Surely it is thanks to science that we're able to make use of technology and now know that hygiene is important to keep microorganisms from proliferating?

In the case of TB, the benefits provided by industrialisation (which took off thanks to the spreading of various technical scientific disciplines) just outweighed the contribution by medical science.

That doesn't mean medicine was totally worthless since we know have a much better idea of how TB spreads and how to attack it.

Similarly I bet there's quite a few people who are glad they never caught scarlet fever and didn't have to spend their life in an iron lung thanks to polio.

Perhaps there was a decline in the number of horses crapping on mud roads?

Civil engineers have long been aware of the decline in infectous disease prior to the introduction of antibiotics, and they (of course) attribute the bulk of it to improvements in water treatment and distribution, sewage conveyance and treatment and better waste disposal, rather than medical advances.

Orrin is correct to distinguish between technology and science, rather than confusing them as M Ali Choudhury does - they are not synonymous. Much civil engineering is scientific only to the extent that it is empirical and pragmatic, relying as much on rule-of-thumb and standard of practice as scientific theory. There are of course also economic and political aspects of any project which an engineer must consider - what is eventually done is generally not the (scientific) ideal, but what is feasible at the time under these social constraints.

Orrin, likewise many of the horrors that we attribute to science are due to technology. See my posting on the Nazis & science below. Using Zyklon-B to kill people rather than a gun or a club isn't due to the evils of science, but the evils of men.

Orrin:

Many, many thanks for the link to Johnson, which is a gem.

Robert:

Yes, thinking they need to be killed is a function of science, the means of killing them was efficient technology.

OJ, do you have any use for science in your worldview? Do you see any doctors or take any prescription drugs, or do you rely on faith alone to cure your body and make your car go? How do you link into the internet, do you have a prayer-based interface? If you do make use of science in your own life, then how is it that you haven't been driven to kill yet, seeing as that is what science does, tell people to kill?

Was Mengele a scientist or an engineer? A perversion or the sine qua non? How do we know the difference?

Thinking "they" needed to be killed was a conclusion just as easily reached by the Nazis as by Islamisists, Inquisitors, or Maoists. Nothing new, or scientific, about it.

The only significant difference is that the Nazis had the tools of the Industrial Revolution at their disposal, which allowed their reach to meet their grasp.

OJ: would it bother you to learn that Richard Lewontin, whom you cite to support your argument, is perhaps one of the most hard core marxists and darwinists in all of academia and is completely up-front about it? Of course I assume you exempt the science of sleep doctors from your condemnation.

Robert:

Sleep doctoring is all about people having bad habits and being overweight.

Yes, I'm aware that Lewontin, like Gould, objects to the philosophy of Darwinism because it conflicts with the philosophy of Marxism--in fact, that supports an earlier point. These are philosophical not scientific doctrines.

Jeff:

One is born a certain race, one adopts a religion. Only death can "cure" the former while the latter can be solved short of murder. That's why the great ethnic exterminations awaited scientific theory.

Robert:

Yes, science is a useful tool so long as we recognizxe how limited is its scope.

"...one adopts a religion." Huh?

One is born into religion with nearly the same degree of invariance as race. How many Jews/Catholics/Mormons/Socialists had non-Jews etc as parents?

"Yes, science is a useful tool so long as we recognizxe how limited is its scope."

Agreed.

From the Johson link, here is one egregious factual error:

" ... the fossil record does not provide examples of gradual macroevolutionary transformation ..."

He clearly knows nothing of the fossil record outlining, for just one example, whale evolution.

Jeff:

The conversos converted. They were inquisited not over faith by religious authorities but over race by secular authorities.

Peter B -

More online articles from Phil Johnson here:

http://www.arn.org/johnson/jo_articl.htm

For all the problems with Materialism as a philosophy, it has one one strength that will ensure that it does not collapse anytime soon: noone doubts the existence of the material universe. Everyone experiences material phenomeonon, and everyone's ecperience of these phenomeonon are consistent. This can not be said of the non-material. Noone can define it, noone can even confirm it's existence. Inserting non-material causes into any explanation of how the world works is merely an excuse to indulge the imagination. Non-materialism explains nothing, because it is nothing. No-one has ever touched, smelled, seen or heard a non-material phenomeonon. It is an explanation that explains nothing.

Robert:

I take it you haven't seen The Matrix or The Truman Show?

I've seen the Matrix and am quite well read on the Philip Dick canon of alternate reality. So what is your point?

The tenuous nature of faith in the material world.

Robert:

But everyone experiences the non-material too. What child has ever thrived without a world of make-believe and reference to some non-material being for guidance or protection? It is only much later, when materialist ideologues have scorned and ridiculed us that we come to believe we have no further need, and therefore they no longer exist. You will no doubt dismiss this as imagination, but does not the universality of it give you pause?

Many thanks, Bruce. I read three and he is dynamite.

Peter,
The world of the imagination is great, it just doesn't work very well to explain how the material world works. If we are to examine a subject like evolution, and not take an a-priori materialist stance, then exactly how do you work in non-materialist explanations? Do you just insert the phrase "magic happens here" to any existing gap in knowledge and leave it at that? How does a non-materialistic line of inquiry work? How do you examine the non-material, how do you get answers from it?

Robert:

Well, you do it in a variety of ways that materialists reject--authority, scripture, personal experience, testimony, history, intuitive and inductive thought, prayer, tradition. etc., and you use reason to both assist you and ground the other sources in reality. I admit these may be of limited use in understanding how the material world "works", but they are pretty helpful in deciding where it stops and starts.

As to your question as to how to explain evolution without taking an a priori materialist stance, isn't that the very problem and source of the scepticism? The only way I can see to work in non-materialist explanations into evolution is presumably to limit the scope of what the theory says, which I assume is why so many of its proponents go ballistic when one tries.

Materialism works fine for addressing material things, from excercise to electricity, from aardvarks to zygotes, and everything in between. Brushing your teeth to splitting the atom.

But what about attitudes like honor and respect? What about feelings like awe, bitterness, and regret? What about love, shame, guilt, and even fear? Materialism cannot touch them, except to either categorize them or disparage them.

People write poetry about the important things in life, not about bacteria or metal fatigue.

Peter:

When "... authority, scripture, personal experience, testimony, history, intuitive and inductive thought, prayer, tradition. etc ..." come to wildly divergent conclusions, how do you reconcile them?

Taking an a priori materialist stance prevents invoking the supernatural prematurely. Proponents go "ballistic" when the immaterial is invoked based on no particularly good reason.

For instance, "irreducible complexity." How do you know the complexity is irreducible unless you know nothing came before? How do you know it is irreducible without taking as given that which remains to be proved? Speciation is another instance. It is taken as a material impossibility--okay, based on what?

It may well be there is an irreducible complexity that can only be explained by appeal to an deus ex machina; speciation may ultimately require the same genesis.

But to make such a claim before material means are exhausted guarantees you will never know if such claim would pass the fly-on-the-wall test.

OJ:

Everything I have read about the Inquisition contradicts your assertion that the conversos weren't hounded out of Spain for doubts about their faith.

Besides, at that time, the distinction between clerical and secular was without difference.

Rwanda, a Christian country without any notable admixture of scientists, seems to have done a pretty good job on extermination.

Orrin's assertion that exterminations had to wait for Marx is wrong. The hundred thousand skulls of Samarkand were piled up in the name of religion by men who had no conception of science and whose most advanced form of technology was the iron knife.

Keith Thomas, in one of his brilliant speculations, tied the decline in mortality in Europe in the late 17th century -- otherwise unexplained -- to a threshold of wealth that allowed most people to have their own spoons.

Orrin, with a medially educated spouse, ought to have access to some information about etiology, which is still pretty much a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Why did Poland miss out on the Black Death? When did measles kill 1 in 10 in England in the 18th century but fewer in the 17th century and in the 19th century?

We don't know enough to know.

Chlorination of water is only a little over 100 years old, and the connection of mosquitoes to malaria is not even that old.

TB is a disease of poverty and in the South Pacific islands today, which are poor but have more modern medical resources than anybody did in 1850, TB is a big killer.

It's complicated.

"But what about attitudes like honor and respect? What about feelings like awe, bitterness, and regret? What about love, shame, guilt, and even fear? Materialism cannot touch them, except to either categorize them or disparage them."

Jim, I see no conflict between a materialist worldview and the ability to appreciate all of the aspects of the human experience that you ouline above. It is certainly a mystery how human consciousness arises from the interactions of matter and energy, although I don't see the need to invoke some immaterial cause to explain it. I never understood how saying that consciousness is embodied in the 'soul' made the mystery any more understandable. The soul is just shorthand for 'consciousness stuff'. How does consciousness stuff explain consciousness? Like I said above, it is an explanation that doesn't explain.

Well, Robert, one possibility is that "Consciousness Stuff" is a primitive - irreducible to other components. This is a restatement that consciousness explains consciousness, but makes it a formal axiom; one cannot go further down the chain of explanation. David Chalmers has essayed this with predictable backlash.

Your axiom is that material explains *everything*, but that seems to run into the 'materialist catastrophe' of denying free will, including the your belief in materialism.

Jeff:

Of course everything you've read says that--try reading a book written by someone who knows what they're talking about instead of someone with an axe to grind against Catholicism:

http://www.brothersjudd.com/blog/archives/008268.html

I didn't say materialism explains everything, I said that you don't have to assume a non-material cause for phenomenon that can't be explained by material mechanisms. It could be that we just don't understand matter well enough.

As for free will, I see no conflict there with materialism, although I'm a little too tired tonight to start down that line of argument. Maybe tomorrow I'll search the archives and re-paste my argument from the last time we discussed that.

Robert:

The point is that the material world is immaterial too, as far as we know. Materialism is the non-material idea.

Robert:

"It is certainly a mystery how human consciousness arises from the interactions of matter and energy, although I don't see the need to invoke some immaterial cause to explain it."

I think you have joined the issue rather nicely. I can understand one who says we should look to material explanations first for natural history, but that may just be because I am too modern to do otherwise. But, if you are going to look for material explanations, don't you have to follow the rules of scientific materialism? Evidence, testable hyptheses, etc. I have lost track of the number of posts Jeff and Brit, etc. have started with: "I can conceive of a materialist explanation for..." and then gone on to show how evolution explains childcare, Shakespeare and SUV's. That is not starting with a proven materialist explanation, that is assuming a priori that one must exist and will be found eventually.

This is why they think those who balk are so thick and why darwinists think the religious are wilfully denying science and reality. They have lost, willingly or otherwise, the distinction between fact and theory. You can talk all you want about the "mountains" of evidence, but, c'mon, if Darwin had forseen how little progress there would be after a hundred and fifty years of intense scientific exploration, he might have had second thoughts. It isn't proven science that is governing here, it is scientism, the assumption that there must be a scientific explanation. That is why people like Dawkins fulminate so--it helps hide the tough questions and keeps him from having to explain how he has figured out the whole story of existence based upon finches' beaks and fruit flies and a fossil record his audience has no capacity to understand. Do you know any microbiologists who challenge the evidentiary basis for germ theory? You won't have trouble finding zoologists who deny evolution proves much at all.

Look at the whole Pre-Cambrian/stasis argument. All theory, but all readily accepted as fact by men and women who pride themselves on tough "I'm from Missouri" cynicism, peer review etc. Why this compulsion to believe? Philip Johnson makes the point that materialists insist evolution (writ large) be taught as fact in the schools at a young age and that weaknesses in the theory only be revealed when they are "old enough to understand". Sound familar? Didn't the Jesuits used to say that if they got hold of a seven year old, they had a Catholic for life?

Does this mean in itself one looks to a non-materialist explanation? Not on the physical evidence, no, but there is enough in the experience of life to at least qualify that for equal time. In other areas, (love, sex and family for example), materialist explanations are so obviously wrong, inadequate and destructive one can credibly make the case they are disproven, although many materialists won't accept certain kinds of evidence and therefore make fools of themselves.

(Please forgive a personal note on that score--as a lawyer practising some family law, I am constantly dumfounded by the reactions of many scientists and high-tech types when their marriages are in trouble. Their explanations as to what is happening and how they should react range from the pathetic to the hilarious.)

Harry:

Rwanda is a Christian nation? Please - I doubt the Hutus were reciting the Kyrie Eleison as they swung their machetes.

Uganda was probably the most 'church-oriented' nation in Africa 40 years ago, and look what happened there.

And Samarkand? Baghdad got it first (a hundred or so years earlier), with a lot more than 100,000 skulls put on display. Religion had little to do with it.

jd:

I realise there's a distinction but even you must admit the two aren't wholly separate animals.

I believe most engineers and materials scientists need an education in physics to some level at least and last time I checked physics was a science.

Ali:

They require it of doctors too--but you only use it on the entrance exams.

OJ:

The book I cited convincingly explains why some cultures became rich, and others poor.

The economic effects of the Inquisition on the countries that practiced it were profound, and lasted hundreds of years.

When curiosity can result in death, and a country expels a good many of its finest artisans, you have to expect that is going to leave a mark.

No Catholic axe to grind there, just a convincing explanation about how Spain and Portugal ran hard aground, despite all their material advantages, as a result of the Inquisition.

Peter:

You rather caricature my argument--I'm pretty certain I asserted evolution must have bequeathed us, as social animals, certain mental habits: reciprocity, empathy, shame. Nothing more. It is difficult for me to ascertain what religions would hope to build morality out of if the nature of the beast was utterly bereft of raw materials.

Perhaps you see it differently?

Jim:

A great number of the machete wielders in Rwanda were Christians. One local bishop egged on the massacres.

Jeff:

On both sides. The point of the violence was ethnicity, not religion.

That is as may be, some clergy were knee deep in blood.

How many of those Rwandans were steeped in Darwinism, do you suppose?

Clergy has often been steeped in blood. But that's not the issue here. The point is it was simple ethnic violence, Darwinism in action. Presumably the fitter of the Hutu and the Tutsi survive, no?

"Clergy has often been steeped in blood. But that's not the issue here. The point is it was simple ethnic violence, Darwinism in action. Presumably the fitter of the Hutu and the Tutsi survive, no?"

1) that's nothing to do with darwinism, as explained in the 'by design' thread.

2) i thought you thought darwinism was nonsense anyway? so even if darwinism would predict or validate ethnic cleansing (it doesn't...not even in the same 'ball park'), that prediction would be irrelevant since, according to you, darwinism is wrong.

you have a real logic blind-spot with this stuff. when it comes to darwinism, it's like you've had an intelligence-bypass.

Brit:

Hinduism is wrong too, but it still leads to bloodshed because people believe it just as Darwinism has.

It is a fantastic principle: to have medicine grounded in science. But the scientific proponents overstate its importance.

Lifespan of Americans has steadily increased over the past century, but the difference in lifespan between rich and poor has not changed much(CERTAINLY not proportionately.) This is because the change in lifespan has been dominated by public health measures and other factors identified by Lewontin. The poor benefit from these factors as much as the rich.

Now, this doesn't mean that we should forsake heart transplants and kidney dyalisis - - just keep their significance in proper perspective. The scientific promoters present us with a "hard sell" that distracts the public from the big picture: eat less, exercise more, get preventive-medicine checkups; live with safety, not paranoia, as one's lifestyle.

Incidentally, that differnce in lifespan: a reduced lifespan due to the poor's lack of medical access .... may be exceeded by a reduced lifespan due to LIFESTYLE differences in the poor. That is, a pattern of priorities and consequent behavior that weighs toward a life of less wealth, would also weigh toward a life of less healthiness.

OJ

so the hutus were darwinian scholars then.

Some of the responses astonish me.

Yes, I know Baghdad was sacked. But I didn't say Baghdad, I said Samarkand, where the 100K skulls were stacked up in the name of purer Islam. That's a religion, you know.

Whether the killing in Rwanda was racial, political or merely resentful does not detract from the fact that it was done by Christians. It may not have been done for religious reasons, but it certainly was not done in the name of science.

The idea that evolutionary theory has not made any advances in 150 years wins the prize for most obtuse statement ever on this blog, and that's against some stiff competition. What do you suppose the decipherment of the genetic code was?

Genetics?

Harry is right. Deciphering the genetic code demonstrated a couple things: there are far fewer genes in the human genome than expected, and far, far, fewer genetic differences between chimpanzees and humans than some had guessed.

Evolution required that number to be relatively small. Had it been large, evolution would have been holed below the water line.

Sounds like an advance to me.

BTW, I'm very curious: how do you know Hinduism is wrong?

For a start, Hinduism has over 430 million deities (and the number keeps growing). Now, reason should tell all of us that any religion which continues to invent gods has got a problem somewhere.

Now, reason tells me that anyone who uses reason to decry a religion's belief structure is setting themselves up to get hoisted by their own petard.

reason is a tool of faith.

Jeff:

If you don't use your mind (logic, experience, common sense, wisdom, history, etc.) to decide these questions, what do you do? Use Tarot cards? Sniff the wind? Look at entrails?

Harry:

Revenge astonishes you?

Jim:

Those questions are undecideable by mere humans. (Absent direct word from God. However, given the plethora of religions, either a whole lot of people are delusional, or there are a whole lot of Gods.)

Therefore, I make no judgments about a religion's belief structure that material consequences don't support, and even then only in terms of fitness, not correctness.

On that basis, Christianity is more fit than Islam. Who is to say whether material fitness is consistent with other-wordly correctness?

Jeff:

You're still not getting it. Material fitness is otherwordly. There's no difference in rational terms between materialism and Scientology.

Sorry, you are abusing words again.

The relative fitness of Christian and Islamic societies is very much of this world. There are any number of material measures, all of this world, to demonstrate that.

But who's to say what God thinks of the Quran vs. the Bible?

Jeff:

I think I understand what you mean by fitness v. correctness, but I don't believe there is a difference. Something that is correct is formally 'fit', as it were. Something that is fit will likewise be formally 'correct'.

The purpose of reason is to search out and pursue what is fit. Harry once chided me for thinking that Christianity is logical. But I have never found another explanation for mankind's nature and condition that works. Some things are indecipherable. But knowledge of God is not one of them - in Christian theology (Psalm 19 and St. Paul in Romans) we are told that God has revealed himself in nature to the extent that knowledge of him (yes, knowledge) is plain, such that we are accountable for unbelief.

Not a pleasant thought, but that isn't the whole story.

Jim:

I am distinguishing between fitness, a purely material concern, versus correctness, which is how True a particular religion's conception of God is with respect to God's reality.

Your quotations of God revealing himself in nature has nothing to do with the former consideration, and sheds no light on the latter beyond God's existence.

So, even presuming God reveals his existence in nature, how can mere humans derive from that God's preferences about anything? For one particularly inflammatory example, if God reveals himself in nature, then God apparently favors abortions, since roughly 20% of all conceptions fail to make it to term, human induced abortions notwithstanding.

However, one can discuss the material fitness of religions with respect to the material fitness of the societies within which they predominate. On that evidence, Protestant Christian societies are more fit than Catholic Christian societies, which are more fit than Orthodox Christian societies, which are more fit than Islamic societies.

I don't think, though, that one could possibly hold that the material fitness of a society is in any way related to the big-T Truth of the predominant religion.