As a semi-related extension of yesterday’s rant, here’s some more evidence that science does have some idea what it’s talking about. If it didn’t, none of this would work.
It’ll be interesting to see how humanity adapts to much longer lives. So long as life expectancy climbs slowly, I think we can handle it without things getting too “interesting.”
(Thanks, Ploni)
Rome built bridges and sewers very well, that didn’t mean Aristotle’s more speculative theories, like the eternity of matter which even science finally in the last 80 years no longer agrees on (though it was taught in public schools as recently as the 1960s regularly), were right, did it?
This doesn’t prove that today’s science is right about everything because there are some, mostly unrelated, successes in the practical realm. If anything the real changes in scientific theories should teach us, is that science’s take on anything that’s in the realm of speculation rather than solid fact, and even in the realm of fact, is subject to change.
I should add that I’m not in favor of mixing religion in public schools however, and that I don’t share the agenda of xtian fundamentalists as they don’t even share my cosmology. (In Judaism, things like the Midrash and Talmud, other works of our sages, and various commentaries play a bigger role in this and other things rather than King James et. al.’s take on scripture taken “literally”).
I also believe a lot in the separation of church and state, so really my disagreements with Aristotle, Darwin, or anyone else in the scientific community, usually belong to the private sphere and not the public – at least as far as people who are not my co-religionists are concerned.
Matter is eternal… until you convert it to energy, a process that was impossible until the twentieth century. So that idea was correct, but was shown to be incomplete when new evidence was discovered. It’s still correct, but it carries a caveat now.
Likewise, most of today’s physics is provably correct… until you reach densities that are presently only found in singularities (a.k.a. black holes). If — or more likely, when — we find a way to measure what’s going on beyond a black hole’s event horizon, the laws of physics will get caveats too.
For anything that science can address (which is not everything), its theories are provably correct, in that they explain all the known evidence. If a theory doesn’t explain the evidence, it isn’t accepted; if new evidence breaks it, it gets modified to account for the new evidence, or replaced by something else that explains it all. The “something else” will inevitably look very similar to the earlier theory, because it has to explain the exact same evidence.
In the realm of evolution, we’ve got fossil evidence showing very conclusively that species change over time, in small increments that eventually lead to individuals that look and act nothing like their distant ancestors. We’ve also got the living world, which has shown very conclusively that such changes are still taking place, and we’ve got several such “cousin” species to humans — the great apes and their relatives. You can see a clear lineage from many of today’s species to a common ancestor species. Do you insist that humans have no such common ancestors with other primates? If so, what evidence do you have that trumps that of everyone else?
(And the assertions of your own distant ancestors aren’t acceptable evidence, because it has been shown that stories inevitably grow and get embroidered in the telling. Your holy book has a longer written history than most, and a system to ensure that it doesn’t change over time, but the events of the first part of Genesis definitely weren’t written down as they occurred.)
Unfortunately, your disagreements with science — public or private — still provide fuel to the people who would destroy it, and all that it has accomplished to date. If you mention them to a single other person with similar ideas, that person can claim that he’s not alone in his beliefs, and it can and does spread. You’ve seen where it’s headed: the Bush ban on stem cell research was the barest beginning of what the most vocal anti-science agitators want.
The anti-science crowd claims that everyone who’s not publicly against them supports them, and uses that to ram through laws to promote their ideas of how the world should work — which inevitably has them on top, for some reason. Deny them that support, or they will deny progress to everyone.
I don’t mention them frequently to xtian fundamentalists and the other types who don’t believe in first amendment protections, as they have a nasty habit of pleading and whining at me to become an apostate to my religion, which is quite annoying. 🙂 So don’t worry, I’m not giving the xtian fundamentalists “aid and comfort” in believing that what was revealed to us is the case.
You’ve already mentioned your opinions here, a number of times, and the Internet is as easily searchable by Christian fundamentalists as by anyone else. But even if you had never said anything at all, those same fundamentalists will claim that your silence means that you support them. To them, if you’re not against them, then you’re with them, and they’ll use that assumed support in any way they can.
“If you’re not for us, you’re against us”. Didn’t George W. Bush say that? 😉 Seriously, I’m not going to change my opinion merely because it either pleases or displeases either you or the xtians. I have more integrity than that.
It wouldn’t surprise me if he did, he’s got the same mentality.
I’m not asking you to change your opinion, for me or anyone else. I’m asking you to study the evidence and come up with your own opinion, rather than blindly relying on someone else’s. No matter how smart or revered a person is, or how good his intentions, he can be wrong. Even if he doesn’t lie, which isn’t a very good bet when discussing a human being.
BTW, I was referring to Aristotle’s theory that our universe was eternal because matter is eternal. Something that the Big Bang theory disagrees with, which was discovered IIRC in the late 1930s, and didn’t gain complete scientific acceptance until the microwave background radiation was discovered in the 1960s. (Coincidentally, by Arno Penzias, the first Orthodox Jewish Nobel prize winner. 🙂 )
I also am looking forward to living a longer life, how else will I be able to stick around to annoy you otherwise? 😉
Then I suggest that you study the evidence for and against evolution yourself, with a mind open to the possibility that it’s correct, and make up your own mind, rather than relying on the opinions of other people who haven’t studied it either, or only studied it with the intention of justifying their preconceived notions. If you still can’t accept it after doing so, you can provide your counter-evidence and try to convince others.
I have only two books (out of hundreds of holy books, though some of the references are contained in those books) in my library on the subject of the Jewish approach to this subject. They seem fairly well thought out to me, and scholarly. I also have taken college-level Biology and took it, like you, all through most of the rest of my education, so I’m familiar with the basic theory and more.
You (and the scientific community) are probably not interested in the perspective that the Oral and Written Torah are correct, however, and that’s OK with me, as long as you don’t insist that Orthodox Jewish children be taught otherwise in a non-public school setting.
(Most OJ children don’t go to public school nowadays anyway, since a thorough education that goes beyond one day a week’s worth is necessary for Jewish literacy and ability to learn the Talmud in the original languages, obey Jewish law and so on.
Also, our Rabbinic organizations have nearly always sided with separation of church and state when they sign “friends of the court” briefs concerning religious education in public schools, school prayer and other expressions of church-state interference, so we as a community don’t pose a threat to any scientific theories being taught in schools, as we view xtian indoctrination of Jewish children to be a greater threat than them encountering a scientific theory if they happen to not be studying in a yeshiva setting and are instead in a public school.)
The odds that your textbooks were up-to-date when you used them are nil, and as I happen to know when you took those biology courses, I have to point out that a lot more has happened in evolution science since then as well. Things that were only postulated, like the reason for humans having only 23 chromosomes instead of the 24 of apes, have been explained and evidence found to strongly support that explanation. More fossil evidence has been uncovered. Human and non-human genomes have been sequenced and very strong similarities found between them. Between those and other general advances, there was enough evidence in favor of it in 2005 to persuade even a conservative Republican judge appointed by Bush Jr.
The arguments against evolution rest on three legs: the “common sense” argument (which is often, as in this case, neither common nor sensible), irreducible complexity, and “complex specified information.” The first is pure human arrogance, the latter two are addressed here. Please read the page before dismissing its contents.
I doubt you’re a harder case than judge Jones was. When he had to sit down and actually evaluate the evidence for and against evolution, he had to agree that it made more sense than creationism in any of its guises. I’m certain you would too, but I know you and I know how your subconscious thought process goes: if the religious leaders you so look up to could be wrong about evolution, they could be wrong about other parts of your faith, so you’ll never allow yourself to even look at anything that might possibly allow you to doubt them.
There’s explanations in the Midrash for the similarity between apes and men, some of that happened during the dor haflaga rather than at creation.
/me reads the article
The article doesn’t seem that convincing to me, he brushes under the rug lots of examples of IC with the claim that they have smaller components. Sure, and watches are made of atoms, that doesn’t mean the watch isn’t made by an intelligent designer, simply because the atoms at a lower level are less apparently designed. 🙂 He completely ignores also the whole point of irreducible complexity, that without all the parts working, the whole thing has no purpose and would result in the destruction of the organism.
That’s true of a watch, but so far as I’ve been able to tell, every biological example anyone has seriously proposed has been explained. The most famous one, bacterial flagellum, he explicitly points out — if you want to see hypotheses that explain it in layman’s terms, as well as anyone without a time-machine can, look here. (Or do a Google search yourself; as I said, it’s famous.)
Even better, read the entire series. Especially the page titled “It doesn’t matter if people do not understand evolution“. In my opinion, that page doesn’t go nearly far enough in explaining the perils of an anti-science government, but it’s a start.
I’ve already said numerous times I’m against an “anti-science” government, simply because I think part and parcel of such a government would be a lack of separation of church and state – which has benefited my community as well as many other communities in America. (If not most Americans.) Incidentally, if Huckabee hadn’t become a doctrinaire Republican, I wouldn’t necessarily view him with alarm. He used to be economically liberal and socially conservative, as he was during his first primary campaign. If he had been willing to continue to not toe the party line on economic “conservativism” (really economic irresponsibility, considering the budget deficit and the reasons for it being the case) I’d probably support him. Instead he became another Fox News talking head, which I guess means he’s just a typical politician after all.
He’s just one of the many potential dangers. Most of whom, for some unknown reason (ahem), eventually show up either in politics, on Fox and Friends, or both.