>>>Another post from the first month of my second year of blogging. I’m rather proud of it as an example of taking on odd things pseuds say about serious intellectuals.<<<

With Matt on hiatus, someone needs to make sure the poo gets flung, and I have decided to take up that role. However, this blog isn’t Pooflingers, so I will call these posts “scroll-by”s, as in the scoll bar in my browser.

Bertrand Russell once said that when a stupid man hears a smart man speak, he will translate what is said into something he can under stand. He was talking about Socrates and Xenophon, but it seems an apt description of what Joe Carter’s attempts to understand opposition to intelligent design. He explains it as follows:

Just as the resurrection is the cornerstone of Christianity, natural selection is the pillar on which neism stands. That is why neists have an apoplectic fit over Intelligent Design. The heretical notion does not just question a theory, it denys the foundation of their religious beliefs. Some even claim that their belief system must destroy other religions (see entry by Sam Harris. Neists may not have a god but their religion has retained the first commandment: Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

What in the world is “neism,” you may ask? It’s an imaginary religion dreamed up by Carter, in part on the thesis that “Hardcore materialists will eventually grow frustrated with the conservative dogma of Darwinism and its complete inability to account for ethical, epistemological, and metaphysical ‘truths.’” I have seen no signs of such frustration, but Carter has found an entirely different set of evidence that this imaginary religion is taking hold: responses to the 2006 Edge question.

I suspect most defenders of evolution don’t pay nearly as much attention to the kind of stuff delt with in the Edge survey as to solid, basic science. As it happens, I just linked to an interview with Paul Myers where he describes his work in evolutionary biology. For someone like him, seeing attacks on evolution is analogous to someone who’s spent their life studying protein folding seeing attacks on the existence of atoms. For a protein researcher to accept that atoms don’t exist means accepting that they’ve done years of reasearch that only makes sense on a false hypothesis. That evolution can be applied to keeping the peace is just a nice side effect of the basic science on evolution itself – kind of like how chaos theory, a brand of mathematics comming out of meteorology, has found wide applications in other fields.

Agknowledging the analogy between the resurrection and evolution is tempting – because of how embarrassing the analogy is the Christianity. The evidence for the resurrection consists of a few sentences of Paul’s letters and a bunch of anonymous, hearsay accounts – roughly equivalent to the evidence that the old theater in my hometown is haunted. The evidence for evolution consists of libraries full of solid scientific research.

Carter does not seem to clearly grasp the idea of something being supported by objective evidence, so he recasts it as a matter of faith:

As Richard Dawkins explained in answering last year’s question, “I believe, but I cannot prove, that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all ‘design’ anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection.” This is the core of their mystical faith system; everything rests on this claim being indubitable.

This badly misunderstands Dawkins in that Dawkins is conjecturing from the one case we know – life on earth – to all hypothetical intelligences anywhere. This is what he cannot prove. Evolution is unprovable only insofar as we cannot prove that God didn’t create the world in 1921. Carter’s willingness to get excited at the mention that science is unprovable is a classic example of the inability of fundamentalists to tell the difference between an unproven belief in one’s own hands and an unproven belief in the tooth fairy.

He further fails to understand that a scientific worldview is not built on one central fairy tale, the way religions are. Yes much science is based on evolution. There is also much science based on the existence of atoms, the roundness of the earth, and inverse square laws. What underlies all these is a belief that while the world may often seem inexplicable; rigorous, objective investigation involving testable hypothesis can help us make sense of it. The alternative is “we don’t understand this, therefore [God/psi/UFOs/ghosts/synchronity/etc].” The presuppositionalism of Carter, Johnson, and Ham denies that these questions can be settled objectively, so they instead try to force their ideas into the schools through political muscle. This makes them a whimpier version of their intellectual forebearers, who used inquisitions rather than school-board elections to enforce their faith-based beliefs.

Similarly, Carter translates Sam Harris’ comments about science and religion into terms he can understand: those of the Jealous Jehovah of the Old Testament. Throughout the Bible, God is represented as a baby who can’t stand it when people don’t pay attention to him, putting him in conflict with gods ranging from Baal to Hermes. The reason scientific thinking causes trouble for religion is that science is inherently rational, while religion is inherently irrational. The only way for religion to survive in a scientifically-minded society is for there to be clear boundaries between where blind faith is applied and where reason is applied, and for people to clearly understand the difference between the two. Such a situation is dangerous for religion for two reasons, though. It may be tempted to creep into areas where reason is clearly the way to go, as in the case of Intelligent Design. Then the backlash is likely to damage religion. On the other hand, when the public is put in the habit of thinking scientifically about things like medicine and evolution, there’s a risk they’ll start thinking that way about God and immortality.

That’s a slightly longer rant than I was planning. I think I needed it.