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.
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.
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.
You cannot disprove philosophy with science, and the fools are those who think they can.
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.
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.
Quite simply, science gets results, religion doesn't.
What do you think if last Thursday is? Because the rest of your arguments apply equally to that and neither have real world consequences.
It also predicted a single origin for all/most life, which presented a lot of problems for the theory before we understood things like continental drift.
Aside from that, it gave us one of the first hints that simple rules can create complex behaviors, which is important to a lot of sciences.
One man looks at the universe and thinks, "Someone must have created this, for nothing can exist without having been created." Another man looks at the universe and thinks, "I cannot see who created this, therefore no one did."
Who has the better case? Who has more evidence? Of course, it's a matter of interpretation.
But the same can be said for your assertion about the philosophical burden of proof and claim for an idea. One man claims, "I cannot see who created, therefore there is no creator. If you think someone created it, the burden of proof is upon you." Another man says, "It exists, therefore someone created it. If you think no one created it, the burden of proof is upon you to explain how something can exist without having been created."
Whichever side you take requires making assumptions that lay the burden of proof on the other side. And if one were going to choose a side, I fail to see how the no-creator side is a stronger default position: the fact of the universe's existence is evidence that it was created. To disprove this would require demonstrating how something can exist without having been created.
The existence of a creator also requires that something can exist without having been created. The burden of proof for this is higher because there are 2 claims.
For example, Einstein's relativity theory predicted that gravity bends light, an effect that had never been observed. Decades later, the theory was confirmed when bent light was detected and the amount of the bend matched the theory's prediction.
The thing is, evolution is really simple. First there are random mutations, which are directly testable. Your DNA will be slightly wrong from your parents DNA. Secondly, there is environmental selection, also easily testable. Drop a house cat in the middle of the arctic and you'll see how it works, although there are much better (and humane) experiments that have been conducted. The testability is much more accessible to ordinary folk than Einsteins theory will ever be.
The final component is time, which is really what creationist take issue with. That's why you'll see them reject every branch of science except evolution.
But if we're talking about something going forward, which excludes the origin of humans, evolution definitely makes predictions (and creationism has nothing to say, AFAIK). We can see evolution in action with our own eyes in those recent "evolution of drug resistant bacteria" videos, and we can definitely make predictions about that and run cool experiments, but creationism isn't a part of those conversations. It's only about where humans first came from.
I'm not defending creationism (more generally: things that even a human isn't smart enough to do but yet WERE done, were done by being(s) smarter than humans) as an explanation, which I believe was only the most likely until we discovered a clearly superior and powerful explanation, but I'm a little puzzled at the "creationism is faith, evolution is theory" response. Evolution as explanation for the past seems like the same kind of thing as creationism, and creationism is only about explaining the past.
To my knowledge creationism has never made a prediction, nor has any new discovery confirmed anything about it.
Oh, I love the last point. I've met people like this - who are atheists for the same reason others are religious - because that's what they were taught and/or because it's cool these days. Religion vs. atheism in general population is not really about independent thinking - in general, people are equally poor at this, whether believers or non-believers.
> 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.
I think you need to have a proper "thinking framework" to explain it well. Like e.g. evolution seems awesome only until you get the feel of just how many checks it does to get to its goal. If you could do half as many checks yourself in a similar timeframe, you'd solve your problem yourself, along with countless others. Or with Bayesian filters, at some point you need to get the feel of how things are connected to one another via causality, and then it stops being a surprise[0].
What I'd wish people would do is to stop trying to score cheap shots off one another. I.e. there's a difference between believing in evolution as a a process and evolution as the only source of all the life around us. For the former, the very phenomenon, you need only:
- ability for a thing to make copies of itself
- ability of an environment to make changes on the blueprint of those copies
That's it. You have those two things, you have evolution by definition. It's a trivial thing to accept once you understand how it works (which sadly, schools tend to not explain well). On the other hand, I sympathize with people who have troubles accepting that this very phenomenon could by itself create all life we know, ourselves included. Ultimately it boils down to whether you trust "science" or "religion" more, and frankly, there's plenty of reasons to distrust both nowadays. Keep in mind that for a typical person, science is not just GPS and cars and cell phones, it's also (and primarily) all the utter bullshit they read in science sections of newspapers and magazines.
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[0] - Tangentially, it also makes you realize that you can only get away with a lie because the party that's being lied to doesn't bother to check things - things are connected together via causal links on so many levels that you really can't tell a perfect lie. Personally, it also makes me believe that the quest for privacy is a moot thing, because it again only depends on how much people bother to dig out the information they want; technology is only making the process of looking at causal links easier and faster.
Yes! I am so disappointed every time I see people effectively talking past each other, arguing about "creationism" and "evolution" when each party has their own definitions of the words.
What if both theories are correct? What if an intelligent being designed the evolutionary process and set it in motion, with or without some nudging here and there along the way? It seems like false dichotomies must be responsible for so much needless fighting throughout history.
Lots of people are ready to make definitive statements about creationism without ever having studied the subject. Unless I am mistaken, creationism is not taught in universities, so one could only make EDUCATED statements about it if one had put the personal effort into studying creationism independently. And if a person had done that, they are unlikely to be making glib statements about how foolish creationists are, instead they would be blogging on the subject where there is enough space to make reasoned arguments.
People who say that creationists are fools, are just like people who are politically correct, or like right-wing extremist ideologues (Christian or Muslim). They are true-believers who have received wisdom from their chosen prophet (who may be a biology professor) but they are not thinking and reasoning.
Thinking is hard. Reasoning is even harder. But I would hope that on HN, there is a larger population of thinkers and reasoners than in the general public.
I'm not even going to state my beliefs on the subject because I am happy to let all of you believe what you want to. Evolution is a useful tool for biological life, but as the article states, it is not the be-all and end-all. It certainly does not negate creationism in all its forms because if it did, I would have heard of the paper which demonstrated this proof. Since I have heard of no such paper, and I know of no biology department in which creationism is studied, I feel confident in saying that evolution has not trumped creationism. I'm even willing to allow that some well-described theory of creationism in the future, could include evolutionary theory and the current neutral genomic mutation theory as part of a larger whole.
Elsewhere in this thread someone said that creationists are fools. I'm assuming its because they believe in a theory of the world that's not correct. By that standard, so are people who believe in Big Bang, evolution, and e=mc2 because they are just best approximations waiting to be replaced by something less wrong.
In my other comment I made a joke about evolution being intelligently designed and instantly got downvoted. It just shows, just like you say, that hardcore atheists are true believers - its belief, not knowledge, just like any religion.
How, brainwashing aside?
There are necessarily missing links in the chain of causality, ones which science cannot fill. Even if you believe popular theories of the origin of the universe, such theories only go back so far, and they do not explain what caused the events they describe. For example, where did the big bang's matter come from?
Which requires more faith: to believe that a being set in motion the processes we observe today, or that they happened by chance? Who is the fool: one who believes that someone must have created this universe, or one who believes that it exists without a cause?
If you tell me that something can exist without having been created, where is your proof? Is not your belief in that theory itself a matter of faith? How, then, do you call others fools who have their own faiths? Of course, you answered this question yourself: compartmentalization.
All it does is create an infinite regress of what created god.
Really? So, tell me then, why are we here? What is the purpose of our life, if there is one? What happens after we die? Or are these mysteries not still left?
> All it does is create an infinite regress of what created god.
Yes, that's right. But saying that, "Since we then cannot answer the question of where God came from, God must not exist" is not logical. The existence of another turtle does not disprove the previous turtle. By your logic, since we cannot explain what created the universe, the universe must not exist.
"But saying that, "Since we then cannot answer the question of where God came from, God must not exist" is not logical."
I see what you're saying, but I think GP may be arguing whether or not that is useful.
For example, what does it say about God beyond that God exists? You ask some good questions, in particular what is the purpose of our life. Does the existence of a prime mover help us decide this? I think we need something more.
> You ask some good questions, in particular what is the purpose of our life. Does the existence of a prime mover help us decide this? I think we need something more.
That depends on whether you believe the prime mover has communicated with us. If you do not, then there would not be much you could do with the knowledge of its existence, so it would not be very useful or relevant. But if you do, then it would surely help us decide, wouldn't it?
I think you've hit the nail on the head here. This brings us to the question is how do you move from the existence of a prime mover to the belief that the prime mover has communicated with us. It's not clear to me that existence implies such communication. And if it doesn't, it's not clear to me that the existence of the prime mover in and of itself is doing any useful work.
On the other hand, proving that there is no prime mover is a well-known difficult problem as well :)
I think you're basically right: it doesn't necessarily imply that. So, since there are so many claims in this world of evidence of the creator's communication with us, it's up to each person to examine the claims for himself--or to not do so: ignorance is bliss, until the moment of truth.
Meaning of life? Who said there is one? You seem to be switching gods to suit your argument. A meaning to life implies a god that cares, not the non interfering prime mover you seem to be arguing for elsewhere.
As for an afterlife, there isn't one sorry. There is precisely zero evidence of any sort of afterlife. There is no physical explanation of how it may be possible.
> Yes, that's right. But saying that, "Since we then cannot answer the question of where God came from, God must not exist" is not logical. The existence of another turtle does not disprove the previous turtle. By your logic, since we cannot explain what created the universe, the universe must not exist.
The point is it doesn't explain anything. It's either infinite regress or you have to accept the universe or god was created spontaneously. At that point Occam's razor eliminates god.
Having said that, you seem to be implying that the same standard of evidence should apply to both science and philosophy/religion, which doesn't make sense. For example, trying to use a computer-related analogy, demanding scientific evidence for an afterlife would be like trying to access VM host memory from within a guest: what happens in the host happens outside the realm of the guest, and the guest cannot (or should not be able to, if properly implemented) directly access host memory.
The bottom line is that you cannot prove or disprove philosophy with science.
Other faiths seem to have found workarounds for this problem. Islam, for instance, has no Nicene creed. There's just the "There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his prophet" thing. Instead, Muslims empower their imams to interpret the religion at the local level. This, of course, leads to violent conflict when leaders from different sects disagree with each other.
The progress made by Christianity over the centuries can arguably be credited to the prescriptive tradition shared by almost all of its denominations. Christ supposedly appointed Peter as his vicar on Earth. It seems perilous -- historically, if not spiritually -- to dismiss the importance of that act.
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.
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.