Fire and Knowledge

The many imperfections of the human backbone which, regrettably, become increasingly apparent as we age, can hardly be attributed to intelligent design. They are easy to understand if we appreciate the fact that our upright posture is a recent evolutionary development. Evolution has taken a spinal column well adapted for horizontal, four-footed locomotion and pressed it into vertical, bi-pedal service. It works pretty well, but every now and then the stresses and strains of this new orientation are too much for the old structure. Intelligent design could have produced a trouble-free support for upright posture, but evolution was constrained by a structure that was already there. Chiropractors, of course, continue to reap the benefits.

–Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (orig. 1999; Harper Perennial, 2002), p. 101

A reasonable person, eager to accept intelligent design as an explanation for [elephants], must therefore believe that the designer started more than 50 million years ago with a small organism quite unlike the Indian elephant. Then, over time, he crafted scores of new species, his designs gradually drifting closer and closer to the modern elephant. In the last few million years, he constructed in rapid succession nearly a dozen semifinal drafts until Elpehas maximus finally came off the drawing table.

–Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (orig. 1999; Harper Perennial, 2002), p. 97

In order to defend God against the challenge they see from evolution, [creationists] have had to make Him into a schemer, a trickster, even a charlatan. Their version of God is one who intentionally plants misleading clues beneath our feet and in the heavens themselves. Their version of God is one who has filled the universe with so much bogus evidence that the tools of science can give us nothing more than a phony version of reality. In other words, their God has negated science by rigging the universe with fiction and deception. To embrace that God, we must reject science and worship deception itself.

–Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (orig. 1999; Harper Perennial, 2002), p. 80

Even with … cautious parameters, selected in a biased manner to draw a maximally optimistic conclusion, the number of species doomed each year is 27,000. Each day it is 74, and each hour 3.

If past species have lived on the order of a million years in the absence of human interference, a common figure for some groups documented in the fossil record, it follows that the normal “background” extinction rate is about one species per one million species a year. Human activity has increased extinction between 1,000 and 10,000 times over this level in the rain forest by reduction in area alone. Clearly we are in the midst of one of the great extinction spasms of geological history.

–Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (1992, Harvard University Press), p. 280

If you accept microevolution, you get macroevolution for free.

–Carl Zimmer, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, p. 325

Here’s a comment I made on Justin Taylor’s blog about whether atheists can trust their reasoning abilities or not. It was in response to an Alvin Plantinga lecture arguing that atheists could not trust them.

Plantinga argues in the last talk that a naturalist cannot trust his own mental facilities. That might be true, but that is why methods like the scientific method exist and are used — it takes something out of the mind in order to test if something is really predictable and testable (and thus, scientifically “true”).

So even if we doubt our facilities, the fact is, we can test our deductions. That will help us determine if our minds our reliable in their deductive abilities. It doesn’t matter whether it is probable or not that we can trust them — the question is, can we?

For instance, we may hypothesize that every time we drop a large stone, on earth, under normal conditions, it will fall. We could doubt that it is true – our minds could be tricking us – but that is why we test it. And we find that every time we test it, it happens. So that would lead us, after thousands of years of testing and theorizing and philosophizing, that our faculties are not all that bad after all, which allows us to put more trust in ourselves for higher levels of thinking. (And thus understand and debate on the concepts of mind and reason and truth!)

So I think the naturalist/atheist has every right to trust their mental faculties just as much as a theist. Both the theist and the atheist can be mentally tricked and lead astray, and both have explanations on why that can happen. And both recognize that and seek to minimize it through methods.

In the end, the theist believes that man is able to reason. So does the atheist. And the atheist believes the theist can reason, and the theist believes the atheist can reason. So, ultimately, they can start at the same place to begin building methods, which is why theists and atheists can both (for instance) be scientists and come to the exact same conclusions when running the same test. (And why they are able to argue about it if they come to different conclusions!)

Almost as soon as [HIV] starts multiplying, our immune system starts recognizing the infected white blood cells and destroying them, wiping out the viruses in the process. But despite the immune system’s ability to kill HIV by the billions every day, HIV can survive these attacks for years. The secret to its longevity is its ability to evolve. The enzymes that HIV uses to make new copies of its genes are very sloppy, making one or two mistakes on average every time they duplicate the virus’s genome. Among the many mutants that spring up, a few strains will turn out to be hard for the immune system to recognize. Because HIV replicates so quickly, these resistant viruses quickly become the dominate strains in a person’s body. It takes time for our immune system to shift its attack toward the new strain, and once it does, the viruses evolve even newer forms that escape the immune system yet again.

–Carl Zimmer, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, p. 218

It’s easy to pretend that humans are the champions of the evolutionary race, that through some kind of superiority we have won Earth for ourselves. But in fact whatever successes we enjoy depends on the balance between ourselves and the plants, animals, fungi, protozoa, and bacteria with which we have been coevolving. If anything, we are the most coevolved species that has ever existed, and depend more than any other species on the web of life.

–Carl Zimmer, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, p. 209