{"id":904,"date":"2006-12-11T09:42:21","date_gmt":"2006-12-11T09:42:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/12\/11\/deisms-just-alright-with-me\/"},"modified":"2006-12-11T09:42:21","modified_gmt":"2006-12-11T09:42:21","slug":"deisms-just-alright-with-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/12\/11\/deisms-just-alright-with-me\/","title":{"rendered":"Deism’s Just Alright With Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at Bora’s House of Round-the-Clock Blogging, we find the sensational headline Beaten by Biologists, Creationists Turn Their Sights On Physics<\/a>. On seeing that, I headed over to the editorial in The American Prospect<\/cite><\/a> that it points to, expecting to be scandalized. When I got there, I found this:<\/p>\n

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U.S. creationists have changed tactics. Though none have explicitly abandoned ID in public, the focus of their scientific cover arguments has shifted from organic change to the creation of the universe. They have picked up on the controversial claim that human life could only have evolved because some constants of nature — the electron’s charge or the strong nuclear force in a hydrogen atom, for example — have very precise or “fine-tuned” values. The fine-tuning claim has been around since the 1930s and is called the “anthropic principle” in physics. […]<\/p>\n

Together, Gonzales and Richards published The Privileged Planet in 2004, which has since become the sacred text of the new stealth creationism. According to Gonzales and Richards, conditions on Earth have been carefully optimized for scientific investigation in such a way that it is “a signal revealing a universe so skillfully created for life and discovery that it seems to whisper of an extraterrestrial intelligence immeasurably more vast, more ancient, and more magnificent than anything we’ve been willing to expect to imagine.” The evidence for creation, in other words, now comes from physics, not biology.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

My reaction to this is, basically, “Is that it?”<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I’m sorry, but I’m just not bothered by this. Basically, what’s being put forward here is a theory that the constants of nature have the values they do because God set it up that way. I know this makes me a bad culture warrior, but I’m just not seeing this as a huge threat.<\/p>\n

I mean, it’s not like we have a better model to explain this stuff. Despite the best efforts of a lot of smart people, we don’t have a fundamental physics model that tells us why, say, the fine structure constant is almost 1\/137. “God did it” is about as good as any other explanation we have. It makes the same number of testable predictions as any existing physics theory, so if it makes you happy to think that God twiddled the knobs on the ACME Universe-O-Matic to allow for life as we know it, go nuts.<\/p>\n

This is in stark contrast to the situation in biology, where we actually do<\/strong> have a perfectly good and well-tested theory that explains the observable phenomena in a consistent and scientific manner. Throwing that aside in favor of the non-theory of “Intelligent Design” is stupid, and attempting to mandate teaching of “Intelligent Design” in schools is downright offensive.<\/p>\n

If the creationists in question were pushing a new physics model that says that, say, like charges repel one another because God subtly nudges the particles apart, that would be stupid. We’ve got an exquisitely tested theory that explains the electromagnetic interaction between particles, that’s good to twelve or thirteen decimal places, and replacing that with a non-theory where God personally intervenes in every particle interaction would be idiotic.<\/p>\n

But in the absence of a good scientific model for what went on before the Big Bang, I’m not going to get too worked up about people developing non-scientific models. You say it was a quantum fluctuation? Great. You say God did it? OK. You say the Big Bang was the hatching of the egg of a cosmic butterfly, and eventually our universe will sprout wings and fly away to dream of Chinese philosophers? Terrific. Try not to operate heavy machinery while believing that last one, but other than that, knock yourself out.<\/p>\n

The other reason this doesn’t particularly upset me is that it’s a huge retreat for the creationists. I mean, if they’re going to fall back to saying that God set the parameters, but the universe has evolved according to the normal laws of physics since then, they’re basically conceding the last thirteen billion years of cosmic history to science. Why should I be upset that they’re trying to hang on to that first 10-35<\/sup> seconds for religion? I’ll take the parts we already understand, and call it a victory for the Enlightenment.<\/p>\n

Call me if they start trying to push false claims about laws of physics that we actually understand. But if the “new stealth creationism” is just Deism<\/a> in a funny suit, I’ve got better things to do with my time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at Bora’s House of Round-the-Clock Blogging, we find the sensational headline Beaten by Biologists, Creationists Turn Their Sights On Physics. On seeing that, I headed over to the editorial in The American Prospect that it points to, expecting to be scandalized. When I got there, I found this: U.S. creationists have changed tactics. Though… Continue reading Deism’s Just Alright With Me<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,7,28,30,11,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in_the_news","category-physics","category-politics","category-religion","category-science","category-war_on_science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}