As a card carrying creationist, I’ve sometimes wanted to post about my reservations regarding the search for evidence of Intelligent Design (ID) and some of the rottenness in the search for evidence in young earth creation. I’ve refrained from speaking my mind on these matters too frequently lest I ruffle the feathers of the few friends I have left in the world (the ID community and the creationist community). But I must speak out and express criticism of my own side of the aisle on occasion.
Before proceeding, I’d like to thank Elizabeth for her hospitality in letting me post here. She invited me to post some things regarding my views of Natural Selection and Genetic Algorithms, but in the spirit of skepticism I want to offer criticism of some of my own ideas.So this essay will sketch what I consider valid criticism of ID, creationism in general and Young Earth Creationism (YEC) in particular.
Take any of the accepted laws of physics, like say the classic one, F=ma in classical mechanics. The physical behavior requires no Intelligent Designer. This is true of every physical law. I recall a professor of physics saying, “after Newton there was no need of witches or of God”. What she meant, it seems to me, is God was irrelevant to understanding physical law. Invoking God doesn’t give further insight to understanding physics.
Only in some controversial interpretations of Quantum Mechanics will some physicists even dare to argue God exists. Such arguments have been put forward by Richard Conn Henry, John Barrow, Frank Tipler, FJ Belinfante etc. See:
But that is the crux of the problem. If the Intelligent Designer is not the focus of physics, and physics underlies all the sciences, then how can ID then be incorporated into science? In that regard, I’m mostly ambivalent to arguing whether ID is science or not.
Like the play “Waiting for Godot”, we are “Waiting for the Intelligent Designer”. I reject the notion that one can apply stone henge as evidence of intelligent design and then make an equally believable case that one can look at the intricacies of the cell and conclude the Intelligent Designer exists. When I was an engineering student, I would be subject to examination to demonstrate that I could make designs. Human made designs are thus subject to independent verification. We can subject those sort of intelligent designers to field laboratory testing, we cannot do so regarding the supposed Intelligent Designer of the universe and life. This lack of direct testability will always leave quite a bit of room for skepticism, if not some inclination for outright rejection, no matter how powerful the arguments are against chemical and biological evolution.
If God were continually making miracles like he did in the time of Moses, we might not be having these debates, but as for now He has chosen to remain hidden from observation and experiment which are the foundations of science.
These criticism of ID will apply to creationism and particularly young earth creationism. Even supposing miracles are real, by their very nature, miracles will elude repeatability (that’s why they are miracles!). The most we can hope for is to use science to demonstrate that an unusual mechanism had to be responsible for certain phenomena. You can pretty much forget being able to create experiments that will require the Intellgent Designer to appear in the laboratory or in the field. Not even creationists will argue for that possibility.
But that is not my worst complaint about the enterprise of YECism. The community appeals to Biblical authority to “prove” its case. But that is no proof whatsoever, and I’d argue that even the Bible doesn’t teach this as a method of proof. Is there biblical thermodynamics, calculus, electromagnetism, classical mechanics, linear algebra, or any major field of research that can be resolved by theology? No.
For example, some YECs will come around and preach that if you don’t believe the Earth is Young, then you’re compromising the word of God. To which I respond, well what does the book of Genesis have to say about what the right form of Maxwell’s Equations should be or how do your resolve the conflict of YEC with the Einstein-Planck equation that is related to the photo electric effect and thus all of Quantum Mechanics. At that point, the preachers have little to say. They’ll then proceed to make disparaging comments about my character.
The major problem of YEC (and there are many) is the problem of distant starlight. Some will invoke temporally and spatially varying speeds of light. Some will argue light was created en-route that gives the appearance of age (GAG!). The problem with varying speeds of light is in order to preserve the energy of the Einstein-Planck equation, one has to then invoke a varying Planck’s constant, which would mean the undoing of Quantum Mechanics. So YECism flies in the face of Maxwell’s Equations (electromagnetism), Relativity (which is related to Maxwell’s Equations), and Quantum Mechanics — no small pillars of real science! Though YECism might stand on its own against evolutionism, it collapses under the weight of modern physics.
But that is not even the end of the story. YECists like Ken Ham routinely demonize other Christians who disagree with him. This is personally distasteful because many in the ID community who have even been expelled and suffered career loss for their criticism of Darwin are also demonized by the likes of Ken Ham. Even supposing YEC is true, this is no way to treat fellow Christian who have shown a lot of courage in speaking their conscience.
Does his organization spend lots of money on real science? Well relative to the millions they spend on amusement parks which they pass off as the “creation museum”, they don’t do much on behalf of answering scientific questions. I’ve mentioned three major problems which are utterly neglected in favor of building amusement parks of no scientific value.
If YECists consider it sinful to believe in an Old Universe, then they’ll have to come to terms with the work of creationists like Maxwell, who ironically has given the best line of reasoning to argue against YECism. Using intimidation, demonization, and appeals to theology will not make much of a persuasive case, even to card carrying creationists like me. In fact, it only reinforces the view they have no facts to stand on, only blind belief.
Sometimes the way YEC “research” is conducted reminds me of the geocentrists that attempted to influence my denomination, the PCA. [incidentally physicist Dave Snoke is an Elder in the PCA, and Dave Heddle is deeply sympathetic to the PCA]. It was disgusting to try to reason with geocentrists. I know many Christian believers, who are in the aerospace industry. That industry wouldn’t achieve its success if it accepted geocentrism. I even met a Christian creationist astronaut who walked on the moon (Charles Duke). This would not be possible if the biblical geocentrists had their way. But some people are so committed to their own theology, they are unwilling to be reasoned with, nor will they seriously engage reasonable objections to their claims. If you want a taste of geocentrism, go here:
Though YECs one the whole aren’t as bad as the geocentrists, there are pockets of them that are as bad, imho. I don’t want these sort of people on my team, and hence I have chosen to affiliate myself with the ID community because of some of the rotten tomatoes in creationism.
So then, in light of these things, why do I accept ID as true and hold out a smidgen of hope that YEC might be true? That obviously will be the subject of future posts at the Skeptical Zone, but all this to say, one can’t accuse me of not recognizing serious difficulties in some of the ideas I’ve promoted and explored. And that is what I would hope the skeptical zone is about.
WJM, if your car broke down would you employ the services of a faith healer?
If not – why not?
My understanding is that is does not, when cancer survival rates are concerned anyway! And furthermore telling people that they should “think positive” and “buck up” actually has the opposite effect. Being told to think positive when they simply can’t makes people feel as if they are doing something wrong by being unable to do that.
More here; http://personalitycafe.com/general-psychology/81227-positive-thinking-has-no-impact-cancer-survival-rates.html
I’m wondering why bother with the faith healer at all. It seems a pointless middleman. If god was going to cure you, why would it depend on if you went to see a faith healer or not? Would god withhold a cure it otherwise would have given because you did not see a particular faith healer on a particular day? Does somebody else who did go on that day get “your” cure instead if you do not?
William, what was the name of the faith healer(s) that you saw? I’d be interested to check their track record…
I would tend to agree that positive thinking doesn’t cure disease, but it can affect quality of life. My father broke his hip at age 93 and got really depressed. He tried to stop eating and starve himself. Despite his best efforts he lived another three years.
I have mixed feelings about that. His last years were rather unhappy.
My point would be that negative thinking seemed to have no affect on his health.
Woodbine,
I’ve never employed a faith healer for any purpose – other than, depending on how you look at it, myself. I employ faith in all my activities. Even if I am going to a doctor or a mechanic, I employ prescriptive, intentional faith throughout the process. I have no problem going to doctors and mechanics because in my view they are every bit as much “the mind and body of god” as walking into a house filled with snake-handlers or consuming peyote at a native american sweat.
I have no deep-seated need to fight the laws and customs of the land in order to prove some point about my faith because my faith doesn’t exclude those customary protocols as being the forms and agencies that deliver the results of my faithful intention. I just do not limit myself to only those customary protocols and forms, and I do not limit my perception of how results may come through those customary avenues.
Why should I not drive to a faith healer if my wife believes it might help? Why should I prevent her from going in and taking part in the proceedings? If my wife thinks we will be able to buy an enormous house even with poor credit and a pitiful income, why should I pour cold water all over her hopes and dreams? Why should I not take all the steps that stand before me as if we we could buy the house at some point?
Should I not do those things out of service to my ego, which doesn’t believe such things are possible? Should I not try, or go along, because I will look like a fool? Should I douse her hopes and dreams – or, for that matter, my own? Should I listen to those who say such things are fool’s errands? Should I not even have applied for the job that I had no qualifications for whatsoever, but which I truly wished to have for a career?
Acting on faith doesn’t necessarily mean you place your hand on a bible and handle venomous snakes, or dance naked around a fire after eating peyote, or fly a plane into a building. Most of the time, having faith simply means not refusing to try something because you cannot see how it can possibly work out and because you will look like a fool if you fail.
So, to answer your question, Woodbine: why would I limit myself to faith “or” a mechanic, when I can as easily employ both? I have found that the application of faith while going through the regular protocols (if available) delivers the best results. I also don’t quit my job while having faith that I will have plenty of money, and I don’t stop eating while having faith that we will be provided with plenty of nutritious food. It’s never an either-or situation.
The act of carrying on even towards what seems an impossible goal, and against what seems to be impossible odds, is in itself a wonderful expression, a wonderful invocation of prescriptive, faithful intent into the world.
In what way do you employ “faith” when you ask a mechanic to fix your car?
If faith is confidence or trust in a person or entity, what person or entity are you trusting in?
I’d suggest this “faith” you have is more akin to pronoia .
I am guessing Sal realized that dealing with you and your ilk is as fun as running, as fast as you can, into a brick wall.
LoL! If you have to be told to think positive tehn you have already lost.
Strange how you take one concept and twist it into a strawman and then attack the strawman.
You have faith the mechanic can do the job.
I intend (have faith) that the mechanic will be honest and good, and that the results will be beyond my expectations for a price I will be very pleased with, and that no matter what occurs, it will all eventually be in my best interests.
Hey, I learned a new word today! Thank you. I will add that to my lexicon of useful terms. Yes, I do believe that the world is conspiring to help me and make me happy. I have faith that all things eventually work out in my favor.
It doesn’t depend on the faith healer; it depends on the individual, identity-constrained requirements of the individual looking to be healed, and/or the individuals observing the process. Some people’s cancer simply goes away without any apparent intermediary. Some people require chemo & radiation as intermediaries. Others require faith healers or other alternative forms of healing. Perhaps some require magic incantations or resolving childhood issues. Some people die of it no matter what kind of healing intermediaries are employed.
None of it has to do with god’s willingness or capacity to heal, per se. It has to do with the individuals involved and their particular internal structures.
God in the broadest sense, as that which encompasses and ultimately empowers all things.
You would be a hoot on the children’s cancer ward.
There are many things that people believe to be true, that would not be appropriate or kind to say in various circumstances – don’t you agree?
William J Murray,
You have simply described yourself as an optimist, which is what most people try to be.
How can a miracle be dependent on “particular internal structures”?
By definition, a “miracle” does not rely on anything, material or immaterial.
I sit corrected. Quite right. I should have differentiated. 🙂
Toronto,
I don’t subscribe to your particular definition of “miracle”.
If your definition of “optimist” is “one who believes that by intent & the nature of the intender the universal substrate of psychoplasm is configured into corresponding and contextually supportive patterns and forms”, then yes.
However, I find that to be a non-ordinary definition of the term.
Here’s the problem I have with your argument, William – I don’t yet see any evidence to suggest anyone requires faith healing. I see you claiming you believe some people benefit from it, but nothing to show that some people were worse off without it.
This gets back to my question above of why do anything?
Just curious, but do you have or know of a way to measure those particular internal structures and how they differ?
William J Murray,
If your definition of miracle is “an event that is dependent on……”, then you are not using the word as it is commonly used.
Please come up with a new term if your definition of a commonly used word is different from the norm.
How can we understand each other if our definitions aren’t clear?
Just FYI:
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2012/04/09/Lawyer-psychics-protected-by-Constitution/UPI-86191334008514/
http://www.sunstar.com.ph/davao/opinion/2012/04/08/sunday-essays-two-sides-faith-healing-215128
http://www.pardaphash.com/news/nirmal-baba-has-fake-facebook-fans-say-report/691113.html
http://www.newzimbabwe.com/blog/index.php/2012/04/bchikura/do-christians-live-longer/
What “argument” do you think I’m presenting here? I’m describing how I see things. Nothing more. I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything. I never claimed anyone “needed” faith healing for anything. I described an event (and could describe others) where a faith healing event apparently healed a condition. I’ve described other sequences of events where faithful intention and action based on it apparently led to good outcomes.
Well, if you’re in pain, wanting the pain to go away is in and of itself “doing something”. Perhaps you are asking me why do anything other than that? Well, if “wanting the pain to go away” doesn’t make the pain go away, and you still want it to go away, the rational thing to do is “do something else” until you find a thing to do until the pain goes away. So, I’m not really sure what this question means.
I don’t know about “measuring them”, but they can be explored via introspective existential and psychological analysis, examination of first principles and a prioris, etc., although that doesn’t do much in terms of changing them.
Morpheus asking Neo to check his basic assumptions about his apparent existence in the Matrix was a good nod to these kinds of questions. The Matrix touched on many of these philosophical ideas – as did “What the Bleep Do We Know” and “The Secret”, among others. IMO, what we essentially see ourselves as, and believe the world to be, defines how the psychoplasm orchestrates the material world in our experience, as well as – on a more mundane level – orcehstrating our confirmation bias and interpretive process.
So what it all boils down to is just another version of “The Secret”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_(book)
How ordinary.
I think that’s a fair assessment. I already said as much in the Libertarian Free Will thread, if I remember correctly. There are many different versions/variations of this prespective in existence.
The funny thing, to me anyway, William is that your life would have been more or less the same whatever your internal attitude was.
Your wife cancer would have gone into remission, faith healer or no faith healer, belief in god or not.
What you fail to realise is that other people, people with the exact same outlook as you in many respects, have not had the “luck” you have had.
So from your point of view your “system” seems to be working. But for an accident of fate (if you had been trapped in full body paralysis as a teenager for example) here you are.
The world might well be conspiring to help you, but given the number of people in the world and the fact that events are not distributed evenly do you really think there’s anything miraculous at all going on?
If you’d have been born in poverty in a slum in India I doubt you’d have got that dream job, whatever your mental attitude happened to be. The world to you seems to be as it has appeared to you, not how it actually is.
Indeed. And no evidence that any of it actually works!
If positive thinking brings positive results, poor and sick people are just not thinking positive enough, right?
That may be, but the actual sequence was that I was living an utterly awful life before, and have been leading a wonderful life since. As I have said, this line of thinking appears to have been instrumental. There were things I did that I simply would never have done given my old mental framework that each led to the fundamental things that have contributed greatly to my wonderful, satisfying life.
I have not “failed to realise” that; they are entirely accounted for in my belief system. Of course there will always be such examples available in order to provide the necessary “plausible deniability” that free will requires. We can always choose to not believe anything we wish. Also, I don’t believe that everyone who exists has free will, but that many if not most “people” are holodeck-like automatons that provide context for what those with free will choose to create.
IOW, the psychoplasm can generate for you all sorts of examples that disprove whatever it is you wish to not believe in, and provide to my experience an endless sequence of that which demonstrates exactly what I’m talking about. That is why faith is required, and why it is useless for me to try to prove such things to anyone.
I’ve certainly considered such views and arguments, but at the end of the day, even if it is all mere coincidence and luck, or if I am in a grand delusion, I am now leading a very joyful and satisfied existence, as is my wife, friends, children and grandchildren, whereas before I was miserable (and most of them were, too). So, what’s the downside? There hasn’t been any that I can tell for over 20 years.
I guess that depends on your definition of “miraculous”, but yes, I do. But then, I think just being able to intend to type responses, and then ideas flow in and english structure and my fingers fly across the keyboard in corresponding order, all with no more knowledge on my part about the process or mechanics involved than just the brute “intent” to do so … is miraculous. I guess I have a low “miraculous” threshold.
There is none, for you anyway.
None for you, but plenty for people who go to faith healers instead of doctors.
Let’s not pretend that doesn’t happen.
These “examples” are actually people. If your system requires broken people to make the whole people like you (so you think) to work then your system is as broken and as foolish and inhumane as any that I’ve heard of.
And believers in your world-view will not strive to help those “examples” because they’ll know that they are needed for contrast.
Happiness is clearly the intersection of sophism and trolling!
Perhaps you could invent a system to mark those “people” without free will?Perhaps some sort of symbol, unobtrusive but obvious. They could wear it on their lapel maybe?
Do I have free will William?
Materialists can’t even prove that happiness even exists!
Oh, er, wait now.
Or, rather, how do you know that *you* are not the automaton William, who has been programmed to think that you in fact have free will but actually your only reason for being is to allow *me* to make my mark?
I once read a sci-fi story about a man who could make anything happen at any time. He thought he was the ruler of the world! One day he met a chap who he could not influence. That chap was the true ruler of the world and made the other guy vanish with a wave of the hand. The first guy was just some color….
I have no idea. What their experience is, and why, doesn’t concern me. This is not a model of existence that is verifiable or falsifiable via consensual empiricism. Let me put it to you this way: there is nobody that is in my actual experience that has put these principles to work and has failed to gain astounding benefit thereof. That you provide theoretical examples that you claim exist outside of my area of existence is irrelevant to my model, which can only be expected to function in one’s personal experience.
I’m beginning to suspect a Poe.
I don’t know that. All of my beliefs are conditional and provisional – I don’t claim them as truths or facts.
If these views stopped working for me, I’d drop them in a heartbeat and replace them. It doesn’t make me any difference if they are true or not as long as they apparently work in my experience.
Would it not be preferable to remove the “apparently” from that sentence?
Many things can “apparently work”. For example, the disgusting trade in rare animal parts in some Chinese “medicines”. It’s done because it “apparently works”. Are you therefore also OK with causing entire species to go extinct because their medicinal properties “apparently work”?
Quite detailed. And moreso if you search for “William J. Murray”. But…
They only exist outside of your model because of you free will choice to exclude them.
I’m sure that there is a homeless shelter within driving distance of you.
Why not go there and explain to them how to put your principles to work and gain astounding benefit thereof?
That’s just my humble concession to the provisional nature of my views, and expresses the point that I’m not claiming that I know any of this as a matter of fact or truth.
Why would I do that?
Short version: IMMA WAERING MAH LUCKY SOCKS.
Rather, why would you not do it?
And you’d not do it because you know, at some level, if you did it would not work.
You would at least want to satisfy yourself that it’s a fact, no?
Because there’s no reason for me to do it. As I’ve already said, it is my view that people experience what reflects their individual nature/intention, or they are programmed automatons. My trying to teach them or change them isn’t going to change anything. They will still see/create what they see/create, or they will continue on with their programming. If they ever get to the point where they are choosing this perspective, it will manifest for them whether I’m involved or not.
Why would I find it “satisfying” when I don’t care if it is a fact or not?
I’m beginning to suspect a Sow…