Posted by Tom on September 20, 1999 at 19:27:31:
In Reply to: Response to Toms' psychologizing posted by Spamboy on September 19, 1999 at 20:26:35:
Dear spamboy,
The fact is that ideas have consequences. This is not just a nice debate about origins. What people believe shapes how people behave–something that most of us care about.
Statement like "The evidence is overwhelming that we evolved" are equivocal. That depends upon what the word means. The evidence for small order changes by natural means is overwhelming. The inferential jump to macroevolution by natural means is mostly a logical deduction from philosophical naturalism. The term normal science comes, as I'm sure you know, from T. Kuhn. He means the working out of specific pieces of a larger paradigm. Kuhn also argued that normal science typically turns up contradictions and evidentiary holes the lead to the overturning of the paradigm. Darwinism faces some major holes: 1) the fact that the fossil record mainly reveals discontinuity rather than the steady evolutionary trees that Darwin would have predicted; 2) the problem of irreducibly complex organisms; 3) problems related to probability and the time scale available for evolution to take place.
Your argument that "Creationists have an intent, or a pre-conclusion in mind.'god did it'" certainly may be true. However, your argument implies something about scientists that is quite false. Scientists are not ideologically neutral either. This has been demonstrated repeatedly by historical and sociological analysis. Almost all scientists a century ago assumed that white males were superior to women and to people of other racial groups. Invariably they found support for this theory in their scientific studies. Their preconceptions guided their research. In fact such ideas, (largely supported by the authority of Darwin's theory incidentally), only died out in Europe and America after WWII, following the embarrassment of the holocaust.
Many people say that the idea of design is scientifically unprovable. But that is not so. The whole notion of the SETI project is predicated upon the assumption that science can differentiate between what is designed and what is an accident. You should read William Dembski's book The Design Inference. Besides the vast majority of scientists before the late 19th century believed in creation--Pascal, Descartes, Newton, Pasteur, Galileo, Faraday, Kepler, Boyle, etc. None of these persons thought that the evidence of nature was irrelevant to the design question. Your impression that the evolutionists have all the evidence is just that–an impression. They are clearly the more powerful group, and they have a monopoly on the funds and the schools. That has always been the case with dominant paradigms throughout the history of science. It never gives any assurance that they are right.
Tom Lessl