Posted on 05/25/2005 3:41:22 AM PDT by billorites
Science feeds on mystery. As my colleague Matt Ridley has put it: “Most scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance that drives them on.” Science mines ignorance. Mystery — that which we don’t yet know; that which we don’t yet understand — is the mother lode that scientists seek out. Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a very different reason: it gives them something to do.
Admissions of ignorance and mystification are vital to good science. It is therefore galling, to say the least, when enemies of science turn those constructive admissions around and abuse them for political advantage. Worse, it threatens the enterprise of science itself. This is exactly the effect that creationism or “intelligent design theory” (ID) is having, especially because its propagandists are slick, superficially plausible and, above all, well financed. ID, by the way, is not a new form of creationism. It simply is creationism disguised, for political reasons, under a new name.
It isn’t even safe for a scientist to express temporary doubt as a rhetorical device before going on to dispel it.
“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.” You will find this sentence of Charles Darwin quoted again and again by creationists. They never quote what follows. Darwin immediately went on to confound his initial incredulity. Others have built on his foundation, and the eye is today a showpiece of the gradual, cumulative evolution of an almost perfect illusion of design. The relevant chapter of my Climbing Mount Improbable is called “The fortyfold Path to Enlightenment” in honour of the fact that, far from being difficult to evolve, the eye has evolved at least 40 times independently around the animal kingdom.
The distinguished Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin is widely quoted as saying that organisms “appear to have been carefully and artfully designed”. Again, this was a rhetorical preliminary to explaining how the powerful illusion of design actually comes about by natural selection. The isolated quotation strips out the implied emphasis on “appear to”, leaving exactly what a simple-mindedly pious audience — in Kansas, for instance — wants to hear.
The deceitful misquoting of scientists to suit an anti-scientific agenda ranks among the many unchristian habits of fundamentalist authors. But such Telling Lies for God (the book title of the splendidly pugnacious Australian geologist Ian Plimer) is not the most serious problem. There is a more important point to be made, and it goes right to the philosophical heart of creationism.
The standard methodology of creationists is to find some phenomenon in nature which Darwinism cannot readily explain. Darwin said: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” Creationists mine ignorance and uncertainty in order to abuse his challenge. “Bet you can’t tell me how the elbow joint of the lesser spotted weasel frog evolved by slow gradual degrees?” If the scientist fails to give an immediate and comprehensive answer, a default conclusion is drawn: “Right, then, the alternative theory; ‘intelligent design’ wins by default.”
Notice the biased logic: if theory A fails in some particular, theory B must be right! Notice, too, how the creationist ploy undermines the scientist’s rejoicing in uncertainty. Today’s scientist in America dare not say: “Hm, interesting point. I wonder how the weasel frog’s ancestors did evolve their elbow joint. I’ll have to go to the university library and take a look.” No, the moment a scientist said something like that the default conclusion would become a headline in a creationist pamphlet: “Weasel frog could only have been designed by God.”
I once introduced a chapter on the so-called Cambrian Explosion with the words: “It is as though the fossils were planted there without any evolutionary history.” Again, this was a rhetorical overture, intended to whet the reader’s appetite for the explanation. Inevitably, my remark was gleefully quoted out of context. Creationists adore “gaps” in the fossil record.
Many evolutionary transitions are elegantly documented by more or less continuous series of changing intermediate fossils. Some are not, and these are the famous “gaps”. Michael Shermer has wittily pointed out that if a new fossil discovery neatly bisects a “gap”, the creationist will declare that there are now two gaps! Note yet again the use of a default. If there are no fossils to document a postulated evolutionary transition, the assumption is that there was no evolutionary transition: God must have intervened.
The creationists’ fondness for “gaps” in the fossil record is a metaphor for their love of gaps in knowledge generally. Gaps, by default, are filled by God. You don’t know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don’t understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don’t go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God. Dear scientist, don’t work on your mysteries. Bring us your mysteries for we can use them. Don’t squander precious ignorance by researching it away. Ignorance is God’s gift to Kansas.
Richard Dawkins, FRS, is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, at Oxford University. His latest book is The Ancestor’s Tale
So there's no evidence against what you believe. Has never been and will never be ...
[R]evisionist history and science are the creation of Satan and those who refuse the witness of God and science and history. These fools are also the same one's who believe in global warming and evolution and other myths created by babbling crybaby's.
... except for people who accept the last 200 years worth of data from geology, paleontology, and biology. To believe one's lying eyes is to be a tool of Satan.
I can't accept that. If using your brain and believing your eyes gets you to Hell, then Hell it is.
It's called chemistry. RWP can tell you all about it.
You are so wrong and the facts you state are foolish.
Precisely. Thank you for the picture of my uncle.
See my 816 and 1024.
PactrickHenry thinks Darwin Central can escape paying the rent. And jwalsh07 is confused about proper Vulcan behavior.
Off to work for the day.
The Gospel of John begins with a restatement of Genesis 1:1a and goes on to assert an organizing principle solely responsible for the creation and sustenance of all things. It then details how this organizing principle took up human flesh for the purpose of fixing every malady associated with our first parents' choice to die.
No, the convergence properties are different. Analogously, consider tossing a coin and see if it cranks out the digits of 1/2.
Note that the coin or needle doesn't crank out anything; they're inanimate generally. Averaging over outcomes yields the aforesaid results.
Just for fun: pi/4 = 1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/9 ....
Evidence of the application of manual implements. We already covered that.
Yes they are. If you want to teach a course in what scientists don't think, then by all means avail yourself of an opposing view, however, if you want to teach a course in what scientists do think, that is what you will have to teach in that course.
You would, by force of law, prevent free inquiry among the body politic, and to that extent you are just like the Pope in Galileo's day.
Yes, well, and to the extent that I'm not threatening you with painful death for expressing your opinions in public, I am not just like the Pope in Galileo's day.
You have all the freedom you can handle almost anywhere you like, but not in the science classroom where you are, quite rightly, restricted to teaching children what scientists think.
Somehow the conspiracy of the early church was SO good it kept a cacophony of almost-Mark, Luke, Matthew, and John gospels from surviving for posterity in spite of a smorgasbord of religious practices and beliefs in the region. There are small variations of wording in gospels and disputes over placement and presence passages, but they don't show the weird kind of thinking that appeared in the post-year-100 pseudo gospels that have psychedelic things like crosses floating out of tombs. The four recognized gospels and known variants are very focused on Jesus and very realistic in tone.
Just as you have the freedom to say ridiculous things, other people have the freedom to ridicule you for it.
You mean like this?
If these really were "What Scientists Think" classes, that would be fine. Trouble is, they are more like "Here Is The Truth" classes. There is an awkward gap between what is now called "philosophy" and what is now called "science" and woe betide the poor fool who tries to keep a foot in both.
To be sure. And I am not alone in that freedom.
Umm.. Did the possibility occur to you that the Synoptic Gospels resemble one another because they mostly copied one another (which the Church acknowledges) and that the reason they were made canonical is because they resembled one another?
oinkest thou?
Thee: Not French, it was a home-boy (Muslim) fanatic around 1380.
I've also seen it blamed on the Turks. Maybe they all had a whack at it.
Trouble is, where are the drafts of this wild stuff that got "tamed" into the current gospels? We can't blame library burners. The early church may have been well disciplined, but during the years its apostles penned what is in the Bible now, it did not practice raids upon rival factions. Instead it preached at its own people, urging them to keep themselves pure in the faith. It was not until the third century that the church got mixed up in Big Gummint, and by that time the bible manuscripts had already been around a long long time.
Hmm.. I shouldn't have said the Church acknowledges the shared text; I'm uncertain whether that's true (and almost certainly not for all denominations). I should've said New Testament scholars acknowledge it.
BTW, in case you haven't noticed, there is at present a cacophony of texts and a smorgasbord of practices and beliefs within Christianity. The reason they don't strike you that way is probably merely because you're accustomed to them.
Take virtually ANY variation found between manuscripts in the gospel texts we know of today, and you will still come up with a story that (1) reads as very realistic, not fantasmagorical (2) not difficult to reconcile within itself even if the exact manner is unclear and (3) focuses on Jesus. It is sometimes a bit bemusing to listen to a rabid King-Jameser whale on a convinced eclectic-texter, as the difference in what the resulting bible teaches, at the end of the day, is not enough to fill a thimble.
All elementary classes are "here is the truth" classes. Philosophical inquiry is for mature minds.
There is an awkward gap between what is now called "philosophy" and what is now called "science"
It's not "awkward" at all. It's purposeful. Science can't get it's business done if it has to untangle Hume-ian doubts every time we want to do an experiment.
and woe betide the poor fool who tries to keep a foot in both.
Indeed. Woe bedtide those who, with an obvious agenda, would would try to convince children that scientists think something other than what they do think, under the guise of reverence for abstract philosophy.
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