Are there actually creationists who are scientists?

[Jimbo07]

Just idle conjecture (because I am neither fully religious, nor fully a scientist):

Wouldn't an intellectually honest creationist (or, more fairly, theistic evolutionist) WANT to be a scientist? If you accept a god-of-the-gaps, wouldn't you want to squeeze the gaps so hard that when all was said and done, what remained must be God?

Assuming for a moment that at some point Behe wasn't a liar, could he have believed that irreducible complexity was that end of the gap? If so, wouldn't he be happy to have it blown away? Wouldn't it mean that there is a different gap for God, and many years of happy searching to continue?

I'm reminded of drkitten's comments on the current intellectual status of the soul. There is still so much unknown, wouldn't everyone want to keep searching, regardless of what the conclusion is at the end of the day?

I don't know.

 

[cyborg]

If you accept a god-of-the-gaps, wouldn't you want to squeeze the gaps so hard that when all was said and done, what remained must be God?

Clearly not.

These people have to live with the cognitive dissonance that says their god is irrelevant when they really wish it wasn't so.

They so dearly want science to say their god is real.

It can't. Tough **** for them.

 

[hgc]

Just idle conjecture (because I am neither fully religious, nor fully a scientist):

Wouldn't an intellectually honest creationist (or, more fairly, theistic evolutionist) WANT to be a scientist? If you accept a god-of-the-gaps, wouldn't you want to squeeze the gaps so hard that when all was said and done, what remained must be God?

Assuming for a moment that at some point Behe wasn't a liar, could he have believed that irreducible complexity was that end of the gap? If so, wouldn't he be happy to have it blown away? Wouldn't it mean that there is a different gap for God, and many years of happy searching to continue?

I'm reminded of drkitten's comments on the current intellectual status of the soul. There is still so much unknown, wouldn't everyone want to keep searching, regardless of what the conclusion is at the end of the day?

I don't know.

You've bumped up against the tension between quest for knowledge and fear of knowledge -- the problem of the willfully ignorant. Filling in gaps does nothing but narrow the breadth of God's territory. If you have an inkling that gaps may be completely closable, you instinctively would not go about eroding the edges of those gaps within your own God-centric worldview.

 

[Jimbo07]

You've bumped up against the tension between quest for knowledge and fear of knowledge -- the problem of the willfully ignorant. Filling in gaps does nothing but narrow the breadth of God's territory. If you have an inkling that gaps may be completely closable, you instinctively would not go about eroding the edges of those gaps within your own God-centric worldview.

It shouldn't have to be this way. There are some gaps that have clearly not been closed, and are not under threat to do so anytime soon. Accepting that God may be in those gaps is forgivable and even reasonable. Being deliberately unwilling to explore the boundaries of those gaps is... well... almost despicable, from either a scientific or religious point of view.

 

[Meadmaker]

Just idle conjecture (because I am neither fully religious, nor fully a scientist):

Wouldn't an intellectually honest creationist (or, more fairly, theistic evolutionist) WANT to be a scientist? If you accept a god-of-the-gaps, wouldn't you want to squeeze the gaps so hard that when all was said and done, what remained must be God?

There's a reason that science class used to be called "Natural Philosophy". You were studying the creation to get at the nature of the creator.

Of course, something went wrong along the way. Some students decided that maybe there didn't need to be a creator.

But yes, that's correct, and I think you would find a lot of agreement among the religious.

 

[drkitten]

"Disproven" is such a harsh word.

But appropriate. Behe stated that without any of the precursor factors, blood clotting would be impossible, and hence that clotting was IC.

This statement, unfortunately, is demonstrably untrue. I'd say "disproven" may be harsh, but is fully justified.

It has been pointed out to you why the Hagemann factor discussion isn't relevant to whether or not the blood clotting system is irreducibly complex,

It has not, thank you. Simply making a counter-factual statement (such as "he Hagemann factor [...]isn't relevant to whether or not the blood clotting system is irreducibly complex") isn't "pointing out."

On the other hand, a statement like "dolphins' blood clots" isn't counterfactual.

 

[Jimbo07]

Of course, something went wrong along the way. Some students decided that maybe there didn't need to be a creator.

Hold on. Everything has to be on the table. It's not wrong to start from an assumption of 'no creator.' It is simply wrong to end with a conclusion of 'no creator,' in the face of contradictory evidence. So far, there is somewhat more compelling evidence to say, 'no creator,' but that is still very subject to change.

But yes, that's correct, and I think you would find a lot of agreement among the religious.

I think it depends on the religion, and its intellectual traditions. A number of science and engineering students and teachers that I have known are Catholic...

(more engineering, I'll admit. Somebody said something about engineers liking to put things together and that being amenable to a creator...)

 

[drkitten]

It shouldn't have to be this way. There are some gaps that have clearly not been closed, and are not under threat to do so anytime soon. Accepting that God may be in those gaps is forgivable and even reasonable. Being deliberately unwilling to explore the boundaries of those gaps is... well... almost despicable, from either a scientific or religious point of view.

Well, the basic problem with the "god of the gaps" in the first place is that it's an idiots' conception of God. If you assume that God is incapable of acting through secondary causes, then any closing of the gaps is unacceptable as it's a direct diminuation of God's power. However, that assumption is (not to put it too strongly) asinine; it reduces God down to below the cognitive level of a chimpanzee.

If you assume that God, like a chimpanzee, is capable of acting through secondary causes, then not only does the whole god-of-the-gaps argument vanish, but so does about 99% of the creationism/evolutionism debate.

 

[Cainkane1]

so does about 99% of the creationism/evolutionism debate.

Maybe God is in the .01% gap.

 

[Jimbo07]

Well, the basic problem with the "god of the gaps" in the first place is that it's an idiots' conception of God.

I was trying to be nice...

If you assume that God, like a chimpanzee, is capable of acting through secondary causes, then not only does the whole god-of-the-gaps argument vanish, but so does about 99% of the creationism/evolutionism debate.

That's a stronger argument than mine, in favour of intellectually allowing that a religious person can be a scientist.

 

[drkitten]

That's a stronger argument than mine, in favour of intellectually allowing that a religious person can be a scientist.

Yeah. But the question at hand is whether a creationist can be a scientist.

Basically, a creationist is someone who simultaneously believes that God is omnipotent and at the same time cannot manage the world as well as I manage my graduate students.

 

[drkitten]

so does about 99% of the creationism/evolutionism debate.

Maybe God is in the .01% gap.

If your God is so small that He can be confined in the gaps between scientific findings, He's hardly worthy of the name....

 

[Meadmaker]

Why didn’t Miller’s testimony refute Behe’s regarding irreducible complexity?

The concept of irreducible complexity is pretty easy to grasp. If a system won’t work unless all of its parts are there, it’s irreducibly complex. We could try to work out an exact, very specific definition of exactly how it applies in biological systems, and Dembski has, but I don’t see the value of going over that. What it really means is the thing won’t work until its fully assembled. It’s a fancy upgrade to the old question, “What good is half an eye?”

Behe says that a lot of things inside plants and critters and us are irreducibly complex. Examples he gives are the bacterial flagellum and the human blood clotting system. They have lots of parts and they don’t work until all the parts are there.

Behe and fellow IDers say that IC systems are a problem for Darwin because there is no survival advantage until fully assembled.

The response to this argument has been known for a long time. It’s usually called cooption. A system that does one thing is changed slightly, and now it does a different, or possibly an additional, thing. If that new thing conveys a survival benefit, it lives on. Yay.

So all you have to do is show that cooption really happens. Miller didn’t do that. He showed that lots of the parts in a flagellum are also found in a type three secretory system. However, there’s lots of differences. He also showed that some parts of the blood clotting system aren’t necessary, but that missed the point as well. Once you have a blood clotting system, you can make lots of variations and end up with a better blood clotting system, and neither Darwin nor Behe would have a problem with that.

(Oh, look. That means there might be spare parts that dolphins don’t need. HA. Case closed. Behe is lying! If you can’t see the fallacy in that, ask. Sincere inquiries only, please.)

To refute Behe, what you would have to do is show how a system that performs one function can be transformed into a system that performs a different function, through a series of steps, each of which was at worst neutral with regard to selection. Take a TTSS and show how to change it into a flagellum, and you’re done.

Did Miller do that? No. He couldn’t. He didn’t know enough to do so. Nobody did. What Miller did was say that there were lots of similar parts, so it probably happened somewhere along the line. Today, someone might have. If you can find the paper, it’s linked at talkorigins, you might be able to tell me if they’ve succeeded. It looks like they have, but I’m unqualified to say.

And, if you don’t think it’s necessary, because it was already done, why would the paper be being published? I don’t remember the exact publication status, but it was going into a peer reviewed journal as new research. If this was old news, I don’t think they’d bother.

 

[articulett]

Ugh... reading through Meadmaker is like reading Behe... endless semantics and nothingness to obfuscate rather than clarify. What is a "lie"? Does he know it's a lie? It's the technique of a defense attorney with a guilty client. If the evidence is against you, muddy the waters and make someone else the bad guy.

Religion is full of doublespeak and hypocrisy-- they notices huge errors where there are none or minor errors while ignoring the the much more egregious errors and gaps in their own claims. You just can't pin them down because they never really say anything. The goal seems to be to make lies into "higher truths" and facts into faith -- they muddy religion and science as if they are both the same and pretend that there are "special" ways of knowing things.

They endlessly defend beliefs and god and creationism and anything to do with religion while ignoring the abuses and lies and demonizing those who dare call it what it is-- lies, nonsense, superstitions, flummery, gobbledy gook, semantic games, and NOTHINGNESS.

 

[articulett]

It shouldn't have to be this way. There are some gaps that have clearly not been closed, and are not under threat to do so anytime soon. Accepting that God may be in those gaps is forgivable and even reasonable. Being deliberately unwilling to explore the boundaries of those gaps is... well... almost despicable, from either a scientific or religious point of view.

The problem is that people have been proffering gods and souls and other forms of consciousness outside of a living brain for eons... science has discovered so much... DNA is really amazing. But we have no evidence for any kind of consciousness outside of a living brain... moreover, we are learning why and how the brain generates such illusions-- and we understand quite well how things can "look designed" to a brain that seeks certain kinds of patterns... but is not designed... or rather is designed from the bottom up-- like the internet or an ant colony or a city...

As science discovers more and more, gods and souls look less and less likely...and if you've invested much of your life in such beliefs-- you tend to play some semantic games and the like to keep the beliefs active. You would rather have the beliefs than find out that you may have been fooling yourself.

If you could know for sure that your God was as imaginary as Zeus or that souls were as likely as Scientology "engrams" or that amazing things you've heard of or known about were really just delusions, illusions, misperceptions, faulty memories, and/or coincidences-- would you want to know?

I think the older you are and the longer you've lived with your mistaken notions, the less likely you are to let them go--but to believe them takes energy... you have to pretend you can't test them, you have to get others to believe... you have to generate faith and the "feeling" of correctness.

Believers are often afraid of new knowledge... they show a lack of curiosity for it and explain it away before they can even read it. I don't know whether they do it on purpose or if it's more like the "ideomotor" affect. But they tend to keep the gaps there in their mind so they can fill it with whatever magic they use to explain it. Humans seem uncomfortable with not knowing and they fill in the gaps as a matter of course just as they fill in the blind spot in their vision. As long as science can't or doesn't explain the unidentified flying object someone saw-- it can be a space ship with alien creatures from another planet. --in their mind anyhow. The leap over all the better explanations and the discomfort of not knowing and fill it with the magic of their culture or fantasies.

 

[articulett]

Ken Miller was fantastic... you can youtube his presentation. But Ken Miller is a Catholic. So, he is a creationist in some sense of the word. I think his degree is in the Philosophy of Science. Many scientists are in some sense creationists, but I just think they use cognitive dissonance like Frances Collins does to make their god so nebulous and outside science-- that way they can believe (which gives them comfort and maybe the whole Pascal's wager insurance) without really having to think about it. I was raised Catholic. I couldn't make sense of the whole god story with him killing his kid because of apple eating etc. So I trained myself not to think of it. Everyone knew that "atheists" were "evil" and that you "needed religion to be moral". But I couldn't not think of it... because if my Eternity was at stake, I only had this lifetime to figure out the rubric... of course, the more you look and seek the truth, the more you realize how ephemeral and unsubstantiated the whole thing is.

But I remember training myself not to ask questions or think too deeply. And I bet that is what creationist scientists are doing. Cognitive dissonance. We live in a world where "faith is good" and where "belief in belief" is promoted.

 

[Meadmaker]

Hold on. Everything has to be on the table. It's not wrong to start from an assumption of 'no creator.' It is simply wrong to end with a conclusion of 'no creator,' in the face of contradictory evidence. So far, there is somewhat more compelling evidence to say, 'no creator,' but that is still very subject to change.



I think it depends on the religion, and its intellectual traditions. A number of science and engineering students and teachers that I have known are Catholic...

(more engineering, I'll admit. Somebody said something about engineers liking to put things together and that being amenable to a creator...)

I'm not sure whehter we are agreeing or disagreeing. What I meant to say was that a lot of religious people are doing exactly, or nearly exactly, what you were suggesting. They study science because the universe is God's creation. They look to the real world to find the limits of faith and of reason. In some cases they examine the gaps so they can find the works of God, while in other cases they look for science to confirm the "truths" of their religion.


What I meant by "something went wrong" is that in some cases, they intended to study the universe as a means of studying God's creation, and they ended up deciding that they didn't need God at all.

 

[articulett]

The question is... at what point should one give up claims for which there is no measurable evidence?... flat earth, phrenology, young earth, alchemy, astrology, "intelligent design", afterlives, souls, aliens that visit earth. When a belief is indistinguishable from known delusions people have had and invented and/or is immeasurable in any way-- I want science to treat such things as imaginary since, until evidence shows otherwise, all such things have so far been imaginary (an illusion, delusion, misperception, mistake in understanding, wrong, a lie, etc.). We know humans are prone to believing in the supernatural. But there is not an iota of evidence that anything supernatural exists.

The evidence for intelligent design is worse than hearsay and anecdote... it's hearsay multiple times removed... not even circumstantial... it's as useless as a wish. Nothing about science has ever furthered supernatural claims... it explains them and turns them into "ordinary".

Although scientists can be creationists... just as JREF members can be. I think the best scientists are not. I think that the more you believe something that is not supported by the evidence, the more you seek evidence or see evidence for propping up that belief. It biases your understanding. Either, there is an intelligent designer or there isn't. And both answers are not equally probable. Just as a UFO could be alien visitors from another planet, or something much more mundane. But both options are not equally likely, and there is only ONE truth. I don't want the scientist who believes that aliens are visiting earth to be the one investigating the matter.

 

[Jaggy Bunnet]

Why didn’t Miller’s testimony refute Behe’s regarding irreducible complexity?

The concept of irreducible complexity is pretty easy to grasp. If a system won’t work unless all of its parts are there, it’s irreducibly complex. We could try to work out an exact, very specific definition of exactly how it applies in biological systems, and Dembski has, but I don’t see the value of going over that. What it really means is the thing won’t work until its fully assembled. It’s a fancy upgrade to the old question, “What good is half an eye?”

Behe says that a lot of things inside plants and critters and us are irreducibly complex. Examples he gives are the bacterial flagellum and the human blood clotting system. They have lots of parts and they don’t work until all the parts are there.

Behe and fellow IDers say that IC systems are a problem for Darwin because there is no survival advantage until fully assembled.

The response to this argument has been known for a long time. It’s usually called cooption. A system that does one thing is changed slightly, and now it does a different, or possibly an additional, thing. If that new thing conveys a survival benefit, it lives on. Yay.

So all you have to do is show that cooption really happens. Miller didn’t do that. He showed that lots of the parts in a flagellum are also found in a type three secretory system. However, there’s lots of differences. He also showed that some parts of the blood clotting system aren’t necessary, but that missed the point as well. Once you have a blood clotting system, you can make lots of variations and end up with a better blood clotting system, and neither Darwin nor Behe would have a problem with that.

(Oh, look. That means there might be spare parts that dolphins don’t need. HA. Case closed. Behe is lying! If you can’t see the fallacy in that, ask. Sincere inquiries only, please.)

To refute Behe, what you would have to do is show how a system that performs one function can be transformed into a system that performs a different function, through a series of steps, each of which was at worst neutral with regard to selection. Take a TTSS and show how to change it into a flagellum, and you’re done.

Did Miller do that? No. He couldn’t. He didn’t know enough to do so. Nobody did. What Miller did was say that there were lots of similar parts, so it probably happened somewhere along the line. Today, someone might have. If you can find the paper, it’s linked at talkorigins, you might be able to tell me if they’ve succeeded. It looks like they have, but I’m unqualified to say.

And, if you don’t think it’s necessary, because it was already done, why would the paper be being published? I don’t remember the exact publication status, but it was going into a peer reviewed journal as new research. If this was old news, I don’t think they’d bother.

Behe said blood clotting was irreducibly complex because it required four specific components or it didn't work. That was his argument - unfortunately for him he was wrong as there were blood clotting systems that worked which were missing one of his essential components.

So did he do what a scientist would and rework his theory in light of the new evidence of which he was aware? Of course not, because it is a religious not scientific belief and therefore cannot be changed.

His so called irreducible complexity got reduced - and yet he still pedals the same BS to the same credophiles. Trying to hide behind a demand that someone recreate every step of the evolution of a blood clotting system under lab conditions is not a demand for evidence it is an evasion.

ID depends on there being things that could not have evolved - irreducible complexity. Behe claimed he found some, the evidence showed he was wrong because they could be reduced. Instead of accepting that one of the fundamentals of his theory had just been blown apart, he demands something that is totally unrelated to his original claim - that the actual route is reproduced. This is utterly unnecessary to show that the system he claimed was irreducibly complex (could not function unless all parts were present) was in fact reducible (because it DOES in fact work with parts not present). An honest scientist would revise his theory, a lying creationist would not - guess which Behe is.

 

[Meadmaker]

ID depends on there being things that could not have evolved - irreducible complexity. Behe claimed he found some, the evidence showed he was wrong because they could be reduced. Instead of accepting that one of the fundamentals of his theory had just been blown apart, he demands something that is totally unrelated to his original claim - that the actual route is reproduced. This is utterly unnecessary to show that the system he claimed was irreducibly complex (could not function unless all parts were present) was in fact reducible (because it DOES in fact work with parts not present). An honest scientist would revise his theory, a lying creationist would not - guess which Behe is.

Behe and Dembski now talk about an "irreducible core". (I think that's the term Dembski used.) The "irreducible core" is the collection of parts without which the system won't work. There may be additional parts, and those parts may also provide functions to the system, but there are parts that must be present for it to work. So, he has revised his theory.* The fact that there are spare, unused, parts isn't important to his point. His point is that there are parts that don't do anything unless there are other parts already present. They don't provide a survival advantage until some multi-part system is present. Therefore, he claims, it couldn't have evolved by natural selection, because the parts would not, by themselves, provide a survival advantage, and the collection of parts necessary to provide the function is too complex to have evolved in a single step.

It's a fairly simple idea, and it's correct. EXCEPT...

and this is well known, it's possible that the part of the system that is part of the "irreducible core" provided some other function before it became involved in the system you see now. All you have to do is show that those parts do serve a purpose without the presence of the rest of the system, and Behe acknowledges that.

At the time of the trial, no one could point to the components of any of the supposedly irreducibly complex systems and say how those components provided a survival advantage before the total system was assembled. To do so, you would have to trace a plausible evolutionary path from one system to the other. At the time, no one had done so.

*Actually, all he has revised is the description of the theory. He's saying the same thing he always said.