Tag Archives: Mathematics

Podcasts

Brian Auten interviews Casey Luskin on intelligent design

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Brian Auten interviews Casey Luskin, one of my favorite intelligent design advocates.

Details:

Today’s interview is with Casey Luskin, Research Coordinator for the Discovery Center’s Center for Science and Culture. In this interview Casey talks about his background and interest in Intelligent Design, defining terms (ID, evolution, creationism, Darwinism), common objections to ID as a scientific endeavor, some milestones in the history of the ID movement, the Dover trial, responding to critics who say “ID is dead,” “not science,” and more. This is a good overall introduction to Intelligent Design.

It’s 75 minutes long or so, and very informative.

About Casey:

Casey Luskin is an attorney with graduate degrees in both science and law. He earned his B.S. and M.S. in Earth Sciences from the University of California, San Diego. His Law Degree is from the University of San Diego. In his role at Discovery Institute, Mr. Luskin works as Research Coordinator for the Center for Science and Culture. He formerly conducted geological research at Scripps Institution for Oceanography (1997-2002).

Luskin is also co-founder of the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness (IDEA) Center, a non-profit helping students to investigate evolution by starting “IDEA Clubs” on college and high school campuses across the country. For his work with IDEA, the Intelligent Design and Undergraduate Research Center named an award honoring college graduates for excellence in student advocacy of intelligent design (ID) the “Casey Luskin Graduate Award.”

Please download the MP3 file at Brian’s site, along with links to other relevant resources.

Mentoring

What should you study to prepare yourself for a career?

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Here’s an interesting post from the Chapman Kids blog. The father is a software engineer like me, and he’s serious and intentional about how he is leading his children.

In a recent post, he talks about one of the adventures that the two kids are having with a community college professor of English writing. The post is entitled “Continued conversation with the kid’s commie teacher”.

He writes:

As many already know, Kelly and Christian take a “writing” class at the community college where the dear leader of the class lectures on the evils of all things Christian, the beauty of communism and atheism, and the righteousness of drug legalization and abortion.  Today’s topic was Christianity.

[…]At the point when he made the claim that Adam and Eve could not have existed because of the scientific evidence for evolution, Christian raised his hand and said, “There is just as much scientific evidence against macroevolution as there is for it.”

“You don’t believe in evolution!” exclaimed the professor incredulously with a look of disdain and horror.

“We DO believe in microevolution.  It is grossly arrogant for you NOT to question your own beliefs when it comes to evolution” said Kelly.  “That is what you are demanding from us.”

The professor said, “Evolution is established scientific fact” and used several of the standard canards (fossil record, etc.) to establish his point.

Then they were off to the races.  Fortunately, during homeschool, Christian and Kelly had read books like The Victory of Reason:  How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success by Rodney Stark, Understanding Intelligent Design:  Everything You Need to Know in Plain Language by William Dembski and Sean McDowell, Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions by Greg Koukl, and Intellectuals by Paul Johnson.  The professor was armed with shibboleths about the truth of macroevolution and quotes from John Shelby Spong about the virgin birth.  John Shelby Spong!?!!  You have to be WILDLY out of touch with both current scholarship and reality if you quote John Shelby Spong about virtually anything.  He quotes the likes of losers like Noam Chomsky and Bertrand Russell, too.

I tweeted Kelly a link to the William Lane Craig vs John Shelby Spong. Here is part 1 and part 2 of that debate on Youtube. It’s worth watching if you haven’t seen it before.

Mr. Chapman continues his post:

It is frustrating.  Here is a writing a professor who fervently believes he is making students question their beliefs through these profoundly silly arguments.  The subject matter is objectionable, but this guy’s incompetence is even more objectionable.  He does not appear to understand the difference between scientific method and historic method (very important in discussion of the resurrection).  Neither does he understand that it is impossible to argue for the primacy of scientific method without consideration of its philosophical underpinings.  I guess I should be grateful he is incompetent with respect to his arguments–he does nothing to get the kids to question their faith or worldview.  Still, a lot of taxpayer money is wasted on professors like this throughout the land.

Well, the kids have to learn how to write, but I think it is important to note English classes are especially politicized. There is an awful lot of ideology in English classes, because that’s the easiest place for people who want to teach to go if they want to avoid being corrected by real life. In English, and other similar areas, it’s easier for a teacher to go on and on about their ideas without have to test them against the real world. It’s the easiest subject for teachers to force students to agree with your ideology without allowing them to be able to bring in facts to disagree. Basically, a secular lefty teacher can always find literature (usually modern literature, blech!) that casts Christians as brutes, Christian moral standards as outdated and harmful, and non-Christian behavior as praiseworthy. Because literature is necessarily made-up – it’s just opinion.

Even someone like me who gets courting and chivalry guidance from Shakespeare and Austen is cautious about taking courses in literature. Plus, you can can get into a lot of trouble for disagreeing with the teacher. I took English electives during my undergraduate degree and they do grade you on your viewpoint, something which is much harder for them to do in math, science, physics, chemistry, etc.

Another post from Mr. Chapman discusses how children should study STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) topics, even if those children intend to work in a non-STEM field.

He writes:

I found a great article in the Wall Street Journal this morning titled Generation Jobless:  Students Pick Easier Majors Despite Less Pay.  It had some startling statistics:

Workers who majored in psychology have median earnings that are $38,000 below those of computer engineering majors, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data by Georgetown University.

Wow.  The article tells a story about a student who switched from Electrical and Computer Engineering because her team stayed up past midnight in a lab to write a soda machine program.  They could not get it to work, so to keep from getting a bad grade, she withdrew from the course.  Then she switched from engineering to a double major in psychology and policy management.  Her grades went from B’s and C’s to A’s.  She said her high school did not prepare her for the rigor of an engineering degree.

So the upshot is that she is willing to work in a low-paying career for the rest of her life because she was unwilling to do what was necessary to pass a few hard classes.  I have had this discussion with people before.  If you cannot handle a specifc course, you can do a TON of things to make it happen. You can get a tutor.  You can take the class two or even three times if needed.  You can take a more remedial course, then try the tough one again.  Is it worth it to go to school for a year or two more to do something you like and that pays well for the next forty or fifty year?  It seems like a no brainer.

The crazy part is that even for those who want to do less technical jobs, it is best to prepare for that non-technical job with a hard degree.

Research has shown that graduating with these majors provides a good foundation not just for so-called STEM jobs, or those in the science, technology, engineering, and math fields, but a whole range of industries where earnings expectations are high. Business, finance and consulting firms, as well as most health-care professions, are keen to hire those who bring quantitative skills and can help them stay competitive.

We joked about this quite a bit, but I wanted to get it into the kids head that, if they went to college (not necessarily a given–preparation for many careers–pilot, electrician, writer, and small business owner are monumentally better served through some type of preparation other than college), they could study their passion, but they needed to start with a rigorous degree.  We defined rigorous as anything that involves hard math.  The use of hard math and statistics is creating new breakthroughs in a lot of fields right now:  medicine, agriculture, sociology, etc., etc. etc.

I agree with Mr. Chapman. And I think that he is definitely going to raise successful, influential Christians, because he and the children are well prepared and engaged. He has a great relationship with his kids. They are definitely more advanced than I was when I was their age. It’s encouraging to me to see a Christian Dad who is focused and purposeful about having solid relationships with his kids, and preparing them for the dangerous world they are entering as adults. I think it’s important to admire the people who are getting it right (the parents and the kids together) and learn from their successes. I like that he is still involved with what his children are learning even after they are finished with high school.

I really do think that engineers make the best husbands and fathers. Engineers learn how to gather requirements, evaluate alternative solutions, and then implement. Engineers care about designing to support expandability, maintenance, security and unexpected emergencies. They are easy to argue with, because they believe in logic and evidence. They are pragmatic – they make decisions based on what works, not what sounds good or feels good. Good engineers also have training in project management, budgeting, leadership and resource management, too. The best engineers are the entrepreneurs, who understand business, economics, business law and politics. It really is an ideal skill set for marriage and parenting. Engineers try to build things, and those building skills can be re-used to build a family.

Polemics

Angus Menuge on methodological materialism and the search for truth

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Dr. Angus Menuge
Dr. Angus Menuge

Methodological materialism is the view that requires scientists to explain everything they observe in nature using material causes and never intelligent causes.

And now, from the Evangelical Philosophical Society blog, an article entitled “Is methodological materialism good for science?”. The article is written by Dr. Angus Menuge, whom I wrote about before.

Intro:

Should science by governed by methodological materialism? That is, should scientists assume that only undirected causes can figure in their theories and explanations? If the answer to these questions is yes, then there can be no such thing as teleological science or intelligent design. But is methodological materialism a defensible approach to science, or might it prevent scientists from discovering important truths about the natural world? In my contribution to The Waning of Materialism (OUP, 2010), edited by Robert Koons and George Bealer, I consider twelve of the most common arguments in favor of methodological materialism and show that none of them is convincing.

Of these arguments, perhaps the most prevalent is the “God of the gaps” charge, according to which invoking something other than a material cause is an argument from ignorance which, like a bad script writer, cites a deus ex machina to save our account from difficulty. Not only materialists, but also many Christian thinkers, like Francis Collins, worry that appeal to intelligent design commits the God of the gaps fallacy.

As I argue, however, not only is an inference to an intelligent cause not the same as an inference to the supernatural, it is a mistake to assume that all gap arguments are bad, or that only theists make them. If a gap argument is based solely on ignorance of what might explain some phenomenon, then indeed it is a bad argument. But there are many good gap arguments which are made both by scientific materialists and proponents of intelligent design.

So how do you make an argument like that?

As Stephen Meyer has argued in his Signature in the Cell, intelligent design argues in just the same way, claiming not merely that the material categories of chance and necessity (singly or in combination) are unable to explain the complex specified information in DNA, but also that in our experience, intelligent agents are the only known causes of such information. The argument is based on what we know about causal powers, not on what we do not know about them.

Since the inference is based on known causal powers, we learn that the cause is intelligent, but only further assumptions or data can tell us whether that intelligence is immanent in nature or supernatural. It is a serious mistake to confuse intelligent design with theistic science, and the argument that since some proponents of design believe that the designer is God, that is what they are claiming can be inferred from the data, is a sophomoric intensional fallacy.

Basically, you identify what material processes have been OBSERVED to be capable of, and then you show that the effect you are trying to explain is beyond the reach of those powers. For example, think of a Scrabble board left alone in a locked room with an open window from morning till evening. It’s summer, so the air conditioner is working hard all day. If you come home and enter the room and find a sentence on the Scrabble game board that says “IF YOU LEAVE YOUR WINDOWS OPEN THEN YOU PAY HIGHER ELECTRICITY BILLS” then does it make more sense to attribute that effect to the wind, or to an intelligent intruder?

If you are a materialist, then you can only appeal to matter, chance and time (and not much time, too). By ruling out intelligence, you are really confining yourself to an obviously wrong answer. But suppose you came home and found that that the tiles were scattered all over the board and on the floor and the only sequences spelled out “AN” and “ZYKDSFGOJD”. I think a better inference there is that the wind blew the bag open made a couple of nonsense sequences. Of course the idea that wind could blow open a bag of Scrabble letters at all is very unlikely, but if you rule out intelligence, that’s all you have left, no matter how strained the inference. You have to believe nonsense.

But what about the design theorist who can rule nonsense out as impossible? Well he hits on the correct explanation of the effect – intelligence.

As the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes says:

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

But if an intelligent design theorist comes along and rules out material causes as an explanation of the effect by showing that the effect is beyond the reach of matter, time and chance, then the explanation of intelligence must be, however improbably, true. The important thing is to rule out materialism by evaluating what material causes can do. We don’t want to rule it out by pre-supposition, because that’s what the naturalists do when they rule out intelligence as an explanation. Ruling things out by pre-supposition is how you get wrong answers to questions. Everything has to be on the table that we have experienced. And every human knows what it is to sequence Scrabble letters into meaningful words and phrases

By the way, the publisher of the book, OUP, is Oxford University Press. Angus Menuge doesn’t mess around.