D*****r
发帖数: 6791 | 1 Much of what people do is done in the name of God. Irishmen blow each other
up in his name. Arabs blow themselves up in his name. Imams and ayatollahs
oppress women in his name. Celibate popes and priests mess up people's sex
lives in his name. Jewish shohets cut live animals' throats in his name. The
achievements of religion in past history -- bloody crusades, torturing
inquisitions, mass-murdering conquistadors, culture-destroying missionaries,
legally enforced resistance to each new piece of scientific truth until the
last possible moment -- are even more impressive. And what has it all been
in aid of? I believe it is becoming increasingly clear that the answer is
absolutely nothing at all. There is no reason for believing that any sort of
gods exist and quite good reason for believing that they do not exist and
never have. It has all been a gigantic waste of time and a waste of life. It
would be a joke of cosmic proportions if it weren't so tragic.
Why do people believe in God? For most people the answer is still some
version of the ancient Argument from Design. We look about us at the beauty
and intricacy of the world -- at the aerodynamic sweep of a swallow's wing,
at the delicacy of flowers and of the butterflies that fertilize them,
through a microscope at the teeming life in every drop of pond water,
through a telescope at the crown of a giant redwood tree. We reflect on the
electronic complexity and optical perfection of our own eyes that do the
looking. If we have any imagination, these things drive us to a sense of awe
and reverence. Moreover, we cannot fail to be struck by the obvious
resemblance of living organs to the carefully planned designs of human
engineers. The argument was most famously expressed in the watchmaker
analogy of the eighteenth-century priest William Paley. Even if you didn't
know what a watch was, the obviously designed character of its cogs and
springs and of how they mesh together for a purpose would force you to
conclude "that the watch must have had a maker: that there must have existed
, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who
formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who
comprehended its construction, and designed its use." If this is true of a
comparatively simple watch, how much the more so is it true of the eye, ear,
kidney, elbow joint, brain? These beautiful, complex, intricate, and
obviously purpose-built structures must have had their own designer, their
own watchmaker -- God.
So ran Paley's argument, and it is an argument that nearly all thoughtful
and sensitive people discover for themselves at some stage in their
childhood. Throughout most of history it must have seemed utterly convincing
, self-evidently true. And yet, as the result of one of the most astonishing
intellectual revolutions in history, we now know that it is wrong, or at
least superfluous. We now know that the order and apparent purposefulness of
the living world has come about through an entirely different process, a
process that works without the need for any designer and one that is a
consequence of basically very simple laws of physics. This is the process of
evolution by natural selection, discovered by Charles Darwin and,
independently, by Alfred Russel Wallace.
What do all objects that look as if they must have had a designer have in
common? The answer is statistical improbability. If we find a transparent
pebble washed into the shape of a crude lens by the sea, we do not conclude
that it must have been designed by an optician: the unaided laws of physics
are capable of achieving this result; it is not too improbable to have just
"happened." But if we find an elaborate compound lens, carefully corrected
against spherical and chromatic aberration, coated against glare, and with "
Carl Zeiss" engraved on the rim, we know that it could not have just
happened by chance. If you take all the atoms of such a compound lens and
throw them together at random under the jostling influence of the ordinary
laws of physics in nature, it is theoretically possible that, by sheer luck,
the atoms would just happen to fall into the pattern of a Zeiss compound
lens, and even that the atoms round the rim should happen to fall in such a
way that the name Carl Zeiss is etched out. But the number of other ways in
which the atoms could, with equal likelihood, have fallen, is so hugely,
vastly, immeasurably greater that we can completely discount the chance
hypothesis. Chance is out of the question as an explanation.
This is not a circular argument, by the way. It might seem to be circular
because, it could be said, any particular arrangement of atoms is, with
hindsight, very improbable. As has been said before, when a ball lands on a
particular blade of grass on the golf course, it would be foolish to exclaim
the ball actually fell on this one. How amazingly, miraculously improbable!"
The fallacy here, of course, is that the ball had to land somewhere. We can
only stand amazed at the improbability of the actual event if we specify it
a priori: for example, if a blindfolded man spins himself round on the tee,
hits the ball at random, and achieves a hole in one. That would be truly
amazing, because the target destination of the ball is specified in advance.
Of all the trillions of different ways of putting together the atoms of a
telescope, only a minority would actually work in some useful way. Only a
tiny minority would have Carl Zeiss engraved on them, or, indeed, any
recognizable words of any human language. The same goes for the parts of a
watch: of all the billions of possible ways of putting them together, only a
tiny minority will tell the time or do anything useful. And of course the
same goes, a fortiori, for the parts of a living body. Of all the trillions
of trillions of ways of putting together the parts of a body, only an
infinitesimal minority would live, seek food, eat, and reproduce. True,
there are many different ways of being alive -- at least ten million
different ways if we count the number of distinct species alive today -- but
, however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there
are vastly more ways of being dead!
We can safely conclude that living bodies are billions of times too
complicated -- too statistically improbable -- to have come into being by
sheer chance. How, then, did they come into being? The answer is that chance
enters into the story, but not a single, monolithic act of chance. Instead,
a whole series of tiny chance steps, each one small enough to be a
believable product of its predecessor, occurred one after the other in
sequence. These small steps of chance are caused by genetic mutations,
random changes -- mistakes really -- in the genetic material. They give rise
to changes in the existing bodily structure. Most of these changes are
deleterious and lead to death. A minority of them turn out to be slight
improvements, leading to increased survival and reproduction. By this
process of natural selection, those random changes that turn out to be
beneficial eventually spread through the species and become the norm. The
stage is now set for the next small change in the evolutionary process.
After, say, a thousand of these small changes in series, each change
providing the basis for the next, the end result has become, by a process of
accumulation, far too complex to have come about in a single act of chance.
For instance, it is theoretically possible for an eye to spring into being,
in a single lucky step, from nothing: from bare skin, let's say. It is
theoretically possible in the sense that a recipe could be written out in
the form of a large number of mutations. If all these mutations happened
simultaneously, a complete eye could, indeed, spring from nothing. But
although it is theoretically possible, it is in practice inconceivable. The
quantity of luck involved is much too large. The "correct" recipe involves
changes in a huge number of genes simultaneously. The correct recipe is one
particular combination of changes out of trillions of equally probable
combinations of chances. We can certainly rule out such a miraculous
coincidence. But it is perfectly plausible that the modern eye could have
sprung from something almost the same as the modern eye but not quite: a
very slightly less elaborate eye. By the same argument, this slightly less
elaborate eye sprang from a slightly less elaborate eye still, and so on. If
you assume a sufficiently large number of sufficiently small differences
between each evolutionary stage and its predecessor, you are bound to be
able to derive a full, complex, working eye from bare skin. How many
intermediate stages are we allowed to postulate? That depends on how much
time we have to play with. Has there been enough time for eyes to evolve by
little steps from nothing?
The fossils tell us that life has been evolving on Earth for more than 3,000
million years. It is almost impossible for the human mind to grasp such an
immensity of time. We, naturally and mercifully, tend to see our own
expected lifetime as a fairly long time, but we can't expect to live even
one century. It is 2,000 years since Jesus lived, a time span long enough to
blur the distinction between history and myth. Can you imagine a million
such periods laid end to end? Suppose we wanted to write the whole history
on a single long scroll. If we crammed all of Common Era history into one
metre of scroll, how long would the pre-Common Era part of the scroll, back
to the start of evolution, be? The answer is that the pre-Common Era part of
the scroll would stretch from Milan to Moscow. Think of the implications of
this for the quantity of evolutionary change that can be accommodated. All
the domestic breeds of dogs -- Pekingeses, poodles, spaniels, Saint Bernards
, and Chihuahuas -- have come from wolves in a time span measured in
hundreds or at the most thousands of years: no more than two meters along
the road from Milan to Moscow. Think of the quantity of change involved in
going from a wolf to a Pekingese; now multiply that quantity of change by a
million. When you look at it like that, it becomes easy to believe that an
eye could have evolved from no eye by small degrees.
It remains necessary to satisfy ourselves that every one of the
intermediates on the evolutionary route, say from bare skin to a modern eye,
would have been favored by natural selection; would have been an
improvement over its predecessor in the sequence or at least would have
survived. It is no good proving to ourselves that there is theoretically a
chain of almost perceptibly different intermediates leading to an eye if
many of those intermediates would have died. It is sometimes argued that the
parts of an eye have to be all there together or the eye won't work at all.
Half an eye, the argument runs, is no better than no eye at all. You can't
fly with half a wing; you can't hear with half an ear. Therefore there can't
have been a series of step-by-step intermediates leading up to a modern eye
, wing, or ear.
This type of argument is so naive that one can only wonder at the
subconscious motives for wanting to believe it. It is obviously not true
that half an eye is useless. Cataract sufferers who have had their lenses
surgically removed cannot see very well without glasses, but they are still
much better off than people with no eyes at all. Without a lens you can't
focus a detailed image, but you can avoid bumping into obstacles and you
could detect the looming shadow of a predator.
As for the argument that you can't fly with only half a wing, it is
disproved by large numbers of very successful gliding animals, including
mammals of many different kinds, lizards, frogs, snakes, and squids. Many
different kinds of tree-dwelling animals have flaps of skin between their
joints that really are fractional wings. If you fall out of a tree, any skin
flap or flattening of the body that increases your surface area can save
your life. And, however small or large your flaps may be, there must always
be a critical height such that, if you fall from a tree of that height, your
life would have been saved by just a little bit more surface area. Then,
when your descendants have evolved that extra surface area, their lives
would be saved by just a bit more still if they fell from trees of a
slightly greater height. And so on by insensibly graded steps until,
hundreds of generations later, we arrive at full wings.
Eyes and wings cannot spring into existence in a single step. That would be
like having the almost infinite luck to hit upon the combination number that
opens a large bank vault. But if you spun the dials of the lock at random,
and every time you got a little bit closer to the lucky number the vault
door creaked open another chink, you would soon have the door open!
Essentially, that is the secret of how evolution by natural selection
achieves what once seemed impossible. Things that cannot plausibly be
derived from very different predecessors can plausibly be derived from only
slightly different predecessors. Provided only that there is a sufficiently
long series of such slightly different predecessors, you can derive anything
from anything else.
Evolution, then, is theoretically capable of doing the job that, once upon a
time, seemed to be the prerogative of God. But is there any evidence that
evolution actually has happened? The answer is yes; the evidence is
overwhelming. Millions of fossils are found in exactly the places and at
exactly the depths that we should expect if evolution had happened. Not a
single fossil has ever been found in any place where the evolution theory
would not have expected it, although this could very easily have happened: a
fossil mammal in rocks so old that fishes have not yet arrived, for
instance, would be enough to disprove the evolution theory.
The patterns of distribution of living animals and plants on the continents
and islands of the world is exactly what would be expected if they had
evolved from common ancestors by slow, gradual degrees. The patterns of
resemblance among animals and plants is exactly what we should expect if
some were close cousins, and others more distant cousins to each other. The
fact that the genetic code is the same in all living creatures
overwhelmingly suggests that all are descended from one single ancestor. The
evidence for evolution is so compelling that the only way to save the
creation theory is to assume that God deliberately planted enormous
quantities of evidence to make it look as if evolution had happened. In
other words, the fossils, the geographical distribution of animals, and so
on, are all one gigantic confidence trick. Does anybody want to worship a
God capable of such trickery? It is surely far more reverent, as well as
more scientifically sensible, to take the evidence at face value. All living
creatures are cousins of one another, descended from one remote ancestor
that lived more than 3,000 million years ago.
The Argument from Design, then, has been destroyed as a reason for believing
in a God. Are there any other arguments? Some people believe in God because
of what appears to them to be an inner revelation. Such revelations are not
always edifying but they undoubtedly feel real to the individual concerned.
Many inhabitants of lunatic asylums have an unshakable inner faith that
they are Napoleon or, indeed, God himself. There is no doubting the power of
such convictions for those that have them, but this is no reason for the
rest of us to believe them. Indeed, since such beliefs are mutually
contradictory, we can't believe them all.
There is a little more that needs to be said. Evolution by natural selection
explains a lot, but it couldn't start from nothing. It couldn't have
started until there was some kind of rudimentary reproduction and heredity.
Modern heredity is based on the DNA code, which is itself too complicated to
have sprung spontaneously into being by a single act of chance. This seems
to mean that there must have been some earlier hereditary system, now
disappeared, which was simple enough to have arisen by chance and the laws
of chemistry and which provided the medium in which a primitive form of
cumulative natural selection could get started. DNA was a later product of
this earlier cumulative selection. Before this original kind of natural
selection, there was a period when complex chemical compounds were built up
from simpler ones and before that a period when the chemical elements were
built up from simpler elements, following the well-understood laws of
physics. Before that, everything was ultimately built up from pure hydrogen
in the immediate aftermath of the big bang, which initiated the universe.
There is a temptation to argue that, although God may not be needed to
explain the evolution of complex order once the universe, with its
fundamental laws of physics, had begun, we do need a God to explain the
origin of all things. This idea doesn't leave God with very much to do: just
set off the big bang, then sit back and wait for everything to happen. The
physical chemist Peter Atkins, in his beautifully written book The Creation,
postulates a lazy God who strove to do as little as possible in order to
initiate everything. Atkins explains how each step in the history of the
universe followed, by simple physical law, from its predecessor. He thus
pares down the amount of work that the lazy creator would need to do and
eventually concludes that he would in fact have needed to do nothing at all!
The details of the early phase of the universe belong to the realm of
physics, whereas I am a biologist, more concerned with the later phases of
the evolution of complexity. For me, the important point is that, even if
the physicist needs to postulate an irreducible minimum that had to be
present in the beginning, in order for the universe to get started, that
irreducible minimum is certainly extremely simple. By definition,
explanations that build on simple premises are more plausible and more
satisfying than explanations that have to postulate complex and
statistically improbable beginnings. And you can't get much more complex
than an Almighty God! | l**********t
发帖数: 5754 | 2 A few difference between "进化论的科普", and researching findings on "进化论
" the science
科普 usually doesn't cite references
科普 usually doesn't explicitly state the underlying assumptions, the
limitation and its implication of the theory.
科普 usually have a eyeball-garbing, provocative title, filled with general
statements back with few solid evidence.
For example, this article talks about probability -- have you found one
concrete example of probability calculated/modeled?
I'm not saying "科普" are all as bad as this one. But you have to
take a grain of salt when reading "进化论的科普" -- some are simply anti-Christianity articles disguised as "科普", and serve as the "scientific" cornerstone of atheists' belief (sorry to say, esp. for those w/o natural science trainings).
other
The
missionaries,
the
been
of
【在 D*****r 的大作中提到】
: Much of what people do is done in the name of God. Irishmen blow each other
: up in his name. Arabs blow themselves up in his name. Imams and ayatollahs
: oppress women in his name. Celibate popes and priests mess up people's sex
: lives in his name. Jewish shohets cut live animals' throats in his name. The
: achievements of religion in past history -- bloody crusades, torturing
: inquisitions, mass-murdering conquistadors, culture-destroying missionaries,
: legally enforced resistance to each new piece of scientific truth until the
: last possible moment -- are even more impressive. And what has it all been
: in aid of? I believe it is becoming increasingly clear that the answer is
: absolutely nothing at all. There is no reason for believing that any sort of
| D*****r
发帖数: 6791 | 3 没错，科普和科研不一样，你可以指点几种这方面的科研参考资料么？
即使是在科研上，也已经不在这些基本假设上多费时间了，因为千百年来科学研究已经收
敛到“无神假设”上了，有神假设早已被科研工作者抛弃了。除非有新的证据表明“有
神假设”更为可能。
“有神假设”超越一切统计证据，本身假设一个无所不能的神存在，这是一个哲学问题。
这篇文章虽然措辞辛辣，但是一些基本道理说得很清楚，如果说是彼此证据多少、是否
有效支持的问题，那自然要用统计方法检验证据。
但现在“有神假设”的支持者根本不谈证据，那从道理上分析清楚就能起到很好的解释
作用。
general
Christianity articles disguised as "科普", and serve as the "scientific"
cornerstone of atheists' belief (sorry to say, esp. for those w/o natural
science trainings).
ayatollahs
sex
is
sort
【在 l**********t 的大作中提到】
: A few difference between "进化论的科普", and researching findings on "进化论
: " the science
: 科普 usually doesn't cite references
: 科普 usually doesn't explicitly state the underlying assumptions, the
: limitation and its implication of the theory.
: 科普 usually have a eyeball-garbing, provocative title, filled with general
: statements back with few solid evidence.
: For example, this article talks about probability -- have you found one
: concrete example of probability calculated/modeled?
: I'm not saying "科普" are all as bad as this one. But you have to
| x****g
发帖数: 4008 | 4 Thanks for sharing
other
The
missionaries,
the
been
of
【在 D*****r 的大作中提到】
: Much of what people do is done in the name of God. Irishmen blow each other
: up in his name. Arabs blow themselves up in his name. Imams and ayatollahs
: oppress women in his name. Celibate popes and priests mess up people's sex
: lives in his name. Jewish shohets cut live animals' throats in his name. The
: achievements of religion in past history -- bloody crusades, torturing
: inquisitions, mass-murdering conquistadors, culture-destroying missionaries,
: legally enforced resistance to each new piece of scientific truth until the
: last possible moment -- are even more impressive. And what has it all been
: in aid of? I believe it is becoming increasingly clear that the answer is
: absolutely nothing at all. There is no reason for believing that any sort of
|
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