For general discussion that would be off-topic in other threads!
The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
For general discussion that would be off-topic in other threads!
You tell ’em, Mind-powers.
Makes you wonder why the ID pushers haven’t pursued that obviously easier strategy – trying to convince the academic communities in other-than-US countries that ID has scientific relevance.
Well, not really. 😀
ID advocates are free to tell the truth about their enterprise. Most of them do anyway when they rail against atheism and materialism.
What they are not free to do is teach ID as science in public high schools. This seems pretty simple.
Yes indeed, I think that is what I picked up from his testimony.
However, how can Fuller take something like the ID/creationist “second law of thermodynamics”, compare it to the real second law of thermodynamics and not recognize that they completely contradict each other? How can he not recognize Henry Morris’s pseudo scholarship in introducing a completely wrong second law?
How could he claim that 1/N^L is the probability of a molecular assembly when no chemistry or physics textbook anywhere calculates the probabilities of molecular assemblies this way?
How can he accept ID/creationist caricatures of basic evolutionary concepts when no biology textbook anywhere describes evolution in these manners?
Fuller, and a number of the ID/creationists would like to argue the blurriness of the “demarcation” issue as a reason to allow ID/creationism “a chance to hold its own” in the classroom; yet none of these people ever mention the fact that ID/creationist concepts are diametrically opposed to the actual working concepts in science. They continue leave out – and, in fact, deliberately hide – the socio/political history of sectarian movement that has been mangling scientific concepts to absurdity ever since Whitcomb and Morris wrote The Genesis Flood.
One would hope that someone involved in the sociology of science would at least get the basic, well-known science right; but too often we see these apologists being sucked in and simply accepting the ID/creationist movement’s misconceptions and misrepresentations without questioning or comparing.
ID/creationists have been routinely mangling scientific concepts to the point of insulting the intelligence of bright students encountering these ideas for the first time; and they have been doing it now for well over 50 years. There are no “metaphysical” arguments that justify subjecting students to this kind of crap.
ID/creationists want the arguments to take place on their turf and with their misconceptions and misrepresentations. It is a chutzpa that asserts that their science is the real science and that there are legitimate philosophical reasons to allow their “science” into the classroom.
It’s worth noting that while the Young-Earth strain of Creationism is the most prominent one, there are others. In particular, there’s Old-Earth Creationism, promoted by Dr. Hugh Ross and the Reasons to Believe crew; other, very much less prominent strains of Creationism, include Day-Age Creationists (for whom each of the “days” of Genesis is an arbitrarily long period) and Gap Creationists (who confess an arbitrarily-long ‘gap’ between Gen1:1 and Gen1:2). So Gregsy’s failure to proclaim his view on the age of the Earth is in no way an obstacle to his being a Creationist; he could be a YEC who’s concealing his Creationist views (a possibility which is 100% consistent with everything he’s posted to TSZ, as best I can tell), or he could subscribe to a strain of Creationism that’s okay with an ancient Earth.
And of course, Gregsy might just be yet another godbot with a bee in his bonnet about atheism. Given that Creationists are a subset of religious zealots in general, it’s hardly surprising that many or all of the diagnostic characteristics of Creationists are shared by religious zealots, and therefore could yield a ‘false positive’ of Creationist when applied to a religious zealot who actually does accept evolution.
Yes, because we can all see for ourselves how productive the “religious science” they practice at UD is.
I mean, you’ve written what, two books, Behe and Dembski have a dozen plus. It’s a no-brainer that at some point someone will publish an actual paper that supports ID!
I’ve been put in moderation at UD; BA implies that I was off-topic and uncivil. I find the implication annoying, as I was responding civilly to his own comment. I suspect BA simply found the exchange embarrassing and wished to prevent it from being read. Since he has prevented me from defending myself from the implied accusation that I was uncivil, I would like to post my squelched comment here. If that’s an abuse of this thread, please let me know.
The deleted comment:
I’m sure you’ve heard the argument that agnosticism and atheism are points on orthogonal lines, as shown in this diagram:
Do you disagree with these definitions or do you have another reason for identifying as an agnostic rather than an atheist?
My personal view is that those who lack a belief in a god or gods are atheists, by definition. I realize that the word has negative connotations to some people, though.
This comment is clearly off-topic for this thread, so I’m going to move it to the sandbox.
I prefer nonbeliever, because it applies to many aspects of life, not just theology. Santa Claus, medical breakthroughs, politics, and much more.
I prefer the word trust to belief. I trust people and statements about how things work, rather than believe. The difference is that trust is explicitly emotional rather than logical, and there is no pretense that my trust objects are objectively true.
KeithS convinced me I can’t be certain of anything (though I am absolutely certain I will not live forever) so I can’t be certain there are no things of which we have no knowledge (in fact I’m pretty certain there are) but I just find what has been on offer to date so patently human – so obviously stuff made up. It’s a case of not ruling out stuff a priori.
As the Barry Arrington thread has quite a few comments drifting off into other worlds, perhaps the simplest thing would be a separate thread and we could move those comments plus these comments in the sandbox to the new thread. That would leave the Barry Arrington thread clear for Barry to defend himself on the charge of quote-mining. Are you game for putting up an OP, Patrick?
I can pull something together later tonight. It might be the shortest thread ever, but I’ll take the risk.
Alan Fox:
Alan is referring to this thread: The Myth of Absolute Certainty .
I would agree that it’s overwhelmingly unlikely, but are you really 100.0% certain, without the slightest possibility of error, that it absolutely will not happen?
Heh. The error makes not living forever even more likely to happen sooner.
That’s the opposite error — thinking you’re going to live forever when you’re as mortal as the rest of us.
Like this guy.
Purchased a pile of Haeckel images cut from a German book. Very nice plates. I scanned them at something like 11,000 x 9000 pixels. This slide show is more like 1100 x 900. Still looks pretty good.
No embryos, alas.
Oh, aren’t those beautiful !!
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_who_became_creationists_after_studying_the_evidence
This is everywhere, but what the heck.
http://www.eatliver.com/i.php?n=9111
Gorgeous! Were they expensive? I’d love an old botanical print or two.
Not that TSZ can always claim to have avoided rancour, but the comments from most of the ID crowd in the UD ‘500 coins’ debate seem of a particularly bilious nature. What happened to their much-vaunted civility rules?
And that’s after Joe’s departure (anyone know what happened to him?)
… this rather sinister offering from good old WJM:
He has a logical warrant for action, you know!
Mindpowers Murray, fix it with your PSI skills!
One of the clearest and most consistent behaviors I have seen coming from the ID/creationists over the years is “monkey-see-monkey-do.”
It took a number of years for the science community to recognize the tactics being used by the ID/creationists; but when that recognition finally occurred, members of the scientific community and those familiar with socio/political culture war tactics began analyzing and articulating ID/creationist behaviors.
The very next thing that happened is that the ID/creationists took those very same analyses and started making exactly the same accusations about members of the scientific community.
It takes a lot of political chutzpa on the part of the ID/creationists to abuse their enemies and then accuse their enemies of doing EXACTLY the very things that they, the ID/creationists, have been doing to their enemies ever since Morris and Gish.
But that’s what they do; they learned from their pulpits how to demonize their enemies.
Mike Elzinga,
As if on cue
Comments are off. I think he’s betting all on red. If he’s right … oh, the glory! If wrong … well, he’ll get another shot, bound to in this well-armed country. Double or quits?
Friends described him as a socialist. That’s the same thing, isn’t it?
Edit to add:
I wouldn’t comment on it at UD even if I could. What can I say except how monumentally stupid his premise is that it matters whether the young man was a “Darwinist”.
Sure, let’s grant that Karl was a “Darwinist”, that not only did he idolize Darwin personally, but that he thought it his mission to improve his species by carrying on “Darwin’s work” of culling the weaker members [no, there’s not a speck of evidence that Karl thought that, but let’s grant it for argument’s sake].
Sure, let’s go further, let’s grant that every single mass murder of the 20th and 21st century in the US was committed by a “devout Darwinist” who was specifically motivated in his murders by his “belief” in the precepts of Darwinism.
So what! What does that prove?
What does that prove when he!d up against the dozens of children killed every year by their parents’ refusing to give them medical care? Because, Jesus. We must put our faith in healing prayer, don’t you know. What about the children murdered directly by their parents trying to exorcise some demon their bloody preacher told them had taken over a perfectly normal kid whom they should have loved and protected?
What about the hundreds of women killed in the US by bishops arrogantly refusing them a medical operation they need to live? What about the thousands of innocent children murdered by the forces of christian dictatorships trained and armed by the US? What about the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis murdered in sectarian warfare as a direct result of religious right-wing US military destabilizing their country? What about the millions of Africans killed by HIV when the crazed christian lobby forced the US government to go along with the demands of the Pope to not supply condoms in aid?
We can do this all day. There is no end to the human suffering their religion has caused and the murders it has directly inspired.
The sum of all Darwinism/evolutionism/atheism inspired murders – if there has been even one in the real world not just granted for sake of argument – is an invisible speck compared to that lake of blood caused by murderous christianity.
All this talk of 500 bits is a terrible way to argue, for or against, novel functionality when actual evidence of de novo genes exist. It would seem to me to be more productive if both the UD and TSZ contributors would examine an agreed upon example (I do realize this might be the impossible.)
For example, this paper looks at a number of protein-coding genes in Drosophila thought to have arisen quite recently from non-coding regions of RNA. If we were to look at one in particular, could we determine how many bits of information it represents, and could ID accept a strictly stochastic process as an explanation? I should think a lot of assumptions and claims could be tested with such an example, and on even ground.
I think it ties into the hypocritically postmodern nature of modern creationism: it’s not about what is true, but what should be true and what people can be convinced to believe.
The way I see it, it is about truth. The question is, whose?
Creationists are convinced The Truth has already been revealed to them through Scripture. Anything which contradicts that must be untrue, by definition, and is most probably the Devil’s work. They cannot and will not surrender that position.
Science, for its part, believes that the best it can do is inch towards whatever truth might be out there through painstaking and methodical research in both field and laboratory, spiced up with flashes of intuition, insight and inspiration.
At root, isn’t there an unbridgeable gap between the two stances?
The way I see it, it is about truth.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this comment. You may be right, in which case my perspective is both wrong and unfair to creationists. I think it’s very possible that they are honestly interested in arriving at a preexisting objective truth, which they would certainly say is the case (and I would prefer to take them at their word in any event). But that then suggests that they believe their comfort level with facts is relevant to determining the truth of those facts–that if they could establish that “Darwinism” leads to school shootings, it would have some bearing on the truth of that ideology.
Crossposted from ATBC:
I’ve been working on a pet project, which relates to a more serious and dangerous problem than creationism: anti-vaccine activism.
As people who’ve read my posts here know, I’m particularly interested in effective communication. So I wrote a guide to how those of us who aren’t healthcare providers can help persuade friends and family to vaccinate. It draws on some of my experience as a negotiator, and negative lessons from poor communication in online fights reported here.
The guide is here: The Most Important Playground Conversation: How to Persuade a Friend to Vaccinate
I would love for people to help publicize it, both because I’m vain and because I hope it can be a real resource for people who want to persuade their friends and family to make a better choice about immunization.
But there’s one thing I particularly want: I would love for anyone who’s had a personal experience with these conversations to leave a comment over at VM. I’d like to collect anecdotes about such conversations to use in revising the guide, and as a further resource.
If you know someone who’s had such a conversation, whether or not it went the way they hoped, please send them our way so we can collect their story.
Thank you!
Pro Hac Vice,
Once I had a terrible conversation with an anti-vax coworker (well, terrible in the sense that I made no impression on their panic about the “toxins” in vaccines). Although that particular coworker doesn’t work there anymore and we’re not in touch, I still think about what I could have said differently.
I like your blog post about having a conversation that’s akin to a negotiation. I think it will help if/when the subject comes up again. I’ll let you know the results then.
In the meantime, is it okay to share a link to your website with some other folks?
And even if it were the case that all murders were inspired by Darwin’s theory, it would make not one tiny bit of difference to whether Darwin’s theory was correct science or not.
“And even if it were the case that all murders were inspired by Darwin’s theory, it would make not one tiny bit of difference to whether Darwin’s theory was correct science or not.” – Elizabeth Liddle
As if “all murders were inspired by Darwin’s theory.”
Yes, but it would make that supposedly (for now) ‘correct science’ horrific, wouldn’t it?
That is, if you stop dropping off your ethics/morality at the altar of supposedly ‘neutral’ science, Elizabeth.
No, not even a little. Do you also claim the Nazi use of Zyklon B gas made chemistry horrific, or their use of V2 rockets made physics horrific?
I don’t see how any claims about the relation between “Darwinism” or “atheism” or “Christianity” (all of which are really too vague to be useful just as stands!) and violence can be empirically substantiated. There are far too many factors — individual mental health, existential insecurity, political and economic instability, and so on to establish causation with any reliability.
Discounting that, all one is left with are vague and unsupportable assertions about “influenced by” or “inspired by”. Those assertions are completely internal to a world-view that expresses and articulates one’s assumptions and sentiments about organized religion, and thus cannot serve as evidence for or against those assumptions and sentiments.
You are neither claiming that Darwin was a theist any more than you are claiming yourself to be a religious Jew, are you KN? You said recently here that you were taught Reform Judaism. But now (for whatever reasons) you obviously have no ‘faith’ in religion, is that right? Deferring to ‘far too many factors’ is disingenuous. Why not talk straight?
Your worldview, KN, is either agnostic or atheist, isn’t it? Might as well come out and openly say it.
The “far too many factors” isn’t disingenuous — perhaps vague and hand-waving? — but I was making a point that seemed to me to be a piece of mere sanity — that the causal relations between any particular incident of violence and the “world-view” attributed to the perpetrators of said violence is almost impossible to reconstruct with any strong degree of assurance. There’s simply far too much opportunity here for one’s anti-atheistic or anti-religious biases to do our thinking for us. The sane course of action is to suspend judgment about such claims.
My worldview is complicated and not at all consistent, and I don’t like assigning labels to it — the more precisely the label fits what I think, the harder it is to communicate by means of that label. Everyone knows (or thinks they know) what “atheism” means, and sometimes I use that term as a bit of short-hand. But it’s not really how I think of my views — I prefer to think of my world-view as evolutionary pantheism (“through us, the universe discovers itself”). I’m much more sympathetic to, say, Schelling, Coleridge, Emerson and Dewey than to the mechanistic materialism of La Mettrie or Laplace or to the agnostic phenomenalism of Mill or Huxley. Where I find myself more closely aligned with people who call themselves atheists is on my anti-clericalism, that I have no use at all for organized religion, but that’s a political view that comes out of my humanistic anti-authoritarianism.
So I’m not being coy or dissembling — I’ve been thinking about these issues for a long time, I’ve been deeply influenced by a lot of very different thinkers, and I don’t have a world-view that be summarized on a T-shirt or bumper sticker.
Neither “atheist” nor “agnostic” describes a worldview.
I’m not sure if you were teasing Gregory about the grammar or making the point that neither atheism nor agnosticism are worldviews. I agree with the latter but I’m not sure if that’s the point you were making.
Wonderful. I haven’t heard any better way to describe what I believe than your phrase. Although, I’ve always been partial to this:
I’m not sure how useful it is.
I think that’s quite beautifully stated. I discovered Watts as a teenager and he definitely made a huge impact on me. Here’s a much longer and more “philosophical” explication, in the sense of being more explicitly grounded in the canon of Western philosophy as understood by professional philosophers:
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Since it is the job of science to develop theoretical frameworks which provide explanatory accounts of natural laws, it now becomes part of that enterprise to develop a comprehensive theoretical account of man-in-the-universe from which it will follow that men seek to understand and represent the universe of which they are a part. And the way to do this may well be by means of a total conception of the universe as a physical system which of natural necessity evolves subsystems that in turn necessarily project increasingly adequate representations of the whole. Crudely, our universe necessarily “grows knowers” and thereby comes to reflect itself (picture itself) within itself. . . . We cannot understand the universe until we understand it precisely as a universe which is such that, within it, a species of entities evolves which seeks to understand and represent it. And we cannot understand ourselves and our epistemology until we understand them both as products of this total evolutionary system and as parts of the very process of its evolution. . . . our universe thus conceived as understandable only as a total system evolving within itself a representation of itself is a philosophical old friend: the Hegelian Absolute evolving to self-consciousness. . . . Sellars proposes that we now understand Kantian noumena in terms of the posits of postulational microtheory. What I am suggesting here is that we can now understand the self-actualization of the Hegelian Absolute as well, in terms of a synoptic empirical theory of man-in-the-universe which views the epistemic activities of persons and the fundamental nature of the physical arena in which those activities occur as explanatorily correlative, neither being understandable without recourse to a conception of the other. . . . And if my readers do not find such an attempt to resuscitate the central theme of Nineteenth Century Idealism particularly congenial to their contemporary idioms, I can cheerfully reply that it is a habit which, like almost everything else philosophical, I learned from Wilfrid Sellars.
— Jay Rosenberg, “A Study in Sellarsian Metaphysics” (1975), §§ 71-75.
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Me too! Absolutely!
It’s why I still find atavistic meaning in the season of the Incarnation 🙂
Well, it seems a pretty obvious point to me. Atheist/agnostic is just a label we put upon a tiny part of our cognition. What’s important is what comes after that; as you say, have a stance of anti-clericalism, or perhaps one is a social-justice warrior, or sadly perhaps one is a Randian. Now those labels might encompass enough of a person’s stance and behavior towards a significant part of their world to be deserving of the term “worldview”. Or even those relatively-large labels might be only a small part of what goes into a person’s “worldview”. Definitely not “atheist” in and of itself.
Whew!
And that’s why I’m not a professional philosopher, or a philosopher of any kind at all, but I’m glad you shared that.
I know you get shit from all sides sometimes. I apologize without reserve for any shit – which I don’t remember, but knowing me, there has been some – that I may have kicked in your direction. Thank you for your contributions here.
It’s fantastic, thanks! I’d never even heard of Watts.
The latter. Yes, the grammar was awkward, but I chose to go with what I took to be Gregory’s intended meaning.
I’ll accept that anti-theism can be considered a worldview, but atheists and agnostics need not be anti-theist.
hotshoe,
Thank you!
Lizzie,
I read The Wisdom of Insecurity, but others here can make other recommendations.
Neil Rickert,
Right — and hotshoe makes the same point.
I’ve never quite known what to do with the term “world-view” — an awkward-sounding English word that was created to translate the German Weltanschauung, and usually we use “world-view” to refer to both a Weltanschauung (an explicitly held and as-such recognized conception of the world) and a Weltansicht (an implicit or tacit ‘map’ of the world, embedded in culture and tradition, and usually not recognized as such).
I guess I’d think of evolutionary pantheism as central to my metaphysics, and insofar as there is a strong affective or emotional component to this for me, as central to my ‘spirituality’ or ‘faith’ as well. But there are other things I hold dear, such as my commitment to liberal socialism in politics or a mitigated deontology in ethics, which don’t neatly fit with evolutionary pantheism (though they don’t conflict with it). E.P. is basically a way of reconciling naturalism and humanism, which are important to me for quite different reasons.
KN, quoting Jay Rosenberg:
It’s clear that our universe “grows knowers”, but why does Rosenberg think it “necessarily” does so?
Hotshoe,
Of course, I’d appreciate it. Thank you.