a recent article by J. Scott Turner, a pro-Darwin biology professor at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York, modern Neo-Darwinists are failing to heed Darwin's advice. (We blogged about a similar article by Turner in The Chronicle of Higher Education in January, 2007.) Turner is up front with his skepticism of intelligent design (ID), which will hopefully allow his criticisms to strike a chord with other Darwinists.
Turner starts by observing that the real threat to education today is not ID itself, but the attitude of scientists towards ID: "Unlike most of my colleagues, however, I don't see ID as a threat to biology, public education or the ideals of the republic. To the contrary, what worries me more is the way that many of my colleagues have responded to the challenge." He describes the "modern academy" as "a tedious intellectual monoculture where conformity and not contention is the norm." Turner explains that the "[r]eflexive hostility to ID is largely cut from that cloth: some ID critics are not so much worried about a hurtful climate as they are about a climate in which people are free to disagree with them." He then recounts and laments the hostility faced by Richard Sternberg at the Smithsonian:
It would be comforting if one could dismiss such incidents as the actions of a misguided few. But the intolerance that gave rise to the Sternberg debacle is all too common: you can see it in its unfiltered glory by taking a look at Web sites like pandasthumb.org or recursed.blogspot.com [Jeffry Shallit's blog] and following a few of the threads on ID. The attitudes on display there, which at the extreme verge on antireligious hysteria, can hardly be squared with the relatively innocuous (even if wrong-headed) ideas that sit at ID's core.
(J. Scott Turner, Signs of Design, The Christian Century, June 12, 2007.)
Turner on the Kitzmiller v. Dover Case
Turner sees the Kitzmiller v. Dover case as the dangerous real-world expression of the intolerance common in the academy: "My blood chills ... when these essentially harmless hypocrisies are joined with the all-American tradition of litigiousness, for it is in the hand of courts and lawyers that real damage to cherished academic ideas is likely to be done." He laments the fact that "courts are where many of my colleagues seem determined to go with the ID issue” and predicts, “I believe we will ultimately come to regret this."
Turner justifies his reasonable foresight by explaining that Kitzmiller only provided a pyrrhic victory for the pro-Darwin lobby:
Although there was general jubilation at the ruling, I think the joy will be short-lived, for we have affirmed the principle that a federal judge, not scientists or teachers, can dictate what is and what is not science, and what may or may not be taught in the classroom. Forgive me if I do not feel more free.
(J. Scott Turner, Signs of Design, The Christian Century, June 12, 2007.)
Turner on Education
Turner explains, quite accurately, that ID remains popular not because of some vast conspiracy or religious fanaticism, but because it deals with an evidentiary fact that resonates with many people, and Darwinian scientists do not respond to ID's arguments effectively:
[I]ntelligent design … is one of multiple emerging critiques of materialism in science and evolution. Unfortunately, many scientists fail to see this, preferring the gross caricature that ID is simply "stealth creationism." But this strategy fails to meet the challenge. Rather than simply lament that so many people take ID seriously, scientists would do better to ask why so many take it seriously. The answer would be hard for us to bear: ID is not popular because the stupid or ignorant like it, but because neo-Darwinism's principled banishment of purpose seems less defensible each passing day.
(J. Scott Turner, Signs of Design, The Christian Century, June 12, 2007.)
Turner asks, “What, then, is the harm in allowing teachers to deal with the subject as each sees fit?” ID can't be taught, he explains, because most scientists believe that "normal standards of tolerance and academic freedom should not apply in the case of ID." He says that the mere suggestion that ID could be taught brings out "all manner of evasions and prevarications that are quite out of character for otherwise balanced, intelligent and reasonable people."
As we noted earlier, hopefully Turner’s criticisms will strike a chord with Darwinists who might otherwise close their ears to the argument for academic freedom for ID-proponents. Given the intolerance towards ID-sympathy that Turner describes, let us also hope that the chord is heard but the strummer is not harmed.
No.
Drink a little wine, eat a little cheese, paint some pretty pictures with the main gun. Just don't ask questions.
There is a similarity, although Lessing comes down on the side of religion. He was far less pc than we are, but typical for his day.
Goedel was working in logical systems. It would be an extrapolation to infer something from his theorems beyond that.
Lemme take a short at them.
Lets say the universe has a creator bigger than the universe, kinda like the universe is part of some greater whole. Maybe the creator of this universe had a design in mind for himself to get into the creation in a limited way (less than the whole) and ran the functions to arrive at a desired model he had in mind at the start (if being god means willing something makes it have to happen, this design model would after a fashion be with the designer when the functional expressions of the creation began).
To make it interesting, the creator chooses one man who happens to believe god when god speaks to him (Abram), and tells this man the model the creator designed from the start will be 'born eventually in the believing man's lineage'. Now, if this creator had in mind to evolve a class of created beings well beyond the four-spacetime coordinate system we sense presently, why not use a sensing mechanism like faith to raise the four-spacetime beings to the next level of reality? And why would such a process need to be instituted world-wide all at once if the time factor of four-spacetime isn't the essential next variable of time which will be functional in the next level of evolved complexity?
I have no idea where you are going with this.
I asserted that saying "nature did it" is different from saying "god did it" because one can follow up by describing the processes of nature in ever increasing detail.
You have described ID as the claim that some unknown and unnamed entity having unknown abilities, limitations, methods and motives, did some unspecified thing at unspecified times.
This is not at all equivalent to saying in ever increasing detail, that all living things are related by descent, and that all physical sciences -- physics, chemistry, geology, astronomy -- must support this conclusion, and that all evidence discovered from this time forward, must be consistent with the claim.
I guess this works, although if the point of Jesus' message of salvation for all was to be universal, it is somewhat contradictory to intentionally limit your scope just because earthly time is inconsequential.
However, instead of tying my brain into a knot trying to explain the secrets of a 5 dimension universe and an all knowing creator larger than the already unfathomably large universe, I think its simply more believable that a bunch of desert dwelling philosophers made it all up.
It does not posit articles of faith, morals, doctrines or Holy writ – it is not religion.
It does not substitute for the theory of evolution because it addresses only “certain features” – not all features.
Like the theory of evolution, it is not an origin of life hypothesis, i.e. abiogenesis v biogenesis.
Most significantly, it does not specify the “intelligent cause,” which could be a phenomenon such as an emergent property of self-organizing complexity or fractal intelligence. Neither does it specify a particular agent, such as God, or collective consciousness, aliens, Gaia, etc. The Intelligent Design hypothesis does not specify either phenomenon or agent — much less any specific phenomenon or specific agent.
The hypothesis is on rather solid ground in that many of us have observed that creatures do in fact often choose their mates (intelligent cause) – and those choices directly affect the traits inherited by the offspring as compared to, say, blindly (undirected) breeding.
In sum, I do not see the Intelligent Design hypothesis as a competitor to the theory of evolution – nor do I see any reason to be concerned about it.
The implication of Godel’s theorems is that scientists are just as subject to faith as non-scientists. Indeed, the renowned atheist Bertrand Russel was so shaken up by this fact that he lamented “I wanted certainty in the kind of way in which people want religious faith. I thought that certainty is more likely to be found in mathematics than anywhere...But after some twenty years of arduous toil, I came to the conclusion that there was nothing more that I could do in the way of making mathematical knowledge indubitable.”
Again, in the ultimate sense, science requires FAITH. Therefore science and faith ARE NOT strictly incompatible.
In the end this increase in knowledge (and the knowledge that we can't prove all true theorems is an increase in knowledge) was achieved entirely by reason.
It may have disappointed Russell, but then he spent years of intense work trying to construct a complete formal system for basic math. So that makes some sense. It still doesn't imply anything about the universe as a whole.
I have to go for now. But when I return I will not only show you how this applies to the universe as a whole, but also to the anthropic principle/origins.
You may not be able to notice what you have written, but you rather clearly state that ID is under no obligation to identify and characteristics of the designer.
This may explain why, in 200 years, ID hasn’t gotten around to doing any research into the methods, or characteristics of the designer. Of course it poses no reason for science to be concerned, other than the fact that ID is intellectually vacuous and associates itself with people who are genuinely anti-science.
And in case if you've misplaced yours, just remember that Latin had no animule called volle.
Maybe just an unfortunate choice of terminology, but wouldn't a "neo-pagan" hold that nature should have the attributes of God? This after all is the distinction between Pantheism (which holds that God is entirely within the world, or is the same as the world) versus Theism (which holds that God is apart from the world, although maybe additionally immanent within it).
It seems to me that a pagan or pantheist would, or at least should, be MORE likely to have a problem with a mindless mechanism like natural selection, since the pagan thinks that nature is supposed to contain mind. OTOH a Theist, who believes that nature is a made thing, with no divine nature inherent in itself, wouldn't have any problem, in principal (at least before we get into Biblical literalism and such), with the notion of mindless mechanisms operating within the creaturely realm.
Slavery is wrong because it regards a person as being less than what God created him to be: Made in the image of God, and thus as having unalienable rights -- unalienable because vested in him by his Creator. Christians are taught that God loves and values each unique human being. Slavery in the United States could exist only because people could not see the image of Christ in the face of a black man. This is human ignorance pure and simple. But God's second law (the minor one :^) ) commands us to love our neighbor -- who is one who bears the image of Christ, whether he be a Christian or no. Christians already have that responsibility, and will be judged accordingly by God.
God has made His intent plain. If people don't get the message, I don't expect He's going to indulge in a lot of righteous nagging: His Law is plain, and it's up to us to live by it (or not, as the case may be). As it turned out, in time people "saw the light," and the institution of slavery in the West disappeared, thanks largely to eloquent, dedicated Christians, such as Wilberforce....
I gather you think that God didn't do WRT slavery what you think He ought to have done. Did you mean to "create" a "man-sized" God here (sized to the limit of our intellect and imagination), as you suggest the writers of the Holy Scriptures did?
In regard to the writers of the Old Testament, in their time slavery as an institution was just a part of the natural social landscape, usually involving spoils of war; and it certainly wasn't confined to black persons. It took the Incarnation of Jesus before the world would be taught that slavery is wrong, for the reasons I gave above.
Thanks so much for writing, GunRunner!
Many actually go to the Galapagos Islands, in order to commune with Darwinism.
It's that crying need for relationship with "the greatest" (which is the maximal need for survival).
It does now.
I'll agree with that.
So, let me know if anyone in this thread changes his/her mind, if you will! ;-`
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