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.
