July 17, 2007
Inferior Design
Richard Dawkins in the New York Times Book Review:
I had expected to be as irritated by Michael Behe’s second book as by his first. I had not expected to feel sorry for him. The first — “Darwin’s Black Box” (1996), which purported to make the scientific case for “intelligent design” — was enlivened by a spark of conviction, however misguided. The second is the book of a man who has given up. Trapped along a false path of his own rather unintelligent design, Behe has left himself no escape. Poster boy of creationists everywhere, he has cut himself adrift from the world of real science. And real science, in the shape of his own department of biological sciences at Lehigh University, has publicly disowned him, via a remarkable disclaimer on its Web site: “While we respect Prof. Behe’s right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally and should not be regarded as scientific.” As the Chicago geneticist Jerry Coyne wrote recently, in a devastating review of Behe’s work in The New Republic, it would be hard to find a precedent.
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 09:21 PM | Permalink
Comments
There's a subliminal assertion in a lot of Dawkins and co. that science can provide all the ethical guidance needed to direct its own progress, and its products as they accumulate, but it's baseless and ultimately fictitious. Our moral and ethical systems have evolved from superstition and something else, and that other still-nameless thing is getting thrown out with the bathwater of fundamental stupidities.
There is no rational foundation for morality except as an observed strategy for survival. No difference between the morality of a wolf and a human being, in the cold of of scientific observation. No difference between Cain and Abel.
Some of us have come to the conclusion that many if not most CEOs etc. are high-function autistics of some undiagnosed type. It's not impossible that unchecked governance by such mutated minds will change us forever, culling the reluctant and rebellious, rewarding the passive and obedient, and some of us think that would not be so wonderful.
It's all well and good to vanquish the pathetically absurd leftovers of centuries of corrupt and corrupting institutional religion, but the even more overt assertion lurking there is that it's a vanquishing of all religion, of "spiritual" things of any kind. Leaving only the light of reason to guide us.
Joseph Mengele was a scientist, first, and an inhuman monster, second. This is not a trivial point.
Posted by: roy belmont | Jul 18, 2007 3:52:11 AM
Roy, there are no religions that do not have at their heart a commitment to counterfactual beliefs about counterintuitive supernatural entities (to gloss Pascal Boyer and Scott Atran.) If those supernatural beings don't exist, that is a repudiation of all religion, exactly as Dawkins claims.
To counter that view, you need to do something other than drag out references to Mengele, you would need to show that at least one supernatural being exists.
Posted by: Clay Shirky | Jul 19, 2007 10:35:12 AM
OK, let's say I'm convinced. Religion is sure enough necessary for morality.
The next question is: which religion? Is Christianity needed for morality? Hinduism? Shintoism? Animism? Who gets to pick?
Oh, you say, it's Christianity, obviously, because only that religion is The Truth. Why is that obvious? Billions of people don't think so. What's wrong with them? All possessed by Satan?
And by the way, Mengele was not rational. Obviously.
Posted by: JonJ | Jul 19, 2007 12:50:01 PM
Roy Belmont has a point, but is ultimately mistaken.
The whole point of the scientific endeavor is to separate truth finding (what exists and happens in the world) from value assessment (what is good and what is bad about it). Science complements morality, it does not oppose it, render it superfluous or baseless, and I don't think Dawkins suggests that it does.
Posted by: rp | Jul 19, 2007 2:42:38 PM
What we use to judge Mengele doesn't come from science. And if it's not going to come from religion where then?
There is no scientific morality that works against the inhuman, there never will be, science is perfectly neutral about things like conflict and competition, and the definition of what it is to be human is as shapeshifting as any animist witch doctor's dream.
There is no "obviously" to Mengele's rationality or lack of it, except that he was participating in a larger social/political/military movement that didn't succeed. His twin studies, his use of live human beings for research - all were rational in exactly the same way as primate research is currently accepted to be. Using the sub-human to expand the knowledge-base of their superiors.
The difference in that context is most primate researchers wouldn't publicly defend the use of human subjects for their experiments, though many would privately, and may soon practice even that, the way things are going as long as the subjects were deemed unfit.
Sub-humans make great lab rats.
My point is that without some external valence there is no scientifically valid ethical code and there won't ever be one. That's the real mandate of religion, not self-preservation of an institution.
"there are no religions that do not have at their heart a commitment to counterfactual beliefs"
Of course there are. You need to study religion a little more thoroughly, or stop pretending to knowledge you don't have.
A belief in the eternal nature of the larger context of our lives can be reduced to counterfactuality only because eternity can't be demonstrated conclusively within that context. It's Xeno's template. You'll never get there going half-way each time. You can't take infinity apart and measure it. Some things aren't going to submit to your metric, but they're there just the same. You have to take that on faith, just like you take your own existence on faith.
Judeo-Christianity is myopic delusional and corrupt. So what? So's the American government. So's CNN.
Standing next to a greater fool makes a lesser fool look better. Dawkins looks heroic next to the braying pack of asses Judeo-Christianity has thrown into and all over the modern agora. So what?
But then the Big Bang seems to have disappeared from its place on the table recently, so conterfactual may not mean exactly what you thought it did.
Science complements received morality. That morality came from where exactly? The ignorance and superstition of the past. Advancing from there without acknowledging and honoring what gave us that well-spring seems adolescent at best.
Of course science doesn't oppose morality, because most scientists are socially integrated and basically whole people - though some, far too many for my comfort levels, seem to be high-functioning autistics without the governing empathy that would prevent what are atrocious and terrible things.
Mengelian hideousness practiced on the chimpanzee. That's moral somehow, right?
Nobility was once a near universally revered attribute of human comportment, now it's been reduced to a dysfunctional and vestigial remnant of some earlier more romantic time, a cinematic thrill divorced completely from any real event or situation. Now it's all about the pragmatic. What works is what's sacred. Problem is, cowardice is far more pragmatic than nobility.
Only an idiot would see this debate as "science" against "religion", but sadly there seem to be more than a few idiots around.
"(what exists and happens in the world)" at the level of the sub-atomic and the supra-galactic is beyond our ken, we can move toward it in pieces step-by-step, but it's infinite and we'll never get all the way there. What's left?
If not faith, something that requires humility of a degree and kind missing entirely from any public champions of "Truth" I've seen lately.
Posted by: roy belmont | Jul 20, 2007 5:18:41 AM
Roy Belmont: "No difference between the morality of a wolf and a human being, in the cold of scientific observation."
Scientific observation doesn't make that distinction (it's part of what makes it scientific) but scientists do, e.g. this guy in Johannesburg.
Posted by: rp | Jul 20, 2007 5:42:09 AM
Roy Belmont:
I may be an idiot still (I do not think that I am quite as educated and intelligent as you are), but I certainly have the capacity to appreciate the intelligent manner you have portrayed your thoughts and beliefs just above.
I have become dismayed at the ubiquitousness of reductionism, mostly, of course, perpetrated by current scientific theories regarding human development and behavior. Love is now merely a concoction of chemicals, human beings mostly a product of their genes; we even have programs like 20/20 promulgating, and attempting to give legitimacy to, the idea that greed is good! Human society, in general, seems to agree, and willingly if unwittingly, allows itself to be further reduced to laboratory rats for the sake of greed and entertainment!! Are we loosing our humanity? I believe we are. We are "flattening" ourselves, mechanizing our psyches long before we are ready to complete the job by mechanizing our bodies, and finally become all machine. Is humanity corollary with morality and/or ethical behavior? I believe it is. I wish I was smart enough and educated enough to make a really good case for it. :(
Posted by: susette | Aug 15, 2007 4:19:10 PM
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