June 5, 2002
But I wouldn't want to confuse this intelligent design movement (which, according to Avram's sources, seeks to undermine empirical observations about the world) with Thomas Aquinas' "argument from design" which essentially comments: "Gee, look at all of the amazing patterns that exist in nature. Can it really be sheer coincidence that the world is as well-designed as it appears to be?"
Neither would I.
What's wrong with the "intelligent design movement" isn't that it's based in a religious apprehension of nature. It's that it's a political agenda, fueled by religion, disguising itself as science. (And sectarian religion at that. Note the material Avram quotes. These people aren't interested in any kind of inclusive ecumenical group hug. These people are here to put Christianity into the public education system, period.)
I have a religious apprehension of nature. But I think science should be taught as science, not forced to yield "equal time" to a movement that bluntly proclaims its sectarian aims.
Moreover, what kind of piss-ant religion still needs to have conniptions about evolution, for cry eye? And what kind of God wants us to be intellectual cheats on Its behalf?
The thing that genuinely baffles me about "intelligent design" is that people with reasonable credibility think that it needs to be refuted with some respect. Why? As far as I can tell, the argument is sheerest nonsense, a circular argument dressed up with smoke and mirrors. They claim that they can prove this, but provide nothing that meets any standard of proof. They are treated as if they might have found something that had been overlooked. Not since cold fusion have I seen so many scientists be willing to make such fools of themselves by straddling the fence.
The gist of the argument is that things are so complex that it is impossible for them to have fallen into this pattern without a guiding hand. However, this casually disregards the fact that had they not fallen into this pattern, they would have fallen into another. "See how everything leads up to this day." One of the tests which is supposed to prove intelligent design is the presence of very complex things, such as the hand, that do something extremely well and nothing else would do in their place. This completely ignores one of the basics of evolution: transitions. Sure, I got hands. Birds got feathers. The antecedants of both were for something other than their current use. Nor do the proponents of this silly argument take into account compounding complexities. One action is very simple, but it causes effects which cause more effects, and at some point the causal chain yields up a vast complexity, all mindless and all from one random cause. I mean, for heavens sake, why does no one every mention fractals when they try to refute this nonsense? Arghhhhh.
Frankly, intelligent design makes me feel stupid when I try to think about it.
I don't believe in god but,
If a women puts any thought (intelligence) into who she has children with, visualizing what her babies would look and act like if so and so was the father and then mates with that man, I would call that intelligent design.
But maybe I'm missing the point.
You don't have to be an atheist to enjoy this rye bread. I expect American Catholics, in particular, to have their spider senses a-tingling when people start trying to get the government to endorse some kind of Official Religious Truth, given the history of anti-Catholicism among American Protestants. (I also expect Mormons to be paranoid about that kind of thing. Jews, of course, are paranoid about that, and far more, all the time.)
Avram, Dr. Ken Miller is a professor of biology at Brown University who has been beating intelligent design silly, in my opinion. He's a fair writer and an excellent public speaker. He's also a practicing Catholic who's written a book about reconcilling his belief in science with his faith.
Lydia: I haven't read extensively in ID books, but the little I have read which was even remotely intelligent focused on microbiology rather than gross anatomy. If they're claiming that hands are proof of intelligent design, they're not just stupid, they're desperate and they've already lost.
I agree with Patrick's comment that the "Intelligent Design" movement, as it's documented on Avram's website, appears to be nothing but a smokescreen for fundamentalist Christians to advocate a dogmatic, religiously-biased viewpoint be presented in public schools.
My thought, in posting here, was chagrin that this sham might be confused with the, to me, interesting question raised by Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages. (The Creationists would probably like nothing better than to lend an air of scholarly credibility to themselves by people conflating their attacks on the scientific method with Aquinas' questions and suggestions.)
In my life, I've thought about Aquinas' question a number of times, and still do from time to time. I didn't mean to start a discussion, here, about the credibility of Swiss Watch versus trial-and-error universes.
I just wince a little at the idea that the duplicity of "intelligent design" is going to be conflated with the sincere questions Aquinas raises in his "argument for design."
If he's a Catholic, he shouldn't have too much trouble "reconciling." The modern Church has committed many sins, but they're fine with Darwin, and firmly on record as opposing "scientific creationism."
Well, sure; Biblical literalism isn't where Catholics are at. Perhaps a better way of phrasing it is that Miller sees harmony between his work and his religion: Each of the great Western monotheistic traditions sees God as truth, love, and knowledge. This should mean that each and every increase in our understanding of the natural world is a step toward God and not, as many people assume, a step away. If faith and reason are both gifts from God, then they should play complementary, not conflicting, roles in our struggle to understand the world around us. As a scientist and as a Christian, that is exactly what I believe. True knowledge comes only from a combination of faith and reason.
I can tell you from the inside (as an erstwhile NRO contributor who's corresponded with some of them) that the whole ID movement was concocted by Johnson along with anti-Einstein anti-Shakespeare nut and American spectator regular Tom Bethell. It is a deliberate ploy to try and unsettle the Darwin 'establishment' (whatever that is) because these guys are just frustrated by Darwin and evolution as a whole, and could find no way to challenge it until ID occurred to them as a rhetorical strategy, masking as science. It was Bethell who encouraged Behe to write his embarrassing book Darwin's Black Box. The intellectual dishonesty behind the whole ploy is what makes me--and several other conservatives and libertarians--just bullshit about these clowns. If you search closely enough on Google, and are patient enough to wade through a lot of crap (I did because I thought there was an article worth writing about these guys) you can actually find old posts from emails Bethell wrote to Johnson discussing how to go about the attack.
Wow! John, I don't suppose you might still have some pointers to those old Google searches...?
Hi Avram:
I just went back to my bookmarks folder and found this:
http://www.aidsinfobbs.org/articles/rethink/rethink2/807
It's not about ID, it's about AIDS (yeah, that's another issue these guys are/were into: that HIV doesn't really cause AIDS...)
In his book, Behe thanks Bethell in particular for
encouraging him to write it.
Anyway, if you have the patience, go to Google, use
the Advanced Search for specific uses of either Phil Johnson or Tom Bethell. Bethell is the better choice because his name isn't that common. Then you gotta sift through the stuff. I had some correspondence with him a couple of years ago about his anti-relativity stuff. Eventually he got pissed off at me and refused to correspond anymore. I had the bad taste to point out that a lot of the accusations he was bringing against Einstein and his science were--to the word--the same as the attacks made against him by Weimar anti-Semites. I wrote a piece for Salon on the whole anti-relativity underground. They're much more colorful (and whacked) than anti-Darwinists. I hope this helps.
Oh, I wouldn't have a problem with them talking about ID, with the following conditions:
1) That it not be in a science class
2) That the teacher also assign Richard Dawkins' "The Blind Watchmaker"
The (quite civilized) discussion I was having with an ID proponent ended when I pointed out that there's no theological reason a Christian can't accept evolution, and she replied, "But I don't want to accept evolution."
Couldn't say anything after that.
I believe that part of the reason the ID argument is taken more seriously than it deserves is the clever choice of euphemism. The confusion Lenny mentioned in his first comment is, I believe, deliberately induced: the name "Intelligent Design" implicitly equates a very specific set of pseudoscientific claims about biology with the general notion of an intelligent creator. Argue against Intelligent Design and you seem to be advocating atheism. I certainly don't mind people advocating atheism, since I subscribe to it myself, but most Americans are not atheists and therefore would feel uncomfortable with anything that seems to imply it.
The word "creationism" used to have much the same bait-and-switch effect, but more people are on to it now, at least in educated circles-- whereas "Intelligent Design" can still confuse them.
Some very militant atheists such as Richard Dawkins play into this by insisting on the equation of science and atheism from the other side of the contrapositive.
John Farrell: That Salon piece was great! I've been interacting with the anti-relativity people on Usenet for a decade, and it was the best mainstream summary of the movement I've ever seen.
Bethell was a great admirer of the late Petr Beckmann, probably best known as the author of "A History of Pi" and some anti-environmentalist books. I knew Beckmann mostly from the Usenet sci groups, where for a while in the nineties he was one of the most awesomely apoplectic flamers in the history of the medium. His favorite debating tactic was to remind everyone that he had a Ph.D. and was a professor (of electrical engineering, I think). His opponents were usually graduate students, so he derided them for being "amateurs." His replacement for relativity seemed to be some variant of dragged-ether theory, but it was hard to tell more because he'd advertise for subscriptions to his journal when pressed for details. I still miss him.
Matt,
Thanks for your comments--and for taking the time to look at the Salon piece. Yeah, I eventually had to spill $40 to get Beckmann's vaunted book. It is indeed an ether drag theory, but he tried to dodge the problems with ether drag by treating the local field (which he never precisely defined) as the area in which light only "seemed" invariant. I think Bethell kind of hero-worshipped the guy. (In fact he told me he was planning to write a "layman's" version of Beckmann's book at some point. (Can't wait!!) It's too bad he went "funny", because Beckmann wrote some good stuff on nuclear energy. I too liked History of Pi.
Best,
John F
I think you're also right, Matt, about Richard Dawkins. He doesn't seem to realize that he's the opposite side of the same coin as the creationists. He thinks the argument from design is basically it. If you disprove it, you disprove God. It never seems to have occurred to him that there is, and has been, in classical Christianity, an argument from contingency. In different wording, you can find this in Aquinas. Contingency is a much more defensible argument for theism, and indeed most religious scientists (like Miller, Owen Gingrich, and others) have always based their theism on it. My favorite praise for this argument was given by the late great Fred Hoyle, who studied the nuclear reactions inside massive stars and the extremely unlikely reactions that led directly to the creation of carbon (and therefore the possibility of life). Nothing shook his "lack of faith" more than this, he wrote, and concluded that the entire universe must be a "put up job."
I may be misremembering, but I don't recall Richard Dawkins saying anything, at least in The Blind Watchmaker, about disproofs of God. He merely said that God is irrelevant to the argument, like Laplace saying, "I have no need of that hypothesis." If you want to believe that God set up the universe to behave the way Dawkins says it works, Dawkins has no problem with that. I think.
The Anthropic Principle should be a sufficient answer to Fred Hoyle's concern. If the physical constants of the universe weren't the way they are, we wouldn't be here to wonder about how improbable they are, so what's the problem? There could be an infinity of universes with different physical constants, but they wouldn't be capable of forming matter and life as we know it.
You're right about Blind Watchmaker. It's in his columns and articles that Dawkins tends to address the issue more than his books. And he does have a problem with religion, I think. Just after 9/11, he wrote a piece, almost a rant, about the evils of religion and that only religious fanatics would have crashed into the WTC. (The Japanese kamikaze pilots of WWII weren't religious fanatics.) Dawkins makes no distinction between types of religion, and what a better place the world would be without it, etc. etc. He also repeatedly harps on the percentage of Americans who identify themselves as Bible Christians, as though that figure alone is proof that most Yanks are scientific illiterates.
Re: the Anthropic Principle. Scientifically and philosophically, it comes across as a dodge. No one can prove that there are other universes, by definition. But even if they could, I don't see how they can prove that the laws of those other universes would necessarily be different, without the assumption of random chance. To me, AP seems no more than a deliberately unprovable concoction to assure scientists who don't want to deal with the philosophical question of contingency (why is there something rather than nothing) that it isn't really a question at all.
And supposing there are other universes, you're still left with the question, where did the natural laws come from by which the randomly generating universes come into being?John: And where did God come from? In discussions like this, "God" too easily becomes just a dodge for "That which I don't have to explain where it came from."
We don't really need the other universes to use the Anthropic Principle at all. The same principle nicely deals with contingency questions in daily life as well. The A.P. itself is not a dodge: it's an explanation of why a dodge isn't necessary.
But if you want to believe that God set this, or other, universes up, go right ahead. The topic at hand is the fallacy of I.D., and the main fallacy of I.D. seems to me to be the belief that God, having already set up this complex universe with its elegant rules, then goes around constantly putting his thumb on the scales.
The Japanese kamikaze pilots weren't religious fanatics?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but during WWII such pilots subscribed to a dangerous mish-mash of Buddhism, Shintoism, and Bushido. They believed Hirohito was a God. Kamikazes were recruited from the ranks of the younger pilots, more maleable and easily manipulated, and were promised glory and honor for their families and for themselves in the hereafter.
Which, I believe, was Dawkins' point. The only way you're going to get a sensible person to intentionally use themselves as a missile is to promise them great rewards for such martyrdom and to brainwash them into thinking the afterlife will be vastly superior to their current one.
With the Japanese, it was a different flavor, but it was still the same dish.
I think that both Derek James and Richard Dawkins are out of touch with the real world of brute human existence. The pilots of airplanes which happen to lose power over densely populated areas, who subsequently continue to fly their aircraft until after the point of certain fatality stand as obvious counterexamples to the notion that only religious fanatics will give themselves to a cause.
Some people are very cynical about human motivations. Rewards in the afterlife aren't the only thing people, even religious people, are willing to consider more important than the continuation of their own, inevitably finite, existence.
The intellects that can plan for their own deaths and lead up to it and actually do it are rare, but can probably be found in any population living under sufficient psychological stress. When they're sufficiently charismatic, they can get others to follow them into death, but religion is just one narrative framework for a murderous confidence game.
Hi Simon:
"But if you want to believe that God set this, or other, universes up, go right ahead. The topic at hand is the fallacy of I.D., and the main fallacy of I.D. seems to me to be the belief that God, having already set up this complex universe with its elegant rules, then goes around constantly putting his thumb on the scales."
I entirely agree. I'm a first-cause believer. And of course, just because you can use mathematics or philosophy to demonstrate the need of a first cause in existential terms, doesn't in any way mean the cause is the god of the bible. Don't get me wrong. Trying to concoct so-called sciences of creation I think is pathetic. It demeans science and religion.
But yes, you do need to posit different universes to make sense of the Anthropic Principle. It precisely allows you to reduce this universe to an inevitable one based on the scenario that there are millions of others. So, sooner or later of course a universe with people would come about and there's nothing surprising about it, special, or whatever. This thereby relievs you of having to offer an explanation for the improbable contingencies in this universe, given the laws as they are, that allowed for the improbable evolution of life. Hoyle's reaction would not have been any different if he'd known about A.P. It was precisely the improbability of the carbon reactions even given the laws of physics that he knew that daunted him.
But even so, so what? I'm not demanding that a limit to what science can tell us necessarily means we must look for a god. I'm merely saying that even the most scientifically educated humans do use another compartment of their experience and intelligence to come to a conclusion or belief at those limits.
The pilot who loses power over a populated area and keeps flying is doing so for a very concrete goal: saving human lives. She isn't going to save her own life by giving up; she can avoid taking anyone else with her.
That's a little different, I think, from getting up on a fine morning and getting into an airplane in order to crash it into a building, or an enemy warship.
But I digress...
They're certainly different cases, but I was specifically recalling pilots of aircraft who could have saved themselves at others' expense, but instead committed themselves to a course of action that would kill them. They will do this without a hint of religious reward, simply because they believe it's the better course of action.
I'm not saying that the motives of mass-murdering hijackers are defensible or particularly comparable, I'm saying that you don't have to be a religious zealot to find a motive for sacrificing your life for a perceived benefit to others. I think some of the pilots were deluded and probably delusional and systematically ensnared by others into a murderous plot. I won't argue that they weren't evil, but those who stood behind them and enable and manipulated them into expressing their rage by an act of murder are even more enormously evil.
That a religious narrative was the frame they chose for their confidence tricks on those evil victims doesn't mean that religion is the only narrative framework that can be used, or that its susceptibility to corruption is a unique flaw of religious worldviews.
Consider, for example, that a belief that one can improve on the random workings of haphazard mating attractions by control of breeding, sterilization, and even "ethnic cleansing." Clearly the belief in the applicability of engineering to genetics as a science doesn't require religious zealotry, but the eugenics narrative can be used to convince people to put aside their humanity and engage in bestial acts of genocide, has been known to be used to con saps into giving their lives "fighting" for a cause as terrorists.
I'm an atheist, by the way, I just don't think that it's useful to attribute these men's evil or their expression of it to their religious beliefs as such.
John, Bob, admirably argued.
My own reaction to "Intelligent Design" crypto-creationism is fairly simple -- the intellectual equivalent of building furniture out of two-by-fours.
First from a non-secular viewpoint:
The Intelligent Design enthusiasts are a bunch of lukewarm believers who think it was impossible for God to have created the world in ways that encompass or are consonant with the narratives of science.
Furthermore, while they may believe the universe is the handiwork of an intelligent designer, they can't believe He's all =that= intelligent -- since, after all, His ways, His works, and His purposes are comprehensible to them.
This is an ensmalled God they're preaching, inadequate in scope to have been the designer of the depths of time and breadths of space, inventor of light and matter, Who inscribed the Fibonacci sequence and the constant =E= into creation like His own secret name writ over and over again.
(The explicit anti-evolutionists preach one even more crabbed. Not only do they go to church and sing "God Moves in a Mysterious Way," then deny that His ways might exceed their comfortable imaginings, but they conceive that a deity in the midst of making the world would stoop to build a false fossil record into the rocks -- in the same act creating a lie, and the subject about which the lie was told.)
I'm surprised that they're willing to let their God be defined as the intelligent creator, and the intelligent creator as God. That puts them at the mercy of scientific breakthroughs. For instance, it looks like for some people, being gay kicks in earlier than what any mainstream religious body recognizes as an age of accountabiliy.
If God is the intelligent designer, do the ID people intend to give up on god as the Great Homophobe? Or do they mean to accept that God might create an entire class of human beings whose natural and sincere impulses are inherently sinful?
If the latter, what are its further implications?
...Onward to the secular parts of the program:
Might the universe be the work of an intelligent designer? Well, yes. It's possible that it was designed. It's possible that the designer was intelligent. But that says nothing further about the designer's nature. If I pass by a vacant lot and see that the rocks in it have been gathered up and carefully stacked into a pyramid, I may infer that someone did the stacking, but that doesn't tell me a thing about their hair color or their political beliefs.
But suppose you start adding characteristics to this intelligent designer. Bear in mind, now, there's no absolutely no legitimate reason to do so; but suppose for a moment that you do it anyway. The plot of the resulting origin issue could potentially include the universe being produced by:
A. Not-so-intelligent design by an intelligent designer who was having a really bad day. Or possibly it was absolutely brilliant design work by a not-exactly-top-notch designer who was having a really good day, and had the sense to claim afterward that he did it all on purpose.
B. God, in His aspect as Brahma the Creator.
C. Eon upon eon of argument, compromise, expert testimony, procedural motions, cloakroom logrolling, and last-minute changes by three partially overlapping committees of intelligent bees from Venus. (Why they're currently headquartered on Venus is a story so long and circumstantial that it can't be told within a single human lifetime; and anyway it has nothing to do with us.)
D. Dawa the Sun Spirit, with the help of His emissary Gogyeng Sowuhti (Spider Grandmother).
E. An act of will on the part of an omniscient, omnipotent , and omnibenevolent being, who continues to watch His creation with an infinitely close eye. And who has a long white beard.
F. The deterioration and collapse of an earlier and much better universe whose nature and origin -- perfectly evident to its inhabitants -- is not apprehensible to us on account of the loss of data attendant upon the collapse.
G. Other.
Are the Intelligent Design enthusiasts willing to accept that the intelligent bees from Venus, are as legitimate (i.e., equally arbitrary) an interpretation of the intelligent designer as the guy with the long white beard? One suspects not. But what that leaves, then, is the intelligent designer and nothing more. The instant they try to identify their intelligent designer with any wider version of god, they're over the line. If their intention was to bring god into the schools, this seems like a deeply unsatisfactory approach.
TNH wrote, "Do the ID people ... mean to accept that God might create an entire class of human beings whose natural and sincere impulses are inherently sinful?"
I think they do. I thought the point of the concept of Original Sin is that all human beings have natural and sincere impulses that are inherently sinful. And that we have to overcome them, and that this is a tough job.
What I have not seen addressed is why God should have chosen to make the test of life such a difficult one to get a passing grade on.
The Christian's reason for picking a particular answer to your multiple choice quiz on who the Intelligent Designer might have something to do with belief in a particular document of attributed divine origin which says so. You may not believe it, but there it is.
I do not advocate these arguments myself, being as much an unbeliever as anyone else here, but I do not like to see my fellow unbelievers sitting around scratching their heads in bafflement as to what the opposition is on about.
Possibly just for purposes of argument, you have accepted the presumption that the universe shows signs of required intelligent design at all, a more serious fallacy. But if it was just for purposes of argument, there is no need to say more.
(John Farrell: no, you don't need to postulate alternative universes to accept the Anthropic Principle. If you should run into an old high school friend at the mall by a million to one chance, you don't have to postulate the existence of 999,999 alternative universes in which this didn't happen. Similarly, you don't need to postulate the actual existence of universes with different physical laws in order to accept the chance that this one has these physical laws. The alternative universes merely help clarify the concept.)
Simon wrote: "Similarly, you don't need to postulate the actual existence of universes with different physical laws in order to accept the chance that this one has these physical laws. The alternative universes merely help clarify the concept." Yes. Which is precisely my point. If this is the only universe, then it's not a chance. It's a startling contingency. And that's where some religious scientists come from. Others shrug and say, yeah it's the way it is, because it's the way it is, and they think no more of it.
Best,
JF
Bob Webber wrote:
"I think that both Derek James and Richard Dawkins are out of touch with the real world of brute human existence."
Exactly how do my comments reflect that I am "out of touch" with the real world?
I simply took issue with John Farrell's erroneous statement that: "The Japanese kamikaze pilots of WWII weren't religious fanatics." Which is patently wrong.
Of course religions aren't the only ideological frameworks that elicit suicidal self-sacrifice, but to ignore extreme religious fanaticism as a particularly insidious instrument for manipulating people into using themselves as weapons is, frankly, out of touch with the real world of brute human existence.
At the center of the issue is the devaluation of human life by the promise of an eternally happy spiritual afterlife. The pilot you cited might well be risking her own life because she values the lives of others, and is therefore trying to save them.
Conversely, the suicide bombers on 9/11 obviously held little value for worldly human life. Do you doubt that they perceived their victims as infidels, unworthy of life? And do you doubt that they anticipated eternal rewards in the afterlife for their actions?
Such religious frameworks are not the only means to horrible ends, but this is the particular mindset of the very viable threat that we are facing today. To not recognize this very core issue is to be out of touch with reality.
JF - If this is the only universe, it need no more not be a chance than meeting your friend at the mall need not be a chance.
There's a common misapprehension which looks at any unlikely event, mundane or cosmic, and says "This is so improbable that it has to have been the result of a guiding force." That conclusion is not necessarily true; it's a result of a misunderstanding of how probability works.
If there's going to be a universe at all, it has to have some set of physical constants, why not these? And if we wonder, why are the constants perfectly suited for us, that's where the beauty of the Anthropic Principle comes in: if it weren't suited for us, we wouldn't be here to wonder about it.
Why were you born, instead of the millions of other possible children your parents could have had, or no child at all? Because if you hadn't been born, you wouldn't be here to wonder about it.
Why did life as we know it happen to evolve on the only planetoid in the solar system suitable for it? The question answers itself: on any other planetoid, we wouldn't be there to wonder about it.
That's the Anthropic Principle.
"There's a common misapprehension which looks at any unlikely event, mundane or cosmic, and says "This is so improbable that it has to have been the result of a guiding force." That conclusion is not necessarily true; it's a result of a misunderstanding of how probability works."
Right. But I'm not talking about a guiding force. You're getting back to creationists and design. I'm talking about contingency. It need not have been this way. And it isn't any one mundane fact. It's a series of them that prompts the sense of contingency. Carbon reactions in stars are just one improbability. But that's not enough to explain life. Then there's the earth's distance from the sun, which is exactly right; but that's not enough; then its particular axis tilt of the planet, then the fact that it has a satellite so proportionally large compared to other planets, to keep the tides and seasons stable, etc, etc. The improbabilities just stretch and stretch. When you size up the series of improbabilities, just saying, well, we're here because that's the type of universe we're in doesn't quite satisfy. And again, I'm not talking about design, but about the contingencies involved in the outcome.
The reason I keep talking about design, John, is because that's the nominal topic of this thread and because you're falling into the same fallacy that the ID people are falling into. "The improbabilities just stretch and stretch," you write. That's exactly the way Michael Behe talks: have you read him?
If my reference to "guiding force" befuddles the argument, take it out, and rephrase the fallacy I cited as the argument that "This is so improbable it couldn't have been the result of chance." As I wrote, "That conclusion is not necessarily true; it's a result of a misunderstanding of how probability works." Nothing in that requires that the "guiding force" be part of the fallacy: it's still a misunderstanding of probability.
"If my reference to "guiding force" befuddles the argument, take it out, and rephrase the fallacy I cited as the argument that "This is so improbable it couldn't have been the result of chance." As I wrote, "That conclusion is not necessarily true; it's a result of a misunderstanding of how probability works."
Thank you for clarifying. (And apologies to all if this has gone off message.)And yes, I have read Behe. Long after the hype, and was surprised at how transparent he was. Within a year of his drawing a line in the sand and proclaiming that the mechanism responsible for blood clotting was irreducibly complex, two different teams (if memory serves) published papers showing exactly how the system could have evolved by natural selection.
Behe's argument of irreducable complexity is very similar to that of early skeptics of the atomic theory, who argued that they'd looked with powerful microscopes and couldn't see them. It turned out their microscopes just weren't powerful enough.
OTOH, it was also by a sensitive experiment which measured nothing that the universal ether was disproved, so sometimes these lines of argument work. But what really disproved the ether was the development of an alternative theory.
And this is where the ID folks tend to fall down. At least Behe is more sophisticated than the ones who think they've got you with questions like "What good is 10% of an eye?" (being vaguely sensitive to light has great advantage over not being vaguely sensitive to light, as a lot of legally blind people can tell you) or "What good is 10% of a wing?" (flying squirrels seem to glide quite nicely with 10% of a wing). Dawkins deals with questions like this most efficiently.
This is why I gave up participating in evolution/creation arguments for sport a few years back.
OK, just a refresher to make sure we all agree on the basic terms: In the world of science, we've got three fields that the creationists take issue with, though they less intelligent creationists generally just lump them all together under evolution. Evolution concerns itself with the development of already-existing life, and its basic validity is considered a settled issue by those who aren't trying to shove the Bible down other people's throats. Abiogenesis is the study of how life arose from non-living matter (Andrew Ellington called it "the problem of self-organization of organic self-replicators"), and (last I checked) isn't settled to the same degree evolution is; there are still lots of important details to be worked out, but unfortunately the working out of those details involves actual detailed knowledge of lots of the fiddly bits of organic chemistry, which leaves it a field not well-suited to armchair speculation by the layman. And we've got cosmology, a word that refers to both the branch of astronomy dealing with the origin and structure of the universe and to a branch of philosophical metaphysics dealing with the nature of the universe. Everyone who's read a little Hawking, Feynman, or Zukav considers themselves qualified to speculate about cosmology, since practical experimentation is so very difficult, and so few people ever ask you to present your math, making this a prime topic for blog discussions and late-night dorm bull sessions.
What we've got down here at this end of the comments page isn't about evolution, it's about cosmology. The problem with cosmological speculation is that the really interesting questions are literally unanswerable. In fact, the most interesting questions may just be unaskable, because they involve speculation about conditions that may predate the very basic rules underlying the structure of the universe and therefore human thought. How can we usefully speculate about what may have brought about causality? What may have preceded time? All cosmological answers (at least all of those phrased in English) make assumptions about the universe that might not pertain to the conditions under which the universe came into being.
It's pretty easy to demolish just about any armchair cosmological theory, and pretty impossible to come up with one that can't be demolished. For example, Hoyle's argument about the improbability of the conditions (on a laws-of-physics level) that lead to the formation of life doesn't go anywhere useful, because even if you assume the existence of a being that could create such a universe, you've just saddled yourself with the problem of explaining how such a being (who must surely be even more improbable than the universe he created) came to be. It's the infinitely-regressing first cause all over again.
Derek James,
The specific paragraph of yours that I'm saying shows that you're out of touch with brute reality is, "Which, I believe, was Dawkins' point. The only way you're going to get a sensible person to intentionally use themselves as a missile is to promise them great rewards for such martyrdom and to brainwash them into thinking the afterlife will be vastly superior to their current one."
My claim is that it's possible to give their lives to a cause without invoking putative rewards in the afterlife, and you haven't rebutted that. I would further say that religious beliefs are not essential to make a person disregard the lives of others.
An otherwise secular-minded person who had been talked into believing that the WTC was the seat of power of evil oppressing Elders of Zion (picking a world-dominating conspiracy at random) and filled with their minions could feel quite secularly heroic flying an airplane into it. Saving his family/people/culture from genocide or enslavement could make the cause of destroying the E of Z something to give his life for.
By the way, do you have anything to back up your claim that religious fanaticism drove the Kamikaze pilots? What I have read is that they were motivated by the living-world honour that pilots and their families would receive through giving their lives in service of their Emperor. No promises of an enriched afterlife that I'm aware of, maybe you can point me to something enriching to read, specific to this point?
Dawkins is out of touch. The main thing that's necessary for people to sacrifice themselves is for them to identify with something outside of themselves -- family, friends, nation, philosophy, their imagined status in the eyes of others -- and people will do that readily enough.
The impulse, frequently indulged, to go out of his way to bash religion is probably my least favorite thing about Dawkins.
Derek James,
The specific paragraph of yours that I'm saying shows that you're out of touch with brute reality is, "Which, I believe, was Dawkins' point. The only way you're going to get a sensible person to intentionally use themselves as a missile is to promise them great rewards for such martyrdom and to brainwash them into thinking the afterlife will be vastly superior to their current one."
My claim is that it's possible to give their lives to a cause without invoking putative rewards in the afterlife, and you haven't rebutted that. I would further say that religious beliefs are not essential to make a person disregard the lives of others.
An otherwise secular-minded person who had been talked into believing that the WTC was the seat of power of evil oppressing Elders of Zion (picking a world-dominating conspiracy at random) and filled with their minions could feel quite secularly heroic flying an airplane into it. Saving his family/people/culture from genocide or enslavement could make the cause of destroying the E of Z something to give his life for.
By the way, do you have anything to back up your claim that religious fanaticism drove the Kamikaze pilots? What I have read is that they were motivated by the living-world honour that pilots and their families would receive through giving their lives in service of their Emperor. No promises of an enriched afterlife that I'm aware of, maybe you can point me to something enriching to read, specific to this point?
Teresa: I believe that your list of possible Intelligent Designers omitted "Mermaids", "Designers belonging to the Emperor", and "Designers drawn with a camel's-hair brush." But I was pleased that it included "Designers who appear as flies when seen from a great distance."
Bob Webber writes:
"My claim is that it's possible to give their lives to a cause without invoking putative rewards in the afterlife, and you haven't rebutted that. I would further say that religious beliefs are not essential to make a person disregard the lives of others."
I'll grant you that it's possible, but there are hypotheticals that are possible while being extremely rare or unlikely. Common sense dictates that it's much, much easier to convince someone to destroy their own lives and the lives of others if their mindset essentially devalues worldy human life in favor of a happy afterlife (for them, and perhaps a not-so-happy afterlife for their victims).
Your example seems a bit weak. I can't really imagine someone wanting to destroy an Elders of Zion-like conspiracy without some sort of religious motivation, but I still get your point. A religious ideology isn't necessarily a precursor to committing a suicide attack intended to kill many others. But I would argue that some sort of dangerous fantasy (e.g., a better "secular" example might be if someone flew an explosives-laden plane into a hotel they thought was filled with aliens from outer space) is probably necessary for someone to commit such an act.
But coming back to reality, the overwhelming majority of suicide attacks (which you seem to keep muddling with the idea of individual self-sacrifice in an attempt to *save* lives) have historically been religiously motivated.
Their happening virtually on a daily basis in Israel.
To be so incredibly worried about offending someone's religious sensibilities as to ignore a prime motivation of people who intend to kill you is recklessly foolish.
Bob Webber wrote:
"By the way, do you have anything to back up your claim that religious fanaticism drove the Kamikaze pilots? What I have read is that they were motivated by the living-world honour that pilots and their families would receive through giving their lives in service of their Emperor. No promises of an enriched afterlife that I'm aware of, maybe you can point me to something enriching to read, specific to this point?"
Sure, no problem. I'll enrich away:
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~liminal/papers/matsuo/kamikaze.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/03/sayle.htm
http://www.stanford.edu/~nickpk/writings/Kamikaze.html
Each of these articles (the first and third well-referenced) clearly indicate the Japanese belief in the spirit and afterlife, in passages such as this:
"The kamikazes also used several expressions among themselves that reflected their beliefs about their imminent deaths. One such expression was the euphemism 'I am going to Yasukuni' or 'See you in Yasukuni' (Barker, 25) which pilots used to mean they were about to embark on their final mission. Yasukuni shrine, on Kudan Hill overlooking the city of Tokyo, was the eternal resting place of all soldiers who died in righteous warfare."
It is also quite widely recognized that the Japanese believed Hirohito to be divine (though personally he himself did not believe this...he still trumped it up and used the mythology to great effect among his armies).
As mentioned in my earlier post, Japanese motivation was an amalgam of notions of honor and pride (exemplified by the Bushido code) coupled with religious motivations. Were they motivated primarily out of religious duty? Probably not. But it was undeniably an integral part of their psychological make-up, and a vital factor in the motivations of kamikaze attacks.
Freeman Dyson's comments on a book by John Polkinghorne regarding the theological implications of modern physics might be of interest:
I am myself a Christian, a member of a community that preserves an ancient heritage of great literature and great music, provides help and counsel to young and old when they are in trouble, educates children in moral responsibility, and worships God in its own fashion. But I find Polkinghorne's theology altogether too narrow for my taste. I have no use for a theology that claims to know the answers to deep questions but bases its arguments on the beliefs of a single tribe. I am a practicing Christian but not a believing Christian. To me, to worship God means to recognize that mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our comprehension. When I listen to Polkinghorne describing the afterlife, I think of God answering Job out of the whirlwind, "Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?... Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding.... Have the gates of death been opened unto thee? Or hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death?" God's answer to Job is all the theology I need. As a scientist, I live in a universe of overwhelming size and mystery. The mysteries of life and language, good and evil, chance and necessity, and of our own existence as conscious beings in an impersonal cosmos are even greater than the mysteries of physics and astronomy. Behind the mysteries that we can name, there are deeper mysteries that we have not even begun to explore.
About atrocities by religious fanatics, and Dawkins' anti-religious essays:
Religious apologists frequently make the claim that atheism is responsible for all the deaths under Stalin and Mao. Sometimes they throw in Hitler too, which leads to long side debates over whether Hitler was an atheist (but it's pretty clear that Stalin and Mao were, at least nominally, regardless of what they personally believed).
My experience on the receiving end of that argument is the reason that I'm uncomfortable with the people who identify religion as a menace to be eliminated on the basis of the Sept. 11 attacks or other modern atrocities. It's too similar to the pro-religion Argument from Stalin. It seems odd to say that "well, what really made his regime evil wasn't atheism" but then make a claim about theism or belief in the afterlife as the source of evil of extremist Islamism.
Of course you can claim that Stalin and Mao were really advocates of the "Godless religion" of Communism. There's some truth to that, but it dilutes the argument; the issue may still be religion but it is no longer theistic metaphysics.
Mr. Farrell, who appears to be doing a very admirable job combatting pseudoscientism in many arenas, is under a serious misapprehension wrt the "Anthropic Principle" and contingency (or maybe I am misunderstanding him).
"The improbabilities just stretch and stretch. When you size up the series of improbabilities, just saying, well, we're here because that's the type of universe we're in doesn't quite satisfy. And again, I'm not talking about design, but about the contingencies involved in the outcome."
Unfortunately, if you don't postulate multiple universes (note, this is not an uncommon postulate, and in fact is one of the two competing quantum theories, although I think it is somewhat out of favor at the moment), "contingency" is quite useless. The mathematical reason is quite simple; your N is 1.
Here is a concrete example. Suppose you flip a coin 1 million times, and every single flip is heads. In order to mimic the Anthropic Principle, suppose further that you didn't look at the results as you were flipping, but looked at the sequence at the end. This seems like a tremendously unlikely result, and it is. But if you only try to flip a coin 1 million times *once*, then the chances of getting *the result you got*, regardless of what it was,are exactly 100%. In other words, you have absolutely no way to discern how likely it was, and the suggestion that it might be a two-headed coin, while awfully tempting, is not supported by the evidence.
Likewise, regardless of how unsatisfying it is, there is simply no probability value that can reasonably assigned to events that only happen once. So, unless you postulate multiple universes, and are able to actually investigate those universes to find out what they are like, the Anthropic Principle is just more comforting non-scientific speculation, with no real justification.
As an aside, the Anthropic Principle always seemed rather hollow to me. For example, a common notion is "if the Gravitational constant were just a little bigger, we wouldn't exist, because the universe would be a very dense ball of collapsed matter" (I may have the physics wrong, but you get the idea). This seems very silly. If the universe were a very dense ball of collapsed matter, we wouldn't be here to comment on how odd it is that we are living in this very dense ball of collapsed matter. Of course, very dense people could be living in that universe, debating how odd it is that the Universe seems so carefully designed to allow for their incredibly dense nature, and "if the Gravitational constant were just a bit smaller, our universe would be expanding rapidly, and our very dense selves could not exist!"
Some ways back, Derek James posted (quoting somebody else):
"The kamikazes also used several expressions among themselves that reflected their beliefs about their imminent deaths. One such expression was the euphemism 'I am going to Yasukuni' or 'See you in Yasukuni' (Barker, 25) which pilots used to mean they were about to embark on their final mission. Yasukuni shrine, on Kudan Hill overlooking the city of Tokyo, was the eternal resting place of all soldiers who died in righteous warfare."
There's actually a little museum at the Yasukuni Shrine (which I visited while in Tokyo) containing the personal effects of many of the kamikaze pilots (including one guy honored as the first kamikaze, who (assuming I read and remember the plaque correctly) lost some crucial control in his plane, and opted to slam it into something at Pearl Harbor rather than ditach at sea). It's a little creepy, frankly-- their old school books and letters to their parents are laid out as objects of veneration.
(Comments about the shrine, and war-related stuff in Tokyo can be found on my web page:
http://home.earthlink.net/~orzelc/Infamy.html
Oddly, this shows up fairly high on the Google results list for information about the Dolittle bombing raid on Tokyo (#1 for a search on "Dolittle Tokyo Pearl Infamy"), resulting in a lot of hits from confused people looking for information about the Pearl Harbor movie...)
It's a little dangerous to really equate Shintoism, especially the state Shintoism of the WWII era, with the religions we're familiar with in the West. It's an odd agglomeration of beliefs, sort of inseparably mixed with Buddhism at this point (though great efforts were made to try to separate the two), and it's hard to really properly state the exact status of the various divine or semi-divine entities associated with it. Even at the height of state Shintoism, they never really believed that the Emperor's divinity carried with it the Western connotations of surpassing and infallible power.
Paul Orwin: Excellent comments on the mathematics of the universe-creation situation ("Your N is 1" - yes, that puts it very nicely), but I'm not sure if you understand what the Anthropic Principle is.
It's not a way of marveling at the uniqueness of our universe, it's a way of explaining that, whether our universe is unique or not, there's nothing we need marvel at. As you said earlier, our N is 1, that's the way it came out. (Not being a physicist, I can't address whether your speculation on very dense beings holds up, though it's a good theoretical point, and only reinforces the line of argument that the Anthropic Principle pursues.)
It is possible that I am mistaken about the nature of the Anthropic Principle, but I was under the impression that (pause for googling) the Anthropic Principle essentially suggests that the Universe is very special because it allows a highly improbable thing (human civilization) to exist.
This page (Anthropic Principle) seems to me to largely back up my impression. My point, such as it was, is that there is no basis for "specialness" except for a case study in circular reasoning. It seems largely empty of any meaning, in any real sense.
It's not my actual field of physics (I do atomic and molecular stuff), but the "Anthropic Principle" is an idea that's kicked around pretty regularly among physicists of all sub-fields.
I've always understood it (at least in its most common formulation) to be basically an argument that the "specialnes" of our Universe is sort of a moot point. That is, the only reason we find the basic conditions of the Universe at all remarkable is that they're ideally suited for our sort of life. But then, if they weren't, we wouldn't be here worrying about it (and some group of creatures who can only exist in a universe with radically different conditions would be marvelling at how ideally suited their universe is to their sort of life...).
It's not an attempt to explain the origin of the Universe, or any of its properties. It's basically an argument to downplay the significance of the "specialness" of our Universe.
(I've heard people use a version of the argument which attempts to argue that it's somehow necessary for life to have evolved so as to marvel at the suitability of the Universe for life, but those people are phoning reality from the same area code as the Time Cube guy (http://www.timecube.com))
Paul: They say that all information is on the web. All misinformation is also on the web. Don't let the religious fanatics hijack the Anthropic Principle and pretend it means the opposite of what it does.
Ok, point taken. I guess my post is support for, rather than argument against, the "Anthropic Principle", in that context.
Simon Shoedecker, if you think the religious participants in this conversation deserve to be called fanatics, you can't have met the real thing. You have far more in common with me, and Patrick, and John Farrell, than any of us have with the anti-evolutionists and the Intelligent Design crowd.
Chad, Paul, and Simon all seem to be in basic agreement, to me. Physicists, in my experience, are pretty blase9 about physical reality and its existence, very much into the how and not at all into the why, and way to focussed on the details to spend much time rubbernecking. Apart from sporadic Fred Hoyle moments, when they gaze in wonderment for a few moments, jot down a quick note, then let the Anthropic Prinicple lead them to shrugging their shoulders and getting back to work.
Even I get, "Wow, that is really soooo cool!" moments at work from time to time, it seems to be a basic human feature, or possibly bug.
I'm reminded of a story (I think by Phil Klass under his standard pseudonym) about a project that sends a pair of spheres back into the early instants of the universe. The story progresses as a series of scenes in which increasingly divergent alien physicists send back different-but-similar (two mucous-covered slugs send back "rough finished copper cubes" in place of the original steel spheres, if I recall correctly) and forever alter what Stephen Wolfram might consider the primaevial cellular automata, acting as production rules to provide the Well Formed Formulae we view as Life On Earth.
It's both remarkable and, er, fundamentally mundane that we have this particular world and are alive in it. I frequently marvel at it, but don't consider myself qualified to determine whether or not it needs a cause, let alone whether or not that cause is a numinous possibility of being with a long white beard.
TNH - Yikes, what did I say that made you conclude I thought there were religious fanatics on this thread? The "religious fanatics" I referred to, dear Lady, were the ones who wrote the websites that tried to hijack the meaning of the Anthropic Principle and thereby confused Paul Orwin.
My dispute with John Farrell was over whether he was falling into the same fallacy as the "ID crowd", not over whether he was one.
I've talked with ID folks. (See my first post in this thread.) I know them, Horatio. I would not confuse anyone in this thread with them.
Bob Webber (crosspost): by "not marvelling" at the universe I did not mean "not rubbernecking". I enjoy being croggled and otherwise goosed by the beauty, wonder, and amazement of the universe. That, I guess, is what you mean by rubbernecking.
I meant merely not marveling at the rarity of its uniqueness and concluding thereby that it had to have been planned.
I don't think we're in fundamental disagreement here.
Hi, Derek James. I don't think we're entirely at odds in our belief about the way the world works, except that it seems to me that you, like Richard Dawkins, have an irrational dislike of and prejudice against religion.
I won't go into all the details of how my interpretations of material you cited to back up your point about Kamikaze motivations for giving their lives for their country and Emperor differ significantly from yours. If their expectations were secular, being honoured, then as Chad Orzel notes, their expectations were met and are still being met. I believe that it's true that they considered their nation holy and their emperor in some sense divine, because that is the narrative by which they understood their nationality.
I have no idea why you think that suicide bomb terrorists have to be religiously motivated. If you live in a refugee camp and have been told all your life that you are being kept down by evil foreign invaders who must be fought by the only means possible, you can believe that you're giving your life in a good cause killing said evil foreign invaders.
Similarly, I have no idea why you think it takes religion to get yourself to the point where you can kill innocents by your actions. Timoth McVeigh doesn't seem to have been a religious fanatic. The white men who got the capital city of Alabama the nickname "Bombingham" were largely of the same religion as their victims.
I don't at all know why you think that religious belief is the prime motivator, or rewards in the afterlife anything but the consolation prize you get while your family or nation gets the main benefit from your death. Except maybe that you like to pin bad stuff on religious belief.
On the question of the religious motivation of terrorists, what Matt McIrvin said. It doesn't really matter if the kamikazes were religiously motivated or not. (I'd never heard particularly that they were, not that that matters.) These intractable struggles, e.g. in Palestine and Ireland, are better understood as tribal conflicts than religious ones. That the tribes are of different religions or sects is of no more significance than that the sides in the US Civil War were of the same religion - and that they were of the same religion was an irony noted by A. Lincoln among others.
(PS: The capital of Alabama is Montgomery.)
"Even I get, 'Wow, that is really soooo cool!' moments at work from time to time, it seems to be a basic human feature, or possibly bug."
It's not a bug. If you report it as such, the Developer will respond with "Works As Designed!" :-)
Seriously, what you call a bug is what I would view as one of the central joys of life. If I were told I could never again experience that feeling ("GoshWowOhBoyOhBoy!") I would find life very dismal indeed. Cherish those moments. Have you never envied a small child seeing soap bubbles for the first time?
Btw I'm a very religious person, but as a radical pantheist, I believe that doing science IS worshipping the Divine, since to know the universe better is to know the Divine better. Therefore things like the Fibonacci sequence fill me with awe and wonder. I withhold any judgement about whether it was designed from the word go (or the word Bang); it's observable fact that it's wonderfully consistent, and that alone makes it worthy of worship.
The sophistication, erudition, and eloquence of the other posts in this thread make me hesitate to post my personal/mystical opinion, but I figure what the heck.
Simon, thanks for catching my brain, um, misfire. A particularly smelly one, at that. I plead guilty, but with the circumstances that I'm Canadian (never memorized state capitals) as well as keeping sloppy memory files.
I liked Christopher Hatton's point of view of science as worship. That feature of human existence has only ever been called a bug by my various employers and thesis supervisors, so far as I know.
Thanks, Bob. Potential button: "Worship the Real World." Nahh, people would think it's about some dumb TV show. :-)
Oh, good, I was in error. Glad to hear it, Simon.
I seem to have been born without the ability to believe, to have faith. I mean, I've really tried. I've joined churches, taken religious instruction, read, thought, prayed, and really, I just can't believe in some Designer, intelligent or otherwise. If one is really out there, and designed me this way is he going to condemn me to hell? I suppose all those radical fundies would just say it was my fault for not trying harder. Ah well.
By the way, Teresa, I love you. Marry me? Oh, but wait, I want to marry Freeman Dyson as well. Hmm...
MKK
Dropping in late here, but....
My main quibble with intelligent design is it postulates that something complicated and organized couldn't have just happened, it had to have been intellegently created. ID then proposes a creator. So, I've always wondered where something as complicated and organized as a creator came from. Wouldn't the creator require a creator? I haven't heard a satisfactory explanation for this.
I do have to admit a few religions do propose an infinite regression of creators (notably the Mormons), but most don't.
Bob Webber keeps making his point, and it's a good one: Religion is hardly the only thing that moves people to acts of fanaticism, or to other acts beyond themselves. (IMO, atheists ought not grant religion such great and unique powers. It's untidy, and I should think they'd find it depressing.)
Bob--I don't have an "irrational dislike of and prejudice against" religion.
Like any ideology, it doesn't bother me until it's used to hurt others (e.g., convincing someone that flying an airplane loaded with jet fuel into a building full of people is a splendid idea, using the Church as a shield against the law while molesting children and covering it up, or, as this thread started on, dragging religion into the classroom to give it equal time with science).
I don't want to hunt everyone down and expunge them of religion. I don't want to do away with the First Amendment. You want to worship Bobo the purple spirit monkey, you go right ahead, as long as your beliefs don't infringe on mine or bring harm to others. On the other hand, if Bobo starts telling you to kill...
So no, I'm not simple-minded enough to think that people only do bad things because of religion (jeez guys, I'm not *that* dumb). But to deny that religions are very powerful narratives, which, when misused, often result in massive pain and suffering, is just as naive a viewpoint of the one you've accused me of holding.
My thanks to Paul Orwin for his comments and example: "Likewise, regardless of how unsatisfying it is, there is simply no probability value that can reasonably assigned to events that only happen once." I accept that. But as you suggest, it is indeed unsatisfying, at least to me (and to others). My point to Simon was that reasonable, educated scientists have (and do) base their religious faith on a contingency argument (not just these physical contingencies which I've been prattling on about, but also the classic existential contingency that you get in Augustine and Aquinas, etc. Which of course is philosophy, not science.)
The problem with the ID people, is that they think a temporary scientific unknown must necessarily lead to a theological conclusion. I don't accept that (and, Simon, if I have given the impression that my contingency argument necessarily leads to... then I completely apologize--I did not explain myself clearly enough. There is nothing necessary about it. But it impresses me.).
I jumped into this thing, by the way, to point out that the entire ID thing has been intellectually dishonest from the outset in my opinion. It's not that Michael Behe really believes this (Ken Miller rightly wonders why Behe never published papers within his field on the subject and just came out with a pop science book): because it's a rhetorical ploy to avoid the otherwise necessary input of his peers, and, unfortunately, when ID gets exhausted, no doubt the Behe/Johnson team will search for some other angle to insist that science be interfered with by non-scientific premises.
Re: Bob Webber's comments some ways back (this comment thread seems to spawn replies even faster than Usenet) about physicists being "blase about physical reality", it's one of those "yes and no" sorts of things. For the most part, working physicists are busy enough dealing with the immediate problems of whatever small issue they're working on to obsess too much about the nature of reality. Yes, Quantum Mechanics is a mind-bogglingly weird theory, and aspects of it make even sober, responsible physicists say "Whoa!" like stoners confronted by the Telly-tubbies, but it's also the most comprehensively tested theory ever devised, and if you put aside the deep philosophical stuff (the "Shut Up and Calculate Interpretation," QM's answer to the Anthropic Principle) it allows you to describe reality with unprecedented precision.
On the other hand, some of the most gaseously metaphysical meandering you'd ever care to read has been generated by physicists, particularly very senior physicists. It's a running joke of sorts in the field that senility in physicists is heralded by the development of a new Theory of Everything or a new interpretation of QM. Countless pop-science articles have been written speculating on the bizarre and basically untestable ideas found in the upper reaches of cosmology and quantum theory, not to mention numerous articles with reasoning along the lines of "We don't understand [physical process A], and we don't understand [biological process B], therefore A and B are related." (Reasoning which, it should be noted, is disturbingly similar to some of the reasoning of the ID folks...)
Annoying as it is to read some of those papers and wonder when the Brain Eater got to the authors, it's hard to really fault them. The Big Questions of the true nature of reality, the origin of the Universe, and our place in it are incredibly seductive (as the 70-ish posts in this comment thread demonstrate). We need ideas like the Anthropic Principle in order to duck around the Big Questions and get useful work done on smaller, more concrete issues.
Mary Kay Kare: If you feel that there's a lack in your life, take a look at the religions that are not faith-based (you know, the ones the fundies deny even exist).
I was raised by a scientistic atheist ("anything we can't measure with current techniques and instruments doesn't exist" -- a curious dogma, as it implies that neutrinos didn't exist until the 50s); it took me quite a while to recognize that my scientific skepticism did not have to conflict with my spirituality. I finally found a religion (Wicca) that did not require me to believe anything I knew was not true. In fact, since it's about actions, not faith, belief per se becomes mutable; I don't believe the same things inside and outside of circle!
If it's just a deity that's the hard part, most of the strands of Buddhism don't have a deity (except in Thailand, where I understand they worship the Buddha, which would be anathema in Tibet). Or Zen. Or Zen Buddhism, which is something else again. Or...make something up!
Um, forgot to say that if you DON'T feel that there's a lack in your life, you have no need to explore spirituality? Didn't mean to imply that everyone needs religion (manifestly not true).
Btw NB the distinction between science and scientism. It's sort of like the difference between agnosticism and atheism. (And by the way some of those religions are atheist religions.) Also I meant to mention that I once wrote a paper "On Monotheism and Polytheism in Wicca" - for a group of HS students who were confused about where Wicca fits. Upshot: gods/the Goddess are all METAPHORS in Wicca - except inside circle, of course, where they're completely real!
This is from old memory, but I think I have it basically right:
The "anthropic principle" can refer to either a "weak anthropic principle", the entirely sensible observation that humans can only exist in, or observe, a universe that is hospitable to our sort of carbon-based life; or to a "strong anthropic principle", which starts handwaving about how "improbable" such things are (see upthread, N=1) and thus claims that the universe is in some unspecified way "designed" to produce intelligent life.
Note that the weak anthropic principle doesn't imply that the universe was "designed" to lead to human life or intelligence, or that we're the only, smartest, or most technologically or otherwise advanced species in existence, or even in this corner of our particular spiral galaxy.
The phrase "Anthropic Principle" gets used to mean a lot of things, including theism and many-universes-ism and more unclassifiable and bizarre versions. What they have in common is the notion that we might be able to "explain" physical laws by their necessity for the creation of intelligent life, for some meaning of the word "explain" that seems reasonable if you squint at it hard enough.
My opinion on this is that it might be correct in some sense but is not terribly scientifically useful, for a couple of reasons. One is that it amounts to giving up: for all we know there might be other explanations for the behavior of nature, and just citing some form of anthropic principle doesn't help in finding them. There is one partial exception: if it really is the case that there are a lot of universes with different physical laws, it's conceivable that an anthropic principle could motivate us to look for the mechanism by which they are generated. But it wouldn't tell us anything about what that mechanism is.
The other reason I am uncomfortable with this kind of reasoning is that I don't think anyone really understands the range of conditions under which intelligent life might exist. If it's even barely conceivable that you could have it in, say, a universe consisting of a huge Conway Life board, then maybe a universe that can produce smart wet land-dwelling animals isn't so special in this regard. I always remember the Stanislaw Lem story about the aliens who conclude that any intelligent being *must* have five sexes and live in pits of bubbling lava.
Hard-Hitting Moderator: Teresa Nielsen Hayden.
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