*spaf*

[rone]

"Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science." (via tnr_feed)

Today must be Opposite Day, or something.  I just can't make my brain bend that way.

Comments

[erikred.livejournal.com]

"Anyone who disagrees with me must be crazy or driven by irrational hatred."

It's got more of a ring to it.

[merovingian.livejournal.com]

God made man!
But he used a monkey to do it!

(Sorry, it seemed like a nice time for a Devo quote.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

John Paul may or may not have believed that he had a fundamental disagreement with scientific accounts of evolution, but as the quotes in that editorial reveal, he always phrased things in such a manner as to leave wiggle room you could drive a biology department through. He was no dummy and surely read his Augustine; you could have an extratemporal God who creates the whole consistent history of the universe in one go, so that you get your appearance of randomness and your mysterious teleology at the same time. Not my cup of tea, but I can live with people pushing that.

If Benedict and Schönborn now believe that it's the Catholic Church's job to repudiate modern science overtly, and the Catholic schools that currently teach natural selection are going to stop doing it, well, I guess the fight is on again, then. One thing I believe is that it's almost impossible to kill science; swim against it and you mostly end up hurting yourself by promoting your own ignorance.

I do think it's interesting that he sticks to papal statements and doesn't start quoting Michael Behe. As a non-Catholic I can't really argue with statements about what the Pope thinks, I can just declare them irrelevant.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

You made me look him up (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Behe)... man, that irreducible complexity thing, what a crackpot theory that is. Was it you who brought up the God gap recently?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

"God of the gaps", maybe-- the idea that anything we can't currently explain is evidence that God directly intervened. The problem being that as science progresses your God's job description keeps shrinking.

So most theologians who are not stupid tend to reject that idea, and see God's hand in the workings of the world-as-it-is, natural forces or no. I don't believe this, but I have no big problems with other people believing it, though that itself raises hard questions about divine justice and benevolence.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Yep, "God of the gaps," that's the one.

I think that a minimum of thought can lead a theist to see that science lets us know how God created us. To get as close as possible to his methods should bring more glory to God. Or maybe i'm just a deist sympathizer.

Divine justice, benevolence... ha. Just ha.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Reed Cartwright argues (http://www.pandasthumb.org/pt-archives/001191.html) that we're reading too much into some poor word choices and Schönborn really just wanted to reject atheism. But I don't think I buy it.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

He's being way too generous. "Now at the beginning of the 21st century, faced with scientific claims like neo-Darwinism and the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science [classic crackpot language — "their actions intend to derail my position"] the Catholic Church will again defend human reason by proclaiming that the immanent design evident in nature is real. [I WILL DEFEND YOUR BEAUTIFUL SKIN BY BEATING IT]"

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, while he doesn't mention Behe, it sounds as if he's actually pretty much entirely swallowed (1) the ID "irreducible complexity" stuff, and (2) anthropic cosmology, taking the theistic option over the multiverse option on the latter.

ID in biology, the notion that there had to be miraculous interventions in evolution, is pretty much 100% crackpot. The anthropic principle (that the parameters of our universe were somehow determined by the need to produce intelligent life, either by divine design, or just because there are lots of universes and this is ours, or for some other reason) is taken seriously by many legit cosmologists but it is highly controversial, far from a consensus view. Nobody disputes that if the physical constants were very slightly different (with fantastically low tolerance), people like us couldn't have come about. But nobody really knows what kinds of intelligence might be able to thrive in all those bizarre kinds of universe with different physical constants and, say, no stars or planets, though people often pretend to know that none can.

Saying that the universe must have been designed because it's so finely tuned to produce the kind of beings we are is just circular reasoning; one needs a proof that there's something inherently special about the kind of beings we are over all the possible kinds of things that could exist in possible worlds. If you're Catholic, you've got something that more or less says that in the Bible, but it's not scientific evidence.

Finally, the various concepts of multiple universes in physics were certainly not invented by spiteful atheists simply as a way of weaseling out of accepting overwhelming scientific evidence for God. They're sometimes invoked as a way of explaining the anthropic principle, but that assumes that you accept the anthropic principle in the first place. If anything, their first legitimate insertion into physics was as a possible way of making sense of quantum mechanics—though I suppose that if you are an archbishop on a fishing expedition for spiteful atheist notions in physics, you could say that that itself was intended to deny a direct physical role for the soul in collapsing wave functions.

Next week...

[eejitalmuppet.livejournal.com]

Any system of thought which denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence that the earth is flat is ideology, not science.

"We're falling off the edge of the world"

[merde.livejournal.com]

perhaps this time i'll manage to get both my html and my spelling right:

apropos this discussion, dglenn's quote of the day references an argument that gravity too is only a theory (http://www.livejournal.com/users/dglenn/592287.html).