What is your take on creationism/creationists?

[Reasonable]

WereKitten said:

richardhutnik said:

Ok, I am going to bring in Paley's watch here for a moment.  Paley's watch argument comes up in various forms (ID is based around it), because people have witnessed personally that complex systems that work together too well are engineered.  People see what men do over and over, and then when they see something else that no one who made it is a sign of, the initial belief is that some intelligence engineered what they saw.  The default position is that the item in question is the byproduct of intelligence, and that is the acceptable default position.

Ok, now bring on people who are evolutionists, and particularly non-theists.  Such individuals end up trying to argue with people the default normal view one should take when one runs into complex systems that look like they were engineered, is that they weren't designed, but came about by a mix of unguided deterministic and random changes.  And the changes that remained were the ones that survived a hostile environment and ability to change. 

If you want to know why, among normal people, evolution as THE all encompassing way of life, that doesn't require a intelligent creator isn't accepted as the norm, it is because of this.  The norm for people is that complex systems are engineered, and not the byproduct of unguided forces that are a mix of random and determinism.  We actually have almost no actual lab experiments that fully functioning complex systems that work together aren't engineered.  Even in experiments where there is chaos involved, and computer models, we tend to see that people code the program to run the environment and set parameters.

So the fact that random mutations selected in a non-random manner can result in building complexity bottom up is something that can amaze and can go against superficial intuition. I can understand that, but a lot of things go against superficial intuition and don't meet the same kind of resistance because they don't touch the sphere of religious beliefs.

Quantum mechanics is based on the hypothesis that reality works with complex numbers. That's horribly unintuitive as it gives some reality to imaginary numbers: every high-school student was probably shocked when a number that squared gave minus one was introduced.

Still, people use lasers every day, accept to be scanned with CAT devices, use appliances based on semiconductor-based diods and transistors. Everything born from quantum mechanics.

That's because they don't have to face the complexities of the underlying theory and its harsh unintuitiveness. They can just use the black box and accept the theoretical work made by physicists and engineer. They won't even try to confute the unintuitive parts of the theory if they are exposed to it, they'll just admit that it works but it's beyond their grasp.

The trouble of evolution by natural selection, on the other hand, is that it seems such a simple idea that everybody think they can understand it fully and quantitatively and mature an informed opinon on it without deeper studies.

 

One other challenge (I think there are others also) that gets in the way of accepting evolution I believe is essentialism.

We seem, so far as I understand it, to lean towards wanting firm basis for understanding the world.  A rabbit is a rabbit, a cow is a cow, a cougar is a cougar, blackberries are blackberries and so on.

This makes sense from a survival point of view given our relatively short lifespan.  So I can learn what a rabbit looks like and how to catch and eat one.  I can learn what poisonous plants look like and avoid them.  I can learn what cougars look like and avoid them.

This I believe makes evolution also feel 'wrong' to a lot of people.  On cosmic timescales, with evolution, there is no actual fixed identify of rabbit - there is no pure form of rabbit.  It's a creature actually in a state of flux, just one beyond our perception due to timescales.  But that clashes with our innate desire to classify - to say 'that is a rabbit and nothing else.'

We are in the end complex beings psychologically, and that affects all of us to some extent - and can make certain ideas and concepts were hard to grasp or believe (even if true) vs. other ideas and concepts which are easy to grasp (even if false).

Heck, I believe even Einstein was supposed (probably apocryphal but maybe not, I can't remember) to have commented that Quantum Physics was 'Spooky'.