Thought you all might be interested in Eugenie Scott's reply to Bill Demski:
Scott replies to Dembski
William Dembski has responded to my January 18 Tom Jukes Memorial Lecture
at UC Berkeley. Others are responding on META and elsewhere to the focus
of his essay, whether natural selection is testable, and I shall not do so
here. I should, however comment on views attributed to me.
I wasn’t really dealing with the testability of ID, though that is the
impression one might get from Dembski’s essay. In this public lecture, I
discussed both traditional creation science as well as Neocreationism, and
compared them. I talked about Behe’s irreducible complexity idea, and
Dembski’s Design Inference, and illustrated religious motivation for
fighting evolution. I am not especially concerned with whether ID is
testable. I look at the testability of ID the same way I look at the
testability of traditional Young Earth Creationism (YEC): YEC can make
empirically or logically or statistically testable statements (the Earth
was covered by a body of water, all living things are descended from
creatures that came off a boat) but its foundational claim that everything
came into being suddenly in its present form through the efforts of a
supernatural creator is not a scientifically testable claim. I’ll let
theologians argue over whether Special Creationism is good theology, but
evoking omnipotent supernatural causes puts one smack out of the realm of
science, protestations of the validity of “theistic science”
notwithstanding. One cannot use natural processes to hold constant the
actions of supernatural forces; hence it is impossible to test (by
naturalistic methodology) supernatural explanations (Scott, 1998
). Whether a supernatural force does or does not act is thus outside of
what science can tell us.
Similarly, ID can make empirically or logically or statistically testable
claims (that certain structures are irreducibly complex; by using
probability arguments like the “design filter” one can detect design) but
the foundational claim that a supernatural “intelligence” is behind it all
is not a scientifically testable statement. (And please, let’s be grownups
here: we’re not talking about a disembodied, vague “intelligence” that
*might* be material, we’re talking about God, an intelligent agent that
can do things that, according to ID, mortals and natural processes like
natural selection cannot. Not for nothing does Dembski say that ID is the
bridge between science and theology.)
In my talk, I wasn’t deploring the untestability of ID *per se* but the
fact that its proponents don’t present testable models. I was referring to
the fact that ID proponents don’t present a model *at all* – in the sense
of saying what happened when. At least YEC presents a view of “what
happens:”the universe appeared within thousands of years ago, at one time,
in its present form, living things are descended from specially created
“kinds” from which they have not varied except in trivial ways, there was a
universal flood that produced the modern geological features, and humans
are specially created apart from all other forms. So what happened in the
ID model?
I said (and have said repeatedly) that the message of ID is “evolution is
bad science”, without providing an alternative view of the history of the
universe. This is not trivial: in books by Philip Johnson as well as in
Jonathan Wells’ new *Icons of Evolution* teachers are told that they should
be teaching students about how evolution is a weak, unsubstantiated “theory
in crisis”, to use former antievolutionist Michael Denton’s phrase. The
theories of astronomical, geological and biological evolution attempt to
explain evidence demonstrating that the universe has been around for a long
time, and has gradually unfolded from a different form to its present
form. There are lots of details in there, about when and how things
happened: when our galaxy formed, when other galaxies formed, when Earth
formed and out of what matter, when warthogs or whortleberries or
liverworts came to resemble their present forms, and on. Something
happened, and we’re trying to figure out what, and trying to figure out the
mechanisms that brought it about. ID tells us that evolution didn’t happen
(what else is one supposed to take away from *Icons of Evolution*?) but it
doesn’t tell us what *did*.
Unless ID proponents can come up with an actual model of “what happened”,
all they have is a sterile antievolutionism that adds little to YEC beyond
the specific ideas of irreducible complexity and the design filter.
The reason ID proponents are so vague about an actual picture of what
happened is that they strive to include YECs, progressive creationists
(PCs), and theistic evolutionists (TEs) among their theorists and
supporters (though the TE gang must feel rather uncomfortable, Dembski
himself having proclaimed that “ID is no friend of theistic evolution”
(Dembski, 1995). This is not just a big tent – it is one bulging with
people who must be eying one another warily. Phil Johnson may want
everyone to just be nice for the time being until evolution is vanquished,
and then they can work out their disagreements, but if you think
evolutionists squabble, wait until you see what happens when the ID folks
have to sort out their differences.
As Ronald Numbers and Kelly Smith independently urged at last summer’s
“Design and Its Critics” conference, if ID is going to attain any level of
scholarly respectability, its proponents are going to have to distinguish
their model from the discredited, unscientific YEC model, even if that
means losing the support of biblical literalist Christians. For aspiring
scholarly movements, the enemy of my enemy is not my friend.
Given my odd line of work, I’m concerned with practical issues such as what
teachers are being told to do, and what effect this will have on American
education. As near as I can tell, teachers are being encouraged to teach
students that evolution didn’t happen, and that if it did, that natural
selection isn’t the cause of it, and that in any event we have to leave
room for the direct actions of a Creator, and all this is still called
science. But to keep all the ID factions quiet, an actual picture of what
happened – which is what evolution is trying to explain and what ID has to
explain – is never mentioned. What should teachers teach? Apparently,
judging from *Icons of Evolution*, they should teach the familiar old YEC
saws about the weaknesses of evolution. Evolution is bad science, they
say. So to my way of thinking, ID doesn’t rise above familiar
antievolutionism, though it may be served up in probability theory and
information theory with a side order of biochemistry, but there is no
coherent ID model of what happened for teachers to actually teach.
This invites the question of what, according to the proponents of ID,
should teachers teach about the following issues?
1) Is the universe a few thousand years old or billions? Most ID
proponents will if forced, uncomfortably confess that they accept an
ancient age of the earth, but they are quick to dismiss the question as
unimportant, presumably to keep the YECs in the antievolution tent. But
should a teacher teach that the earth is millions or thousands of years
old? You can’t have it both ways if you are proposing a K-12 curriculum.
What is the ID model? What happened?
2) Is the geological column which shows a succession of species through
time, “real”– or an artifact? At least the YECs present a model of what
happened: the arrangement of species in the geological column is a result
of sorting by Noah’s flood, rather than their appearance at different
times. Does ID accept the geological column as “real”? This is a simple
thing to agree to: it is still possible to argue (as Jonathan Wells does)
that the arrangement of species through time doesn’t represent descent with
modification – but Dembski et al. are going to have to come clean as to
what this means. Minimally, it means the Special Creationists are wrong,
but it also requires the PCs and the TEs to fight it out as to whether the
succession of species through time represents separate creations or a
geneological pattern of related species.
3) Did living things descend with modification from common
ancestors? This is what biological evolution is all about, and where the
ID big tent starts showing the strain of trying to stretch over
incompatible views. How is ID going to accommodate both Theistic
Evolutionist Michael Behe and Special Creationist Paul Nelson? More
important, what do proponents of ID expect teachers to teach? What happened?
I think I know the answer. Teachers are supposed to teach that evolution
didn’t happen. Of course, if they did, they would be teaching a view that
is well outside the scientific mainstream, and be doing their students no
favors. I like to remind people that evolution is taught matter-of-factly
at every solid university in the nation, including Brigham Young, Notre
Dame, and Baylor. But more importantly for our purposes here, ID does not
present a coherent model of “what happened”, making it impossible for
teachers to present ID as an alternative to evolution, as proponents seek.
Now, maybe Dembski or other ID proponents will tell me that they are not
trying to influence the K-12 curriculum, that they are merely trying to
build a scholarly movement at the university or intellectual level,
trusting that eventually ID will be validated and like other intellectual
movements, it will trickle down to the K-12 level. If Dembski had attended
my talk, he would have heard me advocate exactly this strategy. I don’t
think ID will enter the academic mainstream, but if it does, then obviously
it will eventually be taught in high school. But I don’t think ID
proponents are willing to wait until they get this validation: Jonathan
Wells, whose book provides disclaimers to be copied and placed in K-12
textbooks, is obviously concerned primarily with the K-12 curriculum;
Philip Johnson’s *Defeating Darwinism* is explicitly aimed at high school
students; and CRSC’s Steven Meyer is an author of a substantial “Afterward”
to teachers in the ID high school textbook, *Of Pandas and People*. Bruce
Gordon, presently interim director of The Baylor Science and Religion
Project, has correctly noted, : ID “has been prematurely drawn into
discussions of public science education, where it has no business making an
appearance without broad recognition from the scientific community that it
is making a worthwhile contribution to our understanding of the natural
world” (Gordon, 2001).
So, what happened, Bill? Will you go beyond “evolution is bad science” to
give us an actual model?
References
Dembski, William
1995 What every theologian should know about creation, evolution, and
design. Center for Interdisciplinary Studies Transactions 3(2):3.
2001 Is Intelligent Design Testable? A Reply to Eugenie Scott. META
004. 2001.01.24.
Scott, Eugenie C.
1998 Two kinds of materialism. *Free Inquiry*, Spring, 1998, p. 20.
I thank Glenn Branch for useful comments.
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Dick Fischer - The Origins Solution - www.orisol.com
"The answer we should have known about 150 years ago."
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