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"You don’t have to be a benighted creationist, nor even a believer in divine providence, to argue that Darwin’s astonishing theory doesn’t fully explain why nat

"You don’t have to be a benighted creationist, nor even a believer in divine providence, to argue that Darwin’s astonishing theory doesn’t fully explain why nature is so marvelously, endlessly inventive." Interesting article but why are we still bringing up creationism. This whole apologist / sympathizing attitude needs to be changed. It adds no value to the article except ridicules itself.

kwhitefoot 10y ago
"You don’t have to be a benighted creationist, nor even a believer in divine providence, to argue that Darwin’s astonishing theory doesn’t fully explain why nature is so marvelously, endlessly inventive." But you probably would have to be to think that the argument was relevant to Darwin's theory. Darwin book is titled: "The Origin of Species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life". That is to say, it is explicitly not about how the variation comes about but about how the variation becomes fixed.
spacehacker 10y ago
Indeed. Until we can quantify nature's computational power and the computational complexity of evolving solutions to problems in nature, the only sensible response to the fact that evolution works extremely well is no response because we lack comparisons. Evolution only surprises us when we falsely (or at least without good reason) regard nature and our own creative abilities to belong to the same reference class. There are also already plenty of clues for why evolution works, e.g. distributed representations, parallelization, composition counteracting combinatorial explosions, selection for structures that evolve faster/better (kind of like learning to learn) etc.
SiVal 10y ago
This whole apologist / sympathizing attitude needs to be changed I don't know, as an atheist myself I think the attitude of smug arrogance embodied in terms like "benighted creationist" is the real problem, not that even acknowledging a theory that has been believed in some form by most humans who ever lived is too kind. A person can be a creationist without being a fool and can be a believer in evolution by nothing more enlightened than a lack of independent thinking in an environment where atheism is in fashion among the cool kids. I'll have to say that I'm astonished again and again when I write code that uses some "mindless" search process (including numerous experiments with evolutionary algorithms) and it finds the answer to some problem that I couldn't reason through. I can't seem to get over the feeling that if I have to reason to solve a certain problem, and I can't reason well enough to solve it, and another "thing" does solve it, it must reason better than I do--be smarter than I am--even when I wrote the code that did it. It gives me a sense of "awe" for the power of evolution and a lasting "sympathetic attitude" toward those who just can't believe that it could work this well. Like the power of a simple, naive bayes spam sorter to "interpret the text of email", evolution is one of those things that, even when I can explain it well enough to actually implement it with my own hands, it's still hard for me to believe.
- flukus 10y ago
  > I don't know, as an atheist myself I think the attitude of smug arrogance embodied in terms like "benighted creationist" is the real problem, not that even acknowledging a theory that has been believed in some form by most humans who ever lived is too kind. Creationism was never a scientific theory. And I think we can give a free pass to people being creationist before the theory was created and before it was taught in schools. Modern day creationist though, they are fools.
  - alphapapa 10y ago
    The idea that the universe was created by an intelligent being is not a scientific theory and cannot be disproven by science. It is not in competition with scientific theories of evolution or even, for example, big bang theories, because neither of them can explain why the universe exists, where it came from, etc. If you believe in the big bang, then what caused it, where did the matter come from, etc? You cannot disprove philosophy with science, and the fools are those who think they can.
    - flukus 10y ago
      Sure, there are limits to out knowledge, atheists are a lot happier to say they don't know than most religious folk I've come across. But what your describing is very different to most creationist, you've pushed the god of gaps back to a level where it's largely irrelevant. Most creationist are the 6000 year old earth kind, which has been disproven by several major branches of science.
      - alphapapa 10y ago
        > Sure, there are limits to out knowledge, atheists are a lot happier to say they don't know than most religious folk I've come across. So, if a person says, "I don't know, but I still believe," is that not an example of faith? How, then, can you claim that atheism and/or, shall we say, "sciencism", are more rational belief systems than Creationism, Christianity, etc, given that they both ultimately rely on faith? The atheist says, "Creationists are fools because they have no proof of their creator," while the creationist says, "Atheists are fools because they have no proof of what created." What's the difference? Who has more faith: the one who sees something that exists and believes that something created it, or the one who sees something that exists and believes it was not created? Is either one not faith-based? Does either one not have missing links in its assumed chain? > But what your describing is very different to most creationist, you've pushed the god of gaps back to a level where it's largely irrelevant. How is it not relevant whether an intelligent being created the universe? If the universe was created by an intelligent being, what does it matter how it was done, through natural processes set in motion or by blinking into existence in an advanced state? If the universe was created by an intelligent being, wouldn't that be much more important than how? > Most creationist are the 6000 year old earth kind, which has been disproven by several major branches of science. To be strictly fair, this is not true, because it does not engage with that kind of creationism's assumptions. If one believes that an intelligent being created the universe from nothing, including all the physical laws from subatomic to intergalactic, why would it be beyond that being's ability to create the Earth in a state advanced far beyond its actual age? Besides, in matters like this, what is time, anyway? Einstein showed that it's relative--and if an intelligent being created the rules that Einstein discovered, could not that being bend its own rules? In other words, you unfairly ascribe to the "6000 year old earth kind" an inconsistency which it does not actually bear; you do not engage with it on its own terms. If you do not accept its assumptions, that's fine--your disagreement then lies with them, not with a false inconsistency. Ultimately, the most important question is of who or what created the universe, not how or when it was created. The former makes a difference in how we should lead our lives, while the latter is merely interesting.

kwhitefoot 10y ago

"You don’t have to be a benighted creationist, nor even a believer in divine providence, to argue that Darwin’s astonishing theory doesn’t fully explain why nature is so marvelously, endlessly inventive." But you probably would have to be to think that the argument was relevant to Darwin's theory. Darwin book is titled: "The Origin of Species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life". That is to say, it is explicitly not about how the variation comes about but about how the variation becomes fixed.

spacehacker 10y ago

Indeed. Until we can quantify nature's computational power and the computational complexity of evolving solutions to problems in nature, the only sensible response to the fact that evolution works extremely well is no response because we lack comparisons. Evolution only surprises us when we falsely (or at least without good reason) regard nature and our own creative abilities to belong to the same reference class. There are also already plenty of clues for why evolution works, e.g. distributed representations, parallelization, composition counteracting combinatorial explosions, selection for structures that evolve faster/better (kind of like learning to learn) etc.

SiVal 10y ago

This whole apologist / sympathizing attitude needs to be changed I don't know, as an atheist myself I think the attitude of smug arrogance embodied in terms like "benighted creationist" is the real problem, not that even acknowledging a theory that has been believed in some form by most humans who ever lived is too kind. A person can be a creationist without being a fool and can be a believer in evolution by nothing more enlightened than a lack of independent thinking in an environment where atheism is in fashion among the cool kids. I'll have to say that I'm astonished again and again when I write code that uses some "mindless" search process (including numerous experiments with evolutionary algorithms) and it finds the answer to some problem that I couldn't reason through. I can't seem to get over the feeling that if I have to reason to solve a certain problem, and I can't reason well enough to solve it, and another "thing" does solve it, it must reason better than I do--be smarter than I am--even when I wrote the code that did it. It gives me a sense of "awe" for the power of evolution and a lasting "sympathetic attitude" toward those who just can't believe that it could work this well. Like the power of a simple, naive bayes spam sorter to "interpret the text of email", evolution is one of those things that, even when I can explain it well enough to actually implement it with my own hands, it's still hard for me to believe.

flukus 10y ago
> I don't know, as an atheist myself I think the attitude of smug arrogance embodied in terms like "benighted creationist" is the real problem, not that even acknowledging a theory that has been believed in some form by most humans who ever lived is too kind. Creationism was never a scientific theory. And I think we can give a free pass to people being creationist before the theory was created and before it was taught in schools. Modern day creationist though, they are fools.
- alphapapa 10y ago
  The idea that the universe was created by an intelligent being is not a scientific theory and cannot be disproven by science. It is not in competition with scientific theories of evolution or even, for example, big bang theories, because neither of them can explain why the universe exists, where it came from, etc. If you believe in the big bang, then what caused it, where did the matter come from, etc? You cannot disprove philosophy with science, and the fools are those who think they can.
  - flukus 10y ago
    Sure, there are limits to out knowledge, atheists are a lot happier to say they don't know than most religious folk I've come across. But what your describing is very different to most creationist, you've pushed the god of gaps back to a level where it's largely irrelevant. Most creationist are the 6000 year old earth kind, which has been disproven by several major branches of science.
    - alphapapa 10y ago
      > Sure, there are limits to out knowledge, atheists are a lot happier to say they don't know than most religious folk I've come across. So, if a person says, "I don't know, but I still believe," is that not an example of faith? How, then, can you claim that atheism and/or, shall we say, "sciencism", are more rational belief systems than Creationism, Christianity, etc, given that they both ultimately rely on faith? The atheist says, "Creationists are fools because they have no proof of their creator," while the creationist says, "Atheists are fools because they have no proof of what created." What's the difference? Who has more faith: the one who sees something that exists and believes that something created it, or the one who sees something that exists and believes it was not created? Is either one not faith-based? Does either one not have missing links in its assumed chain? > But what your describing is very different to most creationist, you've pushed the god of gaps back to a level where it's largely irrelevant. How is it not relevant whether an intelligent being created the universe? If the universe was created by an intelligent being, what does it matter how it was done, through natural processes set in motion or by blinking into existence in an advanced state? If the universe was created by an intelligent being, wouldn't that be much more important than how? > Most creationist are the 6000 year old earth kind, which has been disproven by several major branches of science. To be strictly fair, this is not true, because it does not engage with that kind of creationism's assumptions. If one believes that an intelligent being created the universe from nothing, including all the physical laws from subatomic to intergalactic, why would it be beyond that being's ability to create the Earth in a state advanced far beyond its actual age? Besides, in matters like this, what is time, anyway? Einstein showed that it's relative--and if an intelligent being created the rules that Einstein discovered, could not that being bend its own rules? In other words, you unfairly ascribe to the "6000 year old earth kind" an inconsistency which it does not actually bear; you do not engage with it on its own terms. If you do not accept its assumptions, that's fine--your disagreement then lies with them, not with a false inconsistency. Ultimately, the most important question is of who or what created the universe, not how or when it was created. The former makes a difference in how we should lead our lives, while the latter is merely interesting.