Re: The real lowdown on "Intelligent Design"

Delia wrote:
> SilkUpholsteredChair wrote:
> > Delia wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > You can't go wrenching people 300 years out of the past to proof text
> > > your arguments. You need to know what they were really talking about,
> > > which might not actually turn out to support your claims.
> >
> >
> > I am quoting from the Principia, not some esoteric Newton numerology
> > text passed quietly along to John Locke to get printed in France and
> > dug up by Keynes, to which you refer. (Yes, as you correctly point
> > out, the PC Police were on patrol even back then.)
>
> Of course you are. As I pointed out, the Argument from Design was
> completely unremarkable. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
> centuries virtually everyone believed in it. That's not the esoteric
> part of Newton. And they didn't edit it out of Newton. He hid his own
> notes away. He was an incredibly secretive and suspicious man. If
> you've actually read a biography of him you know this.

Right It wasn't remarkable. It still isn't in the way Newton states it.
I didn't cite the esoteric stuff. For some reason, you felt the need
to.


>
> >
> > It's funny: Physical science has no difficulty wrenching "people" 300
> > years out of the past to establish the fundamental laws of motion,
> > optics, and so forth, which haven't changed one iota in the macro
> > world. They don't mind wrenching "people" 300 years out of the past to
> > teach calculus, which this "people" invented. Funny that refraction
> > business. Uh-huh, 300 years back.
>

> I have news for you. Newtonian physics is out of date and has been so
> for quite a long time.

I know. NASA had to completely throw away Newtonian motion and gravity
mechanics when they put a man on the moon. Give me a break.

>His optics (light as corpuscular) was abandoned
> in the early nineteenth century.

I didn't mention corpuscular theory of light and ether. I erroneously
omitted that caveat. I was referring to optics--prism, color,
refraction.


> By the 1870s Maxwell's equations
> governing the laws of electromagnetic radiation summarized a century of
> research in fields undreamt of by Newton. In 1905 Einstein
> incorporated Maxwell, Newton and a lot more to completely revise the
> foundations of physics. Relativity contains Newtonian physics as a
> special case. Fast forward to the 1920s and you add quantum mechanics,
> which Einstein couldn't stand.
>
> If you take a modern freshman year physics course you'll get Newtonian
> mechanics in the first semester or quarter. Then you plunge into
> electricity and magnetism, which is probably straining the level of
> math you've had to that point. If you go on to a second year you learn
> the Einsteinian viewpoint, which is much harder mathematically.
>
> If you're suggesting that the Principia be used as a freshman physics
> text, I really need to suggest you call up your nearest physics
> department and make the suggestion to them.

Ok, I'll do that. When they tell me that they can't excerpt anything
from the Principia--the more accessible sections-- my next question
will be why they don't find the Origin of the Species too difficult to
excerpt in freshman biology. I thought the section I excerpted was
pretty easy. But, I know--kids these days. I mean, teachers these
days.


>Not only do introductory
> science classes, like all survey courses, have an incredible amount of
> material to cover in a very short time, but
>most working physicists
> have very little interest in the history of their disciplines.

Yeah. I've noticed. Kind of makes me think of Einstein's words in his
discusssion of Newton: " in our time, esteem for intellectual values
for their own sake is no longer so lively as it was in the centuries of
the intellectual renascence." (That would be Newton's time.)


>Or
> politics, for that matter. They're going to lose their tempers if some
> right wing fanatic comes in off the street suggesting they take
> precious class time talking about Newton and the Argument From Design.

I already got the part about censoring history and labeling people who
discuss it "right wing" and "fanatics." I'm familiar with the
ideologues who lose their tempers when confronted with inconvenient
historical facts that interfere with their infallible conceptions of
science and religion. How these politics-free teachers who are so
pressed for time find the hours and weeks to get everybody working on
their big class projects about diversity and tolerance for same-sex
marriages, I'll never know. The school must become a black hole where
time stands still during gay awareness month.


> They'll probably suggest you take . . . . a history of science class.
> They don't know much about those, but it will get you out of their
> hair.

Well put. They're too busy with more important project during the
school day. I get it. "Hey, principal, this kid is really trying my
patience with all his fantatical questions about who Newton was. I
mean, Gawd, it's just Newton for Pete' sake. I don't have the time to
waste discussing these insignificant figures from the past. Isn't
there some on line Great Books class he can download?"


> An introductory physics text will have a short paragraph on
> Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein, and that will be it.

> As I mentioned,
> the Principia is out of date.

Right. The inverse square law for the macro world is yesterday's
cornflakes. Well Newton's gravity is accurate for most macro purposes.
Newtonian mechanics still gives the results of movements of heavenly
bodies down to the smallest detail. It still gives us explanations of
the principle of the conservation of energy and a complete theory of
heat. It's still taught. It's still used. It's still the foundation.
I don't believe I said that science hasn't expanded beyond Newton.
Yes, Faraday & Maxwell brought field theory and Plank relativity.
Einstein brought time dilation, but I wasn't speaking of events
occurring near the velocity of light. F=ma has not been refuted in the
macro world for the first year physics student. I can't go on with
this. It's such blarney. I don't know what to tell you. Re-read that
quote I included above from Einstein on Newton or
something...interestingly, he's referring to the atom bomb. I didn't
include that part because of all the political and historical baggage
around the bomb, and, as you said, teachers are too pressed for time to
get into stuff like that, right? As we all know, it's just about
fission and the relationship of energy and mass. Personally, I find
censorship and political agendas in education nauseating. No doubt,
your high school teacher friends would find what Einstein had to say on
the subject of science and religion to be "fanatical," viz., "science
can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with aspiration
towards truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however,
springs from the sphere of religion...Science without religion is lame,
religion without science is blind." Einstein saw no conflict. It's
only the "educators" who feel threatened.

> There's also the matter of the
> mathematics. Calculus was simultaneously invented by Newton and the
> German philosopher Leibniz. Leibniz invented the notation we use
> today. Newton didn't want the riff-raff to learn how to do these
> precious calculations, so he invented a very convoluted geometrical
> technique. This is what he uses in the Principia. It means the
> prefaces he talks about religion and the relationship of God and
> gravity and stuff like that is very accessible; the laws of motion and
> rules of reasoning are fairly accessible (once you get past the
> seventeenth century language) and can be used as readings in Great
> Books and Ideas classes (and often are, BTW). But the actual
> calculations are very dense, and I doubt one freshman in 1000 would
> have a clue.


> >
> > Newton framed these principles in the context of understanding God's
> > "design." It's a matter of historical record. And you would censor
> > that from the curriculum. Not worthy of discussion, I guess. Reflected
> > widespread thinking of the time, but the students don't need to know
> > that. We'll skip over that section. What's that current expression? Oh
> > yes--cherry pick.



> I would censor this from the curriculum, huh? I had pointed out
> precisely in the curriculum where it could be found. Now I've pointed
> out two: a Great Books class as well is likely to contain some excerpts
> from Newton. You're just upset that I went and ruined your nice little
> rant. You seem to want the scientists to teach it. I'm not a
> scientist, but I'll make one further observation. Scientists have been
> the people on campuses who have been least interested in the culture
> wars. They've just wanted to ignore all this business and do their
> work. Now it seems to be wingnuts who know nothing about science who
> are bringing the wars to them.
>
>
> >
> > Why? To further dumb down the American educational system in the name
> > of enlightened thinking? This is not the Soviet Union where all
> > academic disciplines have to be first filtered through the
> > Marxist-Lenist Thought Dept. Or is it?
>
> I have news for you. The educational system is already dumbed down.
> What the hell makes you think it's in the name of enlightened thinking?
> It's the despair of everyone who's ever worked there. Every year the
> students who enter seem to be less prepared. Let us all know when you
> have the solution worked out.
>
> >
> > If Newton's quest was theological, that isn't to be concealed--it's to
> > be discussed. Assert it. Ridicule it. Debate it. Build it up. Tear it
> > down. Most importantly--talk about it.
>
> It _is_ discussed. It's discussed by the sort of scholars that you
> take delight in ridiculing. There's a huge literature on it.
>
>
> Frankly, I wasn't aware that
> > anything Newton wrote in the Principia has been refuted--either
> > scientifically or theologically.
>
> See above for the science.
>
> Has some great scientific mind
> > refuted Newton's assertion that these physical laws are manifestations
> > of the perfect, finished plan? (And I don't mean by someone in the
> > Episcopal Church.)
>
> This isn't something that can be either proved or disproved.
>
> >
> > I don't see what the problem is here. This is not about alchemy, which
> > you try to sneak in to what he said. It's really okay to stay with the
> > text as it is written. Nobody is asking you to deconstruct it to find
> > the sinister, hidden meaning in it. It's perfectly acceptable to take
> > it at face value. That's all he said. You needn't feel threatened.
>
> Huh????
>
>
> >
> > I point out Newton's history not to promote teaching ID in biology
> > class. The Bible is not a science text and wasn't compiled as one.
> > Where natural selection can be shown a posteriori to have naturally
> > occurred, it should definetly be taught in biology. Where it can be
> > demonstrated that life on the molecular level is not irreducibly
> > complex, by all means, present the students with the evidence. Where it
> > can be shown that Darwin himself saw holes in his theory, I say teach
> > it.
> >
> > And where Newton framed his Principia in the context of the Deity, that
> > should be explained as well. And not in some off-the-beaten-path
> > History of Western Science elective. Who knows--it might even open
> > some new doors of scientific inquiry.
>
> In the seventeenth century just about everyone who wrote on science
> framed their work in terms of the Deity and how He interacted with the
> physical world. There's a lot of very fine scholarly work on the
> interaction of Christianity and science, but it's all by these
> off-the-beaten-track history of western science types that you don't
> want to hear about. Who the hell do you think is going to do work like
> this? It's not science. Scientists are not going to teach it. It's
> history or philosophy of science.
>
> (Or do you think that "God
> > doesn't throw dice" gets left out of the Uncertainty Principle
> > lectures. OMG! Even Big, modern Al thought there was some intelligent
> > design? Must be something he ate.)
>
> Well, golly, I wasn't good enough in physics to make it to the quantum
> mechanics class, so I don't really know what they taught in there. But
> do you know what Einstein meant by that statement? Because he didn't
> believe in a personal God. Here's another statement from him.
>
> I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony
> of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and
> actions of human beings.
> -- Albert Einstein, following his wife's advice in responding to Rabbi
> Herbert Goldstein of the International Synagogue in New York, who had
> sent Einstein a cablegram bluntly demanding "Do you believe in God?"
> Quoted from and citation notes derived from Victor J. Stenger, Has
> Science Found God? (draft: 2001), chapter 3.
>
> or:
>
> It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological
> concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will
> or goal outside the human sphere.... Science has been charged with
> undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical
> behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social
> ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in
> a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of
> reward after death.
> -- Albert Einstein, "Religion and Science," New York Times Magazine, 9
> November 1930
>
>
> Now these are not my beliefs. But they are Einstein's. When he (and
> some other modern physicists) use the word "God" they are using a sort
> of shorthand for "the rational order of the universe." The only moral
> here is that you don't line up scientists as your authorities for
> religious beliefs, no matter how smart they are. Just because someone
> is authoritative in one field doesn't mean he is in another. That's
> one reason I brought up the matter of Newton's well-established
> religious wackiness as well. Like the old bumpersticker said,
> "Question Authority."

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