Ken Ham, head of the evangelistic organization Answers in Genesis and the force behind the Creation Museum and the Ark Park, is a low-hanging fruit. Indeed, it might be said that he’s a strawberry, a fruit that hangs so low that it’s almost on the ground. I shan’t spend much time on him, but thought that, for the record, I’d put up a note about his recent attack on Richard Dawkins posted on Ham’s Defending the Faith site: “Richard Dawkins and Mr. Deity.”
You may remember the comedy video I posted showing God (played by Mr. Deity, played by Brian Dalton) encountering Richard Dawkins. In it, Dawkins accuses God of many things, including indolence for using the wasteful and imperfect process of evolution to create species—species ridden with poor “design” like the recurrent laryngeal nerve of the giraffe. Dawkins accuses God of being “redundant” and having been made “completely unnecessary” by the advances of science. (I’m chuffed that Ham doesn’t link directly to the video on YouTube, but to my own piece on it. He reads me!)
Well, Ham doesn’t like that video, of course, for, as an evangelical and fundamentalist Christian, he’s a big fan of God. I want to highlight just two points that Ham thinks are flawed in Dawkins’s arguments. Ham’s words are indented.
1. Dawkins relies on evolution, which is a “historical” science that can’t be observed, and hence can’t be verified. This is an argument that is being increasingly used by creationists, as it resonates with people who don’t know much about science:
[Dawkins] adds, “And what’s more, we have science now, making you completely unnecessary.” By “science” he, of course, means evolution, which is historical science. This kind of science deals with the past and is therefore not directly observable, testable, or repeatable. Now, to prove his point that science has made God unnecessary he says, “Do you know that we just used science to do something truly amazing and quite difficult? We landed a probe on a comet.” Here he has done what so many secularists do. He’s used a bait-and-switch. He says that “science” (unobservable historical science) has made God redundant, but then he uses an example from “science” (observable, testable, repeatable operational science) to prove his point! But historical science and observational science are not the same thing!
Do I really need to refute this? I shall do so, and let me count the ways.
This argument, also made by Ray Comfort, is just dumb. For of course many scientific contentions and hypotheses are “historical,” yet that doesn’t make them any less scientific. For if historical contentions can be tested, or can make predictions that can be examined, then they fall under the rubric of real science. For evolution, these include the prediction that humans evolved in Africa (first made by Darwin in 1871, not verified until the 1920s); that birds evolved from dinosaurs and whales from land-dwelling animals (predicted ages ago, verified in the last 30 years); that the first “real” organisms were simple ones, and only later did more complex ones evolve (the first organisms we see in the fossil record, about 3.5 billion years ago, are cyanobacteria), and so on.
Evolution is further “scientific” in that it alone, among all competing theories (especially Ham’s creationism), is able to make sense of previously puzzling data. (I call this “making sense” notion “retrodictions”.) Such retrodictions include the explanation of biogeographic patterns like the absence of endemic mammals on oceanic islands, of vestigial organs like the tiny, useless hindlimbs on early fossil whales, and of embryological observations like the transitory hindlimb buds in dolphins. I discuss all of this in WEIT, so I won’t reprise it here.
The point is that if a hypothesis can be tested and supported using historical data, and competing hypothesis rejected, then that is a scientific endeavor. If Ham were right, and historical sciences weren’t “observable and testable,” cosmology would be down the tubes as well. How do we know the Big Bang occurred? We can detect its remnants: an expanding universe and the background radiation that is its echo. How do we know how stars “evolve” over time? By observing stars in all stages of production and death, and putting these frames together into a cinematic depiction of the life of a star. If ham were right, geologists would be out of business too.
Further, evolution is not completely a “historical” science, for it also makes predictions about things we can see with our own eyes. For instance, we now have dozens of examples of natural selection in real time, and we have also seen speciation, in the form of new polyploid plant species occurring within a generation (this is again in WEIT). We can observe mutations occurring and see that they are random.
And there are other historical sciences. All we know about ancient Rome comes from history. Would Ham say that our knowledge of classical Rome is deeply flawed or illusory, or that in fact ancient Rome really was built in a day, by God, and the whole series of emperors was a fabrication? And what about history itself? It’s a historical “science,” so maybe Julius Caesar and Napoleon didn’t really exist. After all, all we have of them is the written record. Nobody alive can say he or she actually met them!
The fact is that there is no distinction between historical science and real-time experimental science: both are based on observation, prediction, and testability. There is only science, which I construe broadly as the use of experiment, observation, reason, and testability to find out the best explanations for natural phenomena. The methods of “historical” and “experimental” science may differ, but the principles are the same. Archaeology and history can be a form of science, as can auto mechanics and plumbing (TRIGGER WARNING: Massimo Pigliucci disagrees). Ken Ham and Ray Comfort, by drawing a false distinction between “historical” and “observational” science, and implying that only the latter is “real science”, are simply confusing people—deliberately. They know better, but have to lie for Jesus.
2. Dawkins can’t explain physical laws, which must therefore be due to God. This is again and increasingly common argument for God, and is effective because its refutation requires that people not only pay attention to physics, but be satisfied with answers like “we don’t know the answer yet; and maybe we never will.”
Actually, it’s only because God exists and because His Word is true that we can even land a probe on a comet. [Dawkins argued that this is one of the great achievements of science.] You see, the universe is governed by laws of nature. But in a random, material universe that supposedly arose naturalistically, where do set, immaterial laws of nature come from? And what makes these laws operate the same way tomorrow as they do today? There are no real answers to these questions in an atheistic worldview. But there is a Creator, and He set the laws of nature in place at the beginning. And we can trust that these laws will work the same tomorrow as they did today because our unchanging God upholds and sustains the universe (Hebrews 1:3).
Oh dear—this again? My responses are brief. First, how does Ham show that the laws of nature come from God? Where is his evidence for the deity, and the fact that deity created the laws? Second, why is a lawless universe the default state if there is no God? Why isn’t a universe with laws the default state? Third, we don’t know where the laws come from, but some physicists like the late Victor Stenger have argued that many of them come from the assumption of observer invariance. Alternatively, they may stem from a deeper principle that we don’t yet understand (of course Ham would respond that that Deeper Principle comes from God). Or the laws of nature may vary among different universes if we have a multiverse.
Of course the universe could not exist if there were no “laws of nature,” so our very existence requires them. That doesn’t answer the question of why we have them—a question answered just as well with “I don’t know” as with “God made them,” for both are statements of ignorance—but it does explain why we observe laws. In the Albatross I also broach what I will call the “weak anthropic principle from bodies”: that living creatures, at least the type that we see, couldn’t exist without physical law. If the “laws of nature” were to vary wildly and erratically, we wouldn’t be able to evolve (environments would change unpredictably from one generation to the next), nor would our bodies be able to operate (things like kidney function, nerve function, and blood circulation all depend on “laws” that are constant).
As physicist Sean Carroll has emphasized, in the end we might have to be satisfied with the answer “because that’s the way things are” to the question, “Why do we have the laws of nature that we do, instead of another set of laws?” But that’s no worse an answer than “God did it,” which is like saying “Fred did it.” As Sam Harris said in his blurb for the Albatross, “the honest doubts of science are better—and more noble—than the false certainties of religion.”
I note finally that religionists of Ham’s stripe don’t really believe in invariant laws of nature, for they also believe in miracles, which means that God can break the “laws” any time He wants. And God presumably does that quite often—every time He intervenes in the cosmos, whether to answer prayers, cure the ill, or send someone’s soul to Heaven or Hell.
There’s one paragraph in Ham’s diatribe that is quite telling, for it shows why he and many other Americans are Biblical literalists:
Dawkins’ comments should stand as a warning to those who compromise with man’s ideas of evolution and millions of years. They are opening the door to compromising with the rest of God’s Word. After all, if you can’t trust God’s Word in the very beginning, then where do you stop doubting? If we can’t trust God’s words in Genesis, then why should we trust God’s Word in the Gospels?
This “slippery slope” argument for Biblical inerrancy shows why it’s virtually useless to try to convince these people of the truth of evolution. For if evolution goes, so go the tenets of Christianity. Try fighting that, accommodationists!
And there’s one bit of unintended humor in Ham’s screed:
We can trust God’s Word because it was written by a God who never lies (Titus 1:2), and it’s confirmed by what we see in the world.
Here’s Titus 1:2 from the King James Bible: “In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began.”
In other words, we know that God doesn’t lie because the Bible tells us so. But of course the Bible lies, for it makes many assertions (and not just about creation) that aren’t true: that there was a historical Exodus of Jews out of Egypt, that there was a census of Caesar Augustus, and so on. Nowhere in the Bible does it say “this book is true,” and even if it did it we wouldn’t be forced to believe it. It’s as if one wrote a work of fiction that contained these words “Paul Bunyan cannot lie”; would we then have to take everything he said as really, historically, true?
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UPDATE: Reader Pliny the in Between called attention to a cartoon on his her website, Evolving Perspectives, that’s relevant to today’s post:
I feel sorry for Ken Ham, he has no proof that his parents were ever born because that’s historical science and he wasn’t there.
Poor lamb,
Scenario:
Me; Ken, did you see your parents have sex with each other?
Ken: !!
Me: Isn’t your existence proof they did? Therefore, it isn’t necessary to see things happen to know that they did happen. Right?
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Presumably Ham avoids using any ‘historical science’ to argue for the reliability of the Bible. Otherwise his first argument collapses before it’s begun.
No, it’s God’s word, so of course it’s reliable!
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His (crazy, full of holes) argument seems to be something like:
We weren’t there, so all you’re doing when you do “historical science” is porting in your own biases. So, evolution and creationism are at a par, so he picks the bible because he’s already a believer, etc. (I got this impression from the debate with Nye.)
You’ve really gotta be quite the gullible git to have any faith at all in a book that opens with a story about an enchanted garden with talking animals and an angry wizard. And citing what said book claims of the chief antagonist as validation of the book’s own trustworthiness?
Seriously?
I can understand the Hamster himself falling for that one, but I don’t think I can understand even him thinking it’d convince anybody else.
b&
Here’s completely watertight proof that the Bible is true.
They might want to buy a few cases of this stuff.
Not just “a” story, but two versions of the same story that disagree.
Ooo, ooo, ooo, professor, I know of a “historical” ‘science’ that can’t be observed, and hence can’t be verified – theology!
Theology isn’t even historical. Historical theology would be something like biblical archaeology whereas theology doesn’t seem to involve the use of any real world data at all. It’s the study of things in your head by comparing them with other things in your head, like philosophy only it doesn’t ask interesting questions.
I give Jerry serious props for wading through the writings of professional theologians – when I read someone like Dawkins or David Deutsch I’m met with more ideas in a single page than most theologians manage in an entire book. Theology is the intellectual equivalent of those whale-music CDs.
Hey! That’s not fair to the whales. There’s more intelligence in five minutes of whalesong than there is in the entire theology wing of the Vatican Library.
b&
I retract my whale-directed calumny. ‘Celine Dion CDs’ might have been fairer. Surely you can’t object to that Ben? Bloody hippies.
Careful, there…many of us are hippies, even if we can’t stand Celine Dion….
b&
Hey Ben. Tongue was placed firmly in cheek. Is there an internet acronym for this? ToPFIC?
Even though the first song on Primal Scream’s Exterminator is one of my all-time favourites, I still consider myself an honorary hippie. Too young to have been one first pass.
Yes, you got it!
Huh. I thought he had written “hysterical.”
Is that you, Horschack?
I’ll just drop this rather blunt quote from H.L. Mencken: “Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.”
And many seemingly inexplicable laws, for example conservation laws, are the results of symmetries. Symmetries in their purest sense don’t seem to require an explanation at all – it’s broken symmetries, deviations from ‘neutral positions’, that require explanation, and the explanation for symmetry breaking tends to be a random, non-teleological process anyway.
There are very few laws of nature that cannot be explained, even basic laws such as the conservation laws (as explained by Noether’s Theorem). Other examples are the inverse square laws of gravity and electromagnetism, which are the result of the three dimensions of space. It is hard to think of a law which is a total mystery.
Add to that the conceptual incoherence of the philosophiser’s and theologian’s ‘nothing’, and its application in the ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ question, and the existence of the universe(or ‘something’, or ‘reality’, or whatever) seems to me to be a lot less mysterious and deep than obscurantist believers(and some non-believers too) would hope.
I am in full agreement with Ken Ham on one thing, surprise, surprise. And he says it fairly well.
I’ve made this same point myself countless times, as I’m sure many others have. Of course, my take on this is a bit different than Ham’s. It is obvious that you can’t trust God’s word right from the very first page, and so of course there is no good reason whatsoever to believe anything that comes after.
All of the more liberal and sophisticated believers really need to try and find a reasonable response to this. They won’t be able to find a reasonable one but the exercise may be worthwhile.
Point of clarification: I believe Ham and others who take this line accept the evidential value of human-written texts. So he would accept Caesar’s existense based on Roman books and writings. In fact, the YEC goal here is partly to limit historial investigations to such documentary sources, so that they can claim the Caesar’s writings or the Bible counts as legitimate evidence of past events, but things like tree rings or stratigraphy does not.
Ham is wrong about that, of course. But I’m pretty sure he would consider it rational to accept Caesar and Napoleon based on historical documents.
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Re: the landing on a comet example. If that really bugs Ham, we could easily replace it with a “historical” example such as: “Do you know that we just used science to do something truly amazing and quite difficult? We used it to figure out that there existed a species like tiktaalik, to predict where the remains of that species would be found, and then we found it.”
But evolution is even better; it’s written in stone*!
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* Apologies to Brian Switek for stealing the title of his book.
I thought Ken Ham was a dingleberry.
indeed. on the south end of a north-bound sheep.
Your comments on physics and biology reveal a misunderstanding of their relationship.
Of course physics is compatible with any relation of physics and evolution, but explains nothing of the process of evolution. Physics does not explain evolution. Only biology can do that. To reduce evolution to physics would regular reduction with evolution, about 3.7 billion years ago.
This is the mistake of Fisher, Haldane, and Wright. You make the same argument that they did.
Actually, no. See Alex Rosenberg (The Atheist’s Guide to Reality) and Jeremy England.
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I’m not sure what you are talking about. Searching Jerry’s post for “physics” shows that he doesn’t talk about it in relation to evolution at all. Ham makes an argument about physical laws, which is separate from his argument about evolution being a historical science. Jerry is responding to both separately. One beatdown on evolution. A separate beatdown on physics.
Well, wouldn’t he think that cosmology (part of physics) is a historical science too? I guess Sean Carroll would have a good answer for that.
My guess is Ham’s criteria for what counts as operational science is nothing more rational than “the bits that don’t disagree with my interpretation of scripture.” Trying to divine some deeper, more rational foundation for Ham’s historical vs. operational science distinction is probably wasted effort; he doesn’t have one. To that end, I’ll guess that the bits of cosmology that don’t disagree with his YECism he accepts as operational, while the bits of cosmology that disagree with his YECism he’d label historical.
I’m sure no one expects to be able to fold the science of biology under the science of physics anymore than we would expect chemistry, and Jerry’s description of science “writ large” aims at something different (kinship within empirical methods).
But as Ant already noted (and I want to note out of my astrobiology interest), there are places where physics segue into biology, and chemistry, such as thermodynamics of replicators and geophysics of our ancestors. [Russel et al in “The Drive for Life on Wet and Icy Worlds”, Pross, Pascal, England, …] Modern cells seem to have homologies with geophysical systems in the Hadean, at least in a naive view, and some astrobiologists have started to claim some as such. [Martin and Lane.] And the closer we get to the origin of the replicator population, the more the cells simplify and the more the remaining constraints are those geophysical ones. If the emergence of replicators ushered in a phase change thereafter evolution ruled, I assume the observed homologies eventually froze in by selection maintaining them, and they are part of what Dawkins called the extended phenotype.
I can’t really parse the last sentence, but if it suggests that life emerged about 3.7 billion years ago that is but an upper limit (and then better 3.5 billion of the oldest accepted fossils) of a wide possible range. We now know that Earth was cold and wet 4.4 billion years ago, and some consider that the more likely or at least a possible end of the open range. [Russell et al in “The Drive for Life on Wet and Icy Worlds”; Valley, who pushed the geophysics of a “cool early Earth”; Abramov and Mojzsis of late bombardment modeling such as here: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2009/pdf/2379.pdf ; …]
Your comment is right to the point. You say it takes 3.5 billion years to reduce biology to physics. Reducing parts of biology to purely physics is nonsense despite some is closer to physics or biology. Choose something to talk about – give an example in biology that is purely physics.
What is there in biology that does !*not*! depend on the interaction of matter and forces?
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Ant,
All things in biology are made up of physics and chemistry and many other things. You cannot find anything in biology that is made of only of physics or chemistry. Go ahead and find and tell me how this biology is explained without any evolution.
Now you’re asking a different question.
You asked Torbjörn for an example in biology that !*is*! purely physics, not what can be !*explained*! by only physics.
There is nothing in biology that is non-physical (per my question about matter and forces). However, pure physics !*explanations*! are computationally infeasible. But everything that happens in biology is fixed by physics. In particular, the second law of thermodynamics makes evolution inevitable. /Opera cit./
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“All things in biology are made up of physics and chemistry and many other things”
What do you mean by “made up of”? Do you mean ‘reducible to’? If so what are the “many other things”? Even if you don’t mean ‘reducible to’ I still don’t understand what you’re trying to say. If you mean that, in practice, emergent biological regularities aren’t necessarily explicable by physics then I’m not sure too many people would disagree with you on that(although this is WEIT – someone probably will). And if you don’t mean that what do you mean?
Dear Sorrell-Till,
Of course I am correct. No biological organism is purely physical or chemical, or related sciences. But many others talk about physics and chemistry as cute quotes to explain biology. That is the problem.
I’m sorry, you didn’t answer any of my questions so I still don’t know what you’re talking about. And as a result I’ve no idea whether you’re even making an intelligible point never mind a correct one.
Great article. I forget how much energy was involved with bombardment and planet wide hot spots (~10% unlivable) all acting as one very large and long lasting experiment to generate life.
Since the Bible is the ‘word of God’, then we know that the Biblical God is incompetent.
As evidence, I cite the two creation accounts in Genesis. Was Adam created before Eve or was she created from his rib? They cannot both be true and this is an example of godly incompetence.
Never mind all those astronomical errors, photosynthesis in the absence of the Sun and the Moon not being a ‘light’, the flat Earth, geocentric cosmos etc.
Which all means that God is a serial liar and serially incompetent too.
Well God certainly doesn’t do proofreading, which means that omnipotence is out too and his omniscience is looking awfully suspect.
The Bible has all the appearance of being a verbal tradition derived from scientifically ignorant peasants who were men, obsesses with sex and pathologically homophobic and their tales, incorporating older myths (such as that which was to become Noah’s ark & flood) was subject to change via a generational series of Chinese whispers over the millennia were ultimately written-down and then repeatedly edited, changed and added to. The resulting text, bearing only a vague resemblance to the original.
Naturally, any omniscient god would have foreseen this.
Finally, if an omniscient and omnipotent god can’t foresee the existence of atheists and work-out a way of convincing them/us, then that’s surely convincing evidence that god never did exist.
Now for some light relief:
The Book of Leviticus claims that bats are birds, and that locusts have four legs.
Aw…what the hell. I’m feeling generous.
I’ll give YHWH the locusts one on a technicality.
Locusts do indeed have four legs, in the same way that Baihu has three legs and I have one leg.
It’s just that, in addition to the four legs locusts have, they also have an additional pair, just as Baihu and I an additional single.
The statement that locusts have four legs is correct but incomplete. And, hey, the gods can’t be perfect, can they? Give ’em a break! They’ve only imaginary….
Cheers,
b&
” I cite the two creation accounts in Genesis. Was Adam created before Eve or was she created from his rib? They cannot both be true and this is an example of godly incompetence.”
On the contrary, they are proof of God and his omnicompetence. Only God could seem to do the exact same thing twice over in two different ways.
God is in fact a hyperintelligent pan-dimensional being whose protrusion into our dimension resembles, on occasion, a bearded white man sitting on a cloud. And on other occasions, mice. The two Creation events are simply the same event in multi-dimensional spacetime, observed from two different viewpoints in our three-dimensional space.
Jerry, if I recall correctly, you had a friendly difference of opinion with a commenter who felt that DNA evidence was the strongest evidence for evolution (if my recollection is incorrect, it’s not important). As a chemist (I’m biased), I’ve tended to hold that view as well. Other than the fact that I’m fond of molecules, the reason I find it to be so compelling is that even the means by which the evidence can be brought to bear on the edvolutionary hypotheses wasn’t imagined by the people (e.g., Darwin) who first offered them. That’s a particularly powerful and convincing way to get confirmation of a theory – sort of a pre-prediction.
I agree it’s stronger evidence for evolution than most people give it credit for.
Prior to Darwin, there was no reason to suspect that animals and plants (and other radically different organisms) shared any deep-down biochemical similarities at all. Special creation would certainly not predict that, it might best predict the opposite; that these organisms were built from different systems. The mere fact of a single heritability and developmental system shared amongst all life on earth is, IMO, pretty strong evidence of descent with modification.
Note that the strength of DNA reasoning is still relevant and true today. If we find some species on Mars with a radically different inheritance system, we will likely conclude it did not descend with modification from Earth life. OTOH if we find some DNA-based organism, we will likely suspect contamination. Why? Because use of the same inheritance system is such strong evidence for descent with modification.
Yes, that is powerful. More generally, it is the consilience of independent kinds of evidence that is most compelling.
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I am not sure who the commenter was, but I have held the opinion that the DNA evidence is numerically, staggeringly, overwhelming as an inference for evolution. That evidence argues for common ancestry of modern species in a way that is proportional to a time line. Related species are most similar in DNA, and less related species are a bit less similar in proportion, and so on. This is especially striking when one compares neutral DNA like pseudogenes and transposon insertions.
However, the strongest direct evidence for evolution (and I assume we mean macroevolution) is the fossil record. That, and that alone, is a record of the past.
Of course, a modest portion of the DNA evidence is direct because the DNA is prehistoric, albeit recent – as in Neanderthal DNA. Another biochemical example, about which my memory is hazier, was something I saw concerning amino acid sequencing of collagen from dinosaur bones. The DNA is translated, with concomitant loss of some information, but the evidence is also direct in the sense you’re discussing.
Strawberry: brilliant!
Trouble is, I’ll think of it whenever I eat strawberries now for a while, and they’re growing in my garden at the moment. It’ll spoil the pleasure a little! 🙂
The trick is to drown it in cream and sugar.
Just think of the pleasure you’ll get hulling them, though!
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A bit hard on strawberries though – what did they do to deserve the comparison?!
That’s what I was wondering – they’re a pleasure to consume and good for you. Neither is true of Ken Ham.
I recently reviewed the Moving Naturalism Forward discussions. On the last day Massimo talked about this, starting out by defining the terms “science” and “philosophy” for the purposes of his discussion. A discussion at least in part about how science and philosophy do, and or should, contribute to our understanding of our reality, and how they do, and or should, inform each other.
I thought his express exclusion of denying a meaning of the term “science” as you (and I) often define it in this and similar contexts as “science broadly construed . . . ” was to avoid precisely a major criticism of philosophy that is very legitimate, and absolutely topical to that discussion. That being, how do you evaluate which ideas in philosophy are worth placing confidence in?
Dan Dennett seems more sympathetic to the criticism that philosophy has issues with respecting the need for some, even minimal, empirically derived evidence before placing significant confidence in an idea being useful and or accurate. Dan has pointed this out to other philosophers himself in the past. Massimo seems less sympathetic which is surprising to me since he was, from what I understand, a practicing scientist earlier in his career.
IMO, in science we value models and theories on at least two criteria: objective accuracy and problem-solving utility. Objective accuracy may not be available as a criteria on which to judge philosophical claims and hypotheses, but we can still assess them in terms of how useful they may be for helping us solve problems or think through things. I think philosophical works on ethics and symbolic logic have been very useful to humans in general. To the extent that other philosophical studies are an excellent arena for training critical thinking (what are that idea’s premises? Is the idea valid? Is it sound? How can we tell soundness?), it is also useful.
I agree. Two important issues in philosophy are vetting for usefullness and vetting for objective accuracy. Or maybe more accurately, given the nature of philosophy, vetting for contradiction with objectively accurate models.
Objectively accurate models of reality are either directly or indirectly pertinent to much of philosophy. There is an enormous amount of philosophy that is bunk, even according to many philosophers. I don’t think it is controversial to claim that much of that is a result of ignoring or denying a need to check results against reality (in every day speak). I don’t mean to say that philosophy should not be allowed its warts, just saying, as Dan Dennett has said more than once, that this is something that philosophy could and should improve upon.
In a nutshell, I think Dan Dennett does philosophy proud, Jerry Fodor not so much.
Also, where’s the dividing line between science and science oriented philosophy? Take metaphysics – both (say) general ontology and automata theory are hypergeneral (families of) theories, used because of their fruitfulness in systematizing, etc.
Yes. I think it might be better to not worry too much where to put a dividing line in cases where it isn’t very obvious. In such cases a dividing line seems like it would be more likely to get in the way than to be of any use.
But how do you know that anything you do in philosophy is useful unless you’ve got objective criteria against to measure those results?
That’s the problem with philosophy. As soon as you close the empirical loop, you’re doing science (by whatever name). And if you don’t close it, then you’re flying blind.
b&
See above – how does one test the *general* theory of evolution, say. Not the specific one for the biosphere, but the stuff-neutral one? One adopts it because it systematizes others, etc.
I don’t know what non-biological theory of evolution you might be referring to.
Tiktaalik was a great test of evolution, one of many. The theory led us to expect we’d find it; we looked; and we found it. Similarly, the Standard Theory led us to expect we’d find the Higgs Boson; we looked; and we found it.
If that’s not good enough for you, I can’t imagine what is….
b&
Basically the argument that:
If there are heritable variations, competition for resources, and enough time, one gets evolution by natural selection.
This is stuff-independent and thus cannot be tested except (say) instance by instnce.
Or take physics: one cannot simply look for a consequence of the standard model; one has to make subsidirary assumptions. (Physicists can chime in on how these are used.)
Sorry, but I think you may be going off into some sort of Platonically idealized la-la land of philosophized science.
The law of gravity says that a pair of objects feel a mutual attraction according to their masses and distance from each other. How on Earth would you go about testing that other than by measuring the force (if any) between objects and correlating it with their masses and distances?
I’ve no idea what “stuff-independent” is supposed to mean. Everything that’s real is “stuff-dependent.” Take away the stuff, and there’s nothing left to exhibit whatever characteristics of stuff the stuff might have had..
The laws of physics, the Theory of Evolution…these aren’t things that exist in some sort of idealized sense, such that you can take away everything they apply to and you’re still left with the pure science. They’re descriptions of how the Universe tends to behave.
b&
Indeed. And SM has been tested to 5σ. (I’m not sure how easy it is to put such a precise confidence level on the modern synthesis.)
I’m not quite sure what these “subsidiary assumptions” might be, Keith. Can you give an example?
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For example, making something up for the moment, one might have an instrument that detects such and such by the change in electric potential it produces. So one needs to assume, say, basic laws of electricity and magnetism.
Or, one has to put in the observed masses of certain particles.
Or one makes “limiting case” assumptions.
As for “stuff independent”, think of the computability stuff we’ve talked about earlier – automata theory applies *regardless* of what the stuff is. That’s why it is so useful – and *one* reason why it is untestable. What would confirm or deny that some system fell into a certain class of automata? You can’t *measure* that, only model a system as being a member of a certain class and getting certain fruitful consequences. For example, if one picks “turing machine”, one can understand (say) why something is programmable.
I am never quite sure whether Ham truly believes the nonsense he spouts or whether it is just a comfortable living.
Watch the Ham-Nye debate, if you have yet to. I got the impression, as did many of my CFI-friends, that he’s sincere.
It always amuses me how we’re supposed to rely on an “unchanging god” for things like physical laws, but when it comes to all the awful things the Bible supports, like slavery, we’re told it was a sign of the times. Surely, if it’s the same god, his views on slavery haven’t changed.
People like Ham always do this language thing to try and make themselves right. It used to be just evolution that was a lie. Then there was some that could be observed, so we had micro evolution and macro evolution. Macro evolution is still a lie, and micro evolution is real. It’s the same with the creation of historical science and real science to account for a literalist perspective.
I’m a creationist; I believe man created god. (Not sure who came up with that one.)
You are suppose to ask – Why did g*d create man? Just returning the favor.
Good one! 🙂
Yep, good point. Unchanging God! NT = New Covenant! How…consistent.
So it is written, by the Gawd who cannot lie, right there in that same Buybull chapter that Ham references: you can’t trust those older parts of the Buybull:
(Titus 1:13) Wherefore rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith; Not giving heed to Jewish fables
Can you imagine if Ham were a judge? How would he evaluate evidence.
Lawyer: “We know the dependent is guilty, your honour because hewe have his DNA left at the scene, we have his footprints in the home and we have his finger prints on the gun.”
Judge Ham: “Nope, that’s histoical evidence so it doesn’t count! Case dismissed!”
I expanded on that point some years ago in a post titled “I
want AIG creationists on my jury!”
With Ham, any argument is dead before it starts. The guy believes evolution is a religion. In fact it is an Anti-g*d religion. So if any subject that happens to come up is some kind of religion there is no place to start. Anything on the planet or off, must conform to his religion, his believe, and his nonsense. There can be no conversation.
I don’t believe he could have a conversation with himself so why he tries with another human really makes no sense at all.
Are you saying that Kenny Baby believes it to be an anti-god religion?
Strawberry Man Ken Ham.
Besides what Jerry already said, I note that:
– Ham is inconsistent. A “random” universe wouldn’t be expected to have material bodies or other lawful characteristics of a “material/naturalistic” physics universe.
– Ham is ignorant. Our universe _is_ random (stochastic) on the largest scales, it was a stochastic process that seeded the universe with energy differences (cosmic filaments of dark and baryonic matter).
– Ham is ignoble. It is _a characteristic_ of laws to be consistent over time, that is why we chose to study them and call them “laws”, and Ham likely knows that.
More precisely, my absolute science hero, Emmy Noether (sorry, Jerry!) – who studied physics under the guise of mathematics in a time were women weren’t allowed science study* – found that symmetries gives rise to conservation (of charges). It is constraints of the so called action that makes field particles know how to behave in every volume, in other words be fields in the first place.
* Yes, organized science used to be ignorant and ignoble too. But science got better. What is Ham’s excuse?
What “Genesis” do Ham refer to, Gen 1 or Gen 2?
Again, Ham is inconsistent, the obvious fact that we can’t trust the religious text _because it says so_ is why some, like me, didn’t caught religion. Or possibly Ham is ignorant about his chose religious text.
“It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).”
Ham is likely part wicked (as this is his work) and part ignorant (because he has a B.ASc. in bullshit … errr, “sanitation”).
Not necessarily. In a universe that starts out chaotic and in which anything is possible, there is some probability of that chaos “tossing up” eternally or long-term fixed laws. Since that probability is non-zero (it must be, if the probability is zero then there is something in our ‘anything can happen’ universe that can’t happen), it will eventually happen. After it happens, the universe cannot return to its chaotic state.
So…a random universe would be expected to eventually produce lawful characteristic. In fact if it really is random, the odds of that happening eventually have to be near 100%. If the universe doesn’t ever achieve that state, then its original state wasn’t truly random.
There’s a difference between lawless and random/stochastic. The latter has objective patterns. For example, throwing a six sided die has a propensity-probability of 1/6 for each face (say). Lawless, by contrast, would suggest that there are no patterns at all; such a universe is unlivable and so by the anthropic principle cannot be where we are without ad hoc assumptions (e.g., appropriate miracles). Note that theists have a problem here, because miracles are lawless.
“… is inconsistent, … is ignorant, … is ignoble”
He does remind me of someone in love. His irrationality makes his love probably more believable.
‘And there’s one bit of unintended humor in Ham’s screed:
We can trust God’s Word because it was written by a God who never lies (Titus 1:2), and it’s confirmed by what we see in the world.
Here’s Titus 1:2 from the King James Bible: “In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began.”’
The other bit of unintended humour in Ham’s creed is that Titus is a forgery, a lie. (Ehrman: Forgery and Counterforgery…p. 94). An early Christian liar alleged that God cannot lie.
But for Ham it’s worse. He is about 1,700 years behind his fellow Christians. When the canon was being determined in the 4th century, it mattered to them that the NT documents were written by who they said they were written by. That’s why Corinthians 3 was thrown out: because the Christians said that they believed that Paul did not write it. Titus made it because they said that they believed that Paul wrote it. It turns out that they were wrong.
Allele akhbar. x
Good one. I forgot about Titus, though I read that in Ehrman.
If Ken wants to get philosophical then all science – all existence! – is historical and unprovable. If he can prove that the sun came up today then I’ll buy him breakfast.
This argument, which I see a lot, is ridiculous. We can figure out the trajectory of a bullet. That’s “historical science”. It’s based on an application of known principles to a past event. We can predict the trajectory of a bullet. That’s the application of the same principles to a future event. Same principles, same science.
Nye pointed out that there is a way in which *all* science is historical, since the speeds of all signals (e.g. light) are finite.
He can happily attack history since he knows full well that his precious Bible is fiction.
Ham may be a “strawberry” of the low-hanging variety, but his science-denying assertions make me want to blow a raspberry, of the genus “Bronx cheer.”
The next time Ham is a defendant in court, he should use that argument. Documentary evidence? Historical! Bank account statements? Historical! Eyewitness testimony (were you there?)? Historical! Video evidence? Historical!
And of course the “laws of the universe” are god’s word: e, G, the speed of light in a vacuum, the Perfect Gas Law, Π … it’s all there in the Bible, in the endnotes and whatnot. I think the Lord rounded up on Π to make the math easier or whatever, but still. Totally covered all that stuff.
More broadly, the entire notion of “forensics”, convicting someone of a crime on the basis of fingerprints, DNA traces, matching sweater threads, all depends on !*precisely*! the sort of reasoning used in evolutionary science.
Somewhere on YouTube is a video where either Ham or a follower of Ham burgles a house, and when confronted with obvious evidence against him, he keeps crying “Were you there??”
It appears that Ham’s museum will soon be historical. It’s gong broke. Although he’s creaming $150,000 off the top,.
http://www.skepticmoney.com/is-ken-hams-creation-museum-going-broke/
From a German perspective:
I am always amazed, how a clearly intelligent person as Ken Ham (hey, he makes a lot of dollars with the AiG stuff, so he must have some brain) spreads such nonsense. And additionally, there are other people, who agree to his ideas.
How embarassing for the human society.
Intelligence is not a requirement for making money. Sarah Palin is rich, for example.
Brain and intelligence does not always correlate. 😁
Quod erat demonstrandum.
“For of course many scientific contentions and hypotheses are “historical,” yet that makes them any less scientific.”
I think that should read “…yet that makes them NO less scientific”. (or “doesn’t make them any less scientific”).
“If Ham were right, geologists would be out of business too.”
Precisely. We would not have the understanding of plate tectonics, sedimentation history and paleontological correlation tools to find petroleum to fill the gasoline tank of Ham’s car, or to power the lights and dioramas in his “museum”.
Think about that, Mr. Ham. Fossil fuel that you and your devotees use every day is discovered using methods and procedures that the understanding of the evolutionary history of endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful has given geologists. Think about that when you press the gas pedal or switch on a light.
Geology is also party a historical science. The fact that the hypothesis testing that works so well in evolution also works in geology is well illustrated by our spectacular ability to find oil.
Oil forms in the distant past and is often very deeply buried under ground. How do we find oil? We can’t just poke holes everywhere we think we might have mud sitting on sand (and thus potentially sealing in oil). Instead we have to consider the whole inferred history of an area: We need organic-rich sediments that form under certain conditions to get buried to a certain range of depths for a certain interval of time, and to have certain overlying structures in place once the oil started migrating out of the organic-rich source rocks. Every successful oil well in a new oil field is a successful test of a host of hypotheses generated by geology as a historical science and a REAL science.
“The fact is that there is no distinction between historical science and real-time experimental science: both are based on observation, prediction, and testability. …
Ken Ham and Ray Comfort, by drawing a false distinction between “historical” and “observational” science, and implying that only the latter is “real science”, are simply confusing people—deliberately. They know better …”
Perhaps Ham and Comfort are confusedly conflating their falsely drawn distinction with the approach taken by the logical positivists of Popper’s and Hempel’s stripe ~80 years ago. The positivists preferred and focused on the objective “context of justification” (i.e., the process of gathering, testing, and validating empirical evidence to justify an existing theory) over what they perceived as the relatively subjective “context of discovery” (i.e., the historical-contextual process and sequence of events associated with a theory’s development).
One can render historical accounts/narratives of Darwin’s voyage on HMS Beagle, or of the Human Genome Project, etc. — but these accounts won’t diminish or devalue the reasonably settled certainty of the results achieved.
“We can trust God’s Word because it was written by a God who never lies (Titus 1:2), and it’s confirmed by what we see in the world.”
It’s not nature that lies, but the scientists who look at nature. Or something.
Oh my, there’s nothing left but a small smudge where poor Ken was standing… looks like he forgot the aphorism about tugging on Superman’s cape!
“After all, if you can’t trust God’s Word in the very beginning, then where do you stop doubting?”
As a wise man once said, “The question answers itself.”
I sometimes get the feeling that the emergence of life will be resolved in the coming decades (20 at most). The field of abiogenesis make lots of progress and parts of the process have already been reproduced in laboratories. I hope somebody can relieve me of my ignorance: Am I just wish thinking or are scientists close to discovering the origin of life?
20 years at most, not 20 decades. I hope (and think) the mystery of life will be resolved in my lifetime. (I’m 23).
Well, with medical advances…
/@
We’ve got firm-but-fuzzy outlines of it all already. See this thread for references to academic works that, for example, show that thermodynamics demands that something life-like must emerge in settings such as a terrestrial environment. We’ve got strong clues as to the nature of super-early organisms that might not get classified as alive if you found them in the environment today — and, with that, similarly strong clues about the chemistry in which those organisms developed.
It’s entirely possible there won’t be some sort of landmark discovery that settles the question of abiogenesis, but rather a continuation of peeling back layer after layer until, one day, somebody realizes that the question is effectively solved.
And, yes, this may well happen in the next quarter century.
b&
Thank you very much!
Ham and his ilk live in an “alternate reality” created by the desperate need to defend a spurious belief system: they can’t afford, as expressed quite eloquently in his, “Where do you stop doubting? question, to entertain ANY doubt as to the validity of that system, else it collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, falsehoods, and inconsistencies. It’s a sad testament to the power of belief.
“historical” science that can’t be observed, and hence can’t be verified
My favorite example (being a lawyer myself) is “Should we then release all murderers and rapists who were convicted on circumstantial evidence … such as DNA evidence … when there were no witnesses to the crime and/or the victims are unable to identify the perpetrator?” Near the beginning of my 40+ year career, the legal profession began to recognize that eyewitness testimony was massively inaccurate and the best evidence was circumstantial science-based evidence. Unfortunately, there have been a number of hoaxters who have pushed now discredited “science,” such as “bite mark analysis” or who have outright faked results.
On the other hand, dozens, if not hundreds, of people who have spent decades in prison, or have faced the death penalty, have been freed because of “historical science.” But many criminals have also been correctly convicted based on circumstantial evidence.
If “historical science” is good enough to condemn people to prison or even death “beyond a reasonable doubt, ” why, exactly, should it not be good enough to demonstrate the science of evolution?
Oh, right … evolution has been proved beyond any reasonable doubt … just not beyond any unreasonable doubt.
‘Not beyond unreasonable doubt.’ I like that, so I’m going to nick it.
Of course, the Bible Ham uses is historical itself, making it at least as unreliable as anything else.
OK< so Ham's argument for his god is that "And we can trust that these laws will work the same tomorrow as they did today." His argument against radiometric dating is that "maybe decay rates were faster in the past." And he sees no contraditction at all here.
Astonishing.
Ham’s arguments all raise a problem of time; at what point does science become “historical science”? Last year? The day before you were born? The invention of writing? The beginning of humankind (even though there is no static point that is the “beginning” of humankind)? When God feels like making the distinction?
“I know the Good Book’s good because the Good Book says it’s good.
I know the Good Book knows it’s good because a really good book would.”
Tim Minchin, The Good Book. :o)
(http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/t/tim_minchin/the_good_book.html)
“In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began.” — Titus 1:2
The problem with that is that in the second chapter of Genesis, God tells an outright lie to Adam in an attempt to keep him from eating the forbidden fruit:
“… but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” — Genesis 2:17
But as we all know, Adam called his bluff.