ID and my Philosophy course...

[Keevan_Colton]

JEFFREY BROWN: Now, two prominent players in this debate, who've appeared before school boards around the country: Lawrence Krauss, professor of physics at Case Western Reserve University and author of "Atom: An Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth and Beyond"; and Michael Behe, professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University and author of "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Darwin."
Welcome to both of you. I'd like to start with you, Professor Krauss. The president said both sides ought to be taught. What do you think?

LAWRENCE KRAUSS: Well, it's a completely inappropriate remark, unfortunately. Whatever he may think individually, what he's done is give credence to a concept that's really been proposed by a very small group of people that doesn't appear in the scientific literature.
It's really quite marginal to -- it's part of a very successful marketing and public relations campaign by a well-financed group, the Discovery Institute, of which Dr. Behe is a member. And it shows how you can take something that, from a scientific perspective is really irrelevant and make it appear to be an incredibly controversial issue, which it isn't.

JEFFREY BROWN: Professor Behe, why don't you give us your reaction to what the president said?

MICHAEL BEHE: Well, I was very pleased. This whole debate about whether one can detect design in nature goes back thousands of years to the ancient Greek philosophers. You know, Aristotle and Dimocrates argued over whether there was design in nature and it's important to realize that all biologists readily acknowledged that the appearance of design, at least, is very strong in life.
A man named Richard Dawkins, who's a very strong Darwinian biologist, nonetheless says that biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. So we're talking about a very ancient and ongoing argument.

JEFFREY BROWN: But the critique, Professor Behe, you just heard from Professor Krauss, is that you don't have the evidence, that it's more a kind of marketing campaign. It hasn't gone through the scientific literature.

MICHAEL BEHE: Well, I disagree. The scientific literature contains many, many examples of very complex systems that everybody says appear to be designed. When Darwin wrote his book on "The Origin of Species," he was ignorant and all of science was ignorant about the molecular basis of life.
In the past 50 years, the progress of science itself has discovered that the very foundation, the molecular foundation of life is enormously sophisticated and elegant. There are molecular machines, there are little trucks and buses and outboard motors that shuttle supplies around the cell. And the term "molecular machine" is used routinely in biology. Biology is just filled with terms that imply design.

JEFFREY BROWN: Professor Krauss, help the layperson understand this. Do you and other scientists just not see these machines?

LAWRENCE KRAUSS: No. In fact, actually understanding molecular machines is a kind of interesting area of physics nowadays and there's been a great deal of progress in understanding how the laws of physics and chemistry can naturally produce these devices. To say there's an appearance of design is a reason -- first of all, it's a subjective thing. Some people see design and some people don't. But to suggest that's a reason that there must be design is crazy.
If you look at a snowflake under a microscope, you'll see an incredibly elegant structure. But I don't think Dr. Behe would argue that it was designed. If you look at a geodesic dome on earth, you might say well that was designed by Buckminster Fuller, but if you look at the molecule C-60, which is made up of carbon atoms, it's a geodesic dome. But, again, we understand how natural laws of physics produce this, and to say that this has appeared in the scientific literature is just ridiculous.
A colleague of mine did a study recently of 20 million scientific articles over the last 20 years. In that, if you do the key word "evolution" you'll find about 115,000 hits. If you do intelligent design, you'll find 88 hits. Of those 88, all but 11 were in engineering journals where you hope there's intelligent design. Of the remaining eleven, eight were critical of intelligent design and the other three weren't in research journals.
So it's really a marginal notion and it's -- I have no problem with people exploring it. But if they want to explore it, they should explore it the way the rest of scientists explore it. They should publish articles, perform experiments, do tests, fight with referees and, after maybe twenty or thirty years if they convince their colleagues, then maybe it will get in high school textbooks. But what these people want to do is the opposite of fairness. They want to skip all those intermediate steps and say, let's forget doing the actual studies; let's go directly to the high school classroom. And that's the opposite of fair play, really.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, Professor Behe, how far do you want to push this? The question on the table and the question the president raised is: Should it be taught in the high school classroom? Should it be taught in a science class at this point?

MICHAEL BEHE: Well, let me make it clear, I'm not trying to push anything. All I'm doing is advancing an idea. You know, it was the president who talked about education; high school education is not my particular area of interest, although it's very important.
My own feeling is that I think talking about it would be very exciting; it would be an excellent pedagogical tool to introduce high school students to a variety of topics that get short shrift in science, but are nonetheless very, very important. That is how do assumptions -- how do assumptions affect what theories are produced? How far can one extrapolate data? Can you extrapolate small changes in current organisms to enormous changes over billions of years?
There are many, many -- many, many other questions about how scientists developed theories, test them, come to a social consensus about what is permitted and what is not. And I think just pedagogically, I can't understand why a Darwinian biologist would be reluctant to have these issues discussed in the classroom. Darwinian biologists and Professor Krauss, of course, is not a biologist, but he's a sympathizer; nonetheless Darwinian biologists seem to think that their theory is extremely strong and yet are afraid to discuss other theories. That's a curious position as far as I can see.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, Professor Krauss, go ahead, respond.

LAWRENCE KRAUSS: Well, that's a standard argument that Dr. Behe uses, but it's ludicrous. In fact, of course we want to discuss interesting new controversial ideas in science. Unfortunately, intelligent design isn't one. If Dr. Behe wants to push the idea, what he should do is instead of going out and lobbying states to include in high schools, what that group should do is try and do the science, try and convince their colleagues. You know, in physics, there are hundreds if not thousands of articles on challenges to Newtonian gravity, ideas that Newtonian gravity changes on the scale of a galaxy. But I don't see people saying we should in high school physics classes not teach gravity.
There's an idea where people have actually tried to propose tests and make alternative theories that really make sense and people are actually exploring them. I think they're likely wrong, but people are actually exploring them. But intelligent design hasn't even reached that. There are basically no scientific articles, no proposals, it hasn't affected the essential thinking of the way biology is performed and until it does, there's no reason to talk about it. Of course, we should discuss how scientists arrive at theories and it's a great idea. Maybe we should use Newtonian gravity as an example because as far as I can see the challenge to that is much greater than the challenge to evolution.

JEFFREY BROWN: Professor Krauss, many, many critics of this idea of intelligent design have pointed to it as a kind of backdoor way to bring God back into the high school classroom. Do you see that as what's going on?

LAWRENCE KRAUSS: Absolutely. I have to say that if you actually look at the literature of groups like the Discovery Institute, it's very clear. And that's the reason I as a physicist are involved in this. It's very clear that the attack is not on evolution, it's really an attack on science. The notion that because science doesn't explicitly mention God, it's somehow immoral, in fact, that's in the literature if you read what these people are saying.
And so for me the point about science is it's neutral when it comes to God. There are incredibly devout and spiritual biologists and physicists; there are atheists. And the fact that those same sets of people can work on the same science, evolutionary biology in particular, indicates that the science is neutral and that's the way science should be. Science is not all of human knowledge. It's a very specific discipline that says let's try and look at natural causes that might explain natural effects.
And you know, that may not - that doesn't explain everything in nature, and it's unfortunate with science, scientists suggest that science is all there is, that there aren't other kinds of truth. But it works pretty well and it's the basis of our modern technological society. And I as someone who likes to talk about science and wishes people knew science better get worried when instead of trying to promote thinking about science, we're trying to attack it and suggest that the scientific method itself is somehow suspect. And that's the real danger.

JEFFREY BROWN: Okay. Professor Behe, is this a way to bring God into the classroom and, I guess the direct question is: Is the designer, the intelligent designer, is that god?

MICHAEL BEHE: Well, first of all, to answer your first question, no, this is not an attempt to bring God into the classroom. This is an attempt to account for the data that science has accumulated in the past five decades. Nobody expected the cell to be this complex. Nobody expected molecular machinery to under-gird life. No Darwinian theory predicted this. No Darwinian theory presently accounts for it. We are just trying to explain how such astonishing machinery and complexity has come to be.
The theory of intelligent design is no more an attempt to bring God into the classroom than the Big Bang Theory was. Now, in the early parts of the 20th Century, physicists thought that the universe was eternal and unchanging. And then red shifts of galaxies were noted and this was interpreted as the universe expanding and this was the start of the Big Bang Theory.
Now, many physicists thought that the Big Bang Theory had philosophical and theological implications and they didn't like it. And as a matter of fact, well into the 20th Century, a number of scientists did not like the Big Bang Theory. As a matter of fact, the prominent science journal Nature ran a curious editorial in the late 1980s with the title "Down with the Big Bang." It was written by the editor of Nature, a guy named John Maddox, who called the Big Bang Theory philosophically unacceptable and said that it gave aid and comfort to creationists because it seemed to point beyond the universe.
But the Big Bang Theory was just trying to account for the data. In the same way intelligent design is just trying to account for the data that we've accumulated in the past 50 years. Whether that has philosophical or even theological implications is secondary. We're trying to account for data itself.

JEFFREY BROWN: Okay. Professors Michael Behe and Lawrence Krauss, thank you both very much.

MICHAEL BEHE: Thank you.

LAWRENCE KRAUSS: Thank you

This was just posted up by the dimwit in charge of my philosophy course to show that there really is a scientific debate about ID and it's not just a load of bunk etc...enjoy.

[Molyneux]

Graaah! He STILL didn't answer the question of just who the hell the gorramn Intelligent Designer is supposed to BE!

...is that the same Lawrence Krauss who did "The Physics of Star Trek"?

[wolveraptor]

ID doesn't have data. It has the arrogant presumptions of some dumbass biochemist from Nowheresville that percieved design is real design, and it therefore warrants of a designer. That's why it isn't like the Big Bang.

But I can't believe it was ended with Behe having the last word. It seems awfully biased.

[drachefly]

Nobody expected the cell to be this complex. Nobody expected molecular machinery to under-gird life.

Well, as for the first, many biologists were rather naive, yes (and others, but it wasn't their job not to be). But there's a big difference between our EXPECTATIONS of what evolution had came up with and what evolution was actually capable of coming up with.

As for the second, it's absurd from the face of it straight to the core of it.



I wonder how this played 'on the street' as it were.

[Captain Cyran]

MICHAEL BEHE: Well, I was very pleased. This whole debate about whether one can detect design in nature goes back thousands of years to the ancient Greek philosophers. You know, Aristotle and Dimocrates argued over whether there was design in nature and it's important to realize that all biologists readily acknowledged that the appearance of design, at least, is very strong in life.

Ah, good to know we're taking the word of the philosophers who thought the Sun revolved aroudn the world, that arrows were pushed by the air they displaced, and that earth stayed down because it wanted to be with the rest of the earth and air rose because it wanted to be with the rest of the air. (All from Aristotle, lets not even get into Thales)

A man named Richard Dawkins, who's a very strong Darwinian biologist, nonetheless says that biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. So we're talking about a very ancient and ongoing argument.

An argument that has no proof for it, just a few people making understandable mistakes in the past that some people refuse to let go of.

MICHAEL BEHE: Well, I disagree. The scientific literature contains many, many examples of very complex systems that everybody says appear to be designed.

That everybody being... who?

When Darwin wrote his book on "The Origin of Species," he was ignorant and all of science was ignorant about the molecular basis of life.

So we should take the word of ancient Greek scholars who have been proven wrong on pretty much all counts, but a recent scholar who so far has a great amount of quantifiable evidence behind him should be ignored? Please tell me they don't let you into classrooms.

In the past 50 years, the progress of science itself has discovered that the very foundation, the molecular foundation of life is enormously sophisticated and elegant. There are molecular machines, there are little trucks and buses and outboard motors that shuttle supplies around the cell. And the term "molecular machine" is used routinely in biology. Biology is just filled with terms that imply design.

Ah, so because it's complicated it MUST have been created. There is no way that billions of years of evolution could have resulted in what we see. As for the "molecular machine" comment I won't even get into that as you're using a bad implication to justify your theory.

MICHAEL BEHE: Well, let me make it clear, I'm not trying to push anything. All I'm doing is advancing an idea. You know, it was the president who talked about education; high school education is not my particular area of interest, although it's very important.

Bullshit you aren't trying to push anything. The advancing of an idea is in itself the pushing of an idea.

My own feeling is that I think talking about it would be very exciting; it would be an excellent pedagogical tool to introduce high school students to a variety of topics that get short shrift in science, but are nonetheless very, very important.

No, you don't seem to get that Intelligent Design is not science. The very fact that the Kansas School Board had to change the definition of science should be proof enough of that. If it is confirmed science and involves the relevant study, it will be included.

That is how do assumptions -- how do assumptions affect what theories are produced? How far can one extrapolate data? Can you extrapolate small changes in current organisms to enormous changes over billions of years? There are many, many -- many, many other questions about how scientists developed theories, test them, come to a social consensus about what is permitted and what is not.

This is all standard lack of understanding of how science works, bordering on willing ignorance.

And I think just pedagogically, I can't understand why a Darwinian biologist would be reluctant to have these issues discussed in the classroom. Darwinian biologists and Professor Krauss, of course, is not a biologist, but he's a sympathizer; nonetheless Darwinian biologists seem to think that their theory is extremely strong and yet are afraid to discuss other theories. That's a curious position as far as I can see.

They ARE eager to discuss their theories. They just aren't going to waste their time arguing against something that isn't another viable theory.

MICHAEL BEHE: Well, first of all, to answer your first question, no, this is not an attempt to bring God into the classroom. This is an attempt to account for the data that science has accumulated in the past five decades. Nobody expected the cell to be this complex. Nobody expected molecular machinery to under-gird life. No Darwinian theory predicted this. No Darwinian theory presently accounts for it. We are just trying to explain how such astonishing machinery and complexity has come to be.

*cough bullshit cough* The problem you are running into is the fact that you aren't trying to solve these questions reasonably you're too eager to just go "God did it." and leave the answer at that.

The theory of intelligent design is no more an attempt to bring God into the classroom than the Big Bang Theory was. Now, in the early parts of the 20th Century, physicists thought that the universe was eternal and unchanging. And then red shifts of galaxies were noted and this was interpreted as the universe expanding and this was the start of the Big Bang Theory.
Now, many physicists thought that the Big Bang Theory had philosophical and theological implications and they didn't like it. And as a matter of fact, well into the 20th Century, a number of scientists did not like the Big Bang Theory. As a matter of fact, the prominent science journal Nature ran a curious editorial in the late 1980s with the title "Down with the Big Bang." It was written by the editor of Nature, a guy named John Maddox, who called the Big Bang Theory philosophically unacceptable and said that it gave aid and comfort to creationists because it seemed to point beyond the universe.
But the Big Bang Theory was just trying to account for the data. In the same way intelligent design is just trying to account for the data that we've accumulated in the past 50 years. Whether that has philosophical or even theological implications is secondary. We're trying to account for data itself.

All a Red Herring.

This was just posted up by the dimwit in charge of my philosophy course to show that there really is a scientific debate about ID and it's not just a load of bunk etc...enjoy.

Your Philosophy Professor deserves to be shot, then drawn and quartered. He isn't doing a very good job of being a Philosopher.

[Durandal]

Cyran, I think Dr. Krauss did a better job responding that you ever could. Please refrain from show-boating.

[Darth Wong]

It still irks me that at no point does Dr. Behe ever examine the actual observed characteristics of real intelligently designed product lines over time and compare them to the characteristics of the biosystem. He simply declares that any aspects of the biosystem which cannot be instantly and easily explained must imply design by default. He proposes an amorphous hypothesis with no testable characteristics and expects us to accept that it qualifies as science.

[drachefly]

Cyran, I think Dr. Krauss did a better job responding that you ever could. Please refrain from show-boating.

Maybe he got this mixed up with the 'practice' thread.

[Captain Cyran]

Cyran, I think Dr. Krauss did a better job responding that you ever could. Please refrain from show-boating.

Wasn't trying to. Just found it somewhat irksome and was trying to make a point to Keevan that not all Philosophy professors are like his. All the information I used was stuff I picked up in my philosophy class. I'd just been in a hurry and forgot to add that part.

[Keevan_Colton]

Well, he called in sick today and cancelled the class, and managed to post another item onto the website, in the wrong section, but it's still a vast improvement.

SPIEGEL: Professor Dennett, more than 120 million Americans believe that God created Adam our of mud some 10,000 years ago and made Eve from his rib. Do you personally know any of these 120 million?

Dennett: Yes. But people who are creationists are usually not interested in talking about it. Those who are actually enthusiastic about Intelligent Design, though, would talk endlessly. And what I learned about them is that they are filled with misinformation. But they've encountered this misinformation in very plausible sources. It's not just their pastor that tells them this. They go out and they buy books that are published by main line publishers. Or they go on Web sites and they see very clever propaganda that is put out by the Discovery Institute in Seattle, which is financed by the religious right.

SPIEGEL: In the center of the debate is the theory of evolution. Why is it that evolution seems to produce much more opposition than any other scientific theory such as the Big Bang or quantum mechanics?

Dennett: I think it is because evolution goes right to the heart of the most troubling discovery in science of the last few hundred years. It counters one of the oldest ideas we have, maybe older even than our species.

SPIEGEL: Which is what exactly?

Dennett: It's the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing. I call that the trickle-down theory of creation. You'll never see a spear making a spear maker. You'll never see a horse shoe making a blacksmith. You'll never see a pot making a potter. It is always the other way around and this is so obvious that it just seems to stand to reason.

SPIEGEL: You think this idea was already present in apes?

Dennett: Maybe in Homo Habilus, the handyman, who began making stone tools some 2 million years ago. They had a sense of being more wonderful that their artifacts. So the idea of a creator that is more wonderful than the things he creates is, I think, a very deeply intuitive idea. It is exactly this idea that promoters of Intelligent Design speak to when they ask, 'did you ever see a building that didn't have a maker, did you ever see a painting that didn't have a painter.' That perfectly captures this deeply intuitive idea that you never get design for free.

SPIEGEL: An ancient theological argument...

Dennett: ... which Darwin completely impugns with his theory of natural selection. And he shows, hell no, not only can you get design from un-designed things, you can even get the evolution of designers from that un-design. You end up with authors and poets and artists and engineers and other designers of things, other creators -- very recent fruits of the tree of life. And it challenges people's sense that life has meaning.

SPIEGEL: Even the spirit of humans -- his soul -- is produced in this manner?

Dennett: Yes. As a multi-cellular, mobile life form, you need a mind because you have to look out where you are going. You have got to have a nervous system, which can extract information from the world fast and can refine that information and put it to use quickly to guide your behavior. The basic problematic for all animals is finding what they need and avoiding what could hurt them and doing it faster than the opposition. Darwin understood this law and understood that this development has been going on for hundreds of millions of years producing ever more android minds.

SPIEGEL: But still, something out of the ordinary happened when humans came along.

Dennett: Indeed. Humans discovered language -- an explosive acceleration of the powers of minds. Because now you can not just learn from your own experience, but you can learn vicariously from the experience of everybody else. From people that you never met. From ancestors long dead. And human culture itself becomes a profound evolutionary force. That is what gives us an epistemological horizon and which is far, far greater than that of any other species. We are the only species that knows who we are, that knows that we have evolved. Our songs, art, books and religious beliefs are all ultimately a product of evolutionary algorithms. Some find that thrilling, others depressing.

SPIEGEL: Nowhere does evolution become so apparent than in the DNA code. Nevertheless, those who believe in Intelligent Design find the DNA code less problematic than the ideas of Darwin. Why is that?

Dennett: I don't know, because it seems to me that the very best evidence we have for the truth of Darwin's theory is the evidence that arrives every day from bioinformatics, from understanding the DNA-coding. The critics of Darwinism just don't want to confront the fact that molecules, enzymes and proteins lead to thought. Yes, we have a soul, but it's made up of lots of tiny robots.

SPIEGEL: Don't you think it's possible to leave life to the biologists, but let religion take care of the soul?

Dennett: That's what Pope John Paul II was demanding when he issued his oft-quoted cyclical in which he said that evolution was a fact, but he went right on to say: except on the matter of the human soul. That might make some content, but it is just false. It would be just as false to say: Our bodies are made up of biological material, except, of course, the pancreas. The brain is no more wonder tissue than the lungs or the liver. It's just a tissue.

SPIEGEL: Darwin's ideas have been misused by racists and eugenicists. Is this also one of the reasons that Darwinism is so energetically attacked?

Dennett: Yes. I think the gentler way of putting it is that the Darwinian idea is very simple -- you can explain it to somebody in a minute. But for that very reason, it is also extremely vulnerable to caricature and misuse. I very patiently teach my students the basics of evolutionary theory and then I have to go back and clean up after myself, because they get very enthusiastic about it and they keep falling into these misunderstandings. Darwinism is mind candy, it's delicious. But the thing is, having too much candy can distract from the truth. And that can play into the hands of people who are racist or sexist. So you have to maintain a sort of intellectual hygiene at all times.

SPIEGEL: It seems that everything -- from adultery to rape to murder -- is being analyzed in the light of evolution these days. How can one separate serious research from the candy?

Dennett: You have to be a meticulous gatherer of the relevant facts and you have to marshal those facts in such a way that you have a testable hypothesis that could actually be confirmed or disproved. That's what Darwin did.

SPIEGEL: Your colleague Michael Ruse has accused you of stepping out of the field of science and into social science and religion with your theories. He's even said you are inadvertently aiding the Intelligent Design movement as a result.

Dennett: Michael is just trying to put the implications of Darwin's insights into soft focus and to reassure people that there is not as much conflict between the perspective of evolutionary biology and their traditional ways of thinking.

SPIEGEL: And what about the accusation that you are aiding Intelligent Design?

Dennett: There is probably an element of truth to it. I've just finished writing a book in which I look at religion from the perspective of evolutionary biology. I think you can, should, and even must take this route. Others say 'no, hands off! Just don't let evolution get anywhere near the social sciences.' I think that's terrible advice. The idea that we should protect the social sciences and humanity from evolutionary thinking is a recipe for disaster.

SPIEGEL: Why?

Dennett: I would give Darwin the gold medal for the best idea anybody ever had. It unifies the world of meaning and purpose and goals and freedom with the world of science, with the world of the physical sciences. I mean, we talk about the great gap between social science and natural science. What closes that gap? Darwin -- by showing us how purpose and design, meaning, can arise out of purposelessness, out of just brute matter.

SPIEGEL: Is Darwinism at work every time something new is created? Even at the creation of the universe for example?

Dennett: It's at least interesting to see that quasi- or pseudo-Darwinian ideas are also popular in physics. They postulate a huge diversity from which there has, in a certain sense, been a selection. The result is that here we are and this is the only part of this huge diversity that we witness. That's not the Darwinian idea, but it's a relative. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had the idea -- I would guess perhaps inspired by Darwin -- of eternal recurrence: The idea that all the possibilities are played out and if the time is infinite and matter is infinite then every permutation will be tried, not once, but a trillion times.

SPIEGEL: Another idea of Nietzsche's was that God is dead. Is that also a logical conclusion reached by Darwinism?

Dennett: It is a very clear consequence. The argument for design, I think, has always been the best argument for the existence of God and when Darwin comes along, he pulls the rug out from under that.

SPIEGEL: Evolution, in other words, leaves no room for God?

Dennett: One has to understand that God's role has been diminished over the eons. First we had God, as you said, making Adam and making every creature with his hands, plucking the rib from Adam and making Eve from that rib. Then we trade that God in for the God who sets evolution in motion. And then you say you don't even need that God -- the law giver -- because if we take these ideas from cosmology seriously then there are other places and other laws and life evolves where it can. So now we no longer have God the law finder or the law giver, but just God the master of ceremonies. When God is the master of ceremonies and doesn't actually play any role any more in the universe, he's sort of diminished and no longer intervenes in any way.

SPIEGEL: How is it, then, that many natural scientists are religious? How does that go together with their work?

Dennett: It goes together by not looking too closely at how it goes together. It's a trick we can all do. We all have our ways of compartmentalizing our lives so that we confront contradictions as seldom as possible.

SPIEGEL: But this compartmentalizing has a positive side as well: Natural science talks about life whereas religion deals with the meaning of life.

Dennett: Fine. A boundary. But the trouble is that the boundary moves. And as it moves, the job description for God shrinks. I, too, stand in awe of the universe. It's wonderful, I'm so happy to be here, I think it's a great place for all its faults, I love being alive. The problem is: There's nobody to be grateful to. There's nobody to express my gratitude to.

SPIEGEL: But religion surely gives us moral standards and provides guidance on how to behave.

Dennett: If that's what religion does, then I don't think it is such a silly idea. But it doesn't. Religions at their best serve as excellent social organizers. They make moral teamwork a much more effective force than it otherwise would be. This, however, is a two-edged sword. Because moral teamwork depends to a very large degree on ceding your own moral judgment to the authority of the group. And that can be extremely dangerous, as we know.

SPIEGEL: But religion still helps us to set moral standards.

Dennett: But are we only morally good so that we get rewarded in heaven; so that God will punish us for our sins and reward us for good behavior? I find this idea extremely patronizing. It is offensive in that it suggests that that's the only reason people are moral. Do we only, for example, behave well to get 76 virgins in paradise? That's an idea that many in the West would scoff at.

SPIEGEL: Why then do pretty much all cultures have religion?

Dennett: I think the answer to that question is partly historical in the sense that traditions that survive evolve adaptations for surviving. So that religions themselves are extremely well designed cultural phenomena that have evolved to survive.

SPIEGEL: Like a biological species.

Dennett: Absolutely. A religion's design is completely unconscious in exactly the way the design of animals and plants is completely unconscious.

SPIEGEL: Do successful religions have similar features?

Dennett: They all have to have features for prolonging their own identity -- and a lot of these are actually interestingly similar to what you find in biology, too.

SPIEGEL: Can you give an example?

Dennett: Many religions started before there was writing. How do you get high fidelity preservation of texts before you have texts? Group singing and recitation are efficient mechanisms for maintaining and spreading information. And then we have other features too, like you really want to make sure there are some parts of religion that are really incomprehensible.

SPIEGEL: Why?

Dennett: Because then people have to fall back on rote memorization. The very idea of the Eucharist is a lovely example: The idea that the bread is symbolic of the body of Christ, that the wine is symbolic of the blood of Christ, that's just not exciting enough. The idea needs to be made strictly incomprehensible: The bread is Christ's body and the wine is his blood. Only then will it hold your attention. Then it will win in competition against more boring ideas simply because you can't quite get your head around it. It's sort of like when you have a sore tooth and you can't keep your tongue off it. Every good Muslim is supposed to pray five times a day no matter what.

SPIEGEL: You see that too as an evolutionary strategy to keep the religion alive?

Dennett: It's very possible. The Israeli evolutionary biologist Amotz Zahavi argues that behaviors which are costly -- which are hard to imitate -- are those that can best be handed down because non-costly signals can and will be faked. This principle of costly behaviors is well established in biology and it is present in religion. It is important to make sacrifices. The costliness is a feature you tamper with at your peril. If the imams got together and decided to remove that feature they would be damaging one of the most powerful adaptations of Islam.

SPIEGEL: By using this type of argumentation, can you predict which religions will win out in the end?

Dennett: My colleagues Rodney Stark and Roger Finke have researched why some religions spread quickly and others don't. They're adapting supply side economics to this and saying that there's a sort of unlimited market for what religions can give but only if they're costly. So they have an explanation for why the very bland and liberal Protestant religions are losing members and why the most extreme, intense religions are gaining members.

SPIEGEL: Do you have an explanation for why the belief in Intelligent Design is nowhere so widespread as in the United States?

Dennett: No, unfortunately I don't. But I can say, the alliance between fundamentalists or evangelical religion and right wing politics is a very troubling phenomenon and this is certainly one of the most potent reasons for it. What's really scary is that a lot of them seem to think that the second coming is around the corner -- the idea that we're going to have Armageddon anyway so it doesn't make much difference. I find that to be socially irresponsible on the highest order. It's scary.

SPIEGEL: Professor Dennett, thank you very much for this interview.

[wolveraptor]

Who is that guy? He kicks ass.

[Keevan_Colton]

The philosopher DANIEL C. DENNETT is perhaps best known in cognitive science for his concept of intentional systems, and his multiple drafts (or “fame in the brain”) model of human consciousness, which sketches a computational architecture for realizing the stream of consciousness (the “Joycean machine”) in the massively parallel cerebral cortex.

His uncompromising computationalism has been opposed by philosophers such as John Searle and Jerry Fodor who maintain that the most important aspects of consciousness — intentionality and subjective quality — can never be computed. He is the philosopher of choice of the AI community.

He is also a major contributor to the understanding of the conceptual foundations of evolutionary biology. In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, he argued that the “universal acid” of evolutionary explanation extends well beyond biology to re-conceptualize culture and science itself, and exposed some of the internal conflicts and misconstruals in the contrary claims of Stephen Jay Gould.

Daniel C. Dennett is University Professor, Professor of Philosophy, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of Content and Consciousness; Brainstorms; Elbow Room; The Intentional Stance; Consciousness Explained; Darwin's Dangerous Idea; Kinds of Minds; Brainchildren; Freedom Evolves; and Sweet Dreams.

[Lagmonster]

Dennett: (.....) So they have an explanation for why the very bland and liberal Protestant religions are losing members and why the most extreme, intense religions are gaining members.

This is the part that worries me. I wonder sometimes whether the end result of social religious needs is a population split into extremes between a strong atheist or religiously indifferent population and a fanatically strong religious population, and what that would result in.


Edit: I actually want to expand on that quote of Dennett's, since it would seem to me that the reason liberal religions lose members is because they become apathetic towards a faith whose morals and social acceptance values are identical to what they'd get in a secular social setting, minus the boring sermons and tithing, whereas people with a real ingrained need to be handheld by religion and woven into its social structure tend to find progressive churches unfulfilling and gravitate towards lunatic territory.

To me, this says that religions will only survive by separating themselves from everyday secular cultures and values, if for no other reason than to not be boring and to offer something that feels different from everyday life. Hence, my worry about an eventually polarized population.

[Molyneux]

Dennett: (.....) So they have an explanation for why the very bland and liberal Protestant religions are losing members and why the most extreme, intense religions are gaining members.

This is the part that worries me. I wonder sometimes whether the end result of social religious needs is a population split into extremes between a strong atheist or religiously indifferent population and a fanatically strong religious population, and what that would result in.

What happens if you mix very hot and very cold air?
The best-case scenario I can think of in that situation is a complete split, where the populations just separate themselves from each other.

[Metatwaddle]

Dennett: (.....) So they have an explanation for why the very bland and liberal Protestant religions are losing members and why the most extreme, intense religions are gaining members.

This is the part that worries me. I wonder sometimes whether the end result of social religious needs is a population split into extremes between a strong atheist or religiously indifferent population and a fanatically strong religious population, and what that would result in.

I think there are other people that need to be taken into account here. The world is not made up of people who need a draconian religious structure and people who are not religious at all. There are people in between, people who are open-minded like most atheists but who see spiritual revelation (i.e. "I've felt God's presence in my life") as a legitimate form of knowledge. The strict rules of the Bible and this sort of belief in spiritualism do not always go hand in hand. I went to a liberal Episcopal church for the first seventeen years of my life, and I think churches like that have a definite niche in the religious fabric of the world.

[wolveraptor]

Dennett's entire theory was that such tempered beliefs slowly but surely lose followers, as the entire "spiritual" side seems fruitless: they already are taught that their religion is not the only way to achieve Providence or morality. On the other hands, a fanatic believes every word that spews forth from the preacher's rectum/mouth with gushing confidence and the atheist has no use for it.

[Surlethe]

To me, this says that religions will only survive by separating themselves from everyday secular cultures and values, if for no other reason than to not be boring and to offer something that feels different from everyday life. Hence, my worry about an eventually polarized population.

And that is precisely what you see: the hardcore religious right regards secular society as tainted by Satan. Consider the writings of the apostle Paul, who draws distinctions between life in the Flesh, and life in the Spirit; modern churches see the Flesh as heavily symbolic of secular, fallen society, and Spirit as representative of Jesus incarnate -- i.e., the church itself. So Christianity, at least, has a separation from the mainstream culture built in to its belief structure, and even enshrined in the New Testament. You also see this separation from culture in cults, as well, like the Heaven's Gate group who killed themselves when Hale-Bopp was in the sky.

[mr friendly guy]

This was just posted up by the dimwit in charge of my philosophy course to show that there really is a scientific debate about ID and it's not just a load of bunk etc...enjoy.

Yeah, if you consider a debate one side flogging a dead horse.

My own feeling is that I think talking about it would be very exciting; it would be an excellent pedagogical tool to introduce high school students to a variety of topics that get short shrift in science, but are nonetheless very, very important.

Remember,



This is the guy who redefines science because ID clearly isn't it.