Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id OAA16405 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Mon, 9 Apr 2001 14:18:06 +0100 Subject: Re: Determinism Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 09:13:54 -0400 x-sender: wsmith1@camail2.harvard.edu x-mailer: Claris Emailer 2.0v3, Claritas Est Veritas From: "Wade T.Smith" <wade_smith@harvard.edu> To: "memetics list" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable Message-ID: <20010409131401.AAA21025@camailp.harvard.edu@[128.103.125.215]> Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
On 04/09/01 08:24, Chris Taylor said this-
>I can't think of any part of that occurrence which could not
>be explained by a (theoretical) being with perfect knowledge of the
>state of all the matter and energy in that universe.
And the ID people (intelligent design, AKA theists, AKA creationists),
would use your inability not to think to bolster their specious claim of
a non-evolutionary force. Of course, such a being would of necessity have
to have some sort of existence, even a transcendental one, _outside_ of
this universe, in which case they would have to posit the biverse such a
symbiosis mandates.
Of course, the explanation for step two (as in that famous comic) that
they do use is "then a miracle occurs" which is the time-honored
hand-wave of the theologically biased.
It's been nice to find some refuge from the biverse problem in the
quantal realm by declaring that this creationary force is actually here
in this universe, somehow permeating all structures. But your other claim
still stands- it needs full control.
(They also use 'information conservation' as a hand-wave, as if entropy
and the second law of thermodynamics had some other place to be....)
The excuse of theism provides its falseness.
I enclose this from the NY Times a few days ago -
- Wade
***********
April 8, 2001
Evolutionists Battle New Theory on Creation
By JAMES GLANZ
When Kansas school officials restored the theory of evolution to
statewide education standards a few weeks ago, biologists might have been
inclined to declare victory over creationism.
Instead, some evolutionists say, the latter stages of the battle in
Kansas, along with new efforts in Michigan and Pennsylvania as well as in
a number of universities and even in Washington, suggest that the issue
is far from settled.
This time, though, the evolutionists find themselves arrayed not against
traditional creationism, with its roots in biblical literalism, but
against a more sophisticated idea: the intelligent design theory.
Proponents of this theory, led by a group of academics and intellectuals
and including some biblical creationists, accept that the earth is
billions of years old, not the thousands of years suggested by a literal
reading of the Bible.
But they dispute the idea that natural selection, the force Darwin
suggested drove evolution, is enough to explain the complexity of the
earth's plants and animals. That complexity, they say, must be the work
of an intelligent designer.
This designer may be much like the biblical God, proponents say, but they
are open to other explanations, such as the proposition that life was
seeded by a meteorite from elsewhere in the cosmos, possibly involving
extraterrestrial intelligence, or the new age philosophy that the
universe is suffused with a mysterious but inanimate life force.
In recent months, the proponents of intelligent design have advanced
their case on several fronts.
¶In Kansas, after the backlash against the traditional biblical
creationism, proponents of the design theory have become the dominant
anti-evolution force, though they lost an effort to have theories like
intelligent design considered on an equal basis with evolution in school
curriculums.
¶In Michigan, nine legislators in the House of Representatives have
introduced legislation to amend state education standards to put
intelligent design on an equal basis with evolution.
¶In Pennsylvania, where biblical creationists and design theorists have
operated in concert, state officials are close to adopting educational
standards that would allow the teaching of theories on the origin and
development of life other than evolution.
¶Backers of intelligent design organized university-sanctioned
conferences at Yale and Baylor last year, and the movement has spawned at
least one university student organization ‹ called Intelligent Design and
Evolution Awareness, or the IDEA club ‹ at the University of California
in San Diego.
¶The Discovery Institute, a research institute in Seattle that promotes
conservative causes, organized a briefing on intelligent design last year
on Capitol Hill for prominent members of Congress.
"They are skilled in analyzing evidence and ideas," said Representative
Tom Petri, a Wisconsin Republican and one of several members of Congress
who was a host at the session in a Congressional hearing room. "They are
making a determined effort to attempt to present the intelligent design
theory, and ask that it be judged by normal scientific criteria."
Polls show that the percentage of Americans who say they believe in
creationism is about 45 percent. George W. Bush took the position in the
presidential campaign that children should be exposed to both creationism
and evolution in school.
Supporters of Darwin see intelligent design as more insidious than
creationism, especially given that many of its advocates have mainstream
scientific credentials, which creationists often lack.
"The most striking thing about the intelligent design folks is their
potential to really make anti-evolutionism intellectually respectable,"
said Dr. Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for
Science Education in Oakland, Calif., which promotes the teaching of
evolution.
Dr. Adrian Melott, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University
of Kansas in Lawrence and a member of Kansas Citizens for Science, a
group that helped win the restoration of evolution to the state education
standards, said the design theory was finding adherents among doctors,
engineers and people with degrees in the humanities.
Intelligent design is "the language that the creationists among the
student body tend to use now," Dr. Melott said.
One of the first arguments for the design theory was set out in "Darwin's
Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution" (Simon & Schuster,
1996), by Dr. Michael J. Behe, a professor of biological sciences at
Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. Dr. Behe argued that various
biochemical structures in cells could not have been built in a stepwise
Darwinian fashion.
Since then, the movement has gained support among a few scientists in
other disciplines, most of them conservative Christians.
"I'm very impressed with the level of scientific work and the level of
scientific dialogue among the leaders of the design movement," said Dr.
Guillermo Gonzalez, an astronomer at the University of Washington in
Seattle. The theory "warrants further research," Dr. Gonzalez said.
Leaders of the design movement also look for flaws in evolutionist
thinking and its presentation, and have scored heavily by publicizing
embarrassing mistakes in prominent biology textbooks.
"There is a legitimate intellectual project here," said Dr. William
Dembski, a leading proponent of intelligent design who has a doctorate in
mathematics from the University of Chicago and who is on the faculty at
Baylor, which receives a small part of its financing from the Texas
Baptist Convention. "It is not creationism. There's not a commitment to
Genesis literalism."
Dr. Dembski conceded that his interest in alternatives to Darwinian
theory was partly brought on by the fact that he is an evangelical
Christian, but he said intelligent design could withstand strict
scientific scrutiny.
"The religious conviction played a role," he said. But he added, "As far
as making me compromise in my work, that's the last thing I want to do."
Evolutionary biologists maintain that the arguments of intelligent design
do not survive scrutiny, but they concede that a specialist's knowledge
of particular mathematical or biological disciplines is often needed to
clinch the point.
"I would use the words `devilishly clever,' " said Dr. Jerry Coyne, a
professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, speaking
of the way the theory is constructed. "It has an appeal to intellectuals
who don't know anything about evolutionary biology, first of all because
the proponents have Ph.D.'s and second of all because it's not written in
the sort of populist, folksy, anti-intellectual style. It's written in
the argot of academia."
Despite that gloss, Dr. Leonard Krishtalka, a biologist and director of
the University of Kansas Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research
Center, said recently, "Intelligent design is nothing more than
creationism dressed in a cheap tuxedo."
Dr. Dembski said his rather vague doubts about Darwinism did not take
scientific shape until he attended an academic conference in 1988, just
after finishing his doctoral thesis. The conference explored the
difficulty of preparing perfectly random strings of numbers, which are
important in cryptography, in computer science and in statistics.
One problem is that seemingly random strings often contain patterns
discernible only with mathematical tests. Dr. Dembski wondered whether he
could devise a way to find evidence of related patterns in the randomness
of nature.
Dr. Dembski eventually developed what he called a mathematical
"explanatory filter" that he asserted can distinguish randomness from
complexity designed by an intelligent agent. He explained this idea in
"The Design Inference" (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Dr. Dembski has applied his explanatory filter to the biochemical
structures in cells ‹ and concluded that blind natural selection could
not have created them.
But in a detailed critique of Dr. Dembski's filter theory, published in
the current issue of the magazine The Skeptical Inquirer, Dr. Taner Edis,
a physicist at Truman State University in Kirksville, Mo., said that
while Dr. Dembski's mathematics were impressive, his analysis was
probably detecting only the complexity that evolution itself would
normally produce.
"They have come up with something genuinely interesting in the
information-theory arguments," Dr. Edis said of intelligent design
theorists. "At least they make an effort to get rid of some of the
blatantly fundamentalist elements of creationism."
Dr. Behe, whose book provided the biochemical basis for Dr. Dembski's
work, said he believed that certain intricate structures in cells,
involving the cooperative action of many protein molecules, were
"irreducibly complex," because removing just one of the proteins could
leave those structures unable to function. If the structure serves no
function without all of its parts, Dr. Behe asks, then how could
evolution have built it up step by step over the ages?
"I don't think something like that could have happened by simple natural
laws," he said.
Most biologists disagree.
"It's flat wrong," said Dr. H. Allen Orr, an evolutionary geneticist and
professor at the University of Rochester. Dr. Orr said that cell
structures might have been put together in all sorts of unpredictable
ways over the course of evolution and that a protein added might not have
been indispensable at first, but only later, when many more proteins were
woven around it.
"The fact that that system is irreducibly complex doesn't mean you can't
get there by Darwinian evolution," Dr. Orr said.
Exactly how a designer might have assembled cell structures, say, is a
question seldom addressed by design theorists. But they point out that
Darwinists cannot necessarily offer detailed, step-by-step sequences of
events for them either.
Dr. Behe, Dr. Dembski and Phillip E. Johnson, a professor emeritus of the
law school at the University of California at Berkeley, are regarded as
the intellectual fathers of the design theory movement. Mr. Johnson's
book "Darwin on Trial" (InterVarsity Press, 1991) has become its
manifesto. The book focuses on what Mr. Johnson says are the difficulties
Darwinian theory has in explaining the fossil record.
Until last fall, Dr. Dembski was the director of a center at Baylor that
was dedicated to the study of intelligent design theory. After complaints
from other Baylor faculty members, the center's focus and leadership were
changed, and it now includes design theory as well as other
philosophical, theological and scientific topics.
Dr. Dembski and Dr. Behe are fellows of the Discovery Institute, the
Seattle research institute that promotes intelligent design in its Center
for the Renewal of Science and Culture.
The center's $1.1 million annual budget is supplied largely by Christian
foundations that broadly endorse the implications of the intelligent
design theory, said Bruce Chapman, Discovery's president. Mr. Johnson is
an adviser to the institute, he said.
The center, which reaches people through books, articles, lectures and
local activism, "is going to be of interest to academics," Mr. Chapman
said. "But it's also going to be of interest to people in a more grass-
roots situation because they're teaching science or because they're on a
school board somewhere."
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
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