Getting It Wrong about Atheism and Science
Before we begin, let me tell a brief David Berlinski story. I’ve told it before here, but it bears retelling.
Three years ago The New Criterion sent me one of David Berlinski’s books to review. I didn’t think much of it, and said so rather bluntly in my review, which you can read for yourself here.
A short while after the review was published, TNC forwarded to me an email from David Berlinski, thanking me for having taken the trouble to review his book, regretting that I hadn’t liked it, and wishing me well!
Now feeling terrible about having slighted David’s book, I emailed back suggesting that by way of balance, I might ask the editor of TNC to give my next book to David for review. He emailed back in the same friendly and civil tone, saying he didn’t think that would be right at all.
I call that an extraordinarily high standard of gentlemanly collegiality. Our exchanges were entirely private, so you can’t put it down to moral potlatch display on David’s part. It can only be sheer innate decency. So I enter these exchanges liking and respecting David very much, hoping his latest book sells well — I worked off my guilt for that last one by telling everyone I met to buy it — and determined to try to reach David’s level of civilized discourse.
OKAY BERLINSKI, YOU DOG-FACED MORON … Nah, just kidding. Well, what have we got here?
After some routine slandering of scientists as having “acquired” the “authority” of Soviet commissars — I await with interest the demarcation of ZiL lanes for the sole benefit of atheistical biologists heading for their country dachas — I see this: “It is curious that so many scientists should have recently embraced atheism.”
Now I recall why I disliked David’s book so much. There was something like this on every page — something that fires off the chain of reactions: Is it? … What does this actually MEAN? … Does it, in point of fact, mean ANYTHING? … Oh, the heck with it!
What, in that particular sentence, does David mean by “recently”? Since the seventeenth century? Since that rash of atheist books came out a couple of years ago? The only clue David gives us is a list of physicists in the following sentence. It’s a pretty random list, with a 200-year jump from Newton to Maxwell, so let’s try to be a bit more systematic.
Here are the top twenty physicists from Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment:
Newton, Einstein, Rutherford, Faraday, Galileo, Cavendish, Bohr, J. Thomson, Maxwell, P. Curie, Kirchhoff, Fermi, Heisenberg, M. Curie, Dirac, Joule, Huygens, Gilbert, T. Young, Hooke
Due diligence at this point would require me to go to my local library and read up on these notables in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography. That would involve me leaving my very comfortable perch up here in the tree house, though. I am therefore going to yield to sloth and run up a rough-approximation list for the piety of these people, using the best resources I have at hand: William H. Cropper’s Great Physicists, Wikipedia, and my own fast-cratering memory. Here’s what I get.
eccentric Anglican, functional atheist, functional atheist, devout Sandemanian (fundamentalist Protestant), devout Catholic, conventional Anglican, secular humanist, “social” Anglican, devout Presbyterian, agnostic, nominal Lutheran, agnostic, atheist, agnostic, atheist, deist, deist, nominal Anglican, Quaker, nominal Anglican
No doubt I have got some of them wrong, and there are of course hours of argumentation there. Several million words must have been written just about Einstein’s religion, though the matter seems plain enough to me. (He explicitly and emphatically denied any belief in a personal God, and his “Old One” was so remote and inactive that even “deist” doesn’t really fit Einstein. His Old One was really little more than a figure of speech, I think.) Still, I believe my list sufficiently refutes your statement that “the great physical scientists … were either men of religious commitment or religious sensibility.”
Let us proceed!
Then a question on “how the universe arose.” Punchline: “Given the account of creation offered in Genesis and the account offered in A Brief History of Time, I know of no sane man who would hesitate between the two.”
A few points at random:
- What an extraordinary sentence to commit to print! Its clear implication is that Stephen Hawking is insane. Its only slightly less clear implication is that anyone who does not accept the Genesis account of creation — a category that would include at least half of those top twenty physicists in my last section — is insane. Furthermore, I am insane, and so is my wife. You had better alert the authorities, David.
- Why restrict our choices to just Hawking and Yahweh? There are plenty of other accounts of the origin of the universe for us to choose from. There is a whole raft of them here. Why are you so cavalierly casting aside Mbombo, the white giant of the Makuba, who one day “felt a terrible pain in his stomach, and vomited the sun, the moon, and the stars”? Are you some kind of a racist, David? Or look at this lovely creation story from Tibet. You should at least try to be a little multicultural, David.
- What’s wrong with saying: “I have no clue ‘how the universe arose,’ and I don’t believe anyone else has, either”? OH MY GOD, I HAVE RIPPED OPEN THE FABRIC OF SPACETIME! … AAAAAARRRRRRRGGHHHHHHH! …
“And there is Darwin’s theory of evolution.” Indeed there is. Do you have anything to say about it? No. That is not very surprising. Creationists never do have anything to say about it. They mention it, as you do, and as the authors of that silly movie do, only to at once veer off into questions about biogenesis, a topic about which nobody really knows anything, and that Darwin was not very interested in, and that forms no essential part of his account of the origin of species. I would love to get a conversation going with creationists about the origin of species, but they seem to be even less interested in this topic than Darwin was in biogenesis.
Dawkins is plainly trying to say the same thing in that exchange you quoted, but the movie editors cut it up to make him look stupid.
Metaphysics and philosophers’ opinions about metaphysics — and even scientists’ opinions about metaphysics — form no part of the scientific enterprise.
“What reason do we have to suppose that God might not exist?” Well, his being invisible, inaudible, intangible, nonaromatic, flavorless, and undetectable by any known instrument is a pretty good start. But why is there any burden on atheists to prove that God does not exist? How would you set about proving that Poseidon, Wotan, Ahriman, Unkulunkulu, or the Great Manitou do not exist, David? Come on, give us a clue. I don’t want a detailed 80-page proof in each case. Just outline for me what your proof procedure would be.
Finally, back to those old commissars. “Who knows what mischief Soviet citizens might have conceived had they imagined that the Politburo was not, after all, infallible?” Another one of those say-what? questions. The answer, I think, is that the Soviet party bosses knew perfectly well, and made sure that the citizenry knew that they knew, and would deal with such “mischief” very briskly.
Underlying your last comments, to the degree I can squeeze any sense out of them, is the vague notion that atheism is a sort of religion — “a doctrine,” you say — that people sign on to, perhaps after undergoing some formal instruction from a properly ordained minister. Possibly it does take that form in some individuals, but far more often it is merely an indifference to supernatural explanations, on the part of people who find natural explanations sufficiently interesting. As one of those atheistical book authors says — Hitchens, I think it is — an atheist just believes in one fewer god than you. He is an atheist in respect of Yahweh in just the same way, and for just the same kind of reason, that you are an atheist in respect of Unkulunkulu.
What is your problem with Unkulunkulu, David? Why are you not willing to accept his mighty power? Are you secretly, in your inner heart, one of those arrogant atheists? Well, of course, so far as Unkulunkulu is concerned, you are!
British-born John Derbyshire is the author most recently of Unknown Quantity: A Real and Imaginary History of Algebra. His Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream: A Novel was a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year.
Well, how odd. Just yesterday, the charming Mr. Derbyshire sneered that Dr. Berlinski is an “eccentric non-Christian crank,” and now, just a few hours later, you like and respect Dr. Berlinski very much….
I do owe the odious Mr. Derbyshire my thanks. His 04-28-2998 National Review Online temper tantrum, _A Blood Libel on Our Civilization_, inspired me to promise myself never to visit NRO again as long as I live and to erase National Review forevermore from the publications I subscribe to, thereby saving me time and money.
Despite Derbyshire’s witty writing style, it seems to the same material to which we are accustomed. Atheism is the rejection of any and all divine claims. In general, atheists are strict naturalists who deny the supernatural. The idea that atheism and the selective beliefs of a theist are equivalent does not bear close scrutiny. Someone who believes in one god can agree with a polytheist or a pantheist that reality is not limited to that which is perceivable by the senses. An atheist generally cannot say that.
John here has written a much more cogent article than the early piece Berlinski.
While I may believe Theism is more defensible than Mr. Derbyshire may believe, still I think it is important to be clear and above board in our thinking and discourse of these matters. So, Kudos to John.
Too much of Berlinski’s earlier essay was indeed slanderous, for which he should be ashamed. Should Mr. Berlinski wish to respond to the essay here let’s hope he will be a bit more circumspect.
This exchange has been an excellent example of the difference between using your (considerable) intellect to prop up a belief that provides comfort, and using it to derive as much information about the world as is possible at this time.
Re: origin of the species. The Bible is clear that God created everything according to its KIND. From there, biological change within each species took place.
An atheist or a scientist may acknowledge the existence of unmeasurable things.
But he or she will not make such things the object of SCIENTIFIC inquiry, and will be annoyed by those why try to force her to do so.
Scientific theory is data-driven, and it eventually changes as the data demand; scientific theory has no claim to be taken seriously independent of the data it purports to explain. The creationist-ID account is completely different, remaining the same irrespective of whatever new data might come to light; it explains everything and anything by exactly the same theory. Creationist theory is not data-driven, but exists independently of data. That means that it is factually empty and impervious to falsification. No creationist will specify any set of observations that would cause him to discard his explanatory theory. Creationism-ID is not only not science, it’s antithetical to science. That such a thoroughly dogmatic view should be attacking science on grounds of dogmatism is entirely bizarre and entirely backwards.
Science is a series of heresies opposing orthodoxies, ie the consensus model of the system.
All good scientists are heretical in nature.
Berlinsky’s aregument makes no sense.
Creationism/intelligent design is the orthodoxy…what civilization believed for thousands of years.
ToE(theory of evolution) is the heresy.
and yes, a disproportionate amount of scientists ARE atheists or secular humanists…..but the hidden variable is likely IQ.
I am a believing Catholic. Why can’t we just accept that the universe “is” and get on with understanding it as best we can. I do not read the Bible to understand thermodyanmics nor do I read a science book to understand salvation. The Big Bang theory was posited by an astrophysicist who was also a Catholic priest. If he saw no conflict between his scientific life and his faith life, I won’t either.
I like this quote: “Science gives us knowledge, and religion gives us meaning. Both are prerequisites of the decent existence.” It is from Michael Heller, a cosmologist and Catholic priest from Poland, on occasion of winning the Templeton Prize this year.
1 If I remark that no sane man would hesitate to choose between A and B, it hardly follows that either A or B is insane. This is a point of logic. It is obvious.
2 To suggest that Mbombo or Unkulunkulu have an enduring claim on our attention is to ignore the striking insight achieved by the ancient Hebrews: That various scattered deities are nothing more than local manifestations of a single God. “As all suns smolder in a single sun,” Chesterton observed, “the word is many but the Word is one.”
3 There is nothing wrong in saying that one has no idea how the universe arose. I say it regularly. What Mr. Derbyshire might mean by “OH MY GOD, I HAVE RIPPED OPEN THE FABRIC OF SPACETIME! … AAAAAARRRRRRRGGHHHHHHH!” is anyone’s guess.
4 A movie is not required to make Richard Dawkins look foolish.
5 I would be happy to join John Derbyshire in a debate about the origins of species.
6 Both consideration in the law of contracts and manifolds in differential topology are “invisible, inaudible, intangible, nonaromatic, flavorless, and undetectable by any known instrument.” What of it?
DB
After reading both side of this debate I can only reach one conclusion. John Derbyshire is not a very nice person. If one can sneer in words, Derbyshire is a master of it.
Berlinski isn’t just a nice guy, he’s a fricken saint for even talking with Derbyshire.
But since you have to have God to have saints I suppose Derbyshire will just consider him a friendly primate and then study him.
Possibly (atheism) does take that form ( a doctrine) in some individuals, but far more often it is merely an indifference to supernatural explanations, on the part of people who find natural explanations sufficiently interesting
I can only conclude that Derb has never read a single issue of New Scientist.
the funny thing is that the Scientific Method pressuposes Theism/Creator/Designer.
for an atheist to be Rational, they would have to throw out the SM and create their own that doesn’t pressupose a creator. See David Hume’s problem of Induction.
Derbyshire has written several times that, although he is no longer a Christian, he is a theist. He is defending atheists here against what he sees as unfair accusations, but that does not make him an atheist. It’s remarkable how often “defending X” gets confused with “agreeing with X”.
Which is more scientific … Theist, Mysterian, Agnostic, Athiest ???
Despite sightings and claimed abductions UFOs are not good evidence of life from other stars. Does absence of good evidence constitute evidence of absence of life anywhere else in this or any other universe? Assmume the scientific answer is no. If life can arise naturally here then it certainly can arise elsewhere and elsewhen.
Having arisen and evolved a million years beyond our current scientific understanding can we place any limitations on what they might be capable of? Creating new universes, virtual realities and life forms for example. Even one naturally occurring super species may then create many new realities so the ration of created realities to natural realities may be some large number. Let’s guess that to be on the order of million to one.
It then follows that any reality a life form finds itself in is a million times more likely a created reality than a natural one.
Neither is a movie required to make David Berlinski look foolish.
There is a strong correlation between profession:scientist and faith:none, but the hidden variable is not a desire to rule the the world.
it is IQ and g.
Berlinski’s post is IQ-baiting.
How seductive is this meme?
You are just as smart as those snobby scientists!
You are smart where it really counts!
God-smart.
lulz!
“Does it not occur to you that by purging all sacred images, references, and words from our public life, you are leaving us with nothing but a cold temple presided over by the Goddess of Reason — that counterfeit deity who, as history has proved time and time and time again, inspires no affection, retains no loyalties, soothes no grief, justifies no sacrifice, gives no comfort, extends no charity, displays no pity, and offers no hope, except to the tiny cliques of fanatical ideologues who tend her cold blue flame?”
The author of these words was the John Derbyshire of several years past. I don’t know if he’s just being contrarian these days or if he actually means the things he says. But the Goddess of Reason seems to have gone up in his estimation. And he’s carrying on like a “fanatical ideologue”.
Methinks that Mr. Berlinski prevailed here. Derbyshire’s effort was of a piece with Dawkins, et. al.: full of bluster, cliche-ridden, shallow, and ultimately unpersuasive.
The origin of species is not really in question….natural selection would seem to suffice, although I don’t know anyone who claims to have actually seen it happen.
The more interesting question is the origin of genetic information, a question that materialists meet with either obfuscation or hand-waving.
One does have a bit of sympathy for them — as there is no chance of any empirical experimentation establishing their view that it was all done by random processes without any input from intelligence.
They forfeit our sympathy when they nevertheless demand that their “doctrine” be taught as fact, and employ various forms of ridicule (and worse) to intimidate those who point out that, in this respect at least, the emperor has no clothes.
Bravo, John, for taking on those whose only defense is to fall back on dogma. For as even Origen (no pun intended) of Alexandria, one of the earliest christian theologians (3rd cent.), said,
“Who could be so silly as to think that God planted a paradise in Eden in the East the way a human gardener does, and that he made in this garden a visible and palpable tree of life… I do not think anyone can doubt that these things, by means of a story which did not in fact materially occur, are intended to express certain mysteries in a metaphorical way.”
and
“[W]e found fault with those who, taking the words in their apparent signification, said that the time of six days was occupied in the creation of the world”.
The absence of free will. The jumbling of chemical reaction and electrical impulse. Debating a Darwinist is like arguing with your toaster. Their opinions are simply the recitation of some genetically predetermined chant and they can never be held accountable for their actions. It’s always “my genes made me do it”.
The very foundation of science is faith. Faith in an orderly and rational universe. Let me see, which religions present that world view, hmmm. Tell us again, how exactly did biological life emerge from inanimate, inorganic matter? What exactly is the plausible materialistic explanation for lifes origin? Let’s start there, and remember, no faith allowed.
I’m pretty sure that the worship of Unkulunkulu requires child sacrifice, at least for those with some abnormality, but their high priest has a perfectly rational explanation for this behavior, “Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.”
Worship of Unkulunkulu also requires the acceptance of a priestly cast who claim infallible insight and knowledge of the workings of the universe. All debate has ended and those unwilling or unable to accept the prevailing consensus will be denied credentials, grants and tenure.
But there is hope, at least for the SLDS cult recently raided and broken up in Texas. According to the high priest of Unkulunkulu there is no fixed morality, “We may, therefore, reject the belief, lately insisted on by some writers, that the abhorrence of incest is due to our possessing a special God-implanted conscience.”
Hallelujah.
David: From your remark that “I know of no sane man that would hesitate between the two” it follows that those people you are aquainted with who DO so hesitate are not sane. A fortiori, a person known to you who not merely does not hesitate, but opts for Hawking over Yahweh, must be insane. Therefore Hawking, me, etc. are insane. The logic seems faultless to me.
You have affirmed you belief in the Genesis creation myth. The Mbombo and Unkulunkulu creation myths are DIFFERENT. By picking one, you are discarding the others.
How does “There is nothing wrong in saying that one has no idea how the universe arose. I say it regularly,” square with your affirmation of the Genesis account?
“Consideration in the law of contracts and manifolds in differential topology” are creations of the human intellect. At any rate, I have been unable to find any reference to either in the Book of Genesis. We thought them up and found them useful. Is that your view of the Deity?
It is common for Darwinists to define human actions as evil e.g., anthropogenic global warming.
Where in the theory of evolution is evil defined?
Berlinski’s post is a petty whinge about how those controlling elitist scientists refuse to research IDT on their own dime or discuss it in classrooms dedicated to actual curriculae, which college students are paying for.
Again, creationism/IDT is the orthodoxy, ToE is the heresey that replaced it.
We don’t go backwards in Science.
And you can’t make us.
” The Big Bang theory was posited by an astrophysicist who was also a Catholic priest. If he saw no conflict between his scientific life and his faith life, I won’t either.”
There are a growing number of astrophysicists are rejecting The Big Bang theory as well as “Genesis”. Check out the March 2008 Scientific American. There have been many who don’t look at the Universe as a thing, but everything, with no beginning, middle, or end. Other than that, a great rebuttal John.
Earl, we are in the opening days of the “Two Week Revolution” of nanotech. We can make nano-assemblers.
Right now we can build small, simple organic molecules using bio-assemblers modelled on RNA strands. Pretty soon we will be able to fabricate synthetic life in nanoscale.
I really think you should move your arguments to oppositon of the cosmologists.
btw I am a theist.
It seems to me that every objectionable property of liberals gets projected on darwinists.
Just because someone thinks that evolution is the most likely explanation for the origin of species does not mean that he believes in anthropocentric global warming, the absense of free will and moral relativism.
You do not have to be a liberal to believe in evolution. It is simply the best theory we have right now. And as long as creationism can not make a single falsifiable prediction, it is not a scientific theory but a belief system.
erm…”we can build” should be “we can stack”
pardon
Tom, Berlinski just got punked by the Derb.
“What reason do we have to suppose that God might not exist?” Well, his being invisible, inaudible, intangible, nonaromatic, flavorless, and undetectable by any known instrument is a pretty good start.
Warmed over, rehashed, recapitulated objections leveled by atheists well before the author and completely obliterated by defeator arguments.
See Greg Bahnsen v. Gordon Stein debate “Does God Exist?” as only one example in thousands.
I’m sorry that I wasted two minutes reading this drivel and 30 seconds responding. Where will I go and what will I do to get 2.5 minutes of my life back?
When scientists construct molecules, machines, or even a living organism itself, we learn absolutely zero about the origin of any of these things by mere matter in motion.
There is a serious logical disconnect involved in arguing that watching intelligent agents do their thing somehow provides evidence that the artifacts they make can come about by random means, guided solely by (unintelligent) natural selection.
People who fail to see the distinctions involved cannot rationally object to being suspected of a “religious” commitment to their preferred story of origins.
Godless Communism is no longer in vogue. At least in America.
With the advent of Liberation Theology we have Godly Communism. I liked the old kind (scientific Marxism) better. It could be falsified.
I am a Christian, and if anyone doubts what I mean by that, just let me borrow a phrase and state that I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and…well, and you know the rest, and I believe all of it;
I have e-mailed Derb before, challenging him on his treatment of Theism;
…and I’m here to tell you:
His criticism of Berlinski here is spot-on deserved. It is justified.
Look, folks. Defending Theism in general and Christianity in particular DOES NOT require that we defend every slapdash, incomplete, or flawed argument a fellow believer might make on God’s behalf.
We ought to be manly and mature enough to recognize that sometimes we ourselves make stupid arguments exhibiting carelessness or ignorance. When those arguments are defeated, we ought to demonstrate such virtues as honesty and humility and acknowledge it (even if our debating opponents make capital of it).
After all, it’s not as if the truth isn’t on our side! We needn’t exhibit the insecurity of someone who isn’t sure. I can hardly be afraid God doesn’t exist; we conversed just this morning. One of my mother’s friends was miraculously healed of M.S.; a couple of my life-altering decisions were made on divine guidance which I didn’t understand at the time but now do; His tender mercies are new every morning and it ain’t all hallucination.
Our role, conversing with Derb or anyone else, is to demonstrate the fallacies of bad argument — our own or the opposing team’s! — and in so doing to demonstrate the kind of honesty which befits a God-fearing person.
So let us be forthright, gracious, and magnanimous…and let us be more rigorous about eliminating the worse arguments among our own.
Derb is right: A probable majority of the great physicists of recent memory leaned toward atheism, agnosticism, and deism. That intelligent men can hold incorrect views demonstrates (a.) that there is a certain academic culture which favors these views, just as academic culture favors Marxism, and (b.) the truth is, while self-evident, not obvious. (That is to say: Like the truth that “all men are created equal,” theological truth provides evidence for itself when the matter is closely examined, but can go undetected for centuries if not.) This means it is JUST NOT TRUE for Berlinski to suggest that no sane man would choose Impersonal Creation over the Genesis Account. (And what’s more, it’s churlish bad manners.)
Now, Derb himself is not infallible, even when speaking from the Chair of St. Popper. He offers various pagan gods (with their creation stories) as alternatives, and neglects to notice that these “gods” don’t fulfill the Judeo-Christian definition of “God” as Creator in so far as they emerge from (and are thus dependent on) a pre-existing (and therefore unexplained) universe, instead of creating the universe wholesale from nothing: the unique Judeo-Christian idea.
Because of this, “Unkulunkulu” is simply not a God, in the Judeo-Christian sense, at all; he is in a different category of being. What a shame that English uses the same word for both categories, and that we have only the presence of a capital letter (“God” vs. “god”) to distinguish between that which is eternally self-existing and a notion far closer to stories of woodland fauns and leprechauns!
Derb misses this because he’s woefully uninformed and thoroughly uninterested in getting informed; he once commented about his surprise that Americans actually read books to learn more about their religion, a notion apparently foreign to the watery Anglicanism of his upbringing.
But, outside realms where Derb is uninformed, his criticisms are worth consideration. Berlinski’s comment about the Politburo really was asinine. His attempts at witticisms really are sometimes even worse than my “St. Popper” papal reference, above. Constructive criticism really could do him some good.
So don’t get all flustered about Derb using his first-rate mind to say so.
Instead, my brethren, “Always stand ready to give a logical defense (apologeia) for the hope that is in you, yet with grace and reverence.”
One of the more entertaining aspects of the contemporary mind is it’s proclivity to trip all over itself disclaiming views, half-baked as they may be and frequently are, that may wrankle other contemporary minds. A number of examples appear in this thread, not least of which that science is science and religion is religion and by invoking them in purely those limited, contemporary, postmodern contexts, we can leave them nicely sorted and pigeonholed there.
Surely science, therefore, masters faith. Surely faith is antiquated. This must be obvious.
In other words, the resume of science is unimpeachable. Religion is debunked superstition. Entering the debate requires those disclaimers, lest we not be allowed…to enter the debate.
Which leaves insight, wonder, awe, inquiry, and even open-mindedness, et al, on the sidelines. And surely too love, beauty, principle, justice, and hundreds of other quite real phenomenon, not a one of which is scientifically provable. Philosophically yes; scientifically, no.
So flip this topic over on its other side: In our enlightened, scientific, objectified frame of modern reference, with all its debunking performed and all the quaint old notions its banished, banished, how is it that the spiritual quality of man, as often as not codified and given form in his finest religious enlightenment, has an entire dimension of experience completely outside of the Darwinian standard of our contemporary, scientific day?
In other words, from where comes secular, postmodern, declared, presumed science, painted up as objective, irrefutable objectivity while it’s actually faith-bound and highly idealistic, or it’s various soon-to-be-fact pursuits of hopeful knowledge, they possessing all the properties of faith?
I mean, one day fairly soon, science will alone possess the grand unification of all there is. But that’s neither faith nor is it foolish.
You see, among other things, humans absolutely violate the survival of the fittest rule — we function in the realm of ideas and conscious thought, the physical, scientific universe having somehow developed these decidedly unscientific qualities for reasons only it knows. Plus, humans have an experential quality that contains a entire universe of abstracts utterly useless to the “scientific”, Darwinian trajectory atheists place so much faith in.
Yet, there they are. And they penetrate, well ahead of science, down into the soup of the building blocks of the universe itself. The entire nature of the physical universe, even apart from the great, eternal, problem of its own genesis — one that tears to shreds the false “scientific” constructs of natural versus supernatural — is based on the “faith” that things just are as they are and do as they do.
Penetrate the quantum realm to see this writ large: Below the approximate threshold between Newtonian space and the great mystery of the quantum realm — in other words, when dealing with what this entire construct known as reality is based upon — lies physical self-motivation: Subatomics do what they do simply because they do so! We conjure up Forces to explain what they do, but we leave the question of how they do so functionally ignored.
And this is “scientific”. To the point we’ll trust this vast sea of openendedness, Dawkins-like, to resolve itself, it’s apparent historical proclivity to do nothing whatsoever of the sort notwithstanding.
Because to be faithful to science, we must. Just as we must leave the question of why for the philosophers. So much for grand unification, no?
Imagine: Hard, objective, real, tangible, mystery-solving, answer-bearing (faithful) science knows not a thing about why, and very little, at some very pertinent, physical levels, about how.
Of course, those abstracts will (or should) gnaw at us, even as I have used the common words devised to define them in these simple sentences.
But of course, presumptive, displacing science is not faith. And the sheer faith that science will unfailingly produce An Answer is, of course, somehow also not faith, even though science, by nature, produces as many questions as answers, that being its very nature.
All of this not to bang too much on science — it is as some have observed: The best we have at explaining the physical nature of things. But the experential nature of the human soul, not so much. And the underlying causation and reasons for the existence of All, not at all.
This is no argument for intelligent design. But it’s supremely ironic that science, when used as The Sole Eventual Answer so many faithfully use it as, must then depend so firmly on limiting perspectives and defining parameters. Perhaps it really shouldn’t be used that way. Perhaps we should acknowledge that in reality, science is quite beholden to the faith it clearly resides inside, and that the ability the conscious mind has to grasp realities entirely outside of the sciences proves that they are not masters. They are dependents.
griefer: “There is a strong correlation between profession:scientist and faith:none, but the hidden variable is not a desire to rule the the world. it is IQ and g.”
I am not at all sure about this. As a grad student in a university physics department, I can certainly agree that there’s a lot of scientists who profess atheism. Even more common are those for whom religion simply isn’t enough of their mental landscape to even care enough to call themselves atheists. But I’m really not sure the percentage of the practicing religious is much lower among university physicists than it is among the general population. How many of those at your local Starbucks go to church, or pray regularly, or read their Bible, or in any way take their professed Christian or other religion seriously? I don’t know, but it’s surely not many.
I submit that the hidden variable is not IQ. It’s honesty. A scientist will at least not lie and check the “Christian” box on the survey when there’s nothing in his life to warrant self-identifying as such. The average Joe will.
But why is there any burden on atheists to prove that God does not exist?
Well, because you are the ones making the claim that God Does Not Exist. Not may not, not god is unlikely, not god doesn’t really make a lot of sense. You are taking the bold step of saying that you CAN prove a negative and God absolutely positively DOES NOT EXIST.
Even if every religion on earth is wrong, Science can only really support agnosticism. If you said ‘there’s no evidence of god, and science remains agnostic on the subject til some turns up, anyway let’s change the subject from something we can never prove and talk about these molecules!’
But that’s not what you say. you say ‘god absolutely doesn’t exist and you people are hanging out with an invisible friend, god you’re stupid.’ If you were less obnoxious about proselytizing your faith you’d get less static about it.
It’s unfortunate that so many of the pro-Derbyshire posts here confirm what Berlinski says about scientists and atheism. Particularly the arrogance of atheist science, and the reduction of faith and belief in God to literal readings of Genesis (the comments about IQ, which are simply bigoted, are a good example).
Unlike others who want to say that either Berlinski or Derbyshire (take your pick) is a hack, I think both make good points. I *have* read recent issues of many science magazines, and the opposition to theism isn’t as casual as Derbyshire implies. It is *often* virulent and bigoted. More so among the fellow-travelers than the scientists themselves, of course.
For the record, I am a theist who does not read Genesis literally (like most Christians), and who has no particular problem with Evolution. I think the conflict over these things has more to do with science intruding rudely on theology (Dawkins being a good example) and vice versa with ID. It’s the constant sniping that’s the problem. Dawkins and his ilk only make the debate more difficult (same with ID). Neither side really seems to want to admit their own role in poisoning the debate. It’s all about reducing their opponent to the most ridiculous theory.
There is a wide middle ground here.
One problem with griefer’s (nishi’s?) IQ. To griefer/nishi it’s all IQ, 24/7, thereby subscribing to the quite religious view of special knowledge.
Which, naturally, leaves perspective at the curb.
If perspective was irrelevant, there’d be a linear consensus among scientists (and for that matter, among every subset within the IQ architecture.)
I have a fair amount of personal respect for Derb, given his willingness to regularly engage people directly (and privately, via e-mail). I also realize he’s aiming somewhat for humor here, but I fail to see the difference in speciously querying Berlinski on Unkulunkulu and the editing of Dawkins’ comments that Derb in “Expelled” (which I, or for that matter Derb, haven’t seen.)
I’m not all that familiar with Berlinski’s work but it strikes me that “ID types*” and Darwinists spend a lot of time talking past one another about these issues, and that much of the intellectual dishonesty in this debate comes from a refusal to take either side at their intended meaning. This may be perfectly unintentional or the result of frustration, but it seems quite common.
For example, Derb postulates an either/or scenario in Berlinski’s work in order to play off a multi-cultural riff of world religions and comically imply that Berlinski hasn’t given much care to alternatives to Christianity. However, this relies on a completely literal reading of Genesis, something few Christians would sanction as the basis for a scientific rational for understanding what happened. The essence of any reference to Genesis in a scientific context is to that of a Creator. Perhaps Berlinski tries to draw in other inferences from Genesis (the birds/reptiles order is interesting, given the recent discoveries of dinosaur/chicken relationships
and those might be interesting from a theological and literary perspective, but the essence of Genesis is that God created life in a way that is beyond our ken.
So, while Derb has a bit of fun drawing in the cornucopia of world religions, the essential conflict between created and chance life is obscured. Getting to the heart of that may not be as much fun (and is immensely difficult, given the chasm between metaphysics and science – which Derb has always correctly pointed out) but it might provide more room for some understanding and carve out some common ground or at least some common understandings.
*Creationist may be technically accurate, since that refers to anyone who believes the material universe is the product of some intelligence, but as Derb uses it pejoritatively, like an epithet, I prefer the ID term – which is more generic in polite usage.
Ann:
It is true that a growing number of physicists are searching for something that would explain the Big Bang.
I myself have problems with this search, however:
(1.) The “arrow of time” represented by increasing entropy is better explained if the cosmological system does not pre-date the Big Bang; otherwise, we have to ask how a pre-expansion universe at a lower state of order got into a higher state (the point of the Bang). That requires recourse to energy-sources from outside our space-time, and now we’re talking miraculous intervention all over again.
(2.) This is acknowledged by scientists who think in higher dimensions (e.g. string theorists) and they’re willing to allow for a collision of “branes” in a higher-dimensional “bulk” to be the source *of* our space-time from *outside* our space time. This allows them to posit something outside our universe, but something which is decidedly Not God.
And they might be right! But they have no proof from which to say so, for, as Douglas Adams humorously observed, one can’t “fire missiles at right-angles to reality.” One can’t interact with that which is outside our space-time in any meaningful way. No experiment is possible. The preference of a Materialist for a purely material First Cause outside our space-time is just that, a preference. He LIKES it more than the notion of a Personal Cause.
Which is, I think, the origin of all of these “What Caused The Big Bang” theories. Hubble himself didn’t like the notion of the Big Bang; he and others have always complained that it smacked of divine intervention. And they’re right, so let’s not be surprised if they go looking, with a certain feverish intensity, for any alternative!
And you know what? One day they may find one (one that they can experimentally demonstrate, I mean, not just one they can pleasantly imagine), and it STILL won’t matter to the whole Theism/Atheism argument. It really won’t. Because whatever they find either has Causality in space-and-time as events in our universe do, or it is, itself, miraculous. And if it has Causality, then we’re back to searching for a First Cause, all over again.
Scientists are our friends. Seriously! Sure, I know, they keep making philosophical pronouncements on the basis of scientific discoveries, thereby demonstrating that, however professionally trained they are as scientists, they’re often rank amateurs at philosophy. But everyone has character flaws. Is it any surprise that the character flaw most endemic to some scientists, is that of being a know-it-all?
Let us then be who God made us to be, and be as forgiving and tolerant of the character flaws of others as we can. Even if it’s Darwin, Dawkins, or Derbyshire.
Sez MHatch: “It is common for Darwinists to define human actions as evil e.g., anthropogenic global warming.
Where in the theory of evolution is evil defined?”
Quoi? WTF? My straw-manometer just pegged the dial. Apart from the tendentious and baggage laden description of, say, an evolutionary biologist as a ‘Darwinist’ – which, we are meant to read, is a member of some sort of weird sect like the Exclusive Brethren – if any time a public figure identified with the defence of the science of evolution against obscurantism opines that ‘global warming is evil’, he is speaking as a private citizen, and not with his ‘Darwinist’ hat on. As such, we should pay him as much (or as little) heed as we would anyone else.
As for ‘evil’ in the neo-Darwinist synthesis: there have been many and varied approaches taken under its aegis to the problem of why altruism arose.
A very nice takedown of an irrational piece.
That said, you ought not have whitewashed Dawkins. He’s an “evangelical atheist” who goes out of his way to both insult other belief systems and convert others to his.
Hitchens (while I respect the man) also has a stated bias. While you cited him in his statement about merely believing in one God less, you neglected to do so with respect to his arguments that religion is a negative force.
Both have written books forthrightly stating their positions.
For full disclosure, I believe in ID. Within certain limitations and under certain definitions.
That God created life and put in place the mechanisms of evolution (of which we still only have a limited understanding) is philosophically defensible.
Arguing that “random mutation” is unlikely to have created the results we observe through the fossil record and direct observation is also perfectly defensible. Making this arguement implies design, which in turn implies a designer.
Neither is falsible, but then, neither is the current proposed mechanism of randomn chance.
Excellent post, R. C. May I take it as a confirmation of the great diversity of scientific (or philosophically scientific) perspective as well as the semantic issues within the constructs of “natural” and “supernatural”?
One could argue a powerful case that matter and energy are themselves constructed of supernatural constituents.
Mr. Derbyshire,
I enjoy reading you, and particularly on this subject. A couple thoughts:
You write (in your Berlinski review linked above): “I am aware that galaxies collide and pass through each other, but are there really instances of them merging?”
You may know this by now (the review was from 2005), but galaxies do merge. To supply a ‘for instance’, check out the super-galaxy Messier 87. You can see a great representation of the galactic filamentary structure here (first five minutes, I believe), with M87 anchoring our nearest galaxy cluster:
http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/lectures/info_2007/2007_08_28.htm
Our current models suggest mergers account for the 10% or so of galaxies that are elliptical.
That’s one. Two, it’s possible that, upon reading your writings on science and religion, one takes away the idea that you come down on the side of science because its methodology is superior in principle and in fact, but for me, personally, I don’t think you stress this point hard enough. As Nietzsche wrote, “The most valuable insights are arrived at last; but the most valuable insights are methods.” Truth claims arrived at from pure reason, intuition (redundant, I know), and revelation are epiphenomena of a species-specific pathos; they are radically contingent, pure cacophony produced by methodological noise.
So when someone tells you that, at bottom, one must also have faith in science, so neener-neener, you can say, yes, this is true, but my faith is elevated to procedure, whereas your faith is mired in result. He’ll either get it or he won’t, but by definition, you will have won.
The flaw in the athiest science argument can be illustrated by analogy.
UFO sightings, abuction stories, and comet suicide cults are not good evidence for the existence of life on other planets.
Hence there is no good evidence for life on other planets. Therefore the scientific conclusion is that life does not exist on other planets.
However if life is a natural development on this planet then (scientific or not) it exists elsewhere with near certainty even without “good evidence”. So in this case the scientific (according to Derbians) conclusion is almost certainly wrong.
By constraining a definition of science so that it produces wrong answers in a particular case, they discredit it’s usefulness to apply it to that case.
R.C. is right. Next month I think we will discover Higgs Bosons at CERN.
But Berlinski and Stein and their ilk will have to start moving faster to keep up with science.
The goalposts keep moving. I personally think we will be able to fabricate synthetic life in nanoscale, unpick the fabric of spacetime, map the omnium and build atoms from scratch in picoscale.
And I’m a theist!
“however professionally trained they are as scientists, they’re often rank amateurs at philosophy.”
and that is exactly why we decline to discuss pilosophy in our science classes and our laboratories.
You have your own universities and colleges and schools like Oral Roberts and BYU where people are trained to discuss philosophies.
Go forth and discuss IDT there.
lulz!
The big problem I see is the attempt to demonize science and scientists. Are we really ready for another Dark Age?
“One could argue a powerful case that matter and energy are themselves constructed of supernatural constituents.”
yes Ten, exactly, and that discussion belongs in a course curriculum at Oral Roberts, and not in my quantum mechanics class.
at MIT
And Luke is correct, Dawkins is an evangelical atheist….he is a proselytizer.
Dr. Francis Collins(observant catholic) and Dr. Scott Atran(atheist) are much better advocates for the interaction of thinker-believers and thinker-nonbelievers.
“What reason do we have to suppose that God might not exist?” Well, his being invisible, inaudible, intangible, nonaromatic, flavorless, and undetectable by any known instrument is a pretty good start.
I believe Mr. Berlinski has previously noted that arguments such as this can also be used against mathematics and its objects. I find it strange that Mr. Derbyshire, the author of a book about algebra, apparently fails to see the irony of denying the immateriality of “God” while implicitly accepting the immateriality of numbers and other mathematical concepts.
In other words, ladies and gentlemen, science is only open to Methodological Challenges; if the subject is This Universe, science is not vulnerable in any other way.
If you can enter that arena, have at it. If you can find a better discovery procedure than the scientific method, you will have earned a preeminent place in the pantheon of human genius.
Look…like JA says.
Science is the ultimate free marketplace of ideas.
For an idea to be discussed, it must be better than the current model.
IDT is the orthodoxy, the last years model.
You are trying to force us to buy an inferior last years model when we already have the current, superior model.
Good luck with that.
>> What exactly is the plausible materialistic explanation for lifes origin? Let’s start there, and remember, no faith allowed.
No faith allowed?
OK. Here goes:
I.
Don’t.
Know.
This is how those of us who respect the scientific method respond to questions when we don’t yet have enough data to justify a specific answer.
As you can see, Berlinsky is quite correct. We are horribly arrogant.
What motivates quantum particles, griefer/nishi?
hahaha
trudat
If I wanted an opinion on a suit, I might ask a fashion editor. If I wanted to find out how to cut a piece of metal perfectly in half, I’d ask a machinist. I would not expect the machinist to know much about the right cut of suit for my body, and I wouldn’t expect the fashion editor to know much of anything outside his area of expertise.
My impression of science today is that like many other fields, it rewards extreme specialization. Quantum physicists spend decades studying increasingly narrow but deep gaps. Biology is probably similar. These people are many things, but they are not generalists, and while it might be entertaining to find out what a quantum physicist thinks about Renee Zellweger’s Oscar gown, I wouldn’t expect the slightest level of expertise. If they are not qualified to comment on a dress, why should I care whether they think that the Bible is the revealed word of God Almighty?
FWIW, my fear is that we are descending into a world where both left and right embrace mutually-exclusive but equally-pernicious sets of non-truths. The left for its part is quite comfortable to dismiss every bit of reason that calls even its peripheral tenets into question.
The real danger in the Right embracing anti-scientific thought is that it increases the acceptability of these ideas generally. So we don’t just get more authority for Pope Benedict, we also get more authority for the Rev. Wright to talk about how white math turns black men into social outcasts.
Ten, that question goes to……….BYU!
hahahaha
seriously…wtf are “quantum particles?”
quantum mechanics is the relationship between quanta and elementary particles.
did you mean superparticles? exotic particles? gluons? quarks? charmed quarks?
upquarks? downquarks? jinnparticles? higgs bosons?
and “motivate” wtf does that mean? do you think particles are running around in little nanocars? do you think they are sentient?
jeez..the two properties of particles are mass and decay, moron.
and Berlinski got totally punked by the Derb.
Greifer writes:
“There is a strong correlation between profession:scientist and faith:none, but the hidden variable is not a desire to rule the the world.
it is IQ and g.”
With all due respect, this is nonsense. There are plenty of people with above-average IQ who espouse a strong faith (and plenty with below-average who happily ignore faith as much as science). This is the kind of egocentric twaddle that poisons these debates. I doubt it would withstand scientific scrutiny. Indeed, Dawkins claim of a genetic source for religious faith, while I disagree with it, demonstrates that the simplistic and self-serving idea that intelligence leads to irreligiousity is not even seriously taken by one who himself on occasion bolsters the idea with ill-considered rhetoric.
I would posit the following correlation as being more likely (but far from all-inclusive). People who gravitate towards a materialistic philosophy of existence are more likely to gravitate towards materialistic disciplines. Again, there are a fair few philosophers and scientists who weigh against that as a rule, but it’s a far fairer and objective concept than the pretense that intelligence is confirmed by a rejection of religion.
One last observation regarding the following comment:
“‘What reason do we have to suppose that God might not exist?’ Well, his being invisible, inaudible, intangible, nonaromatic, flavorless, and undetectable by any known instrument is a pretty good start.”
The problem with this statement is its sloppy generalization. There have been plenty of observations of God recorded throughout history. Now, it’s fair to say that, given the contradictions in those observations, that some of them are unreliable. What it is not fair to suggest though is that the absence of a scientifically-measurable God is somehow a crushing blow against the notion of God’s existence.
The same argument might be used to squash the concept of spontaneous/chance-based organization of life, etc. Most of all though, it stems from a kind of organized subjectivity. It suggests that because certain individuals, groups, etc. don’t encounter God that they can rightfully claim that He doesn’t exist.
Well, I’ve never been to Wales, but I have it on good authority that it’s there.
What motivates the smallest, irreducible quantum particle, griefer/nishi…is its motivating force. And what motivates that is what motivates that. Turtles upon turtles.
So unless there is no limit to “physical” reductionism — to little levers operated by yet more little levers — we should agree that science will indeed never explain anything outside of observable properties. And if there is a limit to physical reductionism, below which level stuff simply does inexplicably what it does…science will never prove anything outside of observable properties.
Ergo, at some deep level, stuff simply is what it is, a principle akin to…faith. With its mystical Origin akin to the supernatural, and presumably possessing the properties of the intent and will to set up such order, the force to pull it off, our awe at comprehending it, and perhaps even, the mutual love that comes from observing such properties. From which comes truth, honor, principle, beauty, and a host of other decidedly unscientific properties, all of them existing, ironically, within a cold, godless, random Place that assembled itself.
Because is it not a tenant of detached, isolated, secularized quantum mechanics that it exhibits inherent, self-motivated behaviors and group interactions (at something akin to Einstein’s spooky actions at a distance) but not Newtonian properties? Correct me if I’m mistaken, it’s not my field.
That discussion does indeed belong in a course curriculum at Oral Roberts, as well as in your quantum mechanics class. At MIT.
That it’s typically philosophically explored in neither is an inverse of the observable, philosophical notion that at the end of that detached scientific era, God must be again Infinite and the Universe will be again infinitely mysterious and the two shall become inseparable. Again.
I do believe that having been conflicted against God for so long, and quite understandably so, science will one day discover not your or my God, but the conviction that there is a Singularity, and that for all intents and purposes, It is indistinguishable from “God”. Such as It may be.
After which point (and with the diversion of Science! out of the way) we can accept again that the mind had already deduced and reasoned that “God” and God’s attributes were simply the sheer nature of things (that semantic conflict between the natural and the supernatural crops up here again, as does the observable fact that science cannot be expected to issue answers) and get on again to the abstract evidences of consciousness, not least of which are free will and the essential nature that all consciousnesses possesses a philosophy thereby.
nishi, you really do lack all meaningful perspective.
jeez..the two properties of particles are mass and decay, moron.
Thanks for making the precise point. And for missing the obvious irony. And the wordplay. And for bundling it all up, again, in your own tidy little IQ.
JA makes a critical error, in my opinion, when he writes:
“So when someone tells you that, at bottom, one must also have faith in science, so neener-neener, you can say, yes, this is true, but my faith is elevated to procedure, whereas your faith is mired in result.”
The error is grounded in a fundamental assumption that because science is based on a method for interrogating the material world (or at least the parts we can get at) and because the most direct part of our existence is grounded in that material world, that the method science employs is superior.
Upon further reflection, something close to a tautology emerges: “We are material so anything that examines the material is superior.” The assumption presupposes either the absence or the impossibility of getting at metaphysical reality.
I certainly don’t subscribe to certain relativist concepts of the material world (i.e. that it is more or less our perception that is real and not necessarily any reality beyond that – that sort of thinking, which I’m simplifying a bit for brevity’s sake), but there is a difference between the efficacy of a method designed to get at the most direct part of experience and the “superiority” of faith based on it.
This is especially so when the “faith” in question has more to do with the assumptions about God, the source of life, the universe, etc. derived from materialist reductionism, rather than the specific things that science can authoritatively tell us.
In other words, JA seems to be arguing that any conclusions he reaches about metaphysical matters are sounder, simply because he reached them through his reliance on a material process.
The contradictions of such a position should be readily apparent.
Derb aside, nishi, allow this illustration:
This, quantum mechanics is the relationship between quanta and elementary particles, implies precisely this: So unless there is no limit to “physical” reductionism — to little levers operated by yet more little levers — we should agree that science will indeed never explain anything outside of observable properties. And if there is a limit to physical reductionism, below which level stuff simply does inexplicably what it does…science will never prove anything outside of observable properties.
The mark of a good mind, nishi, likely includes the ability to originate a broader, more creative perspective when confronted with paradox. I fear you cannot see the reality trees for the self-limiting, hidebound elitism of your young, presumably peer-approved predispositions about it.
I’m unaware of any proofs — especially within the context of existence boiling down to the two faithful properties of mass and decay — by such acclaim.
Scientists often confuse the model with reality. That is, they find a reasonable way to map out what MAY have happened, and then confuse it with what DID happen. Christians, often confuse the scriptures with reality, that is, they confuse Hebrew legends, myths and stories with history (for example, care to provide any secular evidence for King Saul, King David, King Solomon and his temple, or Hebrews in Egypt as Slaves?).
Both groups, seem to me, rather silly.
How much less dishonest to be able to say (as only a few from each group seem able) “We don’t know, and it doesn’t matter all that much anyway.”
If you want to believe in a God, or Gods or no Gods, then choose for yourself. However, if you are foolish enough to hold your belief as fact, then you appear no better than the fool on the other side. We do not know if a deity of any sort exists, Yahweh has been pretty silent for about 2000 years, his Son appears to have gotten lost on his way back and Zeus and the gang apparently moved out of Mt. Olympus awhile back. Further, we DO NOT KNOW what happens after death. There may be Heaven or Hell, there may be reincarnation, there may be nothing… none of us will know until we experince it ourselves. ANYONE who tells you differently, is lying. They may be the nicest old pastor form a quaint little town, a bombastic megachurch Reverend or Richard Dawkins… not so different in the end.
There was only one Commandment that Moses really needed to bring down from that Mountain:
“Thou Shalt Think For Yourself, Schmuck!”
For those interested in a great exchange regarding the “Science-VS-Religion” as well as a review of Ben Stein’s new documentary “Expelled” go to http://politerminal.blogspot.com
Cheers!
See Greg Bahnsen v. Gordon Stein debate “Does God Exist?” as only one example in thousands
second, and would note that it can be found on youtube. The ultimate smackdown
“Given the account of creation offered in Genesis and the account offered in A Brief History of Time, I know of no sane man who would hesitate between the two.”
Derbyshire seems not to have noticed that it is hesitation that Berlinski is defaming, not one choice or the other. Perhaps he is hoping that both the scientifically literate and his Young Earth Creationist friends from the Discovery Institute, where Berlinski is a senior fellow of the Center for Science and Culture, will presume their own choice is the sane one.
“What reason do we have to suppose that God might not exist?” Well, his being invisible, inaudible, intangible, nonaromatic, flavorless, and undetectable by any known instrument is a pretty good start.
same logic applies to the Laws of Logic, something materialist can not account for and are ultimately irrational.
“as well as in your quantum mechanics class. At MIT.”
nope
keep it your unis and bible colleges, tyvm.
In my quantum mechanics class we study the double slit experiment and the quantum teleportation experiment. We are busy unpicking the fabric of the metaverse at CERN, WITH EXPERIMENTS.
Over the last 50 years we built tools and metrics for the science of the very small.
And we plan to use them.
We shall not waste time speculating about supernatural “motivations” when we plan to discover physical ones.
This does not threaten my perception of god…he is unknown and unknowable.
And we will get there eventually.
But until that time i will not tolerate whining because we won’t discuss god in our universities. You have plenty of unis and colleges and churches.
Go discuss god there.
Nor will I tolerate the slander of Science or scientists.
By either Berlinski or Ben Stein.
I did not say that high IQ made one into a atheist perforce.
I said there was a strong correlation between high IQ and being a scientist, and a strong correlation between high IQ and being an atheist.
High IQ being the “hidden” variable.
Berlinski said there was a strong correlation between being an atheist and being a scientist.
Not me.
Decide for yourself, but remember, correlation is not causation.
CB: “In other words, JA seems to be arguing that any conclusions he reaches about metaphysical matters are sounder, simply because he reached them through his reliance on a material process.”
Science says nothing about metaphysical matters; these constructs are outside science’s purview, and senseless therein.
However, I can say something about metaphysics. Wittgenstein was correct when he wrote, “The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena”; was wrong when he asserted the insensibility of making propositions about the world as a whole (see Godel, Incompleteness); and was right when he wrote:
“The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science — and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person…this method would be the only strictly correct one.”
The question “Why existence?” will forever be senseless and therefore unanswerable. “The facts all contribute only to setting the problem, not to its solution.”
I see, nishi.
So even though the double slit is akin to a mental experiment (in that it naturally asks if particles are sentient and what effect the observer could possibly have, even though I did not ask you either and you still concluded I was suggesting particle nanocars) you cannot bring yourself a perspective that simply allows itself to ask to what level of reducibility you will, in faith and by asserted intent, go in search of irreducibility.
This simple mental experiment is pointless, because, you know, you’ll prove the merit of science either by reducing stuff forever or by reducing it to the point you have to accept that it floats on a entity or entities that simple are. And that simply do.
In other words, The Bottom Turtle, an act of supreme faith (at least until the CERN fires up at which point you’re faithfully sure you’ll answer all why’s with all facts about the nature of all things.)
“We shall not waste time speculating about supernatural “motivations” when we plan to discover physical ones.”
But we shall not first deduce what “supernatural” means, or for that matter (no pun) what abstract or semantic device limits if from the “natural”.
Lovely. The trees of logic lost in a forest of faith. Outcome bowing to procedure, the unapproved to the approved, the question to the assertion, and the observation to the presumption.
Ten,
You are babbling. Please stop.
I’d expect such blissfully unaware confidence, Ratatosk, from a guy who’d condense Moses as only you have.
the Pajamafia just deleted my comment where i informed you all that Berlinski is a DI Stooge, and this is all Wedge Strategy craplogy.
we are wasting our spacetime here.
i suggest you put my comment back or i will get the derb to post it on NRO and also the fact that you are supressing info.
euwwwwwww
the Discovery Institute?
Berlinski you are a DI stooge and this all wedge strategy crapoloy.
The Wedge strategy is a political and social action plan authored by the Discovery Institute, the hub of the intelligent design movement. The strategy was put forth in a Discovery Institute manifesto known as the Wedge Document,[1] which describes a broad social, political, and academic agenda whose ultimate goal is to “defeat [scientific] materialism” represented by evolution, “reverse the stifling materialist world view and replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions”[2] and to “affirm the reality of God.”[3] Its goal is to “renew” American culture by shaping public policy to reflect conservative Christian, namely evangelical Protestant, values.[4]
Intelligent design is the belief that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not a naturalistic process such as natural selection. Implicit in the intelligent design doctrine is a redefining of science and how it is conducted. Wedge strategy proponents are dogmatically opposed to materialism,[6][7][8] naturalism,[7][9] and evolution,[10][11][12][13] and have made the removal of each from how science is conducted and taught an explicit goal.[14][15]
The strategy was originally brought to the public’s attention when the Wedge Document was leaked on the Web. The Wedge strategy forms the governing basis of a wide range of Discovery Institute intelligent design campaigns.
mondo waste of spacetime.
may i respectfully in you, David Berlinski, to take you social engineering and forcibly insert it where the sun don’t shine?
If both science and religion would be judged by what they do, and if each concerned itself only with what it might affect, the two would have nothing to say about each other.
“I personally think we will be able to fabricate synthetic life in nanoscale, unpick the fabric of spacetime, map the omnium and build atoms from scratch in picoscale.”
You may be right, of course…..but when that happens, what will it have demonstrated, please?
A. that random events can fabricate life and do all that other stuff?
or
B. that pre-existing intelligence can do those things?
This is the conundrum that materialists don’t wish to deal with, not that I can blame them. The ultimate “empricists” are faced with the fact that their origins story is no more subject to confirmation or falsifiability than is the Creation.
JA quotes:
“The question ‘Why existence?’ will forever be senseless and therefore unanswerable. ‘The facts all contribute only to setting the problem, not to its solution.’”
With all due respect, you are only resetting the problem I called attention to, albeit in philosophical terms that accomodate the materialist position.
“Why existence?” If one chooses to believe that question of existence is senseless, particularly (and ironically) given the significant amount of order/symmetry/code (to use Flew’s reference to DNA) in the universe, well that’s one’s choice. As we do exist, it’s a pertinent question.
The difficulty of the question does not make it senseless though, anymore than the difficulty of getting to a universal field theory or complex dimensions will dissuade the determined physicist. If physics is an infinite regression of material complexity, I suspect physicists will keep on studying it and certain physicists will keep on making pronounciations beyond science as to what it all means. One might maintain logical consistentancy in suggesting a certain meaninglessness to such physical endeavors, but it would hardly give scientific method a leg up as a broad source of support for faith in sussing out even its own material domain, much less existence in general.
As to the unanswerablity of the question, this too assumes a materialist universe, a faith in nothingness beyond the “natural” (read material) existence. Simply put, the existence of God would (does, given my own faith) shatter such presumptions, because the answers, answers that matter about the metaphysical world, would very much be within our grasp, either through communion with God or through reason based on the historical presentment of God both past and future. The question of God’s existence and the faith required therein only attest to the nature of metaphysical answers, not to the certainty of whether seeking them is senseless or not.
In other words, the notion of absurdity in seeking the metaphysical only draws strength from a contrary faith in the absence or meaningless of the metaphysical. Given the many complexities of human experience that defy easy material reduction, from religious experience to the one you’re having in your mind as you mull this over, such assumptions seem more than a bit presumptuous.
“I did not say that high IQ made one into a atheist perforce.
I said there was a strong correlation between high IQ and being a scientist, and a strong correlation between high IQ and being an atheist.
High IQ being the “hidden” variable.
Berlinski said there was a strong correlation between being an atheist and being a scientist.
Not me. ”
You merely implied the correlative link between intelligence and atheism. I don’t recall focusing on the correlation between atheism and science, so Berlinski’s comments are somewhat superfluous here.
However, these kinds of presumed correlations exist in a vaccuum of their own making. All kinds of non-normative ideas and personality types have correlations with higer IQs, including, if I’m not much mistaken, psychopaths (or perhaps more accurately sociopaths). This also presumes IQ is a reliable indicator of intellect. If this were true, Marilyn Vos Savant would be considered the most brilliant person on earth. I’m sure she’s a nice lady but I’m not prepared to suggest we offer her that particular crown.
My point is that such correlations are self-serving and offer little to the discussion. The point stands, I believe.
CB: “The difficulty of the question does not make it senseless though, anymore than the difficulty of getting to a universal field theory or complex dimensions will dissuade the determined physicist…As to the unanswerablity of the question, this too assumes a materialist universe, a faith in nothingness beyond the “natural” (read material) existence.”
It’s not merely difficult, it’s impossible — logically impossible. And the bottom is not “nothing”, but “something”, insurmountably ineffable — a set of principally unstatable questions and answers which we elide by necessity (Wittgenstein says we “climb the ladder and pull it up behind us”).
The Way, if spoken, is not the Way — etc. In other words, the truths metaphysics seeks to explain are inexpressible in a perfectly precise sense. “We” know they are there, of course, because “we” are here. But we’ll never be able to “think” these truths, or say them.
This is not a material necessity, but a logical one. The answer to “Why Existence rather than Non-existence?” cannot be captured in language, and the question is poorly-formed.
Of course, that doesn’t stop you from saying stuff about it. It just means that it is logically impossible to distinguish the truth or falsity of your proposition.
A thought from Mr. Li Hongzhi on why we shouldn’t believe science is the ultimate truth:
“Many people have thus formed a fixed notion (about science). If people of previous generations set
forth certain laws and doctrines, such as Einstein’s theory of relativity, people then regard
them as the pinnacle of science. People’s thinking in later generations is then confined
within these things, and if someone dares to think higher or intends to go beyond them in
his research, immediately there will be people who say, “Can you really surpass
Einstein?” Why is that? The existing physical environment of modern empirical science
is restraining people. If a truly accomplished scientist exceeds the insights of previous
generations, he will find that although the previous generations’ insights are true and
correct within their domain, once someone surpasses them he will discover that they are
not true per se, and in fact serve to limit people. A truly accomplished person who thinks
for himself will dare to break through them. You will have truly accomplished something
when you break through the conventions set by others.”
People’s thinking in later generations is then confined
within these things, and if someone dares to think higher or intends to go beyond them in
his research, immediately there will be people who say, “Can you really surpass
Einstein?” Why is that? The existing physical environment of modern empirical science
is restraining people.
Wow, this is dumb.
Speaking personally, as a physicist, I would love nothing more than to surpass Einstein. I doubt I will ever have the opportunity.
Any of us would love to be the one who does that. We just realize how high the bar is set.
There is nothing sacred about Einstein and nothing he says is taken as gospel.
All of us want to be the one who changes everything. Nobody is limited by Einstein.
As I told you before John, on this topic you simply sre blinded.
I’ve read Berlinski’s book. You offer nothing but drivel in response to it….like reviewing a movie you have never seen.
Unbelieveable.
Jim: There is a God.
Bob: Prove it.
Jim: OK. I have here a potato. You see that I take a 1/8 inch slice of it.
Bob: With the skin?
Jim: Are you looking? Here, try to bend it.
Bob: It bends a little.
Jim: Give it a good bend.
Bob: It broke. It doesn’t bend very much.
Jim: OK, here is another slice.
Bob: Am I going to bend this one too?
Jim: Here, I drop it into this hot oil.
Bob: I see it sizzling in there. I like potato chips.
Jim: Do you see what it is doing?
Bob: It is sizzling, and getting brown, and curling up.
Jim: Yes, curling up. Bending a lot. Now, you couldn’t bend that chip, and I couldn’t, and I can’t imagine any power on earth that could bend that chip. But, see, it bends. So, there is a God.
Bob: Did you learn that in philosophy class?
“I personally think we will be able to fabricate synthetic life in nanoscale, unpick the fabric of spacetime, map the omnium and build atoms from scratch in picoscale.”
You may be right, of course…..but when that happens, which of the following will it have demonstrated?
A. that random events can fabricate life and do all that other stuff?
or
B. that pre-existing intelligence can do those things?
This is the conundrum that materialists don’t wish to deal with, not that I can blame them. These ultimate “empricists” are faced with the fact that their origins story is no more subject to confirmation or falsifiability than is that of the Creationists.
Or am I missing something?
I think you’ve got it wrong. Berlinski obviously means that no sane man would think twice about believing an Iron Age creation myth involving a magic tree and talking serpent. At least, if Berlinksi is sane, that’s probably what he means.
“What reason do we have to suppose that God might not exist?” Well, his being invisible, inaudible, intangible, nonaromatic, flavorless, and undetectable by any known instrument is a pretty good start.
OK Mr. Derbyshire.
Now your consciousness is invisible, inaudible, intangible, nonaromatic and flavorless, and undetectable by any known instrument.
Thus, Mr. Derbyshire, I deduce, your consciousness, i.e. YOU, do not exist.
I am appalled.
As a Christian I am under no obligation to support sophistry, confusion, manipulation and outright falsehood by other Christians. Some would say that it is my duty to judge truly on this earth. My fairly-well-informed judgement is that Berlinski’s piece and his comment in response to Derbyshire are manipulative rhetoric, not arguments.
As a Christian, a geologist and a student of critical thinking, it pains me to see just how bad his work and the comments of his supporters are.
There is only one way to be honest and at the same time a literal creationist: you must believe that God created evidence for an old earth and evolution. Honest men and women have spent many combined lifetimes using honestly recorded observations and honestly developed arguments to get to the current state of knowledge.
Don’t imagine, fellow believers, that faith and vehemence substitute for truthfulness.
Gabriel, I think you misunderstood Mr. Li’s quote:
“People’s thinking in later generations is then confined
within these things, and if someone dares to think higher or intends to go beyond them in
his research, immediately there will be people who say, “Can you really surpass
Einstein?” Why is that? The existing physical environment of modern empirical science
is restraining people.”
Mr. Li said “existing physical environment” — this is the people around you and the way they think, as well as the world around you and the method of modern science that focuses on measurement, not experience. Your ideas will not be immediately accepted by others because they are threatened by the new paradigm. They won’t understand and appreciate what you are trying to do because it doesn’t fit into accepted wisdom and everything they think they know. Just look at Copernicus, Galileo and more currently anyone doing research on climate change that demonstrates the world is cooling. Some things just can’t be measured, like time-space in other dimensions, but you might be able to experience them in some way. Science hasn’t given a good answer what happens to a person after they die, for example.
If you are looking for the ultimate truth, it’s out there, but you’ll have to look somewhere besides science. I think that’s what Mr. Li is saying. Best regards….
I think its fruitful every once and while to return to exactly what it is that the argument is over. Darwin says that life’s system came about by random mutations of the organism over long periods of time, followed by natural selection.
This is a description of just one of those systems: vision.
“When light strikes the retina of the eye, a photon interacts with a molecule called 11-cis-retinal, which rearranges within picoseconds to form trans-retinal. The change in the shape of retinal forces a change in the shape of the protein, rhodopsin, to which the retinal is tightly bound. The protein’s metamorphosis alters its behavior, making it stick to another protein called transducin. Before interacting with activated rhodopsin, transducin had tightly bound a small molecule called GDP. But when transducin interacts with activated rhodopsin, the GDP falls off and a molecule called GTP binds to transducin. GTP-transducin-activated rhodopsin now binds to a protein called phosphodiesterase, located in the inner membrane of the cell. When attached to activated rhodopsin and its entourage, the phosphodiesterase acquires the ability to chemically cut a molecule called cGMP. Initially there are a lot of cGMP molecules in the cell, but the phosphodiesterase lowers its concentration, like a pulled plug lowers the water level in a bathtub. Another membrane protein that binds cGMP is called an ion channel. It acts as a gateway that regulates the number of sodium ions in the cell. Normally the ion channel allows sodium ions to flow into the cell, while a separate protein actively pumps them out again. The dual action of the ion channel and pump keeps the level of sodium ions in the cell within a narrow range. When the amount of cGMP is reduced because of cleavage by the phosphodiesterase, the ion channel closes, causing the cellular concentration of positively charged sodium ions to be reduced. This causes an imbalance of charge across the cell membrane which, finally, causes a current to be transmitted down the optic nerve to the brain. The result, when interpreted by the brain, is vision.”
This complex cascade of chemical reactions is what Darwin says came about by nothing more than sheer dumb luck – random mutations in the DNA code as it is copied from one generation of organisms to another. Actually he didn’t say that, only because he no idea of how complex the entire system was. However, he did give us random mutation, and the power of random mutation could not only synthesize these specific proteins in the first place, but could then place them in the stupidly complex matrix that causes organisms to see. Yeah, sure.
I know all the Darwinist out there would love to argue over the Big Spooky in the sky, but first you have deal with the realities of modern knowledge. Something that Derby refuses to do, as plainly witnessed by his review of Expelled and Berliski’s comments.
i repeat…do not engage.
Berlinski is a Discovery Institute stooge.
he argues in bad faith.
his entire piece is wedge strategy social engineering.
a colossal waste of spacetime.
you could be reading Penrose or Susskind or Scott Atran.
Griefer:
Susskind? Are you certain you want to go there?
Susskind, when asked about the possibility of a failure to establish the multi-verse theory, (would that leave us with ID) he says – “I doubt that physicists will see it that way. If, for some unforeseen reason, the landscape turns out to be inconsistent – maybe for mathematical reasons, or because it disagrees with observation – I am pretty sure that physicists will go on searching for natural explanations of the world. But I have to say that if that happens, as things stand now we will be in a very awkward position. Without any explanation of nature’s fine-tunings we will be hard pressed to answer the ID critics”.
Four things are in complete display. 1) there is a rush to get an explanation 2) because one does NOT exist (griefer), and 3) ID is the explanation to beat, 4) ID explains natures OBSERVED fine-tuning, where materialism cannot.
Wow, a theory that actually fits the evidence. Its that whole “First Cause” thing. Poor materialists, they wished the laws of nature could just be excused when it gets hot in the kitchen.
(Biology has been getting away with it for at least 50 years.)
John Derbyshire writes: “What reason do we have to suppose that God might not exist?” Well, his being invisible, inaudible, intangible, nonaromatic, flavorless, and undetectable by any known instrument is a pretty good start. But why is there any burden on atheists to prove that God does not exist? How would you set about proving that Poseidon, Wotan, Ahriman, Unkulunkulu, or the Great Manitou do not exist, David? Come on, give us a clue. I don’t want a detailed 80-page proof in each case. Just outline for me what your proof procedure would be.”
In my opinion, there is an important distinction between claims of deity John. And that distinction is the historical appearance of Jesus Christ ‘In The Flesh’.
—Jesus came in the flesh (empirically). Intelligent design is a powerful tool to do just that because it points to the ‘alien author of life’ who is ‘not of this world’.
At least one, ‘scientifically minded person’ has said to me that any empirical proof of alien life would verify the hypothesis; especially if they had the same DNA as we. By manifesting Himself ‘like a son of man’, Jesus fullfilled these ‘scientific’ requirements.
There is a larger theme for the two witnesses, and it is the coherence between the spiritual (philosophical) and material (empirical) witness that is so powerful in the life of Jesus.
John 8:12 When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” 13 The Pharisees challenged him, “Here you are, appearing as your own witness; your testimony is not valid.” 14 Jesus answered, “Even if I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is valid, for I know where I came from and where I am going. But you have no idea where I come from or where I am going. 15 You judge by human standards; I pass judgment on no one. 16 But if I do judge, my decisions are right, because I am not alone. I stand with the Father, who sent me. 17 In your own Law it is written that the testimony of two men is valid. 18 I am one who testifies for myself; my other witness is the Father, who sent me.”
He came ‘in the flesh’ (right down to our DNA) in order to reveal Himself ‘empirically’. He performed miracles to ‘prove’ who He was. He then gave many ‘convincing proofs’ (as Paul said) for His resurrection.
Let us have some sympathy for the doubters, because it was only ‘after’ Thomas ‘touched Him’ that he fell to his knees and declared, ‘My Lord and my God!’
We do not have a God who is ‘only spiritual’ (though God is spirit), He also lowered Himself to our level, not only to reveal Himself in ‘our empirical terms’, but to pay the penalty for our sin.— ( http://rob-lock.livejournal.com/ )
JA writes:
“In other words, the truths metaphysics seeks to explain are inexpressible in a perfectly precise sense. “We” know they are there, of course, because “we” are here. But we’ll never be able to “think” these truths, or say them.”
I appreciate the patient and polite discourse JA offers and endeavor to continue in that vein. It seems to me that there are two key weaknesses in the line of reasoning JA posits.
First off, there is little that can be explained in a “perfectly precise sense” if one looks closely enough at the thing being explained. Mathematics for example, claims precision, but exists as an abstraction of the reality it describes. A simple example is the concept of 1 + 1 = 2. This is “perfectly precise” in the abstract, but complicated once we decide to apply the equation to two real objects, say apples (if only to keep the Genesis thread fresh in our minds
. One apple plus one apple equals two apples, but the apples themselves are unique. The equation only serves to describe the precision of counting the objects, which again is an abstraction of the things themselves.
In language, we resort to a number of similar tactics to convey meaning (and Wittgenstein is of course a major authority on how some of this happens) but the assumption that because a truth cannot be expressed in language that it cannot be got at is a falsity.
Thought is another matter, but only because we tend to think in terms of our experience. Yet, reason allows us to reach greater levels of truth in the exploration of the material world, and not always based on direct experience. We synthesize and imagine and draw upon our specific experiences of mind as well as senses to envision certain conclusions.
Take Descartes famous observation “cogito ergo sum,” for example. This is not a simple material formulation. Descartes is addressing a sense of being, and in the context of his philosophical investigations, particularly one that is not necessarily connected to a material reality (though he reached that natural conclusion soon enough). The sense of being is as much a metaphysical truth as a physical truth. Whether or not one believes in metaphysical truths is immaterial, for if they exist, Descartes is clearly onto one.
It is the disagreement in the existence of metaphysical truths that JA latches on to, and this is an assumption, not a methodically proven fact.
Approaching this idea of “perfectly precise” (which is itself an imperfect formulation, but fair enough in a general linguistic sense) physics and the other material sciences offer much that is far from perfectly precise, but is broadly accepted. Evolutionary theory is full of imprecisions (from the origins question regarding DNA to speciation to the question of mind itself), yet practical applications abound. Physics probes deeper and deeper into the minute recesses of material reality and there are many questions left unresolved and even the speculation that reality may be unresolvable in terms of a fundamental material substance/particle/wave.
Yet science clearly presents useful and practical outcomes and observations, and many scientists, partly on faith it would seem, are comfortable ruling out or limiting metaphysical truths based on this far from this “perfectly precise” standing.
One may argue that science is “more precise” than metaphysics but it is arguable that it is not necessarily more practical where some things are concerned. Moral truths/imperatives, for example, do not rely on physicality for their power. There are physical outcomes to the application of these truths, but the truths themselves are not expressly determined by the methodological interrogation of material reality.
In other words, just as science finds some consensus on material matters, humans have found a fair amount of consensus on some matters that could be classified as metaphysical – laws, sense of being. Saying that these are not precise in no way dulls their power or their meaning.
In other cases, such as religious experience, there is a fair amount of testimony. Certainly, one may disbelieve (or believe) such testimony, but the question remains one of one’s faith in the experience and not one of access to the truths of those experiences. We come full circle then to the acceptance (of at least the possibilty) or rejection of metaphysical truths. The assertion that one can not get at their preciseness is itself a kind of word game, divorced from the experience of many.
Finally, the historical aspect of religious experience, of which Christianity provides the strongest example in my opinion (one of many reasons it is my faith), cannot be disregarded as lightly as it is here (and tends to be in philosophy of a secular bent). Yes, there is a variety of such experiences and surely many cannot be true if one of them is. Yet, if one is, then metaphysical truths are among us. That they rely upon faith to draw the viewer to them does not diminish their power as truths (and not simply experiences).
To put it in direct terms, if a man sees God, no matter how many who are not there tell him he is a fool and a liar, the truth remains with him. If others believe in that truth, it reamins the truth, even if the others rely upon faith to access it.
And while this truth may not be falsifiable under the terms of the scientific method, or “precise,” that individual who recognizes it understands their place in the cosmos to a degree that physics and biology cannot reach.
That others deny this does not change the nature of the truth or the way in which it may be reached.
This complex cascade of chemical reactions is what Darwin says came about by nothing more than sheer dumb luck – random mutations in the DNA code as it is copied from one generation of organisms to another. Actually he didn’t say that, only because he no idea of how complex the entire system was. However, he did give us random mutation, and the power of random mutation could not only synthesize these specific proteins in the first place, but could then place them in the stupidly complex matrix that causes organisms to see. Yeah, sure.
Do tell us all about what Darwin said.
Because Darwin said no such thing.
Darwin never heard of genes or mutations.
This is the problem with arguing with Darwin deniers–they haven’t read Darwin, they have read only characterizations of Darwin.
Modern biologists know a lot more about biology than Darwin did. Darwin, in “The Origin of Species”, talked about a lot of things, like inheritance of acquired characteristics, that biologists no longer believe.
Biologists do not worship a hundred-year-old book.
The Big Idea that Darwin gets credit for is that inherited traits which aid reproductive success will spread through a population.
Vinson, i am a scientist and a believer.
Susskind is awesome. We may find god in a gap, so?
But i do not waste time arguing with DI scum.
and that is what Berlinski is.
/spit
A few additional (!)
thoughts along the thread JA and I have been traveling:
The abstraction of mathematics itself points to a metaphysical quality. Derb has more or less acknowledged this by pointing out that his status as a Mysterion, as opposed to an atheist, is in part based upon the idea that mathematics and other principles, while corresponding to reality, appear to exist apart from specific reality. (I’m paraphrasing, but hopefully not far afield from the original idea.)
My earlier reference to the abstract quality of mathematics echos this very point – albeit backhandedly, given that I was on about the nature of “precision.” I think it’s fair to point out that what we often think of as material precision just as often relies upon certain abstractions. That these abstractions correspond to the material world doesn’t make them material in and of itself – and this is what I was trying to get at in regards to the metaphysical aspects of law and being.
The notion that metaphysical truths cannot be gotten at then is based on the practice of cordoning off metaphysics right around the area of incomprehensibility. This brings us right back to the essentials – the assumption of physicality or material existence upon all that we consider to be “precisely” known is a stolen base, one that all too many steal in trying to assert the superiority of scientific method as a basis for broader assertions.
This certainly brings out paradoxes in JA’s posts as well, which stemed from assertions about faith grounded in science. Faith in what? In the material things that science can get at? Not so much faith as the directly observable there. Faith in the broader metaphysical conclusions? JA contends that no one can get there. This leaves the assertion of no metaphysical reality as the default position, but just as atheism is in a sense a religious perspective (in the fundamental sense of religion as ideas about God, as opposed to the idea of religion as directed practice of those ideas towards God) the concept that there is no metaphysical reality is itself a metaphysical question. The answer therein is also metaphysical, and let there be no confusion about metaphysics as an area of philosophical inquiry and the broader idea of metaphysics (or metaphysical) as the domain outside the material physical world. In the case of that particular question, they overlap.
So the idea that metaphysical truths cannot be gotten at is posited itself as a metaphysical truth – which is much along the lines of the nonfoundationalist paradox regarding metanarratives (that the proposition that there are no encompassing metanarratives that explain reality is itself a metanarrative).
This then tends to be a self-defeating assertion.
My, my, Griever. What a cogent response. Name calling is very persuasive.
Ten,
I would be more than happy to stack my study of history and the Bible against yours any day…
One other interesting thought, back along the lines of the main thread. The references to mathematics makes me recall Derb’s response to the challenge that certain mathematicians have directed against evolution – that is that the probablity of all the elements that create the universe, life, DNA, and beings that are capable of interrogating the same is astronomically high.
The usual responses to this are that the massive amounts of time involved allow for enough random activity to produce the deisred effect. The problem is that the amouint of time scientists estimate it tool for all of this to occur doesn’t fit well with the probablities involved with it happening by chance.
Derb’s response was novel, and I’m paraphrasing: “It just happened.” To some extent this is an understandable response. If one pulls a lever with a 1 in 1,000,000 chance to win and wins on the first go, this all fits in neatly with the probablity. Luck of the draw. However, the essence of Derb’s response contains that very assumption, which is not any more convincing than the prospect of facing that same 1 in a million chance if say, your life depended on the first 50 pulls.
Furthermore, those of us on the religious side can point to the same argument and contend, “God just is,” and point to the historical qualities of say the New Testament, and the reasonings of apologetics (and the idea that these do not directly compete with any scientific theories or discoveries about nature – apart from the notion of the miraculous – which is a contention about God’s power and not nature itself).
Add to this that the idea of a universal mind such as God has a certain correspondence with the idea of universal physical laws, and Derb’s answer potentially turns the usual materialists’ assumptions about Ockham’s Razor on it’s head. The convergence of a massively improbable collection of events is far less simple than the idea of a universal oneness that takes the form of directed intelligence (or God, for short). One may argue that such a oneness is inexplicable, but this derives (again) from the notion of one’s uncertainty about such a being or the metaphysical nature of such a being (see my discussion with JA, if you have a lot of time to read
The explicableness of the being of this oneness though is certainly not much more problematic than explaining why gravity works as attraction instead of repulsion, or other whys of certain universal physical principles.
There is the notion that the universe is actually geared towards organization, life, etc. and that this lowers the probability hurdle, but this idea surely points to the concept of design, since without it we are left with either the original raw probabilities dictated by chance or whatever inaccessable probabilities that exist regarding the creation/existence of a universe that leans towards order, life, etc. Again, at some point one must take Derb’s very honest but very unconvincing answer – it had to have just happened.
One might also posit that the statisticians are simply mistaken, but that’s a very open argument.
Ten,
I would be more than happy to stack my study of history and the Bible against yours any day…
Heh. Concession accepted.
Because proof by an appeal to an asserted, presumed (and imaginary?) authority is even less compelling than the other trifles you’ve presented herein, as the sum total of your online, er, arguments on this matter.
Unless you can yet present something of value instead of asserting items of no evident value, keep digging.
It seems to me, considering how much we’ve discovered which existed prior to human detection (radio waves, electromagnetic fields and force and so on), it seems the materialists who are saying there is nothing else are the ones bearing the burden of proof.
Derbyshire also seems to argue in bad faith in his other writings on this subject. Anyone who calls ID “Intelligent Design Creationism” is either dishonest or ignorant of the varied opinions among ID proponents and criticism from the Young Earth crowd, on the grounds it is too sciencey and not bibley.
Either science can answer all our questions about everything or it cannot. Currently we rely upon science to explain the workings of nature. It is limited to the material. Truth in meaning is not given by science, but philosophy and logic. Philosophy is the lens by which we all interpret the meaning of scientific results. That science is limited to materialist explanations does not imply Materialist Philosophy is true. It can lend support to the notion, but make no mistake, gaps in scientific knowledge are filled by speculations based upon philosophical assumptions about unproven macro (metaphysical) nature of reality. If one’s philosophy is theist in nature, God fills the gaps, if not theist, vast time and chance fill the gaps.
It seems we all have faith in something at the root of our individual world views. That’s why I find the sneering contempt of anti-theists so irritating – they generally fail to acknowledge their own ‘blind faith’.
Heavy, weary sigh……..
One more time from the top.
“Materialists,” “scientists,” etc… (at least the ones worth listening to) are NOT saying, “Nothing exists if we haven’t YET found it.
What they are saying is, in effect, if X cannot be measured – even theoretically – then:
a) It does not exist in any meaningful sense, or, more important:
b) It cannot be an object of scientific inquiry.
The “faith” at the root of the scientific worldview is fundamentally different from the faith that props up religion.
Call it soft faith – the faith that amply confirmed observations are reliable things upon which to base one’s belief system, for the time being.
If this is faith, then the word faith is really too blunt an instrument to be of any service to any discussion. It is reduced simply to anything that is believed without 100 percent certainty – i.e., everything anyone believes, has believed, or ever will believe.
Gabrial Hanna,
When I typed the words: “Actually he didn’t say that, only because he no idea of how complex the entire system was.”
It would then be completely illogical for you to say: “Do tell us all about what Darwin said. Because Darwin said no such thing. Darwin never heard of genes or mutations.”
And then, in lock step, you follow with: “This is the problem with arguing with Darwin deniers–they haven’t read Darwin, they have read only characterizations of Darwin.”
This is called a “straw man”. You erected something to knock down, and, you did it specifically in order to evade the point being made. In other words, you actively deny the point at hand, while calling me a “denier”. How quaint of you.
If I may now make your point: This is the problem with arguing with Darwinists, they refuse to address the actual problems at hand only to address problems they imagine.
Ten,
Ok, let’s break it down like this:
Science is the study of testable, repeatable phenomena. It cannot speak on untestable, non repeatable phenomena. As of yet, there is no testable method for Creation, nor for God. Therefore, any scientist worth more than the ink on the diploma should not claim that Science disproves God or Creation. However, a scientist can claim that the ‘model of evolution’ as defined via genetic drift, survival of the fittest etc can be testable, and therefore falls into the area that Science can talk about.
Intelligent Design, as of yet has not come up with a testable theory, nor a repeatable way to observe anything. Therefore, it cannot be considered within the context of Science. It can be discussed in terms of religion, or belief or philosophy (which is really where idiots like Dawkins should be).
On the topic of Moses, the history of the Jews etc. THERE EXISTS NO EVIDENCE OUTSIDE OF HEBREW SCRIPTURE that Moses ever existed, or that the Jews were slaves in Egypt, nor that The Jews created a 12 tribe nation, nor that King Saul, King David or King Solomon existed. Not one proof of archaeological remains from David’s expansive Kingdom, nor even a scrap of the foundation of Solomon’s temple has been uncovered. In fact, most archaeological evidence now indicates that the Jewish nation probably did not exist as a nation until after the people of the area returned from captivity in Babylon.
Those are the facts.
Now, if we determine that the Bible is a good enough resource to base belief on, then that is certainly fine… but that belief has no more credibility than Mr. Dawkins, because it confuses the spiritual with the physical. Science can tell us about the physical (like the genetic similarities between species or the lack of evidence for King Solomon), but it can’t tell us about the spiritual.
The Bible can tell us something which would be considered spiritual to many people, but let’s face it… it often does a pretty poor job of talking about the physical world that exists outside of simple human observation (sun moving around the earth, flat earth, surrounded by water etc etc etc).
In the end, anyone who thinks that a religion or science IS TRUTH seem equal in their ignorance. Both systems can provide useful models, but the model is not the reality. The Map is not the territory and the Menu is not the Meal. So many seem to eat the menu with Ketchup.
Now, if you would care to discuss Christian Theology, I would be more than happy to discuss that with you off line.
think its fruitful every once and while to return to exactly what it is that the argument is over. Darwin says that life’s system came about by random mutations of the organism over long periods of time, followed by natural selection.
No, that is not what Darwin said. Not at all.
Darwin stated that species could have had common ancestors and that the variety of species could have evolved over time from these earlier species. He pointed to random mutation as an example of what might be a cause for the changes (also survival of the fittest etc).
Darwin didn’t asnwer the question about abiogenesis, Darwin’s views could work if God created the first microorganism with the DNA necessary for all species to develop over time. His version could work if an asteroid happened to hit earth carrying microorganisms from some other planet. It could work if the first life on this planet had been some alien teenagers Science Fair project that got out of hand. Darwin says nothing about WHERE the genes started… only that species appear to change over time, and given enough time ALL species could have evolved through slow and subtle changes.
Darwin’s ideas aren’t really all that bad, its idiots like Dawkins that take things into the realm of fantasy.
Among the many reasons to read anything by David Berlinski is his fantastic talent for exposing the humor impaired. Too many of his critics, on either side of the issue, simply lack the ability to laugh at themselves or even at Berlinski himself.
Learn to laugh, folks….
If one defines “science” in such a way that it can not be used to consider probability of life elsewhere in the universe because for now it is untestable (poppycock) or gives the wrong answer (absence of evidence = evidence of absence) then there needs to be some new word to use for that type of research.
IMO it is better to allow science to be used for SETI and ID than to try to define it only for atheist sensibilities.
>> If one defines “science” in such a way that it can not be used to consider probability of life elsewhere in the universe because for now it is untestable (poppycock)
?!
If life elsewhere in the universe is, in fact, untestable, then I would sincerely hope scientists don’t waste their time on it, becuase – if it is indeed, really, genuinely untestable – then they are absolutely guaranteed to waste a lot of grant money.
Squirril,
Your capacity to argue at the edges of an issue – while apparently pleasing yourself intellectually – is not in question.
“Darwin says nothing about WHERE the genes started… only that species appear to change over time, and given enough time ALL species could have evolved through slow and subtle changes.”
1) A theory intended to explain life on Earth (in its grand view and certainly within its modern practice, that is what ToE is) but says nothing of how life was to have begun, is a scientific cop out.
2) The evidence that would be associated with your latter statement has not been forthcoming to the great shegrin of science – in fact the opposite regularly is found to the the case.
Three things I can observe about this debate at PJM:
1.) It is certainly a viable, lively, worthy debate. That alone supports the contention of “Expelled” that the debate is often stifled by atheistic evangelists in the public square.
2.) That the denigrating, smug, sneering tone of Derbyshire, or Dawkins for that matter do not help their side. It shows not only weakness of character but the underlying weakness of argument. Wy do atheist militants always have to resort to such infantile arguments using referrences to Easter Bunnies, strange pagan gods, or as God being unseen as “proof” that He does not exist. Can’t they see how laughable and weak these arguments are? Certainly they are more intelligent than their arguments reveal.
3.) That whether you believe the Universe started from nothing and expanded into its present matrix of mindboggling beauty and incredible balance and harmony through random, purposeless, non-intelligent forces, or that, as many of the greatest scientist up to the present acknowledge, that a Super Intelligence was behind it all, it is still a matter of faith. One faith might have more reason, common sense, and circumstancial evidence to support it, but it is faith nonetheless.
That is why the debate goes on.
Snippet writes:
“What they are saying is, in effect, if X cannot be measured – even theoretically – then:
a) It does not exist in any meaningful sense, or, more important:
b) It cannot be an object of scientific inquiry.
The “faith” at the root of the scientific worldview is fundamentally different from the faith that props up religion.”
I don’t think this was aimed at me but it is worth clarifying a few things, should anyone posit a specific connection between this post and the thread JA and I have going:
b) Yes, definitely (and obviously so, given that measurable – in the material sense I presume – and scientific inquiry go hand in hand).
a) Define “meaningful sense.” If the definition is “physical” or “material” (perhaps “directly” would be a good modifier) then, yes and we’re back to b). If not, then I would suggest “meaningful sense” is open to debate. I (and a few others) have addressed this more specifically, but there are clearly some things that meaningfully exist in this universe (ideas, emotions, theories, abstractions, ethical principles, certain axioms) that scientific inquiry cannot get at, beyond a reductionist approach that relies on a great deal of speculation.
The faith (or soft faith) that Snippet refers to is really not “faith” at all. Rather it’s a kind of reaction to consistent experience. I agree that, certain postmodern and skeptical philosophies aside, that reliance upon “the faith that amply confirmed observations are reliable things upon which to base one’s belief system, for the time being.” I would point out that, as constructed, religious experience could point to similar conclusions. So, we’re talking about material/natural observations and only in the context of scientific method. I wouldn’t use the word “faith” in this context.
The use of the word “faith” implies some metaphysical connotations. If by the use of the word you mean, “faith that there is only the material” then I could agree that “faith” is the operative word and would also contend that such a faith is no stronger or better than a faith grounded in certain metaphysical concepts or principles. It is one that is easily reinforced by most direct experience but not by all (nor everyone’s).
In other words, the natural world is easier to get at, but that doesn’t change the fact that faith that the natural world is all there is (or is meaningful), is not any different from faith in meaningful things that exist metaphysically. The core assumption of that faith relies upon something that cannot be directly proven by the methodology the faith is based upon, science.
So the “faith” that props up a materialist (or materialist-oriented) worldview is not actually significantly different. I’m not sure if “category error” is the correct description of this misconception, but clearly the faith is not the same as the science, even if it relies on science. Metaphysics can point to science also to a certain extent, and not simply the gaps. The faith you describe is not the same as science and therefore cannot claim the same type of power that comes from testability and other tenants of the scientific method.
genuinely untestable – then they are absolutely guaranteed to waste a lot of grant money
So the new definition of science includes a “waste of money” clause.
You don’t get to decide that SETI isn’t science because you consider it a waste of money.
I should add that everything I’m writing gets back to the problem of the assumption that science as a material discipline can somehow offer weight to a metaphysical conclusion that the universe is only material (or natural, if that word is considered more accurate). The assumption is false. Science’s power comes from it’s interrogation of the natural world. Science can aid in dealing with metaphysical issues insomuch as they correspond to the natural world, but it cannot lend significant weight to any conclusion. The assumption therein is an act of faith, like any other.
Please forgive the wordiness.I’m simply trying to cover a lot of bases on the subject and thinking (and rethinking in many cases) through some of the details with the rest of you.
Cheers.
Moon.
Well said. And perfectly plain.
John Derbyshire wrote:
I would love to get a conversation going with creationists about the origin of species, but they seem to be even less interested in this topic than Darwin was in biogenesis.
Not buying it Derb. Where have you made your interest in debating a creationist on this issue known? Whom have you approached about this and who was it is that refused to debate you on this issue?
There are any number of creationists who I bet would be thrilled to debate you on the issue.
There is Todd Wood, co-author of Understanding the Pattern of Life: Origins and Organization of the Species.
Or how about Woods’ co-author, Harvard trained paleontologist Kurt Wise (who studied under Gould).
Then there is Walter ReMine , author of The Biotic Message: Evolution Versus Message Theory and formulator of Discontinuity Systematics (a framework for discerning and categorizing species, families, genera, etc. from a creationist perspective).
If these guys aren’t interested, I’d bet good money they can refer you to such a person.
In fact, there is a whole field of creationist studies dedicated to this field: Baraminology (from the Hebrew term for biological kind).
Let’s see you step up to the plate Derb: Issue a public challenge to the creationist community to debate this issue – and then follow through.
ID is not the Trojan Horse of the Religious Right as its enemies keep repeating ad nauseum. It just happens to be the way we humans think. We really have to jump ship to swim with the “time+chance explains everything” crowd. That’s why polls keep showing that people are not buying the just-so stories of Darwinism. It would be nice for everyone to simply and humbly admit that we bring all evaluation of so-called truth and observations into our minds through our grids and biases.
Aldous Huxley, for example, had the honesty to admit to his personal bias when he wrote (in ENDS and MEANS) “I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning: Consequently assumed that it had none, and was able to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics; he is also concerned to prove there is no valid reason to prove he should not do as he wants to . . . For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.”
MICHAEL POLANYI, philosopher of science, posits the assailability of logical positivism in PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE. Here’s some material on him from the good folks at WIKIPEDIA -
Philosophy of science
“From the mid-1930s, Polanyi began to articulate his opposition to the prevailing positivist account of science, arguing that it failed to recognize the part which personal commitment and tacit knowing play in science. Polanyi stands out among philosophers of science by the extent of his scientific training, and by the amount of scientific research he carried out.
Polanyi argued that positivism encourages the belief that science ought to be directed by the State. He pointed to what happened to genetics in the Soviet Union, once the doctrines of Trofim Lysenko were deemed politically correct. Polanyi, like his friend Friedrich Hayek, supplied reasons why a free society is preferable.
Polanyi embraced the existence of objective truth (Personal Knowledge, p. 16). However, he criticized the notion that there is something called the scientific method which enables science to supply us with truths in a mechanical fashion.
Instead, he argued that all knowing is personal, and as such relies upon fallible commitments. Our skills, biases, and passions are not flaws but play an important and necessary role in discovery and validation. Observers cannot remove themselves from their observations and judgements, nor should they; it is enough that we act in accordance with the consequences imposed upon us by our beliefs. What saves this claim from relativism is his belief that our tacit awareness connects us with realities, although as our tacit awareness relies upon assumptions acquired within a local context, we cannot simply assume that they have universal validity; we must rather be open to the possibility of error while seeking to identify objective truths. Any process of articulation, however, inevitably relies upon that which we have not articulated. Indeed, reliance upon what we have not articulated is how words become meaningful, i.e. meaning is not reducible to a set of rules; it is grounded in our experience of the world – where experience is not something that can simply be reduced to collections of sense data.”
Regarding Atheism and Dr. Einstein, some may not be aware that Albert Einstein believed there was an “illimitable spirit” in back of the universe. He also likened our universe to what he called a “well-ordered word puzzle”, which he went on to describe as one where many individual words could be put in many places for a fit, but in the end, only one unique set would fit the whole. To him, “God” was too distant to have any interest or involvement in trivia such as earth and its inhabitants. When he was faced with the awful truth of the Holocaust and its implications, he could only come to grips with its horror by reminding himself that our small earth revolves around a very insignificant star.
There is partial support for the quote from Einstein at TIME Mag website -
EINSTEIN (from Time Magazine)
” . . . My religion consists of a humble admiration for the illimitable superior spirit who reveals Himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds.”
Unfortunately, most of the arguments for/against Atheism/ID make little headway, since one’s “Weltanschauung” generally is the driver of interpretations of sets of observations. In that respect, I believe Dr. Berlinski is making a point that hits home. Far too many in the human race prefer a) a “tame” God, b) no God, or c) a distant, non-involved God.
…or perhaps simply Berlinski, since he has already agreed publically to the debate (which you ignored).
Or is he disqualified since he is not a “Creationists” (hiss hiss)?
>>>>>…genuinely untestable – then they (scientists) are absolutely guaranteed >>>>>to waste a lot of grant money
>>>So the new definition of science includes a “waste of money” clause.
>>>You don’t get to decide that SETI isn’t science because you consider it a >>>waste of money.
“…guaranteed to waste a lot of grant money.” was nothing more than a my way of saying, “…guaranteed to totally and completely fail to do real science.”
Which tends to be funded by grants.
The context of the discussion should make it perfectly clear why I would say that.
“Wasting money” doesn’t make an endeavor UNscientific. The risk of wasting money is part of the deal.
SETI is not “unscientific.” It is in fact TESTING something – i.e., whether or not there are intelligence-created messages emanating from extraterrestrial civilizations that we can discover.
Considering its success so far, it would appear to be a great example of an endeavor that is both scientific (technically) AND a waste of money.
G Vinson wrote:
…or perhaps simply Berlinski, since he has already agreed publically to the debate (which you ignored).
Or is he disqualified since he is not a “Creationists” (hiss hiss)?
Not sure if you were responding to Derb or me. Personally, I would love to see Derb take on Berlinski on this issue. The fact that he’s not a creationist would certainly deprive Derb of the use of the arrows he keeps in his ‘anti-creationist’ quiver (then again, given his response to Berlinski here, maybe not.
That said, I would love to see Derb follow through and debate a creationist on the issue – mainly because of his clear implications that 1) the issue is a ‘slam dunk’ for evoltution; and 2) creationists are unwilling to deal with the topic.
How about it Derb? Take on Berlinski and then a creationist! Here’s your chance to strike another blow for the cause!
There is amazingly “logical” assumption concerning SETI: We analyze all those signals coming in from the COSMOS beyond and we sit on the edge of our seats hoping to find some pattern/order to the receptions, because if we do we will confidently proclaim that it proves intelligence is probably behind it. Yet we will not countenance looking at the natural world close at hand, see the pattern and order, and open our minds to seeing Intelligence in back of it all. The SETI gang (at least the Atheists wing) cannot help but hang themselves by their own petard in carrying out this endeavor.
To repeat Einstein, ” . . . My religion consists of a humble admiration for the illimitable superior spirit who reveals Himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds.” The I-D folks could count him amongst their esteemed company.
A debate concerning the certainty of materialists regarding their worldview seems like a good place to acknowledge chemist Albert Hofmann PhD. who died in Switzerland yesterday. Hofmann was no materialist and in fact was a student of the mystical for his whole life, triggered by an experience he had as a child which he often recounted. As a researcher at Sandoz studying ergot fungus and derivatives of such, he began to have a series of dreams several years into this program. Each dream featured the number 25, visions of molecules and various mystical symbols as he has told it. After many nights of this he began to realize that the number 25 referred to the 25th entry in his notebooks, the 25th molecule he synthesized in the series several years before the dream sequence. So he goes to his laboratory and synthesizes the molecule again and the rest is history. He abbreviated the name of the molecule LSD-25 in tribute to this amazing story. So materialists should tackle this legendary story and explain the source of the INFORMATION regarding the 25th molecule that kept impinging into the scientist’s phyche during sleep. Is the gentle Dr Hofmann untruthful when telling this story countless times over the course of his life? The dates of the events are well documented and witnessed. He told of the dreams at the time to witnesses and went back to his notebooks and resynthesized the molecule.
And further I would challenge the materialists to read the classic and revolutionary “Realms of the Human Unconscious” by Grof and explain away the findings of his 17 years of clinical research into therapeutic LSD employment. The book demonstrates that resolution of serious personlity disorders is concommintant with opening of spiritual dimensions in his subjects which, in his words “appear intrinsic to the human personality”. This opening is experienced by the subjects as an ego-shattering encounter with a benevolent ultra-intelligence. Read the book guys, then have at it. Is this a subject worth looknig into, considering that science and academia seems helpless to alleviate the worst suffering that afflicts humanity?
Squirril,
Your capacity to argue at the edges of an issue – while apparently pleasing yourself intellectually – is not in question.
Classy, really… I believe you are terribly confused about what I was arguing if that line of puerile nonsense is your honest response.
1) A theory intended to explain life on Earth (in its grand view and certainly within its modern practice, that is what ToE is) but says nothing of how life was to have begun, is a scientific cop out.
Darwin wasn’t trying to explain the origin of all life on earth, he was making observations about the possible origin of species (hence the name of the book). Further, I am carrying no water for idiots that honestly believe everything happened by accident, some amino acids and a shot of electricity. I have no idea how Life, The Universe and Everything got started, nor, do I think, does anyone else. Some people believe fairy tales. Some people believe theories… which without hard evidence and decent observation, are just modern fairy tales.
2) The evidence that would be associated with your latter statement has not been forthcoming to the great shegrin of science – in fact the opposite regularly is found to the the case.
I agree, i9n some sense… HOWEVER, this is the precise point that makes Evolutionary Studies “Science” and Intelligent Design… not.
We can go look for things that evolutionists think should be there… sometimes the thing is there, sometimes it is not. But, at least we have a method of observation and research that can perhaps prove or disprove the theory.
ID, on the other hand, has no observable phenomena, no testable hypothesis and there is certainly no way to prove or disprove the idea of Intelligent Design… That, my friend falls to the realm of Belief, Faith or Philosophy… the same spot that Atheism exists in.
You can rightly bitch about Atheists claiming that Science supports their beliefs… but that in no way makes ID any more sciency.
“If the axe is dull and he does not sharpen its edge, then he must exert more strength (force).” (words of wisdom from the Jewish King, Solomon)
Entertain this question: “why do apologists hit so hard?”. A modern-day expression in a similar vein is “empty barrels make the most noise”.
May the ultimate Intelligent Designer keep us full and equipped with a sharp cutting edges!
I guess this flap was inspired by the “Expelled” crap. Derbyshitre is 100% right. A scientist has a job to provide a natural explanation for natural phenomena, based on previous laws, observations and experiments. ID, which is just Creationism in a cheap lab coat, is contrary to the core purpose of Science. Could you imagine if everytime a technical or scientific problem arose and these so called Scientitst threw up their hands and said”
“It’s too complicated, there has to be some sort of ID(good old God) involved, Better not try to examine it further or we might upset some religious crank.”
My respect for Derbyshire for bucking the petty anti-intellectual crackpots on the right when it would have been expedient for him to tow his NRO’s party line.
SETI is not “unscientific.” It is in fact TESTING something – i.e., whether or not there are intelligence-created messages emanating from extraterrestrial civilizations that we can discover.
Sorta the point with my (poppycock) comment.
So ID research using microscopes to find “intelligence-created messages emanating from [biology] that we can discover” would be science rignt?
TRO:,
You take the typical theocon tact to insult the person rather than debate the argument. Good work, I’m sure your tiny mind can’t handle anything but what the Bible tells you.
It seems that so many theocons love to insult and harangue and attack people that dare disagree with their fundamentalist dogma. You might be full of religion but spiritually and intellectually you are as dead as a fossil.
psssst Suirrel….you seem to believe that there is no way to tell if something infers design. In this, you are wrong.
In my opinion SETI is good science and a lot of UFO research isn’t.
Kookiness with respect to UFOs does not discredit SETI science unless you want to define science in such a way that both are excluded just to have talking points to use against the UFO kooks.
In my opinion there is no magic ingredient for life. If proper structures can be copied or constucted in a lab from non living componenets they will be just as alive. If life can arise in that way then it could happen naturally too. Simplest explanation.
But most of the arguments used against ID as a basis for legitimate scientific research are bogus. Which is not to say I’m aware of any such legitimate research myself.
no CAPISCEO,
Einstein would have rejected the anti-Intellectual cowardice of the ID folks.
The common rant:
“ID, which is just Creationism in a cheap lab coat, is contrary to the core purpose of Science. Could you imagine if everytime a technical or scientific problem arose and these so called Scientitst threw up their hands and said “It’s too complicated, there has to be some sort of ID(good old God) involved, Better not try to examine it further or we might upset some religious crank.”
Use ad hominem attacks when engaging ID proponents, it will lead to a killing of the debate on merits (which is the primary goal) so label ID as creationism, and voila, no more need for debate — they’re all just silly creationists, don’t listen to them.
Demonization need be the only defense against a idea that you cannot respond to. After all, science’s “core purpose” is to cling to a theory that has not logically fit the evidence.
Lets us see, how does such logic sound?
I like wording of such intellectual proofs:
“The existence of highly complex, organized, and orchestrated nano-technological machines (sometimes made of dozens of complex proteins and RNA subunits) at the very core of all biological functions is undeniable evidence of random mutation followed by natural selection, and completely discredits any proposition of design”.
“The fact that encoded information in DNA is proofread when exchanged from DNA to DNA, when exchanged from DNA to RNA, and when exchanged from RNA to proteins with a reliability of 1 error to 10,000,000 nucleotides provides strong evidence of random mutation followed by natural selection”
“The fact that scientific expressions used to describe inner cell biological processes is virtually identical to the expressions used in engineering and information technologies (while being virtually opposite of expressions in material and geosciences) is commanding evidence of random mutation followed by natural selection, and provides further doubt to the possibility of any design.
“The existence of a code that ‘unlike the periodic table which is determined by the necessities of atomic structure, the genetic code is completely *conventional*. There is no necessary connection between the proteins manufactured by the cell and their equivalents in the DNA code’ provides further evidence of random mutation followed by natural selection, and is a great impediment to any suggestion of design.”
“Time, space, matter, and energy came into being from a materialistically unknowable single source at the beginning of the Universe; this therefore provides conclusive evidence that materialism will forever explain the Universe and all things in it.”
“I see that random mutations can, and in fact do, occasionally create local benefits to organisms (such as immunity to some toxins), therefore we can ignore the fossil record and explain the great variety of all species throughout time.”
“Larger, more complex, organisms cannot adapt to changing conditions through random mutations as easily and efficiently as smaller, less complex, organisms, so we therefore conclude that massively increased complexity is a benefit to the survival of organisms”
“Science cannot find any combination of explanatory pathways for abiogenesis though material means and then test those means in the laboratory, we shall therefore infer that only material explanations are capable of abiogenesis, and demand that any other inferences be tested in the laboratory prior to consideration”
“Any inference of Intelligent causes can not be taken seriously in a scientific sense unless accompanied by a complete description of the intelligent source, as well as a description of whom or what created the intelligent source, unless, of course, the intelligent source provided by SETI.”
“Human consciousness, like non-materialistic causes, cannot generate evidence in the laboratory, therefore it does not exist”
“Of the untold billions of complex life forms that might have ever existed since the beginning of time, we only have evidence for one organism reaching conscious self-awareness on one finely-tuned planet (among billions), in one finely-tuned galaxy (among billions), in one finely-tuned universe; therefore we shall not explore any concepts of Design”.
“Darwin believed that (at the basic level) life would be simple protoplasmic material, modified by natural selection through time, with an “inconceivably great” number of intermediate life forms recorded in the fossil record. What we have found is molecular machines of incredible number and organization, a coded hereditary system of layered complexity, an explosion of life forms in (and around) the Cambrian era, the stasis of body plans over millions of years, and a virtual vacuum of intermediate fossils. This provides strong evidence that evolution by random mutation and natural selection is the only explanatory force behind life on Earth.”
“Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by gradual change through the mechanism of chance mutation and natural selection does not provide a thesis for the actual creation of life on Earth, and does not concur with the fossil record in several important aspects; therefore any competing inferences from the evidence will heretofore be referred to as “poofing” into existence”.
“Both the religion and science have been repeatedly proven through time to have committed gross errors of judgment, biased shading of facts, as well as outright fraud; therefore any thesis that contains any possible religious meaning must be disallowed from scientific discussion without further consideration.”
Einstein would have rejected the anti-Intellectual cowardice of the ID folks.
Can you prove that scientifically?
No? Then it can’t be true.
“Squirrel, Your capacity to argue at the edges of an issue – while apparently pleasing yourself intellectually – is not in question.”
Agreed. I don’t say that as a criticism, but as an observation that you are beneath the point of all this, Squirrel. I’ll respond to your comments:
Point: At issue here ultimately is not the Bible, and therefore, ultimately, is not ID or Creationism — I’d go so far as to say that 100% of the theological experts, phil profs, religious scholars and experts, and 100% the Christian laymen anywhere near these subject that I regularly associate with believe neither in the infallibility of Scripture, the Creation account as a literal device or sequence, the absolute, parallel historicity of biblical accounts, the universal integrity of all sums of alleged divine Christian inspiration, et al. This canard (this trotting out all the fallacies and factual conflicts and illogic incumbent in the texts and their improper uses) is indeed self-satisfying, but it has no merit. It is to argue beneath the level of the discussion.
Point: Science, by the precise definition you gave it, violates philosophical discovery (the seeking of wisdom in all things) if and when it is used to the exclusion of logic, reason, and most amazingly, the obvious experiments that only the mind can perform — the human consciousness, as has been pointed out here at least a few times in relation to Derb’s definition of reality. The entire quantum realm, for example, consists entirely of abstracts and properties — griefer’s mass and decay — and even it’s accorded the right to do precisely whatever it pleases, simply because it does precisely what it pleases, beholden only to what surely resembles only pattern and “habit”, a point yet lost on griefer, the QM student.
Because science can no more trace infinite numbers of sub-atomic causes and effects than it can explain how it’s holy grail, the God Particle (or whatever the irreducible is called these days) can point to a great and spontaneous origin from sheer void and subsequent and a flawlessly self-motivation according to the Laws of Physics. The Ultimate Law of Physics, that law on which all matter, energy, and action are created and then somehow faithfully balance, is akin to the first turtle: both are projected faith. Ah, the irony.
Point: Combining these points reveals that the secular scientist who demands proofs of others and none (at this level) of himself, save to insist that they’re forthcoming, is engaging wild irony and amazing arrogance.
And he’s engaging in faith. The sheer semantic issues that immediately crop here — “God” versus scientific faith — should be enough indication but they’re typically not. The reason is perspective.
Interestingly, that same limited perspective frequently conflates evolution with natural selection. The latter is scientifically evident fact. The former, as an origin theory, is laughable. The reasons should be quite obvious: Origin theory runs right into the brick wall CB and others here have amply illustrated and I’ve tried clumsily to add to.
Oh yes, it becomes entirely philosophical at that level. Which is to say, that the mind that conceives such philosophies also naturally conceives God, at worst. (Or discovers God, at best?) That you cannot define the difference or that you cannot label the terms at that level is not a problem with the philosophy any more than it is a problem with science. But the lack of understanding there is surely a problem, and one that bad science uses as a cudgel just as vigorously as ID does in the reverse.
Mr. Vinson,
I don’t deny your argument has some merit on a Philiosphical level, trouble is that you can’t prove any of it Scientifically. By the way, Evolutionary Science has progressed much father than the days of Darwin, so calling Evoolutionary Biology Darwinism is like calling a modern Psychiatry a Freudianism. Science has one main rule, there has to be a natural explanation. So if you don’t want to play by Science’s rule, please don’t bad mouth Scientists for being, well Scientists. If in the future someone digs up this ID, with his lab and blueprints, you might be on to something. Meanwhile, I will let the Scientists do their job.
However, if you choose to believe in some sort of ID or God, fine by me. Science was never meant to be a guide to living and humanity. If the Scientists ran into your seminary or church and demanded you include Evolution theory in your cosmology, I would insult and abuse them the same way I insult and abuse pseudo-intellectual hypocrites like Ben Stein or Berlinsky. By they way, since Mr. Stein in his contemptible anti-intellectual way made a link between Evolutionary Theory and the Holocaust, I assert there is a much stronger and better documented link betweem Christian anti-Semitism and BOTH Holocausts.
grrrrrrr…..it is GRIEFER, Jim
while you are lookin that up in the Urban Dictionary, please google Wedge Strategy.
Then you will understand what i mean about Discovery Institute scum.
Let me put this succintly so that the lower half of the bell curve and the two digits here can understand.
Science is a succussion of heresies overcoming orthodoxies. IDT/creationism (same diff) is teh orthodoxy–ToE (theory of evolution) is the heresy.
We will NEVER discuss IDT in secular university classes because it is the old model, that was superceeded by a better one.
To paraphrase, you are trying to force us to buy last years model when we already have this years for free.
And the dishonesty, the calumnies against Science and scientists are just creating a bitter divide between us.
I’m a believer AND a thinker.
I sure don’t see many of those here.
The invective spewing from the keyboards and the ad hominem attacks show that these issues cannot be dealt with honestly and dispassionately. Discussion quickly degenerates into an online version of the Jerry Springer show. I find myself coming down with the contagion, so goodbye to all. In true Springer-esque fashion some of you may bid (yell) “good riddance”. That’s OK – I have a soft heart and a thick skin.
Click on my blog name and you’ll be linked to a 3-minute movie related to these issues. It is also on YouTube.
hehe griefer,
I wonder what is next, conservative Science? It’s not like liberals and idealists, everyone’s fave whipping boys, are alwasy pro-Science. The left of the sixties was very anti-Science, equating it with the H-Bomb and pollution(thankfully abated by present regulations and technologies) and trying to get back to some garden to have sex and smoke pot. But I can understand someone’s disgust with Science and Technology based on the possiblity of nuclear or biological warfare annihilation, and the development of video-internet isolation and addiction, mass cosnumerism and pollution better than a quest to explain the origins of life. Does the primeval muck/ooze that they say spawned life scare you more than a 10 megaton H bomb exploding over your town?
Call me crazy, a moron with a low I.Q. or a blind fool who subscribes to the opiate of the masses, I really dont care.
No scientist has yet proven, that God does not exist. I doubt any Scientist ever will. So why do Scientists Persist in saying there is no God. I SAY THERE IS A GOD. Go ahead and take a free shot at me.
Snippet wrote,
That isn’t what I’m getting at. All scientists aren’t Materialists and it isn’t that they are saying nothing exists until we find it, what I wrote is just another way of saying lack of scientific evidence isn’t evidence of lack. To state with authority that a materially transcendent god cannot exist because science cannot measure it (as many arguments I’ve encountered have claimed) is no different than stating the opposite because the Bible says so.
Snippet further:
Serious question: how does one measure something theoretically? Is that what you’re saying, or am I reading this wrong?
More snippet:
Herein lies an epistemological problem. There can be no such thing as a ‘scientific worldview’. I believe science supports my worldview. Does that make it a scientific one?
Are ‘amply confirmed observations’ such as the kind used in legal testimony from multiple witnesses also reliable things to base a belief on some event?
Regardless your answers to these few questions, the soft faith you speak of is not what I was referring. We have not observed ample transitional forms in the fossil record, for instance. (or evolution among high level taxonomies) We have not observed multiverses.
When we take the many pieces of what we have amply observed and quantified to the larger picture of reality, we fill in the gaps in our physical knowledge with metaphysics, no matter who we are or what we ultimately believe about the true nature of reality. Materialists are no better than Theists on this score, though they certainly act like it, that is my point.
Javelin wrote:
Can science tell us what is ‘natural’? How is that defined, exactly? More specifically, how does science determine the boundary of the natural?
Is your statement I quoted above falsifiable? Is that a scientific statement or a philosophical one?
Todd,
if you have been reduceed to making silly word games, then you have lost the argument. You know exactly what I mean. It means, you can’t throw up your hands when confronted with complex problems, like some native seeing a steamboat for the first time, and say “it’s too complicated, must be the gods or a God did it!” Also, there are laws, like Boyles Law and Theories where things are too imprecise. But for the sake of Science, they try to muddle through and find some explanation.
Tropic of Saturn: you described yourself well, you are incredibly dense cause you have it reversed. No Scientists are working in the field of trying to disprove GOd, it’s mental midgets who are raging against Scientists working in Evolutionary Biology. Keep up your self criticism!
For Javelin-
O.K. so there aren’t any scientists who are trying to prove or disprove God. I agree. I havent heard of any Scientists in that field.
But why say there is no God. I guess that is all I am wondering.
How do we know God didnt create the world billions of years ago through the Big Bang and use evolution as a tool to create the world we live in today?
Mental Midget was good. I thought it was funny
Javelin: I don’t deny your argument has some merit on a Philiosphical level, trouble is that you can’t prove any of it Scientifically.
Perhaps you are not in the position to qualify the physical reality of biological or cosmological evidence. After all, the arguments of the Intelligent Design movement, if there is one, are not based on Scripture, but on the observed physical evidence. This is the first and highest denial by Darwinists.
The glaring truth of this can be found in the argument itself. If the ID proponents were actually attempting to explain the material world based on versus from the Bible, then no one would care.
Javelin: Evolutionary Science has progressed much father than the days of Darwin, so calling Evolutionary Biology Darwinism is like calling a modern Psychiatry Freudianism.
No its not. Your analogy isn’t even likely. Freud may be a bitterly debated body of thought, but neither opponent is being told to just shut up. Having the ID community just “shut up” is at the very core of the NCSE, despite any sophistry to the otherwise.
Javelin: If in the future someone digs up this ID, with his lab and blueprints, you might be on to something. Meanwhile, I will let the Scientists do their job.
Remember again please, this is about physically observable evidence. ID proponents have forwarded significant evidence for the inference of actual Design in nature. This point is not disputable by any means other than denial. Its hardly surprising then that denial is the path most chosen, as your words confirm.
Javelin: If the Scientists ran into your seminary or church and demanded you include Evolution theory in your cosmology, I would insult and abuse them the same way I insult and abuse pseudo-intellectual hypocrites like Ben Stein or Berlinski.
I certainly agree that “pseudo-intellectual hypocrite” is both abusive and insulting. The fact that you use it without any factual grounding would cause someone to think that you are nothing more than irrational, or an ass.
Javelin: Mr. Stein in his contemptible anti-intellectual way made a link between Evolutionary Theory and the Holocaust, I assert there is a much stronger and better documented link between Christian anti-Semitism…
Your welcome to your assertion, it has certainly been made before. (I wonder why that is?) Perhaps to be most convincing you could read Hitler’s stenographic Table Talk before you get started.
- – - – - – -
In the early days of the German advance into Eastern Europe, before the possibility of Soviet retribution even entered their untroubled imagination, Nazi extermination squads would sweep through villages, and after forcing the villagers to dig their own graves, murder their victims with machine guns. On one such occasion, an SS officer watched languidly, his machine gun cradled, as an elderly and bearded Hasidic Jew laboriously dug what he knew to be his grave.
Standing up straight, he addressed his executioner. “God is watching what you are doing”, he said.
And then he was shot dead.
What Hitler did *not* believe, and what Stalin did *not* believe and what Mao did *not* believe and what the SS did *not* believe and what the Gestapo did *not* believe and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals, Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did *not* believe was that God was watching what they were doing.
And as far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either.
That is, after all, the *meaning* of a secular society.
-David Berlinski, an agnostic Jew.
- – - – - –
And, what does this have to do with the recorded evidence of observed Design in biology and cosmology?
Javelin,
Why are you dodging my questions? IS your statement scientific or philosophical? Definitions are important. I asked a serious question.
Once again, you are acting like typical know nothing piling on to Ben Stein’s dreaded, all vilifying Nazi link. That is why I threw that undebatable link between Christian anti-semitism and the Holocaust, which even the last two Popes acknowledged. in just to prick up your holy ears. Just remember, plenty of Christians, especially outside of Germany, were glad to lend the Nazis a hand. And the Church itself knew about the Holocaust too, but never told their flock or urged their people to join the fight against the Nazis by calling the war just, Because like a lot of people, they hated the Reds more and were indifferent to the Jews, as well as just cowardly. As far as the Reds go, well thank God they lost, most of them at least. Also, at least the Red Army and government was officially anti-anti-Semitic as well as killing off 80% of the Axis ground forces for us, the one good thing they did.
Hitler believed in God. So do all those Muslims we are supposed to be so scared of, like the ones in the Sudan who killed millions in their sharia’h uber alles war. Hitler believed God had endowed the German race with special powers and privileges to rule, with that same God endowing him as leader. Almost every tyrant King of old supposedly derived his power to rule from God and God supposedly blessed even Ivan the Terrible, Torquemada, Cotton Mathers, as well as various beys, caliphs and mullahs. While a Creator in 1776 was endowing us with equal rights in the Declaration of Independence, that same creator was blessing Dukes and Kings with arbritary powers, including the Parliamentary restrained George 111. God is a convenient sock puppet for all sorts of bad guys.
AS far as the ID movement, you have no hard Science. Your claims of persecution and rejection by the Scientific community and the NCSE does not sound like persecution to me, but justified. Trying to pitch this as some free speech issue is beneath contempt. Maybe if you came up with some hard science to back up your claims, you might be taken seriously. But there is no Scientific merit for your core thesis, that God created us all, cause that is the ID, right?. And to deny that there is religious overtones behind ID is a lie. ID is Creationism in a cheap lab coat. Ben Stein took pains to highlight the atheism of the Scientists he was mocking, as well as pitching the movie in pre-release screenings to church groups. If ID was about Science, not religion, why did that pseudo-intellectual hypocrite Ben Stein pitch his “movie” to religious people? Then there is the Discovery Institute, which is a conservative cultural war group with tons of links to religious groups but scant links to real Science and research. AS far as calling someone a pseudo-intellectual hypocrite, that is a mild insult and certainly subjective. But if Berlinsky and Stein want to get up and be some Jewish frontmen for a bunch of rubes and anti-intellectuals, then they earned that term. I’ve read a lot of stuff Ben Stein wrote and most of it is just right wing blather with some high falutin gloss to it.
As far as Berlinsky’s pandering quote:
“That is, after all, the *meaning* of a secular society”
-David Berlinski, an agnostic Jew.
_________________________________
Thank god he, Ben Stein and I live in a secular country where our Jewish religion or lack of it doesn’t bar us from being a full citizen under the law. In case you were reading too many theocon blogs, the USA was always a secular country. So Berlinsky is blowing smoke. Otherwise, there would have been a state Church and religious tests for offices and privileges.
Listen, like I said, maybe will never find out
the real truth Scientifically. ID and other supernatural explanations have merit in a philosophical and theological way. But the only “proof” that crackpot ID whiners have come up with is that since it is too complicated, someone designed it. Well then, who designed the designer, as well as that designer? So take off your fools gold martyr crown and crawl back into your cave and whine to your fellow believers about how those godless Nazi/Red/homosexual Scientists are mocking you.
Meanwhile I’ll use nanotechnology to build the world’s smallest violin to play a sad song for you. Meanwhile even Tropic guy says that God started the whole mess at the big bang, so the natural devlopment of those organisms is part of the big plan, so those dreaded Evolutionary Biologists, not Darinwinist as you smear them, are just find out more details to God’s plan.
Some dashed off thoughts…
Lack of evidence is not technically evidence of lack, but it is one hell of a liability if you are trying to build a scientifically valid case for the existence of something.
I never suggested one could “theoretically measure” sometihng. I meant that some things are IMPOSSIBLE to measure in any way shape or form, even given enormous technical resources, and are therefore beyond the scope of science.
>> Are ‘amply confirmed observations’ such as the kind used in legal testimony from multiple witnesses also reliable things to base a belief on some event?
Depends on the event, the competence of the witnesses, judges, and the lawyers. Witches were convicted based on trials, after all. Trials that were conspicuously not run by atheists.
>> We have not observed ample transitional forms in the fossil record, for instance. (or evolution among high level taxonomies)
Yes, we have, and, conveniently enough, every transitional form creates TWO MORE gaps! The gap between the form and its (known) predecessor and one between it and its successor. The gaps just keep multiplying. How embarassing for the cult of Darwin!
One more thing. It seems apparent the Berlinsky’s motivation is not to assist science over its Theophobic bugaboo so much as to preserve a belief that he feels is necessary to prevent massive atrocities, as per the quote above (…very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either. That is, after all, the *meaning* of a secular society.)
It is ENTIRELY possible that pulling the God rug out from under an evolving, intelligent, and inherently violent species will be seriously disruptive, and give cover to tyrants, but that doesn’t prove the existence of God.
In fact, the total lack of interest on the part of God in stopping the atrocities inflicted on innocent people (whether supported by Godly or Godless ideology) is one of many reasons for doubting His existence, or at least his interest in the well being of his creation.
“Truth claims arrived at from pure reason, intuition (redundant, I know), and revelation are epiphenomena of a species-specific pathos; they are radically contingent, pure cacophony produced by methodological noise.”
Why is it that, decades after logical positivism has been killed by its own incoherence, we still have so many ignorami like JA and Derbyshire mindlessly advocating it?
A few fun facts:
A) If pure reason is not a guide to truth, which implies that reason is fundamentally flawed, then neither are empirically-derived beliefs filtered through our reason (ie science) a guide to truth.
B) Mathematics is an application of pure reason (ie, intuition). Mathematical truths are arrived at and confirmed/disconfirmed by reason. They are not contingent and subject to empirical proof/disproof. If pure reason is a “species-specific pathos”, then so is the entire field of math.
C) The claim that “Truth claims arrived at from pure reason” are all “pure cacophony” is itself a statement of pure reason (or lack thereof in this case). We can’t actually measure, touch, see, etc truth claims. We can only evaluate them using – you guessed it – our reason.
D) And for that matter, truth itself is only known by pure intuition. Truth is “invisible, inaudible, intangible, nonaromatic, flavorless, and undetectable by any known instrument” – all the reasons that Derbyshire gave for supposing that God doesn’t exist. Perhaps Derbyshire would respond to this by saying that truth is just something we “thought up and found useful” as he did above. And then, completely oblivious to the irony, perhaps he would accuse someone else of being a “relativist”, as is his wont.
But, let’s not be too hard on these guys. If I were this bad at logical reasoning, I’d probably want to diminish it too.
The Deuce – I assume you are not a mathematician or scientist, I’ll bet you are a [poor] philosopher.
a) The scientific method explicitly relies on experimental fact to DISPROVE FALSE statements. In science you never have “truth”. Certainly it is not arrived at by “reason”. Look at the history of quantum mechanics.
b) Mathematical “truth” IS contingent. It depends on the axioms you choose. The most famous example being the existence of parallel lines. Depending on the axioms you choose there can be one “parallel” line a certain distance away from a straight line, an infinite number or none. Depends on your axioms, which you choose. If you were a mathematician you’d know another axiom which is sometimes assumed and sometimes not – the axiom of choice.
c) We can measure “truth claims” against experiments. Some survive, some don’t. Classical mechanics, non-relativistic quantum mechanics and many others were EXPERIMENTALLY excluded. No “pure” reason was involved. We can measure the consequences of our theories and these CAN be verified or falsified. For instance, claims on this page about the irreducible complexity of the eye have been disproved over and over and over. As has every single example of “irreducible complexity” that ID has EVER come up with and every single probabilistic argument against evolution. We may not ever be able to know the “truth” but we can recognise lies and falsehoods when we see them.
d) And here we have the full demonstration of your ignorance of logic. I doubt Mr Derbyshire accepts any theory as “true” in the absolute sense you use. Even Dawkins repeatedly states IF a experiment was done that contradicted Evolution then he would accept it is false but literally millions of experiments have been done to check evolutionary theory both in the large and in the details and it has passed every single one. Contrast this with every single example and “argument” given of ID each of which has failed – remember the flagellum “wheel”? However, not being to say something is TRUE is not the same as saying that you cannot say something is FALSE nor that in that case everything is somehow “equally true”. Even philosophers have known this since Hume.
If I was as ignorant as you, I wouldn’t be smugly be making snide comments about other people’s intellect.
trying to build a scientifically valid case for the existence of something
Not sure anybody is trying that.
Looking for evidence of “intelligence” in biology has been proposed to be as “scientific” as looking for evidence of “intelligence” in radio signals from space.
These are your various assumptions:
1) Typical people know nothing.
2) Your view is undebatable.
3) The tenets of Christianity teach killing.
5) The errant beliefs of tyrants are not the fault of the tyrant.
6) Bad guys are good guys without God.
7) etc, etc, etc
Javelin, you have shown a incapacity to conduct rational thought. You have nothing more than what you’vre been given, and are lost in a fog as to what to do with it. Your tainted assumptions and explanations highlight the weakness of your position better that I could ever hope to.
I will gladly leave you to your conclusions.
(and by the way, you’ve repeatedly derided a PhD of Philosophy and Mathematics, a PhD of Modern European History specializing German Intellectual History, the curators and keepers of the Halocaust Museum, several hundred scientistist and doctors, and an well-liked author. You’ve done it for precisely the reason that you want to stifle debate. You are idiotic in the sense that you are willfully ignorant of the relevance of evidence…and you have no where near the capable intellect of David Berlinski, or any of the others that you choose to “abuse and insult”. By all means, please feel free to hold me in contempt).
Ten:
>You see, among other things, humans absolutely violate the survival of the fittest rule
Absolutely not true. Humans compete on a hive vs hive plain which is over your head now. the individual humans “kept alive” insoide the hive are simply ceels of complex multi celuur paralleism. Natural selction is selcting which hive’s internal assembly line of specialists is moe efficent at convbeting more food into more of itself.
Awareness of this reality is not a pre requisute for this reality to occur.
ten: >— we function in the realm of ideas and conscious thought, the physical, scientific universe having somehow developed these decidedly unscientific qualities for reasons only it knows.
Ideas are like the pheromones of the hive or hormones of the body. They are glues that hold together and compel different assembly line variations (hives). These glues vary and will be unwittinlgy selected between as to which is efficient at holding together the most successful vectors/hives(of these glues).
Those political glues are created by physical bio chemical ‘modules’ (tissuse, jucies : nerves, glands etc) that make up the individual cells /members of the hive. Ie ‘materialism’. These modules are the actual material things being selected between.
This is all very easy to understand stuff.
(Easy to understand but apparently not very easy to type. I just got up is all I can say.
The point is very important (you species of duds) so read it again…)
Ten:
>You see, among other things, humans absolutely violate the survival of the fittest rule
Absolutely not true. Humans compete on a hive vs hive plane which is over your head. The individual humans “kept alive”
inside the societies are simply cells of complex multi cellular bodies /hives. (Hives and mutli cellular bodies have formed multiple times through parallelism.) Natural selection is unwittingly choosing which hive’s internal assembly line, of specialists, is more efficient at converting more food into more of itself.
_The cells of this dynamic need not be aware of this reality for this reality to occur.
ten:
>— we function in the realm of ideas and conscious thought, the physical, scientific universe having somehow developed these
>decidedly unscientific qualities for reasons only it knows.
Ideas are like the pheromones of the hive or hormones of the body. They are glues that hold together and compel different
assembly line variations (hives). These glues vary and will be unwittinlgy selected between as to which is efficient at
holding together the most successful vectors (of these glues) /hives. (The optimistic hope giving lies and delusions and [unwittingly reciprocal] altruism impulse generally doing better than starker accurate truth[tm], in my expericence.)
Those political glues are created by physical bio chemical ‘modules’ (tissues, jucies : nerves, glands etc) that make up the
individual cells /members of the hive. Ie ‘materialism’. These modules are the actual material things being selected between.
This is all very easy to understand stuff.
These are your various assumptions:
1) Typical people know nothing.
(No where did is say that? But the average persons’ level of Scientific education is sorry, which has nothing to do with Evolution. Since I aimed my barbs at people like you and Mr. Stein, are you the template for the inviolable common man! If you can’t understand a Scientist’s mission and choose to give up and blame the great ID for life that is your problem. Whether some Jose Schmoe believes in Evolution or understands Newtonian mechanics is quite irrelevant to the question. Jose is not attacking Evolutionary Biologists for doing their job.)
2) Your view is undebatable.
(That Scientists job is to find natural answers to phenomena of nature, yes I think that is the definition of Science and beyond debate. I explicitly said that the ID, or God argument works on other levels, but at this point, not Science. Where did I say that Science is everything?)
3) The tenets of Christianity teach killing.
(A contemptible lie that your petty mind conjured up to make you feel like some martyr. All I said is that God and various scriptures, not just Christian, have been used by various people to justify all sorts of atrocities, I believe I threw the Muslims, as well as some Israelites and pagans like the Shintos. Hypocrites abound every. My point, which seemed to be over your porcine intellect, is that talking about God and religion is hardly an anodyne to evil. One can find all sorts of apocalyptic brutality to justify killing gays or destroying a city in the Torah. thankfully, those people are fringe and few)
5) The errant beliefs of tyrants are not the fault of the tyrant.
(Sometimes yes, sometimes no. People raised amongst utterly brutal and amoral people are very apt to learn that at their parents’ knee, ala Genghis Khan or Tamerlane. Christianity moderated the Kaiser and his 2nd Reich enough so they were tame compared to the horrors that came later, even though they were quite ruthless by that day’s standard)
6) Bad guys are good guys without God.
(Huh, that is so silly.)
As far as insulting Berlinski, so what? Plenty of Academics are bloody fools and wrong, ala Chomsky or Heidegger or legions of Marxist fools who did sterling work in other fields. Why there are any Marxists today when Marx claimed his view was Science, that failed to predict anything. All revolutions occured in pre-industrial societies, not Germany or England and class warfare is not the engine of history. But there are believers in all sorts of untrue nonsense like Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose day of reckoning gets continuosuly postponed. I never said Berlinski was some evil djinn. As far as Ben Stein goes, I guess he never amused me too much, since I never liked “Ferris Buler’s Plays Hookey” en toto, and speech writers are not prophets. Besides, you and they insult and demean respected Scientists based on their beliefs in Evolution. Richard Dawkins, as I surmise is not an ambassador or a politician, so his skills at making people like him may be slim. But we are not judging him on a high school popularity contest level either.
Danny:
a) The scientific method explicitly relies on experimental fact to DISPROVE FALSE statements. In science you never have “truth”.
This is moronic. You contradicted yourself in the first two sentences. First you say that science disproves false statements, then you say that in science you never have truth. But it’s a fact of logic that proving a statement false ipso facto proves the negation of that statement true. If you can prove something false, you have truth.
Certainly it is not arrived at by “reason”.
Bullshit. All scientific truth is arrived at by reason. Why don’t we believe that the world is flat? Because we have learned certain facts that logically contradict the proposition that the earth is flat. But we can only perceive that logical contradiction by reason. Without reason, we wouldn’t be able to see anything as proof or disproof of any proposition whatsoever, in science or any other field. All intellectual activity relies on reason.
But hey, maybe you do science without reason. You sure argue that way.
b) Mathematical “truth” IS contingent. It depends on the axioms you choose.
That’s not what it means for a truth to be contingent. The point, which went over your head, is that mathematical truths are not subject to disproof by physical, experimental evidence. There’s absolutely no possibility that 1+1=2 will be disproven by some scientific experiment. That’s because they are arrived at by pure reason.
But hey, if you want to believe that math is “pure cacophony” (the original claim) because you can use different axioms, you’re free to do so. Just keep in mind that the same must then be said of all scientific results that make use of math.
c) We can measure “truth claims” against experiments. Some survive, some don’t.
Like most materialists, you seem to have some sort of mental deficiency that prevents you from being able to easily conceptualize outside the material domain, so you completely missed my point. Let me break it down for you:
It’s impossible to “measure” a truth claim. What does a truth claim look like? What color is it? How much does it weigh?
All meaningless questions, because propositions (which is what truth claims are) don’t have physical properties. They have the property of being either true or false, which isn’t physically measurable. Instead, we must evaluate propositions using our reason.
Therefore, a truth claim like “Truth claims arrived at from pure reason are pure cacophony” is self-stultifying, because in order to make it, you must evaluate all possible truth claims that can be arrived at by reason, and evaluate them by reason.
d) And here we have the full demonstration of your ignorance of logic… not being to say something is TRUE is not the same as saying that you cannot say something is FALSE nor that in that case everything is somehow “equally true”.
See above. You are simply wrong as a fact of logic. Saying that P is false implies that !P is true. Don’t deem to lecture me on logic when you don’t even have a solid grasp on the Law of Non-Contradiction.
And nothing you said here even touches on what I pointed out in point D. The point was that, in order to say that scientific truth claims are better than other truth claims, or that some truth claims are false, or that everything is not “equally true”, or anything else about truth at all for that matter, you have to implicitly assume that there is such a thing as truth.
But truth is just as invisible as God, there’s no experimental evidence for its existence, and its existence is known only by rational intuition.
So here we are treated to the spectacle of Derbyshire, JA, and you all prattling on about how truth claims derived from rational intuition rather than science are relativistic and worthless, even as you continuously talk about truth – the most intuitional concept of all. To someone who actually has the requisite knowledge and reasoning ability to see the error, you look like an ignorant lot of buffoons.
natural answers to phenomena of nature, yes I think that is the definition of Science
Therefore the square root of minus one is not scientific and any explanation, research or discovery based on such nonsense is not scientific.
I assume you are not a mathematician or scientist, I’ll bet you are a [poor] philosopher.
Just out of curiosity, what exactly is required to claim oneself a ‘mathematician’. If all you need to do, for instance, is to sit on your duff in classrooms taking notes from a lecture and then later doing math assignments from a textbook, then elementary school kids qualify as ‘mathematicians’. If you need to pass ‘advanced’ mathematics courses to qualify as a mathematician, where is that line drawn? Is simple addition advanced enough? Is algebra advanced? Trigonometry? Calculus? Advanced Fornier transforms? Euler and Navier-Stokes equations? Grassman Algebras? DeRham cohomology? Riemannian geometry? Where is the magical line between ‘someone who has taken a lot of math classes’, and the leviathan of hyperintelligence called a ‘mathematician’? And what is the precise moment of transformation? What are the precise concepts that fuel this cosmological transformation?
It should be a fairly easily mental progression for hyperintelligence brigade to articulate.
Of necessity I’ve played with equations — I got just a hair beyond calculus and into differential equations before I switched majors in college (a few centuries ago) –- but for the life of me I don’t understand why taking a few more classes, be it 5, 10, or 20, would somehow have then mystically transformed me into someone vastly more qualified than everyone else on the planet to understand and comment on all that cannot be measured or inferred.
Please explain.
Deuce & G Vinson,
Well said in your last few posts, which expose the epistemological weaknesses which under gird the materialists’ varied contentions about reality.
I’m still waiting to hear (from the anti-ID crowd) if their statements about the nature of science are scientific or philosophical…
It has been my experience that materialists tend to blur the lines between the two, which explains why so many sincerely believe science objectively supports their philosophy.
The reason they resist ID theory is because it falsifies the portions of modern evolutionary theory so heavily laden with materialist metaphysical assumptions.
Either life (with its complex genetic instructions) came about unguided or guided. To begin the investigation of this question on grounds that intelligent cause is off the table is not very rational for it declares the question answered before it is ever investigated.
Science tells us DNA cannot functionally survive without the controlled environment of the cell. It cannot replicate without protein readers and assemblers. Those proteins are themselves constructed from instruction segments in the DNA. Science also tells us the minimum nucleotides needed for this to take place.
Logic tells us since one cannot exist and propagate without the others and the others cannot exist without the one, both must exist from the beginning. Logic further tells us through probability calculation, that such a confluence and organization of material is akin to a miracle.
Which brings us back to ‘blind faith’.
Javelin, we are seeing a memewar here.
The DI intends to replace the current version of Science with something of their own design.
And they are using social engineering and Wedge strategy tactics to accomplish those goals.
Stein’s movie is an attempt to demonize Science and scientists.
Expelled is just the cartoon version of Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism.
And these poor fools desperately want to believe the theme endorsed by both the movie and the book, as vocalized by Goldberg here.
“I do think Darwinism led to Nazism, in a sense. But that’s because I see Nazism as one of many responses to modernism. And Darwin, for good and ill, represents the rise of modern science — along with Einstein and others. Nazism and Communism and Progressivism were all impossible without the industrial revolution, Darwinism, relativism, mechanized warfare, mass production, etc. They were reactionary responses to these things. Those responses amounted to an express rejection of the conservative and libertarian vision of society, which is why they were leftwing.”
The theme is–
that Science is Bad….reallyreally Bad…..UNLESS it is “guided” by judeo-xian philosophy.
This is what is happening– courtesy Reason and Peter Thiel
reason: What do you think are the most dangerous political trends in the United States?
Thiel: It seems like things are moving in a very anti-libertarian direction politically on every issue. There may be a few exceptions, but generally we’re moving toward a country that’s fiscally more liberal and socially more conservative, which is a very odd configuration. You can debate why that is. Maybe politics has become purely reactionary. It’s a reaction against progress, against globalization, against technology.
There is absolutely nothing libertarian about Goldberg’s and Stein’s premise, that science without religion causes the worlds ills.
They are reactionaries, the memetic equivalent of villagers with pitchforks and torches.
griefer,
Well, I would explain to you why your attempt to link this discussion with contemporary American politics is flawed …
… but I’m afraid you wouldn’t understand.
You see, you’re not an historian, politician, philosopher, psychologist, or political scientist. The concepts are simply beyond your comprehension — I’m afraid you just haven’t taken enough courses to have ascended to the proper level of cognition. It’s simply too complex and involved a process for your comprehension, and in all probability you’re simply too far behind now ever to catch up.
Sorry.
(By the way, in case I’m wrong, will you please list your college-level coursework. I’d like to do my own research into the exact mechanism that makes you an unassailable paragon of scientific, philosophical, and American political intellectual juggernautery. More apropos, I’d like to compare your courses with mine, hopefully to identify just what subjects I need to master before advancing to your level of intellectual prowess. Thank you.)
Deuce, ah the joy of arguing with a smug, self-satisfied moron.
1) That the world is not flat first got traction because someone sailed round it. We KNOW it is not flat because people have taken pictures of it from space. This is experimental proof not reason, except in the most pedantic manner of saying the brain interprets photos and the brain is responsible for “reason” therefore reason is what says the world is flat. Note that it is not just one experiment but numerous experimental facts that say the world is not flat. Certainly it was not found to be round by guys in white togas arguing from first principles but from people making observations. The former (maybe without the togas) is what I can reason, the latter is experiment. The Standard Model for three of the four forces is an example of experiment driven theory. If you think you can derive it from pure reason and posit a set of axioms along with a logically consistent proof of the model then there is a million dollars waiting for you to claim from the Clay Mathematical institute. So far the brightest minds in the world have only managed it for two dimensions – it is currently considered one of the toughest problems in Applied Maths.
2) Firstly, as we being pedantic the axiom of the excluded middle – what you have called the “law of non-contradiction” – is an axiom not a law. There is a large school of logic and mathematics for which things can be neither true nor their negation true, an example is synthetic differential geometry or “intuitionist” logic (which has nothing to do with what you are calling logic) or fuzzy or polish logic. It is commonly assumed because it makes things much easier to prove but like the axiom of choice is quite controversial. Secondly, if you point is to say that it is TRUE to say classical mechanics is FALSE then you are simply repeating what I am saying but in a puffed up “aren’t I smart” way. Does that mean in any way that General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory are TRUE? Nope. Does it imply it? Nope. Does it suggest it is more likely to be true? Nope. It says absolutely nothing.
3) I am going to be kind and assume you are simply confused about mathematical “truth” and scientific “truth”. Mathematical “truth” says absolutely nothing about the real world, whereas scientific “truth” is ONLY about the real world. It is as much a construct of the mind as Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel roof. Mathematical proof is solely contingent on axioms picked so Mr Derbyshire and myself – and I suggest any other mathematician – would be a “relativist” in that we consider Hyperbolic geometry to be just as “true” as Euclidean geometry. The final arbiter of scientific “truth” is experiment.
4) You can measure a “falsity” claim by testing it against experiment. Classical mechanics did not give way to quantum mechanics because of “reason”, it gave way because it gave the wrong results for Blackbody radiation, photoelectric effect, energy levels for electrons etc etc etc. So we can say with 100% certainty that classical mechanics is wrong. As for not being able to “measure” claims, it is this sort of idiotic comment which led to me claiming you cannot be a scientist. Classical mechanics made very very precise claims about all of the above situations which most certainly CAN be measured.
5) As for the idea that if you can say something is false then you can say there must be “truth” then only in the pedantic “it is true that x is false”. I can say I have a much higher level of confidence in Evolution than ID because ID has failed every single hurdle and Evolution has passed every single one. Does that mean that Evolution is true or “truer”, nope. This problem of induction was brought up by Hume and solved by Popper.
Buy a book, you’ll look less of a prat.
Aurelino,
Berlinski’s post is social engineering, part of the DI wedge strategy.
He is attempting to discredit scientists.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Wedge strategy is a political and social action plan authored by the Discovery Institute, the hub of the intelligent design movement. The strategy was put forth in a Discovery Institute manifesto known as the Wedge Document,[1] which describes a broad social, political, and academic agenda whose ultimate goal is to “defeat [scientific] materialism” represented by evolution, “reverse the stifling materialist world view and replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions”[2] and to “affirm the reality of God.”[3] Its goal is to “renew” American culture by shaping public policy to reflect conservative Christian, namely evangelical Protestant, values.[4]
The wedge metaphor, attributed to Phillip E. Johnson, is that of a metal wedge splitting a log and represents using an aggressive public relations programme to create an opening for the supernatural in the public’s understanding of science.[5]
Intelligent design is the belief that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not a naturalistic process such as natural selection. Implicit in the intelligent design doctrine is a redefining of science and how it is conducted. Wedge strategy proponents are dogmatically opposed to materialism,[6][7][8] naturalism,[7][9] and evolution,[10][11][12][13] and have made the removal of each from how science is conducted and taught an explicit goal.[14][15]
The strategy was originally brought to the public’s attention when the Wedge Document was leaked on the Web. The Wedge strategy forms the governing basis of a wide range of Discovery Institute intelligent design campaigns.
Berlinski is a Discovery Institute fellow.
This part of a cultural trend.
/shrug
I am just explaining, the whole bad scientists/bad science theme promoted by berlinski and Stein’s movie is a DI wedge strategy tactic.
You are being manipulated.
sorry.
I would say – mostly because I am prejudiced – that being mathematician implies a certain rigour of the mind. Certainly it would imply a familiarity with logic and a mathematician would tend not to throw about concepts they don’t really understand – unlike say a philosopher…. A mathematician would have an appreciation for subtleties and implicit assumptions that in my experience philosophers simply don’t have. A case in point is Deuce’s lack of appreciation of the difference between mathematical “truth” and scientific “truth” – and the fact he throws around logical concepts he/she clearly does not understand – which probably explains why she/he thinks Berlinski is so smart.
Todd, erm… no.
Lets list some of the assumptions you have made:
1) Because DNA is the basis of inheritance for MOST living things we know about on THIS planet doesn’t mean it is the only way inheritance can work – think retro-viruses.
2) Because DNA is the basis of inheritance for MOST living things we know about on THIS planet NOW, doesn’t mean it was always thus.
3) DNA subsists perfectly well without proteins, it can be crystallised etc
4) Most of the proteins are there to ensure fidelity of copying, obviously that was not always the case.
and the list goes on. If you are seriously interested in this – read about autocatalytic RNA.
I would say … that being mathematician implies a certain rigour of the mind. Certainly it would imply a familiarity with logic and a mathematician would tend not to throw about concepts they don’t really understand — unlike say a philosopher …. A mathematician would have an appreciation for subtleties and implicit assumptions that in my experience philosophers simply don’t have.
Since ‘rigour of the mind’ is the relevant factor, what then, of those individuals who can be mathematicians but choose not to, or who choose to enter fields they find more rewarding, such as say … philosophy, law, politics, business, the clergy. You don’t really believe that everybody who is not a mathematician cannot be one, do you? This may seem like a minor point, but since you have claimed a superior understanding of logic I simply must point out that it is a logic error to assume that because mathematicians and scientists have rigorous minds (a shaky supposition, at best), those who are not mathematicians or scientists cannot have rigorous minds. I have forgotten the name of the logic error, but I think you see my point. In other words, you might be well served not to consider one’s profession a proxy for intelligence when having these sorts of discussions. To do otherwise is irrational, and leads to another logic error: Appeal to Authority. More crudely, and real-world: Mathematicians and scientists are just people who have taken a few more science and math courses than the average person, and like the average person they tend to have very large gaps in cognitive ability (in addition to yawning gaps in education, both formal and informal). And like your average person they are every bit as clueless to these gaps, if not more sore.
But you still didn’t answer one of my main questions: At what point does mathematics, with which ALL of us are familiar, become ‘advanced’ mathematics, and what is it specifically about this ‘advanced’ mathematics that is so transformative relative, so say, algebra, or even simple addition and subtraction? What is this exact advanced transformative cognitive mechanism that anybody who has graduated from college hasn’t already demonstrated to some degree, including Berlinski? What subjects must I master to prove ‘rigor of the mind’, and why these topics, or more accurately, why can ONLY those subjects demonstrate intelligence?
(Now is when I start to map the bellowing of “DO YOU KNOW WHAT I AM …!” to other basic human psychological impulses/failings, and to tie it in with group psychology, mass movements, power, appeals to authority, and the proclivity to herd ‘low IQ’ peoples into boxcars. Think you’re too smart for there to be a connection? That’s exactly why it has happened and will happen again. Alas, I need to get back to work. Hopefully somebody else can articulately pick up the ball on that one ….)
By the way, in 2006 during the height of the troubles in Iraq, a survey polling various professions asked the following question: “Is the Iraq war already lost?” Over 80% of scientists and engineers answered in the affirmative, by far the highest percentage of all identified professionals. Translating specialized technical knowledge and ‘logic’ into predictive ability seems particularly ill-suited to the real world of human affairs. Put another way, to a scientist or mathematician, human affairs are simply ‘concepts they don’t really understand’, an (ahem!) ‘appreciation for subtleties’ notwithstanding.
Geez, I just went back and read Berlinski’s article (originally, I based my response only on Derb’s diatribe, and the idiocy of commenters who agreed with him). Now, having seen what Derb was responding to, I think that he is an even bigger fool. It’s probably not wise to spend more time analyzing Derb’s goof-ups than Derb spends analyzing anything, but here goes.
Berlinski:
Derbyshire replies:
See what happened here? David basically asks, “Unless you ignorantly assume that God is supposed to be a material being that can be measured, then what scientific basis is there for saying that he doesn’t exist?” Derb, completely clueless, essentially replies, “Cause he’s not a material being that can be measured!”
Then there’s this from Berlinski:
Obviously, Berlinski is pointing out the illogical extremes that even brilliant scientists like Stephen Hawking will go to in the attempt to banish any notion of the transcendent in the origin of the universe. He’s jokingly saying that Hawking’s attempt is so logically incoherent that, given a choice between it and the Genesis account, a sane person would choose the latter.
Derb, in a show of histrionics and naive literalism that would make both Andrew Sullivan and Pat Robertson proud at the same time, somehow construes this to mean that Berlinski is actually calling him, his wife, Stephen Hawking, and anybody who doesn’t specifically believe in the Genesis account insane. Then, in a later comment, he goes on to say that Berlinski has admitted to believing in the Genesis account (anybody who is familiar with Berlinski knows that he doesn’t, and that he is in fact an agnostic). Again, right over Derb’s head.
As poor as he seems to be at picking up on subtle irony, I can imagine why Derb might have had such a hard time with David’s previous book. I see that in responding to this article, David continued to go over Derb’s head for the amusement of those who get it, rather than expending energy to directly point out his stupid misinterpretations, and then making fun of him for them. But I find it hard to resist.
Danny,
1) Can retro-viruses replicate without DNA? It cannot, if memory and the first paragraph of the wikipedia entry serve me correctly. So are there other examples of inheritance which don’t rely on DNA transcription?
2) It doesn’t mean it was always thus, but if not DNA then what?
3) Can crystallized DNA replicate without proteins? That would defeat my point.
4) How is it obviously not always the case that error checking proteins existed? Is there physical evidence of this?
So the list goes on? Can you answer my objections to this one?
What is the state of various RNA-world hypotheses? Whether the RNA world hypotheses are correct or not, even ribozymes are copied from somewhere, so postulating replicating RNA strands still doesn’t jump the probabilistic hurdle, nor does it explain the instructions for the host of other proteins required for cellular replication.
Esotek, your snub at my definition of Science and your witless retort about imaginary number is numbingly pointless. Mathematics is not Science. There are no negative square roots in nature, that is just a useful Mathematical construct
Aureliano, maybe I should be more precise. The ill-defined “rigour of mind” is something all mathematicians must have but not all people who have it must be mathematicians. A rather extreme example would be Ed Witten, one of the preeminent if not THE preeminent mathematical physicist of the last ten years. He never did any of the studies you did – he was a history major… so if the number of classes or formal qualifications was the measure then you and I would be more of a mathematician than a Fields Medalist!! Another example would be Bill Gates. Please also note “rigour of mind” is not the same as “intelligence”(whatever that means).
To go back to the original comment, Deuce strikes me like most philosophers I have met; he has thinks he/she(I am henceforth going to assume he is a he to save typing) has a deep understanding of what are rather deep concepts when in fact he has a very shallow one. He clearly has no real understanding of logic, the difference between mathematical theorems and their application, between the meaning of “true” in the strict mathematical case and “true” in the scientific sense. He is confused between the real world meaning and the extremely precise meaning it has in logic or maths.
Finally, why would a mathematician know more about Iraq than someone else? Say an Iraqi? Or someone who did arabic? Also Maths is a separate enterprise from Physics. The standards are completely different. Physics is solely about what matches the real world, Maths is about proofs. They tend to be different types of people. If you look at why Superstring theory has lasted as long as it has with “no predictions” – it makes some but none that are unique to it and not another theory – then a large reason is because the current theories of General Relativity and the Standard Model are so highly accurate that there is no guide as to where to go. Again to respond to Deuce, we KNOW at least one is false because they contradict each other. Given how logically obvious he find falseness implies what is true, I think there is an “easy” Nobel in the bag for him by simply stating which is “true”….
Todd:
1) RNA can catalyse it’s own replication. This is a rather old experiment now. Also retrovirus don’t need DNA to replicate – they are protein shells and RNA. They hijack the hosts replication system.
2) If I knew that, I wouldn’t be talking to you… I’d be thanking the Nobel committee. There are a number of hypothesis out there. The most popular one is RNA replication.
3) OK, maybe I was being pedantic. You said that DNA somehow needs proteins to survive. It doesn’t.
4) Tons of evidence. Different organisms have different transcriptions and replication mechanisms.
What has ribosomes( I assume you mean this when you say ribozymes or do you mean enzymes? ) got to do with it? The whole point is that RNA catalyses itself. No need for proteins. PS not a postulate, you can see it in action.
3)
Aurelino, Deuce…….
What do you not unnerstand about Berlinski’s premise that scientists become atheists because they are powermad control freaks?
Can’t you read?
Berlinski is a DI stooge and he is playing you guyz like a 10 pound steelhead on 20 pound test.
Give it up.
You will never, never force us to buy an obsolete model(IDT) when we have the new one(ToE) for free.
Go teach IDT in christian colleges and unis where it BELONGS.
Step on, an quit buggin us.
We have real research and teaching to do.
griefer,
You are tilting at windmills. This thread has a slew of interesting main issues and side issues that have come up (as usually happens with discussions about ID), and I think many of them are over your head. Each and every point you raised in your previous post isn’t interesting to me.
Although the nature of your responses have been part and parcel to the main phenomenon that does interest me ….
Now how about that list of your completed college courses? I’d like to know what a ‘Map to Intellectual Transcendance’ looks like.
(I, too, must sign out for the evening. Ciao.)
griefer,
You are tilting at windmills. This thread has a number of interesting main issues and side issues that have come up (as usually seems to happen with discussions about ID). Each and every point you raised in your previous post, however, isn’t interesting to me.
Although the nature of your responses have been part and parcel to the main phenomenon that does interest me ….
Now how about that list of your completed college courses? I’d like to know what a bona fide ‘Map to Intellectual Transcendance’ looks like.
(I, too, must sign out for the evening. Ciao.)
How do we know, based on sailing around the world, that it isn’t flat? It’s because, using our minds, we are able to see that the ability to sail around the world implies that the world is round, and furthermore, using our rational sense, we can see that the fact that the world is round logically contradicts the proposition that the world is flat. And, because of the law of non-contradiction, we can see that the proposition is therefore false.
To get from an experiment to facts about the world, or to prove a statement like “the world is flat” false, requires a rational mind that can intuit and interpret facts from the experiment, and that has the ability to understand logical contradictions and accordingly reject as false propositions that contradict those facts.
Experiments don’t prove or disprove anything by themselves. They are nothing without reason. So to the extent you try to claim that reason is flawed as a guide to truth, you’re actually denigrating science too.
That’s not pedantic at all, at least not to any careful, analytical thinker who is interested in ascertaining the truth about things. And why the scare quotes around “reason”? It’s actually an essential insight that reason operates as the final arbiter in scientific practice. It’s a corrective to those like JP who, without looking deeply enough into the matter, try to claim that rational intuition is essentially flawed or useless.
It’s both an axiom and a law. Unless you want to tell me that you consider it optional, in which case, hey, go make yourself crazy trying to conceive a square circle.
No, mathematical truth says nothing about the physical world. If it said nothing about the real world, there would be no basis whatsoever for judging one mathematical claim as true and another false. And yet there is. Guess what? If you get all the questions wrong on a math test, your professor is going to give you a lot of red marks, and it won’t just be because of a difference of opinion.
Again, no you can’t. You evaluate claims as true or false with your mind. You don’t measure them. Or have you found a way to do so? Did you invent a propositionometer? If so, care to send a pic?
Yep, but only because we’re able to use our reason to see that the facts we learned by experiment contradict the claims of classical mechanics.
And it’s this sort of naivety that led me to say that you seem to have some kind of deficiency that keeps you from being able to clearly process non-material concepts. You’re consistently failing to make the basic distinction between physical experiments and the propositional claims gleaned from those experiments. It’s kind of funny that you’re trying to use your ignorance of basic logical distinctions as evidence of my ignorance of science.
I know full well that we can use experiments to prove claims false, but that’s not measuring them. You’re simply missing the point by giving examples of experimental disconfirmation. We measure the physical entities involved in the experiments with physical instruments, and we evaluate the claims with our rational minds.
No, the final (and only) arbiter of scientific truth is the way reality actually is. Experiment is one way that we figure out what the truth is, not how the truth is created.
And it’s more than just that. Saying that something is false implies that there is truth, because the very definition of falsehood is falling short of the truth. Saying that a claim is false is meaningless apart from the implication that there is some truth from which it deviates.
Btw, I’m noticing a trend here. Whenever you’re forced to admit that I am right, you try to dismiss it with an “Oh, but that’s just pedantic”.
Ah, I see. The very definition of a mathematician is someone with a certain vaguely-defined “rigour of mind” as determined by you (and here I always thought it had something to do with math). A less charitable person might be inclined to say you were a vainglorious imbecile, but me, I would never say that.
And this comes from a person who thinks it “pedantic” when I insist on acknowledging subtleties and implicit assumptions.
There is no difference. “Truth” refers to those propositions that accurately describe reality, in science, math, or anything else. There are truths about different subjects, and different methods of ascertaining true statements, but there’s only one kind of truth: the true kind.
griefer:
I don’t like the Discovery Institute, I think that on the whole they are an embarrassment, and Berlinski would probably be better served to part ways with them.
What of it? I don’t give a fig about the DI. We’re discussing the actual arguments that were made by Berlinski and Derbyshire and the ensuing comments here on these pages. Berlinski’s associations are irrelevant, and they don’t make Derb’s reply one iota less unsound.
And just what is Berlinski’s argument, pray tell?
All i read was an assertion that scientists become atheists because they are powermad control freaks.
With ABSOLUTELY NO SUPPORTING DATA, AFAIK.
Assertion by slander I think.
We’re discussing the actual arguments
I see no actual arguments, sorry.
Aureliano, tant pis pour vous.
You are utterly spoofed by Berlinski….so you definitely don’t make the IQ gradient to attend our theory of consciousness rumble.
Alas, education, discipline, and “rigour of mind” are prerequistes for our discussion group.
And yes, not everyone can do high order mathematics.
Mathability is strongly correlated with high IQ and g.
I will be arguing for Hammerhoff’s q-consciousness model…..it is my favorite right now.
As far as I can see your arguments belong in Bible college.
Did you get a degree from Oral Roberts, perhaps?
I’m out, but I will leave you with my favorite Max Tegmark quote to ponder.
In other words, our successful theories are not mathematics approximating physics,
but mathematics approximating mathematics.
Deuce, when you are in a hole stop digging.
“Law of non-contradiction” doesn’t exist. It isn’t a law. It is an axiom – it’s real name is the axiom of the excluded middle. Full-stop. End of debate. Nothing more to see. Move along. Read about intuitionistic logic. Read about Polish logic. Read about axiom of excluded middle. Please. Do yourself and the people around yourself a favour and read a little before you feel the urge to pontificate on subjects you clearly and obviously and patently haven’t got the first clue about. You remind me of the donkey in Family Guy who “knows” Kevin Bacon wasn’t in Footloose(the donkey is “sorry but…”) and insists his colleague “looks it up”.
Again, if you honestly believe that physical theories are solely the product of “rational mind” and not experiment driven and are pure logically driven mathematical theories then write up Quantum Field Theory in three dimensions – you don’t even need to do the four that people normally work in. There’s a million dollars in it for you – and if you are under 40, almost certainly a Fields Medal(Ed Witten got one for doing in **2** dimensions, along with being acknowledged as one of the greatest mathematical physicists of our time) and probably a Nobel too. Or you can go for the “easier” route, and take the fact that at least one of General Relativity and the Standard Model is wrong to divine what is “true” – there’s a dead-certain Nobel for that too. When you are thanking the committee, I’ll admit you are right and will be the first to admit you are one of the greatest geniuses of our time. Until then I’ll stick to opinion you are a pompous fool.
In order to believe in ID/creationism/whatever you choose to call it, you have to believe that the fossil and geological evidence for an evolution was deliberately placed there by your Intelligent Designer/Creator in order to mislead scientists.
Any Intelligent Designer/Creator who deliberately places false evidence is creating a lie.
Any being that creates a lie as an integral part of its creation is evil.
Thus, in order to believe Intelligent Design/Creationism, you have to believe in an Intelligent Designer/Creator that is evil.
I spoke to a couple of Model Theorist mates of mine and they have promised that if you can derive the “law of excluded middle” from a list of axioms – you can pick the axioms, like any mathematician – they will get your extraordinary breakthrough in logic published in the top journals!! I look forward to your proof, as you clearly think it is obvious it shouldn’t take you long….
More seriously, your assumption this must be true is a prime example of the lack of rigour I meant and the inability to spot subtleties.
look Deuce….you and the DI and Berlinski are all profound idiots to argue against ToE.
Google the penrose-hamerhoff model of quantum-consciousness.
That is where to bring it.
Unfortunately you all gonna need mad math skillz to get in the door.
lolz
Aureliano, I think we have a counterexample in Deuce of what I was trying to say about a “mathematical mind”. I am sure John Derbyshire will be exhilarated that imminently Deuce is going to post a comment to his article that solves some of the toughest problems in Maths and Physics – solutions that he claims are “obvious”. In particular, I look forward to when he:
1) Using only the fact that Classical Mechanics is false he will derive the true unified theory of all four forces.
2) Furthermore he will describe in detail the experiment that will prove this ultimate theory “true” and every other theory “false” for all time, thus bringing to an end nearly 400 of physics.
3) He will rigourous prove such a theory is true from pure intellect – just like all the other theories…. Presumably at the same time by a limiting process he will posit mathematically rigourous proof of Quantum Field Theory in 4D – apparently this is already done – by bringing together all the threads that somehow the world’s greatest mathematicians and physicists have failed to do…. even though it is obvious.
4) He will post a rigourous proof showing that Non-Contradiction is not an axiom – ie an assumption – but rather a “law” that must be true in any logical system, thus putting out of business large swathes of Model Theorists. Apparently the proof is so obvious, that every single logician to date will be shown up as a fool.
5) He will do this by pure intellect as this is how ALL scientific theories come about.
I wait with baited breath. Just remember you read it here first. Unless of course the commissars get to him to prevent there power being taken away as everyone realises what what they do is not difficult or subtle but in fact so obvious he can just repeat it as true.
[Danny, I composed the first part of this post before I saw your last comment. I need to rewrite it, but I won’t have the time today. The general arc of the argument is the same, though, so I’m going to post it as is.]
The ill-defined “rigour of mind” is something all mathematicians must have but not all people who have it must be mathematicians … so if the number of classes or formal qualifications was the measure then you and I would be more of a mathematician than a Fields Medalist!! [referring to Ed Witten]
Sigh. You have been tip-toeing around my requests because you don’t recognize why it’s an important issue, but you simply must address this: What is a mathematician? He cannot be ‘one with a rigorous mind’ (i.e., more capable of being correct) because others who have rigorous minds are not mathematicians, and there are plenty of people who call themselves mathematicians who are not the least bit rigorous. I know it sounds puerile, but I simply must know at what point this intellectual prowess begins, which particular mathematical concepts (and their application) one must understand to qualify as a mathematician (or physicist), and what it is precisely about these concepts that allow one to definitively intuit the limits of what can be measured or inferred (i.e., where science ends and informed speculation — philosophy — begins), one of the significant themes of this thread. In practical terms, I also want to identify the point at which I can ensure my own personal intellectual unassailability, thus freeing me up for truly informed inquiry, so I need to know if I can master these subjects, or if I’m already there.
You see, I believe that that we will in very short order start to reach the limits not just of what is measurable (observable), but of what can be inferred through mathematics. In an era of industrialized discovery, of commoditized innovation (I work in Silicon Valley), I think there are a lot of people making the very basic error of thinking that the pace of discovery over the last few centuries will continue in perpetuity. But, really, how likely is it that a bunch of monkeys (or genetically re-engineered monkey-derivatives) and their machines are capable of continuing this pace of mathematical innovation for 200 TRILLION years, when the last of the red dwarfs burns out and the universe finally goes dark. Alternatively, how likely is it that a bunch of monkeys needed only a few centuries of organized, industrialized innovation to come within a hair’s breath of describing reality down to its most irreducible layer?
Put another way: While some of us are greatly impressed with ourselves, in all probability our knowledge of the universe will never amount to much more than just a few thousand years worth of monkey business. In all probability, what we can never properly conceive and can never possibly understand will occupy us peripherally for an additional 200 trillion years beyond this frantic period of discovery, and all that time will be endlessly filled with philosophical speculation and scientific frustration and tantrum (hey, maybe they’re synonymous
. In the end, and sooner rather than later, after we’ve run out of things we’re capable of describing or understanding, mathematically or otherwise, the ‘philosophers’, in whatever guise, will rule our affairs, not the scientists or the Higgs boson. I believe our destiny is a few thousands of years applying science to build our machines while re-engineering ourselves, followed effectively by an eternity of moral and spiritual speculation in near infinite variety. The problem isn’t the unknown, it’s how much of the unknown is unknowable. That formulation is trite sounding and the above explanation overwrought (after all, I’m not a philosopher, or a physicist 
, but try to take is seriously, because it really is the crux of the matter. You believe that the clever mathematical tricks of monkeys can infer all that is worth inferring; others believe the safer bet is that we’re outrageously inadequate to the task.
If I’m correct, I believe at least A LITTLE humility is in order, don’t you think? If I’m wrong, I simply must know which mathematical equations (and the physical concepts described by them) are required to disabuse me of this notion. Who could pass up on the opportunity not just to identify and understand all that is worth identifying and understanding, but to be all-knowing and all-understanding relative to one’s peers (i.e., a god), and all this just a few college courses away ….
Finally, why would a mathematician know more about Iraq than someone else? [etc.]
He wouldn’t. But why were scientists and engineers *more wrong* than, for instance, construction workers, or other academics (including, presumably, philosophers)? Everybody is busy doing other things than following the news. It is not as if a mathematician spending 12 hours a day goofing on proofing is any less informed than someone working 8 hours in manual labor and then coming home to have a pint and watch football. How, then, can the hyperintelligent not just be wrong about such issues, but be more wrong than people who have a terminal case of Lack of Rigorous Mind(tm)?
(please, no semantic games that a mathematician is not a scientist or engineer. There is a place for precision, and in this case I think we both know it is a distinction without a difference.)
Why is this relevant? Remember that in Berlinski’s original article his basic premise was that the deceit of believing oneself the ultimate arbiter of the truth leads to some really nasty social outcomes. While I don’t have any particular attachment to this formulation, I do agree that belief in one’s own intellectual infallibility is as surefire a way as any to ensure a kind of free-floating amoral arrogance that can lead to some rather vicious developments when given the reigns of power. In more everyday terms, those who think they are too smart to be wrong inevitably overestimate their true powers of cognition, and thereby give short shrift to all that is not immediately relevant to their narrow concerns. In short, such individuals lack the self-corrective mechanisms most people have in regards to evaluating human affairs, predicting human system outcomes, and identifying political processes, procedures, and behaviors needed to alleviate various and sundry problems, big and small. (And they HATE people who don’t recognize their self-evident brilliance.) That is a nasty brew, and one I don’t think should be difficult to understand.
Just to be clear, I’m agnostic, and so not religious at all, but if there is indeed some entity or phenomenon out there that we call God, for lack of a better mathematical or physical description, He will in all probability reside in those vast, indefinable layers of the immeasurable, not in our silly little Unified Theory. It is not that God keeps retreating to ever smaller ‘gaps’, it is that it’s likely that what we’ve discovered or what we can discover in toto is so narrow relative to the complexity of reality that it is monumentally inadequate to the task of even beginning to describe what has been called God. Our models are just unbelievably, outrageously pathetic, as are those who think detailed knowledge of these models represents a transcendent state of being and a new order of intelligence. Since there is so much room for God in what can never be mathematically described or observed, speculation about that realm, His realm –- otherwise known as philosophy and religion –- becomes the only tool available to understand it and thus such speculation is entirely rational. In fact, in the end, speculation (religion) has always been and will always be an attempt to rationally order the universe, even when it’s wrong. I should say that again, since it’s an important point: Religious explanations and philosophical speculations have always been and are still rational acts in that they are attempts to explain the unexplainable. After all, it’s not like human beings have a superior cognitive ability now relative to human beings who lived 2000 or 10000 years ago — it’s more probable that we are really not all that much closer now to understanding the true nature of reality than when we started throwing rocks at the moon. In short, it’s those spiritual religious and moralizing philosophical types who are closer to the truth than the scientists, for the simple reason that they instinctively recognize, without benefit of university science or math classes, that the quantity of that which cannot be quantified is probably far, far greater than that which has already been quantified, or can be.
Wouldn’t it be ironic, and elegant, if this instinctive awareness of our own inadequacy were a necessary first step to understanding reality as it is, not as we would like it to be? If this is correct, it was not the caveman throwing rocks at the moon who had it entirely wrong, it’s the contemporary physicists and mathematicians throwing Higgs bosons and Hammerhoff q-consciousness models at impossibly complex reality who have it wrong, or more accurately, grossly, ridiculously, irredeemably incomplete. Ironic indeed.
(By the way, there’s obviously still a lot more discovering to do, for many thousands of years probably (it doesn’t really matter, it won’t be 200 trillion years). I don’t see the harm in amusing ourselves with Higgs bosons. One’s got to do SOMETHING with one’s life, eh? And these kinds of discoveries are just damned cool ….
Talk about drowning in BS…
All of yuhs.
jeez.
Berlinski’s original article his basic premise was that the deceit of believing oneself the ultimate arbiter of the truth leads to some really nasty social outcomes.
i call bullshit.
berlinski’s basic premise is that scientists become atheists because they are powermad control freaks.
can’t you read?
get this thru your stupid thick skull, Areliano.
we are NOT going to discuss god in our university classes, and we are NOT going research god on our dime.
That is what bible colleges are for.
so do it there.
Incidentally, Stuart Hamerhoff is a believer, but Areliano will never have the mad math skillz to get his head around quantum consciousness.
hopeless.
Areliane reads like he took a mail order course on how to argue against evolution.
Auriliano, i would reply but i don’t actually understand what you wrote.
Talk about drowning in BS…
Translation: “Too Many Words! Too Many Words! My head hurts, and you’re all stooopid!”
Geez. This is a discussion about ID, Intelligent Design, which implies an Intelligent Designer, aka God. While the discussion may begin with evolution as its starting point, it is essentially a discussion about God and Science, about origins, about the limitations of science, if there are any, about the fate of our species, etc., etc., etc. The arc of this discussion is really quite common, and I daresay logical. In fact, actual cosmologists –- practicing physicists –- think not just about the origins and fate of the universe, but about other matters such as the limitations of science, all the time. And most will at some point put a little thought into more existential philosophical inquiries about God and species, as well (however poorly), at least those who are worth their salt. Some even write books about it. Some even become science fiction writers, who are basically professional speculators. That you complain about it telegraphs your own intellectual inadequacies. I suggest you just not worry about it for now. Perhaps wait a few more decades when you’re not quite so … hormonal. I hear Grand Theft Auto IV has just come out. Why don’t you just sit yourself down with GTA-IV and a bowl of Cap’n Crunch, or maybe a few slices of cold pepperoni pizza, and leave the adults to their diversions.
(As per my specific posts, well, all I can say is that I composed them mostly between half a round of golf and preparing to head downtown with my wife for dinner and a play. Forgive my previous lack of brevity or properly vetted insight, but I’d like to point out that actual philosophers with PhDs — people who articulate complex ideas for a living – have already been chased off for being too “stooopid” by you and other members of the intellectual streaking brigade. Geez, FP, the world is a lot broader, deeper, and more interesting than the handful of high school or undergraduate biology courses you’ve taken. I think you’d be well-served to stop trying to stuff that great bit beautiful universe into such narrow little intellectual boxes. It’s a stooopid thing to do.)
Folks, I woke up this morning and read through this whole thread, and I did not come any closer to understanding what the theory of ID is. I saw an awful lot of ranting and raving about what Darwin said or didn’t, what scientists think or don’t, and lovely and unlovely personal testimonies of faith or disbelief. But I don’t see the theory of ID presented anywhere at all, here or elsewhere.
If any ID experts could succinctly and cogently present such a theory (give it your best “elevator presentation” attempt), then we’d have a start at actually discussing something. But all you seem to be able to do is to take potshots at the prevailing science from under the cover of religious belief. We are not fooled. We can’t take your “theory” at all seriously until you actually bring it out into the light. Are you so afraid of the light?
Danny,
You disappoint me. griefer and FP are losers — they’re American undergraduates posting on discussion boards on a Saturday night. You’re a Brit, and I thought you were intelligent.
Why the hostility? I understand perfectly if you don’t want to respond, but why the snark?
Are you insecure? Are you an intellectual coward? Other scientists can handle more than just science. Why can’t you?
Or are you another undergraduate pretender?
cmon aure, fess up.
You took this course, did’t you?
Anyway, the anti-evolution self-improvement program Human Events is pitching is called “Tear Apart the “Theory” of Evolution — And Win Every Debate, Every Time,” and here’s the introductory description:
Show any Skeptic that Evolution is Based on Myths,
Falsehoods and Outrageous Lies – In 5 Minutes or Less!
Dear Friend,
I’m fed up with Darwin…
When evolution supporters tried to make me feel foolish for believing in God, I decided to do something about it.
Evolution is not proven fact. Every one of their claims can be torn to shreds. All you need are the missing pieces. Today, I’ll show you what they are.
Within minutes, you’ll:
* Quickly take down self-righteous atheists…
* Easily and accurately defend God’s role as our Creator…
* Send hardened skeptics into a state of confusion…
* Expose the “theory” of evolution and leave scientists with their mouths hanging open…
My name is Jeffrey Howard. If you ever challenged someone on evolution, I have great news.
By the time you read to the end of this letter, you’ll have everything you need to take on the skeptics and win. You’ll never be at a loss for words. The whole evolution debate will be right in your pocket.
Use it anytime, anywhere… It’s much easier than you think. Once you get the real story, it takes less than 5 minutes!
via eric scheie, at Classical Values.
ONE MORE TIME.
IDT is a loozer stategy…it is a pathetic attempt to make creationism into a science.
aint happening.
creationism is the orthodoxy, ToE is the heresy,
talking about IDT in secular universities is EXACTLY the same as talking about geo-centrism when the worls had moved on to heliocentrism.
we aren’t doing it and you cant make us.
go back to Oral Roberts and the Discovery Institute, Areliano.
It isn’t hostility, as far as i can tell you are talking gibberish. Deuce maybe not know what he is talking about but at least he is not incoherent.
Heres the 411.
Dr. Stuart Hamerhoff is actually using SCIENCE and RESEARCH to look for the god-in-the-gaps.
Most scientists and philosophers assume consciousness emerges from complex computation among brain neurons and synapses acting as indivisible bits, or information states. Penrose and I suggest that consciousness involves processes at deeper levels, specifically sequences of quantum computations (~40 per second) in structures called microtubules inside brain neurons. The quantum computations we propose link to neuronal-level activities, and are also ripples in fundamental spacetime geometry, the most basic level of the universe.
One implication of our model relates to a possible scientific basis for secular spirituality (unrelated to any organized religious approach). I should say that Roger avoids discussion of such implications, but I’ve been willing to raise this possibility.
For me, spirituality implies:
* Interconnectedness among living beings and the universe
* A ubiquitous reservoir of cosmic intelligence/Platonic values in touch with our conscious choices and perceptions
* Existence of consciousness after death
Can these issues be accounted for scientifically? I believe they possibly can.
Of course, q-consciousness model is not accessible to 99% of the bell curve, but, chu know, I dont exactly see Dr. Hamerhoff being kicked out of academe…in fact he is highly respected.
He just ran the theory of consciousness conference that the Derb attended.
So why doesnt the DI through Dr. Hamerhoff some fundage ‘stead of using wedge strategy tactics to overthrow ToE?
juss askin.
I’m an atheist, but, like most atheists prefer to refer to myself as “not religious” because O’Hair, Dawkins, Harris and other high church atheists have made the term synonymous with being jerks and because we have no interest in the argument. The arrogance of the high church atheist is embarrassing and irksome to those of us who modestly refer to ourselves as “not religious.”
griefer said more than once that atheists tend to have higher IQ’s.
But the fact of the matter is that the university educated, nebbish, asocial people who call themselves atheists are not the only nonbelievers out there, and they are hardly the most numerous.
Self described atheists of the high church type make up less than one half percent of the population. Nonbelievers run on the order of 20% in the US and higher than that in Europe. Nonbelievers, moreover, tend to have somewhat lower IQ’s, tend to be more likely to end up in prison, tend to be more obese, less educated, somewhat more prone to violence, child abuse, drug abuse, alcoholism, smoking, and are more likely to be avid fans of professonal wrestling and American football.
Get the picture? When one examines the facts then the idea that nonbelief is indicative of inherent superiority in any sense is revealed to be absurd. Calling oneself an “atheist” simply means that one is a nonbeliever who has had the good fortune and intelligence to attain higher education, perhaps in spite of the inherent liabilities that attach to nonbelief than because of inherent strengths.
Eli, i agree..i think perhaps “faith:none” is the true avocation of those eevul ToE supportering scientists that Berlinski is slandering.
I apolo.
I disagree with Dawkins who presents as an evangelical atheist.
He proselytizes, and I despise proselytizers.
Also, i think i can cite correlation…..although I did remind i remind everyone that correlation is not causation.
However, the endless stubborn ill-formed attempts to overthrow ToE IS making christians look stupid, in the cultural stereotype sense, even if they may not actually be leftside of the bell curve.
see Jim Manzi:Show Me the Science at NRO
Trying to wish away valid scientific findings because you believe that they imperil religious or ethical beliefs is a fool’s errand on many levels. Augustine’s guidance from The Literal Meaning of Genesis is quite relevant here:
Even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipse of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.
—
You do unnerstand that I have been laffin you xians to scorn, don’t you?
Yeah Eli, you have some proper stats to back that up?
You know, Eli, those claims you make about atheists sound an awful lot like the claims Jack Thompson makes about gamers.
You can tell us – you got them from the same source, didn’t you? Was it a Cracker Jack box, or was it a far less sanitary source?
Berlinski has scuttled off to post at NRO, where he doesnt have to take comments.
He snipes at the Derb in pissy wimp fashion here–> Berlinski: the Dang Thing.
How does it feel to get pw3ned by the Derb and punked by UNDERGRADUATES?
hahahahaha
lulz.
Yes Griefer…I am certain that Dr. Berlinski feels “punk’d” by you.
Oh and by the way, on this exact forum Berlinski challenged “the Derb” to a debate….which Derbyshire immediate ignored (and for good reason). Anyone can scroll up and find it.
Once again, your antics operate outside the facts, but don’t let that stop you.
Since you can’t talk about the science, feel free to attack me.
G Vinson, John Deryshire ignored it because it because he doesn’t want to get into an idiotic argument about whether consideration in contract law is “detectable” – although I’ll bet he “detect” if DI stopped paying him. I assume he has better things to do…
G Vinson…..the world moves on.
Stein and Berlinski an the DI are still mired in the Dark Ages.
They are the memetic equivalent of villagers with torches and pitchforks.
You can join us in the Future….or you can remain behind, while we mock you and laugh you into scorn.
It’s your choice.
Danny, incorrect. Derby stated that he would love to debate a “creationists” over the science, Berlinski took up his challenge publicly on this very blog.
…and Derby ignored it on his next post.
(end of story)
Griefer, as has already been established, you cannot debate the science, so you call people names in ridicule. So be it, a small place for a small mind.
G. Vinson, it is obvious that you cannot read.
1. Berlinski denies being a creationist.
2. Berlinski is incapable of a scientific debate, and capable of only dishonest wedge strategy tactics like slanderin the scientific community as powermad atheists with no supporting hard data.
I am not “debating the science.”
I am GRIEFING him.
Look it up in the Urban Dictionary.
Thus my focus on making him look stupid.
Berlinski is endorsing and implementing the Wedge Strategy tactics of the Discovery Institute. No one will debate him.
We will mock him and laugh him to scorn.
Actually Berlinski makes himself look stupid.
Did you miss this, G. Vinson?
see Jim Manzi:Show Me the Science at NRO
Trying to wish away valid scientific findings because you believe that they imperil religious or ethical beliefs is a fool’s errand on many levels. Augustine’s guidance from The Literal Meaning of Genesis is quite relevant here:
Even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipse of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.
Berlinski may be a secular Jew, but he is showing vast ignorance and deserves to be laughed to scorn.
Also, I suspect the Derb was referrin to someone with some actual science chops, like Behe or Dembski for the debate.
He never said he’d love to debater Berlinski.
Berlinski disavows creationism, tool.
He is an “ID theorist”.
which, as we know, is “not” creationism.
hahahahahaha
You have become unhinged (and it shows)
and you have become stupid, G Vinson.
pithed by religion.
Griefy,
Manzi quoted Augustine (and it didn’t work for him either).
One might wonder what it has to do with the unsupported dogmatic view that several hundred magic chemicals can self-assemble and begin replicating – despite have no evidence whatsoever that such things have ever happened under any circumstances to any proteins or any nucleotides we’ve ever observed – anywhere.
…what other thoughts of Augustine are you wanting to submit to?
A libertarian’s point of view (from lewrockwell.com) by Charley Reese.
I am an agnostic when it comes to explaining the origin of life. I don’t believe yet in evolution, creationism or intelligent design. I can see flaws in all three. I just simply don’t know and frankly don’t think it matters whether we know or not.
My main conflict with the evolutionists is that they wish to assert their theory as fact and to employ government power to ban discussion of creationism and intelligent design on the grounds that they are unscientific or, worse from their point of view, religious. I am against banning any idea, theory, speculation or body of guesses. Human history shows us to be far too error-prone to go around eliminating dissent by majority vote of one of the more ignorant classes in our society, namely politicians.
Science has been itching to replace religion in Western culture for some time. You can see for yourself how science assumes the characteristics of religion. There is the priesthood (scientists, or at least those who call themselves scientists) and laity, which is the rest of us. Theory becomes dogma. Dissenters are persecuted. The high priests of science want the government not only to fund them, but to enforce their dogmas with the power of the law.
I believe in the separation of church and state. I also believe in the separation of science and state. In fact, I believe in the separation of practically all aspects of life from the state, which should basically tote the mail and guard the coast.
We, as mortals with short life spans, would not even be concerned about the origins of life, except the evolutionists wish to use their theory to destroy religion, and religious people want to use their theory to defend religion.
True science means simply the search for truth, but a search conducted with an open mind and tolerance for dissent. There is nothing wrong with a person believing that a dinosaur evolved into a canary, but there is also nothing wrong with someone believing that God created the first man and woman. I’ve never seen any physical evidence to support either belief, and one is no more improbable than the other. The only fact is that some beliefs have to be accepted on the basis of faith, and that goes for evolution as well as creationism.
The trouble is that both science and religion provide a person with a worldview, and unconsciously the person begins to evaluate everything he or she sees or hears or thinks up in accordance with the worldview. I see no reason to include any discussion of evolution or creationism in secondary schools. There is a large volume of facts biology students need to learn without wasting their time on theories that have no practical value. It’s like teaching molecular physics to students studying auto mechanics.
There is always more to learn than there is time to learn it, so we should be more practical in designing our school curricula. Not every student needs to read Shakespeare or learn calculus. I’ve had no occasion to solve a quadratic equation since I left high school. Students should be taught only what will be useful to them. Survey courses – giving them a taste of what is on the large menu of learning – are useful. Practical courses, such as personal finance or typing, are useful. Teaching all children a second language would be extremely useful, as would be music and drawing.
Why do you people continue to talk with Griefer, aka John. Those of us who know him stopped playing his stupid games long long ago. He sits in his family’s house in his underwear on the computer and never stops. EVER!
Bedsides that, he already told you he isn’t serious (about anything). Half the crap he writes is copied from other blogs, believe me I know.
John, mother’s day is Sunday and you need to show up this time. Don’t screw it up.
Beebopr:
You claim:
“One might wonder what it has to do with the unsupported dogmatic view that several hundred magic chemicals can self-assemble and begin replicating – despite have no evidence whatsoever that such things have ever happened under any circumstances to any proteins or any nucleotides we’ve ever observed – anywhere.”
So tell me two things:
1) How do you reconcile this statement with laboratory experiments that show that very thing?
2) How do you get from evolution to your claim without making absurd and totally unsupported leaps of “logic”?
Remember, to believe in ID/creationism, you have to believe in a Designer/Creator who designed LIES into his creation.
Yinepuhotep,
1) It is perhaps understandable if you simply were not aware of this, but there are no lab experiments showing nucleotides and/or proteins self assembling and initiating replication (abiogenesis). I am not certain what science journals you might read…but it has never happened. Not once, not sort-of, not almost, not pretty-close, but never, ever. You can also throw into the mix that there is no explanation for the beginning of the Universe or of human self-awareness either.
2) Refer to answer one for leaps of faith and/or logic.
Your final comment appears to be a social/political opinion, and has nothing to do with scientific evidence.
erm….carol, ima grrl.
Beebopr, Steven, et all.
It is not OUR responsibility to do the research or teach ID in our secular unis.
Go back to Oral Roberts and the Discovery Institute and do your own research.
Any professors or researchers that wish to discuss ID are perfectly welcome to go and do so there.
May all your children enjoy degrees from BYU and Oral Roberts.
Like I said, ToE succeded the orthodoxy, ie creationism.
going back to creationism would be like returning to flat-earth model.
We aren’t go to do it, and you can’t make us.
Beebopr, there is an ongoing NASA program to recreate the organic soup…but given the permutations and combinatorics the experimenters have to run through, …… personally i believe we will be able to create a simple virus with nano-assemblers first.
We already are capable of using RNA bio-assemblers to stack organic molecules.
It is just a matter of time.
Do you really not get that arguing against ToE makes you look stupid and causes you to become the objects of mockery?
NRO is distancing themselves in embarrassment from Berlinski: The Dang Thing.
you should read it. Berlinski pissily resorts to ad homming the Derb.
Ignoble.
I would point also to Dr. Stuart Hamerhoff and Dr. Francis Collins, two famous, well respected researchers that ARE believers but who do not support IDT.
No one is supressing IDT research.
But we aren’t going to do it on OUR dime, in OUR laboratories, or discuss it OUR classrooms.
Go do it yourselves, or STFU.
One last thing before my lunch is over.
Dr. Hamerhoff is paid to do research..he is being PAID to research the god-in-the-gaps in his quantum conscious research….Dr. Collins is the titular head of the Human Genome Project and an observant catholic…he has recently written an excellent book on God.
Neither scientist is oppressed or fired or blacklisted.
But neither of of them support IDT as oppositionary to ToE.
This certainly suggests that the premise of Expelled and David Berlinski is profoundly false, since they maintain scientists are against ALL freedom of inquiry.
Scientists are NOT suppressing freedom of inquiry into the origins of the metaverses.
We are simply deeply uninterested in IDT as an alternative model to ToE.
Because one, it is stupid, and two, we are supremely bored by the feeble and dishonest attempts of the DI, Berlinski and his ilk at social engineering using the Wedge strategy.
beebopr, abiogenisis is not ToE.
we ARE doing research into abiogenisis.
I fail to get the point of your Augustine quotation.
Be there!
Why carol, you know you are supposed to be working on your Marriage and Family Values training at BYU!
Why, your application to YFZ polygamy ranch will never be accepted at this rate!
/giggles
Beebopr:
You have not answered my question. I shall restate it so that you can understand it, and perhaps you might deign to answer it honestly, rather than with your usual condescension and superciliousness.
What does abiogenesis have to do with evolution? NOWHERE in the theory of evolution is there any claim of abiogenesis. Nor is there any claim of divine creation. Evolution DOES NOT ADDRESS the source of life. It merely addresses the way life develops. Therefore, your assault on abiogenesis (which, contrary to your supercilious and condescending claims, HAS been demonstrated in the laboratory) has nothing to do with evolution, and everything to do with (as you put it) “a social/political opinion, and has nothing to do with scientific evidence.”
Griefer: “abiogenisis is not ToE”
No kidding? So you’ve cannonized a theory suppossed to explain life without having to go to the scientific trouble of explaining how life began. Nice, but insufficient (and a cop out)
Griefer: “we ARE doing research into abiogenisis”
No, *you* are not. But umpteen thousand scientists have over past 100 years. Guess what? Nothing. No RNA world, no crystal patterns organizing replicating cell structures, no easy dextrose, no cytosine, no reducing atmosphere, no nothing. Play your games if you wish, but the people on the front line of the research already know this (you can’t change the facts).
Griefer: “I fail to get the point of your Augustine quotation”
I didn’t quote Augustine, you did.
Carol, I didn’t know. Thanks for the tip. I’m out.
Oh and, Yine…
You asked specifically about abiogenesis. I answered you. There is no laboratorty experiments that have demostrated the creation of organic life from inorganic chemicals. Would you care to cite the publication of such research? No? I didn’t think so – but I am guessing you’ll be quick to obfuscate the issue further.
As for the rest of your comment, I would direct you to the posting I just returned to John/Griefer.
The idea that scientists must not ask questions about a 17th century theory of life on this planet that doesn’t even address the beginning of life on this planet, is perhaps, one that you can bow down to, but (given the huge holes that the theory has on its face) the rest of us are not required to make the same choice (as fewer and fewer scientists are).
“The idea that scientists must not ask questions about a 17th century theory of life on this planet that doesn’t even address the beginning of life on this planet,”
utter bullshit beebopr
real scientists are researching abiogenisis, and either we find it or we find the god-in-the-gaps. real scientists are researching q-consciousness, and either we find or we find souls. WE ARE OPEN TO INVESTIGATION!
we discuss it even, we speculate freely.
dr. hamerhoff and dr. collins have not been fired or supressed for being believers.
ima grrl, lulz, and i guess carol the dimbo has gone off to do her BYU course work so she can be a good little FLDS godbot breeder.
sub-sapients.
/spit
Berlinski tries to pretend that scientists become atheists because they are powermad control freaks…..but I think the real IQ gradient is that xians == stupid.
otherwise they would give give up their endless dimwitted laughable crusade to replace ToE with IDT.
certainly the empirical evidence on this thread proves my point.
ONE MORE TIME
we are not teaching IDT in OUR secular unis.
and you can’t make us.
go teach IDT in your bible colleges, foo’
Beebopr:
“The idea that scientists must not ask questions about a 17th century theory of life on this planet that doesn’t even address the beginning of life on this planet, is perhaps, one that you can bow down to, but (given the huge holes that the theory has on its face) the rest of us are not required to make the same choice (as fewer and fewer scientists are).”
I believe what you meant is, “fewer and fewer scientists are putting up with IDT bullshit, and it’s got the IDT loonies running scared.”
REAL scientists don’t bow down to anything. REAL scientists study the FACTS. And the FACTS support the theory of evolution as it is presently understood. The theory of evolution never addressed the origins of life, because the origins of life are outside its scope. The theory of evolution addresses how life changes to better cope with the environment in which it finds itself. That is FACT. No amount of religious nuttery from IDT wackjobs can change the FACTS.
“In fact, the Bible does not concern itself with the details of the physical world, the understanding of which is the competence of human experience and reasoning. There exist two realms of knowledge, one which has its source in Revelation and one which reason can discover by its own power. To the latter belong especially the experimental sciences and philosophy. The distinction between the two realms of knowledge ought not to be understood as opposition. The two realms are not altogether foreign to each other, they have points of contact. The methodologies proper to each make it possible to bring out different aspects of reality.” — Pope John Paul II (L’Osservatore Romano N. 44 (1264) – 4 November 1992)
Maybe this is why so few Catholics fall for Intelligent Design/Creationism as compared to members of certain American religious sects.
Yine, that is what disgusts me about Berlinski, Stein, the DI, and the IDbots.
They reinforce the cultural stereotype that thinkers can’t be believers.
As a thinker/believer i bitterly resent them making us all look stupid.
I loathe the FLDS women, the Yearning for Zion polygamy women too. It is an affront to my sex that they let themselves and their children be turned into chattel for their religion.
pithed by religion.
/spit
Yinepuhotep,
“The theory of evolution addresses how life changes to better cope with the environment in which it finds itself. That is FACT. No amount of religious nuttery from IDT wackjobs can change the FACTS.”
Uhm dude, you are talking about adaptation. Adaptation is not in dispute with anyone. The ability of variation-plus-selection to adapt an organisms to changing envirnoments, to protect the oprganism from predatory organisms, and increase the range of a species is not, and has never been, the issue. Hell, not even common descent is in question.
What is in contention is random evolution versus intelligant evolution (Design). Its is a fact of scientific evidence that the common Theory of Evolution (by itself) cannot account for what has been found in the fossil record.
Why do you think Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge wrote about “punctuated equilibium”? It wasn’t because the fossil record mapped out Darwin’s idea, and they just wanted to make fools of themselves by explaining something already explained. Think about it. Why does Chen comment that the tree of life is starting to look “more like a lawn” – after he discovered a 520 myo big-brained chordate floating among the sponges?
Why does the father of string theory, Leonard Susskind, think science (without a multi-universe model, where anything and everything is possible) will have a hard time explaining the design inference in apparent in nature?
Why? Are they displaying religious nuttery? Are they the whackjobs you mentioned? Is Lenny Susskind the IDT loonie that is running scared?
Before you make such comments as above, perhaps you should get your facts straight.
Morely, if you’ve read The Cosmic Landscape then you know that Susskind postulates the evolutionary theory of multiple universes.
That we just happen to live in the one that has the right laws of physics to sponsor carbonbased lifeforms.
Yine and i are violently opposed to the “marching morons”, the people that seem to believe that they can somehow force secular unis to teach IDT, that the DI using the wedge strategy can force the adoption of the IDT model over ToE.
Ima q-consciousness grrl myself…look up Dr. Stuart Hamerhoff. He’s a believer.
http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/
http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/skunk.htm
thank me later.
Griefer, a theory is just a “theory”….not a scientific fact…there are no proofs behind any claim being made about the multi-verse…you say “we live in one” apparently because that fits your personal worldview…I see reading through a couple of your comments you seem to have a layman’s problem of conflating your worldview with actual science…nonetheless, niether Lenny, nor anyone else, has ever been able to provide any proofs of a multiverse. Therefore, from a scientific point of view it is nothing.
Hammerhoff? The repeatedly-critized quantum consciousness medical doctor? Sorry Grief, I live in a world of science (backed up by facts), I don’t believe in hobgobblin’s either in books or in your head. If Hammerhoff can actually ever show something for all his speculations – then we’ll listen again (maybee).
I get it that you are a Hammerhoff groupie, so no offense intended.
Morely:
A theory is, in SCIENCE, the result of many years of experimental and observational testing of facts, until we have come up with the best possible explanation for those facts. Contrary to the bullshit given out by the IDT wackjobs, a theory is not something you come up with over chips and beer.
On top of that, your inability to recognize that the debates about specific DETAILS of evolution does not invalidate the fact of evolution itself, merely indicates that you are incapable of recognizing scientific discussion and debate when you see it.
dur…didn’t Einstein come up with theory of relativity via thought experiments?
morely…are you one of those sandwichboard guys? cmon, fess up!
/giggles
so….the Penrose/Hamerhoff model of quantum consciousness is….a hobgoblin?
I see you obviously haven’t read Susskind’s The Cosmic Landscape, and I must assume that you haven’t read Sir Roger’s Road to Reality either.
Did you get your Susskind reference out of some prepackaged DI talking points perhaps?
Perhaps you just read the bookjacket.
hahahahaha
punkd
/high fives Vinepuhotep
anyone else up for some crushing intellectual pw3nge?
Vine an i will be here all week.
Morely, congrats on getting virtually every single statement wrong:
Big brained chordate from 500myo?http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/300/5624/1372c.pdf – maybe to you it seems like it is “big-brained”…. Gould is a Darwinian, always has been and made his money writing books about how Darwin was right. The only argument he has is over trivial details – ie the speed of evolution. It is most certainly NOT a fact that evolution “cannot account for the fossil record”. Susskind, isn’t the “father of string theory”, he isn’t even a particularly prominent physicist and from recollection he wrote an entire book on how IDT was nonsense.
When you start lecturing people on “facts”, it would help if you got one straight….
Beeboppr, again you are wrong. RNA has been shown to autocatalyse. Not only that but there are plenty of autocatalytic systems not based nucleotides or amino acids, just because what we define as life happens to be based on those types doesn’t mean they always were or that that is the way it has to be.
I would also point that if we had taken your intellectual approach of “if it doesn’t have an obvious answer now, then it will never be solved” then we wouldn’t have made it to caves let alone progressed from them….
Danny…let take it one by one Einstien.
1). Big Brained Chordate – See Chen, (the scirentist who discovered it).
2). Gould argued against gradulistic Darwinism – BECAUSE the fossil record does not verify it. Period. You apparently think that SJG wote about punctuated evolution BECUASE the fossil record verified graduliastic evolution?
3). The rate of evolution is trivial? Got it: Mutation rates to accomplish speciation = Minor detail. Whats the fuss?
4). Are you familiar with the personalities associated with the body of cosmological physics at all?
CLUE: All working scientist must adhere to a the party line.
And if I may respond for Beebopr: See a biology book. Chemical reactions are not “life”. Life requires a wee bit more complexity than autocatalytic RNA that goes nowhere, leads nowhere, and suffer immediate entropy. Try adding a regulatory network that magically already knows what to do. Try doing it without any intelligent input whatsoever (none) – since that *is* what your theory presupposses. Go ahead, try it.
Oh, and Danny, you are a Wiki fan I am certain, here is the first couple of paragraphs on Wiki about Lenny (the person you claim is not even a prominent physicists):
“Leonard Susskind (born 1940[1]) is the Felix Bloch professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University in the field of string theory and quantum field theory. Susskind is widely regarded as one of the fathers of string theory for his early contributions to the String Theory model of particle physics.[3]”
“In 2007, Susskind joined the Faculty of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, as an Associate Member. He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was awarded the 1998 Sakurai Prize for theoretical physics. He is also a distinguished professor at Korea Institute for Advanced Study.[5]”
Who is mistaken, you or I?
well morely since you obviously have not read Susskind’s book, I’m afraid you have have wholly misunderstood the quote you laid on us.
Susskind actually says:
“…the bitterness and rancor have coalesced around a single phrase–The Anthropic Principle–a hypothetical principle that says the world is fine-tuned so that we can observe it! By itself this is a silly half-baked notion. It makes no more sense than saying the eye evolved so that someone can exist to read this book.”
Susskind is actually such a fan of ToE that he postulates the evolution of universes!!!!!
That is one of the premises of Cosmic Landscape.
Which you might unnerstand if you had actually read it.
And you are such a dolt, morely.
Susskind even says in CL that he hopes the quote you used “won’t appear out of context on a religious website.”
You IDbots really need to unnerstand that ToE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ABIOGENISIS
now, shoo, go away, or I’ll punk you again and it wont be pretty.
Wow…strong feeling on both sides
I actually think atheists require the greatest faith of all, as they need to believe that this marvelously complex world is simply an accident.
Truly, I have much more respect for those that , while they may not be religous, have an open mind about those things they simply cannot know. I do feel that there is a burden of proof when you postulate that God cannot exist.
as to the Genesis question…how intellectually honest is it to discount creationism based on the interpetations/understanding of the average Christian
You might as well discount evolution theory based on the average understanding of a 5th grade science student.
I know of over 20 different interpetations of the original text of Genesis, and yet supposedly intelligent people parrot the “6 days -no way mantra”
hell, blast and damn!
i am not an atheist.
i am a believer.
but the endless parade of moronic IDbots trying to equate ToE with abiogenisis is just making all believers look stoopid.
go back to school or STFU!, billb.
“Will this sentence appear out of context on a religious website? I hope not.”
from page 8 of The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the ILLUSION of Intelligent Design by Leonard Susskind
gods, why can you people even fuckin’ read?????
Griefer, you continue to be incapable of forming an argument, lets parse you last post shall we?
Griefer: “well morely since you obviously have not read Susskind’s book, I’m afraid you have have wholly misunderstood the quote you laid on us.”
I did not give a single quote by Susskind, therefore I might be forgiven if I deny that I “laid” any on you as well. What you might be refering to is a quote given earlier from Susskind where he is being interviewed and says that without a completed theory of the multiverse (the Landscape) then science would have a “hard time” answering the ID critics. In this he is correct. And just for the record, the quote is not out of context, he is simply saying what everyone already knows (except you, apparently).
Griefer: “Susskind is actually such a fan of ToE that he postulates the evolution of universes!!!!!”
The exclamation points are impressive, they really make the item appear convincing.
Griefer: “That is one of the premises of Cosmic Landscape.
Which you might unnerstand if you had actually read it.”
Did you just wake up? Are you operating under the idea that only you and Lenny know about the multiverse concept? The concept of the multiverse is *not new*. Read Barrow and Tipler’s “The Anthropic Cosmological Principle” then get back to us.
Griefer: “And you are such a dolt, morely.”
And you are a 4th rank science groupie, incapable of critical thinking, and thoroughly lost for self-analysis. So what of it?
Griefer: “Susskind even says in CL that he hopes the quote you used “won’t appear out of context on a religious website.”
Once again, I made no quotes from Susskind. The one quote from Susskind I see on this site (given by someone else) was from an Susskind interview with a well-known science writer, in which Susskind says just exactly what he means to say – that is, that the multiverse is cosmology’s last hopeful defense against the implications of the Design hypothesis. Get over it.
Griefer: “You IDbots really need to unnerstand that ToE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ABIOGENISIS”
No duh? Once again you capitalize your words like you are inclined to believe that you are in the unique possession of this knowledge. It make you look ridiculous. It like some one saying “the sun RISES IN THE EAST” No kidding?. And while we are all recognizing things, you need to recognize that a theory supposed to explain Life on the Earth – that does not even address how life on the earth came about – is a simple, arrogant, under-handed, incomplete, useless, cop out.
Griefer: “now, shoo, go away, or I’ll punk you again and it wont be pretty.”
Apparently you have no idea whatsoever how intellectually immature you come across. Your last comment is the high point. If you don’t understand what I am saying, then don’t sweat it. Its a just thing.
Griefer, a theory is just a “theory”….not a scientific fact…
umm…theory of relativity? theory of gravity?
that a theory supposed to explain Life on the Earth – that does not even address how life on the earth came about
moron, ToE says nothing about origins. can’t you read? that would be abiogenisis.
Why does the father of string theory, Leonard Susskind, think science (without a multi-universe model, where anything and everything is possible) will have a hard time explaining the design inference in apparent in nature?
if you read the book, you would that that is a rhetorical question, which Susskind answers with ….wait for it….
the ILLUSION of Intelligent Design.
go away or i’ll fisk you somemore, sub-sapient.
shorter moronly: “a theory is just a “theory”….not a scientific fact…”
better hope QFT (Quantum Field Theory) holds at CERN.
or we might just rip a hole in the fabric of spacetime.
shorter moronly– a theory is just a “theory”….not a scientific fact…
better hope QFT(Quantum Field Theory) holds at CERN.
otherwise we might rip a hole in the fabric of spacetime.
Griefer….what are the odds you’d believe me if I told you that a Flying Spaghetti Monster poofed the universe into existence 5,000 years ago, and poofed humans into existence in a garden along with mosquitoes, snakes, and rabbits? Would you buy that? Even more, what do you think the odds are that after hearing this, you shave your head and run around airports singing hyms to travelers?
Yes or no? Do you beleive this? Yes or No, what is your answer?
jeebus, moronly, what does it say about you that you think that bizarre question is even relevent?
go talk about ID in bible colleges and xian unis where it belongs.
I’ll take your comment, that the question is so “ridiculous”, as a firm “no” – your’e not buying into it. If you were Lenoard Susskind you’d know why I asked the question.
Unfortunately, for all your vibrant defense of the multiverse, “that bizarre question” is exactly what you MUST believe in order to fully accept the multiverse idea.
Now, certain people will argue differently, but that is simply because they don’t want the baggage of their favorite idea to interfere with their intellectual joyride. The baggage is not talked about, but nonetheless, it is there.
I am fairly certain you don’t understand the history and motive of the multiverse hypothesis – the idea that Susskind kindly renamed the “Landscape”. (Doesn’t that sound better?)
The multiverse is a mathematical contruct, and nothing more. By mathematical, I don’t mean that a model will be painstakingly developed and then tested for empirical evidence to confirm the theory – like say – the Theory of Gravity” that you are so fond of equating it to. To the contrary, it will never be tested. Ever. Its a mathematic exercise without any inferences to its existence outside the math itself. Period.
One might ask what the motivation would be for a brilliant scientist, like Susskind, to pursue such a thing.
Perhaps Susskind is simply driven to explain the perplexing. Then of course, there is also his legendary intellectual piss-fight with his friend and nemesis, Steven Hawking, who says there is “no way around” the Singularity.
The multiverse is an endeavor without reason, save one; to avoid the Singularity.
The Singularity has a lot of baggage also. Its the baggage you get when the end conclusion of current knowledge says that the Singularity and the fine-tunings of the Universe strongly suggest an intelligent beginning. The probabilities associated with the cosmological constant are simply too staggering, an they reach the point of incredulity. Susskind knows this.
It is in this context that Leonard was asked by
Amanda Gefter of the New Scientists, “If we do not accept the landscape idea are we stuck with intelligent design? And he replied:
“I doubt that physicists will see it that way. If, for some unforeseen reason, the landscape turns out to be inconsistent – maybe for mathematical reasons, or because it disagrees with observation – I am pretty sure that physicists will go on searching for natural explanations of the world.”
He goes on to say:
“But I have to say that if that happens, as things stand now we will be in a very awkward position. Without any explanation of nature’s fine-tunings we will be hard pressed to answer the ID critics. One might argue that the hope that a mathematically unique solution will emerge is as faith-based as ID.”
Now, is the context of his comment something you’d like to continue to banter about? He meant what he said, and knew what he meant.
The multiverse has a clear intention, to rid our knowledge of the unlikely natural state of our Universe – to circumvent the improbability. In the multiverse model, everything that is improbable not only becomes possible and probable, but will cerainly happen.
In an infinite number of Universes *everything* (that does not break natural law) will happen, that means everything – like you shaving your head and singing hyms to travelers in airports.
Goodbye Griefer.
Ha!
That last post was a slam dunk.
dude, ima Penrosian!
Sir Roger Penrose, the penrose of the penrose/hamerhoff quantum consciousness model?
i do the online problems at the end of the chapters in Road to Reality.
I embrace the Omnium, dolt, not copenhagen, or many worlds, or multiverse!!!
your argument makes about as much sense as pushing your head around inna bowl of mush.
more unrepenetent bullshit.
“The multiverse is a mathematical contruct, and nothing more. By mathematical, I don’t mean that a model will be painstakingly developed and then tested for empirical evidence to confirm the theory – like say – the Theory of Gravity” that you are so fond of equating it to. To the contrary, it will never be tested. Ever. Its a mathematic exercise without any inferences to its existence outside the math itself. Period.”
dur, idiot, we are testing theory of relativity and string theory right now at CERN you stupid twodigit.
will, my quote from Susskind still applies.
moronly is pithed by religion.
“Will this sentence appear out of context on a religious website? I hope not.”
from page 8 of The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the ILLUSION of Intelligent Design by Leonard Susskind
gods, can’t you people even fuckin’ read?????
will you and moronly are twodigits, 40percenters
go back to Oral Roberts.
The multiverse is a mathematical contruct, and nothing more. By mathematical, I don’t mean that a model will be painstakingly developed and then tested for empirical evidence to confirm the theory – like say – the Theory of Gravity” that you are so fond of equating it to. To the contrary, it will never be tested. Ever. Its a mathematic exercise without any inferences to its existence outside the math itself. Period.
you had better run away you moronic twodigit asshole.
wtf do you think we are doing at CERN?
we are TESTING stringtheory
we are TESTING relativity
will, go back to Oral Roberts.
What is it with junkies?
Instead of being mature and coherent, they sling insults and make stupid criticisms (ala, Griefer).
Is this tactic supposed to be impressive?
I wonder if deRose or Farley would appreciate this unmitigated asshole speaking in their name?
Griefer, I find your comments interesting given my background. Can you please describe the test that “we” are conducting at the center? I assume its being conducted at the Hadron or LEIR, and whom might the lead be?
Thanks
Where did Berlinski go to high school?
As a New Yorker of a similar age, I’m interested in seeing if there’s a connection.
gee, rachel, maybe we are just frackin tired of explainin for the 10,000 time that ToE has nothing to do with abiogenisis, and deconstructin the same old eyeball complexity argument.
Is it possible that all you IDbots are really that stupid?
Or is it just that you can’t read?
will, since you thought moronly’s argument was a “slamdunk” you obviously have no scientific background whatsoever.
If you are interested in augmented your impoverished knowledge of quantum mechanics, may i cordially recommend Physic Review Section D.
Knock yourself out.
heres something from arstechnica
if you can read.
http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/2008/05/07/evolution-whats-the-real-controversy
since IDbots apparently can’t link either, heres the gist
Nationwide, nearly half a dozen states are considering variants of such bills, some of which throw in the origin of life and climate change for good measure. Legislators in Florida recently introduced such a bill in response to new educational standards that were the first to formalize the teaching of evolution. Althought two incompatible bills passed the state House and Senate, they died when the legislature went out of session; similar measures are still pending in other states. These bills appear to have originated at the pro-Intelligent Design thinktank the Discovery Institute, and constitute part of its latest effort towards reducing the teaching of evolution in public schools.
Evolution clearly has no shortage of controversies. But none of those controversies involve the basic principles of evolution, and all of them operate within a framework where random mutation and selection play a key role in creating diverse species that are related by common descent. It’s clear that the Discovery Institute is trying to introduce controversies that don’t exist, while ignoring those that do. That’s why the academic freedom bills it’s promoting are such dangerous things; while supposedly promoting intellectual analysis, they’re actually an attempt to pave the way for misinformation to enter the scientific classroom.
I read Berlinski’s article in COMMENTARY, “The God of
the Gaps”…
(for full text)
http://dakowski.pl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=494&Itemid=48
…on , ironically, the very night of my Easter– the
most important day of my religion, for it is then that
Jesus is believed by us to have proven that HE indeed
is the Son of God; and so we utter in greeting each
other: “Christ has arisen”; to which we respond: “He
truly has arisen.” Unfortunately, our theologians
could neither get together on the date of Easter,
except once every few years, for our fellow
Christians, nor on the date of Passover for our fellow
Jews. Thus, it is here, in what is the key method of
science, MEASUREMENT, that there is a Biblical flaw in
our faith– MEASUREMENT…the stuff Berlinski’s bank
account is made of.
Berlinski is not only arguing for doubt in Darwinian
evolution, but he is also INSISTING on the certainty
of GOD in man’s image (the true logical sequence, for
we all have seen man but few if any saw God). In doing
so– to this believer– he reads and sounds like an
adolescent sophist on a Baptist high school debating
team (or is it Regents University?) as he bases his
case on snip and cut quotes from defensive and angry
scientists and singles out for his rage fellow
adolescent sophist Christopher [what a nice Christian
name] Hitchens. The latter has been the darling of the
neocons and their ideological “World War IV” in the
Middle East, but I guess not for Berlinski, the man of
God in man’s image ideology…or is he also a neocon?
Alas, at his best, Berlinski only reiterates the need
for philosophical supervision of science….and,
presumably of mathematics, applied or contrived, to
which I say AMEN, bravo! Here, here– yes indeed,
evolution NEEDS very much philosophical supervision–
alas, here Berlinski can quote no contrarians for none
exist among scientists. And most certainly, as a
neurobiologist myself, ALL BRAIN SCIENCE DATA needs
severe philosophical scrutiny. For that God gave us
Gerald Edelman and many, many other older sages of
science who no longer litter the libraries with data
but philosophically extract ideas from that of others.
Yet, I urge Berlinski to heed the caution of
neurophilosopher William Calvin and be weary of the
“janitor’s dream” of fundamentals ridden particle
physicists in the basement trying to conjure up what
goes on in the penthouse of the brain where love, hate
and ejaculation are enrapturing. No, Mr. Berlinski,
nerves do not “twitch,” but they depolarize and
conduct current. And what they do in assemblies we can
barely mathematically model as theory rather than
fact. Right now, evolution of the mind, like the Big
Bang, is all models in search of falsification tests,
much like the theory of eleven universes by a very
attractive Harvard theoretical physicist, Lisa
Randall. She may be a lot cuter than Darwin ever was,
but offers no less a theory in search of falsification
tests. Though science is really the inverse of a
cancer test: you can’t be sure about cancer until a
test comes out positive and about science except when
an experiment comes out negative, these are not
dreamed up, as Berlinski would have us believe in
ignorance. Since all these branches of science are
incomplete works in progress, should we settle for
“God” as a totem blocking their path to adventurous
scientific investigation?
Berlinski’s vague amorphous God cloud substituting for
science is the Old and New Testaments as FACT. That
may be fine for the neocon materialists in their quest
to “re-establish” Israel (meaning: “defier of God”) in
Jerusalem as Zionist kings of the Middle East (what
else could they ask for in their waining years now
that Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin– the Three Who Made A
Revolution of their youth are all dead?) but it fails
to define a moral compass for mankind, given that the
Bible makes us all look like nothing but circumcised
apes vs. the uncircumcised apes.
Neurobiology is a young and maturing experimental
science, a term Berlinski failed to consider in his
epiphany against it. Evolution is actually history
helped with clues from genetics, another young
experimental science. Decades from now genetics may be
able to tell us what are the chances that Berlinski
may go mad; but certainly now it cannot tell us if he
is mad…Does that mean we should stop research into
the neurobiology of madness and just leave him to
clergy instead? We tried that for centuries and all we
got were exorcises, Freud and Lewis!
Berlinski’s COMMENTARY article is a fraud because it
slanders as anti-God the very science that makes no
pretensions of knowing anything about God. Yet
Berlinski asserts God’s divine dominion and that we
are made in His image as if he knows best because his
revelation came to him upon eating mushrooms or
something (he gives us no clue).
Berlinski fails– nay, AVOIDS– answering the
question: is there ONTOLOGY without ONTOGENY? No, Mr.
Berlinski, no Amazonian Indian has, as far as I know,
lived a full life in the jungle AND THEN moved on to
Cambridge to write a learned and literate PhD thesis
on civilization from bottom up and from top down. And,
no closer has Berlinski come to a chimp than I to
Jesus, so there’s little he can say with authority–
other than Chomsky’s hypothesis based on “think
experiments”– about the chimp’s non-verbal vs.
Berlinski verbal type cognition. Again, BEING IS
ACQUIRED through a neotony of prolonged maturation–
there is no ontology without ontogeny– not
necessarily a capriciously God given one for the
circumcised but rather one acquired by nature-nurture
interactions developing into intelligence.
I can’t admire Blinks’s faith, given that it is a
payed-per-word assault on Hitch en’s attempts to make
a living selling books. Both come off looking like a
not too interesting boxing match between two blind
fighters. But I do resent the game the noons played
ALLEGEDLY (???) on behalf of Israel, exploiting the
so-called “Christian Zionists” whom the noons laugh at
privately as “dumb gym.” The dumb noons don’t realize
that the domestic agenda of these gos is a Christian–
of their kind only– America that would eventually
deny Blinks and his Nikon fellows citizenship unless
they suddenly find Christ. In my old age I was
planning to be a philosopher too like my beloved
Edeline and Calvin, not to put myself at risk hiding
Jews in my armories from the Hagee-ilk Inquisition.
That’s why I find Berlinski and the neocons and their
World War IV ideology so outrageous– as a scientist,
as a Christian and as an American by choice, not
chance.
I hope Berlinski’s faith in God eventually saves him
from the high probability scourge of Alzheimer’s
better than can our neuroscience to date. As for me, I
still think God would rather I research the damned
disease rather than just pray wishing that He not
inflict it on me but on my pesky neighbor instead.
Daniel E. Teodoru
/golf clap
Sadly Dr. Teodoru, Morely and others on this thread will cherrypick your satiric comments out of context like he did Susskind, and offer those up as proof of their crackpot crank pseudoscience.
Daniel,
I take a measure of personal disquiet in making such an afront – but you are obviously an idiot, perhaps a fucking idiot.
Berlinksi is an agnostic; one arguing for science to end its parade of intolerant certainty about life, since by its own admission, it has little to be certain of.
You and Griefer should be very comfortable, you share your arrogance, and certainly your ability to ignore the relavence of actual evidence.
dur, warren, Berlinski is a Discovery Institute stooge.
lets just cite the wedge strategy again, shall we?
“The Wedge Strategy is a political and social action plan authored by the Discovery Institute, the hub of the intelligent design movement. The strategy was put forth in a Discovery Institute manifesto known as the Wedge Document,[1] which describes a broad social, political, and academic agenda whose ultimate goal is to “defeat [scientific] materialism” represented by evolution, “reverse the stifling materialist world view and replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions”[2] and to “affirm the reality of God.”[3] Its goal is to “renew” American culture by shaping public policy to reflect conservative Christian, namely evangelical Protestant, values.[4]
The wedge metaphor, attributed to Phillip E. Johnson, is that of a metal wedge splitting a log and represents using an aggressive public relations programme to create an opening for the supernatural in the public’s understanding of science.[5]
Intelligent design is the belief that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not a naturalistic process such as natural selection. Implicit in the intelligent design doctrine is a redefining of science and how it is conducted. Wedge strategy proponents are dogmatically opposed to materialism,[6][7][8] naturalism,[7][9] and evolution,[10][11][12][13] and have made the removal of each from how science is conducted and taught an explicit goal.[14][15]
The strategy was originally brought to the public’s attention when the Wedge Document was leaked on the Web. The Wedge strategy forms the governing basis of a wide range of Discovery Institute intelligent design campaigns.”
Berlinski’s proofless assertation that scientists are drawn to atheism because they are powermad control freaks is just part of the DI strategy of IQ baiting.
so, no.
you IDbots are not as smart as real scientists.
you just reinforce the cultural perception of christianity having a negative correlation with IQ.
Morely,
Firstly, life is exactly “chemical reactions” unless you are a vitalist – and from before the 19th century…
Thanks for the advice about looking at the work of Chen – look at the link I posted and see who wrote the article… You may need to get your parents to help with the “scroll” feature of the new-fangled computing device you are operating.
Why does punctuated equilibrium “disprove” Darwinism. Care to quote a single scientist – starting with Darwin – that claims that Evolution progresses at a constant rate(note this is not the same as a “gradual” rate whatever that means). Care to show why mutation generating variety and selection weeding out the weaker varieties means that phenotypes MUST show constant change? I wait for this breakthrough in science with the same baited breath I wait for Deuce to use “pure reason” to come up with the ultimately “true” theory of everything using merely the fact that classical mechanics is false along with the first ever proof of an axiom. I have to say you IDers have a number of phenomenal advances you are keeping under your belt, I suspect the Discovery institute has got a number of Nobel prizes coming their way…..
If you are going to throw Susskind around you might try reading what he writes and not relying on third-hand Wikipedia articles. I doubt he would claim to be a “prominent physicist” or the “father of String theory” – Green, Schwartz, Witten, Polyakov and Polchinski might be better choices. You need to read more than wiki articles based on publisher bumpf and then you wouldn’t make idiotic comments about how SJG “disproved Darwinism” or who a guy who wrote a book whose title is “The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the *****Illusion of Intelligent Design*****” has somehow “proved” ID. Read a book. It’s fun, trust me.
Danny:
This whole comment thread seems to validate the cultural meme that believers CAN’T be thinkers.
And can’t be readers either I guess.
Actually, what this thread illustrates (repeatedly) is that the Design so apparant (to scientists of every stripe for hundreds of years) is so scientifically relavent (and politically un-nerving) that modern materialists will ridicule its proponents at every turn, in any way, and at all costs – regardless of science.
Griefer (and the inane number of strawmen that he has invented to lament) is yet another prime example.
No, what this thread illustrates is that Berlinski is a DI stooge who is devoid of integrity and any knowledge whatsoever of the scientific method, and that believers cant be thinkers OR readers.
and if you don’t post my comments i’ll tell the Derb on you.
Another perfect example, Grief. Nothing more need be said.
can’t you read warren?
lets try this one more time.
Nationwide, nearly half a dozen states are considering variants of such bills, some of which throw in the origin of life and climate change for good measure. Legislators in Florida recently introduced such a bill in response to new educational standards that were the first to formalize the teaching of evolution. Althought two incompatible bills passed the state House and Senate, they died when the legislature went out of session; similar measures are still pending in other states. These bills appear to have originated at the pro-Intelligent Design thinktank the Discovery Institute, and constitute part of its latest effort towards reducing the teaching of evolution in public schools.
Evolution clearly has no shortage of controversies. But none of those controversies involve the basic principles of evolution, and all of them operate within a framework where random mutation and selection play a key role in creating diverse species that are related by common descent. It’s clear that the Discovery Institute is trying to introduce controversies that don’t exist, while ignoring those that do. That’s why the academic freedom bills it’s promoting are such dangerous things; while supposedly promoting intellectual analysis, they’re actually an attempt to pave the way for misinformation to enter the scientific classroom.
just this part, warren, can u read this?
It’s clear that the Discovery Institute is trying to introduce controversies that don’t exist, while ignoring those that do. That’s why the academic freedom bills it’s promoting are such dangerous things; while supposedly promoting intellectual analysis, they’re actually an attempt to pave the way for MISINFORMATION to enter the scientific classroom.
from arstechnica
why are christians culturally stereotyped as “stupid”?
it must be because you cannot actually read.
do i have to have go get the Derb?
Warren, I don’t think the IDers on this thread need anybody help in making themselves look stupid. The ignorance displayed by people who seem to think they are terribly well read is shocking.
Although the wedding is the existence of the world since ancient
times the ceremony, but the bride wedding gown at the wedding
but not to 200 years of history. Wedding dress on the moon
should be the prototype of 1700 BC to 1550 BC, ancient Greek aristocratic dynasty of three generations of women Minnow
worn bare chest, sleeves to the elbow,chest,waist position by a thread in the breast below the lower dressed bell-shaped dress,the overall tight fitting clothing. Now the bride wore white gauze dress hem trailing ceremony was originally a Catholic service.
I have learn a few just right stuff here. Definitely worth bookmarking for revisiting. I wonder how a lot attempt you place to make the sort of fantastic informative site.
You understand therefore considerably relating to this matter, produced me individually consider it from a lot of numerous angles. Its like women and men don’t seem to be interested until it is something to do with Lady gaga! Your personal stuffs nice. All the time take care of it up!