Try and Try Again
by MikeGeneRemember Intelligent Thought: Science Versus The Intelligent Design Movement? This was the book where leading scientists all over the world dropped what they were doing in order to help Save Civilization:
There are examples in history of the collapse of great civilizations. There is no particular reason that the United States should be exempt from historical forces. The Visigoths are at the gates. Will we let them in?
Well, it looks like they failed, as evidenced by the need for a new book. Another crop of scientists have risen to the challenge in Scientists Confront Intelligent Design and Creationism:
Moreover, in a time when creationist textbooks continue to appear in classrooms and the president encourages educators to "teach both sides" of the argument, the book presents a blueprint for improving science education in this country to ensure that every student understands the science that grounds our understanding of evolution.
Creationist textbooks continue to appear in classrooms? Can anyone provide the names of the schools where creationist textbooks continue to appear in their classrooms?
March 29th, 2007 at 10:07 pm
It is amusing the way he doesn't realise that he is actually the barbarian at the gate based on the history of other cultures that have collapsed.
Comment by thesciphishow — March 29, 2007 @ 10:07 pm
March 29th, 2007 at 10:22 pm
Lexington Christian Academy, and probably many other christian academies throughout the nation.
Comment by Aagcobb — March 29, 2007 @ 10:22 pm
March 29th, 2007 at 10:37 pm
So the best you can come up with is a private religious school? Try again.
Comment by MikeGene — March 29, 2007 @ 10:37 pm
March 29th, 2007 at 11:15 pm
Personally, I'm pretty disappointed in most Creationist textbooks (and the lay material is even worse, and the children's material is downright HORRID, with the small exception of the Marvels of Creation series). Todd Wood's Understanding the Pattern of Life is pretty good, but it is for an older crowd. I've thought about writing one just to have something decent for my kids when they get older.
Comment by johnnyb — March 29, 2007 @ 11:15 pm
March 30th, 2007 at 12:36 am
Origin of the Species would be an example of a biology text with plenty of overt religious and theological claims Mike.
Presumably you'd find that in the odd classroom.
Comment by thesciphishow — March 30, 2007 @ 12:36 am
March 30th, 2007 at 1:39 am
thesciphishow:
Paul Nelson makes an excellent example of that here.
Comment by johnnyb — March 30, 2007 @ 1:39 am
March 30th, 2007 at 2:10 am
"Creationist textbooks continue to appear in classrooms? Can anyone provide the names of the schools where creationist textbooks continue to appear in their classrooms?" –MikeGene
The problem with providing credible locations for creationist textbooks is that they are capable of popping in and out of existence at the whim of the creator. Homework assignments must be incredibly frustrating…
Comment by great_ape — March 30, 2007 @ 2:10 am
March 30th, 2007 at 7:00 am
great_ape writes:
You're mistaken. Textbooks came about through an evolutionary process. It resulted from an adaptive response and the relevant genes are the subject of a search.
Comment by Bradford — March 30, 2007 @ 7:00 am
March 30th, 2007 at 10:12 am
This nonsense.
What must really be frustrating for them is that Americans have the highest scientific literacy and the lowest acceptance of Darwinism in the developed world.
Comment by Jehu — March 30, 2007 @ 10:12 am
March 30th, 2007 at 11:06 am
I call BS. There may be religious and theological implications to certain readers of OoS, but those hardly qualify as "overt religious and theological claims".
But then maybe my recollection is foggy.
Comment by K Klein — March 30, 2007 @ 11:06 am
March 30th, 2007 at 11:18 am
Hey K Klein,
You need to get reacquainted with the Origin. Much of Darwin's "one long argument" is explicitly theological. The following, for instance, from the last chapter (14, in the 1st edition):
Use any online edition of the Origin, and enter the search terms "Creator," "theory of creation," "created," etc.
The Origin of Species is now (March 2007) arguably inadmissible in public school biology classrooms, because of its significant theological content.
Comment by P A Nelson — March 30, 2007 @ 11:18 am
March 30th, 2007 at 2:35 pm
Mr. Nelson,
I fail to see how the quote you provided constitutes an "overt religious and theological claim." Just because Darwin may use the word "Creator" doesn't automatically make his argument overtly religious or theological. If "laws impressed on matter by the Creator" constitutes significant theological content, then theology is more insubstantial than I thought it to be.
Googling OoS may get you a passing grade in creationist quote mine school, but to the rest of the world context matters.
Comment by K Klein — March 30, 2007 @ 2:35 pm
March 30th, 2007 at 3:07 pm
K Klein wrote:
Nancy Cartwright, a noted philosopher of science at the London School of Economics and UC San Diego, argues in a recent paper that the concept of a law of nature cannot be made sense of without appeal to God.
This is how she starts off:
Comment by stunney — March 30, 2007 @ 3:07 pm
March 30th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
Hi Mike,
Why? You asked a question and I answered it. Isn't it bad enough that thousands of kids in christian academies are being taught BS?
p.s. I should have remembered Bob Jones University.
Comment by Aagcobb — March 30, 2007 @ 4:34 pm
March 30th, 2007 at 4:47 pm
K Klein wrote:
Here's what Darwin is arguing: God should have made organisms indirectly, via natural laws, rather than as direct or special creations. That's the context in question (see the sentence immediately preceding the passage I cited: "Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created"). It is consistent with God's character, Darwin argues, and therefore a superior position to hold, that God not violate the natural laws he established, a point Darwin stresses in his notebooks.
Remove the theology from Darwin's argument, and it collapses. You'll see this if you try expressing Darwin's point in your own language, but then strike out any reference to God's establishment of natural laws.
Comment by P A Nelson — March 30, 2007 @ 4:47 pm
March 30th, 2007 at 6:51 pm
Actually that is a pretty deeply theological claim inspite of your thoughts that it is not. The idea requires some unpacking and has really far reaching implications, but that doesn't do anything to make it a "less theological" claim but a more theological one.
Comment by thesciphishow — March 30, 2007 @ 6:51 pm
March 30th, 2007 at 7:08 pm
I agree. Perhaps this signals the folly of The Dawkins Approach, where an unwillingness to engage "fairyology" means the critic is out of his depth and he doesn't even know it.
Comment by MikeGene — March 30, 2007 @ 7:08 pm
March 30th, 2007 at 7:13 pm
Hi Aagcobb,
Fair point. But I doubt very much that Scientists Confront Intelligent Design and Creationism is going to do a single thing to influence what is taught in a Christian academy.
So let's make sure people understand that "in a time when creationist textbooks continue to appear in classrooms " no one is talking about public schools and a threat to science. They are talking about what happens in some church schools. yawn.
Comment by MikeGene — March 30, 2007 @ 7:13 pm
March 30th, 2007 at 7:17 pm
What, no replies???
Creationist materials make it into the hands of public school kids, but they make it through channels outside of the public school system. It is perfectly legal.
Some material can be accessed in the public school but it has to go through some hoops and it has to be somewhat below the radar. I personally know science teachers getting pro-ID and creationist literature into the hands of kids via legal loopholes. However, it can't officially be recognized as part of the curricula, but rather materials which students voluntary chose to study….
Or it could be part of a non-science course.
But more effective are personal interactions. For example, the Washington post reported here:
Perfect opportunity to hand out literature, eh?
Sal
Comment by Salvador T. Cordova — March 30, 2007 @ 7:17 pm
March 30th, 2007 at 9:22 pm
K Klein, you need to re-read The Origin. Over and over again, Darwin props up his position with the idea that God wouldn't have done it that way — an explicitly theological position that is carried on valiantly by his disciples today. Cornelius Hunter does a good job of detailing this, if you want to check out his work.
Comment by Eric Anderson — March 30, 2007 @ 9:22 pm
March 30th, 2007 at 9:29 pm
sciphishow, replying to K Klein's comment that "If 'laws impressed on matter by the Creator' constitutes significant theological content, then theology is more insubstantial than I thought it to be.", wrote:
Personally, I would not phrase it this way. I think it better to say it constitutes significant philosophical, not theological, content. Theology assumes God's existence. Philosophy debates God's existence. And Darwin's remark is indicative, in my view, of a philosophical intuition of the significance of the physical world's lawful ordering.
These days, when we know much more about physics than anyone did in Darwin's time, such intuition goes even deeper. Physicists, in trying to understand mindless physical stuff, notice that it obeys astonishingly elegant mathematical rules. It's not just random chaotic stuff. It is intelligibly ordered—–those 'laws impressed on matter' that Darwin talked about.
In fact, intelligible order appears to be irreducible even within the most fundamental levels of physical reality. Let's say string theory or something akin to it turns out to be true. Perhaps the most astonishing thing about that will be the fact that we can, and must, describe that most basic level of the physical world with the severely abstract mathematics of Lie groups, Calabi-Yau spaces, and the like.
But this profound (and non-obvious) mathematical intelligibility is logically inseparable from the concept of rational mind, because being intelligible just means being understandable by a rational mind.
A rock bottom truth, confirmed again and again in the last century and a half of science (the post-Darwin era, if one may express it so), is that in the physical universe, we find this property of being understandable by the 'purest' reasoning (i.e., mathematical reasoning) of which our minds are capable, attaching to everything we find, from black holes to quarks.
The most rational inference to make from this fact—the ineliminabilty of matter's fitness to be understood by rational minds—is much more suggestive of theism as the best ultimate explanatory hypothesis, than of materialism, because, as the very fact of the 'doability' of Big Bang cosmology demonstrates, matter's intelligibility came into being with matter itself. It was there from the beginning.
It might be different if I had any confidence that materialism could explain the existence of rational minds. Some people have something like a blind faith that it can. I think they're making a fundamental logical mistake. It seems to me there is a basic failure of reasoning in thinking that materialism can explain reason itself. It's not just a question of not having enough data, or needing to do more experiments, etc. Nor is it a question of a 'God of the gaps'. Rather, explaining the existence of rational mindedness is not even possibly the 'filling in' of some contingent gap within our current scientific knowledge of the physical world. Mathematical reason, the rules and truths of logic and of set theory, the fundamental norms of rational thinking, starting with the law of non-contradiction—the rational content of all these structures of thought cannot simply be generated by contingent material events or processes; for no contingent factual statement about the physical world entails the existence of any objective normative property of thought. And reason is simply not reason if it is not trading in the currency of the objective norms of thought. The materialist conception of reason inevitably ends up being exposed as counterfeit.
To suggest otherwise is to make a category error. The materialist project of naturalizing reason is like the project of trying to discover the color of ideas, or the temperature of numbers.
I think analogous remarks apply to the question of finding a physical explanation of morality and other forms of value. As with the case of reason, a complete description of the physical world logically cannot entail a prescriptive conclusion. Reason and morality prescribe how we should think and how we should act.
Comment by stunney — March 30, 2007 @ 9:29 pm
March 30th, 2007 at 9:54 pm
LOL, Sal just destroyed Mike Gene's argument.
Comment by nickmatzke — March 30, 2007 @ 9:54 pm
March 30th, 2007 at 10:01 pm
Yeah and western civilization is about to fall.:sad:
Comment by Bradford — March 30, 2007 @ 10:01 pm
March 31st, 2007 at 9:55 am
P A Nelson wrote:
Darwin is not making an argument here. He is stating an opinion ("to my mind") that a theory that attributes the production and extinction of species to natural causes is more in keeping with the laws of nature. Frankly, I think that is a rather non-controversial claim that he needn't have couched so tentatively.
Well, I think I just did.
sciphishow said:
I don't deny that what he said has theological implications, but that's far different that making a theological claim. The empirical argument in favor of a spherical Earth has implications for some simple-minded theologies, but that doesn't make it a theological claim.
Lots of modern science has theological implications, but that is an observer-caused effect, not an element of the science itself.
Comment by K Klein — March 31, 2007 @ 9:55 am
March 31st, 2007 at 10:36 am
K Klein wrote:
But that's not the argument — call it an opinion if you want, it's functionally an argument — Darwin is making.
Those "authors of highest eminence" Darwin is trying to persuade knew all about the laws of nature. They simply denied that such laws were sufficient to explain the origin of species, which they saw as requiring God's direct intervention. Darwin obtains no philosophical (or theological) leverage with that audience by saying that a theory of natural causes for the origin of species is consistent with natural laws. So what? would have been their reply.
He can get some leverage, however — which is precisely why he structures his argument in this passage as he does [Darwin was a meticulous rhetorician] — by stressing the deeper theological consistency of his own theory. God creates via natural laws, not directly.
Compare:
1. Investigator A: This house burned down because of a lightning strike, because a lightning strike is a natural event.
2. Investigator B: Yeah, lightning strikes are natural events, but so what? The evidence indicates arson.
versus
1. Investigator A: This house burned down because of a lightning strike, because we're dealing with a subtle, supremely economical Agent who acts — as you, B, already believe — mainly through natural events.
2. Investigator B: Hm. I DO believe that. I'll have to rethink the evidence, which previously I saw as pointing to arson [direct action].
Abigail Lustig (UT-Austin) has a very insightful essay in the volume Darwinian Heresies (Cambridge U Press, 2004) where she comments on the continuing role of theological language and concepts in evolutionary biology. She writes:
Here's an exercise. Take the Origin of Species, and black out every passage where Darwin asks the reader, in effect, Why the heck would God have done it that way? Or — as Lustig points out — take many modern evolutionary biology texts, and do the same (e.g., Gould's famous panda's thumb article).
Key arguments disappear under the black ink, and the overall case for evolution via natural causes is greatly weakened. Darwin, and Gould, used theology because it provided a tremendous lever.
Comment by P A Nelson — March 31, 2007 @ 10:36 am
March 31st, 2007 at 1:51 pm
K Klein wrote:
Actually, as soon as one invokes laws of nature, one is making a very controversial claim—one that has been controversial for centuries, and is still. It surprises me how often non-theists appear to think that an ontology that includes laws of nature is non-controversial.
In this post, part of an exchange with Mesk, I talk about the controversy surrounding the concept of 'laws of nature', and attempt to explain the significance of it. Here are some relevant passages, with key points highlighted:
Comment by stunney — March 31, 2007 @ 1:51 pm
March 31st, 2007 at 2:44 pm
Here is the issue about natural laws…
Are there laws? If yes, then they are not physical themselves; and yet they are causes—–so you have transcendent nonphysical stuff causing physical stuff.
If no, then science rests on a mistake since science presumes to discover laws.
Hume held there are no laws, and so both inductive and causal reasoning are not really rationally justified, but are only habitual pragmatic, er, practices.
In contemporary philosophy of science, this latter position equates to instrumentalism—science 'works', so let's not bother our heads about whether it's 'really true'.
But there can be no instrumentalist account of the origin of species; or, if there is, it's not Really True, but just a theory that helps us do some things now that we happen to want to do.
Comment by stunney — March 31, 2007 @ 2:44 pm
March 31st, 2007 at 5:19 pm
Hi Nick,
You wrote, "LOL, Sal just destroyed Mike Gene's argument." But this is simply not true. Salvador mentioned that creationist "materials" sometimes do make it into the hands of public school kids "outside of the public school system." I see no list of schools where "creationist textbooks continue to appear in classrooms." Since you are an important player in the NCSE, certainly you, of all people, can provide us a list of such schools.
Comment by MikeGene — March 31, 2007 @ 5:19 pm
April 1st, 2007 at 8:49 pm
P A Nelson said:
The question of philosophical or theological leverage is irrelevant. OoS was not a philosophical or theological treatise, but a scientific one. The proper question is, does this language gain him scientific leverage? Clearly, by basing his theory on the processes and laws known to science, he does.
The only reason you see theological issues here is because you are reading it from a theological perspective, not a scientific one. I don't deny that the theological issues are real and significant, I only wish to point out that they are issues of your making, not Darwin's.
Why should I have to black them out? Isn't finding out why the world behaves the way it does the whole purpose of the scientific enterprise? Your aversion to "why" questions is a flaw particular to theologians, not scientists.
Comment by K Klein — April 1, 2007 @ 8:49 pm
April 1st, 2007 at 9:11 pm
Nelson: Those "authors of highest eminence" Darwin is trying to persuade knew all about the laws of nature. They simply denied that such laws were sufficient to explain the origin of species, which they saw as requiring God's direct intervention. Darwin obtains no philosophical (or theological) leverage with that audience by saying that a theory of natural causes for the origin of species is consistent with natural laws. So what? would have been their reply.
OoS was penned before knowledge of genetics was put on sound footing. Darwin's view of mechanisms for change was primitive. That's not his fault but it is relevant to your claim that OoS bases a theory on processes and laws known to science.
Darwin's genius lies with his marketing abilities. He recognized that a natural solution was sought and provided a sifting device. That was enough. The term origin can be misleading. He never provided an explanation for the origin of life; only diversification once life existed.
Comment by Bradford — April 1, 2007 @ 9:11 pm
April 1st, 2007 at 9:33 pm
K Klein wrote:
Indeed — with plenty of theology mixed in, such as this:
You say I see theological issues because I'm supposedly reading "from a theological perspective, not a scientific one."
Seems to me I was simply reading the book as it was written. Suppose, for instance, that we try to answer Darwin's question, quoted above from Chapter Six of OoS, about the proper mode of the Creator's action.
Is this a scientific, or theological, question? And who raised it? The reader (me), or the author?
Comment by P A Nelson — April 1, 2007 @ 9:33 pm
April 2nd, 2007 at 10:45 pm
Nick,
To follow Mike's point, the NCSE posted the claim about creationists textbooks in the schools on the NCSE website. I'd expect you'd provide more details about this. You certainly don't want to be relying on me to back your claims would you.
And for the record, I don't consider creationist materials being distributed in churches as an example of creationists textbooks in the public schools. Nor do I consider the students having legal access but not a mandated access to creationist materials as textbooks in the public schools. So I don't view my claims as backing the claim of creationists textbooks in the public school system. No way.
So will the NCSE offer a retraction or clarification or dispute the news article?
Salvador
Comment by Salvador T. Cordova — April 2, 2007 @ 10:45 pm