In my last post, I asked why the author of Search Judaism had devoted so much effort to debunking evolution. This isn’t his personal crusade: delegitimizing and ridiculing evolution is common in the frum world, and attempting to disprove it is a Creationist obsession. Last night I came across a short lecture by Daniel Dennet that helped me understand why.
He made the point that absent an alternative, it seems foolish to assert that something that shows every sign of being carefully planned and designed in fact arose by itself. We live in a world with a coherent explanation of how that can happen, so to us it seems obvious that even if evolution were to turn out to be the wrong explanation, we would find a different, naturalistic explanation for the appearance of design in nature. In a world that had never had such an explanation presented, accepting the Watchmaker Argument seems the more rational position.
The universe appears designed. We must account for that. It makes more sense to say it was designed then to say that design arose accidentally, by itself. Sure, there are problems with the Watchmaker Argument, but most people aren’t interested in philosophy and don’t know about them. Even for those that do, it still may seem more reasonable to assume some guiding force designed the universe. In the absence of any alternatives, that force was assumed to be some sort of deity.
What the theory of evolution does is posit a guiding force that is wholly materialistic, mechanistic, and devoid of intelligence or intent.
The debunking of evolution, then, is never intended to “prove” God’s existence. It is instead meant to remove evolution as a viable alternative. If evolution is not the cause of the appearance of design in the universe, then that design must be accounted for. There must be some force that caused that design. In the absence of any alternatives, that force is assumed to be some sort of deity.
That there is still no evidence for God’s existence is beside the point. The point is that there must be some guiding force, and we intuitively assume that such a force must be intelligent. Intelligent force designing the universe = God. To the theist making the argument, the alternative seems to be that it all just happened randomly, which is clearly ridiculous. The argument that there might be some other, wholly physical force at work which accounts for the design we see seems to be just a placeholder. In his mind, the atheist is saying, “I have no idea why the universe seems designed, but I refuse to believe in God, so I’m just going to say that somehow it happened.”
[An interesting thing about framing the argument as a debate over what the force that produced design in the universe is is that it sets up evolution as a direct rival to God, which may be one reason why the religious see it as so threatening.]
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I came across the following paragraph in The Evolution of God by Robert Wright, and I think sums up nicely what I was getting at in this post:
Darwinians who are atheists have been known to celebrate the failure of Paley’s explanation. They love to note how futile this attempt to empirically argue for the existence of God turned out to be. What they tend not to emphasize is that Paley was half right. The complex functionality of an organism does demand a special kind of explanation. It seems clear that hearts are here in some sense in order to pump blood, that digestive systems are here in order to digest food, that brains are here in order to (among other things) help organisms find food to digest. Rocks, in contrast, don’t seem to be here in order to do anything. The kinds of forces that created a rock just don’t seem likely to be the kinds of forced that would create an organism. It takes a special kind of force to do that – a force like natural selection.
Showing posts with label evolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label evolution. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Monday, April 26, 2010
Search Judaism – A Critique: Chapter Four, section four I
I’ve finally gotten around to continuing my critique of Search Judaism. I find that I’m only able to handle small doses of the misrepresentations and faulty reasoning before it goes from entertaining to frustrating, so I’m breaking up the current section into smaller parts.
Evolution (Chapter Four, section four)
The author begins by saying, “The theory of evolution is based on several assumptions.” He promises to objectively evaluate these assumptions and to see if the theory is based on science. So far so good.
Once again, though, one has to wonder why he is putting so much effort into “debunking” evolution. Evolution merely describes how biodiversity developed. It says nothing about the existence or non-existence of God. And, also again, if evolution were proven to be incorrect, all that means is that we would have to answer, “We don’t know” to the question, “How did biodiversity develop?” “We don’t know” does not equal “God did it.” The “God did it” hypothesis would need positive evidence in its favor to be accepted, not merely the refutation of other explanations. The implicit assumption seems to be that God is the default explanation, from which we deviate only when we have other theories.
Assumption 1
The author says that Darwinian evolution claims life evolved slowly, a step at a time, and asks if this is true. He cites the Burgess Shale, a large collection of fossils in the Canadian Rockies discovered by Charles Walcott that date back to the Cambrian period and one of the few to preserve impressions of the soft parts of specimens.
The author claims that Walcott was dismayed to discover, “that all these species were simultaneously present. In other words, there was no evolution over time. This posed a real problem for evolutionists because these fossils contained representatives from every phylum except just one of the phyla that exist today. No new phyla ever evolved after the Cambrian explosion.”
To begin with, while “phylum” sounds all sciencey, it’s actually an ill-defined term and according to Wikipedia, “…"phylum" may be a misnomer indicative of ignorance. Consequently the number of phyla varies from one author to the next.” So the claim that, “No new phyla ever evolved after the Cambrian explosion,” may be a matter of interpretation.
The author then claims that Walcott hid the specimens he collected in the Smithsonian’s archives, implying that he wanted to keep them out of sight so as not to challenge evolution, and that they weren’t “rediscovered” until 1985. Yet Walcott himself published detailed descriptions of his findings in 1908, hardly the action of a man concerned about keeping his discovery from the world, and there were digs at the site every few decades by various scientists to collect new specimens, including ongoing work from the mid-60s through the mid-80s. While Walcott’s specimens may have been “rediscovered” in 1985 as the author claims (I didn't find any information one way or the other), they clearly weren’t hidden away as part of a cover-up and many thousands of specimens from the Burgess Shale were definitely available to scientists in the intervening years.
Furthermroe, this wasn’t the stunning unexpected blow to evolution that the author makes it out to be. Darwin actually devoted an entire chapter of The Origin of Species to the sudden appearance of animal groups with few or no similar ancestors.
The author cites Stephen Jay Gould’s book on the Shale as claiming that scientists were wrong about Darwinian evolution, and that life did not evolve slowly, bit by bit, but that “diverse species emerged and evolved simultaneously.” The author here gives the false impression that the Shale thus proves that biological evolution is false. What he neglects to point out is that:
1) Stephen Jay Gould was a proponent of punctuated equilibrium, the theory that species remain more or less stable for long periods, then undergo sudden, rapid evolution in response to sudden changes in the environment.
2) Even if punctuated equilibrium rather than traditional Darwinian evolution is the more common form evolution takes, it is still the evolution of one species from another, not creationism ex nihlo by an omnipotent God.
3) There are various explanations proposed by scientists for why many of the animals preserved in the Burgess Shale appear without antecedents. Walcott proposed that the period in which the Cambrian animals found in the Shale evolved did not lend itself to fossilization and so the animals from that period are absent from the fossil record. Less speculatively, there are scientists who argue that many of the forms found in the Cambrian period are similar to types that evolved well before then, and there is debate as to whether the Cambrian period really represents an “explosion” of species.
Evolution (Chapter Four, section four)
The author begins by saying, “The theory of evolution is based on several assumptions.” He promises to objectively evaluate these assumptions and to see if the theory is based on science. So far so good.
Once again, though, one has to wonder why he is putting so much effort into “debunking” evolution. Evolution merely describes how biodiversity developed. It says nothing about the existence or non-existence of God. And, also again, if evolution were proven to be incorrect, all that means is that we would have to answer, “We don’t know” to the question, “How did biodiversity develop?” “We don’t know” does not equal “God did it.” The “God did it” hypothesis would need positive evidence in its favor to be accepted, not merely the refutation of other explanations. The implicit assumption seems to be that God is the default explanation, from which we deviate only when we have other theories.
Assumption 1
The author says that Darwinian evolution claims life evolved slowly, a step at a time, and asks if this is true. He cites the Burgess Shale, a large collection of fossils in the Canadian Rockies discovered by Charles Walcott that date back to the Cambrian period and one of the few to preserve impressions of the soft parts of specimens.
The author claims that Walcott was dismayed to discover, “that all these species were simultaneously present. In other words, there was no evolution over time. This posed a real problem for evolutionists because these fossils contained representatives from every phylum except just one of the phyla that exist today. No new phyla ever evolved after the Cambrian explosion.”
To begin with, while “phylum” sounds all sciencey, it’s actually an ill-defined term and according to Wikipedia, “…"phylum" may be a misnomer indicative of ignorance. Consequently the number of phyla varies from one author to the next.” So the claim that, “No new phyla ever evolved after the Cambrian explosion,” may be a matter of interpretation.
The author then claims that Walcott hid the specimens he collected in the Smithsonian’s archives, implying that he wanted to keep them out of sight so as not to challenge evolution, and that they weren’t “rediscovered” until 1985. Yet Walcott himself published detailed descriptions of his findings in 1908, hardly the action of a man concerned about keeping his discovery from the world, and there were digs at the site every few decades by various scientists to collect new specimens, including ongoing work from the mid-60s through the mid-80s. While Walcott’s specimens may have been “rediscovered” in 1985 as the author claims (I didn't find any information one way or the other), they clearly weren’t hidden away as part of a cover-up and many thousands of specimens from the Burgess Shale were definitely available to scientists in the intervening years.
Furthermroe, this wasn’t the stunning unexpected blow to evolution that the author makes it out to be. Darwin actually devoted an entire chapter of The Origin of Species to the sudden appearance of animal groups with few or no similar ancestors.
The author cites Stephen Jay Gould’s book on the Shale as claiming that scientists were wrong about Darwinian evolution, and that life did not evolve slowly, bit by bit, but that “diverse species emerged and evolved simultaneously.” The author here gives the false impression that the Shale thus proves that biological evolution is false. What he neglects to point out is that:
1) Stephen Jay Gould was a proponent of punctuated equilibrium, the theory that species remain more or less stable for long periods, then undergo sudden, rapid evolution in response to sudden changes in the environment.
2) Even if punctuated equilibrium rather than traditional Darwinian evolution is the more common form evolution takes, it is still the evolution of one species from another, not creationism ex nihlo by an omnipotent God.
3) There are various explanations proposed by scientists for why many of the animals preserved in the Burgess Shale appear without antecedents. Walcott proposed that the period in which the Cambrian animals found in the Shale evolved did not lend itself to fossilization and so the animals from that period are absent from the fossil record. Less speculatively, there are scientists who argue that many of the forms found in the Cambrian period are similar to types that evolved well before then, and there is debate as to whether the Cambrian period really represents an “explosion” of species.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Search Judaism – A Critique: Chapter Four, section three
Did the Universe Self-Create? (Chapter Four, section three)
I took a look at the rest of the section headings, and it looks like Chapter Four, the “Scientific Evidence for God,” is going to be based entirely around Intelligent Design and disproving evolution. Oh well.
While I’ll go through each of his arguments, I’d like to note that it’s mostly irrelevant to the question of whether or not God exists and whether or not He created the universe. Firstly, as I keep saying, disproving evolution just means evolution is not the correct explanation for biodiversity. It doesn’t mean that God did it. Secondly, he seems to be making all the classic creationist mistakes, including conflating the Big Bang, abiogenesis, and evolution. Whether or not evolution is correct has nothing to do with how the universe came into being or how life originated. Finally, this is all pretty much irrelevant because of the inherent problems with the Argument from Design that I discussed earlier.
The author begins by describing a number of complex animal abilities, such as time-sense and the ability to navigate using the Earth’s magnetic field as a guide. He then says that it is statistically improbable that these happened through “chance mutation and natural selection.” He even cites the, “Tornado sweeping through a junkyard and assembling a 747” analogy.
From TalkOrigins.org regarding the tornado analogy:
In citing statistical imporobability the author here is displaying a lack of understanding of how probability works. To use the standard analogy, any given hand in a game of cards is statistically very improbable. Yet each player does in fact get a group of cards. The reason this works is because while a player is unlikely to get any specific set of cards, they must get some set of cards. Similarly, the extremely unlikely probability that our specific form of life would form is not really relevant. What is relevant is the likelihood of any self-replicating form arising. That our form of life happened to be the lucky one is no more to the point than that I happened to get a pair of fours, a seven, and two jacks in a hand of poker is relevant to the probability that I would get some combination of five cards.
Further, the unlikelihood of a particular event happening is irrelevant once it actually happens. It is extremely unlikely that any particular person will win a Powerball lottery, yet to claim that the winner actually didn’t win by chance and must have been selected deliberately is silly. So even if the formation of self-replicating forms is vanishingly unlikely, we must accept that they formed. To say that the unlikelihood of their formation is proof that they formed due to the intent of a Creator is as silly as maintaining that the lottery winner must have been deliberately selected. As long as something is possible, it can happen, no matter how unlikely it is.
But we don’t even need to resort to pointing out that a one-in-a-ridiculously-high-number chance is still a chance. The staggering improbability of life occurring spontaneously holds only if we assume consecutive trials. The author quotes a claim that the chance of a bacterium evolving is 1 in 10^39,950. Leaving aside for the moment that we are really discussing the likelihood of a simple self-replicating form, not a more complex bacterium, we are not talking about 10^39,950 trials one after another. We are talking about many (trillions?) of simultaneous trials here on Earth. If we include the rest of the universe with all of the stars and planets, we can run through 10^39,950 trials pretty quickly. If you’re a one-in-a-million kind of person, there are six thousand other people just like you. When the number of trials is in multiples of the probability coefficient, the formation of a self-replicating form isn’t just not unlikely, it’s nearly inevitable.
Lastly, the author seems to be confusing the probability of complex abilities evolving slowly through tiny incremental changes driven by natural selection with the probability of those complex abilities arising spontaneously fully-formed. That everything should line up perfectly by chance to give animals these complex abilities is staggeringly unlikely. The probability of a single small change is much higher, and combined with a high number of simultaneous trials (every birth is a trial) and the (non-random) pressures of natural selection to filter for useful changes the emergence of complex abilities becomes much more likely.
The author goes on to cite the opinions two chemists. The first is quoted as saying, “The statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized reactions that typify living organisms could have been generated by accident is zero!” That may well be true, but evolutionary biologists do not claim that “organic structures” and “harmonized reactions” were “generated by accident.” At best, abiogenesis could be characterized as an “accident,” but that is merely the formation of a self-replicator, which would have very simple with few structures or precisely tuned functions. It is through the process of evolution by natural selection, a non-random process akin to careful breeding, that the complexity arose.
The second chemist, Charles-Eugene Guye, is claimed to have proven “through probability calculus that the formation of even one molecule of living matter by mere chance is as good as impossible.” This is more to the point, as it addresses the simple forms that would have arisen through abiogenesis. Yet the phrasing is strange. “Molecules” are not living matter. Complex modern life is made of molecules that are not themselves alive. (Exactly what is and isn’t alive is an interesting question. Are our cells alive? The mitochondria in our cells? Are individual proteins alive? The atoms which form the proteins?) What the author probably meant are organic molecules.
A quick Google search turned up the following from Wikiquotes:
So we see that Charles-Eugene Guye’s calculation is not valid and therefore irrelevant. Quoting these two chemists is yet another appeal to authority. We are to accept these chemists’ conclusions because they are scientists. Yet at the same time we are expected to ignore the opinions of all the scientists the author did not see fit to quote. Are we to believe that all of these other scientists, presumably as competent as the author’s examples, did not know of these men’s work? And that the author, himself not a scientist, is privy to conclusive proofs of which the experts are unaware? We are left with two equally unlikely possibilities. Either all of the scientists who believe evolution to be accurate and that abiogensis occurred are indeed ignorant of these decades-old conclusive “proofs” and would immediatly change their position if only the mathematical proofs were brought to their attention; or that those scientists who hold evolution to be the truth are deliberately ignoring these proofs and are deceiving themselves and others in a massive conspiracy. (Amazingly, I think the author leans towards the latter. We’ll see a little later when I get up to his discussion of why scientists “believe in” evolution.)
The author now discuses the Miller-Urey experiment which showed that organic compounds will spontaneously arise out of a “primordial soup” containing water and other elements necessary for life when electricity is applied to the mixture. This and subsequent experiments have shown that abiogenesis is a plausible explanation for the origin of life. The author calls this a “…“proof” of the theory of evolution.” Of course, the experiment was about abiogenesis, not evolution, and it and similar experiments, while they don’t tell us how life actually arose on Earth, are certainly valid as proof-of-concept. The author puts the word “proof” in quotes, implying that it is in fact no such thing, yet doesn’t bother to explain why the experiment was invalid.
Instead, he makes the strange statement that, “More than fifty years since the original experiment… scientists have still not been able to create the basic elements – such as carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen – that went into making the experiment work.” What does the creation of elements have to do with how life arose? The creation of elements in stars though fusion is a well-understood process. I don’t know if anyone has managed to create elements in a lab, but even if it’s never been done, so what? We know how the elements necessary for life formed. Whether or not humans have managed to recreate the process is irrelevant.
The author now quotes yet another chemist, Harold Urey, (of the Miller-Urey experiment) as saying that the more scientists learn of the origins of life, the more impossible it is for them to accept it as the result of “accidental evolution”, yet they cling to evolution as “an article of faith.” The origin of the quote is the Christian Science Monitor (January 4, 1962).
TalkOrigins has this quote in their quote-mining section and provides the relevant context:
Dr. Urey’s remarks were taken out of context (and I suspect that the version quoted in the book (which is slightly different from that cited on TalkOrigins) is a tweaked version of the misquote, as this version explicitly mentions evolution and more strongly implies that evolution is a dogma). He was not talking about evolution, but about abiogenesis, and he was not talking about faith in a religious sense but of a conviction that the scientific method is the best way to discover the way the world functions.
Further, even if it were true that evolution is a religious belief, accepted on “faith,” that would only serve to put it on an equal footing with other religious beliefs accepted on faith. If the argument is that evolution is an invalid claim BECUASE it's a religious belief, the implication is that all religious beliefs are inherently invalid, an argument that is antithetical to the book's thesis.
I’ll give the author the benefit of the doubt and assume that he lifted the quote from a Creationist source without bothering to check its veracity. This would merely make him unreliable. To assume that he actually did the research and used the quote anyway would imply that he’s dishonest.
I took a look at the rest of the section headings, and it looks like Chapter Four, the “Scientific Evidence for God,” is going to be based entirely around Intelligent Design and disproving evolution. Oh well.
While I’ll go through each of his arguments, I’d like to note that it’s mostly irrelevant to the question of whether or not God exists and whether or not He created the universe. Firstly, as I keep saying, disproving evolution just means evolution is not the correct explanation for biodiversity. It doesn’t mean that God did it. Secondly, he seems to be making all the classic creationist mistakes, including conflating the Big Bang, abiogenesis, and evolution. Whether or not evolution is correct has nothing to do with how the universe came into being or how life originated. Finally, this is all pretty much irrelevant because of the inherent problems with the Argument from Design that I discussed earlier.
The author begins by describing a number of complex animal abilities, such as time-sense and the ability to navigate using the Earth’s magnetic field as a guide. He then says that it is statistically improbable that these happened through “chance mutation and natural selection.” He even cites the, “Tornado sweeping through a junkyard and assembling a 747” analogy.
From TalkOrigins.org regarding the tornado analogy:
1) This claim is irrelevant to the theory of evolution itself, since evolution does not occur via assembly from individual parts, but rather via selective gradual modifications to existing structures. Order can and does result from such evolutionary processes.
2) Hoyle applied his analogy to abiogenesis, where it is more applicable. However, the general principle behind it is wrong. Order arises spontaneously from disorder all the time. The tornado itself is an example of order arising spontaneously. Something as complicated as people would not arise spontaneously from raw chemicals, but there is no reason to believe that something as simple as a self-replicating molecule could not form thus. From there, evolution can produce more and more complexity.
In citing statistical imporobability the author here is displaying a lack of understanding of how probability works. To use the standard analogy, any given hand in a game of cards is statistically very improbable. Yet each player does in fact get a group of cards. The reason this works is because while a player is unlikely to get any specific set of cards, they must get some set of cards. Similarly, the extremely unlikely probability that our specific form of life would form is not really relevant. What is relevant is the likelihood of any self-replicating form arising. That our form of life happened to be the lucky one is no more to the point than that I happened to get a pair of fours, a seven, and two jacks in a hand of poker is relevant to the probability that I would get some combination of five cards.
Further, the unlikelihood of a particular event happening is irrelevant once it actually happens. It is extremely unlikely that any particular person will win a Powerball lottery, yet to claim that the winner actually didn’t win by chance and must have been selected deliberately is silly. So even if the formation of self-replicating forms is vanishingly unlikely, we must accept that they formed. To say that the unlikelihood of their formation is proof that they formed due to the intent of a Creator is as silly as maintaining that the lottery winner must have been deliberately selected. As long as something is possible, it can happen, no matter how unlikely it is.
But we don’t even need to resort to pointing out that a one-in-a-ridiculously-high-number chance is still a chance. The staggering improbability of life occurring spontaneously holds only if we assume consecutive trials. The author quotes a claim that the chance of a bacterium evolving is 1 in 10^39,950. Leaving aside for the moment that we are really discussing the likelihood of a simple self-replicating form, not a more complex bacterium, we are not talking about 10^39,950 trials one after another. We are talking about many (trillions?) of simultaneous trials here on Earth. If we include the rest of the universe with all of the stars and planets, we can run through 10^39,950 trials pretty quickly. If you’re a one-in-a-million kind of person, there are six thousand other people just like you. When the number of trials is in multiples of the probability coefficient, the formation of a self-replicating form isn’t just not unlikely, it’s nearly inevitable.
Lastly, the author seems to be confusing the probability of complex abilities evolving slowly through tiny incremental changes driven by natural selection with the probability of those complex abilities arising spontaneously fully-formed. That everything should line up perfectly by chance to give animals these complex abilities is staggeringly unlikely. The probability of a single small change is much higher, and combined with a high number of simultaneous trials (every birth is a trial) and the (non-random) pressures of natural selection to filter for useful changes the emergence of complex abilities becomes much more likely.
The author goes on to cite the opinions two chemists. The first is quoted as saying, “The statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized reactions that typify living organisms could have been generated by accident is zero!” That may well be true, but evolutionary biologists do not claim that “organic structures” and “harmonized reactions” were “generated by accident.” At best, abiogenesis could be characterized as an “accident,” but that is merely the formation of a self-replicator, which would have very simple with few structures or precisely tuned functions. It is through the process of evolution by natural selection, a non-random process akin to careful breeding, that the complexity arose.
The second chemist, Charles-Eugene Guye, is claimed to have proven “through probability calculus that the formation of even one molecule of living matter by mere chance is as good as impossible.” This is more to the point, as it addresses the simple forms that would have arisen through abiogenesis. Yet the phrasing is strange. “Molecules” are not living matter. Complex modern life is made of molecules that are not themselves alive. (Exactly what is and isn’t alive is an interesting question. Are our cells alive? The mitochondria in our cells? Are individual proteins alive? The atoms which form the proteins?) What the author probably meant are organic molecules.
A quick Google search turned up the following from Wikiquotes:
…which claims that the odds are 1 in 10^243 against "two thousand atoms" (the size of one particular protein molecule) ending up in precisely that particular order "by accident." Where did Jelenik get that figure? From Pierre Lecompte du Nouy... who in turn got it from Charles-Eugene Guye, a physicist who died in 1942. Guye had merely calculated the odds of these atoms lining up by accident if "a volume" of atoms the size of the Earth were "shaken at the speed of light." In other words, ignoring all the laws of chemistry, which create preferences for the formation and behavior of molecules, and ignoring that there are millions if not billions of different possible proteins--and of course the result has no bearing on the origin of life, which may have begun from an even simpler protein. This calculation is thus useless for all these reasons, …and is hugely outdated (it was calculated before 1942, even before the discovery of DNA), and thus fails to account for over half a century of scientific progress.
So we see that Charles-Eugene Guye’s calculation is not valid and therefore irrelevant. Quoting these two chemists is yet another appeal to authority. We are to accept these chemists’ conclusions because they are scientists. Yet at the same time we are expected to ignore the opinions of all the scientists the author did not see fit to quote. Are we to believe that all of these other scientists, presumably as competent as the author’s examples, did not know of these men’s work? And that the author, himself not a scientist, is privy to conclusive proofs of which the experts are unaware? We are left with two equally unlikely possibilities. Either all of the scientists who believe evolution to be accurate and that abiogensis occurred are indeed ignorant of these decades-old conclusive “proofs” and would immediatly change their position if only the mathematical proofs were brought to their attention; or that those scientists who hold evolution to be the truth are deliberately ignoring these proofs and are deceiving themselves and others in a massive conspiracy. (Amazingly, I think the author leans towards the latter. We’ll see a little later when I get up to his discussion of why scientists “believe in” evolution.)
The author now discuses the Miller-Urey experiment which showed that organic compounds will spontaneously arise out of a “primordial soup” containing water and other elements necessary for life when electricity is applied to the mixture. This and subsequent experiments have shown that abiogenesis is a plausible explanation for the origin of life. The author calls this a “…“proof” of the theory of evolution.” Of course, the experiment was about abiogenesis, not evolution, and it and similar experiments, while they don’t tell us how life actually arose on Earth, are certainly valid as proof-of-concept. The author puts the word “proof” in quotes, implying that it is in fact no such thing, yet doesn’t bother to explain why the experiment was invalid.
Instead, he makes the strange statement that, “More than fifty years since the original experiment… scientists have still not been able to create the basic elements – such as carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen – that went into making the experiment work.” What does the creation of elements have to do with how life arose? The creation of elements in stars though fusion is a well-understood process. I don’t know if anyone has managed to create elements in a lab, but even if it’s never been done, so what? We know how the elements necessary for life formed. Whether or not humans have managed to recreate the process is irrelevant.
The author now quotes yet another chemist, Harold Urey, (of the Miller-Urey experiment) as saying that the more scientists learn of the origins of life, the more impossible it is for them to accept it as the result of “accidental evolution”, yet they cling to evolution as “an article of faith.” The origin of the quote is the Christian Science Monitor (January 4, 1962).
TalkOrigins has this quote in their quote-mining section and provides the relevant context:
Here is the relevant text:
"Dr. Harold C. Urey, Nobel Prize-holding chemist of the University of California at La Jolla, explained the modern outlook on this question by noting that "all of us who study the origin of life find that the more we look into it, the more we feel that it is too complex to have evolved anywhere.
"And yet, he added, "We all believe as an article of faith that life evolved from dead matter on this planet. It is just that its complexity is so great it is hard for us to imagine that it did."
"Pressed to explain what he meant by having "faith" in an event for which he had no substantial evidence, Dr. Urey said his faith was not in the event itself so much as in the physical laws and reasoning that pointed to its likelihood. He would abandon his faith if it ever proved to be misplaced. But that is a prospect he said he considered to be very unlikely."
I bet you are just dying to know what the question referred to in the first sentence is, aren't you? The preceding section was on panspermia vs abiogenesis:
"This theory had been proposed before scientists knew how readily the organic materials of life can be synthesized from inorganic matter under the conditions thought to have prevailed in the early days of the earth. Today, Dr. Sagan said, it is far easier to believe that organisms arose spontaneously on the earth than to try to account for them in any other way."
This is a misquote, pure and simple. With the reporting style used, you can't string together the items in the quote marks and assume he said those things in order.
Dr. Urey’s remarks were taken out of context (and I suspect that the version quoted in the book (which is slightly different from that cited on TalkOrigins) is a tweaked version of the misquote, as this version explicitly mentions evolution and more strongly implies that evolution is a dogma). He was not talking about evolution, but about abiogenesis, and he was not talking about faith in a religious sense but of a conviction that the scientific method is the best way to discover the way the world functions.
Further, even if it were true that evolution is a religious belief, accepted on “faith,” that would only serve to put it on an equal footing with other religious beliefs accepted on faith. If the argument is that evolution is an invalid claim BECUASE it's a religious belief, the implication is that all religious beliefs are inherently invalid, an argument that is antithetical to the book's thesis.
I’ll give the author the benefit of the doubt and assume that he lifted the quote from a Creationist source without bothering to check its veracity. This would merely make him unreliable. To assume that he actually did the research and used the quote anyway would imply that he’s dishonest.
Friday, December 25, 2009
Search Judaism – A Critique: Introduction & Chapter One, section one
The following is a point-by-point critique of “Search Judaism: Judaism’s Answers to a Changing World” by Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer. I’ve summarized each point and then explained what I think is wrong with it. Below the discussion of each point I’ve listed the errors and/or fallacies contained in the point.
The errors in the book fall into three broad categories: instances where the author presented one side of a debated issue without the other, and implied that the interpretation presented was the only one; instances where the author’s facts were simply wrong; and logical fallacies.
Search Judaism: Judaism’s Answers to a Changing World
Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer
Introduction
The book starts off, in its first sentence, by claiming that Avraham had no tradition about God and that he was a monotheist. I suppose this is true, in a sense, about the biblical God, but ignores the influence of Canaanite gods on the image of God in the chumash, which extends to using the names Baal and El as names of God. It also ignores the evidence in the chumash itself that the early Jews were hhenotheistic (devoted to the worship of a single god while acknowledging the existence of other gods) rather than truly monotheistic.
The introduction says that the book is meant to provide an alternative to “rote, habit, and uninspired Judaism” so that one can come to “actual knowledge of God.” Let’s hope it lives up to the hype.
Chapter One
The chapter begins with the question: Are humans just like other animals, or are they something more? While current evolutionary science sees humans as just one of many genetically similar species on this planet, this does not, as the author claims, mean “there is nothing wrong with behaving like an animal, because we are, after all, animals.” This is a straw-man argument meant to evoke an emotional response from the reader; meant to make the reader recoil in moral disgust from the proposition that humans are just like other animals. There would be something wrong with a dog behaving like a cat, something wrong with a goat behaving like a lion, and there is something wrong with a human behaving like a member of another species. It does not follow from the fact that we are a species of animal like any other that we are therefore going to behave immorally. It does mean that we humans aren’t “special,” but hey, that’s just the way it is. That we may want to be special doesn’t mean that we are.
It also ignores studies of behavior in great ape species that show many behaviors, particularly social behaviors, similar to those found in people.
{emotional appeal, straw-man}
Humans and Animals (Chapter One, section one)
There follows a story illustrating the ridiculous extremes people go to caring for their pets, including expensive health care, homes, clothes, etc. Here I must note that such extremes are not the norm and do not represent a trend.
The author then asks if it is moral for people to spend money on expensive medical treatments for their pets when there are children in need of operations; if it is moral to buy expensive clothes for pets when there are people who need to be clothed. This question assumes an either-or situation: that if the pet owners didn’t spend their money on their pets they would donate it to those in need rather than spend it on, say, a cruise, or a fancy car. Such a situation is not the case here. These pet owners are not deciding between their dog’s health and that of a child, but between their dog’s health and a vacation. If people want to spend their money on something the rest of us find foolish, that it their prerogative.
{emotional appeal, false dilemma}
The author states that he has noted historically an inverse relationship between how much people care about animals and how much they care about other people. Even if this is true, confluence is not causality.
He then states that Ancient Egyptians venerated animals to the point where they did not eat animal products – according to Ibn Ezra. Leaving aside that “Ancient Egypt” spans several thousand years of changing social rules, this just isn’t so. There are wall scenes in Egyptian tombs that depict dairy activities (milking cows, preparing cheese), and there is similar evidence that Egyptians’ diets included a wide range of meats, poultry, and fish.
As a counterpoint to the Egyptians’ supposed extreme veneration of animals, the author claims that the great monuments of Ancient Egypt, including the pyramids, were built by slaves. While it’s true that some monuments were built by slaves, and slaves were involved in building the pyramids, most of the labor was done by peasant farmers in the off-season, their labor serving as a form of tax to the monarchy. (I suppose I should just be glad he didn’t claim the pyramids were built by the Bnei Yisroel.)
He goes on to claim that the Egyptians worshiped a host of animals as gods, and lists them by name. It is true that Egyptian gods were associated with animals, but it wasn’t such a simple relationship. The gods were not animals, but were usually depicted as men or women with the head of the animal they were associated with. Thus Anubis, for example, was depicted as a man with the head of a jackal.
The preceding two points don’t actually affect the validity of his argument, but they seem indicative of the overall level of the book’s scholarship.
As a final condemnation of the Egyptians’ supposed veneration of animals and degradation of people, he says that the Torah commands we bring animal sacrifices to drive home the point that there is a difference between humans and animals. In world where (supposedly) humans were considered inferior to animals, Hashem wanted us to know that in fact we are far superior to animals.
Firstly, I don’t really understand the logic here. How does sacrificing animals show that people are superior? It could just as easily be interpreted to mean that animals are superior to people, and therefore a more worthy sacrifice for God. Secondly, this ignores the influence of surrounding cultures, all of which (including the Egyptians who are supposed to have held animals in such high regard) sacrificed animals to their gods. From an anthropological viewpoint, it is likely that the ancient Jews were influenced by the religious practices of those around them. There is even support for this view from within the bounds of Torah. The Rambam says that Hashem commanded the Bnei Yisroel to bring karbanos because all peoples in the ancient world brought sacrifices, and it would have been too difficult for the Jewish people to be too different.
{incorrect historical facts, confluence/causality, spin}
As a second example of historical kindness to animals and cruelty to people, the author cites Nazi Germany and Hitler’s vegetarianism. Again, confluence is not causality. That Hitler was a vegetarian has nothing to do with him being a genocidal monster. To illustrate the silliness of this line of argument, I would like to note that the Nazis also all wore pants. Are we now to infer some kind of causal link between pants and mass murder?
I should also note that his choice of examples, Ancient Egypt and Nazi Germany, both evoke strong negative emotions in Jewish readers, and just barely stop short of being condemnations of a practice in and of themselves (e.g., the Nazis did X, so X must be bad). I doubt these examples were chosen arbitrarily, and find it much more likely that they were chosen specifically because of the emotional reaction they cause in order to create the illusion that the author’s argument is stronger than it actually is.
{confluence/causality, emotional appeal}
The author now segues into an attack on evolution, implicitly claiming that biological evolutionary theory justifies Social Darwinism. It does no such thing, as the theory of evolution is merely an explanation for biodiversity, not a moral framework. Again the Nazis are cited, even though the corrupted evolutionary theory the Nazis used to justify their horrors had almost nothing to do with biological science and everything to do with justifying their claim of being the master race. It was based on the mistaken notion that evolution is a ladder, with some species (or in the Nazi’s useage, races) “more evolved” – and therefore superior – to others. Evolution does not work that way. The theory of evolution simply states that those animals which are best adapted to their environment will be the ones who survive to breed, and that therefore changing environments shape a specie’s development. Thus animals will gain, and more importantly for this discussion, LOSE abilities in the process of adapting to their environment. The Nazi’s claim that they were ubermenchen, more evolved than other races, was evolutionary nonsense.
Now the author makes a statement that is shocking in both its display of ignorance and blatant emotional manipulation. He says, “In theory, what could be wrong with a Darwinist, who didn’t like the color or style of your hair, weeding out your genes from the human gene pool? Scary, isn’t it?”
Yes, it is scary. It’s scary how ridiculous and malicious this statement is. Let’s break it down.
1) Hair style? Really? Because hair style is genetically determined, right?
2) What would be wrong with it is that murder and/or denying someone the right to have children is morally repugnant, regardless of how biodiversity came about.
3) Breeding existed long before Darwin, and was in fact part of what led him to come up with the theory of evolution. Breeding people for hair color could have been thought up, carried out, and possibly even justified in the interest of creating better people without Darwin.
4) That certain traits are selected for naturally because organisms with those traits out-survive similar organisms without those traits in no way justifies a person selecting and/or suppressing physical traits in other people, especially when doing so violates the other people’s human rights.
5) This is like claiming that the germ theory of disease justifies rape and murder. After all, if viruses use people to create more of themselves, even to the point of killing their host, then it must be okay for me to commit rape to procreate and to kill anyone who tries to stop me. Of course, people aren’t viruses – nor is anyone entitled to decide the course evolution should take for his fellow human beings.
6) It is a straw-man argument attempting to claim that evolution justifies murder, which as demonstrated above just isn’t so.
7) It is an emotional appeal designed to link Darwinism with murder and thereby make evolution reprehensible.
8) Even if all of the above was not true, and Darwinian evolution really did justify eugenics, that in no way affects whether or not evolution is in fact the correct explanation for biodiversity, making this an appeal to consequences.
{Incorrect scientific fact, spin, emotional appeal, straw-man, appeal to consequences}
The first section of Chapter One seems to be an attempt to show that:
1. Animals being considered more important than people is a sign of a degenerate society.
2. Evolution claims that humans are just another species of animal and (logical leap here) therefore animals are as important or are more important than people.
3. This is horrifying and justifies murder. (Not true, as demonstrated above.
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