there is no scientific evidence whatsoever for extraterrestrial
intelligence, and there is certainly no mention in the Bible of any
rival covenant with another intelligent species. Worse yet, Sagan
boasts that he could detect an ordered, intelligent signal from space
from the noise and static of mere cosmic debris. But here on earth
we have the massively ordered and intelligently designed “signal”
called DNA, and yet Sagan publicly pretends that DNA is the result of
random processes! If Sagan used the same criteria to distinguish
intelligence from chance in the study of Earth life, as he does in his
search for extraterrestrial life, then he would have to become a
Creationist!
I asked Mr Hoesch what he considered the single most
important argument that his group had to make about scientific
creationism.
“Creation versus evolution is not science versus religion,” he
told me. “It’s the science of one religion versus the science of
another religion.”
The first religion is Christianity; the second, the so-called
religion of Secular Humanism. Creation scientists consider this
message the single most important point they can make; far more
important than so-called physical evidence or the so-called scientific
facts. Creation scientists consider themselves soldiers and moral
entrepreneurs in a battle of worldviews. It is no accident, to their
mind, that American schools teach “scientific” doctrines that are
inimical to fundamentalist, Bible-centered Christianity. It is not a
question of value-neutral facts that all citizens in our society should
quietly accept; it is a question of good versus evil, of faith versus
nihilism, of decency versus animal self-indulgence, and of discipline
versus anarchy. Evolution degrades human beings from immortal
souls created in God’s Image to bipedal mammals of no more moral
consequence than other apes. People who do not properly value
themselves or others will soon lose their dignity, and then their
freedom.
Science education, for its part, degrades the American school
system from a localized, community-responsible, democratic
institution teaching community values, to an amoral indoctrination—
machine run by remote and uncaring elitist mandarins from Big
Government and Big Science.
Most people in America today are creationists of a sort. Most
people in America today care little if at all about the issue of creation
and evolution. Most people don’t really care much if the world is six
billion years old, or six thousand years old, because it doesn’t
impinge on their daily lives. Even radical creation-scientists have
done very little to combat the teaching of evolution in higher
education — university level or above. They are willing to let Big
Science entertain its own arcane nonsense — as long as they and
their children are left in peace.
But when worldviews collide directly, there is no peace. The
first genuine counter-attack against evolution came in the 1920s,
when high-school education suddenly became far more widely
spread. Christian parents were shocked to hear their children
openly contradicting God’s Word and they felt they were losing
control of the values taught their youth. Many state legislatures in
the USA outlawed the teaching of evolution in the 1920s.
In 1925, a Dayton, Tennessee high school teacher named John
Scopes deliberately disobeyed the law and taught evolution to his
science class. Scopes was accused of a crime and tried for it, and his
case became a national cause celebre. Many people think the
“Scopes Monkey Trial” was a triumph for science education, and it
was a moral victory in a sense, for the pro-evolution side
successfully made their opponents into objects of national ridicule.
Scopes was found guilty, however, and fined. The teaching of
evolution was soft-pedalled in high-school biology and geology texts
for decades thereafter.
A second resurgence of creationist sentiment took place in the
1960s, when the advent of Sputnik forced a reassessment of
American science education. Fearful of falling behind the Soviets in
science and technology, the federal National Science Foundation
commissioned the production of state-of-the-art biology texts in
1963. These texts were fiercely resisted by local religious groups
who considered them tantamount to state-supported promotion of
atheism.
The early 1980s saw a change of tactics as fundamentalist
activists sought equal time in the classroom for creation-science — in
other words, a formal acknowledgement from the government that
their worldview was as legitimate as that of “secular humanism.”
Fierce legal struggles in 1982, 1985 and 1987 saw the defeat of this
tactic in state courts and the Supreme Court.
This legal defeat has by no means put an end to creation-science. Creation advocates have merely gone underground, no
longer challenging the scientific authorities directly on their own
ground, or the legal ground of the courts, but concentrating on grass—
roots organization. Creation scientists find their messages received
with attention and gratitude all over the Christian world.
Creation-science may seem bizarre, but it is no more irrational
than many other brands of cult archeology that find ready adherents
everywhere. All over the USA, people believe in ancient astronauts,
the lost continents of Mu, Lemuria or Atlantis, the shroud of Turin,
the curse of King Tut. They believe in pyramid power, Velikovskian
catastrophism, psychic archeology, and dowsing for relics. They
believe that America was the cradle of the human race, and that
PreColumbian America was visited by Celts, Phoenicians, Egyptians,
Romans, and various lost tribes of Israel. In the high-tech 1990s, in
the midst of headlong scientific advance, people believe in all sorts of
odd things. People believe in crystals and telepathy and astrology
and reincarnation, in ouija boards and the evil eye and UFOs.
People don’t believe these things because they are reasonable.
They believe them because these beliefs make them feel better.
They believe them because they are sick of believing in conventional
modernism with its vast corporate institutions, its secularism, its
ruthless consumerism and its unrelenting reliance on the cold
intelligence of technical expertise and instrumental rationality.
They believe these odd things because they don’t trust what they are
told by their society’s authority figures. They don’t believe that
what is happening to our society is good for them, or in their
interests as human beings.
The clash of world views inherent in creation-science has
mostly taken place in the United States. It has been an ugly clash in
some ways, but it has rarely been violent. Western society has had a
hundred and forty years to get used to Darwin. Many of the
sternest opponents of creation-science have in fact been orthodox
American Christian theol
ogians and church officials, wary of a
breakdown in traditional American relations of church and state.
It may be that the most determined backlash will come not
from Christian fundamentalists, but from the legions of other
fundamentalist movements now rising like deep-rooted mushrooms
around the planet: from Moslem radicals both Sunni and Shi’ite, from
Hindu groups like Vedic Truth and Hindu Nation, from militant
Sikhs, militant Theravada Buddhists, or from a formerly communist
world eager to embrace half-forgotten orthodoxies. What loyalty do
these people owe to the methods of trained investigation that made
the West powerful and rich?
Scientists believe in rationality and objectivity — even though
rationality and objectivity are far from common human attributes,
and no human being practices these qualities flawlessly. As it
happens, the scientific enterprise in Western society currently serves
the political and economic interests of scientists as human beings.
As a social group in Western society, scientists have successfully
identified themselves with the practice of rational and objective
inquiry, but this situation need not go on indefinitely. How would
scientists themselves react if their admiration for reason came into
direct conflict with their human institutions, human community, and
human interests?
One wonders how scientists would react if truly rational, truly
objective, truly nonhuman Artificial Intelligences were winning all
the tenure, all the federal grants, and all the Nobels. Suppose that
scientists suddenly found themselves robbed of cultural authority,
their halting efforts to understand made the object of public ridicule
in comparison to the sublime efforts of a new power group —
superbly rational computers. Would the qualities of objectivity and
rationality still receive such acclaim from scientists? Perhaps we
would suddenly hear a great deal from scientists about the
transcendant values of intuition, inspiration, spiritual understanding
and deep human compassion. We might see scientists organizing to
assure that the Pursuit of Truth should slow down enough for them
to keep up. We might perhaps see scientists struggling with mixed
success to keep Artificial Intelligence out of the schoolrooms. We
might see scientists stricken with fear that their own children were
becoming strangers to them, losing all morality and humanity as they
transferred their tender young brains into cool new racks of silicon
ultra-rationality — all in the name of progress.
But this isn’t science. This is only bizarre speculation.
For Further Reading:
THE CREATIONISTS by Ronald L. Numbers (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992).
Sympathetic but unsparing history of Creationism as movement and
doctrine.
THE GENESIS FLOOD: The Biblical Record and its Scientific
Implications by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris (Presbyterian
and Reformed Publishing Company, 1961). Best-known and most
often-cited Creationist text.
MANY INFALLIBLE PROOFS: Practical and Useful Evidences of
Christianity by Henry M. Morris (CLP Publishers, 1974). Dr Morris
goes beyond flood geology to offer evidence for Christ’s virgin birth,
the physical transmutation of Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt, etc.
CATALOG of the Institute for Creation Research (P O Box 2667, El
Cajon, CA 92021). Free catalog listing dozens of Creationist
publications.
CULT ARCHAEOLOGY AND CREATIONISM: Understanding
Pseudoscientific Beliefs About the Past edited by Francis B. Harrold
and Raymond A. Eve (University of Iowa Press, 1987). Indignant
social scientists tie into highly nonconventional beliefs about the
past.
“Robotica ‘93”
We are now seven years away from the twenty-first century. Where are all our robots?
A faithful reader of SF from the 1940s and ’50s might be surprised to learn that we’re not hip-deep in robots by now. By this time, robots ought to be making our breakfasts, fetching our newspapers, and driving our atomic-powered personal helicopters. But this has not come to pass, and the reason is simple.
We don’t have any robot brains.
The challenge of independent movement and real-time perception in a natural environment has simply proved too daunting for robot technology. We can build pieces of robots in plenty. We have thousands of robot arms in 1993. We have workable robot wheels and even a few workable robot legs. We have workable sensors for robots and plenty of popular, industrial, academic and military interest in robotics. But a workable robot brain remains beyond us.
For decades, the core of artificial-intelligence research has involved programming machines to build elaborate symbolic representations of the world. Those symbols are then manipulated, in the hope that this will lead to a mechanical comprehension of reality that can match the performance of organic brains.
Success here has been very limited. In the glorious early days of AI research, it seemed likely that if a machine could be taught to play chess at grandmaster level, then a “simple” task like making breakfast would be a snap. Alas, we now know that advanced reasoning skills have very little to do with everyday achievements such as walking, seeing, touching and listening. If humans had to “reason out” the process of getting up and walking out the front door through subroutines and logical deduction, then we’d never budge from the couch. These are things we humans do “automatically,” but that doesn’t make them easy — they only seem easy to us because we’re organic. For a robot, “advanced” achievements of the human brain, such as logic and mathematical skill, are relatively easy to mimic. But skills that even a mouse can manage brilliantly are daunting in the extreme for machines.
In 1993, we have thousands of machines that we commonly call “robots.” We have robot manufacturing companies and national and international robot trade associations. But in all honesty, those robots of 1993 scarcely deserve the name. The term “robot” was invented in 1921 by the Czech playwright Karel Capek, for a stage drama. The word “robot” came from the Czech term for “drudge” or “serf.” Capek’s imaginary robots were made of manufactured artificial flesh, not metal, and were very humanlike, so much so that they could actually have sex and reproduce (after exterminating the humans that created them). Capek’s “robots” would probably be called “androids” today, but they established the general concept for robots: a humanoid machine.
If you look up the term “robot” in a modern dictionary, you’ll find that “robots” are supposed to be machines that resemble human beings and do mechanical, routine tasks in response to commands.
Robots of this classic sort are vanishingly scarce in 1993. We simply don’t have any proper brains for them, and they can scarcely venture far off the drawing board without falling all over themselves. We do, however, have enormous numbers of mechanical robot arms in daily use today. The robot industry in 1993 is mostly in the business of retailing robot arms.
There’s a rather narrow range in modern industry for robot arms. The commercial niche for robotics is menaced by cheap human manual labor on one side and by so-called “hard automation” on the other. This niche may be narrow, but it’s nevertheless very real; in the US alone, it’s worth about 500 million dollars a year. Over the past thirty years, a lot of useful technological lessons have been learned in the iron-arms industry.
Japan today possesses over sixty percent of the entire world population in robots. Japanese industr
y won this success by successfully ignoring much of the glamorized rhetoric of classic robots and concentrating on actual workaday industrial uses for a brainless robot arm. European and American manufacturers, by contrast, built overly complex, multi-purpose, sophisticated arms with advanced controllers and reams of high-level programming code. As a result, their reliability was poor, and in the grueling environment of the assembly line, they frequently broke down. Japanese robots were less like the SF concept of robots, and therefore flourished rather better in the real world. The simpler Japanese robots were highly reliable, low in cost, and quick to repay their investment.
Although Americans own many of the basic patents in robotics, today there are no major American robot manufacturers. American robotics concentrates on narrow, ultra-high-tech, specialized applications and, of course, military applications. The robot population in the United States in 1992 was about 40,000, most of them in automobile manufacturing. Japan by contrast has a whopping 275,000 robots (more or less, depending on the definition). Every First World economy has at least some machines they can proudly call robots; Germany about 30,000, Italy 9,000 or so, France around 13,000, Britain 8,000 and so forth. Surprisingly, there are large numbers in Poland and China.
Robot arms have not grown much smarter over the years. Making them smarter has so far proved to be commercially counterproductive. Instead, robot arms have become much better at their primary abilities: repetition and accuracy. Repetition and accuracy are the real selling-points in the robot arm biz. A robot arm was once considered a thing of loveliness if it could reliably shove products around to within a tenth of an inch or so. Today, however, robots have moved into microchip assembly, and many are now fantastically accurate. IBM’s “fine positioner,” for instance, has a gripper that floats on a thin layer of compressed air and moves in response to computer-controlled electromagnetic fields. It has an accuracy of two tenths of a micron. One micron is one millionth of a meter. On this scale, grains of dust loom like monstrous boulders.
CBW Automation’s T-190 model arm is not only accurate, but wickedly fast. This arm plucks castings from hot molds in less than a tenth of a second, repeatedly whipping the products back and forth from 0 to 30 miles per hour in half the time it takes to blink.
Despite these impressive achievements, however, most conventional robot arms in 1993 have very pronounced limits. Few robot arms can move a load heavier than 10 kilograms without severe problems in accuracy. The links and joints within the arm flex in ways difficult to predict, especially as wear begins to mount. Of course it’s possible to stiffen the arm with reinforcements, but then the arm itself becomes ungainly and full of unpredictable inertia. Worse yet, the energy required to move a heavier arm adds to manufacturing costs. Thanks to this surprising flimsiness in a machine’s metal arm, the major applications for industrial robots today are welding, spraying, coating, sealing, and gluing. These are activities that involve a light and steady movement of relatively small amounts of material.
Essays. FSF Columns Page 9
