Stumble it!Uncommon Fondness for Spurious Authority
posted in Creationism, Religion, Science by themaiden |Creationists and ID theorists have a particular fondness for Appeals to Spurious Authority. And that is just what this is.
I know quite a few medical doctors. Some are researchers, some limit themselves to private practice, and some do both. These are men and women of all ages and specializations. Not thousands or even hundreds of them - but maybe 30 or 40. Mind you, this is only one data point from a small sampling of physicians, but it is a good one: not one of these fine people believes in Darwinian Evolution. One told me that “Any physician who doesn’t see intelligent design in even his most troubled patient is either blind or stupid or just not paying attention.”
Uncommon Descent � Listen to your Doctors: They know the Truth.
The first comment on the thread reads “If you told this to a member of the Darwinian priesthood they’d just tell you those MDs are speaking outside of their field.” Well, of course, because that is precisely what is happening. Doctors are technicians, like mechanics, and some are quite good in their field. And while I might ask my mechanic about fixing my car, I would not trust his opinion on the origin of the technology. It is highly unlikely tha he has studied in detail the history of science and technology stretching back centuries. It is no insult to the mechanic to say this, nor is a similar statement an insult to doctors.
Repeating the fallacy does not change its fallacious nature, nor does mention of anecdotal– that is, not rigorously gathered– evidence concerning the beliefs of authorities not speaking in their field. And it is especially not helpful to make an idiot of yourself by excluding those authorities who actually do spend their lives studying the subject, as one commenter at Uncommon Descent did.
NDE’s support is almost exclusively from dogmatic science faculty and students who blindly accept their dogmatic teaching. Highly educated people in the real world outside academic settings tend to think for themselves and don’t have this irrational fear of Christian influence.
Let me translate. “Except for the scientists working in the field, lots of people see the problems with evolution.” The statement is laughably inane.
As for the article cited, it starts to crumble in the first paragraph.
I assume this means that by allowing science teachers to include intelligent design into their curriculum this would somehow inhibit student thinking and ultimately inhibit fundamental research.
An appeal to magic? Yes, I’d say that is inhibiting.
Evolution and natural selection has not provided an adequate explanation for many of the cellular and molecular processes that have been discovered. How is it possible that an intelligent design behind the process could stop further research?
It is possible because once one determines ‘irreducible complexity’ there is nowhere else to go. Really, what a bizarre misunderstanding of ID. The core idea behind Intelligent Design is that some things can only be explained by the invocation of an invisible hand. That is a dead stopper of research, if it is taken seriously. It is really not a case of trying to make a watch work better, but of discovering the history of the watch’s development. The author, David James, has presented a false analogy. Certainly a person could research the watch to determine how it could be made to work better, but this tell one nothing about how it came to be in the first place. The idea that, in an Intelligently Designed universe, such ‘improvements’ could be found and made does cast a bad light on the purported Intelligent Designer though.
His discussion of vestigial organs really has no bearing on evolutionary theory, which accomodates recent findings quite well and his point, that “To say that tissues are simply vestiges of evolution because we haven’t yet figure out their purpose, to me stifles an open, searching mind,” is contradicted by history. The research that should have, by his logic, been stifled, in fact wasn’t. It continued and we now know more about various vestigial organs than we did thirty years ago.
He continues with stock creationist objections.
Evolution is not testable nor has it been proven in any way and cannot be observed.
Evolution is in fact testable, and it is testable in the lab, no less. This lie has got to stop.
Take a single e-coli bacteria which is susceptible to a T4 Phage. Put this single creature into a dish and let it grow. Then introduce a T4 Phage. By all rights, the entire colony should die. It doesn’t. Some members survive. How is this possible, since all were descended from the same ancestor? The colony obviously has variation, or all members or no members would die, but not only some members. But the colony started out with effectively zero variation—one individual. The resistant bacteria could not have been hiding as a variant or as an overlooked contaminant. Nor could the resistant bacteria have borrowed a gene. There were no foreign bacteria from whom to borrow. But there is certainly variation and it most certainly came from somewhere.
Nor is the case built on this one piece of evidence. There are many.
The mechanisms of evolution are well documented. Biology departments hold reams of paper documenting these mechanisms. Whole forests have been converted into documentation. One only has to visit a university to encounter more documentation than a single person could read in a lifetime. These days, access to the World Wide Web provides nearly as much data.
These unobserved mechanisms are mutation and selection, and both can be observed in the lab with stunning ease. These are measurable, quantifiable things. That Rosenblum claims they have not been observed is nothing short of absurd. Not only, in fact, have these two mechanisms been observed but speciation itself has been observed. These processes are so well documented in fact that most creationists no longer deny them, arguing instead that only a limited number of species can be so produced. This latter is a considerably more complicated argument than Rosenblum’s, but it is biologically no more sound.
James continues.
I was taught that all living beings came to existence only through the process of evolution by natural selection. There was no consideration for any other possibility…
Not true, at least not true over the long term history of science.
Millions of people, hundreds of millions perhaps, have tried creationism over thousands of years. Creationism, after all, is the original explaination for why things are the way they are. Such-n-such God made this-or-that mountain or this-or-that animal.
…
So, creationism, having been tried for millenia upon millenia, was eventually found to be lacking and had to be abandonned as the evidence mounted. Sane people refer to this abandonment of mythology as the Renaissance and as the Enlightenment. These were times when people, most of whom who had been creationists since birth, began to realize that the world does not look like the world ought to look if those stories about creation were true. Most of these people, if you read their biographies, did not let go of creationism willingly but had it torn from them by the sheer preponderance of evidence. This is not a case, as Joe G., suggests, of not liking it because you haven’t tried it. This is a case of people liking creationism so much that when their researches did not support it they, some at least, left science or went bloody insane in efforts to escape the consequences of their own thoughts. Nicholas Steno is a good example—see The Seashell on the Mountaintop. Steno never abandonned creationism but he did spend the last years of his life doing penance for the damage he knew he’d done to it.
And..
… even when no one has been able to explain adequately the lack of transitional fossil records (of which there should be huge numbers)…
Again, simply not true. First, every fossil is transitional.
First, the idea of ‘transitional fossils’ is largely a creationist invention and it is based upon an invalid ‘hopeful monster’ conception of evolution. The idea of a ‘transitional fossil’ implies that there ought to be something that is half-this and half-that, like a minotaur, which is silly. Changes in a species occur gradually, generation by generation. Any two fossils found close enough in time and range will look very much the same. Fossils found far enough apart in time will show noticable differences, but there will never be a half-n-half. The idea simply makes no sense. In effect, every fossil is transitional, though the changes generation to generation are all but imperceptible.
Secondly, very very few dead things fossilize. This is well known in science and ought to be simple common sense. Think about how many hundreds of millions of insects have lived in your back yard over the past century, yet how many fossils did you find when you dug the post-holes for your new deck? How many animals live an die in a forest every year? Hundreds of thousands, yet how many bones can be found just lying around? Precious few, and I spent a lot of time in the woods as a kid. Objections like this one reveal what I can only term a staggering ignorance of the science involved.
… the astronomical odds for life to begin in some kind of primordial mix as well as multiple biological processes that require many steps to complete their function when there is no intermediate function.
The privileged planet idea… as flawed now as it ever was.
Take “The Privileged Planet”. The book, and I am assuming the video as well, argues that “Contrary to all expectations, the laws of physics seem precisely “fine-tuned” for the existence of complex life.” Wowie-zowie! Pretty striking… until you realize that it turns reason inside out. I can march myself down to the ocean and board an ocean liner. As I am sitting on the deck sipping my lemonade, I think, “Gee, the ocean seems to be perfectly designed, fine tuned if you will, to support this ship.” Well, that is pretty obviously silly. The ocean was not fine tuned for the ship. It is the other way around. The ship was built for the ocean. If the ocean were somehow different, ships would be different. If the ocean did not exist, there would be no ships. You cannot, however, argue that because we have ships the oceans must have been designed with them in mind. That is foolish. That is nonetheless exactly what these ‘priviledged’ arguments do. Stand logic on its head if you want but it will convince no one but the choir.
But the classrooms…?
When the current dogma cannot be challenged in a reasonable academic environment, that is when progress in knowledge becomes stifled and in danger of losing ground. My understanding of the role of science is to discover the truth.
Now come on, the debate really isn’t about the science being “challenged in a reasonable academic environment”. The debate is about inserting ideas into the public school system before they’ve won the right in a challenge in a reasonable academic environment.
No, in fact we see that life forms of different species and phylum are similar in structure and function such as apes and man. We do not observe that they have evolved. Science has made that assumption based on limited data and no testing other than among the same species.
Limited data? No testing other than among the same species? The man cannot be serious. Thousands of scientists working for over a hundred years have not produced ‘limited data’. The claim is absurd. And the suggestion that no testing has been done “other than among the same species” is ridiculous. Cross species comparisons are extremely common, consider, for example, the recent comparison of human and chimpanzee DNA.
So, again, another ID supporter speaks his mind and reveals a profound, almost mind-bending, ignorance. “Listen to your doctors: They know the Truth”? It doesn’t look that way to me.
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