Nancy Pearcey writes:
For starters, the affirmation of design is good for science.
How can beginning with the conclusion be good for science?
Suppose scientists want find out about the nature of gravity. How is it going to help them if they start by asserting that gravity is the result of invisible pixies pulling and pushing things toward the centre of the earth? Why would anyone want to do research if the result was already 'known'? And what if your research points to a different solution? Would you publish? After all, the scientific world has already decided that pixies cause gravity, so maybe it would not be a very good career move to publish something that goes against the grain.
I think the affirmation of design is a very
bad thing for science.
The human mind inherently seeks intelligible order. Thus the conviction that such an order exists to be found is a crucial assumption.
Suppose the human mind seeks to find a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. According to Nancy Pearcey's logic, the conviction that such a pot of gold exists to be found is a crucial assumption. Well, crucial or not, it is also a false assumption. Wanting something doesn't make it so.
No scientists are going to find their work diminished because they ground it in the search for an inbuilt design in nature.
They are if they are going about it the wrong way around. Good scientists
end with a conclusion, which must be testable by other scientists. ID-ers
start with their conclusion and mold every finding in such a way as to fit their preconceived notions. That's not how science should be done.
[...] modern science could have arisen only in a culture convinced that the universe is the creation of a rational mind--and is thus intelligible to our rational minds. This explains why science arose historically in medieval Europe, a period when western civilization was saturated with Christianity.
This is patently false. The Middle Ages were a period of stagnation, in which science was stymied, probably
because western civilization was saturated with Christianity. Western science historically arose in ancient Greece, was preserved during the Middle Ages in the Arab world and only revived in Europe during the Renaissance and the subsequent Enlightenment. If anything, Christianity has brought science almost to a standstill.
Steve Fuller, a sociologist of science, offers this as one reason he testified for ID in the recent court case in Dover, Pa. "The idea that religion provided intellectual sustenance for science," he explained on a recent blog, is "obviously borne out by history."
I think Giordano Bruno, Nicolaus Copernicus, and Galileo Galilei, to name a few, would beg to differ. They had ideas about the cosmos, and man's place in it, that went against Christian dogma. Today however, we know that their ideas, although not entirely accurate, were at least a step in the right direction. The church, on the other hand, did not move at all. We'd still be in the Dark Ages if the church had had its way.
This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 04-May-2006 12:07 AM
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.
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