I’m not sure who John B. Andelin is, but he appears to be a pathologist in North Dakota. Certainly his 16-minute anti-evolution video below is pathological, for it simply takes quotes out of context, cherry-picks quotes, omits all the really good evidence for evolution, and mocks those Christians, like Ken Miller, who accept evolution. He also uses video clips of me to makes his points, but in the clip he shows (from the British Humanist meetings), I do note that the supernatural was once part of science, but was discarded. In other words, I contest the quote from Lewontin that Andelin uses to open this video.
Now I could go into detail refuting the stuff in the quotes or the data he cites, but why waste my time? I presume that most readers here have read Why Evolution is True, accept evolution, and are smart enough to realize that evolution doesn’t (as Lewontin implied) come from an a priori commitment to atheism. (Darwin, after all, began his studies as someone who accepted the Biblical view of life.) We don’t invoke God in evolutionary studies for two reasons: there is no empirical evidence for a creator God, and because we no longer need God to explain anything. The history of science is one of discarding one God-based explanation after another (e.g., lightning and infectious disease) as we discovered the true, naturalistic causes. Yet there could have been empirical evidence for God, and in Faith Versus Fact I give some evidence that would have convinced me that the Christian God existed. Needless to say, no such evidence has appeared.
The lighting is not good here, as it makes Andelin look somewhat Beelzebub-ish, and his angry demeanor doesn’t help. Oh, and, Dr. Andelin, the name of evolutionist Ernst Mayr is pronounced “Ernst MIRE”, not “Ernst MAYr” with a long “a”.
How many errors or deliberately misleading claims can you see in this 16-minute video? I disagree, however with John van Wyhe’s claim that Darwin’s Origin “didn’t have that much evidence” for evolution. It sure did: read the book for yourself!
To rebut this nonsense, I decided to just leave a comment on the YouTube video site, which I’ve put below (click to enlarge it). I hope that Andelin is better at diagnosing diseases than he is at understanding scientific data.
h/t: Mark
Wow – I never thought of that!
He’s got a whole new industry – take down things where there is no god :
The footwear industry
Municipal water treatment
Bingo
… the sky is the limit! Because, of course, god lives on a cloud straight up from where anyone is.
I watched a few minutes of this crap, then remembered I have better things to do with my life, like the shelves of books to read…besides, it brought to mind a few quotes, one, maybe George Bernard Shaw, which goes: “never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.”
Two, from Utah Phillips, (about conservatives/republicans) which goes something like: “republicans are like refrigerators; the light goes on, the light goes off, they won’t do anything that isn’t already programmed into them”.
And three, from Glen Campbell’s character in The Shootist, “ You’ve done nothing when you’ve bested a fool.”
Of course, prof, the world needs people like you who have the intellect, education, and the intestinal fortitude to knock these nitwits about from time to time. Thank you for that.
Well, all I did was best a fool. . . .
Thank you! Will use that line from the Shootist. Rubbing my hands together in glee!
Surely it was John Wayne in The Shootist, not Glen Campbell.
I only allowed a few seconds to come in. I bet he comments online in ALL CAPS.
The first error is in the first sentence, which you point out. His second sentence is also flat-out wrong. Methodological naturalism (I’ve never heard it pronounced as “methodologic naturalism”) is not atheistic. It makes a point of being agnostic, although I am sure he would consider that just as bad. If you want an atheistic philosophy, go to philosophical naturalism. That is in the next room, down the hall, next to the drinking fountain. Try not to get lost.
That just leads to abuse. Argument is opposite the drinking fountain.
He claims evolution is a religion, based on his assertion that it starts with a pre-drawn conclusion and then shoe-horns explanations for various phenomena into this framework however implausible they may be. While that is arguably a good description of ‘creation science’ it is simply not true of evolutionary science. It was once the case that most people who thought about the issue believed that life on Earth had been created by a god but Darwin (who was certainly a believing Christian until his belief was eroded by the evidence in front of him) and others have amassed a vast array of evidence that life has evolved from a common ancestor. As the evidence indicates that life evolved without need for a helping hand from a deity the lack of belief in a god FOLLOWS rather than precedes evolutionary theory.
Which is the thing that really terrifies the god-squaddies. At least, those whose faith is not strong. And who will burn in their most terrifying hell for all eternity in consequence.
It must be horrible having an imagination like that.
That’s a great comment left on the YouTube channel. I wonder if anyone who reads it is open-minded enough to actually read WEIT?
“. . .we no longer need God to explain anything. The history of science is one of discarding one God-based explanation after another. . . .”
This is true enough, but I would put a slightly different spin on it. As you know, the founders of modern science were not materialists. Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” He did not say, “I think, therefore my brain is.” Descartes, Bacon, Galileo, and Newton all perceived the spiritual in themselves and in the world around them. I say perceived, because this was not an act of faith; within the world view that they shared it was a simple act of perception.
What the founders of modern science did believe by an act of faith was, first, that the universe God created was an orderly one and, second, that an increase in knowledge about creation would inevitably lead to a greater knowledge about the Creator. Galileo, on the first page of his Discourse, reiterates their favorite metaphor—the “great book of nature.” “Whatever we read in that book,” he says, “is the creation of the omnipotent Craftsman.”
So they took this for granted even as they saw the necessity of setting God aside for the sake of the great experiment we’ve come to know as science. They were interested in what could be demonstrated—not by appeal to reason or by appeal to shared experience or by appeal to Scripture, but by close observation and replicable experiment. And they had the insight to see that God is not necessary to the conduct of scientific experiments. God doesn’t figure in science’s equations, and there is no reason why he should.
And science accomplished its task beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. As the parable say, the archers “developed amazing precision” and their fame “became greater than ever.” Once given our head, we proceeded with such masterful strokes to accomplish the task of science—including the many technological wonders that followed from our viewing nature as matter in motion—that, gradually, we forgot we had set the spiritual aside for experimental purposes and began to operate as if it simply didn’t exist. We began to mistake the spiritless world of science for the real world—something not even the most reductionist of scientists originally believed. We became so successful as a result of mentally reducing nature to matter in motion, that we forgot that we had done this and came to believe that the world is really like that.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here. Yes, of course the founders were Christian because everyone in the West was Christian back then. And yes, some of them thought that understanding science would help us understand the mind of God. So now we know that God loves beetles above all creatures and didn’t intervene in the universe but set it up so everything look like it evolved. In other words, what we’ve learned from science about God is that there’s no evidence for God, and if he had a plan it was to efface all traces of his being. What kind of God who wanted us to know him and worship him would do that? Not the Abrahamic god, and we have no evidence for its existence.
As far as saying the the “spiritless world of science” is not the real world because the real world has spirit, you are just foisting your unevidenced beliefs in the divine upon us. If there is some divine spirit in the world and we’ve missed it, please tell us what it is and how science managed to miss it.
As for understanding go, we know NOTHING more about him now than we did than the Church fathers knew. Theology has not advanced our understanding of the divine one iota. That’s because God left know evidence for his existence, though of course he could have (messages written in the stars, etc.–see Sagan).
I think your point here is to say that empiricism misses some really important aspect of the divine–but you fail to tell us what it is. You simply recount how science has replaced religious understanding over time.
“I think your point here is to say that empiricism misses some really important aspect of the divine. . . If there is some divine spirit in the world and we’ve missed it, please tell us what it is and how science managed to miss it.”
Science didn’t accidentally “miss” the spiritual, it deliberately set it aside in order to see the physical world more clearly. And thank Ceiling Cat that it did, since before that the Church was touting prayer and penance as appropriate responses to things like the Black Death. The essence of the scientific method is to divide the world into what is relevant and irrelevant to a particular problem, and God simply wasn’t relevant to understanding the Black Death. Having set the spiritual aside as irrelevant to understanding the material, however, we shouldn’t be surprised that science can’t find any evidence for the spiritual. That’s not what it’s designed to do.
All this, of course, is merely my idiosyncratic reading of history; I’m not trying to foist it on anyone. Thanks for your reply.
You realize, of course, that science has repeatedly tried to find evidence for the spiritual, either through seance-busting, ouija boards, intecessory prayer, the absence of regrown limbs in those prayed for, and so on nd so on. Science is indeed set up to find evidence for the spiritual–IF THE EVIDENCE CAN BE MANIFESTED AND AGREED ON. Sadly, it hasn’t appeared.
Plus you never define what the “spiritual” is, though you say it’s an important part of reality that science is missing.
One thing’s for sure: THEOLOGY is not set up to find evidence for the spiritual-, if by “spiritual” you mean supernatural deities, which I suspect you do since you mention “God.” If you want to enlighten us about which disciplines are set up to give “evidence for the spiritual”, then please do.
“If you want to enlighten us about which disciplines are set up to give ‘evidence for the spiritual’, then please do.
I believe it’s a mistake to think that we can grasp evidence for the spiritual by means of “disciplines.” We can’t “grasp” evidence for the spiritual at all; we have to receive it, to let it in. That may sound passive and easy—letting something in—but for us it may be more difficult than anything. Because one of the side effects of our current world view is the assumption that we have to solve our problems by means of human ingenuity and method. We have honed science into a powerful tool, and we always have a tendency to define problems in terms of the tools that we have for addressing them. Accustomed as we are to being heroic and muscular, it will be very difficult for us to assume the stance of passive attention that’s necessary to perceiving evidence for the spiritual. We are always inclined to think we have to do more than we are doing, but in fact we have to do less.
But I know you don’t like extended “debates” on these threads, so I’ll decline further comment unless you insist on it. Thanks again.
Well, I’ll end this discussion by saying that people “receive” (you mean “get a revelation”) of all sorts of crazy stuff, from the delusions of mental illness to all the different tenets of religion. Unless you’re a true believer, you simply can’t take revelations as indicative of the truth. To see if what is revealed is true, you need to investigate it empirically and arrive at a consensus that it’s true: that is, you use the methods of “science construed broadly.”
I’m dumbfounded that you think that simply “receiving stuff” in your head is sufficient to brand it as “truth”. Jews receive the notion that the Messiah hasn’t yet come; Christians the opposite. So what’s the “spiritual truth”?
What does it mean to say ‘perceive the spiritual’? Did they perceive something that they then called ‘spiritual’? Or did they first set out concretely what ‘‘spiritual’ was, deduce its consequences, and then perceive what they had deduced? Or do you mean that they imagined the spiritual? Or is ‘spiritual’ just a label for an emotion?
Scientists come from various religious backgrounds and may have corresponding beliefs. So what?
Can you make concrete what you mean by ‘spiritual’? If you don’t, this is like saying Science didn’t accidentally “miss” the fswrtyw.’ Do you use the word spiritual to refer to an entity that exists? What is it and why do you think it exists? What is that you perceive? If you label whatever you perceive as ‘spiritual’, then all you have done is to attach a label to your private feelings. Does it have an existence independent of your being?
Idiosyncratic or not, you did write about it. One can write what one wants and claim that they are not trying to foist it on other people.
What does ‘evidence for the spiritual’ mean?
People talk of many things religious in the way you talk of the spiritual. What distinguishes it from imagination? Once again, what does it mean?
You seem to be reasonably good at putting words together to form sentences. But remember that meaning is important too. There is more to this world than mere words and grammar. Therein is your problem.
What do you mean by ‘deliberately set it aside’? To deliberately set it aside, it must be there to be set aside. Do you mean they ignored the question?
How do you know that? 🙂 What is God and how do you determine that He is not relevant? Do you mean God talk was irrelevant?
Much of this God and spirituality talk is just a jumble of words 🙂 You have to do more work before you can talk sensibly about it.
I couldn’t make it to 3 minutes! By the way, when, recently anyway, did science promise us health etc?
Can I have 16 minutes of my life back?
As PCC(E) says, it’s a video version of the quote-mining strategy that creationists have been using since the 1950s (if not earlier).
If you make it all the way to the end, you realise it’s a book pitch. Second edition, even! He’s probably got self-publishing costs to try to recoup, and his captive audience has saturated and stopped buying.
Are we talking about this Lewontin quote? “[Scientists] are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. (1997)”
My reaction was that Lewontin was saying that if we assume that God is potentially fiddling with everything, then *any* scientific measurement could be just nature, or it could be nature + some fiddling by God. And if we allow for the latter possibility, then we can’t do science. We could never figure out what was nature and what was God.
So I thought Lewontin’s comment made sense. But I guess this isn’t your reaction?