Transterrestrial Musings

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Rand, where do you stand on the "Intelligent Design" controversy?

Posted by Bill White at October 12, 2004 08:33 AM

Rand,

It is rather amusing for you to describe this as a clash of religions since that is how most "Creationists" would describe it ("Evolution is a religion", etc.) and I rather doubt from previous posts you have any agreement with their arguments.

Posted by Matthew at October 12, 2004 08:41 AM

My views can be found here. You can also find others by googling "simberg 'intelligent design'".

Sorry to disappoint, but I'm not a conservative.

Posted by Rand Simberg at October 12, 2004 08:45 AM

I agree with their argument that to believe in the scientific method is an act of faith. That is my religion.

Posted by Rand Simberg at October 12, 2004 08:47 AM

Yeah, well, It turns out that belief in "intelligent" design (I use the scare quotes advisedly) is at a minimum among those who would know, i.e. the best biologists.

Anyone who has studied biology can begin to see why. In fact living things are pretty appallingly designed, from an engineering point of view. It's all jury-rigged, ad-hoc, fourteen mechanisms to do one simple job kind of stuff. Whatever God's intentions were, he did not design us well, or to last.

So believe or not, as you choose, but to believe because you think life in particular is "intelligently" designed is plain silly, 'cause it isn't.

Posted by Orlando at October 12, 2004 09:29 AM

Orlando, I'll have to disagree with you on how well we are designed. When you can build a self-repairing, internally powered by renewable resouces machine capable of moving objects from 10ths of a gram to 100kg without damage and able to travel at speeds up to 30kpm while avoiding moving objects that lasts around 75 years with no external maintenance you let me know.

Posted by Bill Maron at October 12, 2004 10:11 AM

Why Bush is bad for science - here.

Posted by Bill White at October 12, 2004 10:38 AM

Even if I accepted the nonsense that George Bush would be more "bad for science" than John Kerry, that's hardly a reason to vote against him when we're at war.

Posted by Rand Simberg at October 12, 2004 10:43 AM

I'm not in love with Bush's science policy myself, but the issue has been blown all out of proportion. The administration's power to ban research is pretty limited (there's a First Amendment argument for protecting most research, anyway); all we're really facing--beyond statements from the bulliest of pulpits--is some limits on federal funding. Most science worth doing can move along quite nicely without the government's help, thank you very much.

As for creationism, well, science has all of the proof and has a methodology that is testable, refutable, and predictive. How people can be so sure about the nature of the universe and God's will that they ignore overwhelming evidence opposing their beliefs is beyond me. How is this debate any different than geocentricism? There is nothing in physics or in biology that says that God doesn't exist, and plenty of religions are comfortable with evolution and an old universe. Of course, perhaps we live in Descartes' evil genius' universe, where our senses are completely deceived. Fine, but that doesn't jibe well with Christian beliefs, either.

Posted by Pro Libertate at October 12, 2004 11:36 AM

Bush can't be any worse for Science than the Demo-moonbats and their Gaia worshippers.

Posted by Mike Puckett at October 12, 2004 12:56 PM

When you can build a self-repairing, internally powered by renewable resouces machine capable of moving objects from 10ths of a gram to 100kg without damage and able to travel at speeds up to 30kpm while avoiding moving objects that lasts around 75 years with no external maintenance you let me know.

Well, there are two possible answers to this:

(1) I already have. Two of them, as a matter of fact: a girl age 12 and a boy age 10.

But perhaps you think that's an "unfair" answer, because I didn't build them from scratch, molecule by molecule, or you only want to give me credit for doing things if I can explain to you in minute detail how I did them. (Although how the second possibility would allow you to give credit to a gymnast for executing a back flip is beyond me, since the gymnast could not tell you the exact sequence of muscle contractions that resulted in the flip.)

In which case. . .

(2) I can't build a computer, car or pair of shoes from scratch either. What does that prove? That each of these things must have been designed by God? I don't think so.

You need a better argument. Simply because you are unable to imagine how this or that thing could come about through the unmagical workings of plain physical law does not in itself prove the necessity of supernatural intervention. To think otherwise is to indulge in an unreasonable level of egoism ("If I can't understand it, it must be magic!"). Which is why the "intelligent design" argument for the existence of God has been obviously flawed to reasonable and modest observers since St. Augustine foisted it on us.

Posted by Orlando at October 12, 2004 02:35 PM

Listen, since I actually am a scientist, maybe I can weigh in on this absurd notion that the Bush Administration is bad for science.

It isn't. The Administration has been very supportive of basic biological research, for example proposing back-to-back 15% increases in the NIH budget.

More importantly, the Administration's position on regulation and capital-gains tax relief makes it a lot more attractive for private capital to invest in applied research and development. Unless you want your science to be like Russian or French science, which tends to take and stay in the form of really brilliant publications, you need your science turned into technology. Turning science into technology is what private enterprise does, and the best way to encourage it is, as everyone who didn't fall off the turnip cart yesterday knows, to reduce the tax burden on it and loosen the python coils of pointless regulation.

There's nothing quite like the possibility of making a fortune on an IPO to get smart people to start up biotech firms or rich people to invest in them. The Bush Administration has done a fine job encouraging those dreams and the 12-hour days in the lab they drive.

Posted by Orlando at October 12, 2004 02:55 PM

Not to mention that Kerry's (and Edwards') proposed policies (assuming that they mean it, of course) for prescription drugs (e.g., allowing reimportation from Canada) would be disastrous for pharmaceutical R&D.

Posted by Rand Simberg at October 12, 2004 02:58 PM

If what Jay wrote about really reflects what's being called 'intelligent design', then it's a damn shame, as it sounds like somebody has perverted a potentially good religious viewpoint. What I'd understood ID to be was something that any Christian who is also a scientist could subscribe to, namely that God created everything INCLUDING PHYSICAL LAW. The Bible states (in effect) that looking at the physical universe helps us understand more about God, so for me, science & faith fit perfectly. There's certainly room in my viewpoint for divine interaction with our world, but that doesn't exclude the continuing operation of physical law.

I will say, though, that I *do* have a problem, as a scientist, with the way evolution is sometimes taught. There are educators who teach evolution as a FACT, which undermines the teaching of the scientific method. Evolution is a theory, subject to continuing experimental test, just as we are currently using Gravity Probe B to test General Relativity.

Now, on to the whole 'Bush is anti-science' meme... where's the proof?? (Discounting ultra-liberal ivory tower moonbats like Robert Parks and his ilk.) For all the whining and moaning about the so-called stem cell "ban", prior to Bush, there was little to no federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. All categories of stem cell research have seen huge growth over the last three years. Bush undid a logjam (that Clinton had left in place) and as a result, there's also been increased private funding. There's no real justification for saying Bush has been bad for stem cell research. It's the same group of politicians and scientists with a particularly partisan ax to grind that make all these spurious allegations and if they're so badly distorting the stem cell issue, I've no doubt they're distorting everything else too.

- Eric.

Posted by Eric S. at October 12, 2004 08:29 PM

Orlando, you are WAY off base. YOU said, "In fact living things are pretty appallingly designed, from an engineering point of view. It's all jury-rigged, ad-hoc, fourteen mechanisms to do one simple job kind of stuff. Whatever God's intentions were, he did not design us well, or to last." My response was directed to this. No one that I have heard of has built a machine that functions as well as we do, given the number of tasks we can perform. I NEVER said how I thought we reached our current state of development. Whether we could have been "designed" better remains to be seen, as in depending on how we evolve. Be careful with those assumptions.

Posted by Bill Maron at October 12, 2004 10:05 PM

Evolution is a theory, subject to continuing experimental test, just as we are currently using Gravity Probe B to test General Relativity.

Fair enough, so long as you realize evolution is on a lot firmer footing than GR. Its status in biology is roughly equivalent to Newtonian mechanics at nonrelativistic energies, or Maxwell's equations. Would you care to emphasize the last miniscule shred of tentativity in F = ma, or the possibility that Coulomb's law might not be an exact inverse square, when you teach either to freshmen? If not, I suggest equivalent respect for the biologists' fundamental theories.

Why sensible Christians fight evolution is beyond me. Even if you take the Bible as the Word of God, you've got to also take the strange additional viewpoint that the translation from what God said to the apostle in Greek in AD 50 has been perfectly translated and recopied over the years, from Greek to ancient Latin to medieval Latin to medieval English to modern English. You've got to believe no ordinary human in that long chain of transcribers and translaters ever rephrased things a bit to "clarify" and in fact muddied up what the Creater said about His creation.

I mean, why not take the position that God in fact explained to the apostle how He set the machinery of evolution in motion four billion years ago? But, as He did in the New Testament, God used a lot of parable and allegory, because ancient Greek didn't have the technical vocabulary to describe molecular biology and evolution, and besides His listener wouldn't have comprehended it anyway. That way you can have your cake and eat it, too.

Besides, if as a Christian you really believe that there is only one Truth and He has revealed it, then it seems to me you must believe He would not reveal one truth to the apostles and another to Christian scientists. God does not create deception. It must, therefore, be a human mistake born of ego and sinful pride to believe that what you think the Bible says and what God has revealed to us through the scientific exploration of His universe are in conflict.

It's plausible that God considers a fetish for the modern English prose of the Bible as no more than idolatry, and sees rejection of the simple truths revealed through the facts of His creation as taking a sinful pride in the works of men and turning one's face and heart away from the far mightier works of God.

I'd watch out if I were you. It's possible evolution is the simple revealed Word of God, and you put your soul in jeopardy by doubting it.

Posted by Orlando at October 12, 2004 10:07 PM

No one that I have heard of has built a machine that functions as well as we do, given the number of tasks we can perform.

(1) Perhaps you are overly impressed with yourself as a machine. You may egoistically assume that what humans do well (rapid visual pattern recognition or climbing stairs) is important, and what we do poorly (rapid olfactory pattern recognition, flying 10,000 miles without getting lost, or adding two sixty-four digit numbers in a microsecond) is not important.

Such a belief would have much in common with the conventional twentysomething-male averral that nothing is as beautiful as a woman. As it happens, women disagree. As it happens, all else in the universe capable of thought would disagree that humans are the most wonderfully designed machines imaginable.

(2) So what? Just because you can't imagine a better designed machine than Homo sapiens version 1.0 doesn't mean no one can. In fact biologist see a number of dumb-ass design flaws which any sensible engineer would fix in Homo sapiens version 2.0.

If you don't agree, I'd wonder how you rationalize genetic therapy to fix one of the single-nucleotide mutations in the CFTR gene that causes cystic fibrosis. Or what you'd think when your grand-daughter's OB suggests she consider a new treatment to replace your great-grandson's apo E4 gene with an apo E2 gene in utero, so the kid can live to 106 without fear of middle-age heart attacks.

I mean, is this all delusion? Or does it not seem there are proving to be, you know, flaws in our design that we are now learning to fix? And if we mere mortals can detect and fix those flaws, with what little we know so far about molecular biology, then doesn't that suggest they're pretty dumb and obvious flaws? If an average new user notices something screwy with his new copy of Windows and can tell you how to fix it then don't you begin to suspect some major goof in Redmond? If you happened to notice that they forgot to put wheels on SpaceShipOne, wouldn't you start wondering whether Burt had been drinking a lot the night before he OK'd the final design? If flaws can be noticed and fixed by beginners, the overall engineered quality of the product is a little in doubt, no?

Posted by Orlando at October 12, 2004 10:50 PM

the problem with "intelligent design" is that it sets up an infinite recursion. This was discussed over on www.gnxp.com some time ago.

Intelligent design is based on the premise that biological systems are of such irreducible complexity that they could not have come about through natural process, they are the product of intelligent design. Of course, the designer itself is also and example of a system of such complexity that it would have to be the product of design, which involks the existance of another designer, and so on. This is the infinite recursion.

I have yet to hear a valid response to this.

Posted by Kurt at October 13, 2004 02:16 PM

Once again, Orlando, you are not paying attention to what I wrote. Today, as in this point in time, not 20, 30 or 50 years from now, can ANYONE build a machine with the capabilities of a human? NO, of course not. Could we be designed better, sure. But my egotism doesn't extend to criticizing design flaws in something I am unable to duplicate in the first place. Or would that be arrogance?

Posted by Bill Maron at October 13, 2004 02:57 PM

How do you get everything from a small ball of energy at the big bang where a long list of "natural laws" have to be just right to allow the universe that we know to exist? Or how do you get life from a simple mixture of orginic chemicals on the surface of the earth 4 billion years ago? To say that life came from outer space from another planet or a comet just takes the answer further back in time. Really the only answer that the non-intelligent design folks can fall back on is that given enough time, (ie: a long,long,long, long time) a lot of super rare series of events can occur. And these events have to occur over and over again in the right sequence for life to spontaneous generate. That's a lot of faith in the power of time to let inert matter leap up the thermodynamic stairway in to a living system!

Of course the creation folks also have some problems even within the bible, where there's a gap between Gen 1.1 and 1.2, "Gen 1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Gen 1:2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness [was] upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."

Well the Creator first makes a earth without form and empty? I guess the Creator didn't get it right the first time or had a little repair job to do? Maybe He took his sweet time getting around to doing the job right in Gen 1:5-1-31? Who knows?

Posted by Larry in Woodstock at October 14, 2004 05:52 AM

Why sensible Christians fight evolution is beyond me.

The idea that nonliving matter evolved into life suggests that the existence of humanity is an accident. If there is no purpose to humanity, there is no objective basis for ethics. You can prove that such-and-such injures somebody, but in a purely naturalistic existence you can't prove that that individual matters - only that he or she exists.

The opposition to speciation is a bit different. Whereas the logical conclusion of the former challenges the natural human inclination to assume the existence of objective right and wrong, speciation challenges the human inclination to assume that humans have some sort of purpose that animals don't. If humans are merely upgraded animals, then why, for instance, is slavery wrong if it's okay to own a dog? Why can't I buy a CNN reporter to fetch the paper and catch frisbees for me?

Those are just the metaphysical reasons. There's also scientific reasons - for starters, reconciling evolution with the laws of thermodynamics, proving that a process exists without having observed it in action or having recreated it in the lab, and the apparent ridiculousness of the idea that information (such as one finds in DNA) can spontaneously generate.

Posted by Alan K. Henderson at October 16, 2004 11:46 PM

Orlando and Alan, I know exactly why sensible Christians fight evolution....because they want all the answers given to them. They want it easy. They claim to search for the truth in earnest but then give up at the beginning and settle for a fairy tale or nice bed time story. The entire story of christendom was written to sell, and sell it has. Sorry, but it is a childish notion at best to expect that there is some vastly important objective "purpose" out there that humanity is conforming with. I know what my purpose in life is, as an individual, and I don't believe in God at all. This purpose is my great passion and it drives me forward into the great sea of unknowns in life. It gives me a priceless code of ethics that instructs how I should live on a daily basis. Where did I get this all encompassing purpose then, if not from a god. I created it, that's where. I know I exist. I know you exist. I have simply chosen to believe in my own purpose. It is to do as much as I can, in the short life I have left, to further the survival of the human race for as long as possible. Period. End of story. Show me a purpose more noble and more real than that and I will glady join you. It matters not how we got here. What matters is that we are here, now, but that we hang by a very precarious thread to our existence collectively. What a cosmic tragedy if we allow our species to be snuffed out in the dawn of our civilization. How many other civilizations have met a similar fate? It is all worth finding out. I believe in us.

Posted by Davig at October 18, 2004 01:34 AM

"Because they want all the answers given to them" is a rather shortsighted perception of theism. (You think a religion with the doctrine of the Trinity wants to make the answers easy???) Christianity in particular never pretended to have all the answers, although a few sects offer micromanagerial to-do lists. Heck, "all the answers" couldn't fit in the complete works of Isaac Asimov, much less the 900-something pages of the Bible.

My past statements on purpose address not the subjective individual purpose that Davig is talking about but the objective purpose that applies to all humans. Or at least a subset of it - morality, right and wrong, that humans owe each other adherence to a code of decent behaviour. (Christianity extends the definition of objective purpose to include fellowship with God.) If life is just an accident, then why should we be obligated to refrain from harming each other? Orlando asked why sensible Christians are put off by evolution, and this is one of the reasons. Any theory that implies that there is no basis for objective morality is horrifying.

But is the implication correct? Many opponents (and proponents) view "scientism" - the belief that only the physical universe and nothing external to it exists - as the logical conclusion of evolution. Evolution need not preclude the idea that the supernatural exists, and need not assume that everything evolves. (One might propose an alternative to "punctuated equilibrium" theory - with no approval from Stephen Jay Gould - and suggest that history experienced long periods of evolution interrupted by spurts of creation.) Neither evangelical Christians nor evangelical atheists are eager to engage in such speculation.

Posted by Alan K. Henderson at October 18, 2004 04:07 AM

This may seem impolite, but I AM GOING TO SAY IT ANYWAY. We are poorly designed. Who in their right mind would design a creature where the pleasure areas are placed an inch away from the waste disposal outlets. It IS poor design!!

Unless, of course, the blind clock maker has no sense of propriety----or smell.

Intelligent Design. I do not think so!!

Posted by PERICLES at October 18, 2004 11:58 AM

Pericles' argument reminds me of a woman (I forget her name) who was once published by Insight Magazine and who once lectured at the University of Texas at Arlington (I was in attendance). She argues that the less-than-ideal structure of many life forms proves evolution. As examples she cites a wading bird species' lack of feather waterproofing, and the dubious engineering of the humans lumbar region. This metaphysical argument is rather presumptuous about how thorough a Creator woudl be in lifeform engineering standards.

At least humans weren't created by the person who invented COBOL.

Posted by Alan K. Henderson at October 18, 2004 11:39 PM

All of the answers MOST people are interested in in life can fit on one page. Why am I here, how did I get here, where am I going, why am I going there?, etc. Christianity, and most other religions answer these questions with ease and extreme simplicity. God did it all.

The truth is we just don't know. That, in itself, is horrifying to people. That is why we need to create our purpose ourselves, collectively not individually. We all hate uncertainty. Vulnerable beings that we are, it is understandable why fear rules our lives. One little misstep in life and we could be history.

Evolution has endowed us with the ability to adapt to this ridiculous predicament. How can a species so intelligent be so weak? Simple say the religious one, just pretend that we are not. In fact, just pretend we are eternal. Problem solved. Now life is just a dream and we don't have to worry anymore. The facts are that extinction is the rule on Earth not the exception. Now that is a lot more horrifying than the lack of an objective moral code. The fact that, no matter how we treat each other, we are destined for extinction as a species. That is a problem worthy of solving that needs no god.

The solution may, in fact, depend on improving our own moral codes, which we do daily in the practice of law, but god and religion, which predate most of our modern current legal sytems, are simply no longer needed except by those who want it easy and simple. Witness the democratic elections in Afghanistan by a people long imprisoned by religion. We can make a way for our own long term survival as a species if we put away simplistic notions and stop accepting self imposed limits on our nature. I may die today, or fifty years from now, but the incredible human race could live on forever.

Posted by davig at October 19, 2004 10:40 AM

Poetic gobbledygook. Davig never gives a direct answer to the question that many anti-evolutionists cannot reconcile with evolution (or, more specifically, the "scientism" with which it is commonly associated): how do you prove that right and wrong exist? We may like the fact that elections are going where no ballot box has gone before, but how do you prove objectively that it is good?

Both religionists and agnostics can agree that there is some sort of authority that governs human ethics, judging that conclusion to be the likeliest explanation for the fact that human thought is rooted in moral assumptions, and that humans cannot live consistently with moral relativism - although they certainly disagree on whether that authority can be identified. Atheists, if they disbelieve not only in God but in all things supernatural, are in an intellectual bind; their worldview contains no possible source for objective morality.

Davig has an excessively simplistic view of Christianity. The Big Questions can be summarized quite briefly, but the answers aren't always simple. Part of the answer is "don't hurt anyone," and what constitutes harm - on an emotional, physcial, and spiritual scale - is quite involved.

It should be said that Christianity doesn't address all of the Big Questions. It is concerned with human ethics and reconciliation with God. It is silent on subjective purpose. Outside of its lists of restrictions and certain proactive measures to benefit self and/or others, it has no answers for "What should I do with my life." Why? Because subjective purpose (that doesn't violate the restrictions) is irrelevant to its mission.

Christianity also claims God created the universe. This is no more simplistic than saying that purely naturalistic forces did the job. "But evolution is a complicated set of processes." And divine creation isn't? And all the godzillions of divine decisions involved in such a project? Just because something can't be explained by science doesn't mean that it's simplistic - take ethics, for example.

What is simplistic is davig's critique of Christianity. A belief system should be criticized on the basis of specific doctrines, nto because it is "too simple."

Posted by Alan K. Henderson at October 19, 2004 10:40 PM

Some people will refuse to believe that there is no absolute right and wrong in the universe no matter how blatantly obvious it is. It is simply too "horrifying" to them. "God already created it" is merely a fable, a very nice bedtime story. Science has disproven it as much as it disproved the similar notion that the Earth was the center of the universe. The truth is good.

As the man of faith sees the human "conscience" as strong evidence of the existence of god and a universal standard of ethics, the man of science sees as nothing more than a biological code of behavior that helped humans survive in tightly woven social groups. This genetic programming helped us hunt and fight together, and live to see another day. But it is far from absolute because it is transformed by the continual changes in human culture and its laws.

But I already know none of the scientific evidence for human soacial programming (read Stephen Pinker) will be researched by the man of faith because he is practicing the opposite of science. Instead of being rigorous about disproving his testable theories as a man of science would, he takes his untestable theory and grasps at straws to prove it. I hate to say it, but this is the very definition of intellectual dishonesty. Faith is not honesty.

One thing we can probably agree on because it has nothing to do with science, is that the human race needs a universal code of ethics. We can start by agreeing that we all need to work together to survive in the long run. It does not exist today, as evidenced by all of the conflicting laws and cultural differences in the world. But the human species did not evolve its biological behavioral code in the same environment that exists in the world today. We must adapt or perish. The man of faith cannot even see the problem clearly, so he therefor cannot propose a solution.

That is why ancient religion cannot save the world. There is no universal absolute good and evil or code of ethics, it does not exist, but we need one if the human race is to survive. Only the man of science can support this and it is he who can truly contribute to the progress of humanity. We need a new ethical foundation.

Posted by davig at October 21, 2004 12:10 PM

That is why ancient religion cannot save the world. There is no universal absolute good and evil or code of ethics, it does not exist, but we need one if the human race is to survive...We need a new ethical foundation.

So if there's no absolute morality, then why should we care whether or not the human race survives?

Posted by Alan K. Henderson at October 21, 2004 09:44 PM

Because we ARE the creators. I choose to care about human survival and an ethic that promotes it regardless of how subjective it all is. I created this ethic within myself because I wanted a higher purpose. Others have chosen to care as well. Most in this generation never will. They will never even understand the issue. We don't need a mythical god to inform us because we have already informed ouselves.

There is a distinct possibility that nobody needs to care because a world full of self-interested individuals will seek to perpetuate themselves and their selfish interests with very little ethical code whatsoever other than our system of laws. I think the latter is tragic. So much more meaning and purpose in life is found when one chooses to care about something as awesomely beautiful as the civilization we have built and each and every person in it.

I believe common ground can be found amongst enough people in the world, across many cultures, so that a subjective ethic of long term human survival could become pervasive. The environmentalist movement, although often misguided, has the beginnings of this. It will take a lot more education and teaming up together with others who have chosen to care.

It seems that those who care the most, by sheer numbers, are trapped in old religions that have inadvertantly blinded them to the truth about the new reality of this issue. They need to be liberated but I doubt it will happen anytime soon. Maybe in a few generations. For now, those who have seen the light will be found outside the major religions and probably in more scientifically oriented pursuits. But it is still a small minority of them. It doesn't pay the bills.

Until some great global tragedy forces all to care only those who actively seek a higher calling will become interested, on this planet anyway. That is important to remember because all of the scientific evidence humanity has accumulated leads us to believe that there are other intelligent civilizations out there somewhere in the stars. Perhaps they too have struggled for their own suvival and narrowly missed a disasterous end. I can see a day far into the future when maybe we are cooperating with other civilizations in the universe to survive. But we will never have the chance if we don't make it here first. Care to join me?

Posted by davig at October 22, 2004 10:56 AM

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