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Rush Limbaugh Reviews “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” on Talk Radio
| March 22, 2008 | Posted by Dave S. under Intelligent Design |
40 Responses to Rush Limbaugh Reviews “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” on Talk Radio
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I suppose one can look at ID two ways, either as a twenty year old science project in its adolescence, or as a 2500 year old expression of teleology in nature. That means, I suppose, that either of us could be right, depending on which way you look at it.
For me, Jefferson was simply an 18th -Century installment in a long history of design thinkers. Some have suggested that, perhsps, he would have abandoned that tradition if he had lived in Darwin’s time. I am arguing against that proposition.
Obviouly, I can’t know for sure, just as you suggest. However, I submit that there are still only four possible world views to consider: YEC, ID evolution; TE evolution, or pure Darwinism. To me, it is clear that Jefferson could only have been at home in the #2 formulation for reasons I gave at post #28.
larrynormanfan: thanks for your response. Here are my thoughts on 31.
Here is what existed in the early 1700′s in a lecture on the Enlightenment. I am not so sure there is much new in all this debate. Anti design was at the heart of the Enlightenment.
A slight paraphrase from Alan Kors on the beginning of the Enlightenment from a Teaching Company lecture.
The new philosophy – the embrace of empiricism, learning from experience. The quantification, nature reducible to mathematical law. In the new knowledge, the more universal, the more general the law, the more powerful the explanation is deemed to be. For example, f=ma or gravity varies inversely with the square of the distance between two objects. Two such simple laws that made much of the universe comprehensible. The new philosophy is also a cultural and religious revolution as well as a philosophical revolution. This coincided with an overturn of witchcraft in the late 17th century of persecutions which were rampant in the early 17th century. A removal of superstition about witches but also much more. One sees this in the location of God’s providence to natural law. In the ordinary but wondrous order and operation of nature.
For this generation it was like there had always been in the center of town a complex clock. The clock was a mechanical marvel such that each hour a figure came out and struck the proper number of sounds. It was like there was an invisible agent that coordinated all the movements of the clock and figure. There must have been an invisible being to keep things running right for the clock. Similarly there must a similar person who did the same thing for the world to give us the appearance of order. But when one understands the operation of natural law, one realizes that the clock was created with mechanisms that coordinate the actions reflecting the extraordinary intelligence of the creator of the clock.
It is very easy to reflect with religious awe from the particular (the clock) to the general, from interventions in the natural order to the creation of natural order itself. It produces what can be ascribed as a new religious aesthetic in what seems most supreme and wise and infinitely intelligent and infinitely powerful about God is not particular providence, intervention in the world to bring about such things as rain or the bodies healing but the very general laws of providence that lead to survival, to the procreation of species to a relationship between human beings and nature in which crops grow and life might flourish.
But note that this poses problems for religious belief of Christian Europe that will haunt and obsess the 18th century. For it raises the problems of miracles. If God’s providence is to be located in the general laws of nature, if the wisdom is in the self regulating design of the world, then an intervention would be like someone having come and repair that clock in the town square. And if what one admires is the infinite wisdom of the original design intervention poses a real problem for that admiration.
Knowledge and science is superior than the ancients and is cumulative. The ancients may have had better poets, playwrights, better architects but science gets better and better. Knowledge creates progress. The more we know the real causes of things, the more we can change the world to the human heart’s desire for happiness. This new philosophy believes itself to be deeply religious. It creates problems for religion because it removes theology from things not properly in its sphere. It looks for a theology that is consisting with and evolving with increases in natural knowledge. This leads to further secularizing the West.
The new philosophy is to admire not the miraculous from the bible but admire the order in the world. This is seen in the Declaration of Independence with the statement of the pursuit of happiness is self evident from nature and ordained by God Himself. These transformations occurred within Christian culture.
Anti religious and anti Christian thought and secularism arise as the unintended consequences of this deep theological perspective.
This was from a lecture so the grammar etc was not what would be expected from a written presentation and I did some paraphrasing.
My summation of this is that this religious perspective in the 1700′s had the seeds of its own destruction in its beliefs and has been at work for 300 years. The recent results can be seen with the complete secularization of Europe and our intellectual classes here in the US. It has destroyed both Protestant and Catholic influence in Europe.
In other words, TE’s started early in the 1700′s and are a dying breed today. They claim intellectual and theological superiority but are really just the small remnant of a dying philosophy. According to Darwinian ideas they are not one of the fittest.
Jerry, an intereesting perspective on #33, incorporating several interconnected themes.
A clear case of design inference by Jefferson, to which all signatories to the Declaration of Indepedence gave their assent:
jerry (33):
Thanks for the transcription. What Kors says about Enlightenment thought is common knowledge, but I’m impressed by how much he manages to convey in a few words. As he points out,
And as I said in 23,
Jefferson was fully an Enlightenment figure, and I see him as helping to “kill” the God that had previously been the focus of Western culture. After Eighteenth Century thinkers essentially “put God in his place” and set Reason and scientific discovery on high, it was easy for Nineteenth Century thinkers to conclude that the notion of God was unnecessary baggage. What most Christians don’t understand about Nietzsche is that he offered profound insights into how those who came before him had “killed” God.
You say:
America is secularized from top to bottom. You may think that God is alive in America because most people can recite John 3:16 from the KJV and are willing, when asked, to “confess” that they “believeth on Him,” but I contend that most of those people are indistinguishable in daily life from agnostics and atheists. The typical American understands neither religion nor science, and holds an awful pastiche of beliefs from the two.
As I have said elsewhere, those who care particularly much that evolutionary theory conflicts with their religious beliefs overvalue science. As I see it, the excessive value associated with reason and science in the Age of Enlightenment is at the root of the secularized, lukewarm “religious” belief prevalent in contemporary American culture. I also hold that the ID movement grossly overvalues reason and science, and that it is haplessly contributing to the entrenchment of the spiritual malaise it seeks to remedy.
Turner Coates,
I do not disagree with you that what Kors has said is common belief in academic and other intellectural circles. However, it was not present in the US 50 years ago even in much of academia. What has happened since to cause the change is certainly debatable.
I ascribe the changes as the result of a lack of belief in God or the Judeo Christian story. And I believe the Darwiniån theory is part of this undermining. Just look at how Richard Dawkins proclaims it. He believes it too. But obviously, Dawkins was not there first.
There is a long history of small changes that have led to what we see today. I also believe the incredible prosperity due to science and technology after WW II has contributed immensely too. We have traveled from poverty and an incredible awe ot what God has created to the ho hum of that is just how it is and by the way can “I get my IPOD cheaper and my music free.”
Side note: People sometimes tell me they believe in evolution, and I respond that I do not. Then I explain that I believe that present evolutionary theory is a good scientific explanation of the diversity of living things on earth, that I expect the main features of the theory not to be falsified, and that I expect substantive modifications to the theory in the near future. I also tell them that I do not believe in any scientific theory.
I do believe in creation, but my knowledge of that is utterly private. By direct apperception I see creation as continual. But there’s no way to make my subjective experience into an object of empirical investigation. And that doesn’t bother me in the least. What I know is what I know.
To assert that shared scientific knowledge is categorically superior to individual knowledge is to assault epistemology with a club. There are philosophical Neanderthals among both the IDists and the atheists.
jerry (37):
Dawkins is foremost among the Neanderthals I mentioned in 38.
I think people today respond psychologically to the “miracles of modern science” much as they would phenomena with supernatural causes. They understand science so poorly that all they can do in response to its feats is to feel awe. And their awe generally leads them to vest faith in scientific claims, provided those claims do not obviously conflict with others in which they’ve vested faith.
Science educators often attempt to motivate students by filling them with awe at what science has accomplished. I strenuously object to this strategy. I believe that educators should attempt to convey honestly what a flawed and highly utilitarian enterprise science is, rather than present it as a noble Quest for Truth.
IDists seem to ignore the fact that awe at what science allows us to do is no warrant for accepting scientific explanations as true. They are concerned only when they consider specific claims of science untrue. It seems to me that ID advocates want to make science into something one can believe in, and I must repeat that scientific explanations do not merit this sort of belief.
Turner Coates,
There is a point of view of fighting fire with fire. This does not mean that this is the only tool in the box but I have not seen the other tools work so well. This science tool has got a lot of notice. I prefer just falsifying Darwinian evolution and forgetting about ID which as you see on another thread is already past 500 comments and has gotten nowhere.
One objection to the use of science to show the necessity of intervention is just what is phrased in the Kors lecture about the need to repair the system and what that means about the designer. But the elimination of that concept of God repairing the system and exalting him to even greater heights has led us to our current circumstance where God is not needed.