Thursday, March 19, 2009
Friday, January 30, 2009
Why Intelligent Design does not belong in science
My friend Annie asked me, "...have you seen the Ben Stein movie "Expelled"? I was wondering what you thought of that. I can see how one could say that proving there is a God is not science, but I don't see how you can say that the things that molecular biologists are finding out about cells, the formation of DNA, etc. isn't science. Richard Dawkins admits there are some issues there, and even put forth the idea that perhaps an intelligence from out of our universe "seeded" intelligence into our DNA at some point in our formation. -Annie" and I got a little carried away.
It doesn't take much knowledge of Geology and Paleontology to know that the arguments made against Evolution are very dishonest with the facts. Deliberately dishonest. It's pretty appalling. For example, ID "scientists" like to say that in many places the fossils from supposedly different ages are mixed up or even indicate that so-called evolution has run in reverse. They insist that fossils placed in evolutionary order are subjective, by the whim of evolutionary bias. Put that way, it is as though evolutionary theorists have twisted the facts to support a creation without God, rather than having discovered support for evolution from study of nature herself. Of course, what the ID people never mention is in those places fossil reworking or seismic faulting are always evident. Go to the Colorado river as it flows through downtown Austin, TX. See that dead dog as he gets covered by shifting bank sands, bits of extinct Creataeous corals, turretellas, and ammonites eroded from the rock. If ID is around a million years from now, they'll argue dogs died in the same Great Flood as those extinct species.
Overall, there is nothing in the scientific study of nature that indicates the existence or need for a God. And the reason is pretty clear: science does not need faith in its research of the unknown; rather, to explain phenomena, it tenders hypotheses that it tests. To the extent that these hypotheses survive testing, they become laws. Then as the laws in relationship together form a larger coherent picture, science forms theories. All the science sets out to test or disprove these theories. It doesn't need faith to do this which why anyone, Atheist, Poly-theist, Monotheist and Ancestor Worshipper alike can conduct science and still verify each others work. In fact, faith would hinder its efforts.
Science is human. And just like a bunch of humans, who among them wouldn't want find a way to overturn a law or better yet a theory to have his or her name written in the book of science? Such is the progress of science. Science like religion admires and recalls its heroes. But unlike religion would love nothing better than to find them wrong or partially correct in order to get (not in a holy book, but) in a text book. In that fight to the death for pure prestige, science is just another battlefield. Odd, I don't recall any religions that encourage believers to unseat their gods and heroes. (Kill the Buddha!) That's progress for ya.
Now on that movie "Expelled"; it really devalued Ben Stein as anything resembling a serious person. It was clear he was pandering to that crowd out there that is both at once religious and anti-science. Molecular Biology, as science, does not need God, as science, it needs only study. Sometimes seeking an answer leads to more questions. But in science, the explanations must be testable and their results repeatable. Stein was horridly one-sided. Moreover, Dawkins was only being fair and admitting that intelligent beings can design life, only if they themselves were first evolved naturally. We do this now. We take pre-existing DNA and modify it. Conceivably, we humans with greater sophistication and technology can populate an entire planet with life we designed. But in the end, where does the raw genetic material come from? We know what the ID folks say. The only answer available to science, the overwhelmingly supported by the facts answer, is it evolved through natural selection after a stable environment provided the setting for molecules to function in relationship with other molecules and to begin stabilizing their own existence through replication.
Another thing, a real wicked charge Stein and many of the ID people make at Darwin is that his ideas support totalitarian ideologies and eugenics. This claim is a fabrication. Darwin died before these movements began and neither said anything in support of them nor would he were he alive. He was a Christian himself.
Religion has from its very beginning given explanations of unknowns that are designed to unify a group around a set of beliefs. Before science existed to study physical facts and assemble physical explanations, religion answered a big question "Where do we come from?" The answer was of course "From our God", but then the means were described as well. These means of creation usually had a relationship with the social order of believers. OK...so science comes along and in its curiosity and ambitions begins to study geological history and natural laws and eventually offers theories that have physical explanations that make no reference to a God or the supernatural...
Science does this not because it is "out to get" religion. It does this because it can see an explanation taking shape and making rational sense. Science doesn't address the spiritual world or matters of faith. But neither, it is actively trying to thwart religions' desire to create more believers. However, there are movements and ideologies that are trying to thwart religion in competition, totalitarianism.
Fascism and Communism were both in competition with religion. Early on, so was Capitalism until it saw that religion was a money making enterprise. Early capitalists like Morgan and Carnegie took their understanding of evolutionary theory and championed the idea of Social Darwinism. Darwin and evolutionary science sees evolution as something that just happens without anyone doing anything. But these Social Darwinists erroneously tried to use the theory to justify meddling with the race through eugenics. Funny thing is that Darwin's natural selection indicates that differences will rise in individuals naturally. Eugenics can't prevent that.
Anyway our totalitarians out there, like Communism and Fascism, want to take over the world and they want to rule it forever. This puts them in direct conflict with religion who wants to be around forever too, as forever as their god(s). Totalitarianism needs an alternative to religious explanations of beginnings. Not having far to look they borrow from science. The thing is, communistic and fascist science was not science, because it was forced to support many absurd theories that pandered to the ideology. So in the areas that scientific results conflicted with ideology, science ceased growing, for example, in the Soviet Union genetics didn't advance.
I ask you, given the culture of the kind of religion that wants Intelligent Design included in science what do you think the real objective is? Is it to encourage scientific progress? Is the subject of study really nature herself? I'm not sure they'd do any better than the totalitarians did with science, probably a lot worse.
What this religion really fears is a brother who'll step outside his field and lay hold to all disciplines and making religion irrelevant. It fears this from experience because it used to be a lot like that brother. It wasn't long ago that religions had a firm hold on all of human life and between them they fought trench warfare style. How much better for them now, and us, that religions' are internally fragmented and have their boundaries fractured? In an Ma Bell like break-up, they now get to compete fairly freely to prove who's most powerful, eternal, etc. Religion has its hands full already without having to invade science. Rather, religion would do best to focus on those scientists who in their exuberance or arrogance step outside of science to make faith-like assertions.
When Dawkin's says that evolution leads him to atheism, my eyes roll so hard its audible. When people take descriptive statements of science and make judgments of faith, or worse, leap to moral conclusions the results are often dangerous. Science, because of it's methodology and notion of causality, and possibly its immaturity, is a long way from speaking rationally about any ethics or morality that safeguards the community. You can use the facts of science as premises on the way to the therefore of a moral argument, but don't think science can leap to a conclusion on facts alone. There is that question of value. For all it's problems, conflicts, stupidities, and our innumerable reasons to doubt it, religion has within itself the wisdom of the ages. As it managed humankind through the millenia, screwed up, wrecked nations, lost out and defeated weaker and often really really screwed up competitors (think Aztecs), it learned through trial and error what generally tends to work and is mostly good. To my mind, religion offers pretty decent advice amid life vicissitudes (even if it like pulling teeth to get the reasons why) and I always hope to consider it a friend, if not a slightly deranged one indeed. It must have been abused as a child.
So as one friend to another, Religion, don't fear science. So you didn't get it right when you told people where they came from. You don't have to get all defensive and dogmatic about it! Even if humanity was accident of nature and adaptation, you did create civilization, and even now you can still pitch in to help us make plans and have meaningful lives.
It doesn't take much knowledge of Geology and Paleontology to know that the arguments made against Evolution are very dishonest with the facts. Deliberately dishonest. It's pretty appalling. For example, ID "scientists" like to say that in many places the fossils from supposedly different ages are mixed up or even indicate that so-called evolution has run in reverse. They insist that fossils placed in evolutionary order are subjective, by the whim of evolutionary bias. Put that way, it is as though evolutionary theorists have twisted the facts to support a creation without God, rather than having discovered support for evolution from study of nature herself. Of course, what the ID people never mention is in those places fossil reworking or seismic faulting are always evident. Go to the Colorado river as it flows through downtown Austin, TX. See that dead dog as he gets covered by shifting bank sands, bits of extinct Creataeous corals, turretellas, and ammonites eroded from the rock. If ID is around a million years from now, they'll argue dogs died in the same Great Flood as those extinct species.
Overall, there is nothing in the scientific study of nature that indicates the existence or need for a God. And the reason is pretty clear: science does not need faith in its research of the unknown; rather, to explain phenomena, it tenders hypotheses that it tests. To the extent that these hypotheses survive testing, they become laws. Then as the laws in relationship together form a larger coherent picture, science forms theories. All the science sets out to test or disprove these theories. It doesn't need faith to do this which why anyone, Atheist, Poly-theist, Monotheist and Ancestor Worshipper alike can conduct science and still verify each others work. In fact, faith would hinder its efforts.
Science is human. And just like a bunch of humans, who among them wouldn't want find a way to overturn a law or better yet a theory to have his or her name written in the book of science? Such is the progress of science. Science like religion admires and recalls its heroes. But unlike religion would love nothing better than to find them wrong or partially correct in order to get (not in a holy book, but) in a text book. In that fight to the death for pure prestige, science is just another battlefield. Odd, I don't recall any religions that encourage believers to unseat their gods and heroes. (Kill the Buddha!) That's progress for ya.
Now on that movie "Expelled"; it really devalued Ben Stein as anything resembling a serious person. It was clear he was pandering to that crowd out there that is both at once religious and anti-science. Molecular Biology, as science, does not need God, as science, it needs only study. Sometimes seeking an answer leads to more questions. But in science, the explanations must be testable and their results repeatable. Stein was horridly one-sided. Moreover, Dawkins was only being fair and admitting that intelligent beings can design life, only if they themselves were first evolved naturally. We do this now. We take pre-existing DNA and modify it. Conceivably, we humans with greater sophistication and technology can populate an entire planet with life we designed. But in the end, where does the raw genetic material come from? We know what the ID folks say. The only answer available to science, the overwhelmingly supported by the facts answer, is it evolved through natural selection after a stable environment provided the setting for molecules to function in relationship with other molecules and to begin stabilizing their own existence through replication.
Another thing, a real wicked charge Stein and many of the ID people make at Darwin is that his ideas support totalitarian ideologies and eugenics. This claim is a fabrication. Darwin died before these movements began and neither said anything in support of them nor would he were he alive. He was a Christian himself.
Religion has from its very beginning given explanations of unknowns that are designed to unify a group around a set of beliefs. Before science existed to study physical facts and assemble physical explanations, religion answered a big question "Where do we come from?" The answer was of course "From our God", but then the means were described as well. These means of creation usually had a relationship with the social order of believers. OK...so science comes along and in its curiosity and ambitions begins to study geological history and natural laws and eventually offers theories that have physical explanations that make no reference to a God or the supernatural...
Science does this not because it is "out to get" religion. It does this because it can see an explanation taking shape and making rational sense. Science doesn't address the spiritual world or matters of faith. But neither, it is actively trying to thwart religions' desire to create more believers. However, there are movements and ideologies that are trying to thwart religion in competition, totalitarianism.
Fascism and Communism were both in competition with religion. Early on, so was Capitalism until it saw that religion was a money making enterprise. Early capitalists like Morgan and Carnegie took their understanding of evolutionary theory and championed the idea of Social Darwinism. Darwin and evolutionary science sees evolution as something that just happens without anyone doing anything. But these Social Darwinists erroneously tried to use the theory to justify meddling with the race through eugenics. Funny thing is that Darwin's natural selection indicates that differences will rise in individuals naturally. Eugenics can't prevent that.
Anyway our totalitarians out there, like Communism and Fascism, want to take over the world and they want to rule it forever. This puts them in direct conflict with religion who wants to be around forever too, as forever as their god(s). Totalitarianism needs an alternative to religious explanations of beginnings. Not having far to look they borrow from science. The thing is, communistic and fascist science was not science, because it was forced to support many absurd theories that pandered to the ideology. So in the areas that scientific results conflicted with ideology, science ceased growing, for example, in the Soviet Union genetics didn't advance.
I ask you, given the culture of the kind of religion that wants Intelligent Design included in science what do you think the real objective is? Is it to encourage scientific progress? Is the subject of study really nature herself? I'm not sure they'd do any better than the totalitarians did with science, probably a lot worse.
What this religion really fears is a brother who'll step outside his field and lay hold to all disciplines and making religion irrelevant. It fears this from experience because it used to be a lot like that brother. It wasn't long ago that religions had a firm hold on all of human life and between them they fought trench warfare style. How much better for them now, and us, that religions' are internally fragmented and have their boundaries fractured? In an Ma Bell like break-up, they now get to compete fairly freely to prove who's most powerful, eternal, etc. Religion has its hands full already without having to invade science. Rather, religion would do best to focus on those scientists who in their exuberance or arrogance step outside of science to make faith-like assertions.
When Dawkin's says that evolution leads him to atheism, my eyes roll so hard its audible. When people take descriptive statements of science and make judgments of faith, or worse, leap to moral conclusions the results are often dangerous. Science, because of it's methodology and notion of causality, and possibly its immaturity, is a long way from speaking rationally about any ethics or morality that safeguards the community. You can use the facts of science as premises on the way to the therefore of a moral argument, but don't think science can leap to a conclusion on facts alone. There is that question of value. For all it's problems, conflicts, stupidities, and our innumerable reasons to doubt it, religion has within itself the wisdom of the ages. As it managed humankind through the millenia, screwed up, wrecked nations, lost out and defeated weaker and often really really screwed up competitors (think Aztecs), it learned through trial and error what generally tends to work and is mostly good. To my mind, religion offers pretty decent advice amid life vicissitudes (even if it like pulling teeth to get the reasons why) and I always hope to consider it a friend, if not a slightly deranged one indeed. It must have been abused as a child.
So as one friend to another, Religion, don't fear science. So you didn't get it right when you told people where they came from. You don't have to get all defensive and dogmatic about it! Even if humanity was accident of nature and adaptation, you did create civilization, and even now you can still pitch in to help us make plans and have meaningful lives.
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