Intelligent Design: Science: The Wrath of NoGod (naturalistic religion + money + technique) = bigotry of scientific guilds

"The annual meeting of the Geological Society of America saw its members joining their biologist brethren in attacking the creationist challenge to evolution," says the subtext (semiotics: notice the word "brethren" in this context) to the headline in
New Scientist, in an article preview for "US geologists rally against intelligent design" (semiotics: notice the word "rally" in this context). The article preview is the greater part of an incomplete article of 331 words which is pay-for only (I shall not digress upon the way pay-for news - particularly of developments in science, religion, and health - is in spirit violative of freedom of speech, and of a class nature, and detrimental to the participation of poorer people in the public square and thus a reinforcement of news professions to guilds; but with crumbs, still some of us make do).



Meeting in Salt Lake City, Donald Wise attempted to rally the brethren to his call for "hardball" assault in "attacking the creationist challenge to Darwinian evolution." He called for solidifying the geological layers of his guilds dominated by the religions of naturalism + technicism, with those of "brethren" biologists ranked in their guilds dominated by the same religions of naturalism as an ultimate value and technicism as the working penultimate value which requires all the equipment that costs so much money in hi schools, colleges, and grad programs at universities - to say nothing of individual research programs for which taxpayers are the ultimate providers at universities, affiliated labs, and often rigged in joint ventures with corporate for-profit entities. The "hardball" is about both the secularist religion of St Darwin-according-to-his-latterday-disciples where the naturalism is no longer agnostic or passive, but aggressively jihadist as we are beginning to see. But more than that, the "hardball" is about money; the guilds of geology and biology are afraid that some others who espouse non-naturalsim as a better foundation for the sciences, because it is truly atheist in regard to the claims of sciences conceived without limits in determining the minds of society's youth and the vocations to which some of them are called thru further education. The enemy to the rigidified smug scientific guilds is a scientific revolution (Polanyi, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Lakatos). The classic work that precourses these seminal thinkers (Christian, humanist, anarchist, atheist) is that of I W N Sullivan, The Limitations of Science (NY: Viking, 1933; NY: New American Library, 1956 pbk ).

A most remarkable admission of unscientific bias, which precludes an admission that God is the only plausible explanation of the origin of the universe, is made by J. W. N. Sullivan. At his death, Time called him "one of the world's four or five most brilliant interpreters of physics to the world of common man." He said: "The beginning of the evolutionary process raises a question which is as yet unanswerable. What was the origin of life on this planet? Until fairly recent times there was a pretty general belief in the occurrence of 'spontaneous generation.' It was supposed that lowly forms of life developed spontaneously from, for example, putrefying meat. But careful experiments, notably those of Pasteur, showed that this conclusion was due to improper observation, and it became an accepted doctrine that life never arises except from life. So far as actual evidence goes, this is still the only possible conclusion. But since it is a conclusion that seems to lead back to some supernatural creative act, it is a conclusion that scientific men find very difficult to accept. It carries with it what are felt to be, in the present mental climate, undesirable philosophic implications, and it is opposed to the scientific desire for continuity. It introduces an unaccountable break in the chain of causation, and therefore cannot be admitted as part of science unless it is quite impossible to reject it. For that reason most scientific men prefer to believe that life arose, in some way not yet understood, from inorganic matter in accordance with the laws of physics and chemistry."

Please note: This text is derived from an explicitly evangelical Christian book online, a book in its Chapter 2 which has a specific purpose of apologetics, a variet of apologetics that's called "evidentialist" (in contrast to "presuppositionalist" or "experientialist," atlho the book as a whole is more multi-genred in the deployment of arguments in its discussion; the over-all purpose of the book is confirmation in the Christian faith of college students of Christian background. I like the book's succinct summary of Sullivan's argument and tenor. Further, the Google alogrithm for Advanced Search on "J+ W+ N+ Sullivan+ Limitations+ Science" yielded only this one reference cited above, for a search limited to just the terms specified. One reference! The amount of garbage I would have to wade thru for a perhaps gem 20 pages away set a limitation to my research of this author and title. More largely, I notice that Google does not yield as good results for non-Darwinism, non-evolutionism as it does for more neutral approaches or approaches of strictly neo-Darwinist kind like that of the dogmatician Dawkins. So, a thiestic evolutionary kind of approach today, such as that championed initially by Prof James McCosh, a major thinker in the history of American philosophy with a Common-Sense (Thomas Reid) and Evidentialist orientation that is pro-empirical, pro-scientific, and oriented to Intelligent Design just does not get the referencing it deserves (I'm thinking of the results of googling for Sullivan as above and Uko Zylstra as below). - Owlb

It would seem that the only limit the presentday guilds acknowledge is money for their establishment research programs. Any other claimaint for a place in scientific discussion has to be fawt off, they seem to think. The present Hardball Jihad of the Geology Guild is apparently motivated as much by ideology all the more fixational because it advances the business-as-usual approach to the divving up of all funds available to the discipline.

The actual principle that unites this priestly caste is that of uniformitarianism. It posits the uniformity of each of all the natural forces (each of which must be precisioned and formulated on the basis of conclusive empirical evidence), the uniformity of the natural forces that could possibly have influenced the formation of geological structures, and similarly of hydrological structures in the oceans, seas, rivers, lakes, rain systems, and weather generally. Thus, the hypotheses of mavericks like the author of the theory of Worlds in Collision(1950) which relied on philological sources of ancient myths and legends was witlessly mocked by the combined biological and geological guilds.

Minus the mockery, the uniformitarian position was also held by some Reformational Christian biologists, led by Jan Lever (see his Creation and Evolution(1950) and his more popular Where Are We Headed? A Biologist Talks about Origins, Evolution, and the Future (1956). Lever, professor at the Free University in Amsterdam, continued in the line of James McCosh. Lever was also a follower of Herman Dooyeweerd's and D H Th Vollenhoven's Reformational philosophy, which became a location for a debate between Lever with Dooyeweerd who deepened neo-Augustinianism for biological thawt further by reviving a distinction between creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing) in contrast to the gradual positivization and realization over a long time of the varieties of creation, a position cited by McCosh and leveraged by Dooyeweerd to dissent from the uniformitarian presupposition of his biologist follower, Lever. A similar view, with no necessary alignment to either side of this uniformitarianist vs non-uniformitarian issue - but like both sides commited to the view of long periods of time being empirically conclusive for geology as well as biology - was advanced by the Christian geological theorist J. R. van der Fliert also of the Free University [ "Fundamentalism and the Fundamentals of Geology," International Reformed Bulletin, Spring 1968.] Among American Evangelicals early appreciators of Van der Fliert's stance include Dr. Donald C. Boardman (Wheaton College), Dr. Richard Bube (American Scientific Affiliation), Dr. Roger J. Cuffey (Pennsylvania State University), Dr. Clarence Menninga (Calvin College).

At the same time, the maverick position opposing uniformitarianism with catastrophism also developed significantly. Immanuel Velikovsky's later Earth in Upheaval (1956) was purposely based, as he said , only on "stones and bones," but his burgeoning theory simply could not be entertained and modified within the guild to widen the range of optional explanations for the formation of the present structure of the Planet Earth.

Nowadays however, others are suggesting that the mentioned theory of the unity of life, held by neo-Darwinism and some reformational Christians in biology and zoology, accompanied by its corollary theory that the emergence of all life-forms from one single source on Earth, has been challenged more recently by such physicists as Paul Davies, in his book The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life who displaces the single-source view from an origin strictly on Earth to one on Mars.

The Fifth Miracle provides convincing arguments that life flourishes, and may indeed have begun, deep within the earth's crust, and not in Darwin's "warm little pond." And if in our planet's crust, why not in others'? Indeed, he shows that it is not just possible but likely that living organisms have passed between Earth and Mars embedded within meteorites [a catastrophist neo-Velikovsian nuance - Owlb]. Davies' command of the data and his facility with explaining it to nonprofessionals give the lie to his self-description as "a simple-minded physicist" intruding in another's domain. The best scientists hate to see questions finally answered and love to see new ones raised; by that standard (and by any other) The Fifth Miracle is a first-rate book of scientific speculation. --Rob Lightner

Paul Davies has also written well and interestingly on the spirituality of science, a task for which he is qualified by his doctorate in physics and his religious quest. Among his most engaging books are God and the New Physics and Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World

Are we but ideas in the mind of God? [Shades of Jonathan Edwards' Lockean platonizing! - Owlb] Platonic forms in one of many infinite universes? Davies (Theoretical Physics/Univ. of Adelaide, Australia; co-author, The Matter Myth, p. 1510, etc.) increasingly assumes the mantle of metaphysician as he probes once again theories of origin and destiny, space and time, and creation by design or chance. Some of this tracks familiar Davies ground: a reprise of Plato and Aristotle, Aquinas and Newton, Hoyle and Hawking. Quarks and GUT theories are revisited, as are chaos theory and quantum cosmology. But what makes this exercise different is the extent to which Davies probes computer science and mathematics to develop extraordinarily rich concepts of the nature of complexity. These chapters deal not only with the paradoxes inherent in self-reflecting systems and Gödel's proofs of undecidability in mathematics but relate these famous theorems to Turing's universal machines and the nature of ``computable'' vs. ``noncomputable'' numbers. The upshot of all this lofty discourse is the idea that the laws of physics (or nature) are ``computable'' and that the universe lends itself to simulation, given a universal computer. The more enthusiastic mathematicians exploring these ideas are prepared to say that such computers reveal the organized complexity of the universe, are capable of self-replication, and are therefore alive. Davies concludes that maybe the ultimate answer cannot be obtained through reason but only through mysticism, and he again states his conviction that we are truly meant to be here.... That's not necessarily the conclusion all readers will reach, but the mathematical excursions make this latest Davies volume of more than passing interest. -- From Kirkus Reviews via Amazon. Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. [end] I am using this text without permission on the basis of the Fair Use provisions of American copyright laws, and similiar provisions in Canadian law - Owlb

Now, we come back to the religious bigotry of a scientific ideology firmed up for its cadres because of the nearly-unmentioned fear that available funds the guild establishments and elites presently control will have to be shared with approaches to sciences which may want to re-direct goals of research programs (Lakatos) and uses of available technologies and yet-to-developed-techniques, on the basis of non-naturalistic religious presuppostions, rathan than the established naturlistic ones ("philosophical materialism") currently in vogue. Thus, in both biology and geology today, there are what Abraham Kuyper once characterized as two diametrically opposed sciences, because (all) science is divided by a plurality of ultimate starting points held in one or another presupposing faith as to what ultimate value should be the ground and origin of any particular science's self-elaboration out of a starting point (its axiomata) which becomes effective for the development of its questions, its problem-setting, its techniques (and hence technologies), and research programs.

The issue is not creationism.
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For an update, and a correction of the following clause, plus a reference to Roman Catholic teaching in regard to evolutionism, see refWrite's October 30 blog entry on ID.
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Creationism is a small and marginal approach to which most Christians do not subscribe, because it is founded on a shaky hermeneutics. If hi schools introduced senior-level courses in Biblical hermeneutics, creationism should be among the options studied there; but short of that it truly doesn't belong in any science curriculum. So-called "creation science" is merely a search of empirical confirmations of a limited hermeneutics approach to the Bible, and is thereby utterly tendentious; it should be understood as such but it should not be banned or held up to insulting mockery since it is just too religiously closely-held by too many who support financially thru their taxes paid for government schools and universities where the cadres of the scientific establishment function as professional agents of mockery and bigotry. And, besides, those raised on this particular hermeneutics may just produce something or other of value to everyone, as Feyerabend has demonstrated from well-known cases of the impact of narrow religious beliefs on creative discoveries in the history of science.

Intelligent Design (ID) is not creationism. It grew out of the guided-evolution standpoint ("theistic evolutionism" as launched by James McCosh's The Method of Divine Government before Darwin wrote The Origin of Species). Indeed, ID has always been a distinct discipline not dependent on either creationism or the guided-evolution viewpoint that persists (however represssed) within biology and geology. ID is held by antiChristians as well as Christians - and Jews, and Muslims. ID is held by antitheists as well as theists - most outspokenly by atheist philosopher Anthony Flew who startled the "brethren" by judging neo-Darwinism as empirically-false.

I conclude that the teaching of ID in state-schools - where the taxpayers' funds are used presently for an antipluralist bigoted approach to science, an approach unwilling to function alongside other views, with whom it may share techniques to a very large extent, while framed by a contrary discourse of valuation than that of a huge portion of the taxpaying public - is worth pursuing. Contrary to the anarchist philosopher of science and its history, Paul Feyerabend, the pluralist awareness of what science is and how it actually functions, when healthy in any society, is not to be utterly denied to the young in the schools. Feyerabend acknowledges the validity of adult mature plurality of fundamental views in the sciences, but he contradicts himself to insist that students be tawt only the textbook orthodoxies of mainstream humanist secularist self-enclosed nature-the-only-ultimate-and-determining-value. Feyerabend's Fallacy: Let the school students go thru the crisis of discarding the orthodoxy tawt them in school to the repression of knowledge of all other views, and then let some of them undergo religious conversion at some other time in life perhaps; and then, if they survive all this turmoil and manipulation, maybe some of them will re-enter the cadres of science with their now subversive values and the hard-gained insite that science can't be other than pluralist, not just as to its many disciplines, but as to the fundamental starting point in each science that stands behind a given science's own positive axiomata.

President Bush is more correct than Prof Feyerabend and more drastically correct than the bigotry-bound Geological Society of America, on allowing even students in the developmental stages of their scientific development confront and even debate among themselves the plurality of views and the variety of disciplines among which both biology and geology confront the implications of Intelligent Design, in a polite and considerate way appropriate to any scientific discourse.

In conclusion, I want to remark on why I mentioned Dooyeweerd, Vollenhoven, Lever and Van der Fliert, along with St Ausgustine and the neo-Augustinian McCosh who advocated both guided evolution and Intelligent Design at Princeton University in the Nineteenth Century. Problem-historically speaking from the standpoint of the history of Western philosophy in its relation to biology, the heritage of their work has been passed on to Dr Uko Zylstra who currently is in actuality the main challenger to the present shape of ID theory and research; it is Zylstra who has raised the issue of the neglect of the foundational theme of the biotic basic-laws in ID theory so far, and has done so by expanding the framework of the philosophy of Vollenhoven and Dooyeweerd. The publisher of his major essay on this matter is Zygon, a journal for biological theory. But the blurb presented editorially on the pay-for page to get into this essay, gets Zylstra's position wrong, insofar as his argument does not establish an absolute negation of ID while it does lead toward refutation of philosophical materialism, naturalism, and neo-Darwinian evolutionism as in Dawkins, thru Zylstra's sharing with Vollehnoven and Dooyeweerd their idea of an integrated array of creation law's . So, while something of a misleading Third Way construction is imposed on Zylstra, the editorial summation gives a good orientation to the pay-for article:

A central thesis of intelligent-design theorists is that physical and chemical laws and chance are insufficient to account for irreducibly complex biological structures and that intelligent design is necessary to account for such phenomena. This assertion, however, still implies a reductionist ontology. We need to recognize that reality displays multiple modes of being beyond simply chemical and physical modes of being, each of which is governed by laws for that mode of being. This essay argues for an alternate framework for understanding life phenomena that is neither philosophical materialism nor intelligent-design theory.

. A bit discontent, for a further snippet of orientation, I traced down the following technical reference online by Zylstra in The Dooyeweerd Pages:

Arthur Jones comments about differentiation (as linked to the biotic sphere's kernel of "generation") does get at an important element of the biotic modality. The recognition of differentiation / generation / morphogenesis as a "kernel" of the biotic sphere led me to argue for it as a distinct modality from the biotic modality. I made that argument in my paper entitled: "Dooyeweerd's concept of classification in Biology" as one of the essays in the Festschrift for Evan Runner, Life is Religion. In that essay I argue for a three kingdom classification of living things with the biotic, morphegenesis/differentiative, and sensory as the kernel modalites for the three kingdoms respectively. Although present classification theories in biology are usually based on a five kingdom classification model, I think the criteria for such a classification is less foundational than the one based on a modal analysis.

This development and challenge, which I call the Zylstra Hypothesis is relevant to the entire howling and gnashing of the establishment elites in biology and geology and to their parrots in the the teachers unions of the biological sciences (derivatively relevant also to geological scholarship), relevant whether or not there is or ever were an ID movement. - Owlb