It is an open secret that a major motivation for the commonly encountered, too often angry rejection of the design inference is a prior commitment to Lewontinian evolutionary materialistic atheism; a common thread that unites a Sagan, a Lewontin, many members of Science institutions and Faculties of Universities, and of course many leading anti-design advocates like those associated with the US-based National Center for Science Education [NCSE], as well as leading “science” [–> atheism] blogs and Internet forums and the like.
Such atheists also often imagine that they have cornered the market on scientific rationality, common-sense and intelligence, to the point where professor Dawkins of the UK has proposed a new name for atheists: “brights.”
By contrast, he and many others of like ilk view those who object to such views as “ignorant, stupid, insane or . . . wicked.” (Perhaps, that is why one of the atheistical objectors to UD feels free to publicly and falsely accuse me of being a demented child abuser and serial rapist. He clearly cannot see how unhinged, unreasonable, irrational, uncouth, vulgar and rage-blinded his outrageous behaviour is.)
For telling instance, in Lewontin’s notorious 1997 NYRB article, Billions and Billions of Demons, we may see:
. . . to put a correct view of the universe into people’s heads we must first get an incorrect view out . . . the problem is to get them to reject irrational and supernatural explanations of the world, the demons that exist only in their imaginations, and to accept a social and intellectual apparatus, Science, as the only begetter of truth [[NB: this is a knowledge claim about knowledge and its possible sources, i.e. it is a claim in philosophy not science; it is thus self-refuting]. . . . To Sagan, as to all but a few other scientists, it is self-evident [[actually, science and its knowledge claims are plainly not immediately and necessarily true on pain of absurdity, to one who understands them; this is another logical error, begging the question , confused for real self-evidence; whereby a claim shows itself not just true but true on pain of patent absurdity if one tries to deny it . . ] that the practices of science provide the surest method of putting us in contact with physical reality . . . .
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes [[another major begging of the question . . . ] to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute [[i.e. here we see the fallacious, indoctrinated, ideological, closed mind . . . ], for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. [And, if you wish to try the now routine turnabout false accusation of quote mining, kindly cf. here at UD as well as the above linked.]
The ideologically motivated atheistical, evolutionary materialist a priori is plain.
No wonder Philip Johnson rebutted Lewontin thusly, in his November 1997 reply:
Consequently, if we are to put the design inference issue on a level playing field so it can be objectively assessed as a valid scientific inference, we have to first address the fatal flaws of reasoning in the underlying thought that clothes materialistic atheism in the holy lab coat. (And of course, given its sacrificial, protective purpose, it should be no surprise that I have never seen or owned an expensive lab coat.)
So, “scientific” atheism must now go under the microscope:
1 –> The first problem is to accurately define. For that, it is instructive to first cite the well known online Stanford Enc of Phil, in its article on Atheism and Agnosticism by J J C Smart of Monash University:
‘Atheism’ means the negation of theism, the denial of the existence of God. I shall here assume that the God in question is that of a sophisticated monotheism. The tribal gods of the early inhabitants of Palestine are of little or no philosophical interest. They were essentially finite beings, and the god of one tribe or collection of tribes was regarded as good in that it enabled victory in war against tribes with less powerful gods. Similarly the Greek and Roman gods were more like mythical heroes and heroines than like the omnipotent, omniscient and good God postulated in mediaeval and modern philosophy. As the Romans used the word, ‘atheist’ could be used to refer to theists of another religion, notably the Christians, and so merely to signify disbelief in their own mythical heroes. [First published Tue Mar 9, 2004; substantive revision Mon Aug 8, 2011. Acc: Nov 12, 2011.]
2 –> This is of course exactly what is traditionally understood, and it is what the etymology of the underlying Greek, “a + theos,” would suggest: the denial of the reality of God. But, if one turns to the reliably evolutionary materialist Wikipedia, we will see that in its article on Atheism, there is now a commonly encountered evidently rhetorically loaded redefinition, as appears in the title for this post:
Most inclusively, atheism is simply the absence of belief that any deities exist. Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities. Atheism is contrasted with theism, which in its most general form is the belief that at least one deity exists . . . . Atheists tend to be skeptical of supernatural claims, citing a lack of empirical evidence.
3 –> The last statement, of course, strongly reflects the Lewontinian a priori assertion of materialism, and the underlying notion that to have a supernatural as a possibility would make our cosmos into a chaos. Indeed as Lewontin went on to say: “To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.”
4 –> Back of this, lies Hume’s basic hyper-skeptical error, in effect that there has been a uniform experience that firmly establishes the laws of nature and so we may dismiss any claimed supernatural exceptions as beyond reasonable belief. This boils down to begging the question in various ways, as first of all, we precisely do not and cannot have a global observational basis for the laws of science, they are inductive — thus fallible — generalisations. [Cf. Charles Babbage and Alfred Russel Wallace. (Yes, THAT Wallace, the co-founder of modern evolutionary theory and advocate of intelligent evolution.) Also cf a typical contemporary essay here.]
5 –> Similarly, for a miracle to stand out as being beyond the general course of the world, there must be just such a general course, i.e. a world in which miracles are possible is one in which there will be general regularities amenable to scientific investigation. Informed theists will then tell us that, that the Author of that general course may, for His own good reasons, occasionally intervene at a higher level, in no wise detracts from the reliability of that general course. That is, Lewontin et al have erected and knocked over a ridicule-loaded strawman caricature of theism. (Newton knew better, 300 years ago in his General Scholium to Principia.)
6 –> Moreover, give that there are in fact millions who across centuries, testify to living encounter with God, and to being transformed thereby — including a generous slice of the leading lights of our civilisation across time [just try the likes of a Pascal, a Maxwell, a Kelvin or an Aquinas, for a quick list], to dismissively reject the possibility of miracles or the credibility of witnesses thereto inadvertently puts the human mind itself under suspicion.
7 –> For if so many millions are deluded, then the mind becomes highly questionable as an instrument of inquiry. That is, the atheist who imagines that those who oppose him are delusional, in the teeth of the numbers and quality of the people in question, saws off the cognitive branch on which he too must sit.
8 –> But, the very definition of atheism as “absence of belief in god or gods” that is now so commonly being pushed as the “real” definition, has deeper problems. For, it is usually offered as an argument that the atheist is simply taking a default view: YOU must prove your theism, I hold no position. (Cf. here too, just for fun.)
9 –> This is fallacious and misleading, indeed, a fatal worldview error. Why is that so?
a: It improperly shifts — and indeed ducks — the burden of warrant on comparative difficulties that any serious worldview must shoulder. If it is to be serious as a worldview. (And, let me add {Nov14}: we all have worldviews— clusters of core beliefs, views and attitudes that define how we see the world; the question is whether we have thought them through to their idea-roots, connexions, degree of warrant, and forward to conclusions and consequences for us and our societies.)
b: An easy way to see all of this, is to notice how the very same atheists usually want to dress up their atheism in a lab coat.
c: For instance, as Lewontin tried to argue in his 1997 NYRB article, the a priori materialistic scientific elites want the general public to look up to them as the fountain of knowledge and wisdom, and to come to believe that science is “the only begetter of truth.”
d: But, this is NOT a scientific claim, it is a claim about the grounds that warrant knowledge, indeed an assertion of monopoly power over knowledge. Such is therefore properly a philosophical knowledge claim, i.e an epistemological claim.
e: Lewontin is trivially self-refuting.
f: But the claim is also illustrative of how claims at worldview level are inevitably linked to one another.
g: And, the denial or rejection of belief in God is plainly not an isolated claim, it sits in the centre of a cluster of evolutionary materialistic beliefs.
h: Indeed, Lewontin himself goes on to assert that the significant elites believe that “science” is the surest means to put us in touch with “physical reality” [= all of reality, for the materialist], and that he and his ilk are committed to a priori, absolute materialism.
i: That is the context in which we see that science itself is being radically ideologised by question-begging redefinition. The declarations of the US National Science Teachers Association are particularly revealing on this, once we recognise that for “naturalistic” we can freely read “materialistic”:
The principal product of science is knowledge in the form of naturalistic concepts and the laws and theories related to those concepts . . . . Although no single universal step-by-step scientific method captures the complexity of doing science, a number of shared values and perspectives characterize a scientific approach to understanding nature. Among these are a demand for naturalistic explanations supported by empirical evidence that are, at least in principle, testable against the natural world. Other shared elements include observations, rational argument, inference, skepticism, peer review and replicability of work . . . .
Science, by definition, is limited to naturalistic methods and explanations and, as such, is precluded from using supernatural elements in the production of scientific knowledge. [[NSTA, Board of Directors, July 2000. Emphases added.]
j: This ideologises science and science education, tearing out of the heart of science any serious concern to seek the empirically warranted truth about our world, and to recognise the inescapable limitations of empirically based inductive methods in that pursuit which mean that science must be open-ended and provisional in its fact claims and explanations.
k: In short, the intellectual duty of care to critically assess the scientific materialism at the heart of the relevant form of atheism we face, cannot be ducked so easily as by using the rhetorical tactic of putting up a question-begging redefinition of atheism.
l: This means that scientific atheists must warrant their evolutionary materialism, they must warrant their redefinition of science based on imposition of so-called methodological naturalism, and they must warrant their commonly held view that science monopolises genuine, objective knowledge.
10 –> Evolutionary materialistic atheism, therefore, has a too often ducked challenge to warrant its worldview level claims, on (a) factual adequacy, (b) logical coherence, and (c) explanatory balance and power [being elegantly simple, but not simplistic and certainly not ad hoc].
11 –> That means it needs to take seriously the implications of the empirically reliable principle that functionally specific complex organisation and associated information [especially digitally coded, symbolic information] — once we can directly observe the causal process — are inductively strong signs of design.
12 –> Similarly, it has to seriously address the issue of the best explanations for the credibly fine tuned cosmos we inhabit, which on evidence sits at a precise operating point that facilitates Carbon chemistry, aqueous medium cell based life that uses digital information to guide its self-replication and to synthesise the key nanomachines of metabolic life processes.
13 –> Likewise, it has to address the signs of design that are evident in the living cell, starting with the use of complex, functionally specific digital codes and algorithms to guide critical biochemical processes of life such as protein synthesis.
14 –> The need to account for the increments in complex functionally specific, integrated often irreducibly complex organisation and associated information to account for the dozens of body plans of multicellular life, including our own, is an extension of this challenge.
15 –> Similarly, such materialistic atheists need to credibly account for the reliability and trustworthiness of the human mind, in light of the Haldane challenge that has been on the table since the 1930’s (and of course modern extensions to that challenge):
“It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.” [[“When I am dead,” in Possible Worlds: And Other Essays [1927], Chatto and Windus: London, 1932, reprint, p.209. ]
16 –> Last but not least, given the force of the amorality confessed to and/or directly implied by leading materialistic atheists such as Dawkins and Provine, atheistical, evolutionary materialists need to very carefully ponder the issues that were long since put on the table by Plato in The Laws, Bk X, 2350 years ago, in 360 BC:
[[T]hese people would say that the Gods exist not by nature, but by art, and by the laws of states, which are different in different places, according to the agreement of those who make them; and that the honourable is one thing by nature and another thing by law, and that the principles of justice have no existence at all in nature, but that mankind are always disputing about them and altering them; and that the alterations which are made by art and by law have no basis in nature, but are of authority for the moment and at the time at which they are made.– [[Relativism, too, is not new; complete with its radical amorality rooted in a worldview that has no foundational IS that can ground OUGHT. (Cf. here for Locke’s views and sources on a very different base for grounding liberty as opposed to license and resulting anarchistic “every man does what is right in his own eyes” chaos leading to tyranny.)] These, my friends, are the sayings of wise men, poets and prose writers, which find a way into the minds of youth. They are told by them that the highest right is might [[ Evolutionary materialism leads to the promotion of amorality], and in this way the young fall into impieties, under the idea that the Gods are not such as the law bids them imagine; and hence arise factions [[Evolutionary materialism-motivated amorality “naturally” leads to continual contentions and power struggles; cf. dramatisation here], these philosophers inviting them to lead a true life according to nature, that is, to live in real dominion over others [[such amoral factions, if they gain power, “naturally” tend towards ruthless tyranny; here, too, Plato hints at the career of Alcibiades], and not in legal subjection to them . . .
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It seems there are a few questions for scientific atheists to answer to, before we should take their attempt to monopolise science as anything beyond an ideological agenda.
It would be quite interesting to see their answers. END