Mike wrote:

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.

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

The question of philosophical or theological leverage is irrelevant. OoS was not a philosophical or theological treatise, but a scientific one.

Indeed — with plenty of theology mixed in, such as this:

Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man? (p. 188, 1st ed.)

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?

Klein: 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

Funnily enough, a lot of materialists actually deny the existence of laws of nature. Many have been staunch conventionalists about not only laws of nature, but about all property universals and natural kinds….

….Hume, who I think could plausibly qualify as a materialist in most of today's senses, is famous for denying that there is any necessity, real laws, or real causal powers in nature….

….You had earlier said materialism requires laws of nature, which confer on matter its causal properties. I took you to mean that among materialism's set of real things, there were such things as particles, space, etc, and then on top of that these causally potent things which make particles behave in certain ways etc and which we call the laws of nature. I took you to mean that these laws didn't actually themselves possess mass, occupy space or anything like that, but were big, real causal powers and determinants that with iron necessity governed everything in the universe which they themselves effectively transcended.

But now I see that they may in fact possess small amounts of mass, may be only a few inches long, occupy space, and may even be spoken in a thick German accent"”such as is true of the various "descriptions of the way matter behaves", as you now put it. That would be how a Humean materialist would define it; 'laws of nature' really are conventional human descriptions of observed regularities. But as I already mentioned, Hume and Humeans deny the existence of natural necessity or causal powers altogether (on the grounds that it was incompatible with strict empiricism, given that you can't strictly speaking observe such things, only particular events and occurences). Yet, as I said, earlier you seemed to be invoking a very non-Humean account of natural laws; you seemed to be what philosophers would call a realist or more commonly a Platonist about the laws of nature (Hume and modern conventionalists and instrumentalists being known as 'anti-realist' in this respect).

Now, someone who thinks there are real causal laws not made of matter, transcending the whole universe but really governing matter within it, may be right. But that would be a significant break from a fully unified materialist ontology, because one's conception of the world would include non-physical things—-these laws of nature are not on this account physical objects"”but they would, despite not being physical, they would be causes. (God fits this description too"“a non-physical transcendent cause). Humeans would say no, no, a thousand times NO! That would be, er, magical. For Humeans, Platonism is a magical worldview.

Fine if you want to do that, but many philosophers of a materialist outlook have an unbreakable rule that there are no non-physical causes. Your earlier realist account of laws of nature would actually be viewed as a major concession to the mixed Platonist-physicalist position typified by Penrose, whom most materialists see as troublingly 'mystical' because of it…..

……I also don't think that you've addressed the main issues I raised concerning whether the way the world is, is basically due to chance, or to some deeper rational necessity.

If it's due to chance, then I think the magic analogy sticks"“things happen for no reason.

But if there are deeper, ultimate rational necessities at work, then in fact materialism is false, because you will have invoked something that doesn't emerge from the material world (as any serious brand of materialism ought to require), but rather transcends, governs and orders the material world in accordance with reason (which is a vaguely Godlike property to have, if you think about it). In which case, reason cannot, at root, be an emergent property of matter. In which case, in other words, materialism is false.

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.

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:

Why is evolutionary biology so rife with the terms and emotions of organized Western religion? Numerous factors have played a role. Evolutionary biology's emergence from traditions of religious reasoning and writing, into contexts where religious thinking remained prominent; the propensity of evolutionists to paint themselves, ironically or seriously, as dissenters or believers; their tendency to draw, unconsciously or consciously, their scientific frameworks from preexisting religious ones; and their impulse to take it on themselves to pronounce on issues formerly the domain of religion — all of these have prompted biologists to armor themselves in the language of religious combat.

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.

Here's what Darwin is arguing: God should have made organisms indirectly, via natural laws, rather than as direct or special creations.

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.

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.

Well, I think I just did.

sciphishow said:

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.

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.

LOL, Sal just destroyed Mike Gene's argument.

Yeah and western civilization is about to fall.:sad: