How can one evaluate the claims of intelligent design? Of course, one way is through some sort of method for acquiring and interpreting empirical observations. However, there is another method that for many people is a reasonable approach and often compelling as long as the empirical approach does not dispell it. That is by analogy.
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Steve pointed out where Matt Donnelly says , "There is a sense within the science-and-religion community that the debate over intelligent design has run out of gas. This isn't necessarily because of a lack of interesting topics that could be discussed, but because the usual suspects on all sides of the debate have begun to get noticeably repetitive."
Maybe we need some fresh perspective from some new voices. So here are some tantalizing excerpts from a sampling of various ID critics.
Intelligent Design is the new thing in the Conservative Christian Right I'm A Big Dumb Jackass movement. What the Hell is I.D, you ask? Simply put, it's bible-thumping ask-nothing-read-the-Bible Christian Creationism under a new guise trying to call itself "science".
Intelligent Design is synonmous to Stupid
Intelligent design asserts that there is so much order in the world, a fact that we are unable to explain, that there must have been an intelligent creator who put all this order in the world. The problem with this position is that it does something science never aims to do: it adopts a position with no empirical consequences and leaves us with more questions that cannot in principle be answered.
Intelligent Design
Even their sacred bacterial flagellum didn't just happen. They seem stumped that a cell could be such an efficient little machine able to whip around with it's tail…I'm thinking of something that swims in a pearl jam like substance–right! the sperm cell; it's a single celled little bastard with a tail too. Why can't the bible thumpers just accept that science contradicts the living hell out their beliefs…
Intelligent Design is for pussies
Roth designed the course to "look at intelligent design on three levels: as an argument for the existence of God, as an alternative to evolution in science, and in the context of the current debate over evolution and religion." According to Roth, it is important to understand that ID is not something recently installed on today's front page like an ice block to cool the seething evolution-creation debate. Rather, "intelligent design has a long history. The idea originated well before Darwin's work in the 1850s," Roth said"¦"¦.. The response generated from Roth's class has been overwhelmingly positive among students and faculty. "Various school administrators have told me that they heard positive things about the course from students who enrolled in it," Roth said. It appears that students who participated received a better explanation of intelligent design than they expected. "I gathered from the enthusiasm and interest with which they discussed matters that they were engaged with the topic," said Roth.
Since the comments section of this thread have gone astray, I thought I would offer this thread as an arena for those interested in carrying out their conversation. Have fun…
TelicThoughts member G arago has raised some interesting questions in the comments section, so let me take a stab at them.
Allen MacNeill makes an interesting claim in this post. In discussing how we could distinguish between ID and theistic evolution, he writes:
"This means that if we are to distinguish between IDT [intelligent design theory] and DEI [deism] (and, by extension, from TET [theistic evolutionary theory]) it must be incontrovertably shown that natural laws as they now exist are insufficient to produce existing natural objects and processes. As many others have pointed out, this requires proving a negative. That is, unless we assume that all currently known natural laws are literally all there are or even can be (as Lord Kelvin infamously did at the end of the 19th century), then it is possible that in the future new versions of purely natural laws will be discovered that can explain the existence of those entities now claimed to be possible only through supernatural intervention."
This argument is surely wrong, though, since we make scientific claims all the time about what can and cannot happen. For example, I can say pretty confidently that you cannot make a perpetual motion machine because it would violate the laws of nature. Now this isn't proof that perpetual motion machines are impossible since you can't prove scientific laws. So, even though I think you can prove some negatives, this is irrelevant when it comes to scientific claims. The best anybody can say is "Based on current theory, perpetual motion machines are impossible."
In the discussion about intelligent design and tenure, it has been pointed out that when an academic comitee acts behind closed doors, it's really asking the public to have faith in the impartiality of its members. I was reminded of this when reading this news story in Nature (HT: evolgen). Theresa Markow, president of the Society for the Study of Evolution, has resigned in protest to the discrimination of women applicants for editorship:
A rare resignation has focused attention on scientific societies' treatment of women. Theresa Markow, president of the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), has stepped down in protest that women were not adequately considered for the editorship of its journal, Evolution.
Many think the incident is symptomatic of a wider issue. "I see this as truly problematic," says Patricia Gowaty, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Georgia in Athens. "And it is not unique to the SSE."
The society's rules state that it should create a nominating committee to choose a chief editor. But instead, the society appointed a man after informal queries. It then rejected Markow's request to redo the process. Markow, a geneticist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, resigned the SSE presidency on 18 March, about ten weeks into her term.
Apparently, it's a problem that's far from unique to the SSE:
In the SSE's nearly 60 years, Evolution has had only one female editor "” Markow, from 1995 to 1999. Other journals are similar. Daphne Fairbairn, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Riverside, says she had a "discouraging" experience when she proposed female candidates for an editing position at the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, published by the European Society for Evolutionary Biology. "No one else came up with a single woman candidate," says Fairbairn. "When I raised the issue, they looked at me dumbly."
She says society leaders criticized her suggestions unfairly. "They would say 'she is nasty', or 'she didn't do a good job'. No one was going through the men's list and saying those things." When Fairbairn's term as North American editor ends, the journal will have no female editors.
Juha Merilä, a biologist at the University of Helsinki in Finland and the journal's editor-in-chief, acknowledges there are difficulties appointing women. There are few women at high levels of science in Europe, he says, so the pool of candidates is small. "I am, of course, a little disappointed," he says. "I went through quite a few names; all declined because of other responsibilities."
The journal of the American Ornithologists' Union, The Auk, has not had a woman editor in its 123-year history. But Kimberley Sullivan, an ornithologist at Utah State University in Logan, has a grant from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) to address such issues, and seems to be making progress. The society's existing fellows pick new fellows at the union's annual meeting, from a slate of nominees. At her first fellows' meeting, Sullivan says women nominees were "trashed". "They started blackballing nominees, with someone saying: 'I was with her on a field trip and she misidentified a bird'," she says. "It was terrible." The younger men on the slate came in for the same treatment, she says.
I don't see this blogged, so I'm jumping into the fray (with my usual liberal dose of righteous indignation at this sort of thing). I think this is an important developing story – the Dead Date is April 30.
Despite the Shiavo fiasco we all recall – when the President interrupted one of his frequent vacations to return to DC and call a special session of Congress to prevent the euthanasia of a Florida woman with brain damage – a hospital and insurance company drafted bill G.W. Bush signed into law as Texas governor in 1999 is once again being used to kill. This time it's a 54-year old woman who is not in a coma, is not terminally ill, and whose brain damage from hemorrhage suffered after heart surgery does not compromise her higher brain functions. It just compromises certain motor control, which requires her to breathe by mechanical assist (ventilator). The patient and her family have registered strong objection to this planned "mercy killing," but a single doctor has decided their wishes don't count.
Senior DI Fellow Wesley J. Smith is so far one of very few who have taken up the cause, arguing that the treatment isn't being removed because it doesn't work – it's being removed because it DOES work. He also lists a host of other objections, and lodges substantial criticisms of the Texas law.
Houston Hospital Votes to End Woman's Life with Bush Law
WorldNet Daily: Hospital to Kill Sick Woman
Read it and weep…
Over at Science & Theology News, Matt Donnelly says
There is a sense within the science-and-religion community that the debate over intelligent design has run out of gas. This isn't necessarily because of a lack of interesting topics that could be discussed, but because the usual suspects on all sides of the debate have begun to get noticeably repetitive.
For anyone who has hung around the ID/Darwinism debate for very long it certainly should be apparent that there is a lot of repetition in arguments. Since this type of repetition has been going on for years, I'm not sure it would be a fair inference that the debate is running out of steam. However, I do think that all this rehashing of ideas and arguments presents a rather unique phenomenon in culture. It would be hard to find a contentious concept or issue in scientific exploration that has had such broad exposure. Normally scientific controversies rattle around in academia and the scientific community without much notice by the wider populace. Perhaps this is for good reason because critical struggles over paradigms usually manifest themselves in a dialog among specialists. This is, however, not true for the intelligent design debate. For instance, if one monitors news items covering intelligent design in the media via a Google news search rarely does a day go by without some news media outlet offering a story or commentary on the debate. Whether it is the trial in Dover, a course offering at a university, essays on web sites, or interviews and debates on television there is a steady throng of exposure to the propositions/arguments/evidence etc. concerning ID and Darwinism. Then there are the discussion boards and blogs where both the old guard and a constant stream of new debaters do battle over the issues.
I've argued before that Intelligent Design Creationism could be a legitimate term even though creationism is not equivalent to intelligent design. Here is an article that highlights some of the problems that creationists have with ID. The article focuses on young earth creationism but you can find old earth creationists who have problems with ID, too.
John Timmer is to be congratulated for providing some excellent coverage of the "Teaching Evolution and the Nature of Science" conference. Very good reporting.
What I'd like to focus on in this blog is Pennock's pragmatic test for understanding evolution as science. Take note TelicThought readers. Pennock places a huge amount of value in *what evolution can do for us today* – in other words, how we can use evolution. Directed evolution, by engineers, for people.
The first session was on the nature of science and biology, presented in part by Robert T. Pennock of Michigan State, who testified at the Dover trial. He suggested that teachers should present evolution as part of a discussion of the nature of science, as the development of the theory is an example of science done right. He even suggested that science itself can be viewed as a selective process that discriminates among competing ideas. In contrast, he presented ID as a negative argument against evolution with no explanatory power. Ultimately, however, he suggested that the key feature of evolution is that it passes the pragamatic test: evolutionary processes work in both engineering and computer programming, producing efficient products that would not have been proposed by intentional design, including an antenna used by NASA. I asked him later about the prominent roles played by engineers and chemists (who have careers centered around goal oriented design) in providing creationist arguments with academic credentials, and he suggested that ultimately, the success of evolved designs will win over these fields.
[emphasis added]
John Timmer commenting on the proceedings of the "Teaching Evolution and the Nature of Science" conference had this to say:
Branch's final topic was how to handle a situation where a biology department winds up with a creationist as a graduate student. This was both of general interest, as creationists tend to use their degrees as rhetorical weapons, and of personal interest, as I was part of the Berkeley class that produced the noted Discovery Institute fellow Jon Wells. Unfortunately, his conclusion was that there are no easy answers. He did, however, note that graduate departments exist to serve the scientific community by providing qualified individuals to perform research and teaching services. There is no ethical requirement for graduate faculty to be complicit in the training of someone who is ultimately going to actively harm the field.
An interesting questions come to mind. Who gets to decide what makes a creationist? Is Branch's fellow presenter, Ken Miller, a creationist? Seems reasonable to say that he is. What about our friend Krauze, a good ol' European agnostic? He's telic-minded, but he ain't no theist. Is he on the wrong side of the fence or the right side? Who decides? Do his contributions to an intelligent design blog make him prone to Branch's creationist net?
Also, what do we make of Branch's call for graudate faculty to be soothsayers and predict which of their students will actively harm the field? How does one tell? What should a graduate faculty member be looking for, just to be safe…to protect the integrity of science?
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