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The Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW) University Religious Forum will host “Understanding the Nature of Science: Why Intelligent Design is Considered a Pseudo-Science” with Jeff Nowak, Ph.D., Thursday, Nov. 19, from noon to 1:15 p.m. in IPFW Walb Student Union, Room G21.

The presentation is free and open to the public. A simple lunch is served; donations are accepted. Reservations are not necessary. The series is sponsored by IPFW Campus Ministry.

Nowak is an associate professor of science education at IPFW and director of Northeast Indiana Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (NISTEM) Education Resource Center. He will discuss why people believe the theory of intelligent design is not true science and attempt to demonstrate that intelligent design should be considered a scientific theory.

My point in the other blog was to note that if compassion has an evolutionary explanation for its existence, then so does not being compassionate, and so does every other aspect of our entire humanity by being the product of the same process. This leaves one with no more ultimate standard to use to judge whether we should or shouldn’t be compassionate, for whatever we try to use for the standard is itself subject to the trial. And of course this includes all thoughts, not just ones we call compassion and being in-compassionate. The explanation of our thinking resulting from evolution necessitates that all thoughts, even contradictory ones, have the same grounds in evolution. And this brings us to the difficulty: On this premise, there could be no escape from evolution to find a more solid ground on which to make judgments about any other thoughts that are, themselves, also the result of evolution. Evolutionary Psychologists like Robert Wright, very contradictorily, contends that evolution has given us false beliefs, not seeing that the judgment he is using also comes from the same process as the one he claims produced the false belief. If evolution gives us false beliefs, what grounds have we to trust it in any other regard? This excerpt from C. S. Lewis’s essay The Abolition of Man may help to clarify the matter; and let’s say that our evolved capacities of thought (including compassion) are called Instincts for the sake of argument:

It looks very much as if the Innovator would have to say not that we must obey Instinct, nor that it will satisfy us to do so, but that we ought to obey it. But why ought we to obey Instinct [compassion]? Is there another instinct of a higher order directing us to do so, and a third of still higher order directing us to obey it?—an infinite regress of instincts? This is presumably impossible, but nothing else will serve. From the statement about psychological fact ‘I have an impulse to do so and so’ we cannot by any ingenuity derive the practical principle ‘I ought to obey this impulse’. Even if it were true that men had a spontaneous, unreflective impulse to sacrifice their own lives for the preservation of their fellows, it remains a quite separate question whether this is an impulse they should control or one they should indulge. For even the Innovator admits that many impulses (those which conflict with the preservation of the species [and compassion]) have to be controlled. And this admission surely introduces us to a yet more fundamental difficulty.

Telling us to obey Instinct is like telling us to obey ‘people’. People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war. If it is held that the instinct for preserving the species should always be obeyed at the expense of other instincts, whence do we derive this rule of precedence? To listen to that instinct speaking in its own cause and deciding it in its own favour would be rather simple-minded. Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of all the rest. By the very act of listening to one rather than to others we have already prejudged the case. If we did not bring to the examination of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them. And that knowledge cannot itself be instinctive: the judge cannot be one of the parties judged; or, if he is, the decision is worthless and there is no ground for placing the preservation of the species above self-preservation or sexual appetite.

The idea that, without appealing to any court higher than the instincts themselves, we can yet find grounds for preferring one instinct above its fellows dies very hard. We grasp at useless words: we call it the ‘basic’, or ‘fundamental’, or ‘primal’, or ‘deepest’ instinct. It is of no avail. Either these words conceal a value judgment passed upon the instinct and therefore not derivable from it, or else they merely record its felt intensity, the frequency of its operation and its wide distribution. If the former, the whole attempt to base value upon instinct has been abandoned: if the latter, these observations about the quantitative aspects of a psychological event lead to no practical conclusion. It is the old dilemma. Either the premises already concealed an imperative or the conclusion remains merely in the indicative.

And Lewis is exactly right. We cannot get an ought from an is. And on the premise of a completely evolved human, including all neural networks and all that makes up the capacity of the mind, we cannot have any grounds for why any evolutionary standards should be used to judge other evolutionary standards when they are all themselves on trial in the process. And we have to remember that these evolutionary psychologists really and honestly do consider that whole systems of false beliefs, such as the world’s religions, are merely the result of an evolutionary process, and do not actually exist. This leaves them, though they don’t see it, with the truth that there really aren’t any more fundamental guiding standards above or deeper than any other, because they don’t even rise to the ground of being different from any other belief by comparison. But the matter gets worse when we really conceptualize what is at stake with our evolutionary psychologist’s framework of claiming all sensibilities to be from the same process that has produced all other living things. C. S. Lewis shed’s much needed light on the difficulty of emptying ourselves of the traditional concept of being designed and remolded into the image of evolution:

The process whereby man has come to know the universe is from one point of view extremely complicated; from another it is alarmingly simple. We can observe a single one-way progression. At the outset the universe appears packed with will, intelligence, life and positive qualities; every tree is a nymph and every planet a god. Man himself is akin to the gods. The advance of knowledge gradually empties this rich and genial universe: first of its gods, then of its colors, smells, sounds and tastes, finally of solidity itself as solidity was originally imagined. As these items are taken from the world, they are transferred to the subjective side of the account: classified as our sensations, thoughts, images or emotions. The Subject becomes gorged, inflated, at the expense of the Object. But the matter does not rest here. The same method which has emptied the world now proceeds to empty ourselves. The masters of the method soon announce that we were just as mistaken (and mistaken in much the same way) when we attributed “souls”, or “selves” or “minds” to human organisms, as when we attributed Dryads to the trees. Animism, apparently, begins at home. We, who have personified all other things, turn out to be ourselves mere personifications. Man is indeed akin to the gods: that is, he is no less phantasmal than they. Just as the Dryad is a “ghost”, an abbreviated symbol for all the facts we know about the tree foolishly mistaken for a mysterious entity over and above the facts, so the man’s “mind” or “consciousness” is an abbreviated symbol for certain verifiable facts about his behaviour: a symbol mistaken for a thing. And just as we have been broken of our bad habit of personifying trees, so we must now be broken of our bad habit of personifying men: a reform already effected in the political field. There never was a Subjective account into which we could transfer the items into which the Object had lost. There is no “consciousness” to contain, as images or private experiences, all the lost gods, colours, and concepts. Consciousness is “not the sort of noun that can be used that way”…

And thus we arrive at a result uncommonly like zero. While we were reducing the world to almost nothing we deceived ourselves with the fancy that all its lost qualities were being kept safe (if in a somewhat humbled condition) as “things in our own mind”. Apparently we had no mind of the sort required. The Subject is as empty as the Object. Almost nobody has been making linguistic mistakes about almost nothing. By and large, this is the only thing that has ever happened.

Now the trouble about this conclusion is not simply that it is unwelcome to our emotions. It is not unwelcome at all times or in all people. This philosophy, like every other, has its pleasures. And it will, I fancy, prove very congenial to government. The old “liberty-talk” was very much mixed up with the idea that , as inside the ruler, so inside the subject, there was a whole world, to him the centre of all worlds, capacious of endless suffering and delight. But now, of course, he has no “inside”, except the sort you can find by cutting him open.

The question is whether the first thinkers in modifying (and rightly modifying) them under the criticism, did not make some rash and unnecessary concession. It was certainly not there intention to commit us to the absurd consequence that have actually followed. This sort of error is of course very common in debate or even in solitary thought. We start with a view which contains a good deal of truth, though in a confused or exaggerated form. Objections are then suggested and we withdraw it. But hours later we discover that we have emptied the baby out with the bath water and that the original view must have contained certain truths for lack of which we are now tangled in absurdities. So here. In emptying out the Dryads and the gods (which, admittedly, “would not do” just as they stood) we appear to have thrown out the whole universe, ourselves included. We must go back and begin over again: this time with a better chance of success, for of course we can now use all particular truths and all improvements of method which our argument may have thrown up as by-products in its otherwise ruinous course.

This essay was first published as a Preface to D.E. Harding’s The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth: A New Diagram of Man in the Universe (London, 1952).

Not only have we emptied ourselves from any real standards of truth when our entire person is subject to a mindless process of evolution, but we cannot even say that there exist any standard between us and the non-sentient world given that evolution has produced both. The Subject is just as vacuous as the Object. Lewis was right, we must begin again in our thinking, otherwise we will remain tangled in these absurdities.

http://www.texanonline.net/default.asp?action=article&aid=6474&issue

Charles Darwin published his “Origin of Species” in 1859. There he presented the classic formulation of his theory of evolution. Lady Ashley, reacting to the theory at the time, remarked, “Let’s hope that it’s not true; but if it is true, let’s hope that it doesn’t become widely known.” Lady Ashley’s second hope has failed: Darwin’s theory is everywhere and has now become textbook orthodoxy. This year, universities around the globe are celebrating the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s “Origin of Species” as well as the 200th anniversary of his birth.

But what about Lady Ashley’s hope that Darwin’s theory is false? Darwin presented a bleak picture of ourselves: we are mere modified apes; we are the “winners” in a brutal competitive evolutionary process, most of whose players are “losers,” wiped off the evolutionary scene before they could leave a legacy; the traditional Christian view that we are made in God’s image is simply a story we tell to convince ourselves that we’re special. 

Intelligent design supporters like me view Darwin’s theory as untrue and even as laughable: The theory purports to give a materialistic account of life’s development once life is already here, but it has a gaping hole at the start since matter gives no evidence of being able to organize itself from non-life into life. The fossil record, especially the sudden emergence of most animal body plans in the Cambrian explosion, sharply violates Darwinian expectations about the historical pattern of evolutionary change. The nano-engineering found in the DNA, RNA, and proteins of the cell far exceeds human engineering and remains completely unexplained in Darwinian terms.

Darwin lovers are quick to reject such complaints.  After all, as novelist Barbara Kingsolver declares, Darwin’s idea of natural selection is “the greatest, simplest, most elegant logical construct ever to dawn across our curiosity about the workings of natural life. It is inarguable, and it explains everything.” Kingsolver is no fan of Christianity. Yet many Darwin lovers are Christian. Francis Collins, who directs the National Institutes of Health, is a Christian Darwinist. Leaving aside a healthy skepticism that regards every scientific theory as refutable in light of new evidence, Collins exempts Darwinian evolution from such skepticism: “evolution, as a mechanism, can be and must be true.”

Any theory that explains everything and that can and must be true is either the greatest thing since sliced bread or the greatest swindle ever foisted on gullible intellectuals. The intelligent design community takes the latter view, siding here with Malcolm Muggeridge, who wrote: “I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it’s been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books in the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has.”

Still, it’s easy to understand why so flimsily a supported theory garners such vast support. It provides the creation story for an atheistic worldview. If atheism is true, then something like Darwinian evolution must follow. Hence, any attack on Darwin becomes an attack on the atheistic secularism that pervades our culture. Nonetheless, even though atheism implies Darwinism, the reverse is not true: Darwinism does not imply atheism. Indeed, Christian theists who embrace Darwin abound.

The wedding between Darwinism and Christianity, however, is an uneasy one. To be sure, plenty of marriages are uneasy, and uneasy marriages are often endured because divorce can entail more difficulties than endurance. Thus, when I got involved with the evolution controversy 20 years ago, I naively thought that any Christian, given sufficient evidence against Darwinism, would immediately jump ship. Darwinian evolution, according to Cornell historian of biology Will Provine, is “the greatest engine of atheism ever invented.” Why should Christians stick with such an engine when it’s no longer needed?

Little did I realize how infatuated many Christians are with Darwin. Having convinced themselves that design is an outdated religious dogma, they embraced Darwinism as a form of enlightenment. And having accommodated their faith to Darwin, they became loath to reexamine whether Darwinism is true at all. Unlike Lady Ashley, Christian Darwinists hope that Darwinism is true. But is it really? In this year of Darwinian bacchanalias, let us soberly reassess whether Darwin’s theory is indeed true. And if the evidence goes against it, as the intelligent design community is successfully demonstrating, then let’s be done with it. In that case, reconciling Christianity with Darwinism becomes a vain exercise, solving a problem that no longer exists.
 
­William A. Dembski is research professor in philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of prominent books in the field of intelligent design, including The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Biological Systems, written with biologist Jonathan Wells.

Consciousness makes evolutionary sense only if one does not start far enough back; if, that is to say, one fails to assume a consistent and sincere materialist position, beginning with a world without consciousness, and then considers whether there could be putative biological drivers for organisms to become conscious. This is the only valid starting point for those who look to evolution to explain consciousness, given that the history of matter has overwhelmingly been without conscious life, indeed without history. Once the viewpoint of consistent materialism is assumed, it ceases to be self-evident that it is a good thing to experience what is there, that it will make an organism better able so to position itself in the causal net as to increase the probability of replication of its genomic material. On the contrary, even setting aside the confusional states it is prone to, and the sleep it requires, consciousness seems like the worst possible evolutionary move.

If there isn’t an evolutionary explanation of consciousness, then the world is more interesting than biologists would allow. And it gets even more interesting if we unbundle different modes of consciousness. There are clearly separate problems in trying to explain on the one hand the transition to sentience and on the other the transition from sentience to the propositional awareness of human beings that underpins the public sphere in which they live and have their being, where they consciously utilise the laws of nature, transform their environment into an artefactscape, appeal to norms in a collective that is sustained by deliberate intentions rather than being a lattice of dovetailing automaticities, and write books such as The Origin of Species. Those who are currently advocating evolutionary or neuro-evolutionary explanations of the most complex manifestations of consciousness in human life, preaching neuro-evolutionary aesthetics, law, ethics, economics, history, theology etc, should consider whether the failure to explain any form of consciousness, never mind human consciousness, in evolutionary terms, might not pull the rug from under their fashionable feet.

 (HT to Douglas Groothuis)

Having followed the intelligent design controversy for a decade, I have noticed a recent key change. This year, being the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, should have continued Charles Darwin’s century and a half of triumph. Yet his followers’ accolades are greeted with increasing incredulity, among both serious scientists and the general public. For example, serious scientists and thinkers convened last year at Altenberg, Austria, to consider alternatives to Darwin’s theory of evolution, and a recent Zogby poll showed that most people still don’t believe it, after countless years and dollars spent to convince them.

Darwinism is sort of like Frostie the Snowman. Adults do not believe it because it is not believable.

A judge’s decision to reduce a killer’s sentence because he has genetic mutations linked to violence raises a thorny question – can your genes ever absolve you of responsibility for a particular act?

Look, we probably all have “aggression genes” (whatever that means). Like, if someone was threatening my mom or one of my neighbours, what do you think would happen?

Every so often I get shaken down in local stores for money for women’s shelters.

Here is what I always say:

I will give you the donation you ask, but first I want to make a statement, as follows:

“Just beat the ka-shiddle out of the bastard and you won’t need a shelter! HE will!”

The female employees always burst out laughing – not at me, rather with me.

I give the clerk the money, but I sure hope those shelters teach self-defence. Otherwise, I don’t see the point.

Even if there really are aggression genes, why should anyone get time off without good behaviour? What about all the people who have served honourably in the armed forces, police and fire services, paramedic corps, and dealing with difficult animals or working with rescue dogs to find lost people? Don’t they have aggression genes too?

I don’t know who benefits if some perp’s sentence is cut because he supposedly has aggression genes, but I sure doubt it is the law-abiding public. Instead of an incentive to reform, he now has an excuse for his next offense.

Thanks, pop genetics (as opposed to real genetics), no doubt fronted by “evolutionary” psychology.

I would have thought Einstein’s 1905 papers settled that.

But what do I know?

Maybe some porcupine in a tree somewhere is an exact equivalent of Einstein.

Too bad Porkie never went to school and never published anything and reacted to all problems by standing up his quills.

Einstein didn’t have quills, so he had to think, right?

Oh wait. Einstein might have had quills, but he would use them only for penmanship.

Not as a substitute for thinking.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

I recently revisited this debate, and was struck by how prescient Phil was.

The entire debate is on Youtube in 11 segments, linked below, in order.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AM-H6NxdCd4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghf3dXPAuhQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_fPERJ8KRw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfX0jdlFS5o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9W1Y_PmhSI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzgiU_ML7Cc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwpmM8qA_8k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eX2-QH6-R1o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnRmhQsFBzQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ6fWL0j4aw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw95K3SUefU