But Will it Sell in Peoria?
by Steve PetermannIf the real controversy over intelligent design is not about science but competing worldviews then it will only be resolved in the populace. But the adoption or subscription to a worldview depends on how compelling it is in its many facets. Question is, will it sell? Obviously there are different markets for a worldview. Academia is one, the scientific community is another, and then there is the general public. While most people probably already have a firmly held worldview, there are also those willing to change if presented with a compelling enough case. But what about in Peoria. Peoria has often been thrown up as mainstream America. If you can't sell something in Peoria, you're basically out of luck in America. Now from many surveys it is clear that mainstream America already holds a teleological worldview. Since most Americans either participate in a religious tradition or are "spiritual but not religious" that more than likely entails a teleological view. The real question in the debate is whether the ateleologists, the Darwinians, can sell their worldview to mainstream America.
So what ideas are they trying to sell? Here's some representative quotes:
"..the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."1
"Modern evolutionary biology tells us that nature has no detectable purposive forces of any kind.. Modern science directly implies hat the world is organized strictly in accordance with deterministic principles or chance. There are no purposive principles whatsoever in nature. There are no gods and no designing forces that are rationally detectable.
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Second modern science directly implies that there are no inherent moral or ethical laws.
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Third, human beings are marvelously complex machines. The individual human becomes an ethical person by means of two mechanisms: deterministic heredity interacting with deterministic environmental influences.  That's all there is.
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Freewill, as traditionally conceived, the freedom to make uncoerced and unpredictable choices among alternative possible courses of action, simply does not exist. The evolutionary process cannot produce a being that is truly free to make choices.
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The universe cares nothing for us. Humans are nothing even in the evolutionary process on earth. There is no ulitimate meaning for humans."2
So let see what the sales pitch might look like:
- How the cosmos has and will unfold is based on chance and necessity. There is no ultimate purpose to the cosmos. Your own particular sense of purpose is an important psychological adaptation but has no cosmic significance.
- You are and act the way you do because of the genes you inherited and because of influence of the mechanistic emergence of the culture around you. Biologically you are just like a protozoa, just more complex.
The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes.3
- Any sense of optimism or gratitude you may have for life is an adaptive response that evolved to make you psychologically fit to pass on your genes on to the next generation. If you really want to direct that gratitude somewhere direct it towards serendipity.
- You do not really have any true internationality (i.e. goal orientation) but are merely the product of neural processes in your brain. Those processes are also the product of mechanistic forces.
- Your common sense notion of personal free will is mistaken. You have the same type of freedom as the mars rover.
But what if we think of humans as machines like Mars Rover that have a dimension of freedom? They can go round rocks without having to ask for instructions. Then in this light, it seems to me that freedom is possible "“ perhaps not the freedom that every religious person demands but certainly a robust freedom that would satisfy those Calvinists (like Jonathan Edwards) that insisted that nothing happens outside god's unbending laws.4
- If you want to have religious feelings, go ahead. They may improve your health and are another adaptive product of evolution. Just don't take them literally.
- Eventually all will pass away, with no ultimate meaning to things.
- Don't worry if this all sounds rather stark. At least you can revel in the fact that you know the truth about how things work. Random Chance, necessity, and the survival of the fittest.
Will this sell in Peoria? Not! Question is why would anyone want to subscribe to such a miserable worldview? I can see how a truth seeker might if there were no rational, defensible alternative but there are. ID and modern religious frameworks offer logical and scientific support for teleological worldviews.
References:
1 Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes (Basic Books, 1993)
2 William B. Provine, "Progress in Evolution and Meaning in Life," in Evolutionary Progress, ed. Matthew H. Nitecki (University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 64
3 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1990)
4 Michael Ruse here
May 29th, 2005 at 4:00 am
This is all very good and democratic, but doesn't it miss the point that whether something is true or not isn't connected with how many people believe it? Most of medieval Europe might have thought the world was flat, but that didn't change the fact it was a sphere.
In NW Europe, although people haven't thought out the implications of an atheistic worldview, it is largely accepted without question now. Young people are perhaps the fastest to understand the implications - and they go out and party - "drink to forget the coming storm" - because - well, why not? What difference does it make? They are perhaps the people who are acting consistently with what they believe.
According to Francis Schaeffer - probably the first Christian to start thinking through issues of worldviews - the key thing was to bring people to the point of tension - to show people how their worldview was inconsistent with reality. This isn't a "nice" process - people cherish their worldviews, and it can be an intellectual/emotional crisis when you discover that one doesn't work. It certainly isn't politically correct, and it may require as a starting point very introductory lessons in logic - you are implying that two contradictory things can't both be true! But that is the nature of truth, and its pursuit, which ought to be the ultimate human pursuit.
Comment by Exile From Groggs — May 29, 2005 @ 4:00 am
May 29th, 2005 at 8:41 am
Hi Exile for Groogs,
I don't believe the issue in my post was truth. It was really about how non-compelling the Darwinian worldview is. It just won't market beyond it's limited group.
However, the issue of truth is an important one. Since I don't subscribe to the absolute truth of any tradition (or scripture) my take on religious knowledge is a quite a bit more uncertain and fallibilistic than most would like. It is my feeling that human beings are inherently able to detect the truth about things but not infallibly. Since they participate in reality in its depth they also have some purchase on it. However fragmentary or imperfect that knowledge is, it still constitutes the truth of things. It may not be as clean a processes as going to scripture (which really isn't all that clean either) but, in my opinion, it's all we have. Accordingly I do think that "the masses" to have some purchase on the truth. It may go very wrong on some aspects (a flat earth) but that does not invalidate the body of knowledge in the gestalt or the fallibilistic process of discovering the truth. After all, most people today are not animists or polytheists.
Yes, aren't young people smart! They get it. They see the implications of a non-teleological view and act on it. However, the nontelelogists better be trembling in their boots when this group finally realizes that worldview is neither true, compelling, nor benign.
Yes, creating a cognitive dissonance is a key to changing a worldview whether that dissonance comes from within or outside one's self. Although I'm not sure where I suggested two contradictory things can't be true, that is my sentiment. I believe that reality is inherently rational (while also transcending it). I therefore accept "the law of non-contradiction" as an important rule for truth seeking. However, I do agree with you, if what you mean is that there are apparent contradictions in an idea or concept that are really only contradictory fragments in the whole that can be flushed out with some sort of Hegelian dialectic or Goodmanian reflective equilibrium. Seems to me a combination of both coupled with some good old fashioned empiricism is the path to warranted belief.
Comment by Steve Petermann — May 29, 2005 @ 8:41 am
May 29th, 2005 at 5:19 pm
Thanks, Steve. I continue to be fascinated at the diversity of dissent from straightforward naturalism: please excuse me if I make unwarranted assumptions.
I dissent further from "good old-fashioned" empiricism as a process - my personal epistemology follows Schaeffer (who in turn I would argue follows the Bible….!) in that true knowledge is possible not because of confidence in my own perception, but because there is an external absolute, which means that my observations are a true reflection of the universe (though not exhaustive). In the same way, it is possible to come to a true (though not exhaustive) knowledge of the external absolute, if it has chosen to make itself known.
(PS For the record, it's GROGGS, BTW - the reason why is buried in my blogsite in about October 2004 ….)
Comment by Exile From Groggs — May 29, 2005 @ 5:19 pm
May 29th, 2005 at 7:58 pm
Sorry Exile from Groggs for the misspelling.
I'm not sure why you find this so fascinating. As I see it there are many who find themselves today in a cognitive dissonance. Those so minded wish to honor both the picture of reality that science offers and the picture that religion offers. To do this requires challenging both pictures.
You say you dissent from empiricism but in the same voice you claim that your "observations are a true reflection of the universe" because there is an external absolute. I concur but not because of some scriptural authority but because as Tillich says, I am grasped and shaken by that ultimate reality. Religious conviction emerges not because of some carte blanche authority given to scripture or some other human artifact but because such artifacts are transparent to the divine. It is the epiphany within the divine life that compels us to believe. Empiricism is just one data point in the effort to understand and embrace that depth.
Comment by Steve Petermann — May 29, 2005 @ 7:58 pm
June 1st, 2005 at 1:23 pm
Great conversation, and I hope not to ruin it. Steve, your comments about absolute truth intrigue me. I appreciate the existentialist perspective. If truth is not personalized and lived, then what good is it? But I tend to think that absolutism is still valid, and even necessary, in light of that perspective,. The problem, as I've come to understand it, is that absolutism (the belief that truth is universal and public), must be distinguished from infalliblism (the belef that we know what we know with certainty, or that knowledge must proceed from an infallible foundation). One can be a fallible absolutist, in that we may always be revising our knowledge of truth, without the truth itself changing. We could be wrong, but the very concept of wrongness requires some graded absolutism, the belief that there exists a non-question begging way to arbitrate between rival epistemological claims. (Of course, we *are* certain of some truths, like the basic mathematical and metaphysical kinds (2 + 2 = 4; something exists))
Comment by ariel — June 1, 2005 @ 1:23 pm
June 1st, 2005 at 2:08 pm
Hi Ariel,
Never.
I am in full agreement although I think there will always be question-begging. An aphorism I use to describe a religious stance that affirms the absolute but accepts our fragmentary purchase on it is a faithing fallibilism. The ultimate by definition is infinite and impossible for us to fathom completely. Our grasp will always be fragmentary and ambiquous. However, I believe that we can feel warranted to believe something and act on it if we endeavor to inform our intutitions see here for a fuller treatment of the issue of religious knowledge.
Comment by Steve Petermann — June 1, 2005 @ 2:08 pm
June 1st, 2005 at 6:01 pm
Hi Steve,
Darwinism won't sell in Peoria, but I find ID, properly packaged will sell to to the Atheists, for the very reasons implicit in what you wrote.
Patrick Glyn, Harvard PhD, in "God, the Evidence" wrote:
"I had decided on the basis of intensive philosophical study, that there was no God in a personal sense, no afterlife, no soul. I embraced skepticism at an early age when I first learned of Darwin's theory of evolution in, of places, Catholic grade school.
By the time I received my PhD (at Harvard) at the end of the 1970s, I was a convinced atheist.
The embrace of atheism did not bring joy. Somewhere, I had clung to the hope that I might be proven wrong. The day I grasped that the entire tradition of Western philosophy, from ancient to modern times, was essentially a refutation of the idea of God — (the day I grasped this) was not a happy one. But the conclusion seemed inescapable. "
But then he writes of his conversion:
"
[I had] an encounter with love sufficiently deep to bring an intimation of the divine… I encountered Gabriele. Someone once said that it is hard to fall in love without thinking of God. Such was my experience. Ours was a wonderful romance that would culminate in marriage two years later. But these romantic feelings pointed me toward something deeper…. For reasons that I hardly understood, I began to utter from time to time a little prayer of thanksgiving….
I turned to the physical sciences and discovered that the random, materialistic universe had effectively been refuted or overtaken by an entirely new vision. It was clear that the old framework which we proud intellectuals had based all our atheism and anxiety was coming apart at the seems. I broadened my search to psychology and medicine, and found parallel developments there. Gradually, I realized that in the twenty years since I opted for philosophical atheism, a vast, systematic literature had emerged that effectively refuted my atheistic outlook.
The discovery that I had been so dead wrong about the fundamentals of life sent me into a bit of a psychological tailspin. I realized how wrong I had been, how selfish, how arrogant — I will say it — how sinful. It took time, reading, contemplation, reasoning, prayer and a great deal of extremely patient help (and good humor from Gabriele). There were also spiritual experiences along the way"”beckonings, intuitions, and even minor miracles…"
Salvador
Comment by Salvador T. Cordova — June 1, 2005 @ 6:01 pm
June 6th, 2005 at 3:31 am
They're called endorphins!!!
But seriously, the "embrace of atheism" didn't bring him joy? Mine neither, nor pain, anguish or heartburn. And that's a BIG whoop-te-do. I'm sorry, but I find that statement totally absurd - hence my registration!
But to the OP.
Steve makes it sound like scientists are supposed to be like slicked-up car salesmen (and some ID promoters) and make swamp land in Florida sound like the investment opportunity of a lifetime.
I for one, don't care if I'm in the "in" group and don't particularly care what the popular clique thinks or wants. I never have. Several, lets say, charismatic leaders have shown how easy it is to sell the "public" a bill of goods, getting them to do such things as committing atrocities against ethnicities, to drinking the Kool-Aid.
So a good policy to my thinking is to find out what the "public" wants, and do the opposite. And the heck with what sells in Peoria!!
Comment by Doug McGee — June 6, 2005 @ 3:31 am