Some of you may have managed to catch some of the
videos that came out of
Beyond Belief 2006.
Neil deGrasse Tyson was a speaker and he raised an interesting point that I'd like to bring forward for discussion here at EvC. I'm sure most of us have heard Newton being referenced as invoking an intelligent designer. "I am compelled to ascribe ye frame of this Systeme to an intelligent Agent" - Principia
And clearly, since Newton was one of the greatest geniuses that ever lived and published...we should give some credit to the idea. Here is Tyson's argument in written format, if you have a few hundred MB on your hard drive, you can watch the
full argument. They call Tyson 'the Revererend' for good reason, the talk is not stuffy or boring. Here goes.
Ptolemy
circa AD 150 Ptolemy codified the geocentric universe that became the standard model until Copernicus and Galileo. Ptolemy's work was named,
Almagest. Ptolemy reached a boundary between what was known and what was unknown and in the margins of this great book he wrote:
Ptolemy writes:
I know that I am mortal by nature, and ephemeral; but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies I no longer touch the earth with my feet: I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia
It seems clear that at the limits of knowledge, people can find themselves having an almost religious experience. This, in its two millennia old way, is an invocation of intelligent design.
As truth seekers, it needs to be accepted that some of our greatest scientists and thinkers have done this very same thing.
Galileo
circa 1615. Famously wrote:
Galileo writes:
the Bible teaches how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go
and
But I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use
An early rebuke of the argument of design, you might say. Not long after this, came Newton however.
Newton
circa 1687
Newton was a genius of the highest order. Nobody can realistically call his brilliance into question when it came to describing the world around him. In the Principia he covers the laws of motion and gravity - which he managed to codify before he reached 26 years old!
Some interesting points: When he talks about motion: no reference to God.
When he talks of his 'two body force', no reference to God.
There was no need to invoke God. Newton clearly understood the subjects he was writing on, and God wasn't needed to explain any of it. The problem came when he tried to expand the two body problem and discuss multiple bodies (eg the solar system), at which point it gets very difficult. Using this simple approach Newton was unable to generate a stable model for the solar system.
Newton couldn't get a stable model, and he reaches a limit, a point past which he can't explain. He says:
Newton writes:
The six primary planets are revolving about the sun in circles concentric with the sun, and with motions directed towards the same parts, and almost in the same plane. Ten moons are revolving about the earth, Jupiter, and Saturn, in circles concentric with them, with the same direction of motion, and nearly in the planes of the orbits of those planets;”but it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions...This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being
And there we have Newton, invoking Intelligent Design when he got stuck on a difficult problem. This is important for two reasons. One I will get to in a moment, but the first is that we can say that invoking an intelligent designer isn't inherently the action of a stupid man. When you get to that limit - even the smartest among us, find the temptation to invoke a supreme designer.
Tyson makes an excellent observation here. Even if we manage to increase science understanding in the public - how can we expect them to do any better than the greatest minds that have walked about this earth?
Huygens
circa 1696
Another brilliant scientist, and well known for his work on Saturn. When he talks about the motions of the planets. No problem. The moons of Jupiter. No problem either. The rings around Saturn. Totally fine. Life. Err, err...God?
Huygens writes:
I suppose no body will deny but that there's somewhat more of Contrivance, somewhat more of Miracle in the production and growth of Plants and Animals than in lifeless heaps of inanimate Bodies. . . . For the finger of God, and the Wisdom of Divine Providence, is in them much more clearly manifested than in the other.
No need for a designer in planetary orbits here, but life? The invocation begins!
Laplace
circa 1799
Remember the problem Newton had? Laplace solved it. It took a long time, but it got solved. When asked what role God had in the regulation of the heavens, he reputedly replied:
Laplace writes:
I have no need of that hypothesis
Here is the important thing - Laplace was not smarter than Newton. Not by a long shot, in my opinion. How was able to see further than Newton, by standing on his shoulders? Well, by disregarding the need for a designer. The work Laplace did to solve Newton's dilemma, was well within Newton's capabilities as a mathematician. Newton's invocation inhibited him from solving a problem that remained unsolved for two centuries.
Laplace had shown the solar system could remain stable for longer than Newton was able, by shedding the baggage of a supreme designer of sorts.
Invoking an intelligent designer is a sure fire way to ensure your discovery stops.
Perhaps one day, this God of the Gaps, will be a correct argument. Maybe at the forefront of some scientific endevour,
God an intelligent designer is sat waiting to be discovered. As scientists though, we cannot allow the following reasoning to take place:
phenomenon x cannot be explained using the methods we have developed today. The only other explanation then, is that an intelligent agent is somehow behind it
It might be true, but if we do that, we could potentially set our discoveries back decades. Essentially, you've stopped doing science and you have taken to waiting for someone else to carry on the work and try to answer the puzzles. Not only that, but the argument itself is massively arrogant. When stumbling upon something you don't understand, invoking this argument is like saying "I don't understand it, if I can't understand it, nobody on earth can understand it. What's more, nobody who will ever live after me will be able to understand it. A designer, therefore, is the best solution."
The current ID movement claim a lot of things aren't explainable by current phenomenon, when they are, but that is not the point. That particular movement have a political agenda to push. Besides the political motivations and scientific errors, we still cannot allow science to accept 'Intelligent Design'. It has been part of science before, and it turned out to be straight forward ignorance.
If the greatest minds, if those that understand the problems better than anybody else in the world, if they say that the only way to explain something is by means of an intelligent designer - we have to reject it simply because it has happened before. Newton invoked ID, and about 100 years later it was shown to be unnecessary.
Therefore, Intelligent Design, by trying to demonstrate its truth by pointing out the supposed limits of our understanding, is not a philosophy of discovery (science), but a philosophy of ignorance. It is the philosophy that, we don't know how this could have happened so we'll just say a designer did it and draw a line under it.
Tyson makes a final point I'll bring forward here. This philosophy should be taught in science. It is a real pit fall that great scientists in the past have managed to fall into and it has hampered their science as a result. We should warn prospective scientists of the future of the easy temptation ID offers, and why we should remove such explanations from our scientific understanding because it has been shown to get in the way. Intelligent design is a real phenomenon, it happens to people, something happens to them and they conclude ID, right at the limits of their understanding.
There is a written copy of Tyson's argument, but the server is offline. For the moment you can look at the
google cache version. I make no claim at being able to express this idea better than he - but I think I managed to capture the essence enough for discussion here.
This should probably go in Intelligent Design forum.
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