Rhetorical Outbursts

On my way out of town before the Christmas break, I exchanged several emails with friend of mine about the Pennsylvania court case on teaching intelligent design in public schools. He and I have previously debated which has a more corrosive effect on young children, exposure to explicit depictions of violence or explicit depictions of sex. He worries less about his kids stumbling on to a porn site on the internet than he does about them stumbling onto a violent movie on television. I took the opposite position.

Anyway, here is a bit of our exchange on ID theory and Darwinism. I had emailed him on an unrelated work matter, and he replied out of the blue:

How about that intelligent design case. Did you agree with the PA court [ruling (PDF)]?

I was caught a bit off guard. I think he asked just because he is a smart and naturally curious person who is a little perplexed at my being unapologetically “fundamentalist.” So, I took the bait and sent back more than he probably expected:

Frankly, I haven’t followed the case.

Fortunately, we and millions of homeschoolers aren’t much interested anymore. If the state wants to indoctrinate other people’s children with the lie that science requires denying the metaphysical or a presumption against God — then have at it. Just leave us alone and give us our tax money back, so we aren’t forced to support the propagation of a religious faith in materialism. We will teach our children the truth. Science actually presupposes God, and that presumption was essential to its historical development.

We’re not just bags of chemicals walking around as products of random chance. We are beings who love and write symphonies and ponder the origins of our own existence. I don’t look at Mt. Rushmore and say, “Gee, look what the wind and rain did to those rocks over millions of years.” Only a dogmatic materialist could do that.

See The Wonder of the World:

Well, for modern science to work, for the very possibility of a scientific method that bears fruit in theory and experiment, we must make certain basic assumptions about the nature of the world. For instance, we can’t “do” science in the sense of seeking out underlying causes and laws if we didn’t believe that the world operates with causes and laws. Nor could we pursue our inquiries if we didn’t think our minds are capable of making deductions and reaching valid conclusions.

But why should we believe any of these assumptions to be true? And how did we come up with them in the first place? . . .The fact of the matter is that science and the scientific method didn’t drop out of nowhere. There’s a framework of thought behind science that goes beyond the methods of science. It’s a set of pre-scientific and pre-philosophical insights accepted by the first scientists.

* * *

Most scientists are too busy (as they should be) building on the foundations to worry about the foundations themselves. But if we assume (as science does and must) that there’s rationality in the world embodied in the laws of nature, then we should know if and why this assumption is true and what it implies.

* * *

But where did the idea of such “laws” come from? Not from atheists or materialists. Intellectually it originated in the idea of a divine Mind who instituted immutable laws of nature (as even critics of the concept of laws of nature admit).

Going straight to the point, my friend then asked:

So, do you believe Darwin’s theory of evolution has merit?

To which I replied:

It depends on what you mean by that. If you mean natural selection as the sole mechanism responsible for all species of life on earth, then its merit is in serious doubt b/c it doesn’t adequately explain the fossil record.

See Gerald Schroeder:

The abrupt appearance in the fossil record of new species is so common that the journal Science, the bastion of pure scientific thinking, featured the title, “Did Darwin get it all right?” And answered the question: no. The appearance of wings is a classic example. There is no hint in the fossil record that wings are about to come into existence. And they do, fully formed. We may have to change our concept of evolution to accommodate a reality that the development of life has within it something exotic at work, some process totally unexpected that produces these sudden developments. The change in paradigm would be similar to the era in physics when classical logical Newtonian physics was modified by the totally illogical (illogical by human standards of logic) phenomena observed in quantum physics, including the quantized, stepwise changes in the emission of radiation by a body even as the temperature of the body increases smoothly.

(But, I’m more interested in what you think of the legality of the NSA intercepts.)

Having changed the subject, we then began discussing a topic on which we had much more in common.