This past episode was great to me because it was a narrative about how science (specifically in this instance, the Enlightenment era Royal Society blokes) reveals truth and dispels fear. I have to admit, in part, because I am a big Neal Stephenson fan and and read and re-read the Baroque Cycle, I kind of just felt at home with Robert Hooke and Edmund Halley and Newton and them. Like they were my brothers from another era. But the thing is--science is cumulative. When we look back at what the scientists who came before did--we know their work and where they were coming from. People built on what they did. If any bit of it was wrong, it couldn't even be the foundation for what came after.
This isn't true for Creationism. There isn't anything to build on. There isn't any foundation. It is, simply, "God did it". It isn't based on any observation of "God doing it". Instead, it is a bunch of dumb quibbles about how evolution, as theory, isn't so totally complete as to convince narcissists who need to have God as an artisan making their own personal asses special order.
That's why I chuckle a little--no, hard, when they suggest they should have equal time. No seriously? What if the episode looked like the Kitzmiller v Dover trial? Should creationists really want to have their pseudoscience torn apart on the regular? It might cost them in private school money and text book pimping.
Maybe they should be glad enough they have the 700 Club and "all that".
3 comments:
Creationists are desperate for the respect that science gets, though they have done nothing to earn it. Science works, it leads to disease cures and moon landings. Creationism doesn't produce results, and it never will, and that is what makes creationists so scared and enraged.
Hi Vixen,
your atheism more resembles Ayn Rand's than Jean-Paul Sartre's. Rand was also an Aristotelian and believed A is A.
Sartre would have seen atheism from a very different perspective, probably accessible in his book Being and Nothingness.
I'm afraid I must disagree with you and your fellow traveler Ayn Rand.
Photons travelling at almost the speed of light intersect with the primitive apparatus of our senses and our central nervous system (CNS). Regrettably, our CNS operates at a much slower speed than the incoming photons.
This creates an effect somewhat like looking at the blades of a fan in motion. Visually, it doesn't seem as if anything is there, and yet we know that the blades are revolving.
In other words, the slow functioning of our CNS does not see the gap between one photon and another. As a consequence, the world of appearances is one of delusional evaluations for us.
This is not entirely different than Emmanuel Kant's discovery that you "cannot know things in themselves." Kant pointed out that as our sensory apparatus came in contact with the world through sound waves and light waves, we really only apprehended the evaluation created in our brains through our interpretation of incoming waves of energy.
You might be interested to know that the entire school of Idealism is based roughly on the view that all apprehension ultimately can be demonstrated to be mental phenomena.
Centuries ago the entire world looked at the sun rising in the east and thought that that was what actually happened. Astronomers instructed us that often at night when we look at a star we are simply seeing the light that emanated from that now defunct entity.
We are probably a number of centuries away from people factoring the world of appearances into a delusional evaluation because of our senses and CNS.
It would be nice if the 700 Club on one side and the vast atheist opinion that could easily be derived from Madalyn Murray O'Hair on the other would all realize that they are embarrassing themselves.
--Formerly Amherst
Sometimes I think that "atheism" probably doesn't actually cover whatever my real position seems to be--I don't really consider myself to be as strictly materialist as an avowedly atheist postition might suggest. Maybe "militantly agnostic" is more technically true. While the "gaps" undoubtedly exist--I just don't see the need to find God in them (following LaPlace--I have no need of that hypothesis).
What rankles me isn't the idea that any definition of God fits the "spooky action" occuring outside of our mere human cogitations--it's that idea that people wad up pages of an English translation of an Iron Age compilation of Bronze Age folk tales, wedge them into the chinks of our observed reality to keep out the draft of uncertainty, and then try to sell us a stairway to heaven for their next trick.
I prefer uncertainty to a unfalsifiable certainty, and just find that I function well enough without assuming the existence of a divinity to support the framework of the cosmos I inhabit. Can't rule it out--I don't even have a meaningful objection to what a "good" argument for or against a God would be. I'm comfortable ticking off a box for areas where I lack knowledge as "here there be monsters"--I just don't waste any time wondering whether those monsters approve of shacking up, drinking alcohol, or rock and roll music, and don't see the appeal in people making a hobby of it.
You know--the whole whereof one cannot speak, etc. I'm a bit more comfortable accepting the existence of quarks or superstrings in comparison.
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