[extropy-chat] intelligent design homework

[Robert Lindauer]

On Aug 6, 2005, at 6:33 PM, John Calvin wrote:

> I am opposed to teaching ID in schools.

So?

>  Throughout history people
> have stopped and said "It is this way because (the) God(s) willed it
> so.

Sometimes they were right, sometimes they were wrong.  So?

> Then someone eventually comes along who says, no, there is this
> chain of events, or that mechanism which causes said thing to be, and
> this occurs without any divine intervention.

Sometimes.  There are plenty of unexplained phenomena and series of 
historical events whose physical explanations are inadequate.  There is 
no reason whatever to expect that physics is able to explain all 
phenomena.  It can't even explain life, much less consciousness, 
certainly not history.

> We continue to push the vail back, encounter another one and push it
> back as well.

Leibniz covered this centuries ago.  In every conceptual system there 
are the fundamental units - the "force" or "matter" whose role in the 
formalism of the system is well defined but the existence and nature of 
which are left forever undefined - we can not use a fundamental system 
to explain what its fundamental postulates -mean-.  Everything must be 
explained in terms of them.  One accuses the generations of the past of 
talking about "occult forces" - but how have we really improved over 
"occult forces" by invoking "quantum fields"?  We still can't predict 
what will happen, exactly, -and- the word "field" is no more 
explanatory than the word "force" occult or otherwise.

>   So far every time we stop and say god did it, we
> eventually find new information that pushes gods involvement farther
> and farther back.

This is literally false.  There have been lots of well documented 
events for which we have not found any new information that would push 
God's involvement back any further - both common events (like, wow, I'm 
thinking about love) and uncommon events (like people being seen after 
they've died).  Not only this, the common procedure is not to actually 
EXPLAIN those phenomena but rather to ignore them.  This is common in 
the history of science - one picks the phenomena one wants to explain 
and that fit well with one's theory and then ignores those phenomena 
that don't fit well with the theory.  I think Feyerabend's "Against 
Method" is still the classic on this point.

>  We ought to finally learn this lesson and stop
> saying that God did it.

Not a very good lesson.  Perhaps we should learn the other lesson, that 
God does everything.

> Another issue, is that at various times even learned men have espoused
> the belief that there was nothing more to be learned about the
> universe, and that "Physics has explained all there is to know".  How
> can we encourage children to enter the scientific fields if we are
> teaching them that, this is the end of the line.  Sure we ought to
> acknowledge any gaps in any of our knowledge, but rather than stop and
> say "well, God must have done it", we ought to leap into the gaps
> joyfully, breathless at the new adventures to be had.

A person who looks at the endless gap in our knowledge and says 
"physics has explained everything there is to know" is a fool.
A person who looks at physics and demands an explanation for it is a 
mystic.
"Why are there laws of physics and why are they this way?"

This is not a question invented by appologeticists and clergy, but 
rather the kind of question that our young people actually ask and is, 
in fact, the original impetus for the study of physics at all.  If we 
quash -these kinds- of questions, then of course our children will be 
uninterested in physics.

Robbie Lindauer