The Bias Of Evolution

[Freedom777]

The prominent evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin has spoken bluntly about this anti-God, materialistic bias:
"WE take the side of science IN SPITE of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, IN SPITE of its failure to fullfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, IN SPITE of the tolorance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, becuase we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. IT IS NOT THAT THE METHODS AND INSTITUTIONS OF SCIENCE SOME HOW COMPEL US TO A MATERIAL EXPLANATION OF THE PHENOMENAL WORLD, but, ON THE CONTRARY, that we are forced by our A PRIORI adherance to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door." New York review jan 9 1997 "billions and billions of demons"


Most people think that "science" follows the evidence whereever it leads. But it is IMPOSSIBLE to aviod letting our world view color our interpretations of the facts.


Philosopher of science David Hull said, this "...science is not as empirical as many scientists seem to think it is. Unobserved and even unobservable entities play an important part in it.Science is not just the making of observations: it is the making of inferences on the basis of observations WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF A THEORY. "The effect on taxonomy-two thousand years of stasis" british journal for the philosophy of science.16(61):1-18, 1965

Dr. Scott Todd, an immunologist at Kansas State University, was candid about how certain conclusions would be avoided at all costs, regardless of the evidence: "Even if all the data point to an INTELLIGENT DESIGNER, such an hypothisis is excluded from science becuase it is not naturalistic." correspondence to Nature 410(6752):423 sept 30 1999.

There is but a few proofs of the Religion of Evolution.

 

[notto]

Actually, your post shows how science maintains its credibility. In order to be valid, a scientific hypothesis has to be falsifiable. If a theory or hypothsis is not falsifyable, it is not science. This is the STRENGTH of scientific research. It can only say "we don't know", not "God did it".

"Unobserved and even unobservable entities play an important part in it.Science is not just the making of observations: it is the making of inferences on the basis of observations WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF A THEORY"

A theory is an explaination of a set of observations. It explains those observations and ONLY those observations and does not comment on what cannot be observed (supernatural).

"Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door"

This is not an adherence to a world view, only one of the rules that must be maintained within scientific observation. If one goes outside of this in their research, it is no longer scientific because supernatural can be used to explain ANYTHING and is not falsifyable.

How would we tell the difference between what is natural and supernatural if we did not only study the natural?

Can we say that disease is not cause by supernatural entities? No we cannot, but our observations lead us to a material cause (although that wasn't always the case).

Can we say that lightening is not cause by supernatural entities? No we cannot, but our observations lead us to a material cause (although that wasn't always the case).

I don't know is a valid answer in science and is the answer that science gives to many of the questions. If you choose to answer those questions with a supernatural explaination, you do it on faith and religious grounds.

Please show any explaination given by evolution that is based on unobserved evidence (not simply evidence you dismiss), supernatural entities (unexplained causes or changes in observable behaviors in nature), or faith (no supporting evidence).

Evolution is not a religion. It can be used to support an atheistic view or a theistic one, but that view cannot be fully proven by the science. The science does not say. It only explains what we CAN observe, not what we cannot.

If you look at everything that is unexplained, and assign God to its cause, what happens when the phenomena is explained? Did God stop causing it (lightening, disease)?

HOW CAN WE TEST FOR THE SUPERNATURAL??? What is your alternative to studying natural evidence? How can we study the supernatural through scientic study? Science is only useful if it explains what we can observe and our physical reality.

The only alternative to testing for the supernatural is to assign all we don't know to the supernatural and God. This method has not worked well in the past.

 

[Pete Harcoff]

a) I would love to see those quotes in context (particularly the first one).

b) I would also love to find out the philosophical beliefs of the people making those quotes.

c) Gravity is now a religion. If you are not floating off the planet, then you are worshipping gravity.

 

[webboffin]

I still think evolution lacks transitional evidence - but that's me.

 

[Arikay]

Bah Pete, I dont worship gravity, I worship the winged invisible pink elephants that hold everything to the earth. If you deny the elephants than you deny your salvation in Heaven.

 

[MSBS]

Great this one again. Here is a link to the complete article:

http://www.csus.edu/indiv/m/mayesgr/Lewontin1.htm

Here is the quote in context:

Third, it is said that there is no place for an argument from authority in science. The community of science is constantly self-critical, as evidenced by the experience of university colloquia "in which the speaker has hardly gotten 30 seconds into the talk before there are devastating questions and comments from the audience." If Sagan really wants to hear serious disputation about the nature of the universe, he should leave the academic precincts in Ithaca and spend a few minutes in an Orthodox study house in Brooklyn. It is certainly true that within each narrowly defined scientific field there is a constant challenge to new technical claims and to old wisdom. In what my wife calls the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral Syndrome, young scientists on the make will challenge a graybeard, and this adversarial atmosphere for the most part serves the truth. But when scientists transgress the bounds of their own specialty they have no choice but to accept the claims of authority, even though they do not know how solid the grounds of those claims may be. Who am I to believe about quantum physics if not Steven Weinberg, or about the solar system if not Carl Sagan? What worries me is that they may believe what Dawkins and Wilson tell them about evolution.

With great perception, Sagan sees that there is an impediment to the popular credibility of scientific claims about the world, an impediment that is almost invisible to most scientists. Many of the most fundamental claims of science are against common sense and seem absurd on their face. Do physicists really expect me to accept without serious qualms that the pungent cheese that I had for lunch is really made up of tiny, tasteless, odorless, colorless packets of energy with nothing but empty space between them? Astronomers tell us without apparent embarrassment that they can see stellar events that occurred millions of years ago, whereas we all know that we see things as they happen. When, at the time of the moon landing, a woman in rural Texas was interviewed about the event, she very sensibly refused to believe that the television pictures she had seen had come all the way from the moon, on the grounds that with her antenna she couldn't even get Dallas. What seems absurd depends on one's prejudice. Carl Sagan accepts, as I do, the duality of light, which is at the same time wave and particle, but he thinks that the consubstantiality of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost puts the mystery of the Holy Trinity "in deep trouble." Two's company, but three's a crowd.

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

The mutual exclusion of the material and the demonic has not been true of all cultures and all times. In the great Chinese epic Journey to the West, demons are an alternative form of life, responsible to certain deities, devoted to making trouble for ordinary people, but severely limited. They can be captured, imprisoned, and even killed by someone with superior magic.6 In our own intellectual history, the definitive displacement of divine powers by purely material causes has been a relatively recent changeover, and that icon of modern science, Newton, was at the cusp. It is a cliché of intellectual history that Newton attempted to accommodate God by postulating Him as the Prime Mover Who, having established the mechanical laws and set the whole universe in motion, withdrew from further intervention, leaving it to people like Newton to reveal His plan. But what we might call "Newton's Ploy" did not really get him off the hook. He understood that a defect of his system of mechanics was the lack of any equilibrating force that would return the solar system to its regular set of orbits if there were any slight perturbation. He was therefore forced, although reluctantly, to assume that God intervened from time to time to set things right again. It remained for Laplace, a century later, to produce a mechanics that predicted the stability of the planetary orbits, allowing him the hauteur of his famous reply to Napoleon. When the Emperor observed that there was, in the whole of the Mécanique Céleste, no mention of the author of the universe, he replied, "Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis." One can almost hear a stress on the "I."

In context the words "patent absurdity" and "extravagant promises" certainly read differently, and we see that this was not about being anti-God but about science being naturalistic and not using supernatural explanations.

this is made clear in an earlier passage in the review:

Sagan believes that scientists reject sprites, fairies, and the influence of Sagittarius because we follow a set of procedures, the Scientific Method, which has consistently produced explanations that put us in contact with reality and in which mystic forces play no part. For Sagan, the method is the message, but I think he has opened the wrong envelope.

Why is it that it is so easy to find these articles and show the quote in context? and why is it that creationists never bother to actually spend the 2 minutes to look the quote up and see if it is in context and means the same thing in the actual ariticle it was published in? Heck a search of THIS message board would have found this one, it was already covered (with the exact same quote leaving off the first and last sentances, and the same wrong source attribution [from the same creationist web site?]) in this thread:

http://www.christianforums.com/threads/25283.html

BTW, this article was from the New York Review of Books, not the New York Review-- It is actually a book review and not an article.

 

[Freedom777]

The point i was making was very simple yet seems to have gone over your head. That facts don't speak for themselves, they are interpreted within a biased framework. Thats it I dont know how else to say it, you either get it or you dont, its that simple. Respectively Rob

 

[Freedom777]

Sorry about the misinformation. It wasn't on purpose i must have been typing to fast. Of course The New York review of books.

 

[Cantuar]

The point i was making was very simple yet seems to have gone over your head. That facts don't speak for themselves, they are interpreted within a biased framework. Thats it I dont know how else to say it, you either get it or you dont, its that simple.

OK, then, why don't you tell us how to include the possibility of supernatural actions by God within the framework of the scientific method. Since God doesn't have to pay attention to the laws of nature, it's pretty hard to frame a falsifiable hypothesis to test whether something is caused by God performing miracles. But if you have suggestions, let's hear them. As a rule, creationist complaints on this subject tend to go as far as "Evolutionists are a bunch of atheists and evolutionism is an atheist religion! Yah!" but they never go as far as explaining exactly how scientists are supposed to proceed if they aren't using methodological naturalism. Go ahead, we're all ears.

 

[euphoric]

4th April 2003 at 09:49 AM Cantuar said this in Post #9



OK, then, why don't you tell us how to include the possibility of supernatural actions by God within the framework of the scientific method. Since God doesn't have to pay attention to the laws of nature, it's pretty hard to frame a falsifiable hypothesis to test whether something is caused by God performing miracles. But if you have suggestions, let's hear them. As a rule, creationist complaints on this subject tend to go as far as "Evolutionists are a bunch of atheists and evolutionism is an atheist religion! Yah!" but they never go as far as explaining exactly how scientists are supposed to proceed if they aren't using methodological naturalism. Go ahead, we're all ears.

You won't get a satisfactory explanation for this because there isn't one.  The vast majority of scientists throughout history have held some type of religious belief and if there were a way to apply the scientific method to supernatural events, I have to think one of them would have come up with it by now.  The funny thing is that many scientists who have a religious belief reconcile the methodological naturalism of science with their personal beliefs quite nicely.  It's the few who dogmatically try to insert their religious views into science that create the confusion.

-brett

 

[Freedom777]

Heres my stand. God created science so than how can i exclude him from what he has created. If i am going to be able to come to the right conclusions about a perticular science, God has to be in the equation,otherwise i will come to the wrong conclusion.You can not separate God from science any more than you can separate water from orange juice because if you did it would no longer be orange juice now would it? Thats My position.

 

[Arikay]

An interesting possition, however you dont need to remove god to study evolution. All it takes is to say that god made evolution.

Think of it like a program and a programmer. God has created this very amazing program, he then set it into action. The program is so good that god doesnt need to do much work. Just pop in and talk too, check up on, his people that he could have possibly programed to happen. His program that he created is so amazing, and so complex that humans are only now starting to understand the basics of how it works.
(although its not a scientific hypothesis, because it cant be falsified, it seems to be a commonly held idea)

The god of creation is unfortunatly less smart (dont jump on me yet ), his creation needs lots of hands on work by god. He also put evidence in his creation that tells a false story. How he did it is very simple and has been known by humans for over 2000 years.

 

[Freedom777]

If God made evolution, than He's not the God of the Bible. Which is the God I believe in.

 

[Cantuar]

Heres my stand. God created science so than how can i exclude him from what he has created. If i am going to be able to come to the right conclusions about a perticular science, God has to be in the equation,otherwise i will come to the wrong conclusion.You can not separate God from science any more than you can separate water from orange juice because if you did it would no longer be orange juice now would it? Thats My position.

That isn't what I asked. I asked HOW you include "God performed miracles" within the framework of the sort of falsifiable hypothesis demanded by the scientific method. "God performed miracles" can be used without any more detail to explain absolutely everything, which means that you aren't any urther forward thn you were when you started. You want to include God in the scientific method. I'm asking how. Not why, but how.

 

[The Barbarian]

As Christians generally recognize, there is no conflict between Scripture and evolution. Indeed, the Bible makes no statement either way on evolution, although it does say that life began by natural means.

Which rules out creationism for an orthodox Christian.

 

[Taffsadar]

4th April 2003 at 10:28 AM Freedom777 said this in Post #13

If God made evolution, than He's not the God of the Bible. Which is the God I believe in.

Then I suggest you switch religion to something that isn't an obvious lie (now whos the lord of lies?)...

 

[Follower of Christ]

4th April 2003 at 08:56 AM The Barbarian said this in Post #15

As Christians generally recognize, there is no conflict between Scripture and evolution. Indeed, the Bible makes no statement either way on evolution, although it does say that life began by natural means.

Which rules out creationism for an orthodox Christian.

I think a better understanding of your bible, especially Genesis, is on order.

Stop playing with your god-in-a-box and see what He says about His creation for yourself instead of taking others word for it .

(have you ''STUDIED'' it yourself? Honestly?)

 

[Taffsadar]

4th April 2003 at 04:03 PM Follower of Christ said this in Post #17

(have you ''STUDIED'' it yourself? Honestly?)

Thats a question I would like to ask you about, geography, geology, evolution, physics, biology, classification and astronomy.

 

[euphoric]

4th April 2003 at 04:23 PM Taffsadar said this in Post #18




Thats a question I would like to ask you about, geography, geology, evolution, physics, biology, classification and astronomy.

Add paleontology and genetics to that list.

-brett

 

[Follower of Christ]

yes, and other than an issue of starlight (still working on it), all yor evidence fits very nicely into my Young Earth, correctly interpreted.