The "Threat" of Creationism, by Isaac Asimov

Internet ^ | 1984 | Isaac Asimov

[El Cid]

Re: Assimov post

Quite the screed. It's funny he mentions the Soviet Union and Red China as being 'unscientific':

The Soviet Union, in its fascination with Lysenko, destroyed its geneticists, and set back its biological sciences for decades. China, during the Cultural Revolution, turned against Western science and is still laboring to overcome the devastation that resulted.

when both of these Godless nations (as all communist nations/prisons) treat darwinism as an inviolate religon...

I also don't get the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics defense. I guess I must plead to having a sub-Kindergarden level of intelligence because it sure seems like a violation of this law - and all observations - for a system to become more orderly without a blueprint (e.g., DNA template in a seed), or guiding hand. I am unable to grasp how undirected sunlight + time created -voila- increased order and complexity.

Thanks, though, for posting the links to answersingenesis.org and icr.org.

[netman]

And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

3117. yowm

yowm yome

from an unused root meaning to be hot; a day (as the warm hours), whether literal (from sunrise to sunset, or from one sunset to the next), always, + chronicals, continually(-ance), daily, ((birth-), each, to) day, (now a, two) days (agone), + elder, X end, + evening, + (for) ever(-lasting, - more), X full, life, as (so) long as (... live), (even) now, + old, + outlived, + perpetually, presently, + remaineth, X required, season, X since, space, then, (process of) time, + as at other times, + in trouble, weather, (as) when, (a, the, within a) while (that), X whole (+ age), (full) year(-ly), + younger.

[LogicWings]

The question at the limit, of course, is "Caused by Whom, and Why?"

Begs the Question there was a 'Whom' but the point is well made. Read Hawkins recently and he said we can't concern ourselves with what happened before the BANG! because there were no rules, no natural laws, no time, no anything before that so it didn't exist! Oh, that explains things.

I like to put thus, "What went Bang!?"

You may assume God exists if you wish but it is all the same. Nobody really knows. That's the one thought nobody wants to accept.

[LogicWings]

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!

Thanks ever so much for displaying the benevolent thoughts of those who adhere to Creationism. Rational, well put, devoid of personal attack. You tower among men.

[LogicWings]

The Soviet Union, in its fascination with Lysenko, destroyed its geneticists, and set back its biological sciences for decades. China, during the Cultural Revolution, turned against Western science and is still laboring to overcome the devastation that resulted.

The Altruistic Premise of Communism/Socialism is dependent upon an abandonment of logic, which cannot be abandoned and so wreaks it havoc in consequences. The Communist paradigm of absolute control means they must, at given points, stifle the very innovation it takes for any society to progress. Societies either progress or regress, but they never stay the same. China is up against it once again with the Internet. They will stall if they don't give their people full access to the Internet, yet Communism cannot continue with full information exchange and open discussion.

Whether they treat evolution as 'an inviolate religion' or not is irrelevant. Go ask Osama, which post 118 reminds me of, whether accepting the existence of a Creator makes one reluctant to murder or not. Separate issues. I can't think of a system of thought that hasn't condoned some evil at some time.

[captain11]

Begs the Question there was a 'Whom' but the point is well made. Read Hawking recently and he said we can't concern ourselves with what happened before the BANG! because there were no rules, no natural laws, no time, no anything before that so it didn't exist! Oh, that explains things.

Hawking, bless his heart, is a four year old among two year olds. Despite all his human intellect, he has nary a clue what happened before the "big bang" (assuming there was a "big bang"), and moreover, he is incapable of knowing. None of us are capable of knowing. It must gnaw at him to no end. If Hawking is good, God may tutor him on some truly advanced physics after he's checked out of this life.

[LogicWings]

I can't think of a system of thought that hasn't condoned some evil at some time.

I have to correct myself. Objectivism has yet to condone any evil that I can think of. Peikoff notwithstanding.

[BMCDA]

Yes, and he may also show us what's south of the south pole.

[captain11]

[China] will stall if they don't give their people full access to the Internet

No they won't. As long as the Chinese are willing to manufacturer goods for American consumption at pennies on the dollar under sweatshop conditions, with few environmental strictures, and American businesses pursue same with little regard for the future consequences, China won't stall. Plus which, Americans have "full access" to the Internet, but most couch potatoes still get their news from the idiot box. To paraphrase Mark Twain, "The only man worse off than a man who can't read is one who can but doesn't."

[Capitalism2003]

I always thought of the big band as God's hands, holding everything in the universe...squeezing tight, then releasing it, causing the infinite expansion..
God created the big bang...end of discussion ;)

BANG!!!!!

[billbears]

I happen to be somewhere in the middle. I think General Evolution is bad science, but I also think that when Genesis speaks of the six days of the creation it doesn't mean literal days, because the sun and the moon weren't created for the first several of them, and you can't have days without a sun.

On that point I could probably agree with you. However on the other hand, this is God we're talking about. His way are not our ways. If He wanted to do it in 6 days, then he could have. Our minds don't have the capability to comprehend His power and never will.

I do know one thing for certain. I didn't evolve from a fish, ape, monkey, duckbilled platypus or anything else. God made man in His own image. Now whether that was 6000 years ago or 6 million years ago isn't the issue as much as that was how man was made

[captain11]

Yes, and he may also show us what's south of the south pole.

That's pretty amusing actually, considering that the South Pole hasn't always been where it is now, even on earth, and in the larger picture is hurtling through space in a complex motion deriving from Earth's rotation about the Sun, galactic expansion and rotation, etc. South of what? For all we know, universes are recursively nested at increasingly smaller scale. Once you've reached the exact "point" of the South Pole at this scale, perhaps you must shrink in height to a tiny fraction of a trillionth of a quadrillionth of a picometer, and start all over again, light years away from the "South Pole". Maybe there are seventeen levels of recursion, or maybe nine, or maybe I'm just having some fun here. What seems obvious and easy--may not be.

[captain11]

I have to correct myself. Objectivism has yet to condone any evil that I can think of. Peikoff notwithstanding.

You were right the first time. While there are certainly worse philosophies than objectivism, a philosophy that holds self-interest as a (perhaps the) key ethical tenet has the evil built in.

[Southack]

"Where are the transitions?"

Sometimes transitions are seemless, and at other times each photograph in a motion picture scene will be staged and shot individually (e.g. claymation, stop-action, special effects).

When looking not at photographs but at sequential historical "fossil" evidence, one likeiwse has to ask if each sequential stage was deliberately designed/staged or evolved by chance, whether one is referring to the carcuses of cars rusting in old junkyards or old skeletons ossifying under ground.

Certainly concluding that both cars and skeletons "evolved" would be erroneous, as at the very least we know full well that it was the intelligent designers of the cars who improved each model, not the cars themselves "evolving"...

[Sabertooth]

It is only in school that American youngsters in general are ever likely to hear any reasoned exposition of the evolutionary viewpiont. They might find such a viewpoint in books, magazines, newspapers, or even, on occasion, on television. But church and family can easily censor printed matter or television. Only the school is beyond their control.

So, Asimov is/was a bit of an evo-fascist, eh? How disappointing.

If the government can mobilize its policemen and its prisons to make certain that teachers give creationism equal time, they can next use force to make sure that teachers declare creationism the victor so that evolution will be evicted from the classroom altogether. We will have established ground work, in other words, for legally enforced ignorance and for totalitarian thought control.

Nice unintentional irony. What this is really about is control: Asimov wants it.

There are numerous cases of societies in which the armies of the night have ridden triumphantly over minorities in order to establish a powerful orthodoxy which dictates official thought. Invariably, the triumphant ride is toward long-range disaster. Spain dominated Europe and the world in the 16th century, but in Spain orthodoxy came first, and all divergence of opinion was ruthlessly suppressed.

Yet, secularism is the roughshod orthodoxy of the day. I wonder where Isaac is going with this...?

In more recent times, Germany hounded out the Jewish scientists of Europe. They arrived in the United States and contributed immeasurably to scientific advancement here, while Germany lost so heavily that there is no telling how long it will take it to regain its former scientific eminence. The Soviet Union, in its fascination with Lysenko, destroyed its geneticists, and set back its biological sciences for decades. China, during the Cultural Revolution, turned against Western science and is still laboring to overcome the devastation that resulted.

So, Creationism is like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, all rolled into one?

OK...

As we now, with all these examples before us, to ride backward into the past under the same tattered banner of orthodoxy? With creationism in the saddle, American science will wither. We will raise a generation of ignoramuses ill-equipped to run the industry of tomorrow, much less to generate the new advances of the days after tomorrow.

We will inevitably recede into the backwater of civilization, and those nations that retain opened scientific thought will take over the leadership of the world and the cutting edge of human advancement. I don't suppose that the creationists really plan the decline of the United States, but their loudly expressed patriotism is as simpleminded as their "science." If they succeed, they will, in their folly, achieve the opposite of what they say they wish.

Oh, the sky is bloody falling. This is Asimov's Global Warming theory.

What a shrill little rant this is. Asimov is demonizing his enemies as much as much as any cultist, and more than the vast majority of preachers in this country. In so doing, he completely undercuts his credibility as one who might explain the merits of evolutionary theory. It's not enough to be right, one also has to have a clue.

I'm not the first to say it, but getting rid of government schools will solve this conflict... but I'll bet the intellectual heirs of Asimov will shriek the loudest against it.

[Southack]

"it cannot be shown that 'only' intelligent entities can be shown to be responsible for a process because the whole universe is nothing but process. You just want to take one process, that can be MAPPED with a mathematical system we call Base 4, and ASSUME because it can be mapped in this manner that it MUST be the result of some 'intelligent entity.' This is why I said you reified Base 4 because Base 4 is a CONCEPT not at THING, and exists only as a CONCEPT in your mind, which your are mistaking as a THING, - the error of which is called Mistaking the Map for the Territory."

Nonsense. One can easily show that every known instance of computer programming in Base 2 (i.e. Binary) has been created by an Intelligent Intervention (e.g. Man), and NOT by natural, unintelligent processes.

And as for your "reifying" sub-point, the literal Base 2 and Base 4 instruction sets are more than abstract. They are physically processed in the real world, after all.

That's how Life and Software work, you know...

[Southack]

"But the analogy that DNA is a 'program' Begs the Question that it is one."

Rubbish. DNA is comprised of A, C, G, and T base pairs. These coding instructions are fundamental to how each unique gene (aka: subroutine) has its own functionality. Genes can be predictably altered, deleted, and copied (and we do this in the scientific lab every day) just as software programming subroutines can be altered, deleted, and copied.

"If it were as intelligently designed as you assert it wouldn't result in two headed snakes, or babies without brains."

Nonsense. Try to SHOW the specific wording that I used that could be interpreted to draw that conclusion (HINT: you can't, because I said no such thing).

Software has bugs. Environmental variables can also affect the output of software. Thus, this evidence is clearly contradictory to your claim above.

"I don't have to provide you with a Base 2 that is created by natural processes because there is a vastly more complex process, Base 4, that has been created by natural processes."

Oh please. Base 4 processes have never been proven to have come from ANYTHING except Intelligent Intervention. The only way that you could even claim otherwise is to be so intellectually dishonest as to assert that we "know" that evolution is true so therefor DNA must have been self-programmed naturally (i.e. a tautology, something that no honest intellectual would like to be caught using).

So it isn't that you "don't have to" provide such evidence, it is that you can not provide such evidence. It simply doesn't exist.

[Southack]

"[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)."

While I'm sure that you mean well, Base 4 IS literally an order of magnitude greater in complexity than Base 2.

0 , 1 vs 0, 1, 2, 3

In Binary you'd represent Base 2 as 10, while Base 4 would be 100.

100 is a single order of magnitude larger than 10, FYI...

But no matter. My point is that NEITHER Base 2 nor Base 4 software programs have ever been shown to have been formed by natural, unintelligent processes.

On the other hand, BOTH Base 2 as well as Base 4 software programs have been shown to have been formed EXCLUSIVELY by intelligent intervention (e.g. Man in the case of computer software).

[God is good]

Designer = Creator

[semaj]

Isn't Aasimov dead?