More on Intelligent Design
So, I’ve been commenting a lot in this thread, which deals with JunkYardBlog’s post on how libertarians are a bunch of hypoctrical “intellectual bullies” for expressing disdain for Bush’s support of ID. Most of my thoughts on the subject are contained in the comments of that post, so I won’t reproduce them here. I do read JYB on a regular basis, even though I am one of those atheist libertarians he apparently so despises. I find myself agreeing with him on most political issues, and disagreeing on most social ones that he chooses to address. I thought the first part of his post was pretty aggressive and strident, and painted libertarianism with a pretty broad brush. He’s made a couple of additions to his original post, which tone down the rhetoric a bit (not much, but a bit). Actually, the final addition to the post is the most reasoned, and he makes several good points about how what is scientific dogma today is ridiculed tomorrow - sort of a “how on Earth did we ever believe that” kind of scenario. And this is absolutely correct.
However, while scientific theories get discarded and modified based on new observational evidence all of the time, I’m not aware of any scientific theory that has been discarded for a supernatural explanation. Nothing like “well, we used to think that Old Faithful erupted because of volcanic heating of underground water reservoirs, but now we know that the fire demons do it”, or something similar. Now the converese is certainly true - supernatural theories have been discarded countless times as our knowledge and understanding grows. That’s why we have a Galilean rather than Copernican view of the solar system/universe. No matter how much the church wanted the Earth to be the center of the universe, the observational evidence just didn’t add up.
Anyway, here’s a couple of letters to the Manitoban, on supporting ID, and one rebutting it. The rebuttal is a perfect example of a thoughtful, reasoned, respectful response. Dr. Gingrich, the astronomer arguing for ID, is a very articulate and persuasive speaker. Read for yourself, decide for yourself. Just try not to call me a hypocritical intellectual bully because I don’t think that your faith based version of how the world came into being should be taught in science class.
Theologic truth vs scientific truth. Dare a scientist believe in “design”?
Creation with a purpose? - an argument against universal design
One of the things that has changed in science over the past century is that we’re getting much better at recognising what we don’t know, the limits to our theories. We know perfectly well that Quantum Mechanics is incomplete and that it contradicts Relativity. We know that Evolution provides no answer for the origin of life itself, and that in fact we have no very good answer for that at all.
Evolution, Quantum Mechanics and Relativity will all be supplanted by more thorough and expansive theories, but they won’t be shown to be wrong. Newtonian Mechanics was replaced by Relativity, but it wasn’t wrong; it just had boundaries that Newton didn’t suspect. (Or actually, he might have, since the orbit of Mercury was a big problem even then.)
Individual scientists can be dogmatic, of course, but there is less dogma in science today than ever before.
Comment by Pixy Misa — August 3, 2005 @ 9:47 am
[…] I’ve noticed recently quite a discussion in various places in the blogosphere regarding intelligent design. I noticed the end of a conversation at Owlish Musings, and over at Ambient Irony, which came from Vokdapundit, some over at Life in the Atomic Age, which expanded from Junkyard Blog. And, of course, Evangelical Outpost comments on intelligent design often. Much of this discussion was brought about by President George W. Bush’s statements that he thought intelligent design could be taught in government-run schools. […]
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