The new creationist tactic?

[Fade the Butcher]

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/12/the_new_creationist_tactic.php


They never rest, and you know the creationists are constantly probing, trying to find the next likely inroad into the schools. Sahotra Sarkar offers some concerns about what's coming next in creationism (http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=12282)—these seem like quite probable strategies to me.As the physicist and astronomer Victor Stenger noted in the Skeptical Briefs newsletter last September, The Privileged Planet represents a new wedge in the creationists' arsenal. Equally importantly, the Smithsonian episode shows how this new physics-based version of creationism is being propagated with unusual stealth. Biologists may now feel safe that the problem of combating creationism has moved out of their backyards to infest the haunts of the physicists. Some religious biologists have even endorsed the idea of a conscious creator of the universe, so long as it does not affect biological theory. For instance, the biochemist Ken Miller, who ably defends evolution against creationist charges in Finding Darwin's God, goes on to claim that God created the universe with its laws and evolution is simply a result of these laws.


These moves are dangerous: once the creator enters the science classroom, even through the physicists' backdoor, the room for mischief is enormous. Biologists would do well to remember that, ultimately, what has motivated creationists to action throughout history is the natural origin of the human species. Sooner or later creationists will return to the theory they fear and detest most: evolution by natural selection. Moreover, if religious dogma manages to breach the defenses of science, there is every reason to believe that it will proactively encroach on every other secular institution of society. The new stealth creationism is, in short, as dangerous as its older cousins, Intelligent Design and Young Earth creationism. It can and should be defeated in the same way they were.




We've seen this coming for a long time: the Discovery Institute has been pushing that fine-tuning argument for a while, and that line of argument makes an end run around one of our most successful debaters, Ken Miller, and also puts Francis Collins and many other theistic evolutionists on their side. We prickly, cranky, vociferous biologists, who've been fighting this nonsense for years and are ready to start roaring at the first attempt to smuggle a creationist onto a school board, are also going to be less effective—for instance, I don't pay that much attention to the physics standards, and wouldn't have any influence at all on physics teaching. We'd need more effort at the public school level in this discipline.

And, honestly, physics teachers are smart people, but they get even less training in coping with creationist arguments than biology teachers, and unfortunately, a lot of physics instructors and engineers and chemists have more sympathy for ID than do the biologists. Add to that problem the fact that a few notable evolutionists are perfectly willing to pass the headaches on to the physicists, conceding the Big Bang to a vague version of a god, and this could be a major worry.

[Fade the Butcher]

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=12282

Old-fashioned Young Earth Creationism may have been false but it was at least entertaining. We were supposed to imagine that Noah landed his ark on Mount Ararat some 6,000 years ago, and all the animals around us today are descended from its occupants. We imagine sloths hurrying all the way to Brazil to arrive in time for us to find them today. We imagine ungainly wallabies moving across deserts and oceans to get to Australia within a mere six millenia.

From the 1960s to the 1980s there were concerted efforts in the United States to put Young Earth Creationism into high school science classes. Those efforts were quashed with the 1987 Supreme Court decision in Edwards v. Aguillard, which ruled that Young Earth Creationism was a religious doctrine and requiring it to be taught violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

But creationism, of course, did not die. In the 1990s, it reappeared wearing a lab coat. It was now called Intelligent Design (ID). Proponents claimed ID to be an entirely secular scientific theory that showed the existence of design in nature by finding features that allegedly could not be explained by chance and natural selection. They also claimed that ID theory reveals irreparable flaws in the theory of evolution. The ID creationists were slick. Their patron saint, William Dembski, boasted a Ph.D. in mathematics and presented his claims under a cloak of formidable mathematical symbolism. A few others, such as Michael Behe and Jonathan Wells, even had Ph.D.'s in biology. They were also very well-funded. Their propaganda center, the Discovery Institute in Seattle, was generously endowed by Howard Ahmanson, a right-wing businessman who explicitly endorses the goal of creating a Christian theocracy in America.

Few people were fooled. The test came when Dover County in Pennsylvania required mention of ID in high school biology classes. Following a lawsuit, in a December 2005 ruling in Kitzmiller v. Dover School District, Judge John E. Jones III, a churchgoing Republican, ruled in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania that ID is a religious doctrine that was inadmissible in science class curricula. Judge Jones' ruling was so comprehensive that it is doubtful that ID has any future in debates on science education in the United States, though it continues to make some headway in countries such as Britain and Turkey.

Meanwhile, U.S. creationists have changed tactics. Though none have explicitly abandoned ID in public, the focus of their scientific cover arguments has shifted from organic change to the creation of the universe. They have picked up on the controversial claim that human life could only have evolved because some constants of nature -- the electron's charge or the strong nuclear force in a hydrogen atom, for example -- have very precise or "fine-tuned" values. The fine-tuning claim has been around since the 1930s and is called the "anthropic principle" in physics. Some physicists buy this principle but others (notably including the Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg) are not at all convinced. Some critics have pointed out that the case for fine-tuning of the fundamental physical constants in the universe has been grossly overstated. Others have argued that the formation of complex physical objects always requires subtle interplay between various forces and certainly provides no evidence for design.

Initially largely unnoticed by their critics, creationists began to co-opt the fine-tuning argument when, in their book Rare Earth (2000), paleontologist Peter T. Ward and astronomer Donald Brownlee emphasized that complex life is very uncommon in the universe. Though their claims were subsequently subjected to scathing criticism by David Darling in Life Everywhere (2001) as well as other astrobiologists, they were picked up by astronomer Guillermo Gonzales (who had been a consultant for Rare Earth) and Jay Richards from the Discovery Institute.

Together, Gonzales and Richards published The Privileged Planet in 2004, which has since become the sacred text of the new stealth creationism. According to Gonzales and Richards, conditions on Earth have been carefully optimized for scientific investigation in such a way that it is "a signal revealing a universe so skillfully created for life and discovery that it seems to whisper of an extraterrestrial intelligence immeasurably more vast, more ancient, and more magnificent than anything we've been willing to expect to imagine." The evidence for creation, in other words, now comes from physics, not biology.

The Privileged Planet was launched with much fanfare, including a screening of an accompanying documentary at the prestigious Smithsonian Institution in 2005. The Smithsonian had agreed to co-sponsor the event unaware of the creationist agenda of the documentary and found itself immediately embroiled in a controversy with scientists and the press who pointed out that it was violating its own policy of not presenting political or religious material. Ultimately it tried to resolve the controversy by returning a rental fee to the Discovery Institute, while allowing the screening to proceed explicitly without its co-sponsorship. Ever since then, the Discovery Institute's Web site has gloatingly publicized the Smithsonian screening without, of course, noting the controversy and withdrawal of co-sponsorship.

As the physicist and astronomer Victor Stenger noted in the Skeptical Briefs newsletter last September, The Privileged Planet represents a new wedge in the creationists' arsenal. Equally importantly, the Smithsonian episode shows how this new physics-based version of creationism is being propagated with unusual stealth. Biologists may now feel safe that the problem of combating creationism has moved out of their backyards to infest the haunts of the physicists. Some religious biologists have even endorsed the idea of a conscious creator of the universe, so long as it does not affect biological theory. For instance, the biochemist Ken Miller, who ably defends evolution against creationist charges in Finding Darwin's God, goes on to claim that God created the universe with its laws and evolution is simply a result of these laws.

These moves are dangerous: once the creator enters the science classroom, even through the physicists' backdoor, the room for mischief is enormous. Biologists would do well to remember that, ultimately, what has motivated creationists to action throughout history is the natural origin of the human species. Sooner or later creationists will return to the theory they fear and detest most: evolution by natural selection. Moreover, if religious dogma manages to breach the defenses of science, there is every reason to believe that it will proactively encroach on every other secular institution of society. The new stealth creationism is, in short, as dangerous as its older cousins, Intelligent Design and Young Earth creationism. It can and should be defeated in the same way they were.

Sahotra Sarkar is professor of integrative biology, geography and the environment, and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. He is author of Doubting Darwin? Creationist Designs on Evolution (Blackwell, 2007), Molecular Models of Life (MIT, 2005), Biodiversity and Environmental Philosophy (Cambridge, 2005), and Genetics and Reductionism (Cambridge, 1998).

[Petr]

Moreover, if religious dogma manages to breach the defenses of science, there is every reason to believe that it will proactively encroach on every other secular institution of society.
What have I been telling you - dogmatic materialists like PZ Myers have a secret fear gnawing their guts beneath all their bluster. Control freaks feel that they must control each and every detail or nothing at all. :p


http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=1520&highlight=douglas+kern

3) ID will win because it can be reconciled with any advance that takes place in biology, whereas Darwinism cannot yield even an inch of ground to ID.

So you've discovered the missing link? Proven that viruses distribute super-complex DNA proteins? Shown that fractals can produce evolution-friendly three-dimensional shapes? It doesn't matter. To the ID mind, you're just pushing the question further down the road. How was the missing link designed? What is the origin of the viruses? Who designed the fractals? ID has already made its peace with natural selection and the irrefutable aspects of Darwinism. By contrast, Darwinism cannot accept even the slightest possibility that it has failed to explain any significant dimension of evolution. It must dogmatically insist that it will resolve all of its ambiguities and shortcomings -- even the ones that have lingered since the beginning of Darwinism. The entire edifice of Darwinian theory comes crashing down with even a single credible demonstration of design in any living thing. Can science really plug a finger into every hole in the Darwinian dyke for the next fifty years?"


We've seen this coming for a long time: the Discovery Institute has been pushing that fine-tuning argument for a while, and that line of argument makes an end run around one of our most successful debaters, Ken Miller, and also puts Francis Collins and many other theistic evolutionists on their side.
Take notice, theistic evolutionists: fanatical God-hating Darwinists do not really trust anyone who dares to seriously believe in some kind of God. They are considered security risks no matter what.


How pro-Darwin Catholic biochemist Ken Miller came to be hated one fifth as much as non-Darwin Catholic biochemist Michael Behe

http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=13061&highlight=miller


Petr

[Insidium]

"3) ID will win because it can be reconciled with any advance that takes place in biology, whereas Darwinism cannot yield even an inch of ground to ID.

Translation: ID is not falsifiable, and is therefore not scientific. Good day, gentlemen.

[Petr]

Translation: ID is not falsifiable, and is therefore not scientific. Good day, gentlemen.
Falsifiability criteria is overrated.


"It was soon realized, however, that hypotheses can no more be conclusively falsified than they can be conclusively verified, for a hypothesis cannot be tested in isolation. Physicist-philosopher Pierre Duhem and logician Willard Van Orman Quine have convincingly demonstrated that hypotheses have testable consequences only in the context of certain background assumptions. If a test fails, it is always possible to maintain the hypothesis in question by rejecting one or more of the background assumptions."

http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=16347&highlight=feyerabend

I am not an IDer, in any case. They can speak for themselves.


Petr

[Fade the Butcher]

IDiots will always be searching for some new form of ignorance to call god.

[Fade the Butcher]

PZ has a new book coming out about religion and science. I'm looking forward to it.

[Petr]

These moves are dangerous: once the creator enters the science classroom, even through the physicists' backdoor, the room for mischief is enormous. Biologists would do well to remember that, ultimately, what has motivated creationists to action throughout history is the natural origin of the human species. Sooner or later creationists will return to the theory they fear and detest most: evolution by natural selection. Moreover, if religious dogma manages to breach the defenses of science, there is every reason to believe that it will proactively encroach on every other secular institution of society.
Another citation about materialistic neurosis - this one is from G.K. Chesterton:


"But as it happens, there is a very special sense in which materialism has more restrictions than spiritualism. Mr. McCabe thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe in determinism. I think Mr. McCabe a slave because he is not allowed to believe in fairies. But if we examine the two vetoes we shall see that his is really much more of a pure veto than mine. The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle. Poor Mr. McCabe is not allowed to retain even the tiniest imp, though it might be hiding in a pimpernel. The Christian admits that the universe is manifold and even miscellaneous, just as a sane man knows that he is complex. The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane."

http://www.dur.ac.uk/martin.ward/gkc/books/orthodoxy/ch2.html


Petr

[Fade the Butcher]

Thanks for the spam, Petr. Your input is appreciated.

[Petr]

Thanks for the spam, Petr. Your input is appreciated.
No problemo. Thanks for letting me know about hidden fears of Darwinists.


Petr

[Insidium]

Well, creationism is actually falsifiable, and it has been falsified (the age of the earth, for instance, has been determined to be approximately 4.5 billion years).

[Fade the Butcher]

Deer swam across the Atlantic Ocean to populate North America.

[WFHermans]

The only thing I knew about "creational physics" is that a claim was made that "if the laws of physics would be different in a very small way, the universe wouldn't exist". If this is correct, it is an argument in favour of creationism.

I don't see why it is true. I would say that if for instance the gravitational constant would be a little bit bigger or smaller, the universe would still be able to exist. But I didn't read any book by a creation physicist and don't know their arguments, so I could very well be wrong.

[Fade the Butcher]

It's exactly like saying that because water and oxygen existence in abundance on earth, and that we need both to sustain our existence, that our planet was designed for the purpose of sustaining human life.

[WFHermans]

That is indeed not convincing. This line of reasoning would have merit if they would demonstrate that, for instance, exactly 400,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons of water are on earth, and if there would be only one gallon more or less life would not be supported.

[WFHermans]

If the stars would be arranged to form the text of the Bible I would be convinced.

[Fade the Butcher]

The Bible unambiguosly states that the sun orbits the earth.

[Boleslaw]

I guess to add some humour here:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=t7I73DNguRI

[Insidium]

http://www.ottergoose.net/imgs/family_guy_average_retarded_creationist.png

A little more Family Guy goodness.