Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Little Engine That Could
I’ve commented on Intelligent Design (ID) exactly to the extent that my expertise in the matter merits, which is admittedly not much. A great hue & cry among the evolutionist community explosively insists I’ve commented well beyond that expertise, although I think all I’ve done is raise some questions and make some observations about my failures to get answers to them. I’m taking it as a simple article of faith that I do have the learned background to do that much. I’m not inclined to go much further, but the controversy about ID refuses to go away.
Quite to the contrary, it’s getting louder and louder. Having failed thus far to instigate formal impeachment hearings on President Bush, the media and The Left have decided to hold informal hearings. The Articles are twofold: He has told lies to start an illegal and unjust war resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of human beings, and he wants to allow ID to be taught in our public schools. That’s kind of funny isn’t it? It’s like saying “he has lined up a hundred and fifty Girl Scouts and sexually molested them one by one, after which he gutted them, made them watch as their own entrails were boiled in a huge kettle, ate the entrails, burned the bodies…and then he returned a couple books to the library a whole week late.” If you take Article I as a serious indictment, worthy of even casual deliberation for a possible conviction, how in the world could Article II be relevant by comparison?
Yet both Articles are being debated loudly, and everywhere. I’ll leave this whole thing about illegal and unjust wars for elsewhere. But to rehash ID some more:
Dan Peterson, writing in the June edition of the American Spectator, offers a thirty-thousand-foot look at the arguments for and against ID in “The Little Engine That Could…Undo Darwinism.” He makes a persuasive case, undisputed as far as I know, that the marginalization of ID is based not so much on the scientific process of forming theories based on verifiable facts, but rather something quite opposite. The facts are being excluded in order to preserve established theories.
Severe difficulties with the Darwinian theory were becoming increasingly obvious by the 1980s, and some scientists began to state openly that design should be considered as an alternative theory. Then in 1991 Phillip Johnson…published a powerful critique of Darwinism entitled Darwin on Trial. In that volume Johnson marshaled the extensive scientific evidence against Darwinism. More importantly, he showed that Darwinism has essentially become a faith in naturalism that is immune to refutation by any set of facts. Arguments or conclusions that are not Darwinian are automatically ruled out of bounds by the scientific establishment. Within the Darwinian fold, wild conjectures, surmises unsupported by facts, and arguments lacking in explanatory power are accepted as legitimate, so long as they permit a “naturalistic” explanation.
I really don’t care that much whether or not Bush gets his way on the ID issue, but I’m terribly concerned about how the nature of “science” is changing so that our academics can gather munitions to resist him. Like I said before: Because science is not in the opinion business, a “theory” exists as a tool internal to science, not as a product in & of itself. It appears that our scientists have manifestly failed us here. They’ve squandered their resources toward coming up with explanations to uphold Darwinism, as each piece of evidence has trickled in over time to eather inflict assault on Darwinism, or simply pose a challenge to it. Would Darwinism still survive today if it were treated like any other theory, rather than being enshrined as a sacred cow? That is something I don’t know.
All I do know, is the things I had asked about a week ago remain unanswered as far as I’m concerned. And I’m also concerned about something else: In response to my queries, several scholars have suggested to me, with varying degrees of politeness, that I need to get an education on the impressive, awe-inspiring mountain of evidence supporting a different theory referred to as macro-evolution.
In other words, given a debate on how seriously the ID theory should be taken, there is a scattering of non-collaborating pundits who prefer to shift the debate to the soundness of macro-evolution. Maybe I do need to get that education — I don’t understand the connection. I don’t understand the mutual-exclusivity. I don’t think anybody does.
To debate whether design is involved in the origin of what we call “life,” and shift the argument to how the various species are interrelated, is like debating whether a pizza was home-baked or delivered and shifting the argument to whether that topping is properly called “ham” or “Canadian Bacon.”
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Phillip Johnson is a law professor at UC Berkeley and an evangelical Christian who has stated publicly that his conversion to Christianity was what motivated him to make a crusade out of trying to discredit the science of evolution. His arguments in this book are clever, and appealing to those who have no background in the natural sciences, but they are unsound and invalid, and anyone with sufficient training can see the gaping holes in them.
Johnson is far more clever than most creationists, so he has the sense to disavow some of the wackier claims of the Duane Gish-Henry Morris crowd, like dinosaurs coexisting with humans or a universe that is only 6000 years old. He also comes up with a clever way to get around his complete lack of scientific training. He argues that since evolution cuts across many scientific disciplines, scientists, who tend to specialize in one discipline, are not the best equipped people to analyze evolution–a layman like himself can do better. Sound plausible? Imagine if we applied the same logic to law. I could argue that since constitutional law covers cases in a variety of areas of law, while lawyers tend to specialize in one area, the best qualified person to teach constitutional law is someone with no knowledge of the law. Such an argument is no weaker than the claim that a law professor with no training in science is the best person to critique evolution.
Johnson’s other arguments follow the same pattern–superficially plausible, but invalid once you take them apart. His central argument is that belief in evolution is not scientific–it is just as religious as creationism. He claims that since scientists rule out supernatural causes when they study natural phenomena, the scientists are in fact adhering to a religious belief in “naturalism.” In fact, scientists confine themselves to natural explanations, not because they are arbitrarily ruling out the supernatural for “religious” reasons, but because supernatural explanations are inherently untestable and unfalsifiable, and scientists must confine themselves to claims and explanations that can be proven false.
Imagine, once again, that we turned Johnson’s reasoning around and applied it to law–suppose we allowed supernatural claims into courts of law. “Judge Ito, members of the jury, it is true that my client O.J.’s blood was found at the scene of the murder, but he was not responsible for the crimes, because he was posessed by a demon on that evening and had no control over his body. Since the devil did it, you must acquit.” Johnson and his fellow conservatives (creationist beliefs are almost entirely confined to the right wing) would be outraged.
While Johnson has disavowed any belief in the extreme views of the young earth crowd, it is astonishing how many of his arguments are right out of Gish and Morris. He claims that the fossil record does not support evolution (False. See any paleontology text or the talk.orgins FAQ). He claims that evolution is not falsifiable (False. For example, it would be falsified by findings of modern mammal fossils in PreCambrian rock formations).
Finally, Johnson displays a disturbing intellectual dishonesty when presenting the arguments of the scientists he criticizes. For example, he characterizes Richard Dawkins’ “the Blind Watchmaker,” one of the best books on evolution for laymen, as “a sustained argument for atheism” which is only incidentally about science. Johnson supports his claim with one out of context quote. Anyone who has read Dawkins’ book knows how badly Johnson distorts it, but Johnson’s book is aimed at an audience that has not read Dawkins or other scientists, so few of his readers will realize how dishonest he is.
I have rated the book at one star, meaning that I think there is no reason for a general audience to read the book. The only reason to read it would be to arm yourself against creationism by learning what its arguments are. Otherwise it is worthless.
- Aristosthenes | 08/21/2005 @ 16:20above is from Mark Wiley, 1998. FYI
- Aristosthenes | 08/21/2005 @ 16:24[quote]In other words, given a debate on how seriously the ID theory should be taken, there is a scattering of non-collaborating pundits who prefer to shift the debate to the soundness of macro-evolution. Maybe I do need to get that education — I don’t understand the connection. I don’t understand the mutual-exclusivity. I don’t think anybody does.[/quote]
but you (or ID as a whole) are the one shifting the question of why does the universe exist the way it does to the question of the validity of evolution by bringing up the topic in the first place. If you want to talk about the mere concept of ID, you don’t need to bring up evolution at all. You can discuss the possibility or basic concept of ID in the context of some sort of existentialist framework, but an attack on the validity of evolutionary theory invalidates ID as a serious subject matter of discussion. You are mixing philosophical arguments with scientific ones.
- Aristosthenes | 08/22/2005 @ 12:19“but you (or ID as a whole) are the one shifting the question of why does the universe exist the way it does to the question of the validity of evolution by bringing up the topic in the first place.”
–Not sure which post it is that you’re reading. Obviously, it’s not the one above.
- mkfreeberg | 08/23/2005 @ 18:21