First of all you would have to provide a valid scientific theory regarding irreducibly complex systems.
The concept is pretty simple. Books have been written about it. Do a little googling. But then you would have to explain to me how on earth you could come to the conclusion that irreducibly complex means designed by an intelligent being.
Please see some of William Dembski's books. Intelligent Design is supposed to be more accessible to laypeople. I think The Design Inference is more technical.
After all if we are irreducibly complex, then an intelligence far superior to us should even be more complex.
I always thought that Roman Catholics were Christians.
I didn't say they weren't. I was responding to the claim that all ID supporters come from a "rather twisted and specific branch." First, ID theorists represent a variety of religious (and non-religious) viewpoints. Second, Roman Catholicism, as the largest denomination of Christianity by a large margin, is hardly a "rather twisted and specific branch."
All those 'observations' you mention look more like other scientific theories to me rather than observations of anything.
Which is partially why I clarified by calling them ideas/observations. Irreducible complexity is an idea. We determine whether a structure or system is irreducibly complex by observation and experimentation.
Instead ID starts from the basis that God must have designed everything, God works in much the same engineers and humans in general do and that if that was the case then he must have created something, somewhere which could not be explained by any natural processes.
I'm sure if we looked really hard, we could find someone out there claiming to support ID who believes that garbage, but certainly no one I'm familar with does. Design is an inference, not an assumption.
The issue here is that the existance of an intelligent being cannot be tested and cannot be proven wrong.
That might be true, but it's not important.
If I say that the existence of irreducibly complex structures or systems in nature proves that some features of nature were designed, that claim can be falsified by showing that there are in fact no irreducibly complex structures or systems in nature.
You can say "it can't be falisified" all you want, but the fact is, things like whether or not a system or structure is really "irreducibly complex" can be tested and falisified.
While creationism (of the Answers in Genesis variety) depends on the bible as a source of information, ID in general does not. Even though many ID scientists and theorists are Christians, ID logically comes from ideas/observations like the anthropic principle, irreducible complexity, information theory, and so on. If ID were true, it would lead to a deistic sort of god, if it led to any god at all. Please see my sig.
I assume you mean a "rather twisted and specific branch" of Christianity. However, there are ID supporters who aren't Christians, and those who are come from all different traditions. Michael Behe, for example, is a Roman Catholic and believes in a form of theistic evolution.
You and the people who insist that ID has been falsified (Behe's "irreducibly complex" molecular machines aren't, Dembski's understanding of information theory is flawed, etc) need to get together to work out a consistent position.
I think you misunderstood what I meant. When I said that science wasn't "specific," I meant that the definition of science isn't easy to precisely nail down. I wasn't trying to say anything about the precision of the information it gives us.
Your explanation of why ID isn't science as defined is extremely vague. Basically all you've done is regurgitate bits of the definition and insist that ID doesn't make the cut.
Science may be lots of things, but it is neither "specific" nor "well-defined." I realize that the scientific community (I'd like to think mostly out of compartmentalized ignorance rather than real malice or arrogance) has worked very hard to convince you that this is the case, but it is not. The philosophy of science is an active field in which many very different ideas about what science is and how it should work are actively defended.
Also, it's hard to see how ID is excluded by the supposedly clear definitions you provide above.
Over in America it means that we fell within whatever particular bit of the grading curve they feel deserved to get 99% (Which, for the GRE exam, seems to be about 80 actual % or higher. Given that, in a test prep for the general math section it said that it was very important to remember the difference between "Positive and negative" and "even and odd", I must confess I'm not too worried).
AFAIK, the percentages you see on your GRE score report are not a curved grade. It's the fraction of people you scored better than on that portion of the test. You also receive actual, absolute scores which have nothing to do with the performance of anyone else.
Also, the math portion is deceptively simple. In theory, you only need the math skills of an 8th grader to ace the thing. The GRE isn't testing for whether or not you understand concepts and notation from calculus, though. It's (supposed to be) testing quantitative reasoning. So it uses concepts and notation everyone should remember from junior high and high school to ask questions designed to trip up people with university educations. Maybe you are a mathematical genius and can safely ignore this advice, but if I were you, I'd go ahead and do a few timed practice tests. I scored perfectly on that portion, but I am not too proud to admit that it was partially due to luck and mostly due to the work I put in beforehand. (Btw, my BS is in chemical engineering, so it's not like I was an English major.) Several people I consider to be quite a lot brigher than me scored in the mid 700s.
Never mind that ID is 100% non-verifiable and is useless for precition, whereas evolutionary theory does have predictive value.
Irrelevant, just like most received wisdom about the definition of science.
Suppose an Event A occurs, and a scientist predicts on that basis that an Event B is soon to follow. Event B does follow, so his prediction receives support. His explanation makes no other unambiguous predictions.
Now suppose a different scientist, knowing nothing about the first, arrives at the same explanation. The only difference is, he thinks of his explanation only after observing both events.
Is the explanation of the second scientist not science simply because it fails to make predictions, but only explains data?
Prediction CAN be a useful aspect of science (say, for engineering purposes), but it is not a necessary one.
You say that science is a method, and argue that because ID doesn't follow that method, it isn't science. That might be so, but I can't see what that has to do with whether or not the question is itself a philosophical one. That's what I thought we were arguing about.
Here's how I would summarize what's been said:
You (paraphrasing): "Philosophy has nothing to do with reality."
Me: "The claim that ID isn't science is a philosophical one. If you make that claim and believe that it corresponds to reality, then you admit that philosophy has something to do with reality."
You: "Whether ID is science has nothing to do with philosophy. We have this definition of science, and ID doesn't fit the defintion."
Could you please go into a little more detail about how this helps your position?
It seems to me that the definition of science is a philosophical issue. Leaving aside the fact that the "scientific method" is mostly a myth, we can't use the scientific method to arrive at the scientific method. That's circular. You might argue that this fact doesn't automatically make the definition of science a philosophical concern, which is true. But I can't think of anything better to classify it as.
When we ask whether ID is science, what we want to know is whether one idea fits into a certain (philosophically derived) category of ideas. Surely we are doing philosophy, now. Also, it's hard to see how the scientific method could be used to determine whether ID is science without making the boundaries of science so broad that they begin to include just about every kind of question.
The popular statement, "Intelligent Design isn't science!" is a philosophical one. I don't know whether it's a claim you would make, but if it is, I don't see how you can get away with believing both that it is true (in the sense that it corresponds with reality) and that philosophy has no bearing on the real world.
When some people claim that the US is anti-science, what they seem to mean in many cases is that people in the US feel a gut-level skepticism about a particular understanding of science. They fail to appreciate the fact that what science is and what it gives us are far from obvious, in spite of what they have always assumed. In other words, this is mostly a philosophical issue, not a scientific one.
So, part of the answer is, not just better science education, but education about the philosophy of science. Currently, this is entirely absent, even from university level science education.
Hopefully, debates would be far less shrill and better informed. I'm not of the naive opinion that all disagreement would cease, but I think it would be extremely helpful for participants on all sides to understand how assumptions in this area shape beliefs, and also that no set of assumptions is obviously correct.
the general public really has no idea of what is and is not science
It's not just the general public, really. It's all those pesky philosophers of science who just won't admit that science can be clearly and obviously defined. Idiots, every last one of 'em.
But having brains that are capable of formulating, testing, and applying scientific theories gives individuals a huge evolutionary advantage because it means those individuals do not have to rely on accidental discoveries anymore.
Yes, that's pretty obvious. But having brains that consistently arrive at completely wrong but nonetheless useful conclusions confers the same advantage. So why believe that our brains are telling us the truth about natural selection?
I agree with the stuff you say about this hypothetical brain in your second and third paragraphs. But I'm hazy on two points:
1) If you say that this is a brain producing true information and not a brain producing merely useful information, how do you account for its evolution in light of Plantinga's argument that nature has no reason to select the former over the latter?
2) If you admit that this brain does probably produce merely useful but not true information, how do you avoid sinking in a quagmire of irrationality?
Now explain why a creator would have built brains that are so subject to misdirection, geometric optical illusions, etc. Why would he/she/it have done so?
Is there reason to believe that this hypothetical creator should have designed brains incapable of being tricked? Why didn't this creator make us able to fly, breath underwater, or stick to the walls? What else are you going to ask me to explain, and why should I be obligated to provide an answer?
And if a creator built our reasoning capabilities, how do you know that he/she/it programmed it to accurately reflect reality?
We don't. We still wouldn't know that we have the capacity to arrive at true conclusions, but we could certainly dream up schemes that aren't self-defeating. The most obvious being, "God created our minds, perhaps through the process of evolution, so that we would have the ability to arrive at true conclusions."
Pointing out that evolutionary theory itself can't guarantee the accuracy of our reasoning faculties (which is true)
That's an understandment. You seem to be insinuating that we've been given minds that get things a little wrong. (Sorry if I'm misunderstanding.) But it seems to me that having a mind that gets things close to right is only one possibility among a huge number if natural selection is all that's responsible. If that's true, it's pretty improbable that our minds provide us with anything like the truth.
Prove the above statement wrong.
I definitely can't prove that wrong. But if Plantinga's argument is true, then that statement is preferable to the theory of evolution because it at least is not self-defeating. It may not be the best theory for one reason or another, but it is at least logically consistent.
As soon as you invoke a creator, falsifiability is utterly gone, your conclusions can be ANYTHING, and future argumentation is pretty much futile. Thus creation mythology serves primarily as a tool for a person to project their own emotional needs and desires into their own understanding of reality.
Frequently made but false assertion. Yes, we can make up stories like yours that can never be falsified. But that doesn't mean that every explanation involving a creator is unfalsifiable. Dembski, for example, argues for a creator on the basis of what he calls complex specified information. His argument can be attacked from many different directions - CSI isn't a good criterion for design, CSI isn't present in nature, etc.
Fortunately, there are other ways to evaluate the accuracy of our reasoning capabilities than evolutionary theory or creation mythology.
Actually there are not, not without begging the question. You are measuring the instrument with itself to verify it's accuracy.
End note: Your sig links to a story about Antony Flew "converting to religion".... How does this bolster any point in favor of creationism or any other branch of post-Enlightenment fundamentalist thought?
It may surprise you to learn that I can read and have read the article, so the fact that Flew is now more like a Deist than a Christian isn't news to me. Neither the story nor my sig says that Flew has become religious.
Regarding your question about "post-Englightenment fundamentalist thought," I'm not sure what all you would include in that.
If you are talking about creationism, Flew's change of mind lends at least a smidgen of support to it, I think, in spite of the differences. Deism seems closer to theism than to atheism, to me. I wouldn't press the point too hard, though.
If you are talking about Intelligent Design (which is in no sense a form of "fundamentalism"), some of the people Flew credits with influencing his decision are in that camp.
The scientific theory that these primates had was to run away when they saw a lion, and that was correct and was the part of their mental model corresponding to scientific truth.
It was "correct" only in the narrow sense that it enabled them to survive. The point is, they ran away because of the false belief that running away was the best way to make friends, and so lived to mate.
But really, whether my contrived example is flawless or not is unimportant. It's supposed to illustrate, not demonstrate. The principle still stands. Nature has no reason to favor organisms with brains that yield true information over organisms with brains that yield false but accidentally useful information.
Tthe evidence for evolution is overwhelming
Then in all probability our reasoning process doesn't result in true information, and the chain of reasoning you used to arrive at that conclusion has been undercut.
Ultimately we have no confidence that the deliverances of reason will EVER correspond to reality, be it evolution, creationism, intelligent design, or whatever the theory du jour may be.
I think I agree. But if we are going to take your advice to "use our rational ability the best we possibly can" shouldn't we still prefer explanations of our origins that aren't self-defeating?
Our biology provides us with excellent truth detectors: throughout most of primate evolution, if you were wrong about whether your food was poisonous or whether there was a lion hiding in the bushes, you didn't get to pass on your genes. You didn't get to debate social relativism with the lion before he made a tasty meal out of you.
Actually, no. As Alvin Plantinga has pointed out, any number of false beliefs would accomplish the same thing. For example, if the early primates wanted to be friends with lions, but a few believed that the best way to accomplish this was running away, those with that false belief would be far more likely to pass on their genes. What's required for survival is not truth-detection, but behavior consistent with survival, which can be prompted by belief in utter and complete falsehood.
He goes on to argue that belief in evolution is self-defeating because on the supposition that evolution is responsible for our reasoning ability, we have no confidence that the deliverances of reason (i.e. the theory of evolution) correspond to reality.
you tend to run in to problems with that view,there's a lot of rules laid out in the old testemant that just aren't very compatible with modern society.
This is ridiculously false. There are disagreements among Bible-believing Christians about how the law should be used today, but it is almost universally understood (on the basis of literal interpretation) that it does not apply in the same way as it once did. The New Testament is saturated with contrasts between the New Convenant and Old Covenant. Please do a little research before leaping to any more conclusions. You might start with a google search for "christianity old testament law."
So most non-fundie Christians take the view that the bible is a story about how to live your life, and a story about Jesus's teachings, thus NOT meant to be taken literally and that no, you don't have to obey all the forms in the OT to get to heaven, just accept Jesus as your saviour.
Which Christians believe that you have to obey all the forms in the OT to get to heaven? You seem to be implying that "fundies" believe this. Name such a group that has more than.. I dunno.. 1000 members. In reality, one of the definitional beliefs of fundamentalism is that we need to "just accept Jesus" to be saved.
It seems then a gross misunderstanding to claim that this is one part that MUST be taken as literally true, espically given it is one of the parts that seems most clearly to not be. That all the stuff you don't like in the OT isn't meant to be taken literally and done today, but this one part is.
The misunderstanding here is mostly yours. First of all, you seem to be misunderstanding the technical concept of literal interpretation. The literal interpretation is the meaning of the text intended by the author. We try to discover it by looking at the text itself, studying the author's culture, studying the author's other writings, etc. Literal interpretation in this sense recognizes that the author could have intended what he wrote to be taken metaphorically. "Fundie" scholars who claim that the Genesis account of creation must be taken "literally" in the non-technical sense should do so because in their scholarly opinion, the author meant to be understood that way. There are also plenty of conservative scholars out there who literally interpret the Genesis account to be at least partially non-literal. See for example the so-called Framework Hypothesis. Second, and again, conservative, bible-believing Christians don't (or at least shouldn't) selectively ignore parts of the old testament they don't like. This is just a mistaken perception on your part.
What I expect Christians to appreciate more than the average/.er is that these issues touch on at least three areas: science, theology, and philosophy. Your education in biology maybe qualifies you to speak to the issue from one of these perspectives. (For example, to critique specifically scientific claims.)
Perhaps the parent is thinking irrationally. But just being a baptist with a little education in biology hardly puts you in a position to make that broad determination, particularly when the parent has said so little.
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First of all you would have to provide a valid scientific theory regarding irreducibly complex systems.
The concept is pretty simple. Books have been written about it. Do a little googling.
But then you would have to explain to me how on earth you could come to the conclusion that irreducibly complex means designed by an intelligent being.
Please see some of William Dembski's books. Intelligent Design is supposed to be more accessible to laypeople. I think The Design Inference is more technical.
After all if we are irreducibly complex, then an intelligence far superior to us should even be more complex.
So?
I always thought that Roman Catholics were Christians.
I didn't say they weren't. I was responding to the claim that all ID supporters come from a "rather twisted and specific branch." First, ID theorists represent a variety of religious (and non-religious) viewpoints. Second, Roman Catholicism, as the largest denomination of Christianity by a large margin, is hardly a "rather twisted and specific branch."
All those 'observations' you mention look more like other scientific theories to me rather than observations of anything.
Which is partially why I clarified by calling them ideas/observations. Irreducible complexity is an idea. We determine whether a structure or system is irreducibly complex by observation and experimentation.
Instead ID starts from the basis that God must have designed everything, God works in much the same engineers and humans in general do and that if that was the case then he must have created something, somewhere which could not be explained by any natural processes.
I'm sure if we looked really hard, we could find someone out there claiming to support ID who believes that garbage, but certainly no one I'm familar with does. Design is an inference, not an assumption.
The issue here is that the existance of an intelligent being cannot be tested and cannot be proven wrong.
That might be true, but it's not important.
If I say that the existence of irreducibly complex structures or systems in nature proves that some features of nature were designed, that claim can be falsified by showing that there are in fact no irreducibly complex structures or systems in nature.
You can say "it can't be falisified" all you want, but the fact is, things like whether or not a system or structure is really "irreducibly complex" can be tested and falisified.
While creationism (of the Answers in Genesis variety) depends on the bible as a source of information, ID in general does not. Even though many ID scientists and theorists are Christians, ID logically comes from ideas/observations like the anthropic principle, irreducible complexity, information theory, and so on. If ID were true, it would lead to a deistic sort of god, if it led to any god at all. Please see my sig.
I assume you mean a "rather twisted and specific branch" of Christianity. However, there are ID supporters who aren't Christians, and those who are come from all different traditions. Michael Behe, for example, is a Roman Catholic and believes in a form of theistic evolution.
I didn't insist it was falsified
Did I say that you did?
please try reading next time.
Indeed.
The fact that it has to draw so much from ancient literature
What are you talking about?
You and the people who insist that ID has been falsified (Behe's "irreducibly complex" molecular machines aren't, Dembski's understanding of information theory is flawed, etc) need to get together to work out a consistent position.
I think you misunderstood what I meant. When I said that science wasn't "specific," I meant that the definition of science isn't easy to precisely nail down. I wasn't trying to say anything about the precision of the information it gives us.
Your explanation of why ID isn't science as defined is extremely vague. Basically all you've done is regurgitate bits of the definition and insist that ID doesn't make the cut.
Science may be lots of things, but it is neither "specific" nor "well-defined." I realize that the scientific community (I'd like to think mostly out of compartmentalized ignorance rather than real malice or arrogance) has worked very hard to convince you that this is the case, but it is not. The philosophy of science is an active field in which many very different ideas about what science is and how it should work are actively defended.
Also, it's hard to see how ID is excluded by the supposedly clear definitions you provide above.
15 centuries? Maybe I'm confused about which 15 you mean. Ever hear of the Great Schism?
Over in America it means that we fell within whatever particular bit of the grading curve they feel deserved to get 99% (Which, for the GRE exam, seems to be about 80 actual % or higher. Given that, in a test prep for the general math section it said that it was very important to remember the difference between "Positive and negative" and "even and odd", I must confess I'm not too worried).
AFAIK, the percentages you see on your GRE score report are not a curved grade. It's the fraction of people you scored better than on that portion of the test. You also receive actual, absolute scores which have nothing to do with the performance of anyone else.
Also, the math portion is deceptively simple. In theory, you only need the math skills of an 8th grader to ace the thing. The GRE isn't testing for whether or not you understand concepts and notation from calculus, though. It's (supposed to be) testing quantitative reasoning. So it uses concepts and notation everyone should remember from junior high and high school to ask questions designed to trip up people with university educations. Maybe you are a mathematical genius and can safely ignore this advice, but if I were you, I'd go ahead and do a few timed practice tests. I scored perfectly on that portion, but I am not too proud to admit that it was partially due to luck and mostly due to the work I put in beforehand. (Btw, my BS is in chemical engineering, so it's not like I was an English major.) Several people I consider to be quite a lot brigher than me scored in the mid 700s.
Never mind that ID is 100% non-verifiable and is useless for precition, whereas evolutionary theory does have predictive value.
Irrelevant, just like most received wisdom about the definition of science.
Suppose an Event A occurs, and a scientist predicts on that basis that an Event B is soon to follow. Event B does follow, so his prediction receives support. His explanation makes no other unambiguous predictions.
Now suppose a different scientist, knowing nothing about the first, arrives at the same explanation. The only difference is, he thinks of his explanation only after observing both events.
Is the explanation of the second scientist not science simply because it fails to make predictions, but only explains data?
Prediction CAN be a useful aspect of science (say, for engineering purposes), but it is not a necessary one.
You say that science is a method, and argue that because ID doesn't follow that method, it isn't science. That might be so, but I can't see what that has to do with whether or not the question is itself a philosophical one. That's what I thought we were arguing about.
Here's how I would summarize what's been said:
You (paraphrasing): "Philosophy has nothing to do with reality."
Me: "The claim that ID isn't science is a philosophical one. If you make that claim and believe that it corresponds to reality, then you admit that philosophy has something to do with reality."
You: "Whether ID is science has nothing to do with philosophy. We have this definition of science, and ID doesn't fit the defintion."
Could you please go into a little more detail about how this helps your position?
It seems to me that the definition of science is a philosophical issue. Leaving aside the fact that the "scientific method" is mostly a myth, we can't use the scientific method to arrive at the scientific method. That's circular. You might argue that this fact doesn't automatically make the definition of science a philosophical concern, which is true. But I can't think of anything better to classify it as.
When we ask whether ID is science, what we want to know is whether one idea fits into a certain (philosophically derived) category of ideas. Surely we are doing philosophy, now. Also, it's hard to see how the scientific method could be used to determine whether ID is science without making the boundaries of science so broad that they begin to include just about every kind of question.
The popular statement, "Intelligent Design isn't science!" is a philosophical one. I don't know whether it's a claim you would make, but if it is, I don't see how you can get away with believing both that it is true (in the sense that it corresponds with reality) and that philosophy has no bearing on the real world.
I think I know what part of the answer is.
When some people claim that the US is anti-science, what they seem to mean in many cases is that people in the US feel a gut-level skepticism about a particular understanding of science. They fail to appreciate the fact that what science is and what it gives us are far from obvious, in spite of what they have always assumed. In other words, this is mostly a philosophical issue, not a scientific one.
So, part of the answer is, not just better science education, but education about the philosophy of science. Currently, this is entirely absent, even from university level science education.
Hopefully, debates would be far less shrill and better informed. I'm not of the naive opinion that all disagreement would cease, but I think it would be extremely helpful for participants on all sides to understand how assumptions in this area shape beliefs, and also that no set of assumptions is obviously correct.
the general public really has no idea of what is and is not science
It's not just the general public, really. It's all those pesky philosophers of science who just won't admit that science can be clearly and obviously defined. Idiots, every last one of 'em.
But having brains that are capable of formulating, testing, and applying scientific theories gives individuals a huge evolutionary advantage because it means those individuals do not have to rely on accidental discoveries anymore.
Yes, that's pretty obvious. But having brains that consistently arrive at completely wrong but nonetheless useful conclusions confers the same advantage. So why believe that our brains are telling us the truth about natural selection?
I agree with the stuff you say about this hypothetical brain in your second and third paragraphs. But I'm hazy on two points:
1) If you say that this is a brain producing true information and not a brain producing merely useful information, how do you account for its evolution in light of Plantinga's argument that nature has no reason to select the former over the latter?
2) If you admit that this brain does probably produce merely useful but not true information, how do you avoid sinking in a quagmire of irrationality?
Now explain why a creator would have built brains that are so subject to misdirection, geometric optical illusions, etc. Why would he/she/it have done so?
Is there reason to believe that this hypothetical creator should have designed brains incapable of being tricked? Why didn't this creator make us able to fly, breath underwater, or stick to the walls? What else are you going to ask me to explain, and why should I be obligated to provide an answer?
And if a creator built our reasoning capabilities, how do you know that he/she/it programmed it to accurately reflect reality?
We don't. We still wouldn't know that we have the capacity to arrive at true conclusions, but we could certainly dream up schemes that aren't self-defeating. The most obvious being, "God created our minds, perhaps through the process of evolution, so that we would have the ability to arrive at true conclusions."
Pointing out that evolutionary theory itself can't guarantee the accuracy of our reasoning faculties (which is true)
That's an understandment. You seem to be insinuating that we've been given minds that get things a little wrong. (Sorry if I'm misunderstanding.) But it seems to me that having a mind that gets things close to right is only one possibility among a huge number if natural selection is all that's responsible. If that's true, it's pretty improbable that our minds provide us with anything like the truth.
Prove the above statement wrong.
I definitely can't prove that wrong. But if Plantinga's argument is true, then that statement is preferable to the theory of evolution because it at least is not self-defeating. It may not be the best theory for one reason or another, but it is at least logically consistent.
As soon as you invoke a creator, falsifiability is utterly gone, your conclusions can be ANYTHING, and future argumentation is pretty much futile. Thus creation mythology serves primarily as a tool for a person to project their own emotional needs and desires into their own understanding of reality.
Frequently made but false assertion. Yes, we can make up stories like yours that can never be falsified. But that doesn't mean that every explanation involving a creator is unfalsifiable. Dembski, for example, argues for a creator on the basis of what he calls complex specified information. His argument can be attacked from many different directions - CSI isn't a good criterion for design, CSI isn't present in nature, etc.
Fortunately, there are other ways to evaluate the accuracy of our reasoning capabilities than evolutionary theory or creation mythology.
Actually there are not, not without begging the question. You are measuring the instrument with itself to verify it's accuracy.
End note: Your sig links to a story about Antony Flew "converting to religion".... How does this bolster any point in favor of creationism or any other branch of post-Enlightenment fundamentalist thought?
It may surprise you to learn that I can read and have read the article, so the fact that Flew is now more like a Deist than a Christian isn't news to me. Neither the story nor my sig says that Flew has become religious.
Regarding your question about "post-Englightenment fundamentalist thought," I'm not sure what all you would include in that.
If you are talking about creationism, Flew's change of mind lends at least a smidgen of support to it, I think, in spite of the differences. Deism seems closer to theism than to atheism, to me. I wouldn't press the point too hard, though.
If you are talking about Intelligent Design (which is in no sense a form of "fundamentalism"), some of the people Flew credits with influencing his decision are in that camp.
The scientific theory that these primates had was to run away when they saw a lion, and that was correct and was the part of their mental model corresponding to scientific truth.
It was "correct" only in the narrow sense that it enabled them to survive. The point is, they ran away because of the false belief that running away was the best way to make friends, and so lived to mate.
But really, whether my contrived example is flawless or not is unimportant. It's supposed to illustrate, not demonstrate. The principle still stands. Nature has no reason to favor organisms with brains that yield true information over organisms with brains that yield false but accidentally useful information.
Tthe evidence for evolution is overwhelming
Then in all probability our reasoning process doesn't result in true information, and the chain of reasoning you used to arrive at that conclusion has been undercut.
Ultimately we have no confidence that the deliverances of reason will EVER correspond to reality, be it evolution, creationism, intelligent design, or whatever the theory du jour may be.
I think I agree. But if we are going to take your advice to "use our rational ability the best we possibly can" shouldn't we still prefer explanations of our origins that aren't self-defeating?
Our biology provides us with excellent truth detectors: throughout most of primate evolution, if you were wrong about whether your food was poisonous or whether there was a lion hiding in the bushes, you didn't get to pass on your genes. You didn't get to debate social relativism with the lion before he made a tasty meal out of you.
Actually, no. As Alvin Plantinga has pointed out, any number of false beliefs would accomplish the same thing. For example, if the early primates wanted to be friends with lions, but a few believed that the best way to accomplish this was running away, those with that false belief would be far more likely to pass on their genes. What's required for survival is not truth-detection, but behavior consistent with survival, which can be prompted by belief in utter and complete falsehood.
He goes on to argue that belief in evolution is self-defeating because on the supposition that evolution is responsible for our reasoning ability, we have no confidence that the deliverances of reason (i.e. the theory of evolution) correspond to reality.
you tend to run in to problems with that view,there's a lot of rules laid out in the old testemant that just aren't very compatible with modern society.
This is ridiculously false. There are disagreements among Bible-believing Christians about how the law should be used today, but it is almost universally understood (on the basis of literal interpretation) that it does not apply in the same way as it once did. The New Testament is saturated with contrasts between the New Convenant and Old Covenant. Please do a little research before leaping to any more conclusions. You might start with a google search for "christianity old testament law."
So most non-fundie Christians take the view that the bible is a story about how to live your life, and a story about Jesus's teachings, thus NOT meant to be taken literally and that no, you don't have to obey all the forms in the OT to get to heaven, just accept Jesus as your saviour.
Which Christians believe that you have to obey all the forms in the OT to get to heaven? You seem to be implying that "fundies" believe this. Name such a group that has more than.. I dunno.. 1000 members. In reality, one of the definitional beliefs of fundamentalism is that we need to "just accept Jesus" to be saved.
It seems then a gross misunderstanding to claim that this is one part that MUST be taken as literally true, espically given it is one of the parts that seems most clearly to not be. That all the stuff you don't like in the OT isn't meant to be taken literally and done today, but this one part is.
The misunderstanding here is mostly yours. First of all, you seem to be misunderstanding the technical concept of literal interpretation. The literal interpretation is the meaning of the text intended by the author. We try to discover it by looking at the text itself, studying the author's culture, studying the author's other writings, etc. Literal interpretation in this sense recognizes that the author could have intended what he wrote to be taken metaphorically. "Fundie" scholars who claim that the Genesis account of creation must be taken "literally" in the non-technical sense should do so because in their scholarly opinion, the author meant to be understood that way. There are also plenty of conservative scholars out there who literally interpret the Genesis account to be at least partially non-literal. See for example the so-called Framework Hypothesis. Second, and again, conservative, bible-believing Christians don't (or at least shouldn't) selectively ignore parts of the old testament they don't like. This is just a mistaken perception on your part.
What I expect Christians to appreciate more than the average /.er is that these issues touch on at least three areas: science, theology, and philosophy. Your education in biology maybe qualifies you to speak to the issue from one of these perspectives. (For example, to critique specifically scientific claims.)
Perhaps the parent is thinking irrationally. But just being a baptist with a little education in biology hardly puts you in a position to make that broad determination, particularly when the parent has said so little.