Science and Culture Today | Page 1220 | Discovering Design in Nature

Once upon a time, political and philosophical conservatism was less concerned with practical, day-to-day politics and much more directed to developing a critique of modern civilization, seeking to save the culture from barbarism. In this series of posts, of which this is the final entry, we have been looking at the thoughts of Richard Weaver on Darwinism as a contributing factor in the drift to cultural decay. (You will find earlier entries, Parts I through V, here, here, here, here, and here.)

Today, the most broadly respected deans of conservative political reflection — George Will or Charles Krauthammer — are dependable Darwin defenders and enemies of Darwin doubters. So much for the icons of our day. It was not so when the movement was launched by Weaver with his book Ideas Have Consequences in 1948.

Weaver saw and clearly expressed the cultural costs of a Darwin-directed “world picture,” or vision or “metaphysical dream,” and he suggested the outlines of a scientific critique of evolutionary theory. Unlike Krauthammer or Will — but more like Buckley, Kristol, or Neuhaus — he would have grasped and appreciated the importance of the project that seeks to topple Darwinism.

The primary role of a conservative, in his view, was not to defeat Democratic officeholders or oppose liberal legislation. It was, somehow, to recover the integrated dream or vision that predominated until modern times. That is a thing that matters, or should matter, not only to conservatives but to everyone. Weaver saw that the fractured vision of modernity is bad for your mental health. That is why neurosis, despair, anxiety, depression, hysteria and the like were so common in his day and all the more so in ours.

Who wrote the following words: (A) Phillip Johnson, (B) Jonathan Wells, or (C) Michael Shermer? We should not, however, cover up, hide, suppress or, worst of all, use the state to quash someone else’s belief system. There are several good arguments for this: 1. They might be right and we would have just squashed a bit of truth. 2. They might be completely wrong, but in the process of examining their claims we discover the truth; we also discover how thinking can go wrong, and in the process improve our thinking skills. 3. In science, it is never possible to know the absolute truth about anything, and so we must always be on the alert for where our ideas need Read More ›

Richard M. Weaver, who died at age 53 in 1963, effectively launched modern philosophical and political conservatism in the United States. Everyone cites one of his titles, Ideas Have Consequences, but too few bother to read his actual works. In reading him now I’m struck by what a brilliant ally he would have made in the current debate over Darwinism. Though a philosopher and a professor of English stationed at the University of Chicago, he anticipated not only the major outlines of contemporary thinking about why the evolution debate matters. He also foresaw the outlines of the scientific critique of Darwinian theory. I’ve been writing about him the past week in this series (whose Parts I through IV are here, Read More ›

Several “Thomist” critics of ID have claimed that ID is either committed to, entails, or somehow relates to what they consider an unsavory “mechanistic” philosophy. While a number of ID proponents have explicitly denied this, the details are somewhat complicated. So I’d like to respond to this critique at some length in a series of posts.

Orthodox Catholics have long opposed the overreaching of a “mechanical philosophy” that came to prominence in the seventeenth century with René Descartes (1596-1650) and Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Christoph Cardinal Schönborn calls mechanism “the dominant form of reductionism in science.” ¹As critics of the Aristotelian philosophy that had come to dominate the thinking in medieval Europe, Descartes and Bacon banished formal and final causation from science for leading to dead ends and sterile explanations. Bacon continued to affirm that formal and final causes existed, while Descartes seemed to deny them altogether. In fact, Descartes departed so far from Aristotle’s “qualitative” way of describing the natural world that he reduced matter to mere extension. This foreshadowed a tendency in modern science to reduce every material object to mere quantity.

“Artificial life, the stuff of dreams and nightmares, has arrived.” So proclaimed The Economist on May 20th, after a team of scientists headed by J. Craig Venter [2] announced that it had replaced the natural DNA in a bacterial cell with DNA they had artificially synthesized.

According to University of Pennsylvania philosopher and bioethicist Arthur Caplan, “Venter and his colleagues have shown that the material world can be manipulated to produce what we recognize as life. In doing so they bring to an end a debate about the nature of life that has lasted thousands of years. Their achievement undermines a fundamental belief about the nature of life that is likely to prove as momentous to our view of ourselves and our place in the Universe as the discoveries of Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin and Einstein.”

Whoa! Wait a minute!

What Venter and his team did was to determine the sequence of the DNA in one of the world’s simplest bacteria, use the sequence information to synthesize a copy of that DNA from subunits sold by a biological supply company, then put the synthetic copy of DNA into a living bacterial cell from which the natural DNA had been removed.
As Nicholas Wade pointed out in The New York Times, Eckard Wimmer and his colleagues did something similar in 2002 by synthesizing poliovirus RNA. Wimmer and his colleagues then used that synthetic RNA to make functioning polioviruses. But viruses are not living cells. No one has ever been able to make a living cell from its DNA–not even Craig Venter.

While my chapter in Signature of Controversy responding to Stephen Matheson’s review of Signature in the Cell deals with a variety of issues, I’d like to boil it down to two or three which I feel are the most important topics. Why are they the most important? Because it’s on these topics that Matheson engages in the most name-calling, and where Matheson also happens to be the most wrong. (Is there a reason why evolutionists so often increase the ad hominem attacks when their case is weak?) With that, here’s a condensed and abridged version of my response to Matheson: What would you get if you crossed a snarky pro-evolution blog like Panda’s Thumb with a passionate defender of theistic Read More ›

Critics of intelligent design often try to dismiss the theory as not worth addressing, as a question already settled, even as being too boring to countenance. Then they spend an amazing amount of energy trying to refute it. The very evidence of the ongoing debate sparked by Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell should silence that tired trope that there is no controversy over evolution and intelligent design. That controversy has reached a fever-pitch in less than a year since the book’s first release, marking Meyer’s volume as a book serious Darwinists must deal with. And dealt with it, they haven’t — in their responses, some critics have misread it, while others have simply failed to read it at all. Read More ›

While today it would be more common to speak of a person’s “worldview,” philosopher Richard Weaver (1910-1963) spoke equivalently of a “world picture,” a “metaphysical dream,” or an integrative “vision.” I like vision or dream best, since they conjure something more than a dry-bones philosophical perspective that can be adopted or discarded easily if you change your mind about things. Just as you can be woken involuntarily from a good dream, or you may be unable to wake from a bad one, so too with a vision that explains to you how the world works — what’s above, what’s below, what came before you and what will come after. Once shattered, it is not easily reconstructed. In this series we Read More ›

The vision that first inspired the contemporary conservative movement back in the 1940s and ’50s would be unrecognizable to many conservatives today. In Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences (1948), the book that sociologist Robert Nisbet credited with “launch[ing] the renaissance of philosophical conservatism in this country,” you will not find a single reference to the then sitting President of the United States (Truman). It’s not really a political book at all. It is not about setting or opposing a legislative agenda. It is about correcting a faulty and widespread materialist “world picture” of which Darwinism forms a crucial ingredient. We are reconsidering and appreciating Weaver in this series. (See Parts I and II, here and here.) With “Darwinism … lurking Read More ›