Robin Wilton's esoterica

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28 Oct · Fri 2005

How improbable is a rainbow?

I saw a rainbow today, and it occurred to me what an unlikely thing it appears to be. There it is, surrounded by fractal stuff like clouds, trees, rainfall, wind and so on, and yet it is a perfect geometric shape, delineated in a spectrum of colour which appears to be utterly unnatural. If I were an Intelligent Design proponent, presumably that's about as far as my investigations would need to go: the rainbow is something so clearly at odds with the rest of the observable natural world that it must be evidence of a higher designer. I find ID so intellectually alien that it's hard to know which objection to raise first, but I tend towards this one: anything which encourages someone to give up on scientific method because the thing under investigation "looks too complex to explain scientifically" is bad. If that's the approach we inculcate in our children, I think we are sowing their future with the intellectual equivalent of anti-personnel mines. There ought to be an international treaty against that. In Socratic Athens, it was grounds for hemlock.

Posted by racingsnake @ 05:41 PM GMT+00:00 [ Comments [4] ]

Comments:

I find it unfortunate that ID is associated with an anti-science so often - just because you associate something with being created by an intelligent being, doesn't mean that it has to stop there, quite the opposite: Let's try to figure out how he/she/it was doing it, so we know that neat trick for the time we need it, too! (with the exception that some of those tricks _might_ not be possible for the average non-supernatural being, but that's something to find out, too).
Of course, taking creationism/ID as excuse for laziness or anti-science is sad, but that's not the only option to go from there.

Posted by Patrick Mauritz on October 29, 2005 at 01:19 PM GMT+00:00 #

your search engine is disabled?

Posted by james governor on October 31, 2005 at 12:50 PM GMT+00:00 #

Patrick, many thanks for your comment. I agree, up to a point: the question of <em>how</em> something has been done/created/designed is one which can be subjected to scientific method. Even so, it will sometimes still remain a hypothesis, albeit one so overwhelmingly likely as to be pragmatically accepted as 'fact'. The 'why' question, however, is more likely than the others to remain a matter of conjecture. In your comment, you mention 'supernatural tricks'. I think my point would be that it's the job of science to prove that what appears to be a supernatural trick can either be explained by a non supernatural hypothesis, or is an object of faith or belief, not scientific proof. An example sometimes used is astrology. There's nothing inherently 'wrong' with believing that astrology 'works' - but I think it is important to distinguish between what I have little choice but to believe because it is provable, and what I choose to believe even though it is not.

Posted by Robin Wilton on November 01, 2005 at 10:26 AM GMT+00:00 #

Hi James - yes, the Sun blog administrators have turned it off. Not sure why. Was there something specific you were looking for? I find that if you Google for the topic in question and add the word "esoterica" to your search, it will often find my blog ;^)

Posted by Robin Wilton on November 01, 2005 at 10:29 AM GMT+00:00 #

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