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Ice, The Ultimate Disaster,'' predicted the planetary alignment would trigger a chain of events that will cause the Earth's crust to slide and poles to shift. ``It would be a geological Armageddon'
-- Richard Noone
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ID and Naturalism: Missing the Point
Posted on Tuesday, October 03 @ 08:59:09 PDT by Mick |
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By John Clayton
It has been said that you can always know what pig got stuck, because he squeals the loudest. It seems that the media has gotten stuck pretty badly, because there seems to be an exceptionally large amount of squealing about intelligent design (ID) in the media. In Time for August 8, 2005, for example, Charles Krauthammer has an editorial titled "Let's Get Rid of Scopes Trials Once and for All." It is typical of the attacks on ID being made in the media and by atheists today--totally missing the point of what the controversy is and what the history of the evolution/creation controversy is about.
From a legal standpoint, what the Scopes trial was about was whether Scopes had broken the law, and not whether the Bible was true or whether creationism as defined by the parties involved was logical. The jury decided he had. What the media saw and what has been popularized since the trial are the inconsistencies of some creationists and their beliefs about the history of life on Earth. When Darrow put Bryan in the defendant seat, the questions asked revolved around Bryan's beliefs and what many religious people of the day thought was true. The questions had nothing to do with what had been taught in the classroom and what Scopes was guilty of. They had to do with one person's belief system--in this case the lawyers'.
Most Christians today would believe that the law was not a wise law. A court case today would be more likely to center on the validity of the law rather than on what someone did in their individual classroom. For Krauthammer to make a reference to the Scopes trial as relevant to the ID question is to totally miss the point. What is involved in ID is a belief system that is different from the belief system of naturalism. Your belief system may affect how you interpret facts and how you apply them to problems in life. It may also affect where you go to look for facts--what kinds of experiments you do and where you look for data. Your belief system should not affect the outcome of your experiments or the facts that you uncover about things of history.
Naturalism takes the position that mindless chance is the way everything in life should be approached. The champion of this belief system is Richard Dawkins. Dawkins states his naturalistic belief system clearly in his book Out of Eden (page 133) when he says:
In the universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, and other people are going to get lucky; and you won't find any rhyme or reason to it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good. Nothing but blind pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is, and we dance to its music.
Julian Huxley made a similar statement many years ago when he said:
We are as much a product of blind forces as is the falling of a stone to Earth or the ebb and flow of the tides. We have just happened, and man was made flesh by a long series of singularly beneficial accidents.
Later Huxley explained the basis of his naturalistic philosophy when he said: "I had a reason for wanting the world to not have a meaning, and consequently assumed it had none. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world, is concerned to prove that there is no reason why he should not do as he wants to. For me the philosophy of meaningless was essentially an instrument of liberation--sexual and political."
In both the statements of Huxley and Dawkins the role of chance is emphasized. The argument is that everything is driven totally by chance without purpose or design. Those critical of ID attempt to portray naturalism as the only way science can operate. The fact of the matter however, is that the giants of science in the past have universally been men and women who saw purpose and intelligence in the cosmos. Scientists like Newton, Pascal, Maxwell, and Boyle all came from backgrounds where their view was that God had created the world with order, purpose, and design and they investigated things to find that order, purpose, and design. If you really believe that the creation is mindless and totally driven by rote chance, why would you try to understand it? Even to this day we hear all kinds of scientists talk about the design of something they are studying. You hear statements like "nature planned it to..." and "this is engineered to...." These are not statements of blind mechanistic chance, but a recognition of intelligence and purpose in the things that are being studied.
The ID movement is a belief system that says that blind mechanistic chance is not the primary causal agent in the cosmos. Whether you look at Behe's work with microscopic machines in living organisms, or Dembinski's elaborate discussions of chemical systems, the fact is that chance is not embraced as the only answer to cause in the natural world. This does not mean that everything is robotically driven. I can design a garden and plant the seeds in a certain way to give a desired result. The garden is intelligently designed, but without rain, cultivation, and nutrient provision, the final desired result will not happen. Whether it rains or not is not even a product of chance, in spite of what many of us think. Certain things are needed for rain--water, cool temperatures, and condensation nuclei. We can contribute to these variables intelligently without robotically controlling them.
ID does not preclude research. It does not do away with much of the randomness seen in nature. It simply recognizes that things happen in the natural world for a reason, and that the way things happen are contained within limits that are intelligently set. Darwin recognized this. In Darwin's writings, we see, "I look at everything as resulting from designed laws with the...." Dr. Frank Schaeffer gave a theistic twist of this idea when he said "...so that's how God did it." In my 41 years of teaching high school science, if a student or parent complained about the things we were learning in my earth science or physics class, I would always say, "All we are doing in this class, is learning about how God did what He did. We do not talk about the why-He-did-it issues; that is for you as a parent to do in the religious training of your child." The atheist can say, "Well, I think it just happens" and that is a faith statement that they are free to make and believe. The amount of wisdom and intelligence seen in every aspect of the creation stands in opposition to this view, but there are many things people believe (in and out of religion) that are pretty incredible, and people believe them nonetheless.
Atheists are trying to use the ID movement as a means of creating the view that science and faith are natural enemies. This is an aggressive attempt to claim science as atheist territory. It is important to counter that attempt by pointing out the positive effect of recognizing intelligence in the creation. It has been interesting to watch atheists try to counter Michael Behe's mousetrap analogy for irreducible complexity. Behe compares a mousetrap to various biological machines seen in nature. He shows that to produce a common mousetrap, all of the parts have to come together at the same time and place in a functional way and be integrated together. He then suggests that to get a certain very complex biological organism with its propulsion system and sensing system, the same things must be true. Behe's detractors countered his arguments by devising a mousetrap that worked but which was missing one of the basic parts. The idea was that not all of the parts had to be there for a modern mousetrap to work, and that this could have developed in stages. Behe answered this by pointing out the enormous time, planning, and intelligence that had to be used in order to design an intermediate stage mousetrap that worked around the missing part--chance could not do that.
Investigating the biological organism from both Behe's standpoint and his detractors' standpoint was good science. Both researchers were looking at evidence and trying to construct workable theories connected with that evidence. In both cases the researchers had a vested interest in what they were doing, but they were both doing scientific investigation, and the body of knowledge that was coming from their research was positive and would lead to better understandings. The vicious attempts to smear the ID movement as some kind of insidious religious attempt to destroy science is a dishonest anti-religion campaign. Religious people who try to make the ID movement a methodology of doing science contribute to the misunderstandings and misapplications of apologetics. Science and faith are friends, not enemies. There is a need to stop preparing for war and to find ways of making peace. Both sides need to listen again to the old lines from Albert Einstein, "Religion without science is lame, but science without religion is blind." Einstein also said, "Unless science and religion work together, they are both useless.
http://www.doesgodexist.com/SepOct06/IDandNaturalism.html
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Re: ID and Naturalism: Missing the Point (Score: 1)
 by Islamaphobe on Wednesday, October 04 @ 08:47:28 PDT
(User Info | Send a Message) | This article touches on a rather sensitive nerve of mine. It's a fine article, though Clayton spells William Dembski's last name as "Dembinski." Oh well, we all make misteaks, and to "er" is human.
The Scopes trial to which Clayton accurately refers was a media circus and a prototype for modern media "news" coverage. The State of Tennessee enacted a stupid law that made it illegal to teach Darwinism in the public schools. and that allowed religious skeptics like Clarence Darrow and H. L. Mencken to seize the day to portray belivers in the literal truth of the Bible as dumb yokels. Marvin Olasky of World magazine and the U. of Texas has written a marvelous book on the Scopes trial, incidentally. In one of the curious ironies of today's world, the antagonists of the Scopes trial have undergone a complete role reversal. The defenders of Darwinism have become the dumb yokels and the advocates of ID have become the advocates of intellectual openness in the classroom.
In following the ID vs. Darwinism debate I have noted that proponents of the latter insist upon a definition of science that rules out a role for God by assumption and that they generally insist on "debating" the issues by ridiculilng their opponents rather than by offering serious responses to criticisms of the theory that they claim has been proven. For example, how much evidence do we have today that supports the idea that new species are being created, and where do we find clear evidence of intermediate stages in the development of the eye, wings, and other parts of animals' bodies that are the equivalent of Behe's mousetrap among fossils and living fauna? Let us see the evidence that "proves" Darwinism. I have a belief that many Darwinists who are actually scientists know full well that the theory has problems, but I think they believe that they have to exhibit a unified front against these religious fanatics who might sneak creation into the classroom.
I admit that I have no training in biology, but I know an intellectual dodge when I see one. I am sorry to say that many in our intellectual establishment are as closeminded as the country folk of rural Tennessee of the 1920s whom they dismiss so quickly. I like Charles Krauthammer, but when I hear him dogmatically proclaim that intelligent design is not science, I want to throw up.
John S. Evans |
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Re: ID and Naturalism: Missing the Point (Score: 1)
by Starlight on Wednesday, October 04 @ 15:18:08 PDT
(User Info | Send a Message) | I have problems with both sides of the argument but some times tension is beneficial to keeping a moderating balance. I sure don’t want some creationist cramming their beliefs down my children’s throats at school and neither do I want Dembski’s malarkey infused into their brains either. When it comes to public education we do have to deal with a public that is not going to tolerate our impositions no matter how theologically correct. At least some may consider home schooling and Christian educational systems as possible alternatives. I would have given my eye teeth to have had my children taught under the tutelage of John Clayton, but since that didn’t occur I pulled my kids science book aside and we discussed those chapters with them. It was a very good learning experience for them as we delved into respectable discussions of the pro’s and cons. I must admit I found out that my children wanted to become independent thinkers, and I was challenged to give good answers and not just sweeping judgments.
The quote from Rom 1 is so very fitting when it comes to the arrogance from some like Dembski.
20 For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools.
As far as Krauthammer is concerned I do respect him and enjoy the majority of his writings and I do understand some inclination toward skepticism of ID but it shows a lack of respect for something that he just hasn’t fully grasped. It’s probably a good reminder to all of us to be careful of our own arrogance in many positions that we may have to change someday when we are educated properly :-)
Blessings
Norm
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