I enjoyed this paragraph from Dembsi's writing. He is a fascinating thinker. He goes on using a nice example for illustration in the second paragraph below. Anyone who would reflexively call this kind of thinker a "snake oil salesman" or anything of the sort is way out of bounds.
President Bush has opened up a political can-of-worms with his comment recently. I think he is just going to sit back and let the Mainstream Liberal Media and other completely convinced Darwin worshipers walk down a slope of indignation, shock and outrage and laugh. In the end, he should ask which statement has more validity.
"In the beginning was the word, and the word was with GOD, and the word was GOD, he was with GOD in the beginning. And through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made that has been made, in him was life, and that life was the light of men."
Or....
"In the beginning were the particles, and the impersonal laws of physics. And the particles somehow become complex living stuff on their own power, assisted only by the laws. The stuff imagined GOD, but then discovered evolution."
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To call some area of inquiry “not science” or “unscientific” or to label it “religion” or “myth” is within contemporary western culture a common maneuver for discrediting an idea. Physicist David Lindley (1993), for instance, to discredit cosmological theories that outstrip experimental data or verification, calls such theories “myths.” Writer and medical doctor Michael Crichton (2003), in his Caltech Michelin lecture, criticizes the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) as follows: “SETI is not science. SETI is unquestionably a religion. Faith is defined as the firm belief in something for which there is no proof…. The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief. SETI is a religion.” Crichton’s criticism, however, seems extreme. In the past, NASA has funded SETI research. And even if the actual search for alien intelligences has thus far proved unsuccessful, SETI’s methods of search and the possibility of these methods proving successful validate SETI as a legitimate scientific enterprise.
Radio astronomers discover a long sequence of prime numbers from outer space. Because the sequence is long, it is complex. Moreover, because the sequence is mathematically significant, it can be characterized independently of the physical processes that bring it about. As a consequence, it is also specified. Thus, when the radio astronomers in Contact observe specified complexity in this sequence of numbers, they have convincing evidence of extraterrestrial
intelligence. Granted, real-life SETI researchers have thus far failed to detect designed signals from outer space. The point to note, however, is that Sagan based the SETI researchers’ methods of design detection on actual scientific practice. |
