I have spent over 30 years fighting Creationists, especially the out-and-out literalists who believe that the earth and its inhabitants were made miraculously in six days, some six thousand years ago. More recently, I have been combating the so-called Intelligent Design Theorists who argue that the organic world is so complex one must assume a designing intelligence intervened miraculously. I believe that Darwinian evolution is the right explanation of organic origins and that these so-called alternatives are relicts of an idiosyncratic form of American, Protestant, evangelical Christianity from the 19th century.
I am of course one of many involved in this fight. The late Stephen Jay Gould, paleontologist and brilliant popular science writer, was a major figure. So also is this year’s Templeton Prize Winner, the geneticist Francisco Ayala. Special credit must also go to the National Center for Science Education, an organization that exists to fight attempts to get biblical literalism into the nation’s biology classes. No praise can be too high for its director, Eugenie Scott, who devotes her life to the cause.
One thing that we Creationism fighters came early to realize is that the proper approach has to be grounded on the belief that science and religion are things of different natures—what Gould used to call different Magisteria. Apart from anything else, given the way that the First Amendment has come to be interpreted—separation of church and state—it is only by taking this approach that one can mount a legal case, one that was mounted with success against Creation Science in Arkansas in 1981 and with equal success against Intelligent Design Theory in Dover, Pennsylvania in 2005. The Constitution does not bar the teaching of bad science. It does bar the teaching of religion. The trick therefore is to show that evolution is science and Creationism and its varieties are religion.
There is also a very good social reason for keeping science and religion separate. Americans are religious. If you argue that science simply smashes everything that is central to religion, you are not going to make many friends. Why should people allow their kids to take biology classes if the message is going to be that it is just a pile of hooey to entertain any thoughts and hopes that the death of Jesus on the Cross and his resurrection on the third day makes possible our eternal salvation? This is why the New Atheists are not very helpful when it comes to the fight against Creationism. In their books, like The God Delusion, and on the blogs, like Why Evolution is True and Pharyngula, they preach nonstop the message that science wipes out religion and a good thing too. This may go down well with their audience but is anathema to the average American. It is little wonder that the New Atheists provide the Creationists with their favorite reading.
Obviously, because something is legally and socially desirable, that does not make it true. And equally obviously the case cannot be made that science and religion never come into conflict. You cannot hold to Noah’s Flood and modern geology at the same time. You cannot with the Mormons think that the native people of America are the lost tribes of Israel and accept modern anthropological beliefs that these people came over the Bering Strait. At most, what you have got to show (staying with Western Christianity because this is where the real conflict arises) is that traditional Christianity—the Christianity of Augustine and Aquinas, of Luther and Calvin—does not conflict with modern science. (This is not to say that these thinkers would never have accepted things that today science rules unacceptable, but that they gave a methodology to accept new findings.)
Can this be done? In past pieces in this series of Brainstorm posts, I have tried to prepare the way. The important thing about science, as stressed by Thomas Kuhn, is that it is deeply metaphorical. It succeeds because of its metaphors—force, attraction, natural selection, genetic code, arms race, Oedipus complex. The important thing about modern science is that it is dominated by the metaphor of the machine—the world works or functions like a machine, endless motions obeying fixed natural laws. This holds in the physical world, it holds in the biological world—Richard Dawkins speaks of us as “survival machines”—and thanks to the metaphor of the brain as a computer, it holds in the psychological world also. And finally, the important thing about metaphors is that they put on blinkers. They help to find the right questions to ask—What is the meaning of the order of these different smaller molecules along the backbone of the macro DNA molecule?—and they also rule out other questions as irrelevant or meaningless—Is the DNA molecule Protestant or Catholic?
Cut to the chase. There are a number of questions that are simply ruled out by the machine metaphor as applied to our world. First, why is there something rather than nothing? Machines take the ingredients for granted. It is rather like Mrs. Glasse’s recipe for jugged hare. Take your hare. Note that this does not mean that the question (often, for obvious reasons, known as the “fundamental question”) is meaningless, although as it happens Wittgenstein thought it was. It is just that it is not a question addressed by modern science. You can of course as a scientist ask about origins, that is what evolutionists do all of the time. But ultimately, the world is a given.
Morality is another question not addressed by modern science. David Hume pointed this out. You cannot legitimately go from matters of fact to matters of obligation. Of course the way the world is and what you know about the world can affect your moral decisions. Should I cut this person open and jiggle about with their heart? Well, only if you have the medical knowledge to do so. But that is it. Machines just are. It is what we decide to do with them that brings in the right and wrong.
More contentiously, with Leibniz and many modern thinkers like John Searle, I don’t think that machines think. Or let me be more precise. Perhaps machines do think. Remember Hal in 2001. I don’t think machines explain the phenomenon of consciousness, sentience. I am not sure whether this drives you back to some kind of Cartesian dualism, as suggested by David Chalmers, or whether perhaps the problem of sentience is simply something we will never explain, as suggested by Colin McGinn. What I do know is that when people like Daniel Dennett say that they have a solution as soon as they have described the working of the brain, they are whistling in the wind. Electrical circuits firing off are not the same as appreciating a Mozart opera.
Finally, there is the question of ultimate purpose. The Nobel physicist Steven Weinberg says that the more he studies the world the less purpose he sees in it. I am not surprised. He is not engaged in an inquiry that will yield purpose. This may seem a bit strange because surely machines do have purposes. The automobile is for transport, the stove is for cooking. However, as scholars of the Scientific Revolution have long pointed out, no sooner had people like Galileo and Descartes adopted machine thinking than they realized that all they were really interested in were the mechanisms. Of course, God may well have created everything for a purpose, but as far as science is concerned God rapidly became a retired engineer. So here is another area that modern science simply does not speak to: What is the purpose of it all?
There may be other questions to which modern science does not speak and can give no good answers. Several of my colleagues down here in the Philosophy Department of Florida State think that free will is something ultimately beyond the scope of science. But four are enough for present purposes. Science says nothing. It is silent. The question now obviously is whether religion can pick up and run with this result. I will turn to this in my final piece in this series.
20 Responses to Accommodationism IV
livefreeordie2 - May 3, 2010 at 12:10 pm
Why must you “fight” the Intelligent Design people? The fact is, though you have a different opinion about “why,” you are no different. Your own words point that out. “I believe that Darwinian evolution is the right explanation of organic origins. . .” You believe it. You don’t know it. You can neither prove that you are right nor prove that they are wrong. You have a belief. . .just as they have a belief. I’m sure there’s some kind of psychological symbolism in the fact that you think you have to “combat” them. . . and interestingly, I think they use the same type of language about Darwinists.I’m not a religious person. The whole God and heaven thing doesn’t make all that much sense to me – it seems unlikely that a carpenter from Galilee is actually a human representation of a God that controls the vastness of the universe. But there are questions that science cannot adequately answer. For example – given the “Big Bang,” what existed before it? What was it that went bang? Why did it go bang? And let’s not forget that while micro-evolution is easily demonstrable, the idea that humans “evolved” from other from the slime is a theory with as much proof as the idea that “God created the heavens and the Earth.” Who knows? Both theories may be true. . . or false. But “fighting” or “combating” an idea by trying to silence it seems to me to be a religious, not a scientific endeavor.
macheath - May 3, 2010 at 1:04 pm
livefreeordie2 says:”But there are questions that science cannot adequately answer.”Sure that’s true. And then livefree concludes from that:”Both theories (Darwinian evolution and intelligent design)may be true. . . or false.”Oops. That’s the difference between science and belief, right? Does livefree think it might be equally true that the world rests on the back of a giant tortoise, because some people believe that it does, and who can tell anyway? (Just because you can’t see the tortoise doesn’t mean it isn’t there, after all.)Science attempts to be falsifiable and experimental, and belief does not. Sure, there are bad or lazy scientists who don’t adhere to that standard all of the time, but it doesn’t discredit the operation. Intelligent design can’t stand the test of science–it is, as Ruse points out, religion or belief at its core, dressed up to pretend it is science. Livefree’s standard “both may be true…or false” is ok for a religion course, but not a science course.
new_theologian - May 3, 2010 at 2:33 pm
Macheath says that “Intelligent design can’t stand the test of science.” Does he mean that it can’t prove by observation and experimentation that there is an intelligent designer? That may be so, but Darwinists can’t prove there isn’t. I think that’s livefreeordie2′s point, isn’t it? As far as science can reach, science cannot say yes or no to intelligent design–or creationism. After all, while it might seem an odd thing to suggest (and I’m not suggesting it myself), it is not a logical contradiction to hold that an omnipotent God could have created the world in a short span of time, or even in an instant, and just made it look as if it were really old, with a prehistory that could be regarded as “true” from a purely descriptive, scientific perspective, from within the context of the laws established for the universe, but that happens not to be factually accurate, metaphysically speaking. I don’t think that’s a particularly pro-reason view, but it is not a logical contradiction.In any event, the author is on the right track for finding a reconciliation that can satisfy, but he is not really there yet. His solution will just create a whole different set of enemies. He may satisfy the fideistic element within mostly evangelical Christianity (and I am not suggesting that most evangelicals are fideists), who are happy to abandon as untrustworthy science and philosophy, and all reasoning from anything beyond the Bible. But Catholics and Catholic-minded evangelicals who desire a real integration between faith and reason will be left out in the cold. He is really reiterating Galileo’s proposal, without acknowledging the fact that this is what got him into trouble with the Church and kept him there, and that it remains a sticking point to this very day. There cannot be a completely secular “magisterium” if all truth finally rests in the one Truth responsible for the whole created order.That does not mean that the Bible should be understood as a series of biological or geological pronouncements, but that the question of “what it means” and the question of “what it is” are necessarily intertwined, rather than completely separable, as the author suggests. The beef that we find within the context of the Catholic Church–which neither pronounces definitively on the question of origins nor endorses any particular scientific thesis on the question–is that certain sorts of theories tend to preclude the meaning assertions that the Church already holds to be true by virtue of divine revelation. In other words, if it is already revealed that human existence is not an accident, but is the product of a loving act on the part of a loving God who wills a creature into existence so that he might share his life with him, then any scientific explanation based upon the presumption that human existence is be merely an accident, and mechanical, would necessarily have to be rejected as contrary to the faith.Catholicism, in other words, does not admit the possibility of a total divorce between what we know by natural reason and what we know by faith. There can be a divorce between what we THINK we know by natural reason and what we know by faith; but the Church cannot be mistaken about the fundamental content of the revealed mystery, so if we THINK we know something that contradicts what the Church KNOWS she knows about faith, then, the meaning assertions of the faith always trump the being assertions of natural science. This is basic logic applied to a theological premise: Since, where there is a contradiction, one proposition must necessarily be false and the other true, and we already know by faith which proposition is true, we know by immediate inference, that the scientific theory, which is, by nature, subject to error, must be false.Do we all follow the reasoning? It has nothing to do with the question of whether the world comes to exist over time or not, but instead, with the intrinsic meaning and value of human existence, and the continued providential intervention of a loving God. The material description of origins seems to me to be a matter for scientific investigation, but the foundational philosophical presumption at the heart of Darwinism–namely, that it is all an accident–is simply contradictory to the foundational premise of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and thus, incompatible with the Abrahamic faith.
_perplexed_ - May 3, 2010 at 4:38 pm
“It is all an accident” is hardly the “the foundational philosophical presumption at the heart of Darwinism.” It only seems so, to new_theologian’s who reads into Darwin a series of theological pronouncments.
new_theologian - May 3, 2010 at 6:52 pm
I am referring to the position articulated in the article. Take, for example, the author’s words, where he says, “Of course, God may well have created everything for a purpose, but as far as science is concerned God rapidly became a retired engineer.” If this is a basic premise of modern science, and thus, by extension, Darwinism, then we have a clear contradiction to Christian thinking. It is deism. Perhaps I do not understand the author’s point here, but he seems to be suggesting that, while it may be metaphysically true that God created the cosmos, it is not the case that he continues to govern its directional unfolding. The idea of a final eschatological complexification worked out through a soteriological intervention that operates constantly throughout the whole created order, appears to be precluded as a foundational precondition for science.So let me just say that of science just accepts that it must, from within its own methodological parameters, remain silent as to the question of meaning, I am happy. But two points must also be granted. First, the scientist must never transgress this limit, even implicitly, by suggesting things like “random mutation” as causal principles (an idea that is actually logically absurd, since the idea of a “cause” is the idea of a rational account, while “randomness” denotes an unaccounted-for event, which, as such, is not the object of rational understanding). Second, the scientist must not refuse the theologian his or her prerogative to interpret the meaning of the given facts. As for the theologian, of course, the prerogative remains to question whether science has correctly identified the facts if they lead to a contradiction of what is known by faith concerning the meaning and value of creation in light of the love of God.
dmcgaugh - May 4, 2010 at 7:14 am
Thanks for this lucid and for, finally, a rationally relevant rather than mere mud-slinging piece on science and religion! I think Kant got most of it right (if we leave out, for example, his sexism, homophobia, and defense of the death penalty): 1) There is no “transcendental” (i.e., mental) experience without the body so that we had better damned-well pay attention to how the body (i.e., the entire universe to the extent possible) functions (i.e., always begin with the scientific explanation and take it as far as it goes before introducing alternative explanations); 2) the Copernican Turn requires us to deny our senses and trust our minds; 3) humanity is the animal that is able to “see things that aren’t there” (i.e., we add things to our experience of the phenomena in order to make sense of them = the law of gravity is not written on the falling apple and we only experience appearances/effects not substances/causes); 4) we distinguish between dreaming and being awake not by clarity and distinctness but by non-rule-governed events and rule-governed events, which rules, like substances and causes, are incapable of empirical proof (or disproof) only coherent consistency; 5) for humanity to be the species that it is, it must believe that it has the capacity to initiate a sequence of events that nature cannot accomplish on its own (i.e., it must believe that it has creative freedom — without confusing freedom with liberty’s choices, which allowed Kant to observe in 1775 that this capacity gives us the potential to destroy the earth); 6) such creativity requires us to distinguish between the hypothetical (physical conditions and their physical laws) and the categorical (self-initiated mental conditions and their self-legislated moral principles); 7) rational religion is concerned precisely with given conditions (Mrs. Glasse’s hare) and the effort by individuals and as a collective to try to do better (i.e., religion is morals; but not finger-wagging moralization, which would be heteronomous); 8) any claim for God in religion other than as the “X” that establishes the conditions of experience elevates humanity to divinity (a dangerous dillusion) or 9) undermines our very moral capacity by shifting the focus from what I can do because it is the right thing to do to how do I please this deity to obtain the reward that I think that I want (i.e., morals are always threatened by self-interest; even though we can never be sure that we are not acting on self-interest, we know that it is possible and, hence, to at least question whether one is doing something out of self-interest is the ideal); 10) the goal is not to end evil but to break it (i.e., we aren’t capable of being perfect, but we can do our best and learn from our mistakes). Only after one has established these conditions and capacities can one begin to talk about the three modes of the Categorical Imperative and the three maxims of the understanding …, but that’s another story.My only quarrel with your piece would be with your assertion that we have to somehow entirely separate science and religion. Yes, popular science and popular religion, but appropriate science that is done with the recognition of limits and appropriate religion that is done with the recognition of limits are complementary, not contradictory.Thanks, again!Doug McGaughey
gharbisonne - May 4, 2010 at 7:59 am
Ultimately this is a rather unsatisfying attempt at proof by assertion. If, as seems plausible, humans are constructed to look for volition in the action of certain other entities ( other humans, imagined supernatural beings) then, by our nature, we would expect to see purpose in our own actions and those of a deity. That does not mean the ‘purpose’ is really meaningful or logically justified. We may be similarly constructed to view ourselves as autonomously conscious. If so, our perception we are so is hardly any kind of evidence! What Ruse needs is what he lacks; actual evidence that some measurable behavior of humans or of the universe conflicts with that which would be predicted from the operation of physical laws. Lacking such, his viewpoint is different in detail but not in kind from that of the creationist.
mbelvadi - May 4, 2010 at 8:11 am
The article was going great right until it steered off track onto the subject of sentience. It’s a pretty dangerous territory to dabble into casually. For instance, some might think that you’ve implied that anyone who doesn’t (or perhaps “can’t”) appreciate a Mozart opera isn’t sentient. The history of arguments about sentience, up until the modern technology age, mostly tended around the issue of animals rather than machines. I think that the author of “In Defence of Dolphins” makes a compelling case from scientific evidence that by any reasonable definition of sentience that isn’t “rigged” to reach the “only humans are sentient” outcome, one would have to conclude that dolphins are sentient and worthy of the full protection of the law as individuals, not just as a species. For various reasons, dolphins probably can’t “appreciate” Mozart any more than someone who was born deaf, or someone with severe autism who might find Mozart’s music scary and jarring can.
greybloon - May 4, 2010 at 10:12 am
Dr. Ruse, I heartily salute your endeavors in this subject, but all the same, Dan Dennett has more than explained my consciousness and in other ways given me the “freedom” to construct my “purpose” and “meaning”.If this makes me my personal god, so mode it be (but only in the metaphoric sense).
rchill - May 4, 2010 at 12:25 pm
The world works the way it works….and we have observed and emulated it – the result is machines. Science is not metaphorical but sometimes metaphors are used to help simplify complex scientific processes and hypotheses/theories. Science cannot answer the question of a higher intelligence because it is outside the realm of our inquiry – we must remain within the physical/known universe. We must be able to design experiments, complete with controls and hypotheses. If I do not know what this “God” looks like/functions how can I design a test to identify his/her/its existence?? So, yes, science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God – we don’t go there. Intelligent design has no experimental design beyond claiming irreducible complexity and the fact that all details of life haven’t been worked out. That is not proof – that is not scienc – that is opinion.
new_theologian - May 4, 2010 at 1:16 pm
The specter that always seems to appear is that of Ockham’s razor. But there are two basic problems here. While it is a foundational premise of modern natural science (the simplest explanation is most likely to be correct), a) this principle is a mere prejudice, and b) its meaning is pretty ambiguous. Some will hold that “simpler” means, “involving fewer causes,” while others might argue that “simpler” means, “involving fewer intervening steps.” This places those who invoke an intelligent cause directly up against those who seek to avoid that invocation, on grounds that contemporary natural science has already admitted.It is “simpler” to explain the world’s current condition by appealing to an intelligent designer than by trying to account for it without such an appeal, because the intelligent designer could get us where we are now without as many intervening steps. This is the nature of the ID theorists’ complexity argument. How long would it take, and how many things would have to coalesce just so to lead us where we are right now? It seems “simpler” to appeal to a designer than to non-rational chance events.On the other hand, those who oppose ID oppose it because it introduces another layer of causality into an already cause-rich natural order. It is “simpler” to leave a designer out of the picture.But classical thinkers might retort by saying that creation actually satisfies both interpretations of the Ockham’s razor, because it can reduce all of the created order to a single First Cause in God, while, at the same time, simplifying reducing the number of intervening steps to get where we are right now. It is true that the addition of God adds a new layer of causality, but if that new layer is really the underlying, fundamental, and unifying cause, then it is really the single, simple explanation for everything.Of course, natural scientists will say, “That’s fine, but we can’t study that cause, so if you want to introduce it as a way of “simplifying” the account, you have done so at the expense of our proper methodology.” Fair enough. But that takes us back to my original point. Ockham’s razor is not a valid principle in the first place. It is a prejudice, and once we examine it critically, we realize that it cannot do much for us but confuse the issue.
11159995 - May 4, 2010 at 3:06 pm
For the Chronicle, this is a pretty sophisticated discussion in which i hope Prof. Ruse will respond at some point. I have just a few observations: 1) In ancient times “scientific” explanation involved final as well as efficient causes; the latter became the hallmark of modern science, while the former dropped out or became ceded to religion. But has functional explanation disappeared entirely from modern science? 2) If experimental proof is so crucial as a demarcation between science and non-science, what do we say about superstring theory, which has yet to be “tested” empirically? Does that make it simply metaphysics? Do we even know yet whether superstring theory is testable in principle? If not, how can we say it is “scientific” while Intelligent Design is not? 3) And what does testing mean, anyway, if Duhem and Quine are right that it is always possible to adjust higher-level principles if observations seem to conflict with lower-level hypotheses derived from them? 4) Is cosmology “science” or “religion” when it debates subjects like the Anthropic Principle? — Sandy Thatcher
rchill - May 4, 2010 at 4:04 pm
Superstring theory has a basis in the natural world – far different than the basis of intelligent design and designer. I believe Duhem and Quine are philosophers of science,not practictioner of science…big difference. Of course all hypotheses are based in some part on assumptions, that may or may not hold true. However, should those assumptions later on prove false, the hypothesis and any conclusions based on those results must be reexamined and modified. Once we believed the Central Dogma was dogma: DNA to RNA to protein. We now know the assumptions that the dogma was based on imcomplete information and assumptions – and it has been modified accordingly. And the Anthropic principle..I can observe conditions (from a distance of course!) on Venus, Jupiter, etc….yet those conditions certainly are not compatible with human life! You are arguing science with philosophical principles. Nothing in science states life must be carbon based, or has to resemble anything like what is found on earth. We can guess all we want about the possibilites of other life forms, but right now all we have is the carbon-based ones to analyze. It may be interesting to try to figure out what life might look like if based on other molecules – but right now we can only use ourselves for comparison and realize the limitation of that.
princeton67 - May 4, 2010 at 4:04 pm
The language of the article and of many of the comments misleads.First, replace “religion” with “Evangelical Christianity”. I have not read that nay Rasta- (or Pasta-)farians, Druids, Wiccans, Zoroastrians…. are demanding their cosmologies be taught.Second, the C. does bar the teaching of religion in a biology – or Math, or Phys. Ed. or JROTC – class. It does not bar teaching ABOUT religionS in Literature, History, Social Studies, or Humanities courses.Third, (regarding “the pile of hooey about the Resurrection): any biology (actually, any) teacher who denigrates (or praises)Jesus – or Buddha, Mary Baker Eddy, Joseph Smith, Sun Mynug Moon….- needs to be chastised for irrelevancy. And any department head or assistant principal for curriculum who vetted a lesson plan containing not a description but an evaluation of a religious figure needs to meet with the school board lawyer.
generally_academic - May 4, 2010 at 5:22 pm
It is completely wrong for religion to meddle in science or politics. Religion concerns my/our relationship to The Sacred/God, and the way we align our lives to God. Nothing about science, nothing about politics.To mix (my) religion with science or politics is Blasphemy, and those who do it will be among the damned.
new_theologian - May 5, 2010 at 12:49 am
Generally_academic is a fideist; I’m not.The point is to say that, if religion pertains to the relationship between the human person and the divine, then religious perspectives necessarily become relevant to the political arena, because they come to bear upon what we understand the human person to be, and what we think a good world looks like.This is really pretty basic stuff. People rightly attempt to conform their political action to their sense of what is right or wrong, according to their understanding of what a good human life entails. The assertion that religion has nothing to do with politics, and that it is “wrong” for religion to “meddle” in politics, is simply schizophrenic (not in the technical sense, of course). No religious person could ever hold such a view without first dividing his or her own mind.Indeed, in all cultures, religion serves as the unifying cultural principle. Note that the word “culture” derives from the Latin “cultus”, meaning “religious observance.” This is why Socrates was put to death. He undermined his students’ confidence in the polytheistic cults that formed the social foundation of Greek society at the time. It is why Rome did not tolerate “new religions” for fear that they would undermine the social fabric by disturbing established norms.In his “Republic,” Plato begins by showing Socrates, who does not believe in the nature gods, returning from a cultic festival, because Plato is deliberately attempting to illustrate the connection between politics and religion. But precisely because there IS a connection between the two, it is important to get religion right. This is the point on which all in the classical world agreed.So Plato goes on to explain in Book VII of the “Republic,” that the only way to move beyond the isolated self, and to enter the political realm, is to seek and find the Good, which he clearly depicts as God–not just “his” God, but “the God”, or “ho theos”. For Plato, as for Judaism and Christianity, God makes genuine dialogue (read Martin Buber), and thus, genuine community, possible. Politics is relevant to religion, and religion is relevant to politics.But that’s not the point of the discussion, except to say that religiously-minded people understand very clearly that when one seeks to relegate religion to closet one is tacitly asserting that is deals in mere fantasy, and not in truth.
arrive2__net - May 5, 2010 at 4:22 am
I perceive creationism as an attempt to grab some of the power and influence of science … by people who are actually mostly outsiders to science, and who are otherwise excluded from access to its powers. Therefore, I see creationism not so much as a theory, rather as a movement. As a theory, creationism has had zero heuristic value, there were no research labs in the ancient world populated with researchers whose work was stimulated and guided by the brilliant idea (thousands of years old) that the world and its natural laws where created by an invisible, intelligent, inscrutable, and all powerful being. After thousands of years head start, Intelligent Design should be way ahead of evolution and genetics in the number of scientific research labs dedicated to it, but its not ahead. Historically, intelligent design thinkers do not seem to have had much interest in science or empirical research … until science got some power and influence, but now they are all about science. I am unaware of one true significant scientific break though of Intelligent Design. Have “intelligent design” researchers developed a vaccine, drug treatment, or developed a predictive theory of genetics or physical maturation based on creationism or intelligent design? It seems to me their focus is just on getting access to that power and influence … power of dictating curriculum, science money, etc. Science is not necessarily in conflict with religion, as such. A religion that is moot on exactly when the origin of the world occurred, or had a non-conflicting notion of human origin (Buddhism I believe holds all that is irrelevant) would not have these conflicts with science. So therefore it seems to me that religion and science are not inherently in conflict, but only actually have conflict under a relatively specific set of conditions. You know, a lot of people believe that the story of the flood did not originate in the Bible, but actually predated the Biblical texts in older religions involving different deities (often cited is the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh). There’s the appearance that the flood story was endemic in the region (possibly driven by land- locked ocean fossils), and that the story insinuated itself into Israel’s oral tradition, and from there the flood story made it into the Bible. Outside influence? Well, the substance of the Ten Commandments were all included among the 27 questions Anubis asked of the deceased in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which perhaps could have influenced Moses during his childhood in Pharonic Egypt. It is a funny thing to try to hold up or intimidate or control scientific thought and research based on a Bible story that was apparently adapted from an even older set of deities. (How else could you explain sea shells on a mountain?) But if it really was the intent of God to limit scientific thought this way, then maybe we should all be getting our biology degrees from a school of theology. So it seems to me.
11159995 - May 5, 2010 at 4:52 pm
Pierre Duhem (1861-1916) was a French physicist as well as a philosopher of science. You can read an authoritative account of him here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/duhem/. — Sandy Thatcher
futureprof7337 - May 7, 2010 at 7:01 am
I applaud Ruse’s diplomatic approach. This is important when reactionaries with deeply held beliefs: read Faith, not Agnosticism, or the possibility of doubt, for perfect Faith is little more than superstition. I think Bill Maher’s movie Religulous made a great message about the importance of Doubt in the context of Faith. Because no one really knows if there is a god or mystical force? How does anyone know? How could they? I know there are social forces, but that is just sociology. And I know there are quantum forces and they are neither here nor there, literally. Both Religion and Science are slippery when it comes to proving some things. We look for “God” in outer space and in the genetic code and find complexity, beauty and more questions. This is Science. We hypothesize. We make experiments. We research. Understandably, these “new” ideas shake up the foundations that run an ordered theocratic society, and absurd, chaotic, seeming anarchy might ensue, but that is just the fear, that it is all absurd, beautiful, unbelievable, but scientifically true. But there is a way to be godless without being lawless. The only Faith should be in Science, but we should keep it in check and be morally reasonable. Eugenics, stem cells, cloning, military technology, well you get the picture.In the case of evidence proving or disproving, or as with Darwinian Evolution having a huge stack of verifiable, quantifiable, qualitatively compelling evidence in its favor, it’s hard to argue against it. That we evolved, survival of the fittest, our genes mutated, slowly over time, from the primordial ooze, from yes, one celled organisms. Sure we would like to think otherwise. We like to make up stories that anthropomorphize the Creator. But what if our Creator was Chance and the Elements? just a slowly cooling explosion spinning out into unlikely space, and a mix of elements like hydrogen, carbon and oxygen to catalyze over millions of years.Who can explain Sentience and Language? Having said that, in the face of so much overwhelming evidence of Darwinian evolution that people still stubbornly and blindly cling to an antiquated demagogic propagandic toxic ritual that still somehow does some good in the world (i.e. faith based missions, shelters, soup kitchens, counsel). Will Science feed, lecture and house the poor and unfortunate? Let’s hope so! Can’t I have a warm bed, a hot meal and a shower anyway? It is the 21st Century! Now, can we be practical and focus on the Science of making the world a better place to live for everyone?
generally_academic - May 7, 2010 at 10:03 am
I remember reading about a Buddist response to the God question: Why do you waste your time thinking about this God business when it does nothing to advance your own enlightenment? Work on your own enlightment!Science is interesting and controversial and fun to do. Politics is interesting and controversial and fun to do. But neither brings me closer to Salvation. And so, I’m a good citizen and participate in politics, and I’m a good intellectual and stay up with the important advances in science. But neither leads me closer to Salvation. For that, I have to work on myself and make myself, imperfect though I am, better.And, I am not a supporter of Fidel Castro. He acts very badly and causes great harm. I don’t need to refer to my religion to figure that out.