Follow Me on Twitter!

  • is completely in the throes of the aphorism that a qualitative study's endpoint is hard to clamp down. 3 hrs ago
  • "needs to buy car tires; for the highlander rims" - sung to the melody of "aqualung" by jethro tull. 5 hrs ago
  • found that only about 2% of our students submitted possible plagiarized papers fall '08. wonder how that compares with national averages. 6 hrs ago
  • thinks after reading several books on secularization theory that the neo-atheist arguments are even less intelligible than before. 21 hrs ago
  • is enjoying playoff football. wishing he was in miami today - not for the game, for the sunshine. 1 day ago
  • More updates...

Recent Popular Posts

Recent Posts

Stuff You Might Find Here

Living Social Bookshelf

The Ooze Select Blogger

Scribe Member

Archives

Stuff Elsewhere

Info/Log In

Stats

FireStats icon Powered by FireStats

Evolution is Theory, Not Doctrine

Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 12:19 pm Posted in Blogs I Read, Science, Society, Theology

Interesting set of responses to a New York Times article by Jim, James, and others.  The article states, among other things:

As recently as three years ago, the guidelines that govern science education in more than a third of American public schools gave exceedingly short shrift to evolution, according to reviews by education experts. Some still do, science advocates contend. Just this summer, religious advocates lobbied successfully for a Louisiana law that protects the right of local schools to teach alternative theories for the origin of species, even though there are none that scientists recognize as valid. The Florida Legislature is expected to reopen debate on a similar bill this fall.

A Teacher on the Front Line as Faith and Science Clash

As Mr. David Campbell, who helped devise science teaching standards for the state of Florida, tell his students:

“Faith is not based on science,” Mr. Campbell said. “And science is not based on faith. I don’t expect you to ‘believe’ the scientific explanation of evolution that we’re going to talk about over the next few weeks.”

“But I do,” he added, “expect you to understand it.”

A Teacher on the Front Line as Faith and Science Clash

At Fellowship of Christian Athletes meeting one student says this which relates evolution to ethics:

“Evolution is telling you that you’re like an animal,” Bryce agreed. “That’s why people stand strong with Christianity, because it teaches people to lead a good life and not do wrong.”

A Teacher on the Front Line as Faith and Science Clash

Later, the same student responds with a very different kind of response than Mr. Campbell’s open invitation for students to explore the evidence as scientists and to make an argument based on that evidence.

The last question on the test Mr. Campbell passed out a week later asked students to explain two forms of evidence supporting evolutionary change and natural selection.

“I refuse to answer,” Bryce wrote. “I don’t believe in this.”

A Teacher on the Front Line as Faith and Science Clash

I think a major problem is that the nature of a scientific theory and the nature of doctrine that explains the nature of God and right living are confused.  In a scientific framework, using scientific methodology, intelligent design or its related notions of cosmology cannot be tested - at all.  Just because some will call ID an alternative “theory” does not mean that it is a theory at all since it is an amalgamation of unsupported hypotheses.  Evolution, on the other hand, forms a very powerful systematic set of mutually supported hypotheses based on several sources of countervailing evidence.

If I were to engage ID in a science class it would be to argue to my students why it is not a proper scientific theory.  It is simply unnecessary why we should present any notion of cosmology that requires a first cause in order to be true for the purposes of predicting how nature unfolds right now.  That a big bang, quantum fluctuation, primordial soup, etc. probably (and very highly probably) occurred and thus produced bacteria that lead to life as we know it is sufficient enough to do good science since a first cause cannot be determined by the evidence in a scientific manner.

Now some may no doubt raise the issue that ID and so forth are engineering concepts.  So be it.  The same problem applies.  To say that things are designed by people and apes who use sticks as tools in different ways thus engineering their environments does not require a first engineer if you will to make those various hypotheses valid.  It is a slippery slope to make that claim.

The point is that belief that God structures this reality is a claim of faith in the reality of God, and not because we have faith in science.  The fact is that evolution, as with all science, predicts events in reality with an astonishing rate of consistency.  That is why it is the theory.  Doctrine does not predict, it attempts to explain in order to shape human behavior and so, it is intimately involved with one’s own cultural semiotics and structures.  Doctrine evolves as do species and as do theories.  But this does not mean that a theory is a doctrine since it has predictive power external to the cultural structures that shape belief.  Einstein falsified Newton’s theories of gravitation.  But guess what, Newton’s theories still work - albeit in a limited way.

What seems to me to be the case is that people in general do not know exactly what science is and what it seeks to do.

UPDATE: Looney has corrected me below and the title of this post should be “Evolution is Fact, Not Doctrine”.

The discussion on GetReligion is a good one with numerous helpful comments on the NYT article.  The author of the article in GetReligion does not make a very good judgment by calling evolution an article of faith.

Viewing 15 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    I'm not going to defend ID as science, but I think you've misrepresented it in at least one important way. Your treatment of it as a doctrine and a mere article of faith gets it entirely wrong. It's an argument, and it's a quite longstanding argument in the history of philosophy, although that argument has taken many forms over the 2500 years that it's been offered by philosophers, going back at least to Xenophon and Plato. It's an abductive argument, in other words an inference to the best explanation (a kind of argument common in science, by the way, and in fact the kind of argument most commonly used to support evolution). The starting point for it is usually straight-out data from science, often something like the fact that so much in nature seems unlikely unless there's a designer but sometimes something very specific like the very narrow range of constants in physics that would allow for rational beings to exist. The inference to the best explanation then concludes that this really unlikely fact needs explanation, and the best explanation is a designer who made it that way for a reason. I just don't see how that can be in the same category as believing something from special revelation on faith. Even if the argument is not a strong one, and even if it's not science, it's still a philosophical argument and not much worse than many philosophical arguments that are controversial but still win significant support from serious philosophers (as the fine-tuning argument certainly does, and that's clearly ID).
    • ^
    • v
    Not sure you read the post right. I am not arguing that ID is an article of faith. It is, as you note, a philosophical assertion. That is why it should not be confused with scientific methodology which is a foundation for what we do in science classes and curricula. I am arguing that we ought not confuse evolution as theory with a doctrinal statement in theology. The methods that one uses and the objects that pertain, while in some cases we might have overlap, to the investigation are qualitatively different. I am arguing simply that any statement that describes evolution as a doctrine or as an ideology misunderstands what evolution is and why it is foundational in science.

    The other issue that a designer makes sense as the best explanation for the ordered structures of reality, I think, makes good sense on an intuitive level. But a closer examination of the structures of reality show that this intuition does not have a good concordance of evidence to support it. Quantum fields appear to be chaotic and rather disordered, it is not the most efficient for humans to be upright, there have been numerous mass-extinctions in the world before human beings existed, and so on. So there are equal reasons to assert that there is either no designer or a designer who designed something very flawed. These are other reasons why purporting the scientific nature of ID is wrong and the philosophical arguments when challenged with the various countervailing evidences become more pourous than ever before.
    • ^
    • v
    I forgot to respond on the chaos thing. It's a common argument against intelligent design that there are some things in nature that appear undesigned. But if we infer a designer from some things that appear designed, and other things appear undesigned, that doesn't undermine the design hypothesis. Either the designer didn't design everything, the designer had reasons to design things in a way that makes them appear undesigned, or something happened since the design went into effect to make some designed things appear undesigned. I don't see how any of that is evidence that there's no designer, though.
    • ^
    • v
    Right. It's not evidence that there is no designer in as much as there is not real evidence for a designer. It's an inference in the end based on what satisfies what Polkinghorne calls motivated beliefs. Things that appear not to have a design as such, however, force us to change how we render the inference in that case. For instance, I have heard the pre/post Fall argument.

    The issue here is what satisfies the conditions that are constitutive of something that is designed. There is an aesthetic there that I think we should not put off. That God created it "good" is, I think a stable ground to work that out. Not sure if that is part of Hart's work Beauty of the Infinite, but it seems to at least point that way.
    • ^
    • v
    OK, I think I misunderstood what you were saying.

    On the issue of how good ID arguments are, I think it depends entirely on the particular version. Some ID arguments are awful. It would be very bad to conclude from some appearances of design that there's a designer. In other cases, it's not so bad. The fine-tuning argument, for example, is an argument that the range of constants in physics is so narrow that very small variations would not allow rational life at all. Rational life is so important morally and existentially that it seems like a major coincidence that there would happen to be constants within that very unlikely range. The only way around that argument is to posit the existence of every possible set of constants, but there's no other evidence for such a huge number of universes, and it seems to count against Occam's Razor to postulate such a thing, just as it seems to count against it to posit a creator. In the end, if one of the two is required, and we have competing accounts of simplicity by which one or the other might count as a simpler explanation, then I think we have to conclude that the argument isn't all that bad (whereas the versions that deny evolution are going against a simpler explanation and thus fare much worse).
    • ^
    • v
    I think you are right. And I have no problem with making the philosophical assertion of a designer better. I think Avicenna's argument has got serious legs there - it's more robust than St. Thomas. But I think it should be good philosophy rather than bad science which then makes it bad philosophy if you get my meaning here!
    • ^
    • v
    Yes, the talk origins makes an attempt to explain beginning with "when non-biologists talk about biological evolution they often confuse two different aspects of the definition". Of course this is silly, since Darwin's only achievement was to bundle various ideas together and label them a single, scientific theory of evolution. According to the philosophy of science, a theory should not be multifarious, but deal with exactly one phenomenon at a time and the very first sentence acknowledges that evolution is multifarious. That was my original objection. By utilizing and verifying biological theory number 2,343,444, I have only verified theory number 2,343,444. The "theory of evolution" wasn't utilized and should get exactly zero credit. Or perhaps the points awarded for a correct answer by one student in class get awarded to the student who didn't show up for the test?
    • ^
    • v
    Whose philosophy of science? Again, "all living organisms present on earth today have arisen from earlier forms in the course of earth's long history" is a fact. There are numerous theories from paleontology, biology, genetics, etc. that substantiate this. It's still not "doctrine" and it's not an article of faith. Nor is it an ideological claim or something improbable. It is a scientific claim derived through scientific means - many different scientific means which only further substantiates tha claim that it is correct. I am just not sure you have much of a point here. So I shall refer to evolution as a fact from now on. Thanks.
    • ^
    • v
    Well, I guess I still find this puzzling. I read one of Dawkins books, but never found a point in the text where he referred to a theory of evolution that had any resemblance to the kind that I use daily: measurable quantities, fixed relations. It was all hand waving. My molecular biology books mention the theory of evolution, but if you go through them page by page you will find stuff from physical chemistry or math, but nothing directly or indirectly related to a theory of evolution.

    My kids A'ced California AP Biology, but they can't identify a tangible theory of evolution either. Could you tell me what the measurable quantities are and what the fixed relation is that has been in use since 1859 when it was first derived by Darwin?

    Some have claimed that the measurable quantity was "alleles", but these weren't discovered until almost a century after the scientific theory of evolution was established and there are innumerable relationships regarding how alleles change, so that any reference to them would result in hundreds of theories, all of which would be distinct from each other and from the "scientific theory of evolution" which existed at the time of the Scopes Trial.

    I haven't disagreed that theories have been verified, only that researchers have verified other theories and then falsely credited a non-existent "theory of evolution". Having worked with researchers for 30 years, I assure you that it takes very little peer pressure to get someone to do something unethical with regard to who gets the credit. Within a few days of my first job, I came across identical documents with completely different author lists. The copied document had UC Berkeley ph.d's for the authors, but the original (which was copied word for word) came from a consulting company.
    • ^
    • v
    This is sounding very semantic and not all that helpful. But in general we can define the theory of evolution as the following, "all living organisms present on earth today have arisen from earlier forms in the course of earth's long history". Surely there are different ways to substantiate this which spin off into other theories tied to different mechanisms. However, this definition exists as a fact in the scientific community. That's why the theory of evolution is so foundational.

    But to your point we could just call it a fact rather than a theory since that seems to be more accurate anyway. So evolution is a fact not a doctrine. Makes the point even more solid actually. Thanks.

    For more on this and where I got that definition, check here: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-fact....
    • ^
    • v
    Drew, let me explain differently, since I know how science R&D goes.

    If you poke around the labs at Berkeley, you will find researchers who have many completely different kinds of measurable quantities and innumerable equations that to relate them which are being tested, discarded, and new ones concocted every day. A biology department probably works with thousands of theories, and each theory is distinct and unique. If I have a success, I say something like "wow! look what theory number 5,232,383.3b succeeded in doing!" If a biologist has a success with theory number 2,485,902.27fq31, he says "wow! look what the theory of evolution succeeded in doing!". If there is credit to be given, why not just give it to the correct theory? Why credit a phantom theory which doesn't even exist?
    • ^
    • v
    Because it exists. It's not just one mathematical theorem that some mathemetician goes "aha!" with. That theorem need to then withstand scrutiny and external validity. Evoltuon, when tested continues to do it which is why it is so foundational.

    Evolution is a synthesis of theories that are related to countervailing sources of evidence. Genetic research continues to bear this out in terms of gene mutations. No you cannot observe transitions that occur over billions of years. You can observe the effects of those transitions with the geological and paleontological record among other sources. You know that scientists do not use the term theory lightly. Gravity is to physicists what evolution is to biologists. We cannot "see" gravity, but can mathematically compute its effects to a sickeningly accurate degree.

    The alternatives are that this is some conspiracy to get rid of God (which I have heard before) or that these so-called evolutionary biologists are plain incompetents and are not scientists at all. But this is a baseless assertion so best not to go there. Perhaps you want to tell Francis Collins or Kenneth Brown why this is not science. I am sure they would respond in kind and can actually produce the evidence that substantiates the various hypotheses that construct the theory of evolution. They are academics and so, you can probably locate their email addresses on the web.

    I again implore you to dig just a bit deeper here because you really seem to be ignoring the evidence which is the heart of not only doing bad science, but not doing science at all. If any other biologists can explain the obvious here, please feel free.

    You are building a very fragile strawman with this and continue to do so in spite of the obvious truth that aspects of evolution are facts and aspects are foundational theories.
    • ^
    • v
    You will not find a specification of evolutions measurable quantities and fixed relationship anywhere at UC Berkeley. Speculation is not evidence!
    • ^
    • v
    Again, being in high tech, all scientific theories must share two characteristics: 1) they must involve measurable quantities and 2) they must involve a fixed, relationship. Even quantum mechanics meets this, since it involves measurable statistics and fixed relationships on how those statistics transform. Evolution will never meet either of the requirements, hence it is not a 'scientific theory', nor will it ever become one.
    • ^
    • v
    Um. Measurable quantities and a fixed relationship.

    http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/articl...

    I can feed you some more as well. I suggest reading Finding Darwin's God by Ken Miller as well. Evolution would not be a theory unless it was based on the kind of evidence that you are saying it does not. You might also take a stroll through the Natural History Museums in DC or New York. You can actually see some of that evidence displayed! It's quite amazing.
 

Trackbacks

(Trackback URL)