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Freethought
Association of West Michigan
Meeting Minutes for January 8, 2003; #130
This was our
first meeting of the new year and following a brief hiatus in
December. Our group is now into its 6th year of existence. As
always it is good to see familiar faces and we welcome the new
attendees to our meetings.
Last month's
food drive to help needy families and our collection of toys for
the Toys For Tots program were both successful. We thank all those
who donated to these causes and we thank Don Hansen for doing
the legwork and for many other behind- the - scenes efforts in
making things run smoothly for FAoWM.
A good time
was had by all at our most recent Winter Solstice Party that was
held at Sam's Oasis restaurant. We had our largest turn out for
this annual get together to date, with 41 people (one over actual
restaurant capacity). Don H. shared photos, at this meeting, that
he had taken at the gathering.
It was announced
that one of our members had a prize- winning entry into the New
York Times cartoon caption competition. Congratulations!
Our next regular
meeting will be on January 22. FAoWM member Heidi Stenson will
present "Women & Religion."
On February
12- Darwin Day- we will be treated to the topic "Secret Origins
of the Bible" presented by Tim Callahan who is the Religion
Editor of Skeptic Magazine and author of the book with the same
title as well as Bible Prophesy: Failure or Fulfillment.
Members are
invited to bring their favorite brief story or bumper sticker
that will help spread the good news about freethought to our February
26 meeting: "Freethought Stories, Stickers & Slogans"
presented by member, Dr. Robert Collins.
The topic
for March 12 will be "Does Religion Do More Good or Harm?"
and will be presented by Hope College Social Psychology Professor,
David Myers. He is the author of leading psychology textbooks.
Our Annual
Board Meeting will be on March 22 at 9AM. This is a Saturday.
All interested members are welcome. The location is to be announced.
In addition
to the other topics of interest slated for the coming months,
we are pleased to host Kimberly Blaker on April 9. She is the
editor and coauthor of the book The Fundamentals of Extremism:
The Christian Right in America, which is also the title of her
presentation. This book has been highly endorsed by many luminaries
including Professor Richard Dawkins.
We are also
fortunate in having Rob Boston of the Americans United for Separation
of Church & State to speak to us on State/ Church separation
issues on June 25. We are flying him in from Wash., D.C. He is
the author of numerous articles and books critical of the Religious
Right and their attempts to undermine the Constitutional separation
of Church and State.
All regular
meetings are held at the Yankee Clipper Library located at 2025
Leonard St., SE, Grand Rapids. Meetings begin at 7PM. For more
information, check the websites shown at the top of these minutes.
Our topic
for this meeting was "Intelligent Design: Grasping for Straws
in the New Millennium; A presentation of the many unintelligent
designs in nature." It was presented by FAoWM member, Professor
Gregory Forbes, who shows up on the interest surveys for our group
as one of our most popular speakers. His presentation was filmed
and will be shown as a GRCC broadcast on Cable Access television,
channel 28. He has a long and full bio of accomplishments, degrees
earned and places traveled to for zoological field work.
As a professor
of biological sciences at GRCC and director of the Science Education
Center there, he has a passion for grounding students in good
scientific methodology and imparting a keen understanding of evolutionary
biology. In his capacity as director of the Institute for Evolution
Education and the Michigan Evolution Education Initiative, he
works diligently to train teachers in grades K-12 in understanding
the principles of evolution and how to effectively teach this
cornerstone of biology to their students.
Besides teaching
what evolution is and is not, he instructs others on what science
itself is and what does not fall within its purview. The failure
to comprehend the foundations to good biological science education
allows unscientific views to flourish, and gain acceptance. These
threaten to either supplant, or be taught along with, evolution
in public school science curricula. If evolution is considered
to be "just a theory", employing the term "theory"
in the lay vernacular sense, then it paves the way for the "alternative
theories" of various creationist groups to compete.
Even those
who do not understand what constitutes a scientific theory as
an explanation of the facts based on natural physical laws, itself
based on observation and data recorded and tested that describe
phenomena, have no problem with relying on gravitational, cell
and germ theory, as examples of other theories. They expect a
ball thrown up to come back down and understand, at least basically,
that antibiotics are combating germs that make us ill---not some
wee demons or other "alternative theories." But with
evolution, there is a very direct upsetting potential for our
much- vaunted place within some special Plan. While science has
nothing to say about untestable ideas of superintending, cosmic
beings, souls, or heavenly rewards in some claim of an afterlife,
it does unequivocally show us to be firmly ensconced within the
primate order and as being linked right along with all other Earth's
biota in an evolutionary unfolding over billions of years, with
species coming into existence, extinctions, and fortuitous but
unplanned successes of some branches and twigs of the arborescent
tree of life.
For many people,
the blind phenotype- shaping forces of natural and sexual selection,
and seemingly purposeless formation and extinction of countless
species over spans of time too immense for true comprehension
that science shows us, is a depressing view. What is the master
plan? Where is the grand design? What is the deep meaning of it
all? To these questions that Homo sapiens ask, answers emerge
that fall outside of scientific scrutiny. This impressive planet
with its incredibly varied forms of life must have been designed!
And if designed, there must be a Designer that cares about Its
creation and guides the processes we see around us. And since
billions of years are too vast a time frame to fully digest, the
creationist answer must look at only thousands of years. Humankind
cannot have arisen from other, "lower" forms, or else
how could we be the special pet and ultimate achievement of the
Master Designer? Why would It have bothered to sculpt us from
soulless creatures using a process of descent with modification?
Besides being more comforting, the creationist view is simply
easier to understand as a story. It satisfies our need for supremacy
and links us closely to an all-powerful, guiding, intelligent
force.
Some creationists
argue that if we are no more than another animal "kind"
we cannot be expected to act as beings a wee bit closer to the
angels. If people believe there is no Cosmic Purpose, they will
feel abandoned, alone and feel that life is a pointless struggle.
That many people find personal purpose, joy and have fulfilling
lives as non-believers in an Intelligent Designer, is not persuasive
to them. But scientific data cannot be denied simply because it
does not support certain creation myths. Scientific theories cannot
be dismissed because they are not as comforting as evidence-free
stories told by scientifically illiterate people. It is not the
role of science to produce morality tales or assuage fragile human
egos. As we learned that the Earth was not the center of the universe,
that it was not a flat disc with a firmament (a sort of inverted
bowl) over it, that the stars were not just pinpricks but trillions
of suns and that our Earth's sun was not the "greater light"
of the universe and our moon was not its "lesser light"
and that it was not demons or angels that give us ill health or
vigor, still we were able to somehow make it through life without
crippling depression or a staggering rise in immorality.
Dr. Forbes
focused in this presentation on the newest species in creationist
evolution; the Intelligent Design camp. This is but the latest
attempt to get public schools to focus on a deity as a pseudoscientific
explanatory tool in place of or at least in addition to, evolutionary
biology. With every attempt they made in this effort to usurp
sound biological science for their brand of theology, the creationists
were blocked by court rulings that showed this to be religious
teaching- not science and found it in contradiction of Constitutional
law. In their descent, they modified their approach, however,
to try to make an end run around the laws and court case outcomes.
As Intelligent Design Theory, there is a studied effort not to
mention God or a Creator. Now they are not just creationists,
they are "researchers" developing an "alternative
scientific theory" to the stubbornly entrenched traditional
scientific community. But upon closer inspection we see that their
"research" does not extend beyond Christian theology
and Genesis and their "theory" is no more than warmed
over Paley. This, some 200 years after William Paley argued in
Natural Theology, that if one were to come upon a watch in nature
we would discern a craftsmanship and purposeful design in the
making of this object. Further, he claimed that without the component
parts fitting together in perfect synchrony and assembled in their
present state, the watch would be useless. He therefore made the
argument that the life forms we see around us must have been similarly
designed, purposefully and with all parts made to function immediately,
as they are seen in present form, for the survival of the organism.
The beings of the world had to be the fruit of an Intelligent
manufacturer, with a specific outcome in mind, he reasoned.
Fast forward
to contemporary times and we have modern day Paleys in the form
of Michael Behe and William Dembski and others who make essentially
the same claims. The only addition of any significance that these
"researchers" have added is the memorable phrase "Irreducible
complexity" which really just restates the idea that organisms
cannot have structures that are not created (by a slyly unspoken
but inescapable allusion to Divine fiat) to survive. They assert:
"science cannot explain" how the structures could have
arisen gradually and how the organism could have survived during
the time before they were "complete." Many of these
new (ID) creationists do not dismiss an ancient Earth or even
"microevolution"- or slight changes in the form of "basic
kinds" (as creationists have it) of biological entities.
They do not allow, however, for an evolution that depicts, say,
a terrestrial being adapting to a marine life, or land animals
taking wing as birds or of branches of retiles evolving into mammals;
"macroevolution."
Dr. Forbes
gave numerous examples of how very slight adaptations could bestow
upon the possessor of that alteration a benefit that could give
it the leg up in the success of passing on its genetic legacy.
Eyes are one of the organs that seem too amazing to have evolved
over time. We have, however, living examples of beings with pigmented
patches on their skin that are light sensitive and others showing
us the many steps along the way to the sort of eye humans possess.
And octopi, among other non-human life forms, have a superior
ocular "design." The eye has evolved some three dozen
times independently but oddly, when the Intelligent Designer made
His crowning achievement- us- he gave us eyes that were "wired"
backwards. An analogy would be making a light and fixture where
the wires come out the front, instead of tucked in back. But evolution
is blind to future outcomes and does not strive for perfection.
If a good enough structure evolved, it will likely be passed along
to other descendents. Dr. Forbes even countered the basic premise
of Paley's watch being a result of one independent fiat of manufacture.
All the component parts: springs, cogs, a lens, a metal casing
and so on were developed and used before there were watches. In
biological evolution, parts that were used in the service of one
way of life can become pressed into a very different use as environments
change. Gill arches were exapted to form jaws, other mandible
bones became the bones of the ear, a wrist bone transforms over
time into the "thumb" of a panda that holds its staple
food: bamboo shoots. A lobed fin can evolve into an ambulatory
apparatus as the possessor becomes terrestrial. Other forms belie
their evolutionary past. As just one example: the whale's forelimbs
still retain the bones of their terrestrial past and the hind
buds of what had been their rear appendages, and the cetaceans
still have to breathe air at the surface. As to the wings of birds
being useless in transitional stages, scientists see that the
modified scales that became feathers were probably useful as a
thermal coat and that there are many examples of living animals
that glide including some squirrels (flap of skin between fore
and hind limbs), snakes (body flattened), frogs (with feet webbing
that is spread large and wide), etc. A proto bird that could do
this and already had the thermal adaptation of feathers would
find success in slowly transmogrifying into winged aerial creatures.
Earlier on
in his presentation, Dr. Forbes made clear categorical distinctions
between the disparate approaches of religion and science. He made
no value judgments, giving religion its due for the way of knowing
it addresses and its importance to humankind; but just as science
cannot address spiritual concerns, religion is not a tool for
scientific investigation. The famous expression for this is: "Religion
teaches us how to go to heaven. Science teaches us how the heavens
go."
In a visual
aid, under "science", Dr. Forbes had that it is guided
by natural law, whereas religion makes use of supernatural intervention
(the creation "scientists" are fond of saying that the
way in which God created, employed laws and ways no longer accessible
via scientific investigation. But then this makes their claims
automatically fall outside of science and disqualifies them as
scientific researchers.) Further, he showed that science deals
in observation of natural phenomena whereas religion again references
supernatural causes that are not observable. Science is testable.
Religious claims are not. When a scientific hypothesis is tested
and found to be wanting, no matter how satisfying, it must be
discarded. Religion dogmatically clings to its belief systems
without critical investigation, collection of data or suffering
falsifying evidence. Science has to be falsifiable (if we found
mastodon bones fossilized along with trilobites in the same geological
strata, evolution would be in trouble) and the findings must remain
tentative, with the idea that more and better data may strengthen
or weaken a theory. And science asks questions and seeks to find
an answer, where, conversely, religion provides and answer that
it seeks to prove. Scientific theories unify and explain vast
amounts of observable phenomena. Religious claims connect neither
scientific findings together nor the beliefs of the multitude
of other religious beliefs. There is simply no "theory"
in religion, in the rigorous scientific sense.
Dr Forbes
showed us many visual displays of apparent design and purpose
in animal coloration patterns. In just one such example, he presented
a poster that depicts the alphabet and numbers 0-10 in butterfly
wings. In a droll aside he said that maybe this was the Designer's
way of showing one culture's rendering of letters and numbers
to be the one He favors. Of course this is an artifact of our
own pattern-seeking/seeing perceptual habits as visual hominids
rather than an example of a design for us. Indeed, unaided, we
are forever blind to the sights that creatures who see in the
ultraviolet range, and other parts of the spectrum, perceive.
We are deaf to sounds that a myriad of other creatures enjoy,
insensate to the electrical perturbations that many marine animals
feel, unaware of all but a tiny fraction of the cornucopia of
smells wafting about us, and so on. The world's sensations clearly
were not made with us in mind as the main beneficiary.
As the subtitle
of his presentation promised, Professor Forbes gave us a litany
of the unintelligent designs in nature and even some suggestions
for how our own bodies and senses could have been more optimally
designed for us, especially since we are placed as the supposed
pinnacle of creation. During this phase of his talk, Dr. Forbes
spoke of many of the well-worn claims the biochemist Behe routinely
makes in support of I.D., including the adaptation of flagellum
and blood clotting (modified digestive enzymes) and his favorite
nonliving example- the mousetrap (what now replaces Paley's watch)
as examples of things having, in his pet phrase, "Irreducible
Complexity." He countered these ID examples handily. He also
highlighted the creationist (and other non-scientific/ non-critical
thinking) approach of assuming that if the answer isn't "A"
then it must be "B." In other words, if there is something
that science has not yet discovered the complete answer to, then
it must be something that science, therefore, CANNOT explain;
it must be God. This is the god of the gaps argument. He noted
that with scientific progress, the gaps only shrink, making for
more homeless and unemployed deities. If one puts all one's faith
into a single dogmatic answer and that answer is a cherished god,
then one puts oneself in a terrible predicament when the gap closes,
he observed.
Just a few
of the examples of unintelligent designs he mentioned are the
human menstruation cycle that 3,999 other species do not have,
human eggs produced in utero rather than just before ovulation
(making for old eggs and the potential for genetic defect higher),
physical problems we have as a result of our bipedal stance, having
32 teeth in a mouth with an optimal carrying capacity of 28, the
Eustachian tubes open at one end and into the oral cavity- a "design"
with many resulting problems including deafness, the oviduct that
does not attach to the ovary in humans, etc. In other animals,
Forbes noted, our ability to rotate our arms (a relic of our arboreal
past existence-used in brachiation) is not seen in most quadrupeds.
He joked that you can try rotating a cat's limbs in this manner
by way of experiment and at first you will meet with resistance
but with subsequent trials it will move freely.
One point
made in response to a question during the Q&A portion of his
presentation was that while ID makes untenable claims, this does
not render it wrong necessarily, just that such claims fall outside
of science. If something extends far enough that began as legitimate
scientific research, into areas it cannot address it may then
go to theology. By the same token, if new information arises about
a matter that had been exclusive to theology then it may become
a suitable subject of investigation under the scientific method.
He mentioned
the efforts of colleague and fellow FAoWM member, Carl Bajema
and himself in working against misunderstandings of science at
the fundamental level and said that students should be taught
first what science is, what constitutes the scientific approach
and methodology and what a scientific theory is and how it is
arrived at before venturing into more rarefied, arcane aspects
of biology. Without this basic understanding, it is difficult
for students to discriminate between actual science and creationism
in the guise of science as in Intelligent Design Theory. When
they become adults who vote, lobby, pass laws and make rulings
or are board of education members deciding school curricula this
failure to comprehend the nature of science can be disastrous
for education and policies.
Secretary:
Charles LaRue
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