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Fripp
SFN Regular
USA
727 Posts |
 Posted - 10/18/2005 : 05:17:25
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I live in the Philadelphia area, so this has been constant news in the local paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer. This morning, a very fair and balanced look at ID and its shortcomings was published. Here's the link for the story, and I have also provided the entire text because there is a free registration process that you may or may not want to do. I also posted this in the "Bend Dover, Insert Wedge" thread.
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/12928255.htm
(Emphases are mine)
Can faith, science coexist?
Evolution and Christianity are not incompatible, many believe.
By Faye Flam, Inquirer Staff Writer
For centuries, religious believers have sought signs of God's designing hand in nature's mysteries - whether the orderly motions of the sun, moon and planets, the intricate beauty of an insect's wing, or the complexity of the human eye.
Others say it's the nature of faith not to require evidence.
The term intelligent design entered popular discourse recently, but the philosophy behind it goes back to antiquity. Some philosophers, theologians and religious scientists say the age-old battle unnecessarily pits religion against science, and religion tends to lose.
University of Pennsylvania anatomy professor Peter Dodson said his Catholic faith does not require an intelligent designer to leave clues in nature. "I'm an evolutionary biologist and I'm a Christian, and these issues are not problematic for me."
Dodson, who has lectured on the relationship between religion and science, said the intelligent-design argument falls into an old philosophical notion called "God of the gaps" - the search for signs of the supernatural in otherwise unexplainable natural phenomena.
Isaac Newton proposed something like this, said Wesley Wildman, a professor of theology at Boston University. Where he failed to explain the more complex interactions between heavenly bodies with his own laws, Newton proposed the hand of God intervening directly to keep the solar system orderly.
Today's proponents of intelligent design have argued that science can't explain the complexity of some single-celled organisms or the machinery of the human eye. They suggest a designer's intervention.
Filling the gaps
The trouble with this as theology is that when science fills these gaps in, Dodson said, it can squeeze the role of God out. Just as physics later found natural explanations for what Newton attributed to God's outreach, so biology may more fully explain complex cellular machinery in the future.
Dodson said his faith is unaffected by science because his God wouldn't necessarily leave traces - not in the fossil record or in DNA or anywhere in nature. For him and other scientific believers, absence of evidence is not evidence of God's absence.
In the past, intelligent design had less science to compete with, said Boston's Wildman, who identifies himself as an evangelical Protestant. In the fourth century B.C., Aristotle anticipated evolution and even proposed something like natural selection, but then rejected it because he thought nature was too complex to have emerged without an intelligent designer. In the 13th century, Wildman said, St. Thomas Aquinas argued persuasively that the natural world was intelligently designed by God.
The idea behind intelligent design pervades branches of all three major monotheistic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam, he said. All three have also sprouted branches in which faith does not rest on evidence for the divine in nature.
Theology and science
Some of today's proponents of intelligent design say it's not just theology - it's science. Todd Moody, a philosophy professor of St. Joseph's University, takes this view, arguing that the design theory debated in a Dover, Pa., courtroom is not necessarily a religious idea because it doesn't specify whether the designer is a supernatural power or not. "There's no way to know," he said. "It could be Klingons."
But the idea that aliens came to Earth and tweaked evolution doesn't qualify as science, said Michael Weisberg, a University of Pennsylvania philosophy professor. There's no evidence in its favor, nor is there any proposed way to get that evidence. "To move from speculation to scientific hypothesis, one has not just to assert something," he said, "but to show how it can be tested."
Though the current debate focuses on biology, plenty of other areas of science also gape with holes. Astronomy still can't explain the nature of the "dark matter" that seems to pervade the universe. Einstein's general relativity breaks down in describing the world at a subatomic scale.
Dodson says evolution is singled out not for anything it says about God but for what it seems to say about humanity. "I think the biggest problem for religious believers is the insistence that humans are an accident of an uncaring cosmos," he said.
Shuffling of genes through sex and mutation generates the variety from which natural selection can work. The chance encounter with an asteroid probably killed the dinosaurs, opening a new niche for the mammals that eventually spawned humanity. The late Stephen Jay Gould and other prominent scientists have said if we ran the clock back, evolution might produce a different mix of plants and animals and possibly a world with no human beings.
By adding a guiding hand, intelligent design allows its adherents to continue to believe humans were destined to be here - that we're here for a reason.
Boston's Wildman said his faith does not depend on the notion of humanity as central to the purpose of the universe. "It's a silly conceit and it makes human beings feel better to think that way - that the whole success of the universe turns on the success of the human project."
He said the tradition of ascribing so much importance to humanity goes back to the notion of a chosen people in the Old Testament. For Christians it comes from the belief that Jesus was God's son.
But such a God looks too small, too tribal and too humanlike, he said, to avoid getting pushed out of the ever narrowing gaps in science. That in turn can reinforce the notion that to be scientific you must be an atheist.
For him, a human-centered God is an approximation of the real thing, "and the real thing is beyond human comprehension."
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"What the hell is an Aluminum Falcon?"
"Oh, I'm sorry. I thought my Dark Lord of the Sith could protect a small thermal exhaust port that's only 2-meters wide! That thing wasn't even fully paid off yet! You have any idea what this is going to do to my credit?!?!"
"What? Oh, oh, 'just rebuild it'? Oh, real [bleep]ing original. And who's gonna give me a loan, jackhole? You? You got an ATM on that torso LiteBrite?" |
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Dr. Mabuse
Septic Fiend
Sweden
9688 Posts |
Posted - 10/18/2005 : 07:14:05 [Permalink]
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| What can you tell about the author of this article? |
Dr. Mabuse - "When the going gets tough, the tough get Duct-tape..."
Dr. Mabuse whisper.mp3
"Equivocation is not just a job, for a creationist it's a way of life..." Dr. Mabuse
Support American Troops in Iraq:
Send them unarmed civilians for target practice..
Collateralmurder. |
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pleco
SFN Addict
USA
2998 Posts |
Posted - 10/18/2005 : 07:28:27 [Permalink]
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quote:
By adding a guiding hand, intelligent design allows its adherents to continue to believe humans were destined to be here - that we're here for a reason.
And I think that is the crux of it - ID has nothing to do with science and plenty to do with calming the egos of people who can't imagine a world/universe that doesn't have a big invisible buddy up there watching over them. |
by Filthy
The neo-con methane machine will soon be running at full fart. |
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Fripp
SFN Regular
USA
727 Posts |
Posted - 10/18/2005 : 07:35:51 [Permalink]
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Dr. mabuse,
I don't know much about her background, but most of the more intelligent science articles in the paper are from her. I have a file of articles that i have saved and she has written most of them.
About a year or so ago, she wrote an article about dark matter. In it, she made a reference that everything we know in the universe (us, stars, planets, galaxies, etc) is really just the foam in an ocean of dark matter. I wish i could find that exact quote, but I found it awesome in its implications. |
"What the hell is an Aluminum Falcon?"
"Oh, I'm sorry. I thought my Dark Lord of the Sith could protect a small thermal exhaust port that's only 2-meters wide! That thing wasn't even fully paid off yet! You have any idea what this is going to do to my credit?!?!"
"What? Oh, oh, 'just rebuild it'? Oh, real [bleep]ing original. And who's gonna give me a loan, jackhole? You? You got an ATM on that torso LiteBrite?" |
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Fripp
SFN Regular
USA
727 Posts |
Posted - 10/18/2005 : 07:39:10 [Permalink]
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Found it:
http://cdms.berkeley.edu/press/Phil_02_26_00.html
"Current thinking holds that the universe has at least six times as much dark matter as the ordinary kind. The stars and galaxies we observe are just a froth riding on a WIMP sea." |
"What the hell is an Aluminum Falcon?"
"Oh, I'm sorry. I thought my Dark Lord of the Sith could protect a small thermal exhaust port that's only 2-meters wide! That thing wasn't even fully paid off yet! You have any idea what this is going to do to my credit?!?!"
"What? Oh, oh, 'just rebuild it'? Oh, real [bleep]ing original. And who's gonna give me a loan, jackhole? You? You got an ATM on that torso LiteBrite?" |
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ronnywhite
SFN Regular
501 Posts |
Posted - 10/18/2005 : 23:34:34 [Permalink]
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RE complexity, such as the eye, in the Skeptic's Dictionary Carroll notes that there are far simpler and more straightforward ways to accomplish the same function (such as a digital lens) which wouldn't leave us predisposed to the numerous eye disorders and diseases intrinsic to the complexity of an eye- implying the eye's more likely the clumsy result of randomness over ages than an "intelligent designer." I find Carroll's view far more palatable, plausible, and likely than I do the author's assertions along those lines (seemingly, that ridiculously bumbling complexities were "artistically" intended, for some mysterious reason.) And statements like Einstein's Theories "break down" at the quantum level... so what? That says nothing! Only that more are deeper levels where his ideas become inapplicable... neither he, nor anyone else ever denied that. So Newton made a reference to "Maybe it's God" when asked to explain relativistic phenomenon- it was just another way of saying "I don't know"... a couple hundred years later, we did! Everything she cites as somehow being part of a Creationist rationalization can be interpreted oppositely. I think her spiritual views are reflections off a mindset of "I really want to believe things are like this."
A few years back, a popular electronics author with a column in Scientific American was "canned" by the magazine, allegedly (probably) for his well-publicized Creationist viewpoint and arguments. Much bickering followed. As far as I was concerned, so long as he kept that stuff (spirituality) out of his circuits, I didn't mind. He could have believed in werewolves for all I cared.
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Ron White |
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Espritch
Skeptic Friend
USA
284 Posts |
Posted - 10/30/2005 : 12:55:10 [Permalink]
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quote:
Todd Moody, a philosophy professor of St. Joseph's University, takes this view, arguing that the design theory debated in a Dover, Pa., courtroom is not necessarily a religious idea because it doesn't specify whether the designer is a supernatural power or not. "There's no way to know," he said. "It could be Klingons."
Don't you just hate it when philosophers tell bald faced lies? The man damn well knowes the purposed designer isn't Kligons. Renaming God as the "unknown intelligent designer" doesn't make the arguement one bit less theological or one bit more scientific. It just makes it more dishonest. |
| Edited by - Espritch on 10/30/2005 13:01:42 |
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ronnywhite
SFN Regular
501 Posts |
Posted - 10/30/2005 : 18:29:21 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by Espritch
[quote]Todd Moody, a philosophy professor...
Sounds as though he's not exactly an "unbiased" philosopher, at least on ToE. "Could have been Klingons or Romulans... so long as we agree they Created the Universe and threw the Bible in later on." I think his efforts might have been better applied towards bioethics or something, maybe to figure out how we can better serve our growing population while we're still here. |
Ron White |
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