Los Angeles Times Tracy Wilkinson September 11, 2006
MUNICH, Germany — Under glorious skies in this Bavarian capital where he once lived, Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday warned Roman Catholics against letting modern concerns drown out God’s word, adding that technology alone could not solve the world’s problems.
An overreliance on science has made too many Catholics deaf to the teachings of the church, the pope said in a homily that scolded Western European societies for an increasingly secular focus. Faith is needed to combat diseases such as AIDS, he said.
[ … ]
Although he has described the trip as a personal one, the former Joseph Ratzinger is also determined to boost a faith that by most measures is flagging in Europe, where Catholics have wandered from the church and Muslims immigrants have diluted Christian demographics.
Catholics must make God “the force shaping our lives and actions,” the pope said, adding that many people did not know how or did not like the image of God they had come to know.
He lamented cynics who considered “mockery of the sacred to be an exercise of freedom.”
. . . more
Note 50. You are misunderstanding the illustration Jim. The Boeing 747 example only deals with probability, not irreducible complexity.
I’d be interested in reading about this. Can you direct me to some sources?
Phil wrote:
You are correct, although inadvertently I think, that ID is a “non-theory.” Essentially this is true. It challenges Darwinism on dependence on philosophical materialism. It is called design, simply because it rejects randomness (again, a philosophical construct) as scientifically untenable.
Of course in the cultural dimension, design is perceived as “creationism” but this dimension is fraught with all sorts of political and ideological baggage. It comes with the territory, but the short term victories or defeats can’t be considered in any way conclusive regarding the scientific dimension.
Jacobse writes:
That’s an accurate restatement. I was using “complexity” in a general sense, as in “composed of many parts.”
Note 51.
I can agree with that, and also that political victories don’t change scientific facts. The pope may have sentenced Gallileo to house arrest, but that didn’t mean the sun revolved around the earth.
I was taking the advantage of a rare opportunity to be both respectful and sarcastic.
This is an interesting article, which has the advantage of also being short.
http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/design2/article.html
That term keeps coming up, so I’d like to make sure we’re discussing the same thing. As I understand it, philosophical here refers to a system of principles, and materialism refers to the belief that “everything can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena.”
Would I be accurate to define “philosophical materialism” as “an underlying belief that everything can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena?” I realize that I’m simplifying it a bit, but it’s a two-word phrase; we shouldn’t have to read Karl Marx’s life’s work to understand what we’re talking about.
I ask because, as you explain it, ID proponents are analyzing scientific evidence and finding that it does not support a widely accepted theory. Thus, it seems to me that ID does not challenge philosophical materialism. I think it is clear that “creationism” rejects philosophical materialism, but “intelligent design” is, at the very least, significantly influenced by this philosophy.
The only non-materialistic aspect of ID is the unmentioned designer. But seeking evidence of this designer is a clearly materialistic approach.
This is semantics. It may be true that there was a time when the notion of randomness did not exist, but that doesn’t mean that the existence of random phenomena is necessarily a philosophical construct. And to suggest that the word “design” is used only because ID rejects this randomness is inaccurate.
The foremost Intelligent Design textbook, Of Pandas and People, states that “Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly though an intelligent agent …” (Citation below)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/11/06/DESIGN.TMP
The phrase “intelligent design,” itself, implies that there is an agent of design, and that this designer was intelligent, acting with intent. To refute that is simply to play word games.
Holman wrote: “Many of the examples used by IDers have turned out not to be irreducibly complex.”
Fr. Hans asks: “I’d be interested in reading about this. Can you direct me to some sources?”
I would start with this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreducible_complexity#Flagella
Note in particular the “Stated Examples” section, but the whole article is good. I’m not trying to pick a fight here, but for me the evidence is not on the ID side.
Note 52. Phil, I can’t help but notice that you describe evolution in terms usually reserved for the miraculous.
Note 53. Jim, the piece just restates the arguments.
Note 53.
Not quite. Philosophical materialism posits that nothing exists beyond matter (physical phenomena). Thus all things non-material such as love, values, morality, and especially belief in a god belong to the realm of the “ideal” or the “non-real.” Everything that could possibly be known would be garnered through the study of observable matter alone.
Thus, in historical-cultural terms (put away science for the moment), Darwin was very much a man of his age, ie: he emerged when “faith” (my term) in philosophical materialism ran high. Of course philosophical materialism contains many assumptions that draw from sources outside of it (time is linear for example) so the system, in philosophical terms, is not as self-contained as proponents assumed.
Essentially yes. ID proponents are arguing (like Guilder did although I don’t know if he fits into the ID camp), that the evolutionary theory draws from philosophy (philosophical materialism) and not science and thus has become a hindrance to further scientific research. This is not the same thing as saying that ID rejects matter or such some thing. Put another way, evolutionary theory puts science in service to a philosophy that is proving to be increasingly unscientific. That was the essence of Guilders’ piece.
ID rejects the notion that the world developed “randomly”. It does not deny that “randomness” exists. If you look closely, you can see in the evolutionary theory a secularized creation story, primarilly the movement from chaos into order. Chance and randomness are the “spirit hovering above the waters”. Darwin merely asserted that the emergence from chaos, from nothingness into structure and order was mitigated by millions of millions of years of time allowing the entire creative/generative enterprise to occur. (Again, note that the notion that time is linear — a fundamentally religious notion — reemerged here; Genesis without God really.)
When you get into questions of “agent of design” etc. you move beyond science into theology, philosophy, etc. ID asserts that the notion that the world developed randomly, that no design exists, is essentially a prejudice (prejudgment) not supported by facts and observation.
Science and philosophy/theology are never really that far apart. IOW, the idea that science and faith don’t mix is more apparent than real because faith in philosophical materialism appeared to render religion obsolete under the rubric of science. Now that the philosophy is being extracted from the scientific method, some assert (like Guilder and others) that Darwinian evolution is dogma, not science. That’s the argument.
It of course sends seismic waves through the culture because to see the authoritative imprimatur of science shift to the side that the world might have emerged through design (and thus imply that a god does indeed exist), is something that materialists find very threatening, and rightfully so. That’s why the debates take the shape that they do — courtroom battles, etc. It’s a war for hearts and minds in a way.
Note 56. Thinking through the post (it always comes to me while I am driving), I need to make a couple of clarifications:
This is not entirely accurate. It is more accurate to say: Thus all things non-material such as love, values, morality, and especially belief in a god belong to the realm of the “ideal” although they (thoughts, emotions, beliefs, ie: the intagibles) have an entirely material origin, that is, within the chemical processes of the body, etc.
Not entirely accurate. Although chance and randomness function in the same way in the materialist narrative of creation (in the popular imagination anyway) as the “spirit hovering above the waters” that we see in the Genesis narrative, that is, they are an engine of progress of sorts, in philosophical terms chance and randomness in fact allows for no such engine of progress. Chance and randomness is the absence of design, of a word, of a spirit, or any outside force that would propell the movement from chaos into order. Think of it as not only as a universe absent a voice, but also as a universe absent of any primordial cause.
Of course, that begs the question where do the physical laws come from (did they preexist the first random coupling of proteins?) since these laws must have had their source and origin in the matter they govern and thus cannot preexist matter. To posit they preexist implies design, not randomness.
Fr. Hans writes: “It of course sends seismic waves through the culture because to see the authoritative imprimatur of science shift to the side that the world might have emerged through design (and thus imply that a god does indeed exist), is something that materialists find very threatening, and rightfully so.”
The problem here is that this view depends on scientific realism –the idea that the things that as posited by scientific theories have real existence. Or as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it, “Scientific realists hold that the characteristic product of successful scientific research is knowledge of largely theory-independent phenomena and that such knowledge is possible (indeed actual) even in those cases in which the relevant phenomena are not, in any non-question-begging sense, observable.” [emphasis mine]
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/
I think most people are scientific realists to a large extent. For example, I think most people believe that if you could look at atomic particles through some kind of fastastic microscope that you really would see little balls glued to each other or circling around each other.
But scientific realism has been challenged from many angles. One view is that science produces models of reality that are useful for organizing data, developing other concepts and experiments, and so on. While there may be some isomorphism, to use scientific jargon, between the model and reality, there is no sense that the model is a “picture” of reality.
But I think a more serious challenge comes from Bas van Frassen’s Constructive Empiricism. He holds that the unobservable entities posited by a theory in no way entail or imply belief in the real existence of those entities — that the positing of such entities only entails the belief that they are sufficient to explain the data.
In other words, even if ID were correct — and I believe that it is not — you still would not in any way have demonstrated “that a god does indeed exist.”
The irony for me is that people in the religious right often criticize the concept of scientific realism as a way (they think) of diminishing the authority of science, but the whole idea that ID would somehow establish the existence of a god DEPENDS on scientific realism. Well, you can’t have it both ways.
Note 58. Jim writes:
Of course. I think you are confusing creationism with ID.
Again, it doesn’t appear you understand ID, or the dependence of the Darwinian hypothesis on philosophical materialism. Scientific authority does not depend on the veracity of the Darwinian hypothesis. Neither can science prove or disprove the existence of God. Science is science, not theology.*
I think you are also misunderstanding the nature of the impending (I think) cultural shift. It is not that the authority of science will be diminished. Rather, people will see that the apparent conflict between science and religion does not in fact exist.
*The Darwinian hypothesis will be shown to be the creation story of the philosophical materialist. It is not science. Read Guilder again.