Nick Matzke highlights a quote from a new book by Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt of the Discovery Institute that is simply stunning in its absurdity. According to them, not only did Darwin undermine morality and cause every evil thing imaginable, he also undermined our ability to count:
Strange though it may seem to neo-Darwinists, Darwin's assumption that the terms species and variety are merely given for convenience's sake is part of a larger materialist and reductionist program that undercuts the natural foundation of counting and distorts the natural origin of mathematics. To put it more bluntly, in assuming that "species" are not real, Darwinism and the larger reductionist program burn away the original ties that bound the meaning of mathematics to the world and instead leave it stranded on a solipsistic island of the human imagination.
(Wiker and Witt, 2006, A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature, Intervarsity Press, Downer's Grove, IL, pp. 236-237.)
I urge you not to stare at that paragraph for more than 30 seconds or your brain may leap out your ear and head to the nearest bar for a stiff drink. If one were to read this anywhere other than an actual DI publication, one would assume that it's a parody; they actually appear to believe it.
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The ID community releases idiocies from their weird little grey cells like the earth archive releases dinosaurs into our fossil collections: There's always a bigger one.
Buh? I can't put into words... The... Ouch?
Here's a better one. Assume, like all good trinitarian Christians, that 1=3.
See what THAT does to your math.
Oh my...thanks for the warning about my brain. But once you've read the quote it is impossible to not stare at it with sheer, utter disbelief for at least five minutes. Thankfully, I live in wine country and the nearest tasting room is just down the road. My brain should be back by lunch time.
Too late. (Hey Bartender, make it a double!)
Species not real? Reductionist program?
(Bartender, gimme another!)
I uppose that by "not real" they mean that it is a scientific decision/definition when to identify a group of individuals as a separate species, while real species would be those absolutely determined, presumably by God, without any need for a human decision/definition? This reminds me of that common misunderstanding of language in which people think something has a real name because it really is that name.
It's the sort of idea that creationists/ID people (at least the ones who are honestly confused, not just lying) have in mind, I think, when they say there aren't any transitional fossils because all the ones found are really "human" or "ape" or "bird" or "dinosaur" or whatever. Each individual has a real name, so that the only transitions would be something like a creature with a fully human head and a fully human left foot, with the rest of the body fully not human, or a dinosaur with no bird characteristics except a completely developed feathered wing on just one side. That way we would point to a spot on a creature and say "that's human," and another spot on the creature and say "that's ape." They really can't conceive of a slide from one species to another partly because their thought processes are limited by the fact that they don't understand how language can work that way.
It does often seem to me that one of the underlying problems with some of these very strange-sounding creationist/ID statements is ignorance about how language works. My freshman students used to start out very sure that a "mountain" between two valleys is called that because it really is one, and a "valley" between two mountains is called that because it really is one. When they discovered they had numerous disgreements about the exact point on the ground where a person would move from standing on the mountain to standing in the valley, they began to understand that language is mapped onto reality so that it's impossible for two people to have a logical discussion about whether something is X or Y without first agreeing on a definition of X and Y.
Wiker and Witt's complaint may be in part that if we have to make decisions and develop definitions in order to be able to classify individuals into species, then we're not really able to count how many we have of each of the species. And that's true to the extent that we can't count them accurately until after we have decided on some term definitions.
That has to be the most painfully written objection to a philosphical position that I've seen in a while.
Thanks, Julia, that's interesting. I think you're on to it. But I wonder if there's also something else going on here.
There's a popular presuppositionalist argument which is often summarized by the phrase "atheists can count, but they can't *account* for counting." In other words, without an Absolute Authority which has grounded things as true and granted us the ability to know it, we would be left with nothing more than ambiguity and uncertainty, and anything goes. Even logic and math only work if you first assume that God exists to stop everything from being relative and descending into chaos. Atheism (and thus naturalism and materialism and "reductionism") are supposed to be self-refuting in the same way the statement "it is true that all generalizations are false" is. They implicitly assume something in the very act of claiming they don't.
Yes, this quote is crazy, but I suspect it is not just coming out of nowhere. There might be a well-established line of craziness behind it.
I don't believe that both putative authors contributed that passage. There is every evidence that its composition was Wittless.
[Sorry, couldn't resist and all that.]
Sastra,
"an Absolute Authority which has grounded things as true and granted us the ability to know it"
Precisely. Thank you for clarifying and adding to what I was trying to say. Wiker and Witt speak of "the natural foundation of counting," by which, I think they mean that there is an absolutely true number of objects. Our ability to know what the Absolute Authority has determined is a separate creature is an important element of "the original ties that bound the meaning of mathematics to the world."
As I started to type this, I looked up to see, not ten feet away, three raccoons in the tree just outside my window. According to the Creationists/ID people, how do I know there are one, two, three raccoons, and not two possums and one turkey vulture as it so easily could have been? Why, because as you point out they appear to believe that "God exists to stop everything from being relative and descending into chaos." Raccoons in this view are a separate thing in the world and so must have their separate name and so are naturally counted as part of a single series of numbers.
The idea that the raccoons themselves are transitional, developed from a different species and headed toward possible other new species, with the name "raccoons" just a convenience for me to let you understand what's in my holly tree, does, as you say, mean we are "left with nothing more than ambiguity and uncertainty." Why we can't even be sure of the one, two, three, if we can't be sure what those furry things are.
Those in the creationist/Id group often complain that others don't really understand their arguments. While their specific claims about ID and evolution may be easily understood and refuted, I think you are quite right in saying that "it is not just coming out of nowhere. There might be a well-established line of craziness behind it." It seems to me that it's worthwhile spending a little effort on understanding this underlying world view.
Sigh They're such idiots.
I think I need a drink anyhow. It's only Saturday and I've already found my next monday madness...
In the words of Lewis Black: the left side of your brain looks at the right side and says..."it's dark up here, and we may die." Wow. The Stupidity...it burns.
I don't know about that; my money is still on the one about the two mosquitoes and a mud hole by the sitting governor of South Carolina.
I urge you not to stare at that paragraph for more than 30 seconds or your brain may leap out your ear and head to the nearest bar for a stiff drink.
You say that like it's a bad thing....
Stepping in gum is Darwin's fault.
There is a history to this. You can see it in discussions of "natural kinds" or of nominalism versus essentialism. (See, for instance, this piece about whether Darwin has any impact on the philosophical discussion of natural kinds: http://www.columbia.edu/~psk16/darwin.htm.)
Conservative aristotelians often point to the rise of nominalism as the root of nihilism and modern decadence. But I don't think it's possible to dismiss it as entirely a reactionary idea -- I believe that there are contemporary philosophers who believe that some concept of natural kinds is necessary, as well as mathematicians who believe that something like Plato's Ideas or Forms must be at the bedrock of mathematics.
Wiker and Witt may specifically be relying Jacob Klein's Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, which argues that modern natural science relies on a mathematics that is shorn of the metaphysical presuppositions of the Greeks. This is all way over my head, but I think you can get some flavor of what he's talking about by looking at how long it took for mathematicians to come up with a symbol for zero. If symbols take their meaning from the things that they represent, then how can a symbol that stands for no-thing have any meaning? What actual things do imaginary numbers correspond to?, etc. etc. Modern mathematics, on the other hand, doesn't care so much about "entities" and is, in fact, sometimes characterized as having no factual content whatsoever and being merely formal.
Anyway, I may be wrong about much of the detail, but I do think you can get at the backstory by looking at the nominalism and natural kinds debate in philosophy.