HOW INDETERMINISTS ARE LIKE CREATIONISTS

Replace “intelligent design/IDers” with “indeterminism/indeterminists” and "God" with "Chance" and the passages below are still logical. (This is why the faith in indeterminism worries me – it is irrational yet pervades fields of inquiry that purport to be rational. Blind faith in indeterminism is the flip side from postmodernism of the same coin: They both are just the result of academics throwing up their hands in the face of complexity and saying “we give up!”)

"In contrast [to modern science], intelligent-design theorists invoke shadowy entities that conveniently have whatever unconstrained abilities are needed to solve the mystery at hand. Rather than expanding scientific inquiry, such answers shut it down. (How does one disprove the existence of omnipotent intelligences?) 

“15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense” (Scientific American) Link
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“The overweening strategy of IDers, and their creationist forebears, is to say that everything that we do not understand is evidence of the existence of God. I can imagine IDers of two centuries ago claiming that God made the sun shine, because until 1938 we had no idea where all that energy came from... 

...Who could have guessed twenty years ago that dinosaurs probably became extinct after a giant meteorite collided with Earth and produced a "nuclear winter"? IDers would deprive us of this essential excitement, urging us to stop working when we come up against the hard problems and to ascribe our difficulties to God. 

Coyne, Jerry. 2007. The Great Mutator. The New Republic, June 18.
Link (Richard Dawkins Foundation)

(After posting I noticed this passage discussing Behe's focus on the hard to explain cilia in the same article; replace "design" here with "chance", and "God" and "miracles" with "indeterminism" ):

Behe's arguments from the gaps in scientific knowledge are fatuous. It is certainly true that we do not yet understand every step in the origin of the cilium, but these are early days. Molecular biology is a very young field, and molecular evolutionary biology is even younger. The way to understand the evolution of cilia is to get to work in the laboratory, not to throw up our hands and cry "design." Perhaps we will never understand every step in the evolution of a complex feature, just as we cannot know everything about the development of human civilization from archaeology. But is the incompleteness of our knowledge a reason to invoke God? The history of science shows us that patching the gaps in our knowledge with miracles creates a path that leads only to perpetual ignorance. 

ACADEMIC VIEW OF NEW URBANISM IN 2002

"Over the past two decades, the New Urbanism has emerged as a controversial alternative to conventional patterns of urban development. Although growing in popularity, it has received a skeptical reception in journals of planning, architecture and geography." (Ellis, 2002, 261).

"Clearly, academic schools of architecture are hostile to virtually all traditional building, and find the various permutations of modernism, neomodernism, postmodernism and deconstructionism to be the only suitable styles of our age." (Ellis, 2002, 274).

Ellis, Cliff. The New Urbanism: Critiques and Rebuttals. 2002. Journal of Urban Design, 7(3): 261-291. Link 


More recent academic views on New Urbanism and Jacobs http://bettercities.net/news-opinion/links/14739/how-revisionists-are-blaming-jacobs-new-urbanism

STRING THEORY & THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Are the social sciences like string theory? Some of the controversy surrounding string theory in physics sounds familiar...

"Here are some of the most significant criticisms levied against string theory (or the string theorists who practice it):

• String theory is unable to make any useful prediction about how the physical world behaves, so it can’t be falsified or verified.
• String theory is so vaguely defined and lacking in basic physical principles that any idea can be incorporated into it.
• String theorists put too much weight on the opinions of leaders and authorities within their own ranks, as opposed to seeking experimental verification.
• String theorists present their work in ways that falsely demonstrate that they’ve achieved more success than they actually have. (This isn’t necessarily an accusation of lying, but may be a fundamental flaw in how success is measured by string theorists and the scientific community at large.)
• String theory gets more funding and academic support than other theoretical approaches (in large part because of the aforementioned reported progress).
• String theory doesn’t describe our universe, but contradicts known facts of physical reality in a number of ways, requiring elaborate hypothetical constructions that have never been successfully demonstrated.

(Excerpt from The String Wars: Outlining the Arguments by Andrew Zimmerman Jones and Daniel Robbins Link ).