Most creationists are motivated by their religious beliefs. I'm curious, are there any creationists who are entirely motivated by scientific beliefs, and not religious ones?
You mean the Big Bang? Ok, only joking. I thought scientists had just about demolished all the creationist/intelligent design stuff that the religionists keep inventing.
Apparently some have completely dishonest motivation. We attended a debate between a creationist and a real scientist in the early 1980s, when the Religious Redneck Retard Revival was gathering steam and the oxymoron "creation science" had just come into vogue. The religionist was much better at communication, which was no surprise since, as I have often opined on SciForums, most scientists tend to be crappy communicators, especially with laymen. His arguments were well-formed, his terminology was precise without being arcane, and he spoke clearly and persuasively to the arguments against creationism. But it was when he began to present his "evidence" that his true position began to reveal itself. He had spent considerable time combing through the fossil record, and had gathered only fossils that appeared, in isolation, to illustrate his point. He had spent considerable time reviewing papers on the subject, and had gathered only those that supported his thesis. They fell into two categories: Papers from poorly accredited (or unaccredited) church-sponsored universities like the now-defunct Ambassador College, and undergraduate papers from only slightly more respectable universities. It slowly dawned on us that he was in on the scam! He knew quite well that evolution is incontrovertible. He was simply attempting to recruit people who were stupid, ignorant, poorly educated, and/or hostile to science. Frankly, we couldn't figure out what his goal was. In any case, he didn't make any progress that night, since this particular venue for the debate was in Westwood, CA, barely a mile from the UCLA campus! The majority of the attendees were university graduates and upper-middle-class L.A. liberals. In any case, in the absence of any other hypothesis I suppose I'll have to agree with you that he was motivated by his religious beliefs. But since he obviously believed in evolution and knew that the evidence for it was overwhelming, I don't understand what he was trying to accomplish. A church in which the elders know the truth but carefully conceal it from the congregation in order to manipulate them? This sounds like the Middle Ages!
Hard to imagine such a person, really. If someone is motivated by scientific beliefs, they will, after reviewing all the available evidence, have no choice but to accept evolution. The only way they would fail to accept evolution is if they were ignorant of all the evidence for it – but this is highly unlikely since such evidence is ubiquitous.
Well yes, actually, I do know of one rather curious case. This is Steve Fuller, who is an academic sociologist who claims to be a secular humanist but nonetheless supports Intelligent Design. This, as many of readers will be aware, is a variety of creationism dressed up in the guise of science. More about Fuller here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Fuller_(sociologist) I suppose it is open to debate whether sociology is really science, but a lot of its practitioners would claim it is, or can be.
That raises the question: "creation" of what by what? Human beings create no end of artifacts, so obviously small-scale (presumably) naturalistic creation takes place all the time. If we are talking about life here on Earth, I suppose that there are people who insist that space-aliens created it or have at least guided mankind's emergence. If we are talking about the entire universe, I'm having trouble imagining what a non-religious creation theory would look like. The word 'create' seems to suggest some kind of intentional act by an intelligent agent. Otherwise a word like 'emanate' might be more appropriate. And it seems to me that an intelligent agent capable of creating entire universes would probably have to be something very similar to a god. It is notable that some of the proponents of 'anthropic' 'fine-tuning' arguments try to spin their theories as being non-religious. I'm personally skeptical about that.
Humans differ from animals in that we have free will. The human DNA evolved instincts over millions of years according to evolution. While free will allows us to choose apart from our genetic based instincts. Free will is something relatively new to the human brain, and it could override the instincts of the DNA. This is change in the human mind is what Genesis and Creation is all about. It documents the change in the human mind, perception and behavior. This change begins about the time of early civilization or 10,000 years ago, and consolidates with the invention of writing about 6000 years ago. The very first sentence of the bible says, "In the beginning was the word and word was God". The written word was invented 6000 years ago, the same as the writing of Genesis, which is one of the first applications of this new invention. The tree of knowledge of good and evil is law, since law define what is good and evil. If one was connected to instinct, like an animal, there is no need for law, since this is all innate within instinctive behavior. Law is needed when innate knowledge due to genetic instinct was no longer clear. Creation is a part of human evolution connected to when the human mind begins to transcends the DNA, but in the process of new choices, the new human becomes at odds with itself. The fall from paradise is the lost of that natural human instinct, based no millions of years of selection, that had guided humans until will power appears; Adam.
We would not be able to speak in terms of animal behavior, if they had free will, since each unique animal of a species would do its own thing. With humans we can't agree of what is normal or natural, such as with homosexuality, because there are those free will and choice wild cards which can create a wider range of behavior than natural. There is a way to infer natural instinct. Since, according to evolution, it is a product of natural selection, natural instinct is optimized to nature and can act as a stand alone group of behavior. Free will and choice creates new possibilities, but these may not be optimized to nature. That means if a behavior needs science and medicine to prop it up, and it can't stand on its own without prosthesis, than it is based on choice and not natural instinct. Natural selection would not have chosen a behavior doomed to death and disease under natural conditions but needs gimmicks of science and medicine to prop it up. If we took away condoms and medications, so things are natural, as we find in nature (animals don't use these) natural behavior would not see any additional attrition due to death and disease. Choice, which is possible, but not natural, will see increases in disease and death since it goes against natural due to choice. This behavior would not have been chosen by natural selection since it leads to problems not optimization. Natural selection is not about creating problems. In Genesis, choice and will power start to introduce unnatural, which without modern science and medicine to prop up, creates attrition. They would have called that bestial behavior since it is was hybrid between natural man and beast of choice.
Sociology, psychology, economics, linguistics, history and various other fields of study are referred to as the "soft sciences." "Science" because their practitioners do their best to apply the principles of science to their endeavors, and "soft" because not all of those principles can be used. For example, in psychology it is commonly unethical and often illegal to perform experimentation, one of the cornerstones of the scientific method. Linguistics, another example, has to work without evidence, another cornerstone, because for approximately 65,000 years languages evolved without being written down or recorded in any other way. Sociology is plagued by both of these handicaps: you might be thrown in jail or even assassinated for trying to perform experiments, and before the invention of the technology of writing in the Bronze Age, evidence is sketchy and easy to misinterpret. But this doesn't mean that psychologists, linguists and sociologists aren't scientists. Duh? For starters, many people are convinced that the universe is 100% deterministic, so nobody of any species has "free will" about anything. Those who call on the Heisenberg Principle to justify the assumption that the universe is not deterministic (at least not 100%), have quite a challenge to explain how random motion of quarks, leptons and bosons inside the atoms that comprise our brain cells has anything to do with "will" at all, rather than simply adding a truly random component to our behavior--and also to the behavior of every other organism as well as of volcanoes, decaying radioactive isotopes, and everything else in the universe. The phrase "free will" implies some sort of causal chain of events. We do A because we've seen how poorly things worked out the last time we did B and C. How can this be correlated with random motions? This is true of all chordates: mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish and cartilaginous fish. We all have a forebrain (which, humbly enough, evolved out of the olfactory lobe: our first intelligence was simply chasing after attractive smells because that implied good food was in the offing) which is programmed with a lot of logic gates and other things that we barely understand, including instincts. All chordates have instincts. For example, even as an infant, almost every chordate will run (or swim, fly, crawl, etc.) away from a larger animal with both eyes in front of its face because that is the face of a predator. More advanced chordates have more complex instincts. Certain male birds build elaborate nests including colorful baubles, and the females choose the mate with the prettiest nest. Balderdash. Have you never had a dog or a cat? Have you never seen a domesticated horse, goat, dog, cat, parrot, emu or koi? They make conscious choices every day, often conflicting with their instincts. The non-human apes in particular are fascinating. Many of them live in low-risk environments so they have plenty of time to kill, and they use that time to invent games. Members of at least two species (gorilla and chimpanzee) have been taught American Sign Language, and the conversations their trainers have with them are illuminating. They're curious and eager to absorb new information. Paleolithic humans (early stone age, before agriculture settled us down into permanent villages) had law, but it was instinctive. You don't kill a member of your own tribe. You share your food. You cooperate in hunting. You always do what Grandfather tells you. In a lean year (due to low rainfall) you fight to protect your tribe from other tribes because you're all desperate to encroach on each other's hunting and gathering territory. But in good years you have a summer festival where you swap hunting techniques, medicines, songs and stories... and a few daughters to keep the gene pool "chlorinated." Actually, law was needed precisely when the Agricultural Revolution occurred. It became obvious quickly that division of labor and economies of scale increase the productivity of a tribe, and both of these things were more easily attained by increasing the size of the tribe. So after hundreds of generations of sticking together and not cooperating with other tribes (except at the summer festival), it suddenly became advantageous to welcome them into the village in order to make it larger and more productive. But humans had an instinct to only trust and depend on people they had known since birth. Living in harmony and cooperation with strangers ran counter to our instincts. So they had to invent rules that made this coexistence both peaceful and profitable. Don't steal your neighbor's food. Leave his wife alone. Take turns watching the herds so the lions don't get them. Everyone must cooperate during harvest season. If you have a genuine problem, let the elders decide who's right, and obey their orders. We've been doing this ever since. Our villages keep getting larger: cities, states, nations, and now trans-national hegemonies like the E.U. Our rules have gotten more complicated and we have many more levels of "elders," as we find ourselves living in harmony and cooperation with people on the other side of the planet who are nothing more than anonymous abstractions--because it makes everybody happier, safer and more prosperous--at least when it's working. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Our laws now fill entire computers, but they have the same purpose as the first Neolithic laws (late stone age): they tell us how to get along with each other when our instincts aren't up to the task. It's interesting to notice that our dogs have taken a different path. In the few hundred human generations since the Agricultural Revolution, dogs have undergone several thousand generations. This is quite long enough for their instincts to evolve in order to align with their environment. Even though they are physically not much different from wolves (smaller brains for a diet with less meat, teeth more suited for chewing carrots than killing a bison, etc.), their instinctive behavior is much different from wolves. They have a very weak alpha instinct, allowing a human to be pack leader; they prefer "scavenging" for food (i.e. something out of a can) over hunting; they're much more gregarious, forming huge packs that include even other species; and they retain childhood behaviors like barking, wagging their tails, roughhousing and chasing sticks because that endears them to us. The wolves who were born without these traits wandered back into the forest--or in many cases were simply regarded as meat. Dogs have the instinct to be perfectly happy in a huge, complicated civilization. We don't, so we need laws. There's no need to invoke an invisible supernatural creature who controls human life. This is all plain old evolution. Oh come off it! Each human does not "do his own thing." The majority of our activities harmonize with our community. Shopping for groceries, cleaning the house, taking the kids to school, wearing clothes, obeying the traffic laws, being productive at the office, helping a neighbor with a problem. We are a pack-social species like wolves, dolphins and elephants, and we use our instincts to help the pack survive and prosper. People are occasionally born without that instinct (or damaged). We call them sociopaths. What bizarre assertions are you coming up with now??? Infant mortality was eighty percent from the first appearance of our species, right up until the end of the 19th century! The human species barely survived, because our women were always pregnant or nursing. In fact there was a major die-off about 60,000 years ago, during which the total population fell to about 10,000. (I could be a little off on those figures because I'm not going to bother looking them up right now.) There was a plague around 500CE that killed about half the entire population of the world, and another one a thousand years later that killed off half of the people in Europe. It was only at the dawn of the age of science that we took matters into our own hands and made the world safer. Covered sewers and clean water piped directly into homes made everything and everybody cleaner so they weren't covered with pathogens. Wrapped food kept people from swapping germs in the market, and the automobile did away with the shin-deep layer of fly-infested horse manure that covered the streets of every city. Finally, vaccines and antiobiotics saved the lives of the children who got sick anyway, so that today infant mortality is less than one percent and most people in the developed world don't even know somebody who lost a child! The "gimmicks of science and medicine" conquered the evils of nature! You're funny!
You miss the point. Nature does not use human science and medicine to mop up. Go to the woods and sees for yourself. This is done naturally, with natural selection the mechanism that assures that life continues. Once human free will appears, it becomes possible to choose that which is no longer connected to natural selection. If we also have science, we can compensate for this lack of natural selection by propping it up. This can create an illusion of natural since it appears to be sustainable. For example, eating glass fragments is not natural and would never be chosen by natural selection. It is all risk and no benefit. However, if we had a team of doctors, tools of science, and confidence men, we can compensate for the risk and lack of benefit and make this appear self sustaining. If we use propaganda and say this is natural, see for yourself, many will fall for the trick. I am only talking about will power choice and not things beyond our control like cancer or heart problems. Genesis is about the onset of this new human will power and choice, which could act apart from instinct. Some of these choice were progressive like making bread. This would be called God will. But others were regressive leading to death and disease. It is fairly easy to see how this unique experiment could go wrong since many choices like drugs, alcohol, sex are fun and additive. Choices like hard work are not as much fun. Without science and knowledge people would drift to pleasure and ease. This change was accelerated by the invention of writing about 6000 years ago. What writing did was create a solid platform for the new secondary center of perception (will power) that existed apart from natural human instinct. For example, say a group sees an event, but there is no writing, yet, the story will change with time and/or will be based on who is most convincing or the toughest. With writing, we all agree right after the events and wrote it down. Now when the story changes with time or politics, we can return to reality. Without writing reality may not last. This is a two edged swords since you can also write down perversions and use this a text material to spread a cult. Bit it can also be used to record the stars for early science.
I'm curious, how do you define a religious belief and a scientific belief ? Because, when it comes down to, there are some "leads" for creationism, which are almost all in old old texts, and, afaik, the only "recent" lead we have is the law of one , and i 'm sure most people will call even that religious. Or, what is a scientific belief ? does it need to be logical ? does it need to possible ? does it need to be proven truth ? Science is very different tool then religion, it is a shame some people mix it up with things like creation/non-creation. Religion is a way of live and control. science is about demolishing non-truth and fueling the different things we want to do, not deciding about what we want to do.
Is it right to 'believe' in science? Surely that's the wrong way to talk about it. Take evolution: surely you read about it, then look at the evidence, and then make an informed decision whether the theory is correct or not? It is nothing to do with belief, which implies, imho, taking something on trust.
That sentence is John 1:1 though, new testimony, so some 2.000 years old. We define what is good and evil, btw, through language(because they're words), morals(because they're concepts that we deal with even if/when unaware) and i suppose actions(though i rather argue these actions are part of morals)
Science and religion are different things. But there's always been considerable overlap and the boundary can be pretty fuzzy. There's natural theology, for instance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_theology In the last few decades a fairly influential new variety of something very much like natural theology has appeared, in the form of the 'anthropic' 'fine-tuning' arguments. These are (arguably) eminently scientific and in some cases they are even championed by ostensible atheists. Nevertheless, despite the scientific credentials, these kind of claims still look to my eye like a new variant on the age-old design-arguments for the existence of God. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_Universe
Have to say I rather agree. Any real situation has an infinitesimally small probability of existing, since there are so many factors that, had they been a bit different, would have led to a slightly different version of it. But only one permutation of these factors can actually be the case, and that is the one that reflects the actual situation. It seems to me the Anthropic or fine-tuniing argument suffers from the same logical fallacy.
