Darwinism and popular culture: So we really ARE allowed to critique the little god Darwin now?

_{Denyse O'Leary
November 2, 2009

Darwinism

2}_{Categories
Darwinism}

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Apparently, the sort of comments made in my article in Touchstone – about the little god Darwin – have been noticed by at least one person.

THE DARWIN MOVIE’S NOT SELLING, but John Scalzi doubts those evil Creationmongers are a part of the reason:

How about this: The movie is not selling because it is not believed … Huh? Maybe the story is not believable?

People now generally guess that Darwin was a materialist atheist long before his daughter died. And his whole coterie was committed to promoting the view that he lost his faith over her death , and it is still fronted today.

Fact: In North America, you cannot legally line up people at gun point and force them to watch some propaganda film worshipping Darwin – or worshipping anything – and threaten to shoot or otherwise punish them if they say they do not believe it. If that is not the law where you live, please hold a revolution now.

As a traditional Canadian, I am not a fan of revolution in general. Nature is our vast antagonist, not man. Check a map. But in some places maybe people need a revolution, to get the point across that there are some areas government must not infringe, including freedom of religion and freedom of media. (We have big problems with that just now, but we are getting the message across.)

While I am here, one of the most significant books published this year, because it – potentially – rids us of much Darwin nonsense, endlessly iterated in textbooks, teacher’s manuals and popular films, is Michael Flannery’s republishing, with a useful introduction, of Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory Of Intelligent Evolution . We would be vastly better off if Wallace, rather than Darwin, had been the main theorist. For example, we would never have dealt with the awful eugenics movement and the completely ridiculous evolutionary psychology movement. Wallace was far wiser than his co-theorist, Darwin, about the stuff that really matters.

Comments

BA77,
here are no apparent reasons why the value of each individual transcendent universal constant could not have been very different than what they actually are.
Just as there are no apparent reasons they could not be what they are. It is like you shuffle and deal a deck of cards; each distribution has a very low probability of being dealt but it happens anyway, all of the time! Sooner or later, any distribution is bound to come up. This universe happened too, our existence her is the evidence. We just don't know anything about the 1 to the 66th versions of universes with constants we wouldn't enjoy, just as we know nothing about God except we know that we don't knowCabal_{November 3, 2009
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Seversky, You wrote: The following is a sentence from Dr E B Aveling’s account of a conversation with him: Then the talk fell upon Christianity, and these remarkable words were uttered: “I never gave up Christianity until I was forty years of age.” If true, that would put it at about 1849, some ten years after his marriage to Emma and shortly before the death of Annie." Darwin wrote in his autobiography: "I had gradually come by this time, i.e. 1836 to 1839, to see that the Old Testament was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos or the beliefs of any barbarian." Life and Letters of Charles Darwin. (1958 version) I don't know if Enezio E. De Almeida Filho may have you there, but if his apostasy was complete with the first two thirds of the Book, then it's not hard to think that the latter third was not well-considered in this time frame either.AussieID_{November 3, 2009
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Darwin's case, that is. Judge the other case for yourself.vjtorley_{November 3, 2009
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Seversky (#20) Regarding Darwin's characterization of hell as a damnable doctrine: see http://www.angelfire.com/linux/vjtorley/whybelieve8.html and read the attached essay and articles. I think a fair-minded person would conclude: case not proved.vjtorley_{November 3, 2009
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Im begginning to see the pattern here. The defenders of ID always seem to end up invoking religion. (Bornagain77 & StephenB Im looking at you) And why their posts so loooong ?Graham1_{November 3, 2009
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Allen_MacNeill
Could it be that the contributors and commentators at this website aren’t interested in the science of biology, except insofar as it can be distorted for political purposes?
You're a commentator, and I think all of your contributions are political.Clive Hayden_{November 2, 2009
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Mr StephenB, Sorry to miss your earlier rejoinder. On the topic of fulfilling prophecies, for the sake of specificity could you give a link to such a list that you think is worth discussing?Nakashima_{November 2, 2009
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Mr BA^77, We're talking about Wallace. Just carpet bombing the thread with another topic is chatterbot behavior. The charming opening statement of accusing your partner in dialog of intellectual suicide is funnier if you stick to the canonical "Jane, you ignorant slut..."Nakashima_{November 2, 2009
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Mr StephenB, The allusion was all mine sir.Nakashima_{November 2, 2009
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---Mr. Nakashima: "Well, I suppose my point in quoting Wallace was that ID is a pretty big tent if Mrs O’Leary can be charmed by him, yet you would oppose him quite strongly." You used Wallace's quote as an example of someone who is scandalized by my very specific argument that immoral behavior affects religious belief. On the other hand, I perceive nothing at all in my response that alludes to ID, "big tents," or anything that places O'Leary on one side of an argument and myself on the other. Have you been getting enough sleep?StephenB_{November 2, 2009
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So Nak, will scrutinizing prophecy, relieve you of the the intellectual suicide you committed when you denied the implications of the fine tuning of the universe? -------------- The numerical values of the transcendent universal constants in physics, which are found for gravity which holds planets, stars and galaxies together; for the weak nuclear force which holds neutrons together; for electromagnetism which allows chemical bonds to form; for the strong nuclear force which holds protons together; for the cosmological constant of space/energy density which accounts for the universe’s expansion; and for several dozen other constants (a total of 93 as of 2006) which are universal in their scope, "just so happen" to be the exact numerical values they need to be in order for life, as we know it, to be possible in this universe. A more than slight variance in the value of any individual universal constant, over the entire age of the universe, would have undermined the ability of the entire universe to have life as we know it. To put it mildly, this is a irreducibly complex condition. Anthropic Principle - God Created The Universe - Michael Strauss - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjn8poWD7tM On and on through each universal constant scientists analyze, they find such unchanging precision. It should also be noted that the four primary forces/constants of the universe are said to be "mediated at the speed of light" by mass-less "mediator bosons". Thus since time, as we understand it, comes to a complete stop at the speed of light this gives these transcendent universal constants the characteristic of being timeless, and thus unchanging, as far as the temporal mass of this universe is concerned. i.e. We should not a-prori expect that which is timeless in nature to change in value, and if a constant is found to have changed in value, during the entire history of the universe, we should presuppose an external transcendent Agent "adjusting" the constant for a higher purpose. Psalm 119:89-91 Your eternal word, O Lord, stands firm in heaven. Your faithfulness extends to every generation, as enduring as the earth you created. Your regulations remain true to this day, for everything serves your plans. Here are a few sites that list the constants: Fine-Tuning For Life In The Universe http://www.reasons.org/fine-tuning-life-universe Evidence for the Fine Tuning of the Universe http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/designun.html Evidence For God In The Cosmos - Fine Tuning of Constants - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDm9nBD-w_A There are no apparent reasons why the value of each individual transcendent universal constant could not have been very different than what they actually are. In fact, the presumption of any materialistic theory based on blind chance expected a fairly large amount of flexibility, and variability, in the underlying natural laws/constants for the universe, since the natural laws themselves were postulated to arise from some material basis. They "just so happen" to be at the precise unchanging values necessary to enable carbon-based life to exist in this universe. All individual constants are of such a high degree of precision as to defy comparison to the most precise man-made machine ( which is 1 part in 10^22 - for the gravity wave detector). For example, the individual cosmological constant (dark energy) is balanced to 1 part in 10^120 and the individual mass density constant is balanced to 1 part in 10^60. Fine Tuning Of Dark Energy and Mass of the Universe - Hugh Ross - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B0t4zSzhjg To clearly illustrate the stunning degree of fine-tuning we are dealing with in the universe, Dr. Ross has used the illustration of adding or subtracting a single dime's worth of mass in the observable universe would have been enough of a change in mass density to make life impossible in this universe. This word picture he uses, with the dime, helps to demonstrate a number used to quantify that fine-tuning of mass for the universe, namely 1 part in 10^60 for mass density. Compared to the total mass of the observable universe, 1 part in 10^60 works out to about a tenth part of a dime, if not smaller. Where Is the Cosmic Density Fine-Tuning? - Hugh Ross http://www.reasons.org/where-cosmic-density-fine-tuning Hebrews 11:3 "By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible." Although 1 part in 10^120 and 1 part in 10^60 far exceeds, by many orders of magnitude, the highest tolerance ever achieved in any man-made machine, 1 part in 10^22, according to esteemed British mathematical physicist Roger Penrose (1931-present), the odds of one particular individual constant, the “original phase-space volume” of the universe, required such precision that the “Creator’s aim must have been to an accuracy of 1 part in 10^10^123”. This number is gargantuan. If this number were written out in its entirety, 1 with 10^123 zeros to the right, it could not be written on a piece of paper the size of the entire visible universe, even if a number were written down on each sub-atomic particle in the entire universe, since the universe only has 10^80 sub-atomic particles in it. The Physics of the Small and Large: What is the Bridge Between Them? Roger Penrose Excerpt: "The time-asymmetry is fundamentally connected to with the Second Law of Thermodynamics: indeed, the extraordinarily special nature (to a greater precision than about 1 in 10^10^123, in terms of phase-space volume) can be identified as the "source" of the Second Law (Entropy)." This 1 in 10^10^123 number, for the time-asymmetry of the initial state of entropy for the universe, also lends strong support for "highly specified infinite information" creating the universe since; "Gain in entropy always means loss of information, and nothing more." Gilbert Newton Lewis This staggering level of precision, for each individual universal constant scientists can measure, is exactly why many theoretical physicists have suggested the existence of a “super-calculating intellect” to account for this fine-tuning. This is precisely why the anthropic hypothesis has gained such a strong foothold in many scientific circles. American geneticist Robert Griffiths jokingly remarked about these recent developments; "If we need an atheist for a debate, I go to the philosophy department. The physics department isn't much use anymore." ---------------------- So please do tell me a bedtime story about how all this fine tuning came to be Nak,,,bornagain77_{November 2, 2009
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----Mr. Nakashima: "I find the whole toting up of places where Jesus fulfills a prophecy (which starts in the text of the Gospels themselves) a very weak reed." Can you be a bit more specific. I am referring to prophecies that were made prior to the New Testament. A prophecy that starts in the text of the Gospels would not be a prophecy but rather a redacted fraud. ---"Do you really want to give your allegiance based on a metric like “number of prophecies fulfilled”? Anyone can kick snakes and ride white donkeys." The prophecies to which I refer are not even remotely similar to anything of that texture. I am baffled by your comment. ----"On the whole you’ve been posting in several threads recently with an argument that can be countered simply as correlation is not causation. That doesn’t even bother challenging whether the correlations you assert actually do exist. What you write here is more reasonable about behavior and belief, but it also isn’t rising much above ‘you are what you eat’ in the gravitas of its message." You are being uncharacteristically vague in the above paragraph and your comment is usually wide sweeping, so I cannot respond to that which has not been made explicit. In terms of the relationship between belief and behavior and vice versa, I don't get the relationship between that and your foray into human diet and the "gravitas" of the message. Are you challenging the proposition that behavior affects belief? Once again, clarity will serve your purpose. It is not like you to waste words in this way.StephenB_{November 2, 2009
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LOL! Damned by whom would be my question.
Great question... If I am damned by believing what God wrote then let it be so.ellijacket_{November 2, 2009
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Seversky, So now we get to the meat of the matter. It is not about, nor was it ever about the science, upon which this site is ultimately based in the first place, it is about your deep seeded fear that your loved ones may be in hell. And that is what is too much for you to bear. It doesn't matter to you if all the scientific evidence in the world echos the glory of God, which it does,, all that matters to you is that you are not in control of this situation and you have a deep seeded anger about that,,, How in the world do you expect us here on UD to deal with that? Do we somehow possess the knowledge to tell you exactly what awaits each person on the other side? Do we know the fate of each of your relatives? I know I don't know,,, If I told you to go in prayer to God about this matter to find peace you would not listen anyway,,,so what is the point??? Why do you visit a science site when you clearly need spiritual healing?bornagain77_{November 2, 2009
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Seversky wrote:
In my view, Lewis and those who share his belief are damned for their support of such a “damnable doctrine”
LOL! Damned by whom would be my question. If there is no God (or gods), then there are only other human beings to damn him (or anyone for that matter). If Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Jeffrey Dahmer, Klebold & Harris, Bonnie & Clyde, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, James Earl Ray, or any other person whom have been labeled "evil" are any example to go by, then the most certain way to attain immortality in a godless world is to be damned by your fellow human beings.angryoldfatman_{November 2, 2009
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Mr StephenB, Well, I suppose my point in quoting Wallace was that ID is a pretty big tent if Mrs O'Leary can be charmed by him, yet you would oppose him quite strongly. I've looked at a few of these lists of hundreds of prefigurations of Jesus in the Hebrew Bible that are on the Web and I find most of them poor stuff. Nor is there a sense of double blind experiment to the situation. If every educated Jew in the country knew a verse about a white ass, Jesus would be a fool to pass up an opportunity to ride one. I find the whole toting up of places where Jesus fulfills a prophecy (which starts in the text of the Gospels themselves) a very weak reed. Do you really want to give your allegiance based on a metric like "number of prophecies fulfilled"? Anyone can kick snakes and ride white donkeys. On the whole you've been posting in several threads recently with an argument that can be countered simply as correlation is not causation. That doesn't even bother challenging whether the correlations you assert actually do exist. What you write here is more reasonable about behavior and belief, but it also isn't rising much above 'you are what you eat' in the gravitas of its message.Nakashima_{November 2, 2009
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bornagain77 @ 14
‘There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it’ : CS Lewis
"I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlasting punished. And this is a damnable doctrine" --Charles Darwin in his Autobiography His wife Emma, a devout Christian also wrote in a note on that passage in his autobiography: "Nothing can be said too severe upon the doctrine of everlasting punishment for disbelief -- but very few now wd. call that 'Christianity,' (tho' the words are there.)" In my view, Lewis and those who share his belief are damned for their support of such a "damnable doctrine"Seversky_{November 2, 2009
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----Mr. Nakashima: "Pace to Mr StephenB, Wallace wrote, 'I will pass over as utterly contemptible the oft-repeated accusation that sceptics shut out evidence because they will not be governed by the morality of Christianity…'" I salute you for presenting that quote since it indicates that you do, indeed, get my point. Clearly, I assert that which Mr. Wallace finds contemptible. You would be surprised how many people who are hooked on pornography also find it impossible to believe that Christ, who warned against the vice of lust, was preannounced hundreds of times in Old Testament prophecies. Notice that the latter point is an easily verifiable fact, yet those mired in sin don't seem to be able to face it. What we believe affects how we behave, but how we behave also affects what we believe.StephenB_{November 2, 2009
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Enezio E. De Almeida Filho @ 13
Darwin had no faith in God prior to engaging to his cousin Emma.
The following is a sentence from Dr E B Aveling's account of a conversation with him:
Then the talk fell upon Christianity, and these remarkable words were uttered: "I never gave up Christianity until I was forty years of age."
If true, that would put it at about 1849, some ten years after his marriage to Emma and shortly before the death of Annie.Seversky_{November 2, 2009
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BA:
All God does in the end with people is give them what they most want, including freedom from Himself.
Amazing that anyone can believe such an obvious falsehood. Tell it to the millions dying from disease or lack of food.Monastyrski_{November 2, 2009
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Seversky states: "No, the problem in this country is freedom from religion for those who want nothing to do with it." All God does in the end with people is give them what they most want, including freedom from Himself. 'There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.' All that are in Hell, choose it' : CS Lewisbornagain77_{November 2, 2009
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WHO CARES if or why Darwin believed or didn't believe in God? And who cares what Darwin was like as a person? Evolution stands on the scientific merits. The rest is all straw men.Anthony09_{November 2, 2009
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As to Annie Darwin and Darwin's loss of faith see Mark Pallen's excellent historical posts: http://roughguidetoevolution.blogspot.com/2008/12/annie-darwin-and-darwins-loss-of-faith.html http://roughguidetoevolution.blogspot.com/2009/07/spread-of-annie-myth-its-worse-than-i.html http://roughguidetoevolution.blogspot.com/2009/07/surprising-spread-of-annie-hypothesis.html Darwin had no faith in God prior to engaging to his cousin Emma.Enezio E. De Almeida Filho_{November 2, 2009
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There is no "little god Darwin" except in the minds of those who need an Emmanuel Goldstein for their Two Minutes Hate. Pace to Mr StephenB, Wallace wrote I will pass over as utterly contemptible the oft-repeated accusation that sceptics shut out evidence because they will not be governed by the morality of Christianity... Is there something predictive to Wallace's teleology that would earn it a place at the table of science? His enthusiasm for Spiritualism? What part of Wallace's thought would have prevented Spencer's "survival of the fittest" from being applied to contemporary society? In some other part of the multiverse where Darwin dies in 1858, and Wallace publishes on his own, does the Holocaust not happen? Does Columbine not happen? Why do you think so? Wouldn't Richard Weikart be publishing a book called "From Wallace to Hitler"?Nakashima_{November 2, 2009
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So we really ARE allowed to critique the little god Darwin now?
You do not seem to have had any trouble doing that for as long as I can remember. In fact a large part of the traffic on this blog is devoted to just that.
Fact: In North America, you cannot legally line up people at gun point and force them to watch some propaganda film worshipping Darwin – or worshipping anything – and threaten to shoot or otherwise punish them if they say they do not believe it.
As far as I know, nobody has suggested the people be forced to do anything of the sort. Although, FACT, there are some so-called Christians in North America who would like to do something similar: statements of Christian belief on the currency and plastered all over public buildings, mandatory participation in Christian services for children in school whether they are Christian or not and mandatory public prayers before official meetings of public bodies or sporting events regardless of what faith the attendees follow, other religions tolerated as long as they don't make a nuisance of themselves but atheists and agnostics banned from holding public office and possibly even disqualified from US citizenship - a sort of Christian Talibannination.
Nature is our vast antagonist, not man.
Nature is not our antagonist, it is something of which we are an integral part. There are many aspects which are dangerous, yes, but we treat it as hostile at our peril since we are entirely dependent on it.
But in some places maybe people need a revolution, to get the point across that there are some areas government must not infringe, including freedom of religion and freedom of media.
The problem is not freedom of religion, just look at the sheer number of churches, chapels, cathedrals and other religious buildings dotted all over the landscape. No, the problem in this country is freedom from religion for those who want nothing to do with it. There is also the question of freedom from the worst excesses of the mass media but I'm afraid that is the price we pay for freedom of expression.

Seversky_{November 2, 2009
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Denyse: off topic but I thought this would interest you http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1224249/The-unromantic-truth-kiss--spread-germs.html?ITO=1490 Kissing evolved to spread germs!? LOLBorne_{November 2, 2009
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Einstein was neither considered for the Nobel Prize for his theory of special relativity (published in 1905) nor his landmark 1905 paper on Brownian motion, which effectively validated the atomic theory of matter. He was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922, "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". This refers to his 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect, "On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light", which was well supported by the experimental evidence by that time, and which laid the groundwork for the theory of quantum mechanics. Scientists recognize Darwin's contribution to the science of biology as essentially equivalent to Einstein or Newton's contributions to the science of physics. This is why Darwin is often referred to as the "Newton of biology". Indeed, there was no science of biology until after the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859 (for more on this, see: http://people.delphiforums.com/lordorman/light.htm , written by Theodosious Dobzhansky, one of the founders of neo-Darwinism and a devout Russian orthodox Christian). Darwin called himself a naturalist, as did virtually all of his colleagues. Their name for what they did was "natural philosophy", not biology, which became a systematic natural science as a result of Darwin's work. The term "biology" was coined and popularized by Jean-Batiste Larmarck, the author of the second most influential theory of evolution, published in 1809 as Philosophie Zoologique. His theory of evolution was virtually identical to Darwin's, with one exception: Lamarck thought that evolution was progressive, leading inexorably to more complex forms as the result of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The overwhelming majority of scientists worldwide are celebrating three milestones this year: the 200th anniversary of the publication of Philosophie Zoologique by Lamarck, the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species. Furthermore, the scientific theory of evolution has never been more widely respected among scientists, nor has it ever experienced as rapid an expansion into other fields of science. There is now the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for biology — the Crafoord Prize, awarded since 1984 by the Norwegian Academy of Sciences. The list of winners for biology reads like a list of the leading lights of modern evolutionary theory: Robert Trivers (2007), Carl R. Woese (2003), John Maynard Smith, Ernst Mayr, & George C. Williams (1999), Sir Robert M. May (1996), Seymour Benzer & William D. Hamilton (1993) Paul R. Ehrlich & Edward O. Wilson (1990), Eugene P. Odum & Howard T. Odum (1987), and Daniel H. Janzen (1984). Curious isn't it, that only two of these Crafoord Prize winners has ever been mentioned at this website (Carl Woese and Edward O. Wilson), and that even in their cases no mention has been made of their contributions to biology in general nor evolutionary biology in particular. Could it be that the contributors and commentators at this website aren't interested in the science of biology, except insofar as it can be distorted for political purposes?Allen_MacNeill_{November 2, 2009
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I think you are just further elucidating my point there. Right O'Leary? Yeah, I am a fan of Einstein, despite his obvious bad flaws. Einstein was actually denied, I think it was the Nobel award for his Special relativity the first time it was being considered because the people who were judging it did not understand it- and said they could not award a theory which was beyond their understanding. Which to me from Einstein's perspective must be hilarious. Imagine waiting to find out if you won and they say no because they cannot comprehend the mathematics. You would be thinking to yourself "this is pathetic, here I am awaiting approval from a bunch of people way below by intellectual level." It makes a joke out of institutionalism. Einstein was a smart self taught dude. He was way beyond his math teachers by his early teens- studying day and night- and he digested Kant's Critique of Pure Reason by age 15 I think. Which is insane when you think that Kant was like one of the wisest Philosophers and people to ever live and his Critique was written after studying all the age old Philosophers etc in his old age. So Einstein was already up with Kant, and in a sense beyond over 2000 years of philosophy when he was just 15. Now he was plenty flawed and got some things way wrong too but like Babe Ruth and Brett Favre sometimes to break all the records you have to lead in strike outs and interceptions as well. The only person I have ever seen have it all is Joe Montana. Looks, family, money, and a perfect record holding 4 for 4 wins in super bowls. How all of this relates to instituitonal Darwinism imop is that it was the freedom that Einstein developed through, which ennobled his creativty and perseverence and inspired his timeless quotations- which actually are symbolic of an excellent philosophy “Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.” The image of God in the spark of man is that freedom of choice and creativity lead by a spiritual guidance of right and wrong. Yet it is Darwinism which seeks to limit our personal beliefs about nature. That is by taking away the dimension of design it has put a false constraint on knowledge. We cannot ask nor think about that life and the universe was designed via an intelligence. This drains the spirit and mystery of science for a lot of people. That is why I think ID should be taught about- even if briefly, so at the least the people who are interested in pursuing it can find inspiration there, and those who see it as useless, or false can ignore it and pursue science the same old boring way it has been. Like Newtonian physics to Einsteinian physics, you can choose to follow the old paradigm or pursue a new one. True science is the search for new things, and it is part of the search for truth- as physicists like Einstein knew, physics was actually part of philosophy- or science is shaped by the science of science. All science Einstein said were part of the same tree. "All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom." Darwinism looks at everything though through a very lame reductionist perspective of chance and selection. This is at the very least a blind ally. "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” The biggest flaw I personally think he had was a heavy skepticism in the belief of a personal God. I would add a line to his quote about science and religion which is "religion without good spirituality is worthless." Ad this makes a personal judgment about individual's moral values which of course guide science and determine it's level of value. ID, however, in contrast to DE, looks for deeper design principles. And Steve Meyer is on to something more than idealism when he argues for the potential fecundity of ID. There is nothing wrong science being simple - but as Einstein also pointed out it should be as Simple as possible, but not simpler. And DE does not answer the questions of the origin of form and improbability of specified complexity etc- so it is too simple an explanation to count as an acceptable one. You know, Einstein certainly had plenty of flaws but one thing that was great about him was he got the ultimate last laugh over all those teachers and people who said he was practically retarded in early grade school. He had his weaknesses but compensated for them by maximizing the abilities and talents he did have. Luckily for him he was allowed to pursue his interests and was at least INTRODUCED to the subject mater of philosophy and advanced mathematics etc. The institutions tried to set him back in life but he proved that with the right ideas and enough hard work and development the truth can win out. While I dot think it was developed enough, Einstein did have a certain deep respect for God, design and spirituality- As he never liked the dead end philsoophies which bar you from aksing the higher question like DE does... "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." "The important thing is not to stop questioning." And maybe my all time favorite quotation... "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." ^Which puts "everything" into perspective.Frost122585_{November 2, 2009
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Frost at 5, you quoted Einstein: "The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education." And what happened? In Einstein's three 1905 papers, he blew classical physics apart. It was okay to disagree with orthodox theorists, even if, like him, you are only a patent office clerk somewhere, but you make sense.O'Leary_{November 2, 2009
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The book, "Social Darwinism" has a good history of evolutionary thought all the way back to Epicurus (?) the Greek philosopher.Collin_{November 2, 2009
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