ID to Win?

Stephen over at Doggie\‘s Breakfast pointed me to this article, which claims that the victory of the theory of Intelligent Design over Darwinian evolution is inevitable. I posted a lengthy comment to his blog (sorry Stephen!), and I thought that it might be as well to reproduce it here, as my own response to the article.

The article makes some good points, but is flawed from the start: “Intelligent Design theory is destined to supplant Darwinism as the primary scientific explanation for the origin of human life.“

This is something that seems hard for many people to grasp, but ID (whatever its merits might be) is simply not a scientific explanation for anything. At best, it’s a justification for a supposed lack of a scientific explanation! To be scientific, a theory must be testable and falsifiable. ID is neither.

This is betrayed when he says things like this: “Is it possible to speak of a “science” of concepts? Right now, the scientific establishment says no. This unhelpful understanding of science will soon be discarded in favor of something more useful in the information age.“ The understanding of science can change, he is right there, but there are certain concepts that cannot be discarded if what remains is to be called “science” at all. And among those concepts are the inconvenient ideas of observation, experiment, theory and falsification. There are many kinds of knowledge possible without these things – but they are not science. And confusing them with science only makes understanding harder.

However, when it comes to politics, the article’s conclusions are more probable: “ID will be taught in public schools as a matter of course. It will happen in our lifetime. It’s happening right now, actually.“

This is plausible. He might even be right. The only question is whether ID is taught in science lessons or RE lessons. If it’s science then, despite his protestations, it will harm science. Because basing your “science” on a nonscientific ground means that your science is floating free. If ID is the basis for biological research, many possibilities will be missed and mistakes will be made – because it deliberately sets out not to explain many parts of biology! The most telling point here is that the entire edifice of ID is based on two things – pointing out that scientific knowledge is not complete (Duh!), as though that somehow proved that scientific knowledge is false, and constructing cloud castles that don’t stand up for a minute once some real science is actually applied to them (as in their supposed examples of “irreducible complexity”).

The stupid thing (and I use that term advisedly) is that many scientists who believe that evolution is a true and accurate description of the development of life on earth are both Christian and hold a belief that might be termed “weak ID”. That is, we believe that God is involved in history and guides events, that God planned this world, that God is in charge. But we would refute vigorously all the twaddle spouted by the “ID crowd” about “irreducible complexity”, which is a willful misrepresentation of the facts. We don’t need this ID nonsense to sustain a belief in an involved Creator God. That is, the author seems to confuse the scientific theory of evolution with a certain “scientism” that uses this as a launching point for a materialist philosophy.

pax et bonum

Article posted at 9:08pm on 13 October 2005
Category: Faith, Musing, Science

Hello, John,
I found your blog through Stephen Dancer’s Doggie’s Breakfast and he found the link to the article in a post from me so I thought I ought to give you a comment. We have to take into account the American context of the original post, of course, and that means that your ‘elegant’ solution of teaching ID in RE will not work there. Other than that there are just three comments I want to make.
1) I thought that the most telling observation in the article was I’m afraid that that one does come across the Atlantic and might, just might be detected even in your own attitude to irreducible complexity. Granted, it is a engineer’s concept and engineers do not tend to have a high enough regard for the capabilities of life but it is somewhat snobbish of life-scientists to disregard a thought process just because it comes from a ‘lesser’ discipline.
2)We moan when medecine is slow to pick up on scientific findings yet are well aware that a more ‘scientific’ approach to medecine would require unethical experimentation on an unaware, healthy population and don’t go there. How is it then that we don’t, in turn, learn the lesson from Mathematics that not everything is falsefiable?
3) Do you really believe that the Darwinian denial of design is scientific? Darwin fought against one form of design perfectionism which he knew well and disagreed with but he never once engaged with the possibility that that design perfectionism was flawed, not because of the invocation of a designer but because the perfectionism does not meet the facts. Darwin proved the perfectionism to be false but he could not divorce design from the perfectionism he associated with it and threw the baby out with the bathwater. Elements from both sides of the current debate are remaking Darwin’s mistake but, inasmuch as the ID proponants who accomodate the real world are not beholden to the perfectionists beside them, it is those Neo-Darwinists who won’t take design arguments seriously who are selling the pass.
John/.

John Kilpatrick () (URL)
2:02pm on 14 October 2005

Missing between ‘was’ and ‘I’m afraid’ is ’2) ID will win because the pro-Darwin crowd is acting like a bunch of
losers.’
Sorry.

John Kilpatrick () (URL)
2:06pm on 14 October 2005

Thanks for the comments, John. I do want to address two points you made.

First, the problem biologists have with “irreducible complexity” isn’t that it comes from engineering (many excellent pieces of biology share roots in engineering). The problem is that the whole idea is simply wrong and inapplicable in every example that I’ve heard. It misses essential and well-known pieces of biology.

Second, beware of talking about “Darwinism”. There are many, many variants of “Darwinist” philosophies – but none of them has anything to do with the truth or otherwise of evolutionary theory in biology. The point about evolution is not that it denies a Creator but that it explains the design of organisms in terms of natural selection. This is the central point that too many people miss – evolution isn’t “random” or “undirected”. It is very strongly non-random, because it is driven very hard by the selection of those organisms that manage to survive.

So, the question isn’t one of design – it’s one of where the design comes from. Evolutionary theory says “isn’t Creation marvellous. Look how the Eagle’s wing matches its purpose so completely!” ID says “isn’t God marvellous. Look how the Eagle’s wing matches an aeroplane wing!”.

However, you’re totally right that the extreme Darwinists (in the philosophical sense) are harming science almost as much as the extreme Creationists/IDers.

pax et bonum

[John] () (URL)
7:26pm on 14 October 2005

Thank you for coming back at me in the way you have, John,

John Kilpatrick () (URL)
11:23am on 15 October 2005

I especially value the way, you describe ID as saying ‘Isn’t God marvellous. Look how the eagle’s wing matches an aeroplane’s wing.’ An excellent caricature and one that would have more mileage apart from two minor details. There is a difference between those ‘designists’ who think that irreducible mechanism spotting is enough to bring down the whole idea of natural selection and those who think that there are areas of investigation that are still being dealt with as the proverbial ‘black box.’ In other words there are designists who are creationists and there are those who aren’t. Secondly, you and I both know that there are people doing good work in the field who will say, ‘Isn’t Creation marvellous. Look how the eagle’s wing matches its purpose so completely.’ but we also know that this is not the public perception of what is being said. The public perception is that biology with one voice is saying, ‘Look how the eagle’s wing matches its purpose so completely, there is no God!’
My point is that hearts and minds will not be won over any more by a simple closing of community ranks to ridicule the outsiders. Generals know the danger of preparing for the last war rather than the next one but, and this is where the original article ( http://www.techcentralstation.com/100705.. which we have inevitably got away from a little bit) scores still, science doesn’t get it that it, as a culture, has to operate within the real world and, if it did, this is where it would bend, IMHO.
Thank you once again for the level of engagement and I look forward to seeing many claims for irreducible complexity shown to be wrong by publication and refutation in peer-reviewed journals because it will harm science to keep them out and, once again, IMHO, do no harm and be good PR to let the toughest cases in.
John/.

John Kilpatrick () (URL)
12:18pm on 15 October 2005