Michael Ruse ja "Darwinin epäilijät"

"Kertoisitko, mitä mieltä olet Michael Rusen näkemyksestä Plangingan vastaukseen? Rusen kritiikkihän koski sitä, että hänen mukaansa evoluutioteoria on ymmärretty täysin väärin, jos ajattelee että evoluutioteoria ei sisältäisi aivan ytimessään ajatusta, että kehitys on ollut sattumanvaraista, ja että mikään Jumala ei ole kehitykseen voinut vaikuttaa.
Evoluutiobiologit ymmärtävät evoluutioteorian ilmeisesti täysin toisin kuin teologit. Jopa niin toisin, että esim. Rusen mukaan (joka on maailman tunnetuimpia evoluutiobiologian filosofeja) ohjatun evoluution ajatus on suorastaan täysin vastoin evoluutioteoriaa.

Rusen mukaan uskon Jumalaan voi kyllä yhdistää evoluutioteoriaan, kunhan uskoo, ettei Jumala ole koskaan tehnyt eikä tule tekemään mitään tässä maailmankaikkeudessa."
Anonyymi kirjoittaja

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Kyseessä on professori Michael Rusen kirjoitus Philosophers rip Darwin, joka on julkaistu The Chronicle of Higher Education lehden numerossa maaliskuun 7. 2010 (linkki).

Rusen kirjoitus on arviointi kirjasta What Darwin Got Wrong (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2010), jonka julkasivat Rutgers yliopiston Filosofian professori Jerry A. Fodor ja Arizonan yliopiston Kognitiivisen tieteen professori Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini. Tämän kirjan taustalla puolestaan on samojen kirjoittajien paljon julkisuutta saanut teksti Why Pigs Don't Have Wings. Ruse pitää Fodoria ja Piattelli-Palmarinia kasvavan darwinismia arvostelevien filosofien joukon edustajina.

Ruse kuvaa evoluutiobiologian nykytilaa lyhysti konferenssin esitysten perusteella ja nostaa sitten kehitysopin kriitikoiden joukosta esiin Alvin Plantingan hauskan teesin:

Consider the role played by evolutionary theory in our intellectual world. Evolution is a modern idol of the tribe; it is a shibboleth distinguishing the ignorant fundamentalist goats from the informed and scientifically acquiescent sheep. Doubts about it may lose you your job. It is loudly declared to be absolutely certain, as certain as that the earth rotates on its axis and revolves around the sun—when it is no such thing at all.
Alvin Plantinga 1999

Ruse arvioi miestä "Plantinga is an open enthusiast of intelligent design, the belief that at some points in life's history an intelligent being intervened to move the process along. I am not quite sure whether this makes him a full-blooded creationist, although he has in the past said he does not think it an impossible position."

Ruse kirjoittaa niin hauskasti ja terävästi, että en yritä referoida vaan lainaan tekstiä suoraan tähän - voit lukea koko esseen linkistä:

Wherever Plantinga stands on this spectrum, he stands with the intelligent-design theorists in strongly emphasizing what they see as the falsity of Darwinian evolutionary biology.

Why does Plantinga feel this way?

In his view, Darwinism implies that there is and can be no direction in life's history. All change is a function of randomly appearing new variations (mutations) that are then sifted by the opportunistic mechanism of natural selection. Although new variations are not uncaused, they do not appear according to need.

As Darwin himself argued, to think otherwise is to illicitly bring in a directing God.

The late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould used to pun that the arrival of the human species was entirely an accident brought on by our lucky stars—a comet that hit the earth 65 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs and allowing for the rise of mammals. It is precisely that kind of thinking to which Plantinga is opposed.
Ruse 2010

Sitten lainaus Ruselta tiede/usko keskusteluun liittyen:

Plantinga's views are understandable because philosophy today tends to be very secular, and there is a lot of sympathy for the claims of the so-called New Atheists—Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens—that if you are a Darwinian, then you ought to be at least an agnostic, if not an outright atheist.

Ruse viittaa myös Thomas Nageliin, joka sanoo olevansa ateisti, mutta puolustaa ID ajattelua ja on varsin kriittinen evoluutiobiologian teesejä kohtaan ... lievästi sanottuna! (Nagelin kannanottoja on uutisoitu Suomenkin Siionissa kuluneena vuonna 2012).

Suppose someone says that doubting evolutionary theory is equivalent to thinking the earth is flat. Nagel writes: "This seems to me, as an outsider, a vast underestimation of how much we do not know, and how much about the evolutionary process remains speculative and sketchy." He goes on to tell us that those who think we are now well on the track to understanding the mechanisms of evolution are wrong: "Nothing close to this has been done."

Ruse arvostelee Darwinia arovstelevaa filosofien joukkoa siitä, että he eivät huomioi ID ajattelun arvostelua eivätkä ota evoluutiobiologian tutkimusta vakavasti, vaan poimivat tarkoitushakuisesti aiheita puolustaakseen syvempiä näkemyksiään.

But rather than work over the details, I want to draw attention to the way this crop of critics ignores evolutionary biology—aside from the kind of cherry-picking in which Fodor engages. Nagel may sneer about the failure to find "accessible literature" that answers his worries. In what part of the library was he doing his literature search?

Where, for example, is any discussion of the Grants' work on the Galápagos finches? What about a detailed look at the new scholarship that is challenging earlier thinking about the evolution of bipedalism? What about the discoveries of molecular biology and of the similarities (homologies) between humans and fruit flies? And why no mention of Marc Hauser and his work uncovering the secrets of moral thinking? There is a deafening silence on those and other issues. Fodor, Nagel, and Plantinga don't need to turn themselves into biochemists, but some awareness of the issues and advances would not be entirely misplaced.

(Tästä muuten ei Ruse minua teologina voisi syyttää, olen avannut opiskelu-blogin myös Darwinin peipposista!)

Kristityn huoli evoluutiosta
Michael Ruse on tarkka poika ja tekee eron Plantingan kristillisen kalvinistisen uskon ja muiden filosofien välillä. Hän arvioi näin Plantingan motiiveja

This total lack of interest in the science is surely suggestive. The critics are being driven by other, for them deeper, concerns. And as an evolutionist, I turn to the past for clues.

What fueled the initial opposition to Darwin was a concern with our species, with Homo sapiens. For 150 years, since the Origin, critics have feared that we humans might become part of the evolutionary picture—not just our bodies, but our minds, our very souls. What makes us distinctively and uniquely human?

This worry is still alive and well in today's philosophical community. Plantinga is open in his fear that Darwinism makes impossible the guaranteed existence of our species. More, for years he has argued that Darwinism is bound up with the metaphysical belief that everything is natural (as opposed to supernatural), and that this leads to a collapse of rational belief and knowledge.

The chance elements in Darwinism are simply not compatible with Plantinga's Christian faith.

Filosofin arvostelu evoluutioteoriaa kohtaan

As nonbelievers, Nagel and Fodor are a bit different, but not that different. For years Nagel has argued against a reductive view of the human mind, believing it to be more than just molecules in motion—the obvious end result of Darwinism. At some level, Nagel believes, the mind is above the material. It is perhaps a stretch, but probably not too much of a stretch, to say that the kind of sympathetic attitude that Nagel takes toward intelligent design points not so much to a concealed theism (akin to Plantinga's open theism) as to a kind of vitalism, in which there are nonnatural, nonphysical forces that direct things in the material world.

And then there is Fodor. The final section of his new book is very revealing. As a dreadful warning to those who do not accept his main conclusions, Fodor prints passage after passage of claims by Darwinians that one can understand human nature and thinking as the product of natural selection: This is where we will all end up if we don't stop the rot right now. My suspicion is that Fodor doesn't really give a damn about fruit flies or finches or anything else out there. But when it comes to Homo sapiens, he wants no part of a naturalistic explanation that reduces design to the workings of blind law. There may not be a God, but we sure are made in his image.

Erinomainen kirjoittaja, eikö olekin tämä Ruse! Fodor sanoo ... "Jumalaa ei ehkä ole, mutta meidät ihmiset on totisesti luotu Hänen kuvakseen"

Michael Rusen lopputoteamus

Now those of us who love Darwin and his theory have got the philosophers to deal with, too. I see steak in my future. But in truth, I am not really happy. I might even turn vegetarian if I could persuade my fellow philosophers to start taking science seriously. Could they possibly entertain the idea that being at one with the living world does not make us any less worthy as human beings? After the Origin was published, the wife of the Bishop of Worcester supposedly reacted: "Descended from monkeys? Let us hope that it is not true. But if it is true, let us hope that it not become widely known."

A century and a half later, the time has come to shout the truth from the rooftops.

Ruse 2010