Parts to Wholes: the Socionomic Systems Nexus

Decivers to Debunkers to Developers

Ben Stein's Expelled: No Integrity Displayed In the new science-bashing movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, Ben Stein and the rest of the filmmakers sincerely and seriously argue that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution paved the way for the Holocaust. By "seriously," I mean that Ben Stein acts grief-stricken and the director juxtaposes quotes from evolutionary biologists with archival newsreel clips from Hitler's Reich. Prepare for an intellectual night at the cinema. No one could have been more surprised than I when the producers called, unbidden, offering Scientific American's editors a private screening. Rather, it seems a safe bet that the producers hope a whipping from us would be useful for publicity: further proof that any mention of ID outrages the close-minded establishment. (Picture Ben Stein as Jack Nicholson, shouting, "You can't handle the truth!") Knowing this, we could simply ignore the movie—which might also suit their purposes, come to think of it. Unfortunately, Expelled is a movie not quite harmless enough to be ignored. Shrugging off most of the film's attacks—all recycled from previous pro-ID works—would be easy, but its heavy-handed linkage of modern biology to the Holocaust demands a response for the sake of simple human decency. Expelled wears its ambitions to be a creationist Fahrenheit 911 openly, in that it apes many of Michael Moore's comic tricks:

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed--Ben Stein Launches a Science-free Attack on Darwin

Roving Defender of Evolution, and of Room for God Dr. Ayala, a former Dominican priest, said he told his audiences not just that evolution is a well-corroborated scientific theory, but also that belief in evolution does not rule out belief in God. In fact, he said, evolution “is more consistent with belief in a personal god than intelligent design. If God has designed organisms, he has a lot to account for.” Consider, he said, that at least 20 percent of pregnancies are known to end in spontaneous abortion. If that results from divinely inspired anatomy, Dr. Ayala said, “God is the greatest abortionist of them all.” Or consider, he said, the “sadism” in parasites that live by devouring their hosts, or the mating habits of insects like female midges, tiny flies that fertilize their eggs by consuming their mates’ genitals, along with all their other parts. For the midges, Dr. Ayala said, “it makes evolutionary sense. If you are a male and you have mated, the best thing you can do for your genes is to be eaten.” But if God or some other intelligent agent made things this way on purpose, he said, “then he is a sadist, he certainly does odd things and he is a lousy engineer.” That is also the message of his latest book, “Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion” (Joseph Henry Press, 2007). In it, he writes that as a theology student in Spain he had been taught that evolution “provided the ‘missing link’ in the explanation of evil in the world” — a defense of God’s goodness and omnipotence, despite the existence of evil. “As floods and drought were a necessary consequence of the fabric of the physical world, predators and parasites, dysfunctions and diseases were a consequence of the evolution of life,” he writes. “They were not a result of a deficient or malevolent design.”

BREAKING THE GALILEAN SPELL My aim is to reinvent the sacred. I present a new view of a fully natural God and of the sacred, based on a new, emerging scientific worldview. This new worldview reaches further than science itself and invites a new view of God, the sacred, and ourselves—ultimately including our science, art, ethics, politics, and spirituality. My field of research, complexity theory, is leading toward the reintegration of science with the ancient Greek ideal of the good life, well lived. It is not some tortured interpretation of fundamentally lifeless facts that prompts me to say this; the science itself compels it. This is not the outlook science has presented up to now. Our current scientific worldview, derived from Galileo, Newton, and their followers, is the foundation of modern secular society, itself the child of the Enlightenment. At base, our contemporary perspective is reductionist: all phenomena are ultimately to be explained in terms of the interactions of fundamental particles. But Laplace’s particles in motion allow only happenings. There are no meanings, no values, no doings. The reductionist worldview led the existentialists in the mid-twentieth century to try to find value in an absurd, meaningless universe, in our human choices. But to the reductionist, the existentialists’ arguments are as void as the spacetime in which their particles move. Our human choices, made by ourselves as human agents, are still, when the full science shall have been done, mere happenings, ultimately to be explained by physics. Reductionism is inadequate reductionism. Even major physicists now doubt its full legitimacy. Biology and its evolution cannot be reduced to physics alone but stand in their own right. Life, and with it agency, came naturally to exist in the universe. With agency came values, meaning, and doing, all of which are as real in the universe as particles in motion. “Real” here has a particular meaning: while life, agency, value, and doing presumably have physical explanations in any specific organism, the evolutionary emergence of these cannot be derived from or reduced to physics alone. Thus, life, agency, value, and doing are real in the universe. This stance is called emergence. Emergence is therefore a major part of the new scientific worldview. Emergence says that, while no laws of physics are violated, life in the biosphere, the evolution of the biosphere, the fullness of our human historicity, and our practical everyday worlds are also real, are not reducible to physics nor explicable from it, and are central to our lives. Emergence, already both contentious and transformative, is but one part of the new scientific worldview I embrace.

The Search for Truth in a Reverent Spirit (Theodore Roosevelt) THERE is superstition in science quite as much as there is superstition in theology, and it is all the more dangerous because those suffering from it are profoundly convinced that they are freeing themselves from all superstition. No grotesque repulsiveness of mediæval superstition, even as it survived into nineteenth-century Spain and Naples, could be much more intolerant, much more destructive of all that is fine in morality, in the spiritual sense, and indeed in civilization itself, than that hard dogmatic materialism of to-day which often not merely calls itself scientific but arrogates to itself the sole right to use the term. If these pretensions affected only scientific men themselves, it would be a matter of small moment, but unfortunately they tend gradually to affect the whole people, and to establish a very dangerous standard of private and public conduct in the public mind. This tendency is dangerous everywhere, but nowhere more dangerous than among the nations in which the movement toward an unshackled materialism is helped by the reaction against the deadly thraldom of political and clerical absolutism. At present we are in greater danger of suffering in things spiritual from a wrong-headed scientific materialism than from religious bigotry and intolerance; just as at present we are threatened rather by what is vicious among the ideas that triumphed in the Revolution than we are from what is vicious in the ideas that it overthrew. But this is merely because victorious evil necessarily contains more menace than defeated evil; and it will not do to forget the other side, nor to let our protest against the evil of the present drive us into championship of the evil of the past. The excesses of the French Revolution were not only hideous in themselves, but were fraught with a menace to civilization which has lasted until our …. Nevertheless, there was hope for mankind in the French Revolution, and there was none in the system against which it was a protest… Better the terrible flame of the French Revolution than the worse than Stygian hopelessness of the tyranny—physical, intellectual, spiritual—which brooded over the Spain of that day. So it is with the modern scientific movement. There is very much in it to regret; there is much that is misdirected and wrong; and Dr. Dwight is quite right in the protest he makes against … the intolerant arrogance and fanatical dogmatism which the scientists of their school display to as great an extent as ever did any of the ecclesiastics against whom they profess to be in revolt. The experience of our sister republic of France has shown us that not only scientists but politicians, professing to be radical in their liberalism, may in actual fact show a bigoted intolerance of the most extreme kind in their attacks on religion; and bigotry and intolerance are at least as objectionable when anti-religious as when nominally religious.

Accidental Civilization

At the forest’s edge Not very long before that incident, I had visited Liberia in the course of its prolonged and brutal civil war. I found that the rebels had not merely destroyed the authority of an admittedly highly imperfect, corrupt, and unscrupulous government; they had gone on to dismantle every vestige of higher civilization they could find, as if refinement itself were nothing but a mask for injustice and oppression. Thus the hospitals, in which no medical activity whatsoever now took place, had not merely been damaged in fire-fights between opposing forces, government and rebel, but every piece of equipment, down to the last little trolley, had been systematically dismantled, so that, at considerable effort, the wheels had been sawn from them to ensure that they could never again be used in any capacity. This was done with astonishing thoroughness even in a ghost hospital where, previously, open-heart surgery had been carried out. The university was likewise destroyed, and the library sacked by people who obviously had not just an indifference to books, but an active hatred of them, a desire for revenge upon them and all that they represented. None of the above would, I think, have surprised either Sigmund Freud or José Ortega y Gasset, whose most famous works on the state of the world, Civilization and Its Discontents and The Revolt of the Masses, were published in the same inauspicious year, 1930. Their view that mankind was not moving inexorably towards a condition of complete contentment and satisfaction thanks to technical advance was triumphantly vindicated, if triumph it can be called, in the years following. Both authors were to suffer exile, but this was an infinitesimal part of the suffering which was soon to come. The two analyses of the existential condition of mankind are different in emphasis. Although Ortega says penetrating things about the psychology of modern man, he regards that psychology as secondary to sociological change. Freud emphasizes the psychological as primary. In other words, man is endowed by nature with instinctual desires that have to be controlled in civilized conditions, if those conditions are to continue to obtain, but the control gives rise to frustration, guilt, and anxiety, that is to say to discontent. The picture Ortega draws of the mass man is not an attractive or flattering one, but Ortega is not a snob who simply excoriates the appalling habits and tastes of those below him in the social scale. For him, mass man is the man who has no transcendent purpose in life, who lives in an eternal present moment which he wants to make pleasurable in a gross and sensual way, who thinks that ever-increasing consumption is the end of life, who goes from distraction to distraction, who is prey to absurd fashions, who never thinks deeply and who, above all, has a venomous dislike of any other way of living but his own, which he instinctively feels as a reproach. He will not recognize his betters; he is perfectly satisfied to be as he is.

‘Mill is a dead white male with something to say’ In his excellent, well-timed biography of Mill, British author and commentator Richard Reeves argues that being quoted by both sides in something like the smoking debate ‘would have pleased’ Mill (2). Mill was the public intellectual who believed that truth is discovered through argument rather than being established from on high, so that ideas become a ‘living truth’ through debate rather than a ‘dead dogma’ handed down by our superiors. And as Reeves draws out in his biography, Mill also revelled in intellectual eclecticism. He thought the truth lay somewhere in opposing arguments. As he wrote in On Liberty: ‘Conflicting doctrines, instead of the one being true and the other false, share the truth between them.’ (3) Just for the record, he didn’t mean, in a pre-PC relativistic fashion, that ‘all truths are equal’, but rather that truth is arrived at through the clash of ideas, the changing and tempering of views through open debate, rather than being set in authoritarian stone. In many ways, the promiscuous use of the harm principle to justify bans and state intrusion into our lives sums up just how illiberal our era is. Mill had a view of men as capable and energetic, who, when given the chance, could progress to become serious and even ‘heroic’ individuals. Thus, he had a quite narrow view of harm: in his view, it would take quite a lot to harm individuals who were possessed of free will and very often grit, and therefore he argued that only clear cases of harm could justify restrictions. Today, by contrast, individuals are viewed as weak and vulnerable. The term ‘the vulnerable’ is used to refer to whole swathes of society.

Prior Posts

Putting the Pieces Together: Framing, Crisis & Linkages

Re-visiting Ramblin Randy: Do the Best You Can with What You've Got

Framing the Radical Center: a Policy Agenda for the 4th Republic

Faith, Hope and Enchantment: Why Religion Matters...More

ME Faultlines(Readings): Values, Culture & Conflict