Show Me the Science
Show Me the Science - New York Times: "The fundamental scientific idea of evolution by natural selection is not just mind-boggling; natural selection, by executing God's traditional task of designing and creating all creatures great and small, also seems to deny one of the best reasons we have for believing in God. So there is plenty of motivation for resisting the assurances of the biologists. Nobody is immune to wishful thinking. It takes scientific discipline to protect ourselves from our own credulity, but we've also found ingenious ways to fool ourselves and others. Some of the methods used to exploit these urges are easy to analyze; others take a little more unpacking.
A creationist pamphlet sent to me some years ago had an amusing page in it, purporting to be part of a simple questionnaire:
Test Two
Do you know of any building that didn't have a builder? [YES] [NO]
Do you know of any painting that didn't have a painter? [YES] [NO]
Do you know of any car that didn't have a maker? [YES] [NO]
If you answered YES for any of the above, give details:
Take that, you Darwinians! The presumed embarrassment of the test-taker when faced with this task perfectly expresses the incredulity many people feel when they confront Darwin's great idea. It seems obvious, doesn't it, that there couldn't be any designs without designers, any such creations without a creator.
Well, yes - until you lok at what contemporary biology has demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt: that natural selection - the process in which reproducing entities must compete for finite resources and thereby engage in a a tournament of blind trial and error from which improvements automatically emerge - has the power to generate breathtakingly ingenious designs."
A creationist pamphlet sent to me some years ago had an amusing page in it, purporting to be part of a simple questionnaire:
Test Two
Do you know of any building that didn't have a builder? [YES] [NO]
Do you know of any painting that didn't have a painter? [YES] [NO]
Do you know of any car that didn't have a maker? [YES] [NO]
If you answered YES for any of the above, give details:
Take that, you Darwinians! The presumed embarrassment of the test-taker when faced with this task perfectly expresses the incredulity many people feel when they confront Darwin's great idea. It seems obvious, doesn't it, that there couldn't be any designs without designers, any such creations without a creator.
Well, yes - until you lok at what contemporary biology has demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt: that natural selection - the process in which reproducing entities must compete for finite resources and thereby engage in a a tournament of blind trial and error from which improvements automatically emerge - has the power to generate breathtakingly ingenious designs."
posted by Tyler at 11:08 AM
2 Comments:
This article makes the incendiary error of linking a system with a faith, which is jumbling the fruitbasket. That there may be an unknown power or entity behind the development of natural selection is something that science can only speculate about in the paucity of non a-posteriori argument. Likewise, Creationists are in an unsuitable environment of trying to prove something that is a matter of faith. After all, while I have faith that an airplane will most likely land safely, I personally do not have the data to prove how this is the case. If I was an engineer and could prove this that would be different.
To make a short story long: Those who have no belief in the spiritual have only an absence of data upon which to base their conclusion, just as the spiritual people who deride current scientific beliefs do so on faith. I feel that the only way to reconcile these differences is to devise and accept ways in which they can concurrently be valid theories entirely irrelevant to each other. Pope John Paul II tried to do this with the declaration that humanoids could have been around for many more millennia, but that these weren't Men until God infused them with a soul, which he reckoned to be considerably more recent.
Articles such as this tend to either deride the faithful on what they feel are 'scientific' grounds, or the faithful deride the materialists on what they feel are 'scientific' grounds. Incendiary comments (which I admit to use often) are unconstructive in this setting.
Oops. I have a cold and got carried away. Shalom from a person to whom personal faith is irrelevant.
My cold gone, I made a more careful reading of the source article, which I still thought had a tragic flaw. When Dennett writes: '...by [natural selection] executing God's traditional task of designing and creating all creatures great and small, also seems to deny one of the best reasons we have for believing in God' it should read 'God of the Creationists', though even then my previous point stands as it still is mixing science and theology in the same way that the Creationists try to. In many ways Dennett is executing the first part of the same strategy he says is being employed by the ID people, he misuses or misdescribes religious philosophy. Take that paragraph out and I think it was an outstanding article.
-jp (who lost his p/w)
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