Philosophers From England

"This is purely a figment of Gish’s imagination. He speculates about the character of transitional forms, and then chides paleontologists because they do not find what he demands."

"It is hard to resist the impression that all these computations are designed to bamboozle those who become weak at the knees at the sight of numbers."

"All the Creationists’ major objections have now been examined. What appear, at first glance, to be imposing obstacles turn out, on closer inspection, to be conjuring tricks employing inaccuracy, misrepresentation, dazzling numbers, and layers of confusion. As a teacher, I sometimes wonder after an exam why some students became confused on a particular point, and I try to understand how my presentation or the formulation in a book could have misled them. In the case of the Creationist authors we have studied, there is no great difficulty in seeing how muddles arise. They want to use scientific data and scientific principles to attack evolutionary theory. So they skim, searching for ammunition. When they find a claim that seems to be at variance with evolution, they seize it as a trophy to bring back to the Institute for Creation Research for public display. If they actually tried to understand the terrain they scavenge, they would have learned some interesting science. Instead, they seem to acquire only the most tenuous grasp of complex theories and then offer their muddled caricatures of important scientific works to as wide an (inexpert) audience as they can reach. (It is possible, of course, that their understanding is greater than that revealed in their confused discussions. But I am loath to accuse them of perverting ideas that they actually comprehend.)"

"Barnes and Morris both choose processes that we know to operate at different rates at different times, and then use the observed rates to estimate the time at which the process began. Dating the past is a complicated and technical business, and one cannot ignore the technical details simply to generate the ages one wants. Without a thorough understanding of which rates are constant overtime and which rates fluctuate wildly, Creationist dates are bound to be stabs in the dark. However, Creationists know what they want the age of the earth to be. So just as in the case of the second law of thermodynamics, important parts of science are abused. By carefully picking a process on the basis of its ability to give the desired result, without attending to the question whether it is reasonable to think that it happened at a constant rate, Creationists attempt to convince the uninitiated that their blind dates have scientific references. Nobody should be taken in."

"Respect for the truth does not require one to take seriously ideas simply because they are popular or backed by influential people. Once it has become clear that a proposal makes no contribution to our understanding, we are not compelled by tolerance to give it further attention."

"Creationism does not merit scientific discussion. As we found in the last chapter, Creation “science” is not a promising rival to evolutionary theory. It is not integrated with the rest of science, but is a hodgepodge of doctrines, lacking independent support. It offers no startling predictions, no advances in knowledge. We cannot commend it for any ability to shed light on questions that orthodox theories are unable to answer. Nor can we praise it for offering a definite alternative that might help scientists in their quest for an improved biological or geological theory. “Scientific” Creationism has no evidence that speaks in its favor, partly because Creationists are so meticulous in leaving their doctrines blurred."

"So we encounter the strategy exemplified by Morris: Talk generally about design, pattern, purpose, and beauty in nature. There are many examples of adaptations that can be used—the wings of bats or “the amazing circulatory system,” for example. But what happens if we press some more difficult cases? Well, if there seems to be no design or purpose to a feature (and if its presence cannot be understood as a modification of ancestral characters), one can always point out that some parts of the Creator’s plan may be too vast for human understanding. We do not see what the design is, but there is design, nonetheless. Since no plan of design has been specified, Creationists have available another all-purpose escape clause. But it is precisely this feature of Creation “science” that impugns its scientific credentials. To mumble that “the ways of the creator are many and mysterious” may excuse one from identifying design in unlikely places. It is not to do science."

"Because Creationists would like to identify themselves as members of the scientific community, scientists engaged in an internal debate with other scientists, they pounce on any remarks by eminent biologists or geologists that can be made to suggest their point of view. These remarks are wrenched out of context—whether creationists simply do not realize the importance of the context or whether they are willfully distorting the authors intentions, I do not know. In any case, for the creationists, misleading quotation has become a way of life."

"The formulation that I have given accords with those found in textbooks on physics. But it does not coincide with the statements of the second law offered by some Creationists. Creationists like to present the second law either by omitting any mention of its restriction to closed systems or by choosing a statement that does not make this restriction clear."

"The road to Creationism is paved with bad philosophy."

"Unfortunately, this is not the end of the story. Although they do not refer to closed systems in stating the second law, Creationists have heard that the law only applies to such systems. So they are ready for the response I have just given. Morris even calls it “an exceedingly naive argument.” There are two popular Creationist rejoinders. The first is to pooh-pooh the concept of a closed system. The second is to change the subject."

"This response gets high marks for low cunning."

"Consistency is not the hobgoblin of the Creationist mind."

"To provide scientific explanations, a creationist would have to identify the plan implemented in the creation. The trouble is that there are countless examples of properties of organisms that are hard to integrate into a coherent theory of design. There are two main types of difficulty, stemming from the frequent tinkerings of evolution in the equally common nastiness of nature. Let us begin with evolutionary tinkering. Structures already present or modified to answer to the organisms current needs. The result may be clumsy and inefficient, but it gets the job done.… (examples of the panda’s thumb, orchid self-fertilization, and the ruminant digestive system elided) The second class of cases cover those in which, to put it bluntly, nature’s ways are rather repulsive. There is nothing intrinsically beautiful about the scavenging of vultures, the copulatory behavior of the female praying mantis (who tries to bite off the head of the “lucky” male), or the ways in which some insects paralyze their prey.… (example of coprophagy elided)"

"The book that follows is a chase. The Creationist is allowed to choose one battleground after another. Given each choice of battleground, I insist that the battle be fight on that ground. In every case, “scientific” Creationism is defeated. When all the distortions have been removed, all the attempts to flaunt credentials examined, all the misleading quotations returned to their contexts, all the fallacies laid bare, we shall see Creation “science” for what it is—an abuse of science."

"Creationist strategy is often to run entirely different issues together, to concoct a muddy paste out of distinct allegations about the evils of evolution and the glories of Creationism."

"Creationists are actually criticizing methods that are used throughout science. As I shall argue extensively, there is no basis for separating the procedures and practices of evolutionary biology from those that are fundamental to all sciences. If we let the creationists have their way, we may as well go whole hog. Let us reintroduce the flat-earth theory, the chemistry of the four elements, and mediaeval astrology. For these outworn doctrines have just as much claim to rival current scientific views as Creationism does to challenge evolutionary biology."

"Ironically, philosophers of science owe the Creationists a debt. For the “scientific” Creationists have constructed a glorious fake, which we can use to illustrate the differences between science and pseudoscience. By examining their scientific pretensions, I have tried to convey a sense of the nature and methods of science."

"In almost any natural population of organisms, more offspring will be produced than are able to survive. The offspring will vary—in particular, they will vary with respect to characteristics that affect their abilities to survive and reproduce. Some organisms will survive longer and reproduce more frequently. If the advantageous characteristics are inheritable, then they will be transferred to descendants. As a result, they will become more prevalent in later generations. Over a large number of generations the common features of the population may be radically changed."

"Evolutionary change is change in the genetic constitution of a population. This type of change can come about as a result of a number of factors. Immigration and emigration of organisms will bring new alleles and new allelic combinations into the population and will cause others to disappear. Mutation will lead to the formation of new alleles. The major claim of a Darwinian theory of evolution is that the principal factor of change is natural selection: The most important evolutionary changes come about because some allelic pairs are fitter than others, and these obtain greater representation for their constituents alleles in subsequent generations."

"Do the doctrine’s problem-solving strategies encounter recurrent difficulties in a significant range of cases? Are the problem-solving strategies an opportunistic collection of unmotivated and unrelated methods? Does the doctrine have too cozy a relationship with auxiliary hypotheses, applying its strategies with claims that can be “tested” only in their applications? Does the doctrine refuse to follow up on unresolved problems, airily dismissing them as “exceptional cases”? Does the doctrine restrict the domain of its methods, forswearing excursions into new areas of investigation where embarrassing questions might arise? If all, or many, of these tests are positive, then the doctrine is not a poor scientific theory. It is not a scientific theory at all."

"Even if Creationists continue to lose in the courts, they may still succeed in wreaking havoc upon science education (and, ultimately, upon American science). By lobbying local school administrators, the Creationist minions can affect the books that are chosen and the curriculum that is designed. Because textbooks are published to make a profit, the special-interest pressure will change the character of the books that are produced. While Creationist laws fail, the cause may triumph, as science education relapses into its post-Scopes, pre-Sputnik condition."

"The limits of a creature’s consciousness are closely related to its particular set of capacities. As I shall elaborate in a moment, language provides us with an extraordinarily enhanced set of capacities, and consequently with an equally enhanced realm of consciousness. Perhaps this should be seen as a case in which a difference of degree amounts to a difference of kind. But if so, it is crucial to remember, from the point of view of evolution, that a difference in kind can be the summation of many small differences of degree."

"Whatever the unique features of humans may be, there are realms of behaviour for which the similarities between ourselves and our near relatives are too great for it to be credible that in one case the behaviour reflects an underlying soul or mind, while in the other there is no such thing, only the grinding away of neural machinery."

"Darwin and his intellectual descendants have provided us with fundamental insight into the nature of the world we live in and of our place within it, a contribution to our basic metaphysics. It is still widely supposed that this is the sort of thing that should come from philosophers or even theologians. In this case, at any rate, the insight has come from biology and I, as a philosopher, am happy just to do my best to interpret it. The theologians, I have suggested, can be less complacent about this insight, and may even need to retrain for a discipline with a subject matter with stronger claims to existence."

"One commonly held ideal of a possible good life is one spent in adoration of or service to the Supreme Being. It is hard to believe that the value of such a life is independent of whether there is, in fact, any such being to adore or serve. In sum, how we should live is a question that cannot be wholly separated from facts about how things are."

"The main point, which would perhaps be unnecessary to labour if it were not so controversial and if it had not been denied in important respects by some quite unlikely people, is that the theory of evolution has been a major, even decisive, contributor to the process of undermining prescientific supernaturalistic metaphysical views and replacing them with the naturalistic metaphysics assumed by most contemporary philosophers. The question is not whether evolution and a particular religious tradition are logically consistent. Provided the religious tradition avoids factual claims, as Gould’s conception of distinct magisteria forces them to do by fiat and as sensible theologians have been increasingly willing to do for centuries, they are consistent because they do not speak on the same subjects. But it is nevertheless the case that science and religion speak for radically different conceptions of the universe. And as the conception fostered by the former has become more compelling, so that promoted by the latter has become less tenable. Science does not contradict religion; but it makes it increasingly improbable that religious discourse has any subject matter."

"My point is not to claim that science has told us everything important about the world, that there are no longer any mysteries yet to be discovered, or even that science can ever tell us everything we would like to know. I have no doubt that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in anyone’s philosophy. My point is rather that we know enough to accept our ignorance. We have enough idea of how we can, sometimes, find out even quite profound truths about the world we inhabit that we should no longer be satisfied with mythologies that are made up from sheer ignorance."

"The main point I want to make in this chapter is that prior to the development of a convincing theory of evolution there was an argument of sorts for belief in God, and an argument that could have been seen to meet naturalistic standards. However, this argument, always problematic, was entirely undermined by the development of a convincing account of evolution. Consequently, I claim, we have no good reason for belief in God. This is, of course, a very major contribution to our world-view."

"I should mention the possibility that there are moral rather than empirical reasons that favor religious belief. It is, of course, enormously problematic to offer as a sufficient reason for belief the suggestion that one would be better off believing it. This is generally described as wishful thinking."

"Faith is, I suppose, a rough synonym for belief, with an additional connotation that this belief is not grounded on anything. This is a difficult concept to take seriously from a philosophical point of view. Obviously if one has it, one finds it convincing. If one doesn’t, it’s hard to know how to understand the conviction, since no reasons can be offered for it. The difficulty is exacerbated by the variety of objects of faith that are on offer. How does one decide whether to be more impressed by the convinced Christian or the convinced Muslim? Or, for that matter, the person equally convinced of the healing powers of crystals or that faith can move mountains? If there are no reasons for adopting these systems of belief, it seem impossible for there to be any reason for choosing between them. My own response is, I hardly need say, not to take very seriously. It is one thing to admit that our knowledge of the universe is extremely limited, but a counsel of despair to respond to this by believing whatever we feel like."

"And that is the real force of my earlier insistence on empiricism. My brand of empiricism does not insist that we must have fully compelling grounds for the things we believe, or indeed that we can find totally irresistible grounds for anything much beyond the immediate and banal. It insists only that we have some reason for the things we believe and that we decline to believe those things for which we have no reasons. A modest requirement, perhaps, but one that would dispose, I contend, with a large part of the religious and superstitious mythologies that continue to dominate and sometimes devastate human lives."

"Religious difference, arguably, remains the most effective basis for defending boundaries between them and us, and the withering away of this kind of mythology would, I think, be entirely salutary. This is to say nothing of the thought that it may well be better for people to believe what is true."

"Obviously enough, we cannot decide what evolution entails without a fairly sharp conception of what it is."

"Empiricism provides the standard to which beliefs should answer. If we are capable of finding out what kind of world we live in, surely the best way of doing so is through our experience of it."

"If you start putting very large numbers of human brain cells into primates, suddenly you might transform primates into something that has some of the capacities that we regard as distinctively human – speech or other ways of being able to manipulate or relate to a human. These possibilities, at the moment, are largely being explored in fiction but we need to start thinking about them now."

"The radical edge that Hodgskin gave his laissez-faire advocacy confuses people whose thoughts come in prefabricated boxes. Today if someone sympathizes with labor’s plight, he’s bound to be labeled a collectivist, although earlier radical individualists located the source of that plight not in the market but in the halls of government. This was better understood in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the likes of Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker, and Herbert Spencer held the libertarian vanguard."

"One of the first objects then of the law, subordinate to the great principle of preserving its unconstrained dominion over our minds and bodies, is to bestow a sufficient revenue on the government. Who can enumerate the statutes imposing and exacting taxes? Who can describe the disgusting servility with which all classes submit to be fleeced by the demands of the tax-gatherer, on all sorts of false pretences, when his demands cannot be fraudulently evaded? Who is acquainted with all the restrictions placed on honest and praiseworthy enterprise; the penalties inflicted on upright and honourable exertions;—what pen is equal to the task of accurately describing all the vexations, and the continual misery, heaped on all the industrious classes of the community, under the pretext that it is necessary to raise a revenue for the government?"

"Nature may annihilate, but she never tortures…. Not so the legislator. He has inflicted on mankind for ages the miseries of revenue laws,—greater than those of pestilence and famine, and sometimes producing both these calamities, without our learning the lesson which nature seems to have intended to teach, viz. the means of avoiding this perpetual calamity. Revenue laws meet us at every turn. They embitter our meals, and disturb our sleep. They excite dishonesty, and check enterprise. They impede division of labour, and create division of interest. They sow strife and enmity amongst townsmen and brethren…."

"Among the legislative classes embodied into, and constituting the government, we must place the landed aristocracy. In fact, the landed aristocracy and the government are one—the latter being nothing more than the organized means of preserving the power and privileges of the former."

"It is a not less important question, who is the law-maker, who made, who makes, who enforces obedience to these rules and practices? Can he show a title bestowed upon him by nature, derived from the laws of his organization, and the constitution of the universe, to have and to own, and to appropriate all the wealth that is created? Now it is an important fact, but it is so obvious that one is sneered at for drawing a deduction from it, that the law has always been, and is at present made, by men who are not labourers. It is actually made by those who derive from nature no title whatever to any wealth. But as law in fact is only a general name for the will of the law-maker, being, the expression of his desire to have wealth, and retain power and dominion, it is clear that in making laws for the appropriation of property, he will not, consistently with nature, give to every one what he produces. This object always has been, and now is, so to dispose of the annual produce as will best tend to preserve his power. Nature rewards industry and skill, the legislator be he who he may, is utterly regardless of the connection between industry and plenty."

"The first and chief violation of the right of property, which pervades and disturbs all the natural relations of ownership, confusing, and perplexing the ideas of all men as to the source of the right of property, and what is their own, of which so many actions stigmatized by the law as crimes, are the necessary consequences, and the natural corrections,— the parent theft from which flow all other thefts, is that of the legislator, who, not being a labourer, can make no disposition of any property whatever, without appropriating what does not naturally belong to him."

"The natural right of property far from being protected, is systematically violated, and both government and law seem to exist chiefly or solely, in order to protect and organize the most efficacious means of protecting the violation…."

"Those who make laws, appropriate wealth in order to secure power."

"The persons who thus appropriated the soil of Europe, did so by a right of conquest. They did not lay down the sword the instant they had overrun the land, they kept it drawn in their hand, and engraved with it laws for the conquered. The countries they overran had been previously cultivated by slaves in a rude manner. In appropriating the soil, they appropriated its inhabitants, reduced some to slavery, and continued the slavery of others. Power so acquired, and privileges so established, were the basis of the present political and legal, not social, edifice of Europe. These conquerors were the first legislators. By an almost uninterrupted succession, the power of legislation has continued in the hands of their descendants to the present day."

"What is the law?—Who are the law makers?— The law is a great scheme of rules intended to preserve the power of government, secure the wealth of the landowner, the priest, and the capitalist, but never to secure his produce to the labourer.—The law-maker is never a labourer, and has no natural right to any wealth.—He takes no notice of the natural right of property.—Manifold miseries which result from his appropriating the produce of labour, and from the legal right of property being in opposition to the natural."

"The power of making laws was long vested in those—and still is vested in their descendants—who followed no trade but war, and knew no handicraft but robbery and plunder."

"The law, as to preserve life is that of individuals, is a set of rules and practices … intended to appropriate to the law-makers the produce of those who cultivate the soil, prepare clothing, or distribute what is produced among the different classes, and among different communities."

"[I]t is nevertheless proper to make men aware that the price they pay for attempting to uphold the artificial right of property, is nothing less than the enormous sum of misery inflicted in the name of law and government."

"Hodgkin’s many articles for The Economist made it one of the most interesting and provocative libertarian periodicals of its time. In addition to supporting laissez-faire, voluntary education, and other (classical) liberal causes, Hodgskin also opposed capital punishment and questioned the traditional wisdom about the efficacy of punishment as a deterrent to crime."