Cliff:
>Rather uncomfortable, to think that the world is controlled by an
intelligence
>which may not necessarily be worthy of religious adulation. I wonder how
>many ID advocates really feel that way. ID seems to be religion without
>religion, science without science.
Bertvan:
Hi Cliff. Such a definition of "intelligence" feels comfortable to me. I
agree that most ID advocates entertain the conventional beliefs about a
"creator". What we have in common is skepticism of "random mutation and
natural selection" as an explanation of nature's diversity.
Cliff:
>Inevitably, if enough people hold this view, children will be aware of it.
>But that's not saying it should be taught in schools. The proscription
>against teaching the supernatural in school was instituted when 95%
>of the populace in the US were regular church-goers. Why change
>the rule now, when people are less religious?
Bertvan:
If you define "information", "consciousness" and "free will" and everything
else we don't understand as supernatural, I'd agree that ID is supernatural.
However the truth is, I think more is done to promote ID by fighting to ban
it from the classroom, than if children were allowed to discuss it. I've
been reading more of The Third Culture,
http://www.edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/d-Contents.html
Lee Smolen a theoretical physicist said,
Many of the people who work on complexity, such as Murray Gell Mann,
Stuart Kauffman, Harold Morowitz, and others, imagine that the world
consists of highly organized and complex systems but that the
fundamental laws are simply fixed beforehand, by God or by mathematics.
I used to believe this, but I no longer do. More and more, what I
believe must be true is that there are mechanisms of self-organization
extending from the largest scales to the smallest, and that they explain
both the properties of the elementary particles and the history and
structure of the whole universe.
As a scientist, one can believe what one wants and work on what one
wants, but one also accepts the idea that in the end the community is
the ultimate judge of the usefulness of what one does. This requires an
ethics that makes honesty and respect for the views of others essential,
while at the same time making individuality and difference and
disagreement essential. So at any one time in the scientific community,
there's a consensus about certain matters on which almost everyone has
come, after long struggle, to agree; but there's also a large area where
no consensus exists. Indeed, this state of affairs is necessary, because
if there was too great a consensus the process would stop; this would be
the death of science.
Bertvan: I agree any science that tries to stifle discussion is dead.
Contrast this expression of tolerance with what Steve Jones, (not our Steve
Jones) a biologist says:
Steve Jones: I have a problem with scientists who spend most of the time
looking at their own navels, trying to define what it is they're
supposed to be studying. It's like a game where both teams stand around
arguing about what the rules are supposed to be. That's the difficulty
with the "consciousness" game. Just how do you play it, and where's the
goal? Is there a goal at all - or even a game? Define what a problem is
in terms accessible to a layman, and you have the beginnings of a
science. If you can't, you have nothing but a series of opinions.
My feeling about most people in that field is that they'd find life more
interesting if they continued to do what most of them started by doing -
getting their feet wet by doing experimental work.
There's a disease of middle-aged literary men called Hearty Degeneration
of the Fat; when you get old, you boom about Big Issues. G.K. Chesterton
was a classic example. Scientists, I guess, have a related problem -
Anguished Uncertainty of the Elderly is probably a better term. All of a
sudden you forget that science is the art of the answerable and you
begin to speculate about things that basically lie outside science
altogether.
I'm not saying Nick Humphrey does only that; certainly not. But it's
something we're all in danger of doing. Nick Humphrey is going into
fields I don't find interesting. The consciousness field, the
meaning-of-life field - it's always left me cold.
Bertvan:
I'm glad the great physicists of the last century didn't allow Jones to
define science for them.
Bertvan
http://members.aol.com/bertvan
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon May 29 2000 - 16:05:29 EDT