Scientific Cenobites, part 7 of 8

This is part seven of a nine part essay which merely seeks to present what scientists have to say about science and scientists.
Atheism and science

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

Atheism and science
B. C. Johnson wrote a book that is meant to teach atheists how to debate with, and win against, theists:

“Theists are impressed, for example, by the fact that the eye is composed of many atoms which work together closely interacting to make possible a particular result – in this case sight. Theists claim that close, complex interaction of countless parts proves that the result produced is actually intended. This assertion is unfounded and an example should suffice as evidence to support my claim.
Consider a random whirl of dust particles. All the particles composing it must interact to produce the exact distribution of particles which occur. If only a single particle has moved contrary to its course, the exact arrangement of particles would have been different. We would never have recognized the change because all dust particles look alike to us, but the result would nevertheless have been different.
Now, according to the theist’s reasoning, the existence of this complex interaction of countless particles producing a specific result must indicate the presence of some intention. However, the result of a completely random, totally unplanned whirl of dust particles in exactly what we mean by an unintentional result. Clearly, reasoning which makes a demonstrably unintended result appear to be intended is fundamentally unsound.”[1]

Atheism and science
Michael Ruse is a philosophy professor (University of Guelph) an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian who has argued for the ACLU against the balanced treatment bill.

“‘Dr Ruse,’ Mr. [Duane T.] Gish said, ‘the trouble with you evolutionists is that you just don’t play fair. You want to stop us religious people from teaching our views in schools. But you evolutionists are just as religious in your way. Christianity tells us where we came from, where we’re going, and what we should do on the way. I defy you to show any difference with evolution. It tells you where you came from, where you are going, and what you should do on the way. You evolutionists have your God, and his name is Charles Darwin’…

Heretical though it may be to say this — and many of my scientist friends would be only too happy to chain me to the stake and to light the faggots piled around — I now think the Creationists like Mr. Gish are absolutely right in their complaint. Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion — a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit that in this one complaint — and Mr. Gish is but one of many to make it — the literalists are absolutely right. Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today…As a social reformer therefore, Huxley, known in the papers as ‘Pope Huxley’, was determined to find a substitute for Christianity. Evolution, with its stress on unbroken law — which could be used to reflect messages of social progress — was the perfect candidate. Life is on an upwardly moving escalator…

Indeed, recognizing that a good religion needs a moral message as well as a history and promise of future reward, Huxley increasingly turned from Darwin (who was not very good at providing these things) toward another English evolutionist. Herbert Spencer — prolific writer and immensely popular philosopher to the masses — shared Huxley’s vision of evolution as a kind of metaphysics rather than a straight science. He was happy to insist that even moral directives come from the evolutionary process itself…Evolution now has its mystical visionary, its Saint John of the Cross. Harvard entomologist and sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson tells us that we now have an ‘alternative mythology’ to defeat traditional religion. ‘Its narrative form is the epic: the evolution of the universe from the big bang of fifteen [billion] years ago through the origin of the elements and celestial bodies to the beginnings of life on earth’…

The language of Stephen Jay Gould is hardly more tempered. We learn that evolution ‘liberates the human spirit,’ that for sheer excitement evolution ‘beats any myth of human origins by light years,’ and that we should ‘praise this evolutionary nexus — a far more stately mansion for the human soul than any pretty or parochial comfort ever conjured by our swollen neurology to obscure the source of physical being.’ Mr. Gould ultimately rejects traditional readings of evolution for a more inspiring, liberating version: ‘We must assume that consciousness would not have evolved on our planet if a cosmic catastrophe had not claimed the dinosaurs as victims. In an entirely literal sense, we owe our existence, as large and reasoning mammals, to our lucky stars’…If people want to make a religion of evolution, that is their business…

The important point is that we should recognize when people are going beyond the strict science, moving into moral and social claims, thinking of their theory as an all-embracing world picture. All too often, there is a slide from science to something more, and this slide goes unmentioned — unrealized even. For pointing this out we should be grateful for the opponents of evolution. The Creationists are wrong in their Creationism, but they are right in at least one of their criticisms.”[2]

Atheism and science
George F. R. Ellis attended the University of Cape Town and graduate school at the University of Cambridge, he is a cosmologist, Quaker philanthropist, antiapartheid activist, and policy guru:

“…has been exploring alternatives to the so-called standard model. According to many in the field, this theory posits that the big bang was followed by a period of rapid inflation, yielding a universe near ‘critical density’—that is, with just about enough matter to recollapse eventually in a big crunch. Ellis says his aim is to counter a recent trend ‘of researchers being very dogmatic, almost to the point of discounting the astronomical evidence…

People need to be aware that there is a range of models that could explain the observations,’ Ellis argues. ‘For instance, I can construct you a spherically symmetrical universe with Earth at its center, and you cannot disprove it based on observation.’ Ellis has published a paper on this. ‘You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds. In my view there is absolutely nothing wrong in that. What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide that.”[3]

“‘When [Robert] Broom came into the room he walked straight past me, straight past some of my staff who were with me and immediately dropped to his knees in front of the Taung fossil,’[4] recalls [Raymond] Dart. ‘Broom said it was ‘in adoration of our ancestors.’ It was a remarkable occasion. I was very surprised.’”[5]

“Clifford Jolly, a British researcher at New York University, proposed the new hypothesis in a new classic paper in 1970, titled simply, ‘The Seed Eaters.’ The term ‘classic’ is used here, as in most fields of science, to mean that the paper is almost certainly wrong in every detail, except one: its underlying philosophy.”[6]

Atheism and science
Biochemists and molecular biologists had come up with a date beyond which they did not believe hominids could have existed. Vincent Sarich wrote:

“‘One no longer has the option of considering a fossil specimen older than about eight million years a hominid no matter what it looks like.’[7] In other words, he did not care whether Ramapithecus looked like Australopithecus or even Homo sapiens. It was simply too old to be a hominid….Even Louis Leakey joined in the fray, admitting first that ‘I am not qualified to discuss the biochemical evidence,’[8] and then going on to assert that it must be wrong because it was at variance with the fossil record…This initial line of criticism by the paleoanthropologists is unequivocal: the biochemistry is wrong because it doesn’t agree with the fossils. Period.”[9]

“Contamination with older rocks in therefore an ever-present danger in using material from these so-called reworked tuffs.”[10]

“Fitch and Miller’s radiometric date [of 2.61 million years] was out of sync with the story the animal fossils seemed to be telling.”[11]

Atheism and science
Basil Cooke; paleontologist at Dalhousie University, Canada:

“For Cooke, the obvious comparisons with the Koobi Fora pigs implied that the date of 2.61 million years for the KBS Tuff must be wrong, because he judged the pigs found below it to be more like 2 million years old.”[12]

“In the end it got quite heated, and proper argument eventually gave way to ‘You are completely wrong,’ to which the reply was ‘No, you are completely wrong.’ Sounds like faith, not science, doesn’t it?’”[13]

John Harris, “we were very unhappy at having to fit what seemed like a logical evolutionary sequence into a scheme that made nonsense of it.”[14]

“With hindsight it is clear that we were really very naive about the difficulties of dating geologically young zircons,’[15] Gleadow observes. ‘However, the highly charged atmosphere surrounding the KBS controversy meant that any result we produced took on an exaggerated significance and produced a certain feeling of implicit pressure (imagine maybe) to publish without delay. I wish we had waited but I guess that is the lesson of the whole KBS story.’”[16]

“Fitch and Miller now contend, the reason they got such a confusing spread of dates was that the material they were given to analyze had been mistakenly collected from a series of tuffs other than the KBS…Leakey finds this explanation less than convincing. ‘It is a most extraordinary explanation,’[17] he says. ‘I am as sure of where that first sample site is as I am about where my house is.’”[18]

“As Smithsonian Museum scientist Gerrit Miller observed in 1928: ‘Among recent subjects of animated scientific and popular controversy both in and out of print there is perhaps none that has aroused more widespread interest than the discussion of human ‘missing links.’’[19] And to judge by subsequent history, some of which has been recounted in that pages of this book, nothing much has changed since Miller’s time.”[20]

[1] B. C. Johnson, The Atheist Debater’s Handbook (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1983), pp. 39-40
[2] Michael Ruse, How Evolution Became A Religion—Creationists correct?: Darwinians wrongly mix science with morality, politics [National Post 5-13-00]
[3] W. Wayt Gibbs, “Profile: George F. R. Ellis – Thinking Globally, Acting Universally,” Scientific American, Oct. 1995, pp. 54-55
[4] Interview with the author, Philadelphia, 23 May 1985
[5] Roger Lewin, Bones of Contention (New York, NY: A Touchstone Book published by Simon & Schuster Inc., 1987), p. 78
[6] Ibid., p. 98
[7] “A Molecular Approach to the Question of Human Origins,” in Background for Man, edited by V. M. Sarich and P. J. Dolhinow, published by Little, Brown, 1971, p. 76
[8] “The Relationship of African Apes, Man, and Old World Monkeys,” in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 67, p. 746 (1970)
[9] Lewin, pp. 105, 111
[10] Ibid., p. 192
[11] Ibid., p. 195
[12] Ibid., p. 197
[13] Ibid., p. 226 citing an interview with the author, 21 Nov. 1985
[14] Ibid., p. 237 citing an interview with the author, Los Angeles, 18 Nov. 1985
[15] Ibid., p. 247 citing a letter, Gleadow to author, 21 Mar. 1985
[16] Ibid., p. 247
[17] Ibid., p. 249 citing an interview with the author, Nairobi, 22 Jan. 1985
[18] Ibid., p. 249
[19] “The Controversy over Human Missing Links,” Smithsonian Report for 1928, p. 413
[20] Lewin, p. 301