The "Threat" of Creationism, by Isaac Asimov

Internet ^ | 1984 | Isaac Asimov

[PatrickHenry]

Could you be a little more specific?

Post 95 is pretty specific.

[LogicWings]

Nonsense. Even if I was treating abstract math as material (i.e. reifying), there would still be no error in the logic postulated above (reifying per se is never sufficient evidence of a logical fallacy), and it's rather arguable that even treating mathematical instruction sets as material would be incorrect even on its face, to boot.

Gee, missed this. It isn't arguable. Thanks for proving the reification. I can see I was right, this is a rather futile discussion.

[HiTech RedNeck]

These are earthly-perspective statements, and would fit a scenario of an earth that started out with a continuously cloudy sky, but later the atmosphere cleared and the lights became visible. Funny that astronomers continue to talk of sunrise and sunset to this day; isn't that unscientific too?

[dubyagee]

In short, the complexity of the universe—and one's inability to explain it in full—is not in itself an argument for a Creator.

True, not in and of itself. But it is ONE argument for a creator. And it certainly is not an argument against creation. So what's the point? It doesn't seem he really has one.

[PatrickHenry]

Over 100 posts in 3 hours. Not bad. But hardly a record.

[BMCDA]

Just thought this might be a good addition to the article you posted ;^)

---

"The Quixotic Message", or "No Free Hunch"

IDists...

On Intelligent Design...

• ID is whatever we say it is, and we don't agree.
  

• Greater and greater numbers of scientists are joining the ID movement, which is why we keep referring to the same three year after year. [1]
  

• ID is not creationism, and can be perfectly compatible with evolution. This is why we're asking schools to teach the "evidence against evolution".[2]
  

• We're not creationists, except for those of us who are, but the rest of us won't confirm that we're not. But if you call us creationists, we'll complain to no end. [3]
  

• The correct stance on issues like an ancient Earth, the common ancestry of organisms, and natural selection can be worked out later, after we've convinced the public that they should be rejecting at least one of these. [4]
  

• ID is a widely accepted theory in the scientific community. Just last year, over 100 scientists signed a statement which does not support ID, but does say that they are "skeptical" of Darwinism. The opinions of tens of thousands of other scientists don't count, because they're all biased. [5]
  

• ID is a program for research into the science of design, nothing more. Part of our research plans are to produce coloring books for preschoolers, and to make ourselves more likeable at parties. [6]
  

• ID is a scientific theory for detecting purpose and teleology in nature. But don't ask us what that purpose is, because that's a religious question that's separate from ID.
  

• The Designer could be anything from God to a space alien. But the Raelians, who believe it was a space alien, are being illogical.

On Darwinism...

• Darwinism can't explain the evolution of life in every single detail, therefore it's wrong. But don't ask IDists to explain these things, because that's not the kind of theory ID is. [7]
  

• Mainstream scientists dare not disagree with the monolithic block that is Darwinian orthodoxy. However, here are a number of mainstream scientists who disagree with each other on some issues, which means that they can't agree on anything. [8]
  

• Darwinists are driven by religious and ideological motivations. But since we've removed the picture of God and the phrase "Cultural Renewal" from our website, everyone knows this isn't true of us. [9]
  

• Absolutely everything wrong in society is caused by dogmatic Darwinian atheistic materialists. Including stereotyping, demonizing, and scapegoating. [10]
  

• Darwinists are responsible for both socialism and laissez-faire capitalism. Both racism and liberalism. Both feminism and sexism. Both animal research and the animal rights movement. And Commie-Nazism. [11]

On philosophy...

• Philosophers cannot agree on exactly where the line between science and non-science lies. Therefore, anything can be considered science if we say so.
  

• If a living system looks well designed, it's evidence for ID. If it looks poorly designed, that's just because we have no way of knowing what constitutes good and bad design.
  

• Afterall, we can't tell that it's bad design because we have no way of knowing what the Designer really intends. But we do know that ID will revolutionize culture, society, and law, according to what the Designer intends. [14]
  

• Methodological naturalism is an unfair rule that keeps us from considering supernatural explanations. But this would mean that detectives couldn't consider an intelligent agent in a person's death, because as we all know, murderers are supernatural. [15]
  

• A good scientific theory like ID should be vague and ambiguous, and refuse to propose any specific details about mechanism or history. Some unspecified being "designed" something, somewhere, at some point in time, somehow, is a perfectly good explanation.
  

• The argument from design is not a theological argument, because we aren't necessarily talking about God. But any rebuttal of the design argument is theological, because it requires us to say "God wouldn't do it this way", and this is not legitimate. [16]

On the Evidence...

• Since the peppered moth case has been proven problematic, natural selection is disproven. The other 1,582 studies of natural selection in the wild, as well as the numerous laboratory studies, don't count. [17]
  

• And peppered moths don't rest on tree trunks. The actual datasets of moths found in natural positions in the wild, off but also on trunks, are irrelevant because researchers have captured thousands of moths over the years in their moth traps, and not once has a moth in a trap been found on a tree trunk. [18]
  

• Since moths don't rest on tree trunks but instead higher up in the branches, this means that birds can't get to them, because there is a magic barrier preventing birds from visiting tree branches.
  

• As demonstrated above, moths don't rest on tree trunks, which means that the photographs showing the contrasting conspicuousness of moths on tree trunks found in textbooks are FRAUDS, FRAUDS, FRAUDS. All the other staged animal photos in textbooks are however unobjectionable.
  

• The fact that more inclusive groupings, such as phyla, appeared before more specific groupings, such as genera, is evidence against evolution. Likewise, the fact that Europeans first appeared before Tony Blair is evidence against shared human ancestry. [19]
  

• Evolution can't produce novel information, because any change to an enzyme that increases substrate specificity reduces the reactivity of the enzyme with other compounds, which is a loss of information. Similarly, any change which increases the enzyme's generality is a loss of information because the enzyme has lost some specificity. [20]
  

• Life could not come about by natural means because it has Specified Complexity. Specified Complexity means something that cannot come about by natural means, therefore life must exhibit Specified Complexity. [21]
  

• It was very nice of our loving Designer to design an immune system to protect us from the deadly diseases He designed.
  

• The fundamental unity of living things means that there is only one Designer. The extraordinary variation among living things, including their tendency to kill each other, just means that our singular Designer is very creative and whimsical. [22]
  

• Lateral gene transfer, which is a powerful mechanism of evolution, is evidence against evolution.
  

• The fact that the laws of the universe are perfect for life is evidence for a Designer. The fact that the laws of the universe can't produce life is evidence for a Designer. [23]
  

• Irreducibly Complex structures require multiple parts. Therefore they can't evolve. If someone demonstrates how a structure that requires multiple parts could have evolved, that just means that it wasn't Irreducibly Complex.
  

• IC structures must be molecular systems. Except mousetraps.
  

• "Indirect" pathways are wildly unlikely and as hard to find as leprechauns, and are therefore only a "bare" possibility but not a realistic one and can be safely disregarded, despite the detailed attention paid to them by every major biologist from Darwin to Dawkins. [26]
  

• The ID hypothesis, on the other hand, bears no resemblance to leprechauns.

---

From: The Quixotic Message

[nightdriver]

"Post 95 is pretty specific."

No, actually it isn't. If you can't read past that, there's really no reason for you to read any further in the Book. There are a lot more things than that to stumble you.

[PatrickHenry]

Asimov:
In short, the complexity of the universe—and one's inability to explain it in full—is not in itself an argument for a Creator.

You:
True, not in and of itself. But it is ONE argument for a creator.

Actually, no. It's not an argument at all. Unless you want to claim that anything we can't explain today is an argument for a Creator. There have been too many previously-unexplained phenomena (disease, lightning, fertility, weather, etc.) that were once attributed to the Olympian gods, but which we now know to be natural phenomena. Will you allow the claim that things we can't yet explain are still good arguments for Zeus' existence?

[LogicWings]

But it is ONE argument for a creator.

No, it is just an argument for not knowing. His point is that, in science, Assertions must be founded on something. and creationism isn't founded on any evidence at all. None. The whole argument comes down to, "Well, there isn't any OTHER explanation." Which isn't, logically speaking, an argument at all.

The concept of a 'creator' is not, by definition, cannot, be something that human beings 'experience' so the concept 'floats,' it is dependent upon nothing in human experience. This, as a basis for a scientific view, violates all the rules of logic, upon which science depends.

[nothingnew]

This discussion has been a no-win discussion for years.

People believe what they believe because THEY WANT TO...

FMCDH

[HiTech RedNeck]

Greater and greater numbers of scientists are joining the ID movement, which is why we keep referring to the same three year after year

The usual tiresome argument-from-consensus. PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN!

[BMCDA]

90%??? Where did you get that number from?
To be honest, I don't think it is that bad yet.

[LogicWings]

Funny that astronomers continue to talk of sunrise and sunset to this day; isn't that unscientific too?

Funny you should mention that. Bucky Fuller pointed this out decades ago and tried his whole life to come up with better terms than sunrise and sunset. Never could. I ponder it once in a while, but would it really matter?

[Katya]

It's interesting the way they always portray the bible thumpers as the "only" creationists out there. There is a whole center of esoteric spiritual thought and philosophies which stem from a creationist view point.
This isn't new either..it's been around for the last century. Theosophists, Rosicrucians, Gnostics and various esoteric orders all subscribe to creationist systems describing the birth of the universe as something other than a big bang from nothingness.

[LogicWings]

More than the physical paradox, I like the moral paradox of God commanding Adam to obey Him, when Adam could not know the difference between obeying and not obeying, since these imply moral concepts, and then condeming Adam for is 'Sin' - which Adam couldn't have committed because he was morally innocent.

If God couldn't foresee that Adam would fall, then He isn't omnipotent, and if He did foresee that, then He intended Adam fall, or He would have created Adam with more character, since Adam wasn't responsible for his character, God was. The whole thing is a philosophical morass and an outright contradiction.

[lucysmom]

I think--at least hope--that most scientists would be happy to let religion be religion if people will let science be science.

Its unfortunate that some think its either or, and a choice has to be made.

[BMCDA]

Well, it's a claim I've heard from IDists but so far there haven't been a lot of scientists (especially biologists) who have joined the ID movement

[El Cid]

RE: Post 12

How alarming! I generally have little more reaction beyond complacent derision for creationism, but this essay delivers a powerful wakeup call. If America slides inexorably back into the grips of creationist obscurantism, it will slip into the twilight much the same as the Ming and Qing dynasties oversaw China's demise in a past era. But, what to do?

Yeah, being a creationist really hampered Sir Issac Newton, Michael Faraday, Louis Pasteur, Joseph Henry, Johann Kepler, Blaise Pascal, Ambrose Fleming .... We are so much poorer for the works of these ignoramouses who believed that the purpose of science was to learn God's thoughts by studying His creation.
Of course, Darwin inspired men such as Karl Marx (who wanted to dedicate one of his books to Mr. Darwin) and Adolph Hitler - and we are so much better for it... We can learn much from the communist countries that insist in the dogma of evolution and treat Darwin as one of their gods.

Of course we could also consider the words of Romans 1, and wonder if there truly isn't anything new under the sun:

Rom 1:18-24

18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;
19 Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.
20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:
21 Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.
22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,
23 And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.
24 Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves:
25 Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.

[captain11]

[Base 4, aka quaternary] is an order of magnitude of greater complexity than Binary math (something for which we don't see forming except with Intelligent Intervention).

Not really. The inherent mathematical complexity is largely the same, in any base. Humans use base 10 as a notational convenience, no doubt influenced by the specifics of anatomy. Lacking pinkies, we would likely count in octal.

While not mathematically more complex, base 4 does have the advantage that it requires only half the digits as binary (e.g. 255 decimal == 11111111 binary == 3333 quaternary).

Humans are well past the early computational barbarism of programming in straight binary (or assembly for that matter, except where required in performance critical applications). High-level languages and compilers ease the painstakingly precise drudgery of transforming high-level code into machine code. It is straightforward to modify a compiler back-end or assembler to emit low-level machine instructions in quaternary instead of binary. Thus, the mere fact of base 4 as the basis of DNA computation is not conclusive proof of anything, although it is an elegant bit of engineering.

Moreover, the dominance of binary in human machine computing, while a current fact, is not the last word. Advances in quantum computing will inevitably yield architectures with qubits (quantum bits) having bases greater than 2.

You raise some interesting points, however, and in doing so expose the late Asimov's myopia. Asimov laughably failed to deal with the obvious, namely the "big bang" postulated some 15 billion years ago, and from which the full vastness of the universe is theorized to have emanated from an infintesimally small point. The question at the limit, of course, is "Caused by Whom, and Why?"

Try as we might, and with all the hubris for which humans are famous, realize this. We are as two-year olds trying to understand quantum physics. God exists, but it is pure foolishness for us to think we can understand all He knows. In time, if we survive long enough, we may travel to the stars. It bears reminding who made the stars, not to mention the universe that contains them.

[Cedric]

Despite {or, perhaps, through} your manifest arrogance and vitriol, it is apparent that you are clinging to the preposterous, threadbare creed of Evolution with the ferocious fervor of a fanatical, yet uncertain, religious zealot. Rant on at the altar of Darwin!