The Questioning Christian

“Show Me the Science” — Daniel Dennett in NY Times

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D. C. Toedt III

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From Show Me the Science, by Daniel Dennett, in Sunday’s New York Times (paragraphing edited, emphasis added):

The Discovery Institute, the conservative organization that has helped to put intelligent design on the map, complains that its members face hostility from the established scientific journals. But establishment hostility is not the real hurdle to intelligent design.

If intelligent design were a scientific idea whose time had come, young scientists would be dashing around their labs, vying to win the Nobel Prizes that surely are in store for anybody who can overturn any significant proposition of contemporary evolutionary biology.

Remember cold fusion? The establishment was incredibly hostile to that hypothesis, but scientists around the world rushed to their labs in the effort to explore the idea, in hopes of sharing in the glory if it turned out to be true.

Yup.  Read it all.

Comments

3 responses to ““Show Me the Science” — Daniel Dennett in NY Times”

  1. trevize Avatar
    trevize

    Much as I can’t stand the way Dennett seems to dominate popular discussions on consciousness and the tired materialistic reductionist view of mind and matter, he makes solid points in this article. What’s alarming is that our understanding of “how science works” has fallen to such a level that an article like this is needed to lay it all out.

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  2. kevin Avatar
    kevin

    this article is so closed minded. in my opinion it truly is a shame that some scientists can’t seem to keep an open mind. science is about learning and understanding all the things we can and cannot see. by closing ones mind to any type of hypothesis that holds a certain level of possibility is damaging to science over all. the fact of the matter is that intelligent design is a widely accepted theory. not only by the genral public but by world renowned scientists as well. the theory of evolution, while a sound one also contains just as many if not more gaps and holes in it as intelligent design. personally, I think God himself could pop into the sky, show himself to the entire world and say. “look, here I am for all to see. I’m God. I created everything and this is how I did it.” and you would have people all over the world lining up to disprove it ever happened. the fact of the matter is that unless God could be used as a common lab rat, studied and analyzed for years, and be subjected to all kinds of experiments. those that wish not to believe in him or any kind of intelligent design would not be satisfied. the worse part is that if after all this was done and they still couldn’t understand him they would probably try to find a way to unjustify his deity anyways. there are so many other things that point toward intelligent design outside of biology.as far as intelligent design being taught in schools. i say go for it. i have learned more about the sciences in my reasearch on this subject than i probably ever would have bothered with if it were not for this controversy. i say give both sides equal time in the class room. we are, after all, intelligent human beings that are capable of making are own judgements on this issue. in closing i would like to say that the two sides share one thing in common. it takes just as much faith to believe in darwinism than it does to believe in intelligent design.

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  3. D. C. Avatar
    D. C.

    Kevin, I think you may be setting up a strawman.
    Sure, there are darwinists whose belief is practically a personal religion (Richard Dawkins comes to mind).
    But what many of us are saying is simply this: We can’t completely trust personal intuition, whether our own or someone else’s. Unless an intuition can be corroborated by external evidence — which I’ve said elsewhere is a gift from God, his communication to us of what he has actually wrought, as opposed what we imagine he has done — it remains merely an intuition, and we do well to be cautious in following it.
    Thanks for stopping by.

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