The nature of naturalism

[Roger Stanyard]

Let me surprise everyone by leaping to Marc's defence. if I understand him correctly, he is enlisting his quotation in support of an interesting philosophical position, that goes by the name of occasionalism, and is particularly associated with the name of the 11 century Persian-Arabic philosopher al Ghazali. According to this, natural Law is the expression of the divine will, every incident of physical causation is the occasion for that will to manifest itself, and the problem of induction is solved by reference to the consistency of the divine will, which guarantees the consistency of natural law.

Needless to say, I don't believe a word of this (and I'm quite sure that Paul and Timothy, whom Marc quotes, had no inkling of such philosophical subtleties), but it is a coherent position that reconciles science and religion, and indeed could be said to ennoble science for the believer, since the laws of science are expressions of the divine will.

I'm not sure Marc is saying this at all because creationism is based on Biblical literalism. Miracles can only be invoked where and when the Bible says they occurred, otherwise the Bible is not being interpreted literally. As a consequence, the creationists have to resort to "scientific" arguments to fill in the "gaps". That itself is a rejection of divine will as an explanation of consistancy. The whole shooting match of creationism is as much a rejection of miracles as based on them.

As far as I can make out, the arguments of Adnan Oktar and his followers are far, far closer to the "philosophy" of occasionalism. It's why some of them accept the "Big Bang" and reject Intelligent Design.

I also assume that the rejection of ID by so many (most) creationists is, de facto, a rejection of occasionalism.

[Paul Braterman]

I am not disagreeing with Cathy in general, and completely share her opinion of Marc's views. I was making the very narrow point, which I maintain, that regarding God as the grounds of being (as in Marc's specific biblical quotation, although certainly not in Marc's overall position), and nature as subject to his will, is completely consistent with the pursuit of science.

I was not saying (and would not say) that what Marc and his associates pursue counts as science.

Interesting that Roger picked up on the connection between occasionalism and the Adnan Oktar (aka Harun Yahya) brand of creationism. Although Oktar and his cult cut and paste so indiscriminately from creationist writings that I'm not sure how significant this is. al Ghazali remains extremely influential in Islamic thought, although I think (and so does the much better informed Taner Edis in An Illusion of Harmony) that the common practice of blaming his philosophy for the decline in the science of the Moslem world is shallow, and does not fit the facts.

[Peter Henderson]

Roger wrote:

What the creationists are after has nothing to do with science; it's power and influence. Saving souls, preaching and getting members for their churches. They've twisted science to that end and will always do so.

Paul wrote

We certainly don't disagree, and nobody who has read the Wedge document could doubt the deeply political nature of the power behind at least the American creationist movement. However, it remains the case that in order to get creationism into US schools, an important step in the political process envisaged, it needs to be packaged as "science", and that this is a large part of the motivation for such packaging.

and in my opinion, this is a major problem for science.

Creationists like Marc see their creation science as real science. That somehow there is still a debate going on within science on things such as the age of the Earth/Universe, flood geology, and biological evolution itself. The followers of creationism read the crap that is continually churned out week after week by the Answers Research Journal and the Journal of Creation and see this as evidence of a young Earth, global flood, 6/24 hr. creation, and that biological evolution is false. The young and the scientifically illiterate wont have a clue as to why highly technical articles by highly qualified writers such as Snelling, Walker, Austin, Sarfati or Baumgardner for example are so wrong and nothing but absolute shite.

and lets cast our minds back to Dover for a moment. Dover was obviously a milestone in this so called battle. But what was the verdict about Dover all about ? Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but the Dover verdict showed that ID was religion, not science and that the US constitution prohibits the teaching of religion as science. Personally, I don't think that's good enough.

OK, so Judge Jones was persuaded by the evidence from Ken Miller and Barbara Forrest that ID was nothing more than YECism in disguise but YECs like Marc will say "what did Judge Jones know about science"?

and what will happen when some school or other manages to get YECism into the science class in the UK, or the nutters over here get it into the Giant's Causeway visitor's Centre or the Ulster Museum ? The UK has no written constitution so we can't fall back on that one. Neither have we the equivelent of the ACLU in the US (as I have said before) so I'm at a loss as to what will happen.

We should have regional groups all over the UK such as NI citizens for science but no one here seems interested in setting up such a group. Those involved in this over here should be people such as the Rev. Dr. Ron Elsdon, Dr. Shane McKee, or Brian McClinton. Not plebs such as myself who is qualified to HNC level in chemistry, who did his post primary education in a Secondary School ,albeit a very good one (I was borderline in my 11 plus i.e. I neither passed nor failed), and who worked as a chemist in power stations for 20 odd years. The people who should be organising this should be far more qualified and professional than I am.

No, in my opinion there's going to come a point when the actual scientific claims of creationism will have to shown why they are false. There's no point in continually relying on the courts to fight science's battles.

As someone once said, as in a football match, when you are constantly forced to keep defending your position eventually, the opposition is going to score a goal. That's what we should all be scared of.

[Michael]

Peter

Don't run yourself down,. You have a lot to offer and know your stuff and the issues involved. You also have a good Christian perspective. Your posting are accurate with only a few flaws, and few acheive that. Few can deal as well with a wide range of issues.

Playboy will luv this comment:)

[Roger Stanyard]

Creationists like Marc see their creation science as real science. That somehow there is still a debate going on within science on things such as the age of the Earth/Universe, flood geology, and biological evolution itself. The followers of creationism read the crap that is continually churned out week after week by the Answers Research Journal and the Journal of Creation and see this as evidence of a young Earth, global flood, 6/24 hr. creation, and that biological evolution is false. The young and the scientifically illiterate wont have a clue as to why highly technical articles by highly qualified writers such as Snelling, Walker, Austin, Sarfati or Baumgardner for example are so wrong and nothing but absolute shite.

A very pessimistic outlook, Peter! The Zeitgeist against creationism is growing and has been for the last six years. Everything they've ever touched they've screwed up on. As belief in religion continues to decline, they are preaching to a dying audience.

and lets cast our minds back to Dover for a moment. Dover was obviously a milestone in this so called battle. But what was the verdict about Dover all about ? Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but the Dover verdict showed that ID was religion, not science and that the US constitution prohibits the teaching of religion as science. Personally, I don't think that's good enough.

The turning point against creationism/ID wasn't Dover; it was the Kansas Kangaroo Court earlier in 2005. The media decided that the ID crowd were utterly dishonest.

OK, so Judge Jones was persuaded by the evidence from Ken Miller and Barbara Forrest that ID was nothing more than YECism in disguise but YECs like Marc will say "what did Judge Jones know about science"?

Let them; it shows them up as bigoted and stupid. It isn't the job of a judge to be an expert witness, ever. The defence supplied the expert witnesses for their case.

and what will happen when some school or other manages to get YECism into the science class in the UK, or the nutters over here get it into the Giant's Causeway visitor's Centre or the Ulster Museum ? The UK has no written constitution so we can't fall back on that one. Neither have we the equivelent of the ACLU in the US (as I have said before) so I'm at a loss as to what will happen.

We don't have a written constitution but we still have a constitution which gives us a pile of protection.

We should have regional groups all over the UK such as NI citizens for science but no one here seems interested in setting up such a group. Those involved in this over here should be people such as the Rev. Dr. Ron Elsdon, Dr. Shane McKee, or Brian McClinton. Not plebs such as myself who is qualified to HNC level in chemistry, who did his post primary education in a Secondary School ,albeit a very good one (I was borderline in my 11 plus i.e. I neither passed nor failed), and who worked as a chemist in power stations for 20 odd years. The people who should be organising this should be far more qualified and professional than I am.

I've long thought you are exactly the right person for such a group. You're an outstanding communicator who understands all the issues, including religion. and also have a diplomatic streak. The issue isn't qualifications, it's about organising and communicating.

No, in my opinion there's going to come a point when the actual scientific claims of creationism will have to shown why they are false. There's no point in continually relying on the courts to fight science's battles.

No need; the creationists are shit scared of the courts and shit scared of publicity. That's why they've given up totally on the former and have gone underground on the latter. Their on a very sticky wicket - every time they open their mouths they are ridiculed, endlessly.

The "stength" of creationist activity is in direct proportion to their ppolitical influence. The Republicans in the USA are increasingly loathed and are not going to recover as a viable political movemment for a generation. The creationists have been on a high in NI since 2007 (when the regional government with a strong DUP presence finally got going). But the DUP is still a minority movement and can't deliver what the creationists want.

[cathy]

I'm worried as well as you Peter. We may be able to legislate against what gets into the science classroom (and even that only seems to hold true in England as far as I can ascertain) but not against who is brought in to speak in CUs in either schools or universities unless it is racist or sexist or offensive in some way. Nor can we do anything about the creationist twaddle being fed to growing numbers of youngsters in church youth groups or to the kids that are taken out of the main services for child friendly activities. Teenagers in particular like to belong to something, are vulnerable and are susceptible to twaddle and love the idea of a good conspiracy theory. Once they get onto a high horse they can proselytise for England. Even better if you get the ones that haven't particularly shone at science and say well maybe the person giving you Ds was wrong.

The declining belief in religion is masking the fact that a significant number of those remaining are from creationist churches (which in my opinion is helping drive the others away). So there may be less church goers overall but those that are left will be extremists and creationists. Groups like AiG are also becoming increasingly aggressive in their marketing of the idea that only creationists are true believers making the large number of 'it doesn't matter what you believe as long as you
believe in god' churchgoers re-assess their postions and start accepting and pushing the creationist line. Like Marc and I suspect his church.

A lot of scientists are insensible to the threat, partly because they can't imagine how people could be that stupid, partly because they don't usually come across those sorts of people. I'm worried anyway. I'd never come across this madness before and now I seem to hear something new about it every day.

And I agree that Peter is doing a fantastic job. You all are.

[jon_12091]

We should have regional groups all over the UK such as NI citizens for science but no one here seems interested in setting up such a group. Those involved in this over here should be people such as the Rev. Dr. Ron Elsdon, Dr. Shane McKee, or Brian McClinton. Not plebs such as myself who is qualified to HNC level in chemistry, who did his post primary education in a Secondary School ,albeit a very good one (I was borderline in my 11 plus i.e. I neither passed nor failed), and who worked as a chemist in power stations for 20 odd years. The people who should be organising this should be far more qualified and professional than I am.

Unfortunately there are more reasons not to be interested in creationism than vice versa. As for 'qualified' I don't think anyone is truely qualified to handle creationism (you need to be some kind of genius polymath). In fact it requires a certain amount of bravery to expose ones mind to their output in order to catalogue it.

No, in my opinion there's going to come a point when the actual scientific claims of creationism will have to shown why they are false. There's no point in continually relying on the courts to fight science's battles.

We've shown creationist claims to false repeatedly, but they keep coming back, its not so much the claims rather the peple who peddle them. As for Dover the issue came to court because thats the game the creationists chose to play and they got burnt. They broke their own cardinel rule of not exposing their claims in a forum where they came be shown to be manifestly wrong.

As someone once said, as in a football match, when you are constantly forced to keep defending your position eventually, the opposition is going to score a goal. That's what we should all be scared of.

To borrow your football anology I don't see the BCSE as so much playing the game, rather we try keep track of the game for the side thats actually playing by the rules! Most scientists and educationalists simply don't understand how creationists work. I happen to think we enjoy a rather healthy scoreline ...

As for the future - Steven Chalk stood up last year and said he believes the Creation story to be allagorical, Vardy has put some (legally) clear blue water between himself and 'creationism', AiG may well be pushing their line hard (becasue it feels it loosing ground), but I don't see much of their theology selling well this side of the Atlantic, and C4ID is a spectacular own goal, which will probably turn its toes up immediately the money runs out. Intellectually the movement is pretty bankrupt beyond the "professional creationists". The inanity and banality of the grass roots as illustrated by the forum on creationcoversations, the usual suspects on premier, etc ad nauseum

Creationism may score the odd goal but they usually cap it with the intellectual equivalent of running face first into the goal post...

[Roger Stanyard]

Creationism may score the odd goal but they usually cap it with the intellectual equivalent of running face first into the goal post...

Me suspects that the creationists are about to run headlong into a brick wall ith the Ark Encounter. It's a huge risk for them.

Nobody knows what the business plan is.

What little has bee released suggests it is deeply flawed.

AiG is gambling itself, financially, on the escapade.

AiG is, in essence, an autocratically run fiefdom of Big Ken which makes it unstable.

The American these park market is overcrowded and ruthlessly run and his competition isn't going to sit idly by.

Only $800k has been raised to finance the project.

[marcsurtees]

Roger asks, "So why have the courts been told otherwise?"

Because for legal reasons, creationists in the US have to deny that they are religiously motivated, which means that they have to present their alternative version of reality as "science". We should praise Marc for not stooping to such depths.

The issue still remains as to how we went from whatever species there are alleged to have been 6,000 years ago to the species we observe today (and in the fossil record). What is the scientific explanation and who can it be tested by the scientific method?

More precisely what are kinds, how to we observe kinds resulting in species today, what processes are involved, what evidence is there in the archeological record,how consistent is it with genetics, how did species move from being herbivors to carnivors over the space of 1,600 years, how consistent is this with symbiotic relationships...

These are kinds of question that some creation scientists are asking and trying to answer by applying the scientific method. (see for example http://www.creationbiology.org/).
We suspect that most of these questions can be answered scientifically because they would be part of the normal processes (that God maintains to keep the universe functional).
The problem we have is getting the grant money to do this kind of research because of our presuppositions are the wrong ones! Most of the work is being done in the USA as they can tap into other sources of income.

[marcsurtees]

Let me surprise everyone by leaping to Marc's defence. if I understand him correctly, he is enlisting his quotation in support of an interesting philosophical position, that goes by the name of occasionalism, and is particularly associated with the name of the 11 century Persian-Arabic philosopher al Ghazali. According to this, natural Law is the expression of the divine will, every incident of physical causation is the occasion for that will to manifest itself, and the problem of induction is solved by reference to the consistency of the divine will, which guarantees the consistency of natural law.

I have just finished wading through all the posts that followed mine, and I can confirm that I broadly agree with the above quote.

My definition of miracles is something along the lines of the following:
Events that are not consistent with what usually happens and cannot be explained except as acts of God.
Non-repeatability is probably not part of the definition as some miracles were repeated a number of times, raising the dead, healing various diseases.

It may be theoretically possible to explain a miracle scientifically if we could observe it, but I am not sure. For example turning water into wine. As energy and matter are interchangeable we could describe a series of modifications that turn tap water into Chateau Petrus. But we would be at a loss to explain the mechanism.

So the act of creation of the universe and life would be miracles.

[Paul Braterman]

These are kinds of question that some creation scientists are asking and trying to answer by applying the scientific method. (see for example http://www.creationbiology.org/).
We suspect that most of these questions can be answered scientifically because they would be part of the normal processes (that God maintains to keep the universe functional).
The problem we have is getting the grant money to do this kind of research because of our presuppositions are the wrong ones! Most of the work is being done in the USA as they can tap into other sources of income.

Here is a specimen of the research carried out as Creation Biology. I think it will be clear to anyone who has ever attempted to obtain research funding why they are unsuccessful:

"A Quick Method for Developing a Cognitum System Exemplifed Using Flowering Plants, Roger W. Sanders, Occas. Papers of the BSG No. 16, pp. 1-63, ©2010 BSG.

Abstract: The cognitum, a gestalt-level taxon recognized through human cognitive powers, is a recently introduced taxonomic concept. To apply this concept, a cognitum system of flowering plants is proposed. Human cognitive data were obtained by compiling and comparing the intuitive classifications by five prominent modern but pre-cladistic, pre-molecular authorities. Core group taxa of a cognitum were taken as those in the intersection of the five classifications for that traditional taxonomic group. Those taxa outside the intersection but in the union were assigned to a cognitum’s fuzzy boundary, often linking it reticulately to one or more other cognita. More inclusive secondary cognita were formed by majority rule into a partial hierarchy. At the class level, two cognita (monocots and dicots, respectively) were recognized. At the family/order level, 63 cognita were recognized, and at the subfamily/family level, 72 cognita were recognized. The family/order level cognita grouped into 16 secondary cognita, two of which were at the subclass/class level. The family/order level cognita are linked by 264 boundary groups (plus three boundary groups between monocots and dicots). The cognita, while reflecting traditional taxonomic groups, are not equivalent to them or to baramins but rather highlight the mosaic nature of those groups."

The last statement, if it means anything (and I'll avert my eyes from the baramins, out of decency), claims that the traditional taxonomic groups are mosaics of something more fundamental, namely the way pre-cladistic authorities classified plants on the basis of what things look like. Wonderful thing, the cognitum. Silly old cladistics!

[Paul Braterman]

As energy and matter are interchangeable we could describe a series of modifications that turn tap water into Chateau Petrus.

NO! The whole point of my post on this subject was to spell out that as a result of differences in nuclear binding energy, it is not possible to convert water to wine without inputting enormous amounts of energy, other than by violating at least one of the conservation laws that seem to be universally true; the law of conservation of baryon (in this context, proton + neutron) number, and the law of conservation of mass/energy.

So the miracle at Cana wold involve an active violation of natural laws, rather than just the superposition on their normal operation of a divinely guided process.

[Roger Stanyard]

My definition of miracles is something along the lines of the following:
Events that are not consistent with what usually happens and cannot be explained except as acts of God.

That's not consistent with what you have said in the past; you've told us that anything that disagrees with you version of Biblical interpretation must be wrong; therefore miracles must be accepted solely because the Bible says they happened even if other interpretations exist.

[Brian Jordan]

Here is a specimen of the research carried out as Creation Biology. I think it will be clear to anyone who has ever attempted to obtain research funding why they are unsuccessful:

"A Quick Method for Developing a Cognitum System Exemplifed Using Flowering Plants, Roger W. Sanders, Occas. Papers of the BSG No. 16, pp. 1-63, ©2010 BSG.

Are you sure about that reference Paul? I could have sworn the author was Alan Sokal.

[cathy]

Marc wrote The problem we have is getting the grant money to do this kind of research because of our presuppositions are the wrong ones! Most of the work is being done in the USA as they can tap into other sources of income.

J K Rowling wrote Harry Potter in a local cafe when she was a single parent on benefits, proving you don't need a lot of money to write fiction Marc!!! Though she did have sufficient talent to make her writing believable. When are you actually going to realise that there is no such thing as creation science. You yourself have said everything has to agree with the bible. However if you really do need to pretend you are doing something scientific, why not suggest TiS stops wasting money publishing crap books nobody wants or tap Ken for some of his disposable income. Theres plenty of money sloshing about in the old creationist game and load of gullible folk being conned to cough up cash. So why haven't they managed to come up with anything yet! Nothing at all!!! Nothing to even shake evolution let alone replace it with creationism.

Why do you keep kidding yourself. Most people have the capacity to change their views in the light of new info.