August 16, 2002

• How to Drive on Ice

  
  

  When people learn that I homeschool my kids, they tend to have certain assumptions about what that means.  They assume for instance that I'm a religious nut.  They assume that my kids are socially warped.  And they assume that instead of "real" biology, I teach my kids a radical brand of Young Earth Creationism that denies many of the scientific discoveries of the past 200 years.  Most people are polite (it's safest to be polite around religious nuts, you never know WHAT they might do ). 

  
  

  I probably am a nut (whether of the religious or some more exotic variety is still a matter of some consideration), and I'd be the last person to hold up my children as positive examples of social virtue.  So I'll take the safer route and talk about some of what I hope to teach my children in regard to faith and science.

  
  

  Sometime back I posted about the "problem of faith."  I have no faith in faith itself.  Without a proper object for your faith, far from exercising a virtue, you are engaged in a mind-destroying act.  Regardless of how much faith you have that the frozen lake is safe to drive on, if the ice isn't thick enough, no amount of faith will support your truck.

  
  

  This example is intuitive knowledge to most Americans.  But not those from Minnesota.  There's a very good reason that people from Minnesota don't get that simple concept.  Most of the time, during certain months of the year, (August - June) the ice on any lake or pond will support the weight of a vehicle.  Even after all the years I lived there, it still strikes me as odd and somehow eccentric that they must erect little traffic signs for those people who drive across the lake instead of around it.  Even though they have good reason based on past experience to assume that the ice will support them, it's a fairly regular news item that so and so was lost when his truck fell through.  Minnesotan's are so used to their notion of driving on ice, that they don't stop to question the object of their faith, the ice itself.

  
  

  I find that most people have never looked beyond what they think they remember from their high school or undergraduate biology text.  They feel greatly superior in intellect to those poor deluded fundamentalists who've closed their mind the great achievements of scientific understanding.  They drive daily across that lake without ever stopping to test whether the theory in which they've placed their faith is indeed strong enough to support them.

  
  

  Steven Weinberg, physicist, says of Intelligent Design that "everything I said would be refuted if a flaming sword were to strike me down at the podium."  I wonder if Mr. Weinberg would recognize what a flaming sword looks like in the field of scientific inquiry.  He made his remark before a sympathetic audience who were in laughing agreement with his assumption, only a miraculous act could bring the laws of science into question.  Even then the laws are not in fact questioned, they are regarded as the unfortunate victims of a capricious deity.

  
  

  Does it strike anyone else that this is a very odd position to be held in the same century in which Einstein overturned Newton,  When the Wright brothers flew, and Neil Armstrong walked on the moon?  Weinberg made his comments in contempt of the concept of Intelligent Design.  In summary of Weinberg's scathing essay (published in two anthologies Best American Essay's 2000 and Best American Science Writing of 2000), he says that at issue is whether or not it is a matter of scientific study to link the design of the universe with a specific theology of monotheism and it's incumbent doctrines.  This is known in logical circles as a "strawman."  Instead of addressing the actual science of Intelligent Design, Weinberg caricatures this branch of study as fundamentally flawed.  He demands that scientists involved in this field endeavor to prove all manner of abstract doctrines regarding God to be "scientifically" falsifiable.  Well, to be crass, this would be no different that if I said to Mr. Wienberg (and by the way he is a brilliant man, half of the partnership that won the Nobel prize for Physics in 1979) that unless he were able to prove that physics could predict the place and time that a mountaingoat would next give birth to an all white kid, that his pursuit of the "Theory of Everything" is laughable. 

  
  

  The most interesting thing to me is not that Mr. Weinberg should hold such an illogical point of view, but that two different organizations should consider his essay to be among the best of that year.  I'm certain that his essay wasn't chosen because his grammar and spelling were pristine or that it was submitted on the highest grade of archival quality linen paper.  No, the publishers of these anthologies apparently think that Mr. Weinberg's view has merit.

  
  

  The study of Intelligent Design has implications for many areas of technology.  I'm excited about research into "artificial intelligence."  I'm intrigued by the possibility that someday a truly "intelligent" machine could be designed and constructed in a laboratory.  But, it seems unlikely to me that we could ever create an intelligent design if we don't know what an intelligent design would look like.

  
  

  Would it seem reasonable to Mr Weinberg's supporters to insist that unless the "artificial intelligence" machine were able to suspend the laws of nature that it would have failed to meet the scope and specification of "intelligence."  Maybe one day soon and intelligent design will think about Mr. Weinberg and chuckle to itself.  It might sit down and write him a courteous letter.  I wonder if Mr. Weinberg upon receipt of the epistle would recognize it as a flaming sword.

  • 9:48 am
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