Here is Phil Johnson's review of Robert Pennock's book, "The Tower of
Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism" in Books & Culture,
and Pennock's reply.
I personally haven't yet read the book, but the feeling in the ID movement
among those who have is that Pennock's "Tower of Babel" is so poorly
argued that it is hard to take it seriously. There is a feeling of, if that is the
*best* that the scientific materialists can come up with, then we have
nothing much to fear.
One IDer put it this way:
"Crack open _Tower of Babel_ at random, and likelier than not, you'll land
on an error of fact, an ad hominem, a tendentious digression, a logical
howler, or a missed point. If someone...can tell me what they see as the
genuinely sound arguments in the book, I'd be delighted."
I don't know what was the *philosopher* Pennock's point is in his opening
paragraph when he wrote:
"Johnson's is a philosophical attack, and the movement he leads is top-
heavy with philosophers, such as William Dembski, Robert Koons, Stephen
Meyer, J. P. Moreland, Paul Nelson, and Alvin Plantinga. It also includes
conservative commentators, such as John Ankerberg and Nancy Pearcey,
and even some scientists, like Michael Behe, Walter Bradley, and Jonathan
Wells."
Who does Pennock think is better equipped to lead an attack on
the *philosophy* of scientific materialism if not *philosophers*?
Anyway, the above sounds like a similar mix of philosophers and scientists
that exist among the leaders of the Darwinist camp, which is to be expected
if Darwinism is primarily a philosophy. What about the Darwinist philosophers
Michael Ruse, Daniel Dennett, Helena Cronin and David Hull? Moreover
Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins are hardly the average scientist
slogging it out in a lab as their day job!
As John Wilson, Editor of Books & Culture pointed out in his editorial
titled "Thou Shalt Not Take Cheap Shots"
(http://www.christianity.net/bc/9B5/9B5003.html):
"Surely, it seems, Pennock must be aware of the extent to which his own
argument in Tower of Babel incorporates a panoply of rhetorical strategies.
And these are not incidental, merely decorative, adding a final twist to an
argument already essentially clinched. On the contrary--and quite
unremarkably--rhetoric plays a crucial role in his project."
Getting back to Johnson's review, I like the following paragraph:
"What I have said so far should not be controversial. If scientists--and
professors in general, and elite journalists--understood the issues correctly,
Darwinism would self-destruct over night. Once the analytical spotlight is
properly focused, few people will defend the finch-beak example as
evidencing anything beyond trivial variation, or the computer selection
example as anything but the kind of logical fallacy you can legitimately
flunk an undergraduate for misunderstanding."
Steve
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http://www.christianity.net/bc/9B5/9B5030a.html
Books & Culture
Sep/Oct 1999
[...]
THE SCIENCE PAGES
Phillip Johnson
---Robert Pennock's book is an all-out attack on the "new creationists," a.k.a. the Intelligent Design Movement (hereafter IDM), an informal group of which I am currently the most prominent representative. It is an honor to be the main subject of a book-length attempted demolition by a professor of philosophy, and I welcome the opportunity to respond.Here is where the debate stands, as I see it. The IDM aims to transform the evolution/creation debate by focusing on the main issue and pushing the details to the background. The main issue is the scientific naturalist claim that the origin and development of life can be explained employing only unintelligent natural causes like chance, chemical laws, and natural selection. This claim is as important for philosophy and theology as it is for science. The neo-Darwinian theory was discovered by a science that was committed a priori to methodological naturalism, the principle that research should always be guided by a commitment to discover strictly natural causes for all phenomena. Most educated people today have been taught to regard the theory as unassailably confirmed by objective scientific testing. Many think that it follows that the success of the theory provides a powerful justification for basing research in all fields, including even biblical studies, on methodological naturalism. Darwinism (i.e., naturalistic evolution) is thus not just a scientific theory but a creation story so culturally dominant that it is even protected by judge-made law from criticism in the public schools.
We in the IDM argue that the supposed confirmation of the neo-Darwinism as a general theory is the product of philosophical bias in the selection and interpretation of evidence. When the evidence is interpreted without a bias in favor of naturalism, it does not support the claim that evolutionary biologists have discovered a mechanism that can create life in the first place, or cause simple life forms (like bacteria) to develop into complex plants and animals, or build even relatively simple adaptive organs such as bacterial flagella. Our argument makes no reference to the Bible or to any other authority other than empirical testing. Indeed, we argue that it is the Darwinists who embrace a religious prejudice by refusing to give fair consideration to evidence or reasoning unless it supports their a priori commitment to naturalism.
I will illustrate the difference between IDM thinking and Darwinian thinking with two examples from Pennock's book. The first is the most famous instance in which evolution by natural selection has actually been observed, the variation in finch beaks on an island in the Galapagos. To tell the story as briefly as possible, the average size of the beaks in the island population increased by 4 to 5 percent after a devastating drought, probably because the larger-beaked birds had an advantage in opening the last tough seeds that remained. A few years later there were floods, again killing most of the birds, following which the average beak size returned to the pre-drought norm. Nothing new emerged, and no permanent change occurred.
Pennock says that the scientists "were able to see the Darwinian mechanism at work, sculpting individual traits." He argues that to accept such an example of "evolutionary change within the type is tantamount to accepting it generally," because "[t]here is no essential difference in kind between microevolution and macroevolution; the difference is simply a matter of degree." To set any limits to change would be arbitrary, because all creatures are made from the same genetic material and one needs only to change a fraction of the genes to produce a new species. Hence, for Pennock the cyclical finch beak variation demonstrates a mechanism that is in principle capable of the kind of major changes, producing new species and even new phyla, that we call "macroevolution."
programs as proof that the Darwinian mechanism has actually been observed--tells us nothing about how birds or other animals might have come into existence. It is not merely a matter of saying that small changes do not necessarily add up to large changes, although the fallacy of extrapolation is a notorious path to absurdity. The more important point is that variation of the finch beak sort involves no increase whatsoever in genetic information or adaptive complexity. When evaluating such an example we have to make allowances for the limited time available for observation, but a process that never gets started isn't going to reach a distant objective no matter how much time we give it.
Besides the experimental failure, there is a theoretical reason to conclude that a combination of random mutation and natural selection cannot create new complex organs or organisms. Even the simplest of living organisms, the bacterial cell, is a miniaturized chemical factory far more complex than an airplane or a computer. Such a complex entity requires an enormous quantity of information in the form of instructions that tell the many parts just what they are to do and in what order they are to do it. Even the arch-materialist Richard Dawkins agrees that a single cell requires a program with more information than all the volumes of the encyclopedia, and a complex organism like ourselves contains trillions of cells working in concert. The genetic information, like the information in a book or computer program, is complex, specified, and non repeating, which means that it cannot be the product either of random movement (which produces disorder) or chemical laws (which produce simple, repetitive order). (For a more complete explanation, see my review of The Fifth Miracle, by Paul Davies, http://www.arn.org/docs/johnson/fifthmiracle).
How do Darwinists argue that their mechanism is information-creating, given the absence of any biological examples? One of the main arguments is a computer analogy most famously employed by Dawkins. Here is how Pennock describes it:
In The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins beautifully illustrates the power of cumulative selection with an example that considers the probability that a monkey banging at a keyboard would type out a line from Shakespeare at random. The chance of our monkey hitting upon the line "METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL" from Hamlet is tiny if we require him to get all 28 characters right in a single step. But switch now to a Darwinian monkey who be gins with a random string of 28 characters, produces multiple replications of this sequence with some chance of a copying error each time, and then repeats the process starting for the next set of copies with whichever of the copies is closest to the target sequence as the original. If he continues in this way, in a surprisingly small number of generations he hits the target [emphasis added]. Of course, the "Darwinian monkey" is really a computer that generates random letters and then produces the target text by retaining the correct letters when they appear in the correct places in the sequence, as they are eventually bound to do. Careful readers of The Blind Watchmaker will know that Dawkins admits that the computer analogy "is misleading in important ways," and Pennock seeks to disarm criticism by citing the warning. This concession has not prevented Dawkins or Pennock from misusing the analogy repeatedly to exploit the very feature that is misleading about it: it smuggles intelligence into an argument whose purpose is to illustrate how a text can be written without intelligence. It is not cumulative selection that writes the target text; the program designer writes the text into the computer's memory along with the instructions for retaining the correct letters and discarding the incorrect ones. The reference to Darwinian monkeys and copying errors serves only to distract attention from the fact that the computer program would require less intelligence if it bypassed the cumulative selection charade and printed the target text directly from its memory. The example illustrates intelligent design, in the form of programmed instructions.
What I have said so far should not be controversial. If scientists--and professors in general, and elite journalists--understood the issues correctly, Darwinism would self-destruct over night. Once the analytical spotlight is properly focused, few people will defend the finch-beak example as evidencing anything beyond trivial variation, or the computer selection example as anything but the kind of logical fallacy you can legitimately flunk an undergraduate for misunderstanding.
The other Darwinian arguments are no better. I doubt that any but true believers in Darwinism will be impressed by Pennock's centerpiece argument, the evolution of languages. Of course language has evolved, just as symphony orchestras and computer software have evolved. All these examples illustrate the often unpredictable results of interaction among intelligent agents. They do not support an inference that intelligence is not needed to produce either language or software.
Despite these rather obvious points, which bright high school students can readily understand, the mainstream intellectual community remains devoted to Darwinism and is predisposed to believe that the IDM is "against science." How did this perception become so widespread, and why is it so difficult to change? The primary answer is that Darwinists have successfully exploited what I call the "Inherit the Wind stereotype." They have framed the issue as "biblical fundamentalism versus scientific fact," and in such a contest only the latter can win. That is why I have been so determined to keep the Bible out of the debate, and why the Darwinists have been so determined to keep it at the center. Pennock's book is based on the stereotype, and he spares no effort to keep it alive. If you believe him, the only question is whether you are going to credit the evidence of repeatable experiments on the one hand, or some cloudy mysticism or Bible-thumping fundamentalism on the other.
If that were the issue, I would be on Pennock's side. But that is not the issue. What the IDM stands for is resolving disputed issues by unbiased scientific testing, where this is possible, without making any exceptions either for the worldwide flood of Noah or for the creative power of the Darwinian mechanism. The Darwinists want to make an exception for the latter. It is often claimed that science by its nature rejects the miraculous, but it would be more accurate to say that science ceases to call something a miracle once it has decided to accept it. The inflationary Big Bang assumes that the universe emerged at a point in time from a subatomic vacuum somehow seething with quantum particles, and expanded in a fraction of a second to cosmological size. I do not ask biologists to contemplate anything as bizarre as cosmic inflation or quantum indeterminacy, but they might consider giving credit to that everyday reality we call intelligence, which can do things that chance and chemical laws can never do.
What Robert Pennock is defending is not science, but a nineteenth-century philosophy that has survived so far because materialists have seduced the leaders of biology into their philosophical camp. Once the issue is grasped, the best scientific thinkers will agree that the term science properly understood refers to an unbiased procedure for testing hypotheses, not to a dogmatic adherence to philosophical materialism regardless of the evidence. What Pennock's argument actually demonstrates is that Darwinism can maintain its cultural power only by sowing confusion and appealing to prejudice.
Phillip Johnson is professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of many books, including most recently Objections Sustained (InterVarsity), a collection of essays, many of which first appeared in BOOKS & CULTURE.
Copyright (c) 1999 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture. September/October 1999, Vol. 5, No. 5, Page 30-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------http://www.christianity.net/bc/9B5/9B5031.htmlBooks & Culture
Sep/Oct 1999
THE SCIENCE PAGES
Robert Pennock
In his writings, law professor Phillip Johnson portrays himself as a soldier in the "culture wars," the point man in a "wedge strategy" to break apart the "religion" of evolution and to bring creationism into the mainstream. Johnson's is a philosophical attack, and the movement he leads is top-heavy with philosophers, such as William Dembski, Robert Koons, Stephen Meyer, J. P. Moreland, Paul Nelson, and Alvin Plantinga. It also includes conservative commentators, such as John Ankerberg and Nancy Pearcey, and even some scientists, like Michael Behe, Walter Bradley, and Jonathan Wells. In Tower of Babel, I discussed the most important contributions of these intelligent-design creationists (hereafter IDCS), and new writings of established creationists such as Norman Geisler, Henry and John Morris, and Hugh Ross. Contrary to Johnson's charge, I did not portray all creationists as Genesis literalists, but I was careful to describe (in their own terms) the interesting theological factionalism among Christian anti-evolutionists and anti-evolutionists who start from other religious viewpoints.
Johnson has organized an uneasy alliance against a common enemy. IDCS unite in their opposition to evolution and in their disdain for those Christians who believe one can be a theist while accepting its truth. William Dembski draws the new creationists' line in the sand, writing that IDCS "are no friends of theistic evolutionists." Johnson labels such believers "theistic naturalists" to highlight what he takes to be the incoherence of their "accommodationist" view. It is such compatibilist positions that his wedge aims to split, which is why, as he admits, so many Christian theologians oppose his movement.
Johnson says that IDCS push "the details" into the background. What this means is that they try to keep hidden their specific beliefs about the age of the earth, Noah's flood, and the goings-on in the garden. But scientists know that when testing a scientific hypothesis, the Devil is in the details. Johnson's generic design hypothesis that "God creates" is too vague to be tested scientifically, so science properly remains agnostic about the question, leaving such matters to religion.
Readers should thus beware when Johnson says IDCS want to resolve issues by "unbiased scientific testing," for theirs is not science as ordinarily understood, but rather something that would be taught in a special "department of theological science." The revolutionary "theory of knowledge" that this yet-to-be-developed theistic science will follow rests on what Johnson describes in Reason in the Balance as "the essential, bedrock position of Christian theism about creation," namely, the opening lines of the Gospel of John (1:1-3). According to Johnson, when the Bible says that in the beginning was "the Word," it speaks of "information," and "plainly says that creation was by a force that was (and is) intelligent and personal." However, knowledgeable readers will recognize that IDCS' references to complexity and information theory are no more than designer window dressing on a basic God-of-the-gaps argument.
Besides its obvious political utility, it is hard to know what to make of Johnson's claim that he is "so determined to keep the Bible out of the debate," for he often, though selectively, cites scriptural authority. He be moans, for instance, how naturalism has corrupted even the law, so that legislators no longer assume the authority of biblical morality, on issues ranging from divorce to homosexuality. In Tower of Babel, I show what happens when one drops the standard framework of methodological naturalism out of the law in the way that IDCS recommend it be dropped from science. Johnson continues to decline to de fend his proposal on his home turf.
As in the above case, Johnson simply ignores other arguments in Tower of Babel and reissues his usual brief. He writes that one could "flunk an undergraduate" who failed to get the "obvious points" he makes about the two examples he discusses--points that "bright high school students" should easily understand. However, bright students always do their reading, and they will see that I included these examples because IDCS say misleading things about them. The Grant's finch research is one of several studies showing not only that we can observe the Darwinian mechanisms at work in nature (sexual as well as natural selection) but also that we can measure them and see that they operate as predicted to produce functionally adaptive morphological changes. If there is any "fallacy of extrapolation," it is made by Johnson, who conveniently ignores the relevant causal processes exemplified, and seems to think that two data points are sufficient to infer "cyclical" variation within a fixed type. Creationists believe in some magic, uncrossable boundary that defines biological species, and Johnson fails to address the challenges I made to this view. Don't be fooled by talk of "genetic information" or "adaptive complexity." IDCS provide no definition or measure of these concepts, and no evidence that natural mechanisms cannot produce an "increase" in these, or even that an increase is necessary to evolve new species.
Johnson's discussion of Dawkins's computer simulation is particularly misleading, for I included that case specifically to show how IDCS regularly misrepresent what Dawkins explicitly claimed about his program and the way that it supports evolution. I also provided my own alternative example and de scribed other computer models that evolve using genetic algorithms, neither of which has the feature of a specific target that IDCS claim (falsely) "smuggles intelligence" into the procedure. Genetic algorithms can generate just the sort of novel, functional, and specific complexity that IDCS say is impossible without intentional design. Evolutionary computation is a rapidly developing field that is proving its power theoretically and in practical applications, from airplane wing design to, yes indeed, computer software development. (I made no claims about symphony orchestras.)
The only new item in Johnson's article is his acknowledgment that languages evolve. This is an important admission, for Johnson is usually careful not to say anything about the "details" of his position that could fracture his alliance. Traditional creationists do reject linguistic evolution, and for the same reason they reject biological evolution, because it goes against a plain reading of Genesis, which states that God specially created the different languages in the great confusion at Babel. I discuss this case, because the theory of the evolution of languages matches that of the evolution of biological species in all of its most significant elements: the structure of the theory, the kinds of evidence available, and how the central evolutionary hypothesis of descent with modification is justified. It is easy to see the flaws in the creationists' arguments in this context. Of course, the evolution of languages has some special features because the causal processes involved allow, for instance, Lamarckian as well as Darwinian mechanisms, but linguistic evolution does indeed challenge the IDCS' central claims. No one designed English, or any other natural language. Languages do not need special intentional design to evolve from one into others, and neither do species.
To test Johnson's claims about the adequacy of his response, I gave an advance copy of his article to a class of undergraduates to evaluate who had already read Tower of Babel. The students all recognized that Johnson had failed even to engage, let alone rebut, the book's arguments about the cases he mentions. In their papers, many pointed out how he also ignored arguments that undermined IDCS' claims about in formation and complexity and the viability of a supernatural "science." Others noted the ways that he substituted rhetoric for argument (like that dig about flunking undergraduates).
Johnson addressed his book Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds to the bright high-schoolers he hopes will join his movement, and perhaps he is right that they will understand his points better than college students and those in the "mainstream intellectual community" do, who are supposedly blinded by their "devotion" to Darwinism. IDCS portray scientists as being either leaders or dupes of a materialist empire they compare to the former Soviet Union. Evolutionary scientists are purportedly struggling to retain their "cultural power" as evolution--their "dogmatic philosophy"--teeters on the brink of collapse. Their methods do not involve evidence but rather "bias," "hype," "stereotyping," and "appeal to prejudice," not to mention "smuggling" and "seduction." By defending scientists from these unfounded charges, I now stand accused of the same crimes.
In fact, I made no attempt to defend materialist metaphysics (nineteenth-century or otherwise) in Tower of Babel, but discussed how Johnson confuses this with science's reasonable methodological constraints. Johnson's own philosophy is an odd jumble of postmodernism and premodernism that subverts the possibility of unbiased testing. IDCS say material processes can't produce new species, but they fail to tell us how they think immaterial intelligences do the trick, or how their theological science will investigate such claims. The "best scientific thinkers" are not holding their breath for an answer. Johnson is content to hammer away at science, driving his wedge between it and religion, while concealing the details of what his movement would put in its place.
Copyright (c) 1999 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture. September/October 1999, Vol. 5, No. 5, Page 31.========================================================================
--------------------------------------------------------------------"It is not difficult to imagine how feathers, once evolved assumed additional functions, but how they arose initially presumably from reptilian scales, defies analysis." (Stahl B.J., "Vertebrate history: Problems in Evolution", Dover: New York, 1985, p349)Stephen E. Jones | sejones@iinet.net.au | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones--------------------------------------------------------------------