Thursday, May 23, 2013

Part Two- Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

(For Part One go here)

The 2013 tornado that struck Moore, Oklahoma was an EF5 tornado which yet again revealed the fearsome destructive power of nature.  Hearing the stories, seeing the devastation is heart wrenching enough from this distance, one wonders what it's like to be there. Such a swath of raw havoc wreaking energy leaves us agasp at the sight. Our prayers and condolences for the people of Moore.

Two sights were particularly hard to watch, one was an older gentleman sitting on his rocking chair staring somewhat blankly at a bleak horizon, no doubt where his home once stood and those of his neighbours. All that hard work, all those memories- all gone all gone in an instant.




The other picture that evoked such powerful emotions, indeed my wife had tears in her eyes- is the sight of two more older gentleman erecting a sorry, bedraggled Star spangled banner amidst the rubble of Moore. Their intention was brave, their purpose clear- this will not beat us, we are down but not out, we shall rebuild, like a Phoenix we shall rise from the ashes, this will be our place, our home once again, oh how they love America. Good on them.




The video that I am about to embed into this post is a similar story, it evokes powerful emotions in me as I hope it does in all who love freedom. It too is about a type of destruction and havoc but it is far less obvious, it is about the destruction of an ideal, or set of ideals, an abstract chaos taking place in a society that was the American dream.

It's about freedom- freedom of inquiry, freedom of speech, freedom from tyranny and discrimination.

That story is a story told by Ben Stein, he calls it Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

In his many interviews held in different parts of the world Ben Stein found a recurring story:
"Intelligent design was being suppressed in a systematic and ruthless fashion, but maybe intelligent design should be suppressed. I didn't like what was happening to these scientists but on the other hand we don't want our kids being taught that the earth was flat or that the Holocaust never happened. It was time to ask the scientific establishment what was so bad about intelligent design?"

In a page on the Website of the National Center for Science Education entitled the Creationism Controversy it says this:
'For more than two decades, the National Center for Science Education has been opposing efforts by creationists to weaken or block the teaching of evolution.'

Dr. Eugenie Scott of the NCSE  responded to Stein's question:
"If they have a way of understanding nature that's superior to the one that we all are making lots of discoveries using- Great, bring it on."  
What I found somewhat surprising in this otherwise excellent presentation was that in some ways this challenge of Dr. Scott was not taken up. For the scientist who goes into his laboratory with an evolutionary naturalist presupposition the problem of induction within the scientific method that has been known about by philosophers of science for several hundred years and more recently re-affirmed by, of all people, the atheist Bertrand Russell- has never been efficiently answered:
“Past observation cannot lay a rational foundation for future expectation” 
Bertrand Russell on the uniformity of nature. This is one of the Dirty Little Secrets of Scientism. The problem of the uniformity of nature and the inductive method is best explained by theism because while it doesn't remove the problem it does at least have strong explanatory power, whereas when philosophical naturalism is assumed there isn't even the slightest effort to overcome it. The question is studiously ignored and left begging. Is that good Science?

The following clip shows the first few minutes of documentary and the next one down is the full length movie.







On a website dedicated to the intelligent design community I found this comment with regard to the vilification of Guillermo Gonzales, the scientist who co-wrote "The Privileged Planet" and who featured in the documentary.:
"This last century is going to be remembered like the alchemists — they tried so desperately to turn lead into gold, but just weren't able to bring themselves to admit that chemistry lacked such power. Likewise, biologists cannot bring themselves to admit that materialistic evolution lacks such power of creation."
What needs to be remembered is that there is not only an emotional commitment to naturalism, but a lifetime of commitment to the science upheld by the philosophy of materialism. Reputations, livelihoods, huge investments of time and money are at stake here. Did we think the establishment were just going to lie there belly up? The upheavals in cosmology and molecular biology in this century have seen a convergence that is, pardon the pun, unparalleled. When the anthropic principle and the "fine tuning" argument as discussed in "The Privileged Planet" come together with the incredibly complex biology of a single cell, and you couple that with the knowledge that information theory has never found a single instance of true information that wasn't connected to an intelligence- DNA becomes yet another spiral, gripping nail in the coffin of philosophical naturalism.

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