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"Whales and dolphins lack one part of the system called Factor XII, yet their blood clots just fine. Or consider the bacterial flagellum. ID predicts that without all of forty to fifty biochemical components, none will be functional. But this is demonstrably false. If you take away all but about ten components you get something called a type-Ill secretory apparatus, the very micromachine used by yersinia pestis, the organism that caused the Black Death.5 Would that it were nonfunctional!...
Brian Greene, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, writes in The Fabric of the Cosmos:
A common misconception is that the big bang provides a theory of cosmic origins. It doesn’t. The big bang is a theory.. . that delineates cosmic evolution from a split second after whatever happened to bring the universe into existence, but it says nothing at all about time zero itself. And since, according to the big bang theory, the bang is what is supposed to have happened at the beginning, the big bang leaves out the bang. It tells us nothing about what banged, why it banged, how it banged.
As physicists trace the expansion of the universe backward in time, they reach a point at which current theory breaks down...
Critics respond that the fine-tuning of the universe would imply theism only if we knew that the life-permitting values of the fundamental constants are brute facts that won’t be explained by any deeper physical laws. However, there is no consensus in physics about this... it would be folly to base a sweeping metaphysical conclusion on a highly speculative, unfinished frontier of advancing science...
Especially since Darwin, many theologians and ordinary believers alike began to defend the biblical traditions as alternative theories of biology, geology, and cosmology. Hence “scientific creationism.”... The late, great paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould took the other route to the independence of science and religion, defending a principled division of labor between the empirical and nonempirical, which he dubbed “non-overlapping magisteria,” or NOMA.” On this view, religion and science can peacefully coexist in neighboring yet isolated domains...
The sciences cannot preclude the supernatural in principle for the general reason that there is no way to legislate in advance what may or may not be used in our scientific exploration of the world. The history of science is filled with examples of novel entities, processes, and methods of inquiry that were once unknown or disregarded but that came to have important places in science.
For example, from its beginnings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, modern science had confined itself to entities that are directly observable by the naked eye or with the aid of instruments such as the telescope. Yet in the 1800s, this standard was eventually revised so that by the end of the century, leading researchers found it perfectly acceptable to invoke unobservable entities, such as electromagnetic fields. Why? Because their hypotheses explained a great many facts, pointed to interesting new insights, and found support in persuasive indirect evidence; namely, the observable effects of the unobservables...
How strong is the presumption of naturalism? Strong enough to prevent anyone from crying, “God did it” whenever there is a gap in our understanding of natural causes. As philosopher Paul Draper puts it, “Very strong reasons to believe there is no hidden naturalistic explanation would be required as well...
Although there is a growing body of scientific knowledge about autism, the basic nature and root causes of the illness remain largely mysterious. There are significant gaps in the current naturalistic understanding of autism. Yet you don’t hear anyone calling for a supernatural explanation, the “intelligent design” of autism. Why not? First, there is the general confidence based on past experience that natural causes will be forthcoming. Second, there is a body of background knowledge concerning the roots of other disorders in genes and environment or some complex mixture of the two. A naturalistic account of autism would fit with this background better than a supernaturalistic account. Finally, the present gap in our understanding of autism is not at all surprising given the relatively immature state of our understanding of the brain...
Bare-bones creationism also illustrates how evolutionary science and theology could have something to say to one another no matter how thin the theology. If it were correct, then among other things it follows that everything in natural history was intended by God (or at least, everything that was not for some reason unavoidable). Theological insights tumble out: the creator has—in the phrase attributed to the geneticist J. B. S. Haldane—an inordinate fondness for beetles (or better yet, bacteria, which appeared on Earth two billion years before any other living thing and continue to dominate the planet in sheer numbers and distribution); the creator is prepared to sacrifice any number of innocent creatures as research subjects in his experimentation with life... Even if biology says nothing about the supernatural. it can still have implications for theology...
The Cartesian model of the person was dustbinned for two main reasons. First, it is not at all clear how an immaterial soul could cause changes in the physical body. Consider: Souls are thought of as purely nonphysical—they can’t be weighed, split in half, heated or cooled; they lack mass, electric charge, and so on. But then how could they possibly have a cause-and-effect interaction with bodies, which have exclusively physical properties? Second, there are many specific correlations between mental phenomena and brain activity. For example, language use and spatial reasoning appear to be localized in particular areas of the brain. Brain injuries cause very distinctive changes in perception, cognition, and even personality. Some mental diseases like schizophrenia have a genetic component. But why would any of this be if the mind were independent of the brain9 After all this evidence, anyone who still believes in the Cartesian model ought to have someone else’s head examined...
The openings in our throats for breathing and swallowing are so close together that we often choke. The birth canal is too small, increasing the chances of injury, even death, during delivery. The list goes on. What’s more, we know that almost every species that has ever existed on Earth is now extinct. Every museum of natural history is a scrapheap of failed experiments. An engineer whose designs were this intelligent would not have a job for long...
Sometimes people talk as though such deprivation and suffering is necessary to preserve a “balance of nature.” There is nothing redemptive in balance. Any balance of nature is just a state of equilihrium that is, a state of a system such that, when the system enters that state, it tends to stay in it. That says nothing about the value of the state. The most stable balance of nature is everything being dead...
The Golden Rule in its common form is neither evolutionarily nor morally sound. The Golden Rule does not win an iterated prisoner’s dilemma. It counsels cooperation always (assuming that is what we would want done unto us). But the Tit for Tat strategy counsels us to cooperate only if the other players do. If they defect, then they get the same done unto them. The Golden Rule is also indefensible as an ethical principle, since it is satisfied by wicked actions so long as the actor is consistent: the genocidal Nazi executioner who, upon discovering that he is Jewish, consents to his own execution. He does not do unto others anything he would not want done to himself. There must be more to morality than the Golden Rule...
Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser has conducted a large-scale cross-cultural study of people’s judgments about hypothetical moral dilemmas involving the permissibility of killing another person...
First, the effects of demographic and cultural variables on the pattern of moral judgments are insignificant. Second, there is a dissociation between judgment and justification, such that people rarely produce coherent justifications for their moral verdicts of right and wrong. And third, there are three principles that appear to unconsciously guide people’s judgments, when consequences are held constant: People judge intended harms as worse than foreseeable harms, harms resulting from action as worse than harms resulting from omission, and harms involving physical contact as worse than those involving no contact.
On the basis of these findings, Hauser has hypothesized that a shared “moral grammar” shapes the moral reasoning of all normal human beings, a set of universal assumptions embedded in our psychology...
Thank goodness, there is such a thing a nonreligious objective ethics. In fact, there is no alternative to it. Conscience is secular by its nature. Not only is the secular conscience possible without religion, the religious conscience is impossible without it...
Maybe the problem with secular standards in particular is that they can never be certain—another meaning of “relativism.” However, the alternative to certainty is not ignorance but fallibility, the idea that a belief can be reasonable even though it is not justified conclusively or beyond all possible doubt...
This second source of consternation about ethics... can moral claims be known with a degree of confidence less than certainty? Again, it would not bankrupt the idea of morality to admit that moral knowledge is imperfect and revisable in light of future experience. After all, the most successful ways of knowing that we know of are found in the natural sciences. In the sciences, fallibility and revisability are virtues. Why should moral knowledge be held to a higher standard?...
What else could relativism mean? It could mean that apart from a transcendent order, nothing is better or worse, right or wrong, period. Truth is opinion, and “objective moral truth” is opinion on stilts. Taken to the extreme, this is just nihilism, the doctrine that nothing really matters. It is hard to argue that nihilism is the reigning ideology of our time, except perhaps at certain dance clubs and on cable TV between the hours of 11 p.m. and 4 a.m. Just ask yourself how many nihilists you’ve met today (if they found a reason to get out of bed in the morning, they probably weren’t nihilists)"
--- The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life / Austin Dacey