Expelled at Biola — Ben Stein Receives the Phillip Johnson Award
| March 28, 2008 | Posted by GilDodgen under Expelled |
Last evening I attended a big Expelled event at Biola University in La Mirada, California. Presenters included Ben Stein, Walt Ruloff, Caroline Crocker, Guillermo Gonzalez, Stephen Meyer, and Biola faculty.
Expelled executive producer Walt Ruloff began with a short presentation. He talked about his background in computer technology and how he founded a logistics-optimization software company in his early 20s that became spectacularly successful, primarily, according to Walt, because they thought outside the box and questioned everything.
After Walt sold his company he became involved with the biological research and technology world, and discovered that the exact opposite was the case: people in this field were and are not allowed to ask questions. Walt was totally shocked when it was revealed to him by one of the leading genomic researchers in the U.S., who gets all his funding from the NIH and NSF, that the only way to get funding is to pretend to believe in Darwinian orthodoxy. Even more horrifyingly, this leading genomic researcher (whose face is blacked out and voice disguised in the movie, to protect him from the destruction of his life and career by Darwinists) said that as much as 30% of the research in his field is shelved and never published because it might provide ammunition for “creationists.” In order to stand any chance of being published, interpretations of biological research must be artificially force-fit into the Darwinian paradigm, regardless of the evidence.
Walt decided to do something about it.
Ben Stein talked about his early years in the civil-rights movement, and how he and others in that movement were spat upon, denigrated and vilified, because they dared to challenge the reigning racist orthodoxy.
Caroline Crocker talked about how she was blacklisted in academia for daring to suggest that there might be problems with orthodox Darwinism, even though her students could not detect what her personal opinions were.
Guillermo gave a timeline about his expulsion from academia, for daring to suggest that there might be evidence of design in the universe.
The main thing that struck me about Caroline and Guillermo was that they displayed no hostility or vitriol toward their persecutors. Think about this, and what it indicates about personal character on both sides.
At the end of the evening Ben was presented with the Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth, to a thunderous standing ovation.
While accepting the award, Ben commented that in the end ID will win, because the truth is on our side. He also commented that Americans don’t like to be bullied and told what to think — by anyone.
I paraphrase Ben: “People don’t like to be told that what is obviously true is false.”
Amen to that.
Gil
101 Responses to Expelled at Biola — Ben Stein Receives the Phillip Johnson Award
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congregate
All the examples you gave serve to falsify common descent. I have no problem with common descent and neither do many other (perhaps not most) ID proponents. ID doesn’t do anything to either dispute or confirm common descent.
So if we define evolution as just “descent with modification” and leave out the part about random variation and natural selection being the underlying mechanism then you and I will no longer have much to disagree about.
What all us ID proponents have in common is we don’t believe that chance and necessity is an adequate mechanism to create all the required modifications that occured during the course of evolution. We believe that only intelligent agency is the only demonstrated means of some of those modifications. The modifications we’re talking about can be basically summed up (in my words) as the creation of novel cell types, tissue types, organs, and body plans. Evolution didn’t happen without changes in all four categories. Chance & necessity has never been observed or been demonstrated by experiment to be sufficient to generate those novelties.
Well Dave, as I understand the standard theory of evolution, those major modifications would have to have occurred over long periods of time, and would likely have occurred in small populations. We aren’t likely to see any of them happen in a single human lifetime. If ID predicts something different, maybe we will.
So what evidence could there be? Fossils. The fossil record as you know is not exhaustive; as far as we know it does not currently provide evidence reflecting every existing species at any particular point in time (let alone two points relatively close together), and seems unlikely ever to do so. Most cell types, tissue types and organ types are soft tissue that is particularly unlikely to fossilize. Most body plans seem to have appeared before the evolution of hard tissue at all. Nevertheless there are some transitional series that many scientists consider compelling evidence for stepwise transitions. Given the unlikelihood of genes fossilizing, there is no way to be sure exactly how closely the organisms in those series are related. The regulars here have heard about them before and are not compelled.
I guess I don’t believe there is a smoking gun for either side out there. But I think the evidence fits pretty well with the standard evolutionary theory. And I don’t see how there could be any evidence which would falsify frontloading by some unknown entity (or any other proposed ID hypothesis). Insects have six-legged body plan, while mammals have four, and reptiles have zero or four? Frontloaded that way. Yeast can reproduce asexually or sexually? Frontloaded that way. Marsupials common in Australia, placental mammals in the rest of the world? Designed that way.
I think as a matter of science Occam’s Razor cuts against the explanation which requires the positing of a designer which leaves no signs except ambiguous ones in its design work.
You say elsewhere you love a mystery. Which is the more elegant, satisfying and useful solution to this mystery?
C:
You are again leaving out the crucial issue: functionally specified, complex information:
Second, in claiming an inadequate fossil record [just as was claimed by Darwin] you leave off the key point on sampling theory.
Namely, that by far and away, most samples of a population resemble the population to a great extent. For NDT-style macroevolution to be true, there had to have been multiplied millions of major transitions, which would show up on a cross section of perhaps hundreds of thousands of fossil species [as classified] in the multiplied millions of fossils collected over the years; significant numbers [probably hundreds or thousands] of clear — not just-so story — transitional cases should have turned up in the past 200 years or so of active fossil collection.
But, what has happened is that we now probably have fewer candidates for transitional forms than in Darwin’s day!
The gaps in the fossil record are very real, and they have been plainly real for a long time. So much so, that various ad hoc hyps are now put forth to blunt their message.
And, that means that Occam’s Razor is cutting away all right, but not as you seem to imagine.
GEM of TKI
kf-
If it’s so clear and obvious to you, why is it not generally accepted?
1) conspiracy of millions of materialists (many of whom belong to various religious faiths) to deny the obvious
2) millions of materialists are so deep in denial they can’t see the obvious
3) Satan
4) perhaps you are mistaken?
5) other
What is the most likely explanation for this conundrum?
congregate: If you are going to offer kairosfocus a multiple-choice quiz, you ought to at least include the correct answer as one of your options.
Inasmuch as 95.8% of evolutionary biologists are atheist/agnostic, it just may be that they are not kindly disposed to any scientific enterprise that discusses non-material realities.
congregate
This certainly would not be the first time that a theory accepted by the majority was in actuality erroneous so I dont see how going dow this path helps you much. I would recommend “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn.
Furthermore I would think that for a theory that is so well accepted and apparently so well docuemnted you should have little prolem in providing the evidence KF has requested from you.
So far the best that you can do is say that the evidence for the mechanism of evolution (rmns)is comon descent as if common descent can possibly be the proof of the mechanism. This is nothing but a circular argument.
Your second line of argument is nothing more than another fallacious argument ie the argument from authority. Everyone belives i to be so therefore it must be so.
What is sadly lacking is EVIDENCE. Do you have any for KF?
Vivid
StephenB- Go back one more time to my multiple choice answers, if you will and read option number 5.
There is no scientific enterprise which discusses non-material realities, whatever those are. Science is and for the last several centuries has been the search for natural explanations of the natural world. To the extent it has been a search for non-natural explanations, as I think some here claim, it has been an abysmal failure. Can anyone here list the non-natural explanations that are generally accepted in the scientific community?
Science cannot disprove the existence of non-material realities. Science cannot rule out intelligent design. All scientists can do is say “this is my best sense of how it happened.”
Vivid-
If you go back and read kf’s posts here, and his always linked, I think you will see that he is familiar with all the evidence and finds it sadly lacking. There is nothing I or anyone else can produce that would change his mind. He knows how many bits were in the first self-replicating molecule for God’s sake. Nobody else can imagine what it was, and he’s counting its bits! How is any mere blog commenter going to tell him anything he hasn’t heard and dismissed in five well padded numbered paragraphs before?
C — and SteveB and VB:
First, Steve and VB, thanks on the challenge to provide evidence of spontaneous, chance + necessity only origin of FSCI, in general and as required to support the Darwinian style story of origins.
For, indeed, no authority — singular or collective — is any better than that authority’s facts, assumptions and reasoning.
C, further to Steve’s remark:
Kindly, first, observe the recent attempts to redefine science as in effect the best evolutionary materialist account of the cosmos, from hydrogen to humans. In short, there is plainly a lot of closed-minded question-begging going on, in a context where most scientists of today’s generation are woefully ignorant to the point of being laymen on the relevant history and phil issues on defining science or addressing the challenge of the logic of induction, especially the inference to best explanation form that is at the heart of scientific investigations.
Indeed, it would well repay us all to take time to re-read Plato’s Parable of the Cave, with an eye on the apparatus of manipulation that that worthy discussed [but which is glided over as a rule in most modern discussions that rush on to his theory of the forms; the Matrix movie series at least gets that part right].
Then, think about the state of science in the early decades of C17, where by far and away most scientists accepted the longstanding Ptolemaic picture as extended and elaborated across time — the longest run of a scientific theory of all time, I’d say: 1500 years, and which was giving a “reasonable” view of the data in hand.
Were they and their “consensus” right?
The point is that scientific views are always provisional and are subject to evidence.
Kindly provide same, as I asked.
GEM of TKI
—–”StephenB- Go back one more time to my multiple choice answers, if you will and read option number 5.”
Fair enought. The option was indeed there
—–”There is no scientific enterprise which discusses non-material realities, whatever those are. Science is and for the last several centuries has been the search for natural explanations of the natural world.”
Not so fair. Methodological naturalism is the new kid on the block, and this new kid has become a juvenile delinquent. It is one thing to “emphasize” the importance of natural explanations; it is quite another thing to close the door to anything else. The emphasis has been around for a while, but the iron clad rule is new and destructive. Science is contingent on the current state of knowledge. Things change. The discovery of coded information has given us a whole new ball game. The insistence that everything remain excatly the same no matter what the circumstances is nothing short of psychotic.
C:
I find a couple of points in your onward responses that appear at 97 – 98 very illuminating, but not in a happy way:
1] 97: There is no scientific enterprise which discusses non-material realities, whatever those are. Science is and for the last several centuries has been the search for natural explanations of the natural world.
Historically false and philosphically question-begging — as long since pointed out and linked at 101 level.
For starters, “several centuries” carries us back to C17, the period of the scientific revolution. As for instance Newton [C17 - 18] and Maxwell [C19] and Kelvin [C19 - 20] or for that matter today’s gene gun inventor, Sandford [C20 - 21]exemplify, a great many of the founders of science — and for that matter many effective or even eminent practitioners to this day [where they are not censored from speaking their minds!] — affirm that they are exploring the order of God’s universe. (As a tid-bit FYI, much of Maxwell’s conception of electromagnetism had to do with the way his church was thinking about the doctrine of the Trinity in light of a systems-oriented view!)
The classic term for this approach to science was: thinking God’s thoughts after him. If you are not familiar with that term, think about what that means about just how deeply censored your education has been.
Second, there is a category confusion: when one explains natural regularities one seeks for mechanical necessities that reliably give rise to those low-contingency patterns. But, science also studies high-contingency situations [not least, the accounts of geology and biology of origins try to address such], and so must advert to causal factors competent to account for high contingency — chance and/or agency. Indeed, the application of statistics [e.g. Fisherian style null-hyp rejecting hypothesis testing and ANOVA] and control vs treatment studies to scientific investigations address precisely the challenge of discriminating chance and intent. Going further, the inference to message in the face of noise in communication science and information theory, has much to do with discerning the characteristics of agency vs chance processes.
So, science in fact routinely addresses the three causal factors and understands that contingency, complexity and [functional] specificity are relevant signs of which factors predominate.
What is really happening is that by imposing the “natural explanations” criterion, certain factions in science and philosophy are seeking to smuggle in the back door, that if inference to agent action in a particular context might possibly challenge the evolutionary materialist picture of origins, from hydrogen to humans, then it is rejected by being question-beggingly tagged “unscientific.”
That is tantamount to saying that science is redefined as applied atheism.
It also censors inference to the best explanation, by turning it into inference to the best materialistic explanation. But, science properly is an empirically anchored search for the truth about our world.
Let us hear the classic definitions of science and its method again:
2] There is no scientific enterprise which discusses non-material realities, whatever those are.
Kindly explain to me the precise nature of mathematical and informational entities . . .
3] If you [Vivid] go back and read kf’s posts here, and his always linked, I think you will see that he is familiar with all the evidence and finds it sadly lacking. There is nothing I or anyone else can produce that would change his mind . . .
I find this return to an ad hominem, in the teeth of my protest above at 84, all too sadly telling:
4] He knows how many bits were in the first self-replicating molecule for God’s sake. Nobody else can imagine what it was, and he’s counting its bits!
C, this strawman caricature is really disappointing.
You will kindly note that I have pointed out that observed life forms exhibit DNA chains of from 300 – 500,000 base pairs to approximately 3 bn. That is a fact, and it is a further fact that the lower end are “too simple” i.e. these are organisms which depend on others to provide essential nutrients that they lack the ability to internally create. [Indeed, ~ 1 mn bases is more like a reasonable estimate, but I am being generous.]
I have then pointed out that this is the empirical data that has to be accounted for: a config space of order at the absolute low end, beyond which life functionality disintegrates, about 4 ^300,00 ~ 10^180,000. [Or do you want me to not round down from 360,000?]. In such a space, we will find biofunctional, code-bearing configs to be lost, not least because the code is optimised to give stop codons if something goes wrong. And that is before we ask where did the rest of the algorithm-processing machinery to get life to work come from.
I have a very simple explanation, as per Trevors and Abel:
So, when you then resort to critiques of style, that is telling on want of substance.
Indeed, it brings to mind a remark or two from the original post:
There is a word for that: censorship, plainly in service to the suppression of the known or knowable but inconvenient truth.
If that uncomfortably echoes the parable of Plato’s Cave and Rom 1:18 – 32, so be it: certainly, I did not make it so.
“Who de cap fit, let ‘im wear it . . .”
GEM of TKI