Sir Fred Hoyle

 

URL: https://barryhisblog.blogspot.com/p/sir-fred-hoyle.html

Sir Fred Hoyle FRS (24 June 1915 – 20 August 2001
Wikipedia entry @ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle

Sir Fred is often held up as an authority by creationists in support of their 'theories'. 

This article explains why relying on authorities is not a valid or convincing form of argument.

Hoyle is best known as an astronomer who supported the "Steady State" model of cosmology, in contrast to the "Big Bang" model, a term he coined himself, which he maintained was not a derogatory characterisation. The Big Bang model, BTW, was proposed by a priest, hardly earning it the label of 'atheistic'. See https://barryhisblog.blogspot.com/p/fred-hoyle.html .

Hoyle, although a sort of atheist, believed that the probability of life spontaneously arising by natural means was comparable to the idea that an operational Boeing aircraft could be assembled by a tornado tearing through a junkyard.  

Hoyle was an oddball, who didn't understand chemistry or even basic mathematical probability. I'm a retired teacher of mathematics, and like all mathematicians, I demand SHOW YOUR WORKING. It NEVER gets presented.

He never provided any probability calculations. Probability is a branch of mathematics that requires numbers. He provided none, just presenting an argument from personal incredulity.

Instead, he put forward the idea of "panspermia" - the idea that life had been seeded on earth from space, either by some natural means, or by the intervention of some alien influence. It is an idea famously lampooned by Dawkins in his interview with Ben Stein. https://web.archive.org/web/20080406092110/http://richarddawkins.net/article,2394,Lying-for-Jesus,Richard-Dawkins

This is known as kicking the can down the road. It solves nothing, and reveals Hoyle to be poorly qualified to talk about the origins of life (origins, BTW, asserted in Genesis, when it talks of life being brought forth by the earth and the waters).

Hoyle also thought that our nostrils pointed downward in order to protect us from space-borne pathogens!

Although he could not get his head around the idea that the universe was created in such a way that it could give rise to life, he had no difficulties with evolution, as the quotes I include below show. 

One last thing. He made great contributions to the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis, the processes by which stars can transmute elements into other elements - something that creationists try to deny. People can make great and valuable contributions to science. They can also be off-the-wall eccentrics in other areas. You follow the science, And judge its quality. You don't follow personalities. Not in these matters.

“The creationist is a sham religious person who, curiously, has no true sense of religion. In the language of religion, it is the facts we observe in the world around us that must be seen to constitute the words of God. Documents, whether the Bible, Qur’an or those writings that held such force for Velikovsky, are only the words of men. To prefer the words of men to those of God is what one can mean by blasphemy. This, we think, is the instinctive point of view of most scientists who, curiously again, have a deeper understanding of the real nature of religion than have the many who delude themselves into a frenzied belief in the words, often the meaningless words, of men. Indeed, the lesser the meaning, the greater the frenzy, in something like inverse proportion.”
–Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Our Place in the Cosmos (1993), p.14

“We are inescapably the result of a long heritage of learning, adaptation, mutation and evolution, the product of a history which predates our birth as a biological species and stretches back over many thousand millennia…. Going further back, we share a common ancestry with our fellow primates; and going still further back, we share a common ancestry with all other living creatures and plants down to the simplest microbe. The further back we go, the greater the difference from external appearances and behavior patterns which we observe today…. Darwin’s theory, which is now accepted without dissent, is the cornerstone of modern biology. Our own links with the simplest forms of microbial life are well-nigh proven.”
–Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Lifecloud: The Origin of Life in the Universe (1978), p.15-16

On probability, see 

https://barryhisblog.blogspot.com/p/probability-emo.html
https://barryhisblog.blogspot.com/p/on-failures-of-mathematical-anti.html
https://barryhisblog.blogspot.com/p/here-be-dragons-searching-large-phase.html