In the above video clip, the supposed scientist failed to comprehend that for a theory to be valid it should accord well with the facts, and offer one a way to disprove it. Thus religion and creationism are not valid scientific theories, whereas evolution and gravity are. Holding up a bible and declaring that it holds the truth does not represent a serious rebuttal. He takes advantage of the understandable gaps in knowledge to argue that the bible is correct. In science (as in socialist theory) there is rarely if ever 100% proof, only a weight of evidence. Pseudo-scientists exploit this lack of certainty to insinuate their own bogus ideas on to the gullible.
Ed Suominen was raised to believe in the literal truth of the Bible, including the creation story. But Suominen is also an engineer, trained at the University of Washington. He has been a patent agent and an inventor, and eventually his work with electrical and digital systems led him to notice something his church hadn’t taught him about: the power of natural selection. He was trying to optimize a design, when he came across a useful software tool:
“You set up an artificial chromosome with each digital 'gene' determining a parameter for some widget you want to design. Then you created a population of individual widgets by running simulations with different sets of randomly chosen parameters, and had the widgets 'mate' with each other. You repeated this process over many successive generations, throwing in some mutations along the way. Those widgets that worked best in your simulation had the best shot at having 'children' in the next generation.” It was the beginning of the end. After discovering the practical value of evolutionary computation, Suominen began reading about evolutionary biology. The Genesis story fell apart.
In June 2012 forty-six per cent of adults in America said they believed that ‘God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years.’ Only fifteen per cent agreed with the statement that humans had evolved without the guidance of a divine power. .... Such poll data raises questions: Why are some scientific ideas hard to believe in? What makes the human mind so resistant to certain kinds of facts, even when these facts are buttressed by vast amounts of evidence? Why is creationism still rearing its head, after religion had been marginalised and church attendance have fallen? How is it, 150 years after Darwin, creationists still believe that Adam and Eve actually existed 6,000 years ago in the Garden of Eden.?
We get used to hearing stories about creationism, and the attack on science. The revival of religious fundamentalism, creationism and the spread of mystical sects is based on a loss of confidence in science and human progress together with a general rejection of rational thought and problem solving.
Creationists retain their belief system by refusing to accept the evidence. They are afraid that without God there really is no relevance to life. They fear that science is taking the heart out of the human experience and replacing it with facts. They fear that a world with no meaning is a world with no mercy. We can express some compassion for the fear and the desperation these people have, confronted with a world they don’t understand and in which they feel utterly helpless. People fear what they don’t understand. This is about people who need to have a reason to go on living, which capitalism isn’t giving them. It’s about people’s need to believe in something, which capitalism doesn’t supply or has taken away. The battle of ideas is not just a battle of the mind, it’s a battle for the heart. We can no more win hearts with economic methodology than scientists can with peer-reviewed research. We live in a world which cares only about money and believes in nothing at all. This is what Moslems and Christians despair about, and this is something with which we can surely empathise. As Suominen puts it, “You don’t have original sin without an original sinner. And without original sin...you don’t need a redeemer.” In other words, the central story of Christianity, the story of a perfect Jesus who becomes a perfect human sacrifice and saves us all relies on the earlier creation story.
This is the sigh of the oppressed in the heartless world, as Marx famously expressed it.
Here are some of the most obvious manifestations of capitalism's social decadence:
• the ongoing break-up of community relationships and the atomisation of the individual, characterised by the development of a competitive "every man for himself" type culture as the dominant one in society.
• the massive explosions of drug taking, phenomena which were once peripheral or isolated in pockets, but which are now generalised.
• the increases in violence and crime, spurred on by the horror and violence infecting the media and has turned major cities at the heart of capitalism into war zones.
• the continuing rise of a nihilistic "no future" culture among large sections of young dispossessed workers who see no progress and no hope.
• the massive corruption of capitalism's political apparatus, which is particularly evident in the succession of sleaze scandals, but which is in fact a feature of the modem nation state virtually across the globe.
• and lastly, but certainly not least, heightened nationalism, racism and inter-ethnic violence, engendered and encouraged by the rampant competition eating away at the social fabric of society.
The world really does need some intelligent design but it is the creation of a new type of society. None of the religious evangelising and appeals to "family values" are likely to succeed as the very continued existence of capitalism and the forces it has unleashed make that near impossible. Appealing to some sort of higher morality within the context of the market is clutching at straws,
No comments:
Post a Comment