It came to my attention this week that there were some problems with the Wikipedia entry on a University of Pittsburgh physicist, David Snoke. I've linked to the Discussion page, rather than the entry itself, to demonstrate the bile and bad behavior that goes on in the process of making an "encyclopedia" entry at this site. It's disgusting.
Snoke is a respected condensed-matter physicist, albeit one who probably wouldn't have gotten a Wikipedia entry (well, except he is in Who's Who). The entry was created because of an article he co-authored on complexity in protein evolution. It has implications for intelligent design, and there's where the problems have come up.
The page has been run by anti-ID people and had for a while been worded more like a polemic against Snoke. Snoke has tried to correct some of it, but much of what he adds keeps getting deleted by his antagonists. I have never done any Wikipedia editing, just because I haven't felt like spending the time it seems to take, but this would be something worth contributing to, if I did.
I'm not convinced by ID, but it deserves a more respectful hearing than it's getting in this excuse for an encyclopedia. I'm glad that at my institution, we're able to have debates on it amongst the faculty, without this kind of behavior.
Showing posts with label intelligent design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label intelligent design. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
A thought on Intelligent Design
I posted a version of this in the comments over on Mark Shea's blog, and I think it's of general interest enough to repost it here:
I have a sympathy for Intelligent Design, but as a physicist, I think that the experimental evidence for this design can only come from looking at the fundamentals—the ultimate origins in cosmology and the nature of physical laws themselves.
This is only a suspicion of mine; I believe that, given the complexity of the interactions between the individual particles of matter, God can work directly in our world without our ever observing a violation of the natural laws. And with God knowing the future, He could arrange the intereactions needed for His purposes far in advance, so small changes have time to produce large effects.
So I doubt that we're going to look and find supernaturally-explained glitches in evolution.
On the other hand, the big-picture questions of "Why is the universe here at all?" and issues of "fine-tuning" for its habitability go back to the beginning of time and the moment of Creation itself. Science, physics in this case, necessarily works within the physical laws of nature. But the laws of nature are properties of the universe itself. So we are unable, even in principle, to use those laws to extrapolate backwards, past the moment the universe came into existence. Physics cannot answer the question, "What was there before the Universe?," unless it is to talk about our universe bubbling up out of another, pre-existing universe. But that only pushes the question back to the origin of that other universe.
What ultimately got the whole ball rolling, existence-wise? Physics will never be able to answer, because of the nature of science itself.
I have a sympathy for Intelligent Design, but as a physicist, I think that the experimental evidence for this design can only come from looking at the fundamentals—the ultimate origins in cosmology and the nature of physical laws themselves.
This is only a suspicion of mine; I believe that, given the complexity of the interactions between the individual particles of matter, God can work directly in our world without our ever observing a violation of the natural laws. And with God knowing the future, He could arrange the intereactions needed for His purposes far in advance, so small changes have time to produce large effects.
So I doubt that we're going to look and find supernaturally-explained glitches in evolution.
On the other hand, the big-picture questions of "Why is the universe here at all?" and issues of "fine-tuning" for its habitability go back to the beginning of time and the moment of Creation itself. Science, physics in this case, necessarily works within the physical laws of nature. But the laws of nature are properties of the universe itself. So we are unable, even in principle, to use those laws to extrapolate backwards, past the moment the universe came into existence. Physics cannot answer the question, "What was there before the Universe?," unless it is to talk about our universe bubbling up out of another, pre-existing universe. But that only pushes the question back to the origin of that other universe.
What ultimately got the whole ball rolling, existence-wise? Physics will never be able to answer, because of the nature of science itself.
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