The Rhetorical War Over Evolution
Are creationists stupid or willfully ignorant? Is that a loaded question? I personally don’t think that creationists are stupid, because they come up with incredible gems of twisted logic. They expend quite a bit of effort and time to create justifications for their beliefs, and come up with creative solutions to demonstrate their beliefs.
One of my favorite creationist attempts to “prove” the veracity of The Bible involves the mathematical proof that, yes, Noah could have fit all of those animals on the Ark. Mark Isaak reviews the issue at Talkorigins.org:
- Collecting each species instead of each genus would increase the number of individuals three- to fourfold. The most speciose groups tend to be the smaller animals, though, so the total mass would be approximately doubled or tripled.
- Collecting all land animals instead of just mammals, birds, and reptiles would have insignificant impact on the space required, since those animals, though plentiful, are so small. (The problems come when you try to care for them all.)
- Leaving off the long-extinct animals would free considerable space. Woodmorappe doesn’t say how many of the animals in his calculations are known only from fossils, but it is apparently 50-70% of them, including most of the large ones. However, since he took only juveniles of the large animals, leaving off all the dinosaurs etc. would probably not free more than 80% of the space. On the other hand, collecting all extinct animals in addition to just the known ones would increase the load by an unknown but probably substantial amount.
- Loading adults instead of juveniles as small as Woodmorappe uses would increase the load 13- to 50-fold.
- Including extra clean animals would increase the load by 1.5-3% if only the 13 traditional domestic ruminants are considered, but by 14-28% if all ruminants are considered clean.
So, Woodmorappe was creative; yet he was wrong. Is he stupid? No. Is he creative correct? No. Is he willfully ignorant? Quite possibly so, and as much as I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, I find it difficult to be generous when it comes to intelligent people who are creationists.
Another example of a creationist who appears to be willfully ignorant is Tom Willis. Willis is the editor and publisher of CSA News, (pdf.)
For Atheist Claim #1: Matter has been here forever or
came into being Naturally. The 1st Law of Thermodynamics
states emphatically that matter/energy can be neither created nor
destroyed. We transform matter, e.g., we burn logs, but the total
matter/energy in the Cosmos does not change.But, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, which, because of
its importance, many believe should be called #1, states that, in
every exchange of energy, some is effectively lost due to an imperfect
exchange. In each energy exchange, e.g., in a fire, or a
living cell, the total energy in the universe remains the same, but
a qualitative change causes there to be less available for work.
The measure of this loss is called entropy, and is called by many
“Times Arrow.” A universally understood result of this law is
that, if the Cosmos had truly been here forever, there would be
no energy available for work. The Cosmos would be at about 3
degrees above absolute zero (0 K on the Kelvin scale, -273.15
centigrade, -459.67 Fahrenheit). This is a largely uncontested
fact, not a “Christian myth.” The atheist, Isaac Asimov, in his
Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science stated essentially the same
thing.
This presents a nontrivial issue for atheists. Matter cannot
have been here forever (2nd Law) and it cannot come into existence
in real time (1st Law). Thus, these Laws, known to everyone
qualified to be called a “science teacher” clearly require a
powerful, non-material cause of the Cosmos. Only a fool can
know of these two laws and remain an atheist. Claim #1 of
atheism is absurd.
I’d like to call him stupid for writing this, but my feeling is that he has the mental capacity to choose to understand what it wrong with his argument. He is more intent on providing justification for his own belief than he is in gaining a true understanding of the processes of science and nature.
This is what makes creationism an easy target for people who actually take the time to be curious about how the world works, whatever their religious stance. One doesn’t need to be a scientist to understand that evolution is the process by which life has propagated through all of its varieties. The details are complicated yet available to those of us laypeople who wish to take the time to study them.
More disturbing, however, and the reason I brought this to Clashing Culture instead of my own blog is the contempt that Willis displays towards all evolutionsts. He would, if he were in charge of the democracy, deny anyone who is not a creationist the right to vote. This would include Thomas and Stephen along with Anastasia and myself. In his book, Thomas and Stephen are as much atheists as we are simply because they accept the facts of evolution.
Should Evolutionists Be Allowed to Vote?
* They do not and can not know the purpose for Man. In
fact, all of them believe Man has no purpose.
* Therefore, they cannot make informed judgments about
how men should behave toward each other, or what would
be “good” or “bad” for any group of men to do, or not do.
* Thus, they have no sane foundation upon which to base
“laws” or rational for insisting that other men obey the
laws.
* Thus, the religion they profess to believe renders them incapable
of participating in any decision about what men ought
to do. But, that is the purpose of all law.
* Therefore, in a sane society, evolutionists should not be allowed
to vote, or influence laws or people in any way!
They should, perhaps, make bricks to earn enough to eat.
Q.E.D. – Quod Erat Demonstrandum
“That which was to be demonstrated.”
Now, seeing such nastiness from a creationist, how should we approach the attacks on science from these quarters? Do we simply dismiss them as cranks? Do we patiently show them their errors of logic and judgment? Would they listen to us if we tried?
Is creationism an easy target for intellectual exercise, or does it need to be approached more delicately?
I think that the best medicine for Creationist ignorance of science is for the real scientists to ignore them. Instead of constantly fanning the flames, the scientific community should simply refuse to acknowledge their argument. The fact is, creationist pseudoscience has no falsifiability, so every time the real scientists make another point against them, they can explain it away because God can do anything he wants. This twisted logic has even led some ludicrous dogmatists to claim that the dinosaurs never existed; God just put the fossils in the Earth to test our faith.
Instead of persistently (and rightly) arguing with these stubborn people (in the spirit of Richard Dawkins), maybe we should just forget about them, concentrate our efforts on making our evolutionary theory better, and let their cause slowly peter and die.
You neglected the best (worst!) part of Willis’s article, where he says that evolutionists should not just be denied the vote, but should be violently expelled from civil society.
Evolutionists can’t be expelled from civil society — for they represent the scientifically conscious. A civil society must be steeped in intellectual enlightenment.
No, they (we!) represent the attack of “… the intelligent, educated segment of the culture.”
(Thank you, Pastor Ray Mummert, for that insightful remark during the time of the Kitzmiller trial..)
Phil Plait at Badastronomer.com mentioned the Kentucky legislator who said that we are “elitist” in the context of abstinence-only education. As a person who is proud to be elitist (because I defer to experts,) I am still leery of claiming complete rationality.
I would like to think that we could ignore the creationists but, well, you’ve seen the numbers of those in the U.S. who accept that creationism does a better job of explaining origins.
I agree in part with Joseph’s comment that we should just ignore them.
The problem is not the creationists, it’s the people that they dupe. Those people we should not ignore.
What bothers me is that these religious extremists interact with the population at large. If they were content to live in some commune (with or without guns and Kool-aid), I wouldn’t care as much. We have to face the very real truth that people like this are influencing the next generation and things like public policy on education.
Yep, where it comes to trying to ignore them we can’t forget that they are getting onto school boards and curriculum committees. We can’t let them continue to misdirect people that what they are talking about wrt origins has anything to do with science.
It’s where I see my responsibility as a non-scientist who respects science, and part of the reason that I blog. We just can’t ignore creationism. We shouldn’t “debate” them, but we can’t ignore them.
It seems to me that what makes this Willis person dangerous and disturbing is not his creationism but his fundamentalism. In my view (and in my experience), fundamentalisms are universally anti-rational and do significant harm to the rational mind. I’ll leave a careful definition of “fundamentalism” for another time, but suffice it to say that I don’t see the phenomenon as being limited to Abrahamic religions, or even to religion in general. Listening carefully to extremists of various kinds, one can hear fundamentalisms in all areas of the social/intellectual landscape.
Mike’s phrase “willful ignorance” is one I’ve used myself, trying to capture the malignant combination of arrogance and ignorance, with the arrogance protecting the ignorance and the result being a robust positive-feedback loop. Fundamentalisms, it seems to me, are particularly potent inducers of the necessary arrogance, by creating “beliefs” that are spiked with various additives: inevitability, “obviousness”, Gnostic deliverance, divine command. I would go as far as to suggest that one of the best ways to identify fundamentalism, at least practically, is to look for profound ignorance that is asserted with utter confidence.
One challenge for a community like this one (referring to Clashing Culture) is to identify rough boundaries that we can use to distinguish extremism/fundamentalism from belief/opinion, not merely to avoid offending each other (I’m not worried about that) but to achieve a measure of clarity in approaching things as horrifying as Mr. Willis’ ravings.
Definitely a money quote.
[...] June 18, 2008 by Stephen Design and the Intelligent Design movement (IDM) will probably come up regularly on this blog, and in fact I am eager to discuss the concept of design with the other bloggers here. But it’s almost impossible to bring up “design” without bringing to mind the IDM, and that’s unfortunate, because the IDM is contaminated with some of the most toxic intellectual and cultural ideas that one can find outside of the brand of fundamentalism that Mike brought up a few days ago. [...]
So, Woodmorappe was creative; yet he was wrong. Is he stupid? No. Is he creative? No.
Er….
“Woodmorappe was creative….Is he creative? No.”
So what changed in the space of three sentences?
Thanks, Murray.
Tom Willis made comments regarding Atheists believing that the universe has been here forever. He was speaking of entropy, time’s arrow and the second law of thermodynamics. Mike, I compliment you for stopping short of calling him stupid. I’m a creationist and I’m not so sure I’m that forgiving. I believe that the preponderance of what Woodmorappe and Willis said in the quotes was indeed very stupid. The animals on the ark, the circular logic, and their arrogant attitude toward Naturalists are actually much worse than stupid, but I don’t understand why this particular statement itself would be. Willis seems to be pointing out a philosophical issue regarding the need for a beginning, and therefore a beginner. In the scientific community Big Bang Cosmology is well accepted. Nearly all atheists do in fact believe in the Big Bang don’t they? A possibility that would resolve this would be for an infinitely old universe. But in this case the universe should already have achieved a mean temperature of near absolute zero. He seems to miss the target by hundreds of miles on everything else, but is he really wrong on this?
I would say that the Big Bang is where the evidence leads, so yes, atheists go with the Big Bang until and if some contrary data comes along.
As for the need for a Beginner, how does the Beginner not need a Beginner? Someone once said something about “Turtles all the way down.” Where does the bottom turtle rest?
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “how does a beginner not need a beginner.” I was speaking of the universe needing a beginning and therefore a beginner. Steven Hawking demonstrated when he got his Ph. D. from Cambridge that based on the theorems of General Relativity; the dimension of Time had a coincident beginning with Matter, Energy and Space. The physical laws that physicists have been looking to as a possible cause for the universe are those of Quantum Mechanics. The thinking is that the universe popped into existence from quantum fluxuation. The difficulty that Steven Hawking revealed is that the physical dimension that quantum mechanics works within is time; and yet it had no existence until it simultaneously appeared with matter, energy and space. This removes it as a candidate for the universes creation.
Whatever the cause of the universe is, it cannot be confined as we are to the universe’s space-time dimensions, or its matter, energy (or turtles). The science of this universe cannot tell us the attributes of any creative agent because He/They/It had to have acted outside of our own dimensions. Not having access to the additional dimensions of any possible creative agent, I would be unable to state from science or logic that the beginner, in the dimensions that he exists within, either had a beginning or he did not. Although, I think I could build a pretty good case showing that the beginner is not turtles
I would cite Dr. Anthony Rizzi’s “The Science Before Science” Rizzi (a physicst LSU) would pose two philosphical points. “Something cannot change itself” and “Something cannot give what it does not have”. The creation of the universe is the “change” and as Jim as pointed out the cause exists outside of matter, space and time. “Being” that we see manifested througout the universe must have come from a source that has “Being” to give.
I would highly recomend Rizzi’s book.