Why are scientists so fond of contradicting themselves? Scientists like to believe they are the most logical people on earth but time and time again I find them trying to rationalise their own preconceived notions. I love reading science magazines but I find this dishonesty or blindness very frustrating. Sometimes I think I’m more scientific than the scientists!
Here’s something from Isaac Asimov.
Indeed, humans, as creatures who behave in a purposeful, motivated way, naturally tend to attribute purpose even to inanimate nature. Scientists call this attitude teleological, and try to avoid such a way of thinking and speaking as much as they can. But in describing the results of evolution, it is so convenient to speak in terms of development toward more efficient ends that even among scientists all but the most fanatical purists occasionally lapse into teleology. Let us however try to avoid teleology in considering the development of the nervous system and the brain. Nature did not design the brain, it came about as the result of a long series of evolutionary accidents, so to speak, which happened to produce helpful features that at each stage gave an advantage to organisms possessing them. In the fight for survival, an animal that was more sensitive to changes in the environment than its competitors, and could respond to them faster, would be favored by natural selection. If, for instance, an animal happened to possess some spot on its body that was exceptionally sensitive to light, the advantage would be so great that evolution of eye spots, and eventually of eyes, would follow almost inevitably. [Asimov’s New Guide to Science (Revised Edition) 1987.]
First, Asimov said everything happened by accident. No design, no guide, no aim, no purpose whatsoever. He called the human brain the most complex object in the known universe, but we got that purely by a happy series of meaningless events. (By the way, the brain is so complex scientists today are still struggling to figure out how it works.)
Right after that, he brought up “natural selection”. So there is a purpose after all - survival! For some strange reason, all life is fighting to survive. That is the standard or benchmark all living organisms aim for. And the guy who set the criteria is a chap called Natural Selection. Whatever he is, all scientists agree that he is NOT God! Call him Mother Nature or Mr Evolution, but never never Creator! That’s a sin that will get you excommunicated from the Church of Scientism!
So there are two things all good scientists accept without a hint of irony:
1) There is no God because we can’t prove there is no God.
2) Everything happened by accident but guided by natural selection.
Amazing mental gymnastics, if you ask me.
Here’s another passage I came across recently.
Piet immediately suggested a design for multiply nested binary star graphstellation that would have the delightful technical designation “hyper-super-duper double-star system”: a pair of a pair of a pair of double stars. 16 total. This configuration would be stable and unlikely to interact with nearby stars. It also would do no harm to the solar system or life on Earth, should we end up as part of the formation. The set-up phase would coax pairs of stars into headings destined to bring them into mutual embrace in such a way that the pairings would eventually pair as well, and so on. Such a structure would be vanishingly unlikely to come about naturally, and it would be recognizable at a great distance. An alien observer wouldn’t have to be able to discern all the individual stars in order to notice that something funny was going on; the alien would only have to note subtle changes in the qualities of the light, wobbles in the position, and other clues. [Jaron Lanier; Discover; February 2008.]
What this guy is proposing is to adjust the positions of nearby stars using the gravitational pull of space crafts so that aliens from outer space can detect our presence. Which begs my question, if we can look at the human brain and say it was created by a series of accidents over millions of years, why should an alien look at our “graphstellation” and conclude it’s man-made?
Enough said!
[Image from crystalinks.com]
