Alas, conversations with my brother read like a goddamn Chick Tract now. Here’s one of my responses that I thought was choice, from after he pushed me a little too far with his failed indoctrination effort:
people like to talk about ID and evolution like they’re equal concepts….that’s like asking someone to take a pepsi challenge with a pepsi and a bucket of feces
He was being rude and he deserved that.
I’d like to sound like all this makes me happy, but it doesn’t. The people pushing this agenda are fucking disciplined and have infiltrated the culture deeply if they’ve got a generally apolitical person like my brother staying as on-point as he was. He has never been confident arguing with me, but today he was combative and pushy and never gave an inch. And he said exactly what everyone else in that movement says when they’re trying to win converts.
So…
I want to know why the secular humanist think tanks/science community/etc. don’t have an equally effective script for people to read from. The Pepsi remark is funny, but isn’t going to win any converts. How does one go about speaking to a religious person about the importance of science? How to keep it more civil than this exchange was?
Honestly? I don’t know if you can ever win with a lot of those people. Even if there was a perfect script to read from, it wouldn’t matter… as far as they’re concerned, they’ve got God on their side, and that’s all that matters. The rest of us are just hapless heathens who WILL be saved, eventually; we just don’t know it yet!
Sure, people like my brother aren’t going to be won over when they’re that far-gone. But what about the people they’re targeting who are still impressionable?
My father-in-law, who is a Methodist trustee, says about evolution thusly: “If God really cared about us, he would have taken his time wouldn’t he?” And that’s the most reasonable thing I’ve probably ever heard a religious person say about evolution. The problem is, of course, literalists — and my father-in-law is not a literalist. I’m not sure what to do with literalists.
That’s a pretty good answer Nikki.
A different form of the same response is, ‘millions of scientists are religious and have no problem with evolution’ so why do you?
Or more succintly
Evolution does not equal atheism
I’ve been fighting this one for over ten years. There is no script but trust me. We’ve got every base covered. It’s the reason they keep losing all the way from the local school board to the Supreme Court.
All their base are belong to us.
Long story short, the reason why there’s no Chick Tract for the Opposition is that the opposition largely consists of people who don’t want to deal with people who can be substantially influenced by the philosophical equivalent of half a stale off-brand Funyun.
You have to ask yourself what converted you to a mindset that didn’t involve an old man in the sky by whose whim you would either be condemned or salvated…salvationed…salivated…right. Yeah. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that it involved a lot of logical deduction, compare-and-contrast between dogma and real-world observations - in other words, effort. People who A) put that kind of effort into their thought processes, and B) exist as a member of a largely-persecuted minority typically don’t want to deal with…wait, I already said that. Anyway.
Regardless - Rusty, if you would care to attend a nationally-televised sporting event wearing a giant rainbow mustache and carrying a sign which reads ON THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS, I would be happy to accompany you.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHALOLZ!!!!!!1!!1!
That’s the funniest thing I’ve read all week.
Without science, there would be no mass-printing of Bibles.
In the few hundred years that science has been the operative mode of inquiry in the western world we have achieved near universal literacy, explored the far corners of the world, eradicated dozens of diseases, mastered flight, harnessed electricity, doubled the average life span and increased the common wealth a thousandfold.
During the preceding millennium when Christian dogma was the operational mode of discourse we had the Spanish inquisition, the crusades, feudalism, rampant political instability and we still had to bury our own feces.
How’s that for a Chick tract, minus the cartoons, of course?
the national center for science education has been fighting the good fight for quite some time. i don’t know if they are pithy enough fer ya, but i have heard their exec dir interviewed, and i thought he was quite charming and engaging without going over us average folks’ heads.
http://www.natcenscied.org/default.asp
As has been mentioned, the whole “evolution does not conflict with religion” argument makes the most sense to me. But I find it better phrased (if you have some sort of faith) as “my belief in evolution does not conflict with my belief in God.”
Make it personal, because it combats the (false) stereotype that most people who oppose ID are atheists or whatever. I have a very strong belief in a God, and some right wingers trying to tell me otherwise simply because I refuse to accept their crazy perversion of reality makes me mad.
The best way is definitely not insulting or degrading the beliefs espoused by those who you are talking to. This is supposed to be a dialogue, right? Well, ask questions, listen to the answers and above all, be considerate. You can’t expect someone to take you serious if you call them names. If you are going to be an ass about it, then no one is going to listen to you.
Name-calling is bad, obviously, Brad. But the thing is, these people are pushing a theory that has been categorically rejected by all credible scientific institutions as being based in religion, not in any sort of scientific process. It’s not a Pepsi-Coke choice. ID has no place at the table, and so I’m curious what sort of listening and considering I’m supposed to do when someone tells me the world is made of fairies and pixie dust. I call bullshit on that.
And, Brad, don’t you think the “other side” should have to abide by those same rules you outlined? It’s obvious that they are often not being respectful of those who have differing beliefs… and yet somehow it’s anyone who’s not a fundamentalist Christian who gets painted as the bad guy. Why is that, hmmm?
Just so the other side can get a word in here, ID and “literalism” are not the same thing. They’re just not. The so-called “literal” view of Genesis 1 and 2 is “six-day creationism”. There are a LOT of theoretical options to explain how the full range of life on this planet came to be besides (1) Evolution guided by natural selection, which is itself guided by no intelligence whatsoever, accounts for EVERYTHING, and (2) God made the world in six 24-hour periods of time. These are simply not the only two options.
“Intelligent Design” is nothing more than the claim that there is scientific evidence contradicting (1). But this does not constitute an endorsement of (2), any more than my denial that all dogs go to Heaven entails that I must believe they all go to Yemen.
The most well-known ID proponents–Michael Behe, Phillip Johnson, William Dembski, etc.–all explicitly deny “six-day creationism”. Behe, for instance, says he believes that evolution has happened on a pretty grand scale, but that it by itself cannot account for the full way that life has come to be. These guys might just be liars hiding their true beliefs from all the infidels, but I doubt it.
Lots of religious people believe in “theistic evolution,” which is the belief that God created life on this planet by using the natural process of evolution. This view fits within “intelligent design” parameters, so long as you think that there is scientific evidence that something in this universe exhibits signs of being designed by an intelligence.
Intelligent Design is not a competitor with evolution per se. It is a competitor with atheistic or materialistic conceptions of evolution that see “blind” (undirected, non-intelligent) evolution as the source of all things.
Thanks for your thoughts Xon. I didn’t say literalism and ID were the same, though I think Nikki might have alluded to that above.
What you wrote re-enforces my problem with most of the conversations I have with ID proponents (my brother mosty recently)… that if there is even the slightest imperfection in the science — i.e., if something is 98 percent right — that it needs to be replaced with something for which there’s 0 percent proof.
My brother asked me, “do you think it’s possible that god waved his hand and created the universe?” (paraphrasing)
Sure, it’s possible. Anything is possible. I could grow four more legs tomorrow morning and wouldn’t need to use elevators anymore. But that doesn’t make it true.
Rusty you don’t come across as very sincere in wanting to to talk about this. From the little bit that I’ve seen, everytime someone makes an objection to your ideas, you bring up fairies and feces. No wonder you aren’t having much success talking about this.
What’s there to talk about Brad? Some disagreements are so fundamental that no amount of talking is going to solve them, and all people can do is try to co-exist without shooting each other.
Yeah, it was definitely Nikki that made the association with “literalism”, Rusty. I should have made that clear initially.
If I may risk a further comment in response to you, though…
I agree that this would be a bad way to proceed in a scientific or almost any other kind of endeavor, and if ID people are doing this then I want no part of them. But I don’t understand ID folks to be doing things this way. Rather, they believe that there IS evidence (not “0 percent proof”) that some things have been designed by an intelligence of some sort. And if even just one thing is like this, then “naturalistic evolution” cannot be right, because naturalistic evolution claims that ALL things are the result of intelligence-less evolution.
So, the situation as I see it is not one theory that’s 98% right versus another that has 0% proof, but rather one theory that claims to explain 100% of something (in this case, biological origination) and another theory that claims that there is strong evidence that this 100% cannot be correct.
Now, I honestly don’t have a position regarding how good or bad the evidence that IDers put forward might be. I read Behe’s book (Darwin’s Black Box) back in 1997, and it sounded reasonable to me. But I’m a philosopher, man, and I don’t do the white coat thing. I left Georgia Tech while pulling my hair out. But it is clear, in any case, that IDers do put forward evidence which they claim is strong enough to make us believe that certain things in the universe have been designed by an intelligence of some sort. And this means that “blind” evolution can’t account for everything. That’s the argument, anyway.
“Sure, people like my brother aren’t going to be won over when they’re that far-gone. But what about the people they’re targeting who are still impressionable?”
One anecdote that has worked for me, although it is kind of cheating, is I relate helping a friend build and develop a race car. We started with a plan, built the car, then through trial and error on the track eliminated and replaced what didn’t work and reinforced what did. The car started with what we thought was an intelligent design, then evolved into a truly intelligent one. So in a twisted sense, evolution is a means of intelligent design, if you will.
Oh goody. We have truly entered ID-land. Xon, please don’t misunderstand what I am about to say. I have no problem with religion and no problem with your personal views. As I said earlier there are plenty of scientists of many faiths who have no problem reconciling science with their spiritual beliefs.
However, I do have a problem with those like Johnson and Behe who will prey on the lack of knowledge of the masses to confuse and ultimately reach their goal of getting everyone to agree their view is equal.
It is not.
I’ll try to be brief.
First of all, Rusty is correct. There is zero evidence for Intelligent Design. There are some good stories but in science that does not make evidence.
Behe wrote an interesting book but since its publication, hundreds of scientist have refuted his conclusions from the blod clotting to the flagella motor. Doesn’t it make you wonder why Behe chose to publish a pop-science book instead of publishing through the rigorous peer review process? It’s simply because it would not pass muster.
Dembski is also a scientist and I will grant that he has taken a more scientific approach to ID than others. He has tried to develop a concept called a design filter that would quantify design. So far he has failed. Having said this, if you truly believe he is viewing things through the objective lens of science, I refer you to his blog full of bluster Uncommon Descent. Once again, interesting that he chooses the public forum as opposed to scientific circles.
Now Philip Johnson is an interesting character. Did you know that he isn’t even a scientist? He’s a lawyer. Now I am not a scientist either so that may not matter. However, I do not go around trying to force pseudo-science on school boards. Philip Johnson does.
Which brings me to the term “naturalistic evolution”. It’s a term frequently used by ID supporters like Johnson but rarely by scientist. If a scientist uses the term it is in the context that science can make no claim on the unnatural. Science deals in evidence not belief. Naturalistic, Theistic and whateveristic evolution do not exist in the science classroom only evolution does. They do exist in the philosophy classroom and that’s just fine with most scientists. Johnson uses them disingenously to cloud scientific debate.
The bottom line is that Intelligent Design is a rehash of two older arguments called God of the gaps and the watchmakers argument. Scientists look at something we can’t comprehend and say we need to keep asking questions. Intelligent Design advocates look at something we can’t comprehendand say we cannot comprehend it therefore a higher being is responsible. Science is about asking questions, not just throwing up our hands and saying Goddidit.
And that is where Intelligent Design ultimately fails.
Finally, I hate numbers. If you want numbers go to a math class. Evolution is not 100% right or even 98$ right. Science is not about being certain. Science about collecting evidence, observing that evidence and then finding the best explanation for that evidence.
In 150 years, a mountain of evidence has affirmed Darwin’s theory over and over and over again. Every effort to falsify the core theory has failed.
So far Intelligent Design has failed to show any evidence of design or any evidence falsifying Evolution. Until they do, their “theory” is not only not at the same table as Evolution. It’s not even on the same floor.
Griftdrift, thanks for the interaction. My “defense” of IDers here is purely philosophical, not scientific. I have already said that I don’t take a position on whether or not the evidence IDers put forward is strong or persuasive or not. I also, for whatever it is worth, do not think ID should be taught in government schools, as things currently stand, though the fact that I call them “government schools” already tells you I’ve got a deeper work-around for that gnarly problem.
I am concerned about the dismissive way you speak of the evidence that IDers put forth, though, but this is not because I think that their evidence is good. For all I know, you may be right and all their evidence (including someone like Behe’s seemingly-plausible arguments) is crap. But, if I might give my own lecture for a moment about how science is supposed to work, there is something seriously wrong when a new theory is mocked for the fact that it has “no publications” or that it has not yet put forth any “new evidence.” A lack of evidence is not evidence of a lack, as they say, and while obvioulsy nobody can claim to pass scientific muster if they have no evidence it is odd to hear scientists become so indignant at the very possiblity of another theory being correct. Hardly any scientific advancement comes from simply holding to what we already think we know, and not expanding our explanations to other things. Rather, (though you might not like how closely I follow Popper here) the dominant theory has certain anomalies in it, and a few theorists become obsessed with explaining the anomalies and eventually come to a whole new theory that includes what was good about the old theory but also enables theorists to move on to even greater explanatory power. To try to shut any side of a theoretical debate down because none of their attempted evidence has worked so far strikes me as unscientific.
If you want to say that IDers have not yet given any evidence to support their theory, and so in the absence of any other comers comprehensive evolution (since you object ot calling it “naturalistic”) is still the king of the hill, then that’s fine. Who can argue? But let the IDers keep searching out whatever they can search out, and don’t be so obsessed with stomping them out of existence. This is not what good scientists do.
Besides, back onto my own home turf of philosophy, your description of the ID argument is remarkably uncharitable. Anyone who supports any dominant scientific paradigm can accuse their lesser-accepted rivals of God-of-the-gaps thinking. As I said a moment ago, “You can’t explain x, and my theory would” is not an unreasonable way to try to understand the world. If the dominant paradigm has certain “gaps” in it, things it cannot explain, then it is the stuff that intellectual advancement is made of to forge ahead into that gap and try to figure out how to explain those “gaps.” If a person simply says “God did it, the end” then you could accuse them of doing bad theory, but this is not what IDers say.
The “Watchmaker” argument is not a scientific argument anyway. It is philosophical. Certain things exhibit sign of having a “telos”, an end towards which they were designed to function. This is undeniable in the real world…an oreo cookie is not just a random array of molecules that happen to make the shape of the word “Oreo”, for instance, and anyone who tried to say that for all we know it might be would not be thought fit for intelligent discourse. But perhaps other things in the world (such as the climate of our planet, or something) also demonstrate these signs of purposive design. The question is whether this philosophical argument can be turned into a scientific one, and I think what the IDers are saying is that it could be along the following lines:
“Design is something we see in the world in human artifacts all the time. If we can somehow get a grip on exactly what kinds of features count as signs of this design, then we could perhaps conclude that other things in this world, things beyond the power of human beings to make, were also designed. Who or what the designer might be is anybody’s guess, scientifically-speaking.” IDers have even said, publically, that someone who thinks that an alien civilization designed certain features of our universe would be perfectly consistent with their theory.
But so far, you say, they have come up with no evidence that confirms this. Well, so be it, but maybe they will. In the meantime, though, it’s nothing to get in such a stink about.
Except that, of course, there are people trying to get ID into government schools. I understand your concern here, in that if a theory is not yet scientifically proven, then it seems illegitimate to want to put it in the science curriculum. These school boards must have some other motive…and they do. But I think the real solution here (aside from abolishing government schools!) is to recognize that the kind of science a high schooler “needs” to learn is really not relevant to either side of the evolution/ID debate. Heck, these days even many biologists admit that evolution isn’t really all that useful as far as understanding how things work today. It’s nice to have some understanding of how things go to be the way they are, but 15 year-olds don’t really need to be able to name the genetic tree behind a frog before they can cut one open and see what’s inside. Let science be about discovering the way the world works (and certain parts of evolutionary theory are still useful to this end, such as the old ‘factory moth’ examples), and leave the historical reconstructions of how it got that way for later in life. This strikes me as a reasonable approach to high school education, especially in a government school setting where lots of people from different backgrounds are being thrown together.
A few responses to Xon-
Regarding the Watchmaker theory, I’ve always dismissed it–as a philosophical idea and a scientific one–because of the problem of recursion, to which I’m sure you’ve been introduced.
If the criterion for purposive design is the complex existence and function of given systems/organisms, the implied designer must have been designed himself (or itself, if it’s a process). Then you go on and on. The only way to stop the infinite loop is to say, at the first step, that the creator simply exists, we must take it on faith, etc. Then, your “evolutionist” would just point out that it’s much simpler–and equally valid–to say that the universe “just exists”.
Do you have a source for this assertion? I’m not asking as a means of attacking the assertion, but my scientist friends have always said the opposite. And they’re generally pretty passionately objective and wouldn’t (I think) claim
otherwise just to suit their cause.
Garrett, to address your request for a source first, it is one of those things that I have simply heard a number of times in the last few years. The most recent biologist I heard of saying something like this was a blog post I read last week about Jerry Coyne. I don’t remember where I read the post, though, so I’ll have to go through my history on the office computer to find it.
Not everyone agrees with this, and I didn’t mean to imply that they did: I am sure the majority of biologists today remain insistent that evolution does indeed have strong explanatory power and practical value. But my point is just that there are a number of folks who don’t really see it that way, and that these folks are not by any means religious, or IDers in disguise, etc.
As to teleological arguments in general, Garrett, I would offer a few comments as a brief response to your “recursive” argument.
I’m not sure why this would necessarily be the case. The intelligence that designed the complex features of the physical universe might itself be simple–i.e., not composed of parts. This is, for example, one of the traditionally-assigned divine attributes according to western monotheism (Judaism/Christianity/Islam).
But perhaps these dogmas are incorrect. Since the “mind” of the designer was capable of designing this complex physical system that is our universe, then that implies that the mind of the designer itself must be complex. But if all complex things require a designer, then so does the mind of the world’s designer, and so forth and so on. Is this what you are getting at?
I’m still unpersuaded, though. For one thing, I think it misrepresents teleological arguments to say that they are simply attributing design to any complex system. Rather, there are particular features of some particular complex system, that seem to indicate design. It is, in theory, the kind of observation that can only be made on a system-by-system basis. Since we cannot, or at the very least have not yet managed to, observe the “system” of the posited designer, then we are unable to say whether the designer was itself designed.
But it may have been. As a philosophical argument, both as it was put in previous centuries by Aquinas or William Paley and as it is currently being put by ID advocates, the argument from design does not claim to tell us anything about the intelligence that made the world, other than that there is such an intelligence. If we want to try to know more about that intelligence, whether it is itself designed, whether it is God or space aliens, etc., that will require another argument. No argument can answer every question that might come up if the argument itself is successful. (And this illustrates, again, why it is so misguided to equate ID with “creationism”.)
But it’s not simpler to say this, if the universe displays features which are complex but also are apparently incapable of accounting for their own complexity. As I said above, there are different kinds of complexity, and design arguments are not usually about complexity per se, but about certain kinds of complexity that we see in the physical universe. These kinds of complexity seem to involve some sort of interworking parts that are themselves incapable of self-organization in the way necessary to interwork the way they do.
If a dog walked in my office right now and started juggling, I would be amazed and would assume that it was a very special dog indeed. Because “normal” dogs can’t do that! What’s more, I would assume that someone had “modified” this dog in a fairly extensive way, either by actually operating on its anatomy or through some (psychological?) process that I do not understand. Because, again, something about juggling does not seem consistent with typical dog anatomy. Dogs lack the appropriate machinery to juggle, so to speak, and even if they had it it appears they would lack the mental capacities to know how to use it. So, I would figure, either some mad scientist operated on this dog and gave it new anatomical parts capable of juggling, or he otherwise modified in a way that I cannot begin to fathom.
Now, someone else might come into my office and wonder about how the mad scientist knew what juggling is. Who taught the mad scientist to juggle? I don’t know. Beats me. His dad? Other scientists? Some other mad scientist that did the same operation on him? But humans being able to juggle is not the same kind of mystery that a dog juggling represents. And if this person then said to me, “A ha! You can’t explain the scientist knowing how to juggle. He ‘just juggles.’ Well, then, it’s just as simple and valid to say that there is no scientist and that this dog ‘just juggles.’” But this wouldn’t be a very convincing position at all. Because of the nature of the complexity of the situation–i.e., the nature of dogs and the nature of juggling and the way that dogs don’t seem able to juggle on their own–it is much simpler to suppose that someone other than the dog made it able to juggle. But this doesn’t tell us anything about that someone other. That’s a whole other question, that we may or may not be able to answer. But whether we can answer them or not, the “other juggler” hypothesis is much simpler and more valid than the “self-taught canine juggler” thesis, because we know that dogs can’t juggle on their own. We don’t know if the person who modified the dog can juggle on his own or not, but we know for sure that dogs cannot. The simpler explanation still leads to more questions, but this is an okay thing for a simple explanation to do.
And, besides, saying that anything in the physical universe “just happens” the way it does is anti-scientific. The physical universe is the very thing that science is supposed to be studying to give a fuller explanation of. It could be, though, that some scientific discovery leads us to believe that there is something beyond this physical world. At that point, science would have nothing to say about that thing, other than it exists and has/had some kind of influence on the physical world. So it makes a lot more sense–philosophically and scientifically–to say “such-and-such just is” when we’re talking about something beyond this physical universe than when we’re talking about someting within this physical universe (or this physical universe itself).
I’m sorry but I just can’t buy that. It screams “logically impossible” to my brain. And it gives the impression of grasping for straws.
Amber, so be it. You don’t have to buy it. (Though I don’t know why it’s “logically impossible”–a simple thing is a thing without parts. Is an electron, or a quark, logically impossible?) But it’s definitely not “grasping for straws”, given that the western monotheistic religions have held that God is simple for thousands of years (in the case of Judaism and Christianity), starting long before anybody ever tried to use a “design” argument. The doctrine of divine simplicity is much older than any discussion about whether complex things require a designer.
But, I’m not even sure that the divine simplicity thing even works as a response to Garrett’s earlier comment, anyway. It all depends on what exactly Garrett meant when he implied that the designer is itself “complex” and so would require a designer of its own.
Of course they are not logically impossible. But wouldn’t you say that they had to come from somewhere? Or to put it another way, didn’t they have to be created by something? I get the impression that for ID-ers, at least, they would have to have an explanation of who or what created electrons and quarks. (Because even though they themselves might not show “evdince of design,” they are building blocks in things that do show evidence of design, so by extension is seems to me that they woul dneed an explanation too.)
Ah, interesting, Amber. I think I see where you are coming from now.
As I understand it, IDers don’t talk about electrons at all. Since such things are simple and have no complex parts working together in a functional way, there’s no real “traction” for getting a design argument off the ground about things like electrons. IDers point to other things that show evidence of “design”.
Of course, from a philosophical or theological perspective, all things cry out for an explanation of where they came from. And, certainly, Christians (and Jews and Muslims) believe that God made electrons just as much as He made more complex things. But arguments about “where things came from” are usually classified as “cosmological” arguments for God’s existence, not teleological (”design”) ones. And, in any case, IDers aren’t interested in proving where electrons came from. ID isn’t about proving where every single thing in the universe came from, so much as it is about proving that certain particular things (or systems of things) in the universe must have been designed by an intelligence. Of course, most people will infer from this that everything in the universe was designed by this same intelligence, but that is not part of the “science” behind ID.
My understanding of the situation, in any case.