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| 2005/11/15 [Science/Biology] UID:40593 Activity:very high |
11/15 "Some well-respected scientists have fostered the spread of
intelligent design. Henry F. Schaefer, director of the Center
for Computational Quantum Chemistry at the University of
Georgia, has written or co-authored 1,082 scientific papers
and is one of the world's most widely cited chemists by other
researchers.
Mr. Schaefer teaches a freshman seminar at Georgia entitled:
"Science and Christianity: Conflict or Coherence?" He has
spoken on religion and science at many American universities,
and gave the "John M. Templeton Lecture" -- funded by the
foundation -- at Case Western Reserve in 1992, Montana State
in 1999, and Princeton and Carnegie Mellon in 2004. "Those
who favor the standard evolutionary model are in a state of
panic," he says. "Intelligent design truly terrorizes them."
This past April, the school of science at Duquesne University,
a Catholic university in Pittsburgh, abruptly canceled its
sponsorship of a lecture by Mr. Schaefer in its distinguished
scientist series. According to David Seybert, dean of the
Bayer School of Natural and Environmental Sciences,
Mr. Schaefer was invited at the suggestion of a faculty member
belonging to a Christian fellowship group on campus. The
invitation was withdrawn after several biology professors
complained that Mr. Schaefer planned to speak in favor of
intelligent design. The school wanted to avoid "legitimizing
intelligent design from a scientific perspective," Mr. Seybert
said. Faculty members were also concerned that top students
might not apply to Duquesne if they thought it endorsed
intelligent design. Mr. Schaefer gave his lecture -- entitled
"The Big Bang, Stephen Hawking, and God" -- to a packed hall at
Duquesne under the auspices of a Christian group instead."
From yesterday's WSJ article "Darwinian Struggle At Some
Colleges, Classes Questioning Evolution Take Hold":
http://tinyurl.com/aq2qp (if you have subscription)
Huh? How come top scientists can believe in such ridiculous
theories?
\_ Please use a link to a file or accessible URL if you
are going to quote large blocks of text. That makes
the motd works better for us all.
\_ You are welcomed to put the text in a file with
a link, and then you can delete it from the motd.
Huh? How come top scientists can believe in such ridiculous
theories?
\_ How can motd posters post with such horrible formatting?
\_ Obviously the OP wasn't designed intelligently.
\_ Actually, I am more of an evolutionary dead end.
\_ Pause and pull back. ID, as a philosophy or extension of theology,
has been embraced by a number of gifted scientists (including
Newton). The trick is where people take this out of the realm of
theology or philosophy and instead attempt to present it to the
exclusion of actual science, i.e., evolution. In other words, if
you believe that G_d created everything through the Big Bang and
you believe that **God** created everything through the Big Bang and
created life (and us) through evolution, there's no conflict
between ID and science. It's when you start to say that the
Bible must be taken literally instead of allegorically that the
whole thing becomes ridiculous.
\_ Newton was pre-Darwin, when there was no Theory of Evolution yet
to explain things.
\_ Darwin's theory doesn't really explain very much. That
doesn't mean the alternative is that God created
everything, but why do people always treat evolution as
case closed? There are still many more questions than
answers.
\_ "why do people always treat evolution as case closed?"
Another attempt to tweak facts to discredit TE.
\_ Not tweaking any facts, but biologists almost
universally believe TE explains all life as we know
it while making some really big leaps of faith
themselves. Unlike, say, QM, there isn't even
really any math to lay a groundwork with. Just some
observations and a giant leap.
\- there isnt a complete theory of
turbulence either. do you fly in
planes?
\_ Airflow around my spherical plane is
perfectly laminar. -physicist
\- that's no moon
\_ No. I ride a mule myself.
\_ No bestiality on motd please.
\_ Yes, sometimes it seems to be that the assumptions
and reasoning are as follows:
(1) we have to come from somewhere.
(2) it has to be a natural process.
(3) TE fits (1) and (2) so we really like it, and
will consider case closed even though it has
some holes.
\_ "people always treat evolution as case closed?" Another
fact-tweaking by the ID people?
\_ but I think the ID under discussion is the one that
espouses "reducible complexity".
\_ I think the biggest problem with ID is that it is a "scientific
theory" that says "there's no need for further science because of
<magic thing X>" What's advanced science since the dawn of time
are the people who say "no, that's not magic, how does it work/
how did it happen?" If we accept any type of supernatural effect
as a complete scientific explanation for something, we're greatly
hurting the cause. I think even people who believe in a creator
should see this.
\_ I don't think this is true, at least according to my
understanding. If so, then I think different people have
different ideas about ID.
\_ You're right. There are currents among the ID that are
young-earth creationists, and some that aren't. They all,
however, are trying to codify their religion into science.
Which is never a good idea. -emarkp
\_ You're like a communist who champions property rights.
It's nice to see anyone supporting property rights, but
a communist is still a communist. Likewise with a
religious conservative who does not want to destroy
American science.
\_ I agree with you that ID cannot stand as a scientific theory,
but is "irrreducible complexity" valid as a critique of
the evolution theory?
\_ I think it's something we don't understand, like how black
holes are generally accepted, but we don't understand the
physics of an actual singularity, IIRC.
\_ hmm .. but in the case of "irreducibly complex", TE
is directly challenged, while in the case of the
blackhole, it's just that the math breaks down, and
we can't understand things once that happens.
\_ But in the case of evolution, we've encountered
"irreducable" complexity before, and then later we figure
out how it could have happened. (e.g. eye lens
evolution) What makes the current "irreducable"
wall any more certain?
\_ Did you find the explanation on how it could've
happened convincing?
\_ I did. Read "The Blind Watchmaker." --PeterM
\_ what do you think of this:
http://www.leaderu.com/real/ri9203/watchmkr.html
\_ I don't think so. It ignores the possibility of an
intermediate form which wasn't irreducible, which then
simplified into the now-irreducible form. It also assumes
that current biological structures/organisms labelled as
irreducible have been labelled correctly. -emarkp
\_ that's the whole point right? you need to chart a
path of small evolutionary steps to arrive at the
complex structure, with each of the intermediate form
making evolutinary sense (i.e. each step a positive
improvement).
\_ The whole point? I don't quite understand what you mean
by that, but /my/ point is that something that is
irriducible now may have evolved from something that
wasn't irriducible. -emarkp
\_ Am I missing something? You are not making sense.
\_ Evolution means things change over time. One form
that's an advantage but more complex could evolve
to something that's an advantage but is simpler
(more efficient). There's nothing about evolution
that declares that every step is more complex or
has a purpose easy to identify. -emarkp
\_ We should have stopped at atoms. Everything
on the quantum level is too complex. |
| tinyurl.com/aq2qp -> users1.wsj.com/lmda/do/checkLogin?a=t&d=wsj&sd=users1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB113193754738896194-search.html%3FKEYWORDS%3DHenry%2BSchaefer%26COLLECTION%3Dwsjie%2Farchive The Page You Requested Is Available Only to Subscribers Please log in below to access the Online Journal (remember that all log-i n information is case-sensitive). |
| www.leaderu.com/real/ri9203/watchmkr.html Phillip Johnson has been a professor of law at the University of Califor nia, Berkeley, for 26 years. He received his BA from Harvard and his JD from the University of Chicago. Johnson is the author of Darwin on Trial, a work which contends theories of evolution are based on philos ophical naturalism. Since the writing of his book, Johnson has spoken a nd debated extensively with experts on the issue. Stephen Jay Gould, professor of paleontology at Harvard University an d a leading Darwinist, recently ended his year-long silence concerning t he attack on Darwinism from the book Darwin on Trial by Berkeley law pro fessor Philip Johnson. Gould responded with a three-page book review in the July 1992 issue of S cientific American. In the review, Gould chastised Johnson for what he p erceived as the misuse and omission of scientific evidences, the lack of understanding of the logic of evolutionary thought, and on the inabilit y to cogently and equitably debate the issues. In response, Johnson asked the editors of Scientific American if they wou ld grant him equal space to answer Gould. In an effort to grant Johnson the opportunity to rebut his c ritics, Johnson's reply is printed in its entirety. The Real Issue has s ummarized Gould's review at the end of Johnson's rebuttal. "Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of h aving been designed for a purpose." So writes Richard Dawkins, author of The Blind Watchmaker. As a Darwinist, Dawkins maintains that the appearance is deceptive, and t hat living organisms are actually the product of purposeless material fo rces-random genetic variation and natural selection. This "blind watchmaker thesis" is the most important claim of evolutionar y biology. If scientists were able to say only that primitive fish "some how" became amphibians, and then mammals, and finally humans, nobody wou ld be very impressed. Absent a credible mechanism, the transformation of a fish into a human being is nearly as miraculous as the creation of ma n from the dust of the earth. What makes the story of evolution impressive is that Darwinist scientists think that they know how such transformations occurred, through natural processes requiring no divine guidance or non-material orienting force. The blind watchmaker thesis has enormous religious significance because i t purports to explain the history of life without leaving any role to a supernatural Creator. "Before Darwin," writes Stephen Jay Gould, "we thought that a benevolent God had created us." After the acceptance of Darwinism, that belief beca me intellectually untenable. According to Gould: "No intervening spirit watches lovingly over the affairs of nature (though Newton's clock-windi ng god might have set up the machinery at the beginning of time and then let it run). And whatever w e think of God, his existence is not manifest in the products of nature. " God as a remote First Cause thus remains a possibility, but God as an act ive creator is absolutely ruled out by the blind watchmaker thesis. That is why Richard Dawkins exults that "Darwin made it possible to be an in tellectually fulfilled atheist." That doesn't mean that Darwin made it i mpossible to be anything but an atheist. For example, Darwinism and theism can easily be reconciled by those who, like Asa Gray and Charles D Walcott, misunderstand Darwinian evolution as a benevolent process divinely ordained for the purpose of creating hu mans. Those who really understand Darwinism, but still have spiritual inclinations, have the option of ma king a religion out of evolution. Theodosius Dobzhansky-Gould's prime example of a Christian evolutionist- actually exemplified the religious dimension of Darwinism. Dobzhansky di scarded the traditional Christian conception of God, followed Teilhard d e Chardin in spiritualizing the evolutionary process, and worshipped the glorious future of evolution. Gould writes that religion and science should not conflict, "because scie nce treats factual reality, while religion struggles with human morality ." But this statement implies a distinction between morality and reality which does not exist, and which Gould himself would never observe in pr actice. Does the morality of racial discrimination, for example, have no thing to do with the factual reality of human equality? The author of Th e Mismeasure of Man didn't seem to think so. And what gives Gould the au thority to proclaim that religion may not concern itself with the factua l reality of God? God can't have any moral authority unless He really exists, and if God re ally exists He might take a hand in creation. When a scientific elite cl aims exclusive authority to decide what is "real," it is asserting contr ol over science, religion, philosophy, and every other area of thought. Religion, like science, starts with assumptions or conclusions about real ity. If we were created by God for a purpose, that is one starting point . If we are the accidental product of blind natural forces, that is a ve ry different starting point. In the former case we try to learn the will of our creator, and in the latter case we discard that "intervening spi rit" as an illusion and proceed to chart our own course. Thus Gould himself, in the concluding sentence of Wonderful Life, proceed s directly from a Darwinist starting point to the religious conclusion t hat we are morally autonomous beings who create our own values: We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in thi s most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes-one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way. The author of all those statements castigated me for suggesting that Darw inism is tied to naturalistic philosophy and opposed to any meaningful t heism. David Hull, reviewing Darwin on Trial for Nature, was equally sev ere with me for refusing to concede that Darwinism has finished off thei stic religion for good. Hull emphatically proclaimed a Darwinist doctrin e of God: What kind of God can one infer from the sort of phenomena epitomized by the species on Darwin's Galapagos Islands? The evolutionary process is rife with happenstance, contingency, incredible waste, death, pain and horror.... The God of the Galapagos is careless, wasteful, indifferent, almost diabolical. He is certainly not the sort of God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray. Now to the more important q uestion: Is the blind watchmaker thesis true? To put the question anothe r way, does natural selection really have the fantastic creative power w hich Darwinists claim for it? That seems an appropriate question, but pe rsons like Gould, Dawkins, and Hull insist that the very definition of " science" rules the question out of order. They say that science is inherently committed to naturalistic premises, t hat Darwinian evolution is the best scientific (ie naturalistic) theor y of biological creation that we have, and even that Darwinism possesses a virtue called "consilience of induction"-meaning that it explains a l ot if we assume that it is true. One way or another, Darwinists meet the question "Is Darwinism true?" wit h an answer that amounts to an assertion of power: "Well, it is science, as we define science, and you will have to be content with that." Some of us are not content with that, because we know that the empirical evidence for the creative power of natural selection is somewhere betwee n weak and non-existent. Artificial selection of fruit flies or domestic animals produces limited change within the species, but tells us nothin g about how insects and mammals came into existence in the first place. In any case, whatever artificial selection achieves is due to the employm ent of human intelligence consciously pursuing a goal. The whole point o f the blind watchmaker thesis, however, is to establish what material pr ocesses can do in the absence of purpose and intelligence. That Darwinis t authorities continually overlook this crucial distinction gives us lit tle confidence in their objectivity. Examples of natural selection in action, like Kettlewell's observat... |