*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

[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.