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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Outstanding Collection, 14 April 2008
This is an all star collection of essays by some very eminent scientists and others, including Richard Dawkins, Steven Weinberg, Richard Feynman, Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Pinker, James Lovelock, Daniel Dennett, etc. Thrown in for "balance" or fairness are essays by some others who espouse views decidedly not congenial with those of Editor Paul Kurtz, who is the founder of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.
Most noticeable among the latter is William A. Dembski a mathematician and a well known proponent of Intelligent Design. I want to start with his essay which is entitled, "Skepticism's Prospects for Unseating Intelligent Design."
Immediately in the title we see employed one of the familiar tactics of the now discredited creationists, namely a statement presented slyly as "a given" about something that is in fact untrue. Dembski has skeptics (or actually evolutionary biology) attempting to "unseat" Intelligent Design. This is bit like the tail trying to wag the dog. The main thrust of Dembski's argument is that more Americas believe in design than in evolution. This "counting heads" sort of argument is obviously not science. It is an attempt to politicize science, to make what is true dependent upon what a majority of people think is true.
Dembski writes, "To allow an unevolved intelligence a place in the world is, according to skepticism, to send the world into a tailspin. It is to exchange unbroken natural law for caprice and thereby destroy science." (p. 91)
This is insincere since what Dembski really is saying is "To allow God a place..." Science would be glad to allow God a place in the world if it were somehow established that God exists. So far, after many, many centuries of trying, no one has been able to provide any evidence that God exists. Furthermore if God should become scientifically manifested, the skeptic's world would not be thrown into a tailspin. Rather skeptics would have a little less to be skeptical about!
What Dembski is really asserting here is the simple statement "If God exists, then skeptics think science will be destroyed." It's really laughable how the euphemistic expressions for God that the Intelligence Designers contort themselves into tend to turn their prose into babblelese.
Dembski finishes with some bogus claims for ID, some satirical "action points" for skeptics, and then returns to his main theme: "Poll after poll indicates that for most people evolution does not provide a compelling vision of life and the world." (p. 97)
Well, science move aside! The people have voted! Reminds me of the bumper sticker, "God said it. I believe it. That settles it."
More typical of the profound thought and expression in the book is the brilliant essay by Steven Weinberg entitled, "A Designer Universe?" This essay includes the famous statement: "With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil--that takes religion." (p. 40)
Another nice Weinbergian expression is this as a kind of comment on the idea that God gave humans free will as a way to account for evil in the world while maintaining an all powerful and benevolent God: "It seems a bit unfair to my relatives to be murdered in order to provide an opportunity for free will for Germans, but even putting that aside, how does free will account for cancer? Is it an opportunity of free will for tumors?" (p. 38)
Still another is this as a counter to the idea of God the Designer: "if...you believe in a God who is jealous, or loving, or intelligent, or whimsical, then you still must confront the question `Why?'" (p. 38) Consequently, such a God is not the entire answer and really begs the question, "Who designed him?"
This point is generalized by asking "Why is this theory compelling and not another? Why quantum mechanics and not Newtonian mechanics?" Weinberg concludes, "So there seems to be an irreducible mystery that science will not eliminate." (p. 33) This mystery, this uncertainty, is what creationists would like to eliminate. But I believe the mystery is part of the human condition and something to revel in, not something to sweep under the rug with authoritarian certainty.
Another outstanding essay is by Victor J. Stenger, "Anthropic Design: Does the Cosmos Show Evidence of Purpose?" He concludes with this beautiful view of the cosmos: "The hundred billion galaxies of our visible universe, each with a hundred billion stars, is but a grain of sand on the Sahara that exists beyond our horizon, grown out of that single, original bubble of false vacuum. An endless number of such bubbles can very well exist, each itself nothing but a grain of sand on the Sahara of all existence. On such a Sahara, nothing is too improbable to have happened by chance." (p. 45)
One of the most straightforward and appealing statements in favor of science is this from David A. Shotwell in his essay "From the Anthropic Principle to the Supernatural": "If you admit the supernatural into your calculations, anything goes. That is why a supernatural explanation is useless to a scientist, however pious he may be on Sundays. It provides no direction for research, suggests no testable hypotheses, and gives no reason to expect one result rather than another...." (p. 49)
I'm running out of space, but be sure and read Daniel Dennett's profound and witty homage to science entitled "Why Getting It Right Matters: How Science Prevails." Here's a quote: "Alongside our tools for agriculture, building, warfare, and transportation, we have created a technology of truth: science." (p. 156)
Here's another about "a standard of truth [from Plato] to be aspired to by all truth seekers." This standard is "heavily relied upon, even in matters of life and death--by the most vigorous opponents of science. (Or do you know a church that keeps track of its flock, and their donations, without benefit of arithmetic?)" (p. 157)
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by Stuart Sutherland
by Prof. Richard Wiseman
by Ben Goldacre
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