Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Finding the true path, 5 Sep 2007
It's a bit depressing, seeing a man of global outlook having to produce a book of such limited audience. It's even more depressing to realise that audience has expanded to the UK. Kitcher's philosophical study is an excellent summation of the false ideas forwarded by anti-Darwin forces in the US. His approach is a needed one, that "creationists" of various stripes there must be addressed in rational terms, and on their own ground. He accomplishes the task with extraordinary skill and reserve. It's a badly-needed book, but it's a pity is that this is so. It's to be hoped Kitcher's well-reasoned techniques applied here will reach a significant portion of that targeted readership.
His approach is to categorise the themes of creationist writers as regards the value of the "science" they purport to espouse. He puts creationists in three basic forms: "Genesis" - the biblical "literalists"; "novelty" - special acts of creation by some supernatural interference; and the "anti-selectionists" - composed of the newer "Intelligent Design" advocates. "Anti-selectionism" has found a niche by contesting the concept of the Tree of Life, the graphic representation of gradual change in organisms over time to produce new forms. It isn't evolution itself these writers contest, but the details not readily explained by what we know now. Aimless mutations aren't enough to explain the complexity of some elements in certain organisms, they argue. Some undetectable "force" must be involved. The first two forms are adhered to by sincere, if dogmatic followers. The third is one that must be considered on the evidence under study. That consideration must adhere to the rules of scientific investigation to be valid.
Kitcher understands that the challenge of the anti-selectionists isn't based on scientific, but on cultural, values. He recognises that the real agenda of "Intelligent Design" is to give religious people a way to grasp Darwin's concept within a framework of supernatural forces. They have been forced to concede that "young-Earth" biblical creation is untenable. They also recognise that "special creations" aren't supported by the fossil or genetic record. The only way to allow their deity a means of keeping its hand in is to give some tampering power. Bacterial flagella and some internal functions of the body argue against Darwin's "descent with modification". Building up certain proteins to perform the tasks they do today cannot be sustained, they contend. Kitcher responds by noting that while the "anti-selectionists" can make this arguement due to lack of hard fossil evidence for how these functions evolved, neither do the Darwin-detractors offer any evidence for divine tampering to establish them.
The author's classifications may be novel, but the issues involved have been presented often. What makes this book important and necessary is Kitcher's resistance to sinking into wearying invective. His prose is bright and conversational, his lining out of evidence firmly dispassionate and his conclusions irrefutable. He makes no unwarrented claims, and fully recognises that gaps in our knowledge remain to be filled.
Another gap, however, must also be contended with. What to do about those who feel that "faith" is a human necessity? The author offers an historical synopsis of what the Enlightenment contributed to our view of the supernatural. Of all the challenges to Christian belief, it was Darwin's that was the most devastating. It was one thing to displace the Earth from the centre of the universe. It was quite another to remove any supernatural element from life's workings. In particular, it's devastating to some to learn that humans are not the subject focus of divine attention. Kitcher's answer is that a new form of "faith" must emerge, and be encouraged. That "faith" will not resist natural selection, but embrace it. That new religion will combine a form of Darwinist humanism with a sense of the spiritual as a social mucilage. There will be no "god", but there will be a drive to reduce pain and suffering so far as possible. It won't be easy to establish such a concept, particularly in a nation with such vocal forces objecting to natural selection having a role in human affairs. But success depends on the withdrawal of artificial objections to Darwin's ideas. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
We had scotch'd the snake, not killed it, 11 April 2009
All right-thinking people were relieved when Judge Jones concluded that the purpose of the intelligent design movement was religious and that ID had no place in a high school science class. For good measure, the Republican judge in the Dover trial also determined that ID was not science, and remarked upon the inanity and dishonesty of the Christians involved. Philip Kitcher doesn't want to spoil the party, but in the preface to this brilliant book he reminds us that we've been here before. Like any good plague, creationism has a nasty habit of breaking out just when you think it's gone away. Kitcher did more than most during the last big outbreak in the early eighties, giving lectures, writing a book, engaging in debate, helping to win the argument for Darwin. Then, as if parodying that which it despises, creationism mutated into intelligent design and off we go again.
However successful the prosecution, what counts as science should not be decided in the courtroom. Kitcher's approach is to treat ID "as its leaders characterize it, as a hypothesis put forward to identify and account for certain natural phenomena." This may seem too charitable to some and too much like hard work to others, but one of the benefits of such an approach is how it scales up to the bigger questions. While Behe myopically peers down at his precious flagellum, Kitcher sees Darwinism as part of the "enlightenment case against supernaturalism." The line of argument he develops "throughout this essay shows Christianity in retreat." Extinction may be too much to hope for, but this is hardly good news for the godly. Behe the devout Christian might wish he'd climbed inside Darwin's black box and kept his mouth shut.
While current scientific knowledge can easily steamroller the ID egg, the creature responsible still lives and thrives in a culture that has provided sustenance for centuries. Clearing that habitat is a tougher job, and involves understanding how scientific knowledge is acquired. Kitcher's thesis is that ID is a dead science, "a doctrine that once had its day... but that has rightly been discarded" by all self-respecting scientists.
Darwinism itself has not enjoyed unbroken and unanimous assent from the beginning. Until the modern synthesis of the 1930s, it could plausibly be doubted whether natural selection had "the power to bring about the major transitions in the history of life". Anti-selectionism was the last of a trinity of bible-friendly beliefs to be "consigned to the large vault of dead science", where it joined "Genesis creationism" and "novelty creationism", buried around 1830 and 1870, respectively.
Darwinism eventually succeeded because of its explanatory value. Kitcher gives many examples where "Darwin offers a simple explanation" while "the proponent of special creation" sees only a "puzzling brute fact", an "expression of the whimsy of creation". Does "Intelligence" explain anything? Its backers shamelessly beg the question with their "irreducible complexity" and ask us to accept the peculiar proposition that "Intelligence is more 'worried about' the disadvantages that beset unflagellated bacteria than about the human beings who are, according to religious tradition, the foci of divine concern." The technical merges into the moral as we ask: can Intelligence fix simple design faults, such as increasing the frequency of an allele that would eliminate sickle-cell anemia and confer resistance to malaria? Apparently not. "But if it can't perform these easy tasks, why should we think it can manage the transition to the bacterial flagellum?"
Echoing David Hume, we might easily take life on earth "as the handiwork of a bungling, or a chillingly indifferent, god." Further humiliating those Christians who so foolishly think the bible had anything scientifically worth saying, Kitcher turns to the bible itself, "a collection of inconsistent documents, many of whose parts are evidently fictitious. How can reliance on this canon provide grounds for thinking that, despite all appearances, life has been planned by a powerful and benevolent deity?"
Christians who go in for any kind of creationism, however thinly disguised, can only embarrass themselves in the scientific arena, but at least they can return to their churches and to the safety of their religious beliefs. Not so fast. Like Shylock, who thinks he can have his bond if not Antonio's life, there's a nasty surprise in store. Many Christians, indeed, many religious people, are providentialists, believing "the universe has been created by a Being who has a great design, a Being who cares for his creatures, who observes the fall of every sparrow and who is especially concerned with humanity." The problem is, "a history of life dominated by natural selection is extremely hard to understand in providentialist terms."
"Darwin's account of the history of life greatly enlarges the scale on which suffering takes place. Through millions of years, billions of animals experience vast amounts of pain," just so that we can "worship the Creator". "The mess, the inefficiency, the waste and the suffering are effects of natural processes" - chosen by the Creator "to unfold the history of life."
For me, personally, the absence of such a creator is to be welcomed, as is "the massive body of evidence linking human beings to the rest of nature" and Darwin's great achievement of explaining how "you can have the appearance of design without a designer." Others will rightly fear that their faith cannot survive such an assault, so utterly devastating is Kitcher's argument. He acknowledges that many Americans can turn only to the churches for a sense of community but he concedes too much by contrasting "stark atheism" with a rosy view of religious life. Church politics and personalities can be both divisive and rancorous, and there are plenty of secular communities that offer support in times of need. In promoting secular humanism, we should remember that comfort is best found in human contact and not in abstract creeds.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Not intelligent design, 5 Aug 2009
Living with Darwin: Evolution, design and the future of faith by Philip Kitcher, Oxford University Press, New York, 2007, 194 ff. (review for Amazon)
Not Intelligent Design
It's been said before many times over the past century but the message is still not getting through: the biblical stories of creation, prophesies and miracles are man-made myths. The Bible is historical fiction - tales woven around real people, places and events but telling stories that are intended to convey a moral message, primarily as propaganda to create social cohesion for the peoples of the Middle East at that time. The Christian New Testament served a similar purpose in Constantine's Roman Empire. The more honest clerics, like Anthony Freeman, Don Cupitt and John Spong accept this.
However, creation and evolution are explainable in rational, scientific terms. This is the message of Kitcher's excellent little book: the author is a professor of philosophy at Columbia University. He explains clearly the role of chance in Darwin's theory of evolution and how biological processes can give the appearance of having been designed; Michael Behe's `irreducible complexity' theory is thereby explained and the whole argument undermined. The theme of the spontaneous emergence of complexity that is current in biology is interpreted in terms of natural forces. Intelligent Design is exposed for what it is - creationism with a patina of science.
Kitcher also tells us something of the turmoil caused by the discoveries of Darwin and Lyell, though this aspect of the story is more extensively covered in Keith Thomson's The Watch on the Heath (HarperCollins). What Kitcher does do, and does well, is to show how accepting what science tells us about our origins, and that of the universe, does not mean that the idea of the sacred is valueless. There is room for faith alongside science.
Dr Howard A. Jones is the author of The Thoughtful Guide to God (2006) and The Tao of Holism (2008), both published by O Books (John Hunt Publishing) of Winchester, UK
God in Us: A Case for Christian Humanism (Societas)The Sea of Faith (SCM Classics)Eternal Life: A New Vision: Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell
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by Jerry A. Coyne
by Sahotra Sarkar
by Richard Dawkins
by Steve Jones
