Abraham Redux: Please Focus on the Issue
| December 8, 2007 | Posted by Barry Arrington under Intelligent Design |
In the post below Dr. Dembski brought the Abraham case to our attention and asked whether it is legitimate to fire an employee merely because of his beliefs as opposed to his job performance. The discussion rapidly deteriated into speculation about possible reasons Woods Hole might have terminated Abraham for poor performance. All of those speculations are idle and beside the point. Dr. Dembski asked, “Is it legitimate to fire someone because of their beliefs?” It is simply no answer to that question to say, “Well maybe they fired him for reasons other than his beliefs.”
The purpose of this post is to attempt to focus the discussion back on the issue Dr. Dembski raised, which is a very profound issue in my view.
A copy of Abrham’s federal court complaint is here. I would like to focus on the following sworn allegations:
16. Plaintiff’s work with Defendants focused on zebrafish developmental biology, toxicology and programmed cell death areas of reseach which required no acceptance, or application of , the theory of evolution as scientific fact.
17. Plaintiff at all times, before his employment began while helping to design and construct the lab and during his employment, performed exemplary work and was often praised and commended by [his supervisor] and other staff members for the quality of his research, commitment and scientific presentations.
20. Plaintiff assured Defendants that he was willing to analyze aspects of his research using evolutionary concepts if warranted . . . but his sincerely held religous belief did not allow him to accept the theory of evolution as a scientific fact.
30. Plaintiff was fired even though acceptance of evolution as scientific fact rather than theory (in contravention of his sincerely held religious beliefs) was in no way a bona fide occupational qualification of employment, was not previously mentioned or implied as a requisite for hiring, and was never listed among necessary critera for the advertised position by Defendants.
I am not saying these sworn allegations are true. We do not know if Abraham will be able to prove them at trial. However, in order to focus the discussion on the issue Dr. Dembski raised, all commenters to this thread should assume for the sake of argument that the sworn allegations are in fact true.
The debate question for this post is: “Assuming paragraphs 16, 17, 20 and 30 of Abraham’s complaint are true, Woods Hole’s termination of Abraham was wrong.”
71 Responses to Abraham Redux: Please Focus on the Issue
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It appears that Mr. Irons is not only a smarmy lawyer, but a religious bigot to boot. I wonder whether he has made the trek to Virginia and danced on Falwell’s grave. As a quid quo pro, one might suggest that there’s still an empty seat on that bus full of lawyers.
I looked up the Alliance Defense Fund; it’s a family values law firm, which opposes homosexual marriage, and “gays in the military.” Presumably, gay bashing now means that one may not seek to preserve an institution that has served the human race well, albeit in a variety of forms, at least since Abraham was called out from Ur of the Chaldees, and when one is keeping an eye out for incoming lead, you have to cover your back also.
BarryA,
You have made the allegations drafted by an attorney and attested to by Abraham into Abraham’s own allegations. I think this is unfair to Abraham, but I will play along for the sake of argument.
For Abraham to frame the allegation in such terms is a sure sign that he is a scientific and philosophical cretin. In the language of scientists, a scientific fact is no more than a well-supported scientific theory. Whether or not the instruction sticks, most Americans attending public schools are told repeatedly that the “fact” in “scientific fact” does not have the plain-language meaning of “fact.”
If Abraham cannot demonstrate that his religious beliefs dictate that he diverge from his scientific colleagues in the meanings he assigns to two terms of art, scientific theory and scientific fact, then he has demonstrated low competence by harping on a distinction without a difference.
I emphasize that this may well be unfair to Abraham. The words are clearly his attorney’s, and not his. I would not guess that the attorney is a scientific cretin. He or she probably caught on to the meaning of scientific fact as a child, and is likely using the term fact equivocally to stir up a cloud of dust. My attorney friends admit to doing such things.
It appears that Woods Hole has reached the apogee of the fanaticism begun by Galileo in his joust with the Church. Prior to that incident, hypotheses were commonly seen as mere reasoning and/or calculating devices used to “save the appearances”, a philosophical position nowadays called instrumentalism. Note that “saving the appearances” had nothing to do with truth, it was nothing more than an intellectual game that did have practical consequences: for instance, you could predict eclipses. This instrumentalist approach had been used for millennia (for example, see Ptolemy’s Almagest, dated around 150 Anno Domini). This is exactly what Dr. Abraham in fact did; he treated Darwinian evolution ex hypothesi, operating within a tradition millennia old. (I think lawyers do the same kind of “for the sake of argument” thing in court on a daily basis. Barry could affirm or deny, I would accept his authoritative judgment.)
Now, Galileo sought to replace this instrumentalism with the notion that a hypothesis that “saves all the appearances” is the Truth (big T). Woods Hole seems to have called Galileo and raised him one. You are expected to believe the Truth of Darwin without any demonstration that the appearances are saved. I call this Gnosis, not science and it’s a science stopper.
Galileo dispute with the Church had nothing to do with science or any resistance to a change in thinking by the Church. Galileo undermined the authority of the pope who was in the midst of the 30 Years War and trying to deal with conflicts between two Catholic Powers, France and the Hapsburgs who were on opposite sides in the war.
As such Galileo had to be squelched because not for scientific reasons but for political ones as he took it upon himself that he knew best how scripture should be interpreted and this made it difficult for the Catholic Church in handling Protestantism which places a much higher importance on literal reading of the scriptures than the Catholic Church did.
Most fail to recognize that many of Galileo’s astronomy predictions were actually wrong as was a lot of his other theories. Kepler made better predictions and he preceded Galileo. The heliocentric theory was not fully supported till about 200 years later when the parallax problem was solved. What Galileo did best was formalize thinking on gravity which led to Newton’s laws some 30 years after he died. One could even argue that without Galileo’s work on gravity, we would not have had Newton’s laws so quickly.
semiotic
It’s nothing but pedantry to say there is no such thing as a fact in science. Do you think it’s just a strong theory that water can exist as a solid, liquid, or gas? That’s a scientific fact. Science is chock full of what anyone but a pedant would call facts. Historic biology is really hypothetical if you want to be precise about it – it doesn’t even rise to the level of theory to say nothing of considering it to be a fact such as the solid, liquid, and gas phases of H2O.
Galileo’s run-in with the Church had everything to do with the Aristoleans at the universities who did not want their world-view challenged. It was those academics who convinced the Church that their world-view and the Bible were in-sync. And it was they who had the Church go after Galileo.
History 101
Joseph,
I am sorry but that is not in sync with what happened. The pope was a personal friend of Galileo and approved the printing of his book and supported his work if he would make the stipulation that it was a hypothesis yet to be proven. That way there would be no pressure on how scripture should be interpreted at the moment which was in the middle of a major war between Catholics and Protestants. In the book Galileo had a dialog between three people and one was portrayed at a simpleton and that is where the pope’ hypothesis stipulation went, into the mouth of a simpleton.
There was a fight between the French and the Hapsburgs going on at the time and The French wanted to replace the pope and were using this dispute as part of their campaign to replace the pope. The French Catholic were helping the Protestant Germans fight the Catholic Haspburgs. It was all about power and politics and nothing about science. Galileo’s book came out in the midst of this fight and made the pope look like a simpleton when in fact the pope had supported Galileo in his scientific efforts.
The theory of the day that fit the data the best was that of Tycho Brahe which was geo centric. Brahe data was better than Galileo’s data. Kepler’s data was even better but not as well know. Galileo knew of Kepler but did not use it. He also knew of Brahe’s data which was better than his. Also no one could solve the parallax problem nor the wind problem. A rotating earth had to be spinning a 1000 miles per hour at the equator and this should have generated huge winds but there were none and these two phenomena supported a geo centric solar system. Eventually these would be solved but not for a long time. The parallax problem was solved in 1838. So until that time Galileo’s ideas were just a hypothesis and his particular one was a bad one.
Galileo was very smart but an arrogant a–hole who was full of himself and pushed the wrong way too hard and was justifiably shut down. He essentially thought he could undermine a pope during a major war. He was sentenced to a cruel life in the comfy chair at his luxurious estate.
We owe a lot to Galileo including his finding of Jupiter’s moons and that they revolved around Jupiter and thus supported the Comperican theory. However, Galileo’s greatest achievments were in gravity.
History 301
The following is from The Crime of Galileo:
“It has been known for a long time that a major part of the church intellectuals were on the side of Galileo, while the clearest opposition to him came from secular ideas.”
The following is a review of the book:
See also Galileo and the Church:
Wow it looks like what I originally stated is in-sync with what happened. Go figure…
DaveScot,
Solid, liquid, and gas are labels scientists have assigned to observed states of matter. A defunct scientific fact is that all matter is in exactly one of those states. Physicists have found it useful to designate various other states. Given the proliferation of names for states of matter, it is conceivable that there will come a day when physicists find it useful to adopt a simpler nomenclature. The states might be defined as properties of fundamental stuff like strings (not to say that string theory is viable). We have no basis for saying that solid, liquid, and gas will have any more scientific utility over the long term than earth, air, fire, and water.
People know the fact (in the plain-language sense of fact) that water may be solid, liquid, or gas by a process that stands outside of science proper. The scientific fact is a matter of definition, but the corresponding fact is taken as reality. Interestingly, the scientific fact that most matter in the visible universe is in the plasma state has no reality for most people. It used to be that stars were made of gas, but now they’re “really” made of plasma. People often believe facts that derive from outdated scientific facts.
These considerations should not seem like mere pedantry to Nathaniel Abraham, whose doctorate is in philosophy.
Joseph,
That happened in 1615. He was given a mild censure in 1615. Galileo was sentenced 18 years later by the Inquisition in 1633 to house arrest for a book that was written that year and was in the middle of the 30 Years War and purposely made the pope, his friend, look bad. It turns out a lot of the science in his book was bad but he wanted to reinterpret scripture anyway which was a source or real tension then.
I suggest you get two courses from the Teaching Company by scholars in the History of Science. Most are available form local libraries. Each debunks the claims that Galileo was hounded or unfairly sentenced. He was told to not claim his ideas were theories but hypotheses. The popes and most of the powerful cardinals were his friends and he repaid them by disobeying them on how he was to present his ideas.
The two Teaching Company courses are “Science and Religion” by Lawrence M. Principe from John Hopkins. and “Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It ” by Stephen Goldman of Lehigh and probably one of the most knowledgeable professors in the country on the history of science. He is a fountain of information about just everything having to do with science. Goldman spends a half hour on Galileo and Principe spends an hour on the controversy.
Goldman on the Teaching Company website says about Galileo; “But the church was actually correct that he had no basis for claiming the heliocentric theory was true, rather than simply an interpretation of experience.”
Here is what is said on Principe’s Teaching Company website “Moving from the early centuries of the Christian era and the Middle Ages to our own day, he exposes the truth about the Galileo Affair…”
As I said Galileo was an arrogant a–hole. In England they would have had him beheaded for making the king look bad. In Florence he only got house arrest during a time of major crisis.
—–Jerry, writes, “As I said Galileo was an arrogant a–hole. In England they would have had him beheaded for making the king look bad. In Florence he only got house arrest during a time of major crisis.’
This is true. He pushed the envelope almost to the point of a dare, stepping out of his role as scientist and claiming theological expertise. He even presumed to reinterpret the meaning of scripture so that it would harmonize with his yet-to-be-confirmed theory, even as the Church was fending off charges about not taking scripture seriously. He was doing the very thing that he had promised not to do. The politically correct versions of this event are spectacularly misleading.