That One's So Stupid It Isn't Even Hard - Update: Though it apparently is too hard for some

The statement that evolution is not directed isn't a scientific assertion, it is ideological.   Though there could also be a large component of ignorant repetition in the claim.  There's a lot of that going round in the atheist mutual admiration society.  

There is no way in science to determine if the way things are is or is not directed.   At best they can describe how things are, they have no ability to determine why they are as they are.  But that doesn't stop them from claiming they can.  

I'm not surprised that the best minds of the rump remnant say those kinds of things, it only shows they're no where near as bright as they think they are. 


Update:  Note The "somehow" in this quote from Wolfgang Pauli.

"Einstein's conception is closer to mine. His God is somehow involved in the immutable laws of nature. Einstein has a feeling for the central order of things. He can detect it in the simplicity of natural laws. We may take it that he felt this simplicity very strongly and directly during his discovery of the theory of relativity. Admittedly, this is a far cry from the contents of religion. I don't believe Einstein is tied to any religious tradition, and I rather think the idea of a personal God is entirely foreign to him. But as far as he is concerned there is no split between science and religion: the central order is part of the subjective as well as the objective realm, and this strikes me as being a far better starting point."

That "somehow" is exactly what I said above, science can't address the issue of design in nature in any ultimate sense.  "Somehow" in that sentence is an admission to the lack of that ability.  Though I think that the conclusion that there is design is an entirely rational one, certainly no more irrational than the claim that science can demonstrate a lack of design in nature. 

And, there is this from Werner Heisenberg:

“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”

I, somehow, doubt that there are better experts on natural science hanging around Eschaton than Pauli and Heisenberg. 

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We all conceive of God in terms we can imagine, based on our experience and our thinking derived from our observations.  That's as true of atheists as it is for theists or others.  It's not a huge surprise that physicists, who have concentrated so long and so heavily on material objects might have a problem conceiving of a personal God but when you get right down to it, even physics, itself, depends on personal beings, us.  I think that as Heisenberg also said the universe, being stranger than people could imagine, it could be something that God could imagine, God being smarter than we are.  But there isn't any way to find that out by science because science is limited by what people can imagine.  

As I've pointed out before, one of Pauli's and Heisenberg's colleagues,  Arthur Stanley Eddington said, 

Eighteen years ago I was responsible for a remark which has often been quoted:

"It is one thing for the human mind to extract from the phenomena of nature the laws which it has itself put into them; it may be a far harder thing to extract laws over which it has had no control It is even possible that laws which have not their origin in the mind may be irrational and we can never succeed in formulating them."

This seems to be coming true, though not in the way that then suggested itself. I had in mind the phenomena of quanta and atomic physics, which at that time completely baffled our efforts to formulate a rational system of law. It was already apparent that the principle laws of molar physics were mind-made — the result of the sensory and intellectual equipment through which we derive our observational knowledge — and were not laws of governance of the objective universe. The suggestion was that in quantum theory we for the first time came up against the true laws of governance of the objective universe. If so, the task was presumably much more difficult than merely rediscovering our own frame of thought”.


Since then microscopic physics has made great progress, and its laws have turned out to be comprehensible to the mind; but, as I have endeavored to show, it also turns out that they have been imposed by the mind — by our forms of thought — in the same way that the molar laws are imposed…

Which is definitely related to another famous quote from Heisenberg:

“We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning."

When a scientist starts out with an ideological motive, as so many do, especially when they are so philosophically ignorant that they don't have the insight to understand that their motive is ideological, they are MORE not less vulnerable to introducing their bias into the scientific declarations and statements.   Any of them who claim they can figure out if there isn't design in evolution is, I guarantee it, either doing so from ideological motives or they are repeating that from someone else who originally said it from ideological motives.   

Any design of the universe would have to include those things Heisenberg and Eddington mentioned which aren't susceptible to science, so science can't discern that design.  Any design in evolution would involve far more complex and hidden aspects of a far more complex range of events and results than what physicists deal with.  To expect that anyone could discern design in something that complex and unknown as something other than a personal conclusion is absurd.  

To expect that science could confirm something requiring as much and probably more information than the person who makes a personal conclusion of design in nature, that there is no design in it, is entirely absurd.   That is also an entirely personal conclusion.  At the least, it is a conclusion based on less of the evidence required to demonstrate that than a personal conclusion of design would because it pretends to be science and it would require a comprehensive knowledge which is not and never will be available to fulfill the requirements of science.  


I think that what these guys figure is an ever newer golden age of empirical rationality is, in reality, just the result of so many scientists being philosophically naive to the extent they sometimes can't analyze even their supposedly scientific statements to understand its ideological content, content which is supposed to not be there so they believe it isn't there.  

I think the culture of biology, especially evolutionary biology in all of its several areas of concentration, dealing with things which are more complex and so making any general conclusions about them more difficult, is especially vulnerable to introducing ideological content into their science, though, these days, cosmologists seem to be in a race to see who can do more of that.  Added to that fact is the pervasive influence of the Malthusian-Darwinian imposition of blatantly ideological content of the vulgar, Brit-materialist kind and that leads to a kind of science that invites ideological controversy, probably more of it than the aura of invulnerability granted by the general ignorance of science and, again, philosophy, has been prevented by that very air of mystical and ignorant awe that they claim to disdain in religion.

Any resulting hostility to and skepticism of science built up by that kind of ideological warring by scientists is tragic when it comes to some of our most dangerous applications of science and technology, such as that which has resulted in catastrophic climate change through science and technology.   I have a feeling if the atheists hadn't made those ideological claims hostile to religion and other things, hadn't promised more than they could deliver on others, hadn't made sure their claims could match what they could support, the oil and other extraction industries and those who profit from them wouldn't have had nearly as easy a time convincing people to not believe them when they had something far more important to tell us. 

So much of the current hostility to science was completely avoidable if scientists and those claiming to speak from scientific knowledge had not gone out of their way to impose an unwanted and hostile ideology by way of science.  That is especially true in the period since the 1970s and the rise of the atheist ideological effort coming out of the "Humanists" and concentrating around CSICOP (now "CSI") and the other bull shit, pseudo-skeptical groups which were all motivated out of associating science with atheism.   Even people who should have known better from the start, such as Stephen Jay Gould got involved with that stuff.  If we live long enough as a species, maybe that will be seen in the future for the terrible and damaging blunder it was.   Though a lot of that started in the 1860s and 70s from the Darwin inner circle.  I've written a little on that in the past.