I mean, if you leave out the crackpots, the idea that the stars, which are much more significant in size than Earth, rule our destiny makes sense. It’s beautiful and it was just what court intellectual needed, centuries ago. It doesn’t happen to be true.
The idea that natural selection acting on random mutation could fill the world with exquisitely complex life forms makes sense to fashionable intellectuals today and it doesn’t happen to be true :
In a recent essay (Posted: May 1, 2019 ) in the new issue of The Claremont Review of Books, “Giving Up Darwin,” he credits reading Stephen Meyer’s book Darwin’s Doubt as the primary cause of his rejecting neo-Darwinian evolution, a “brilliant and beautiful scientific theory” but one that’s now been overtaken by science. The problem is that, as Huxley once pointed out, a beautiful scientific theory can be destroyed by just one “ugly fact.” (Thomas Henry Huxley, Presidential Address at the British Association (1870); “Biogenesis and Abiogenesis”, Collected Essays, Volume 8, p. 229.)
“Its beauty is important. Beauty is often a telltale sign of truth. Beauty is our guide to the intellectual universe—walking beside us through the uncharted wilderness, pointing us in the right direction, keeping us on track—most of the time.”
– Sean Pitman, ““A fond farewell to a brilliant and beautiful theory” – David Gelernter” at Detecting Design
The poet John Keats (“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all”) would not have liked this message: Sometimes one must choose between beauty and truth.
See also: The Manhattan Contrarian on David Gelernter abandoning Darwinism. What would an urban sophisticate make of doubts about Darwinism? Once the enforcement trolls have been banished below stairs, hasn’t Darwinism become something people patter at cocktail parties, so that others know that they are bicoastal and just deplore! their privilege? Instead of being genuine deplorables who might doubt?
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