Re: ID opens up a new front

From: Stephen E. Jones (sejones@iinet.net.au)
Date: Sun Jul 16 2000 - 16:57:09 EDT

  • Next message: Bertvan@aol.com: "Randomness and complex organization via evolution"

    Reflectorites

    Here are excerpts from a report in Geotimes by its editor David
    Applegate's regarding the ID movement's congressional briefing on May
    10. My comments are in square brackets.

    Steve

    ====================================================================
    http://www.geotimes.org/current/scene.html Geotimes ... July 2000 ...
    Creationists Open a New Front David Applegate ...

    What geoscientists might find remarkable about this briefing was its topic:
    Scientific Evidence for Intelligent Design and its Implications for Public
    Policy and Education. Intelligent design is the latest variation of creationist
    theory, and it may be ... the first wave of the creationists' new front: the
    U.S. Congress.

    [The continual attempts to try to depict ID as just another "variation of
    creationist theory" (i.e. YECs) will eventually backfire. When it
    becomes clear that IDers are not all, YECs, and in fact some (if not
    most) IDers aren't even theists, it will have expanded the meaning of
    "creationist" in the public mind well beyond YEC. It would probably
    have been a better tactic to have distinguished between creationism and
    ID and then tried to play one off against the other]

    Last summer's events in Kansas...Since then, efforts to discredit evolution
    have intensified ... Until now, the issue has been quintessentially local. But
    the May 10 briefing could represent a shift to a national stage.

    [It is a bit of evolutionist mythology that the creation/evolution "issue" has
    only ever been local, e.g. red-necked Bible thumpers from the deep South.
    But he is probably right that Kansas where ID gained national prominence
    and now this briefing represents a shift of ID to the national stage.]

    ...about a dozen members of Congress - including two members of the
    House Science Committee - served as honorary "hosts" (mostly in absentia)
    or introduced the speakers. The briefing and reception were held in a
    hearing room of the House Judiciary Committee, the space having been
    arranged by ...chairman of the Subcommittee on the Constitution. ... Petri
    is first in line to become chairman of the House Committee on Education
    and the Workforce ... the committee responsible for federal education
    programs may be run next year by a man who expressed his hope for a
    "swelling chorus" of support for intelligent design creationism.

    [It is interesting to see that ID may have support among members of the
    "Science", "Judiciary", "Constitution" and "Education" Committees!]

    Those who attended the briefing were treated to a three-hour primer on ID
    creationism from some of the movement's leading lights, including ...
    Stephen Meyer, ... Michael Behe and ... Phillip Johnson. ... Joining them
    was ... Nancy Pearcey ....

    [Hopefully the audience learned the difference between "ID" and
    "creationism" at this "three-hour primer", even if Applegate did not!]

    Most of the ID advocates were excellent communicators. ... leaving the
    audience convinced that life could only, obviously, be the handiwork of an
    intelligent designer. Consider it Occam's razor run amok: confronted with
    two explanations, one (seemingly) dizzyingly complicated and the other
    disarmingly simple, choose simple. Choose design.

    [Interesting how if simplicity is the criterion, Occam's razor supports
    design! I was reading an old New Scientist which admitted this possibility:

            "From those opposed to religion comes the view that God is an
            unnecessary hypothesis and should become redundant according to
            Occam's principle that 'entities should not be multiplied beyond
            necessity'. Occam may not have agreed - he was, after all, a
            theologian. And his razor appears double-edged: many of our
            correspondents argue skilfully that a simpler Universe includes
            God." ("The God letters," Comment, New Scientist, 15 May 93.
            http://archive.newscientist.com/archive.jsp?id=18730200)]

    ... They did not thump Bibles. ... nor did they seek to explain that the
    Grand Canyon was formed during the Noachian flood. The intelligent
    design creationists voiced their acceptance of the depth of geologic time ...
    even certain aspects of evolution itself. In fact, ID creationists not only
    accept the advances of science, they argue that those advances have
    revealed a universe of physical and biological systems so complex that they
    could not possibly have come from evolutionary processes. .... This
    approach cleverly places ID theory at the cutting edge of scientific
    discovery ....

    [Maybe readers might be wondering why Applegate still keeps calling them
    "creationists" if they "voiced their acceptance of the depth of geologic
    time". But he does at least realise that ID is not based on what we don't
    now know, but on what we *do* now know!]

    Intelligent design, they said, is one side of a debate between two
    competing, empirically derived scientific theories - a debate that does not
    include religion. ... But while ID creationists tout the empirical derivation
    of their theory, their intentions are far from secular. As Pearcey wrote ...
    while [intelligent design theory] does not require any theological
    presuppositions, it has theological implications: It is resolutely opposed to
    the atheistic, purposeless, chance view of evolution taught in the power
    centers of science."

    [*Obviously* ID "is resolutely opposed to the atheistic, purposeless,
    chance view of evolution". But what Applegate does not point out is that
    the latter "has theological implications" too!]

    ... Ironically, the ID creationists accept the achievements of science and
    indeed place their theory at the pinnacle of modern knowledge, but also
    demonize the scientists who made those advances ... Johnson portrays
    scientists as an elite priesthood ... There is a disconnect between the pains
    they take to portray the debate between ID and evolution as purely
    scientific and this separate line of argument portraying Darwinism as a
    religion.

    [This is false. Johnson does not "portrays *scientists*" as "an elite
    priesthood" (for starters Mike Behe is a scientist) but the science
    *establishment*. In fact unless Applegate equates "scientists" with
    "Darwinism" his own words above make this distinction.]

    The speakers also tarred evolutionary theory with the controversial findings
    of social scientists who apply Darwinism to human interactions. Pearcey
    shocked the audience with a recent sociology book that asserted rape was a
    natural male impulse... She also blamed Darwinism for the excesses of
    popular culture ...."

    [Darwinists are always claiming that Darwin is more than anyone else
    changed our view of who we are. Only in this month's Scientific American,
    Mayr claims that "Modern thought is most dependent on the influence of
    Charles Darwin" (Mayr E., "Darwin's Influence on Modern Thought,"
    Scientific American, July 2000, p.67), so if they claim the credit, they have
    to also take the blame.]

    ... Intelligent design will be even more a part of the landscape if its
    partisans succeed in convincing the often warring factions within the
    creationist camp to unite under their big tent.

    [Applegate at least acknowledges that there are different factions within
    creationism, and ID, being more general (and aligned with none of them),
    can unite them under its "big tent".]

    ... Two of the briefing speakers coauthored a legal guidebook on how to get
    intelligent design material into public school science curricula. Their efforts
    threaten to erode science education at the very moment when our
    technology-based society needs it more than ever.

    [Applegate just *assumes* that ID would "erode science education",
    without any evidence. If anything ID would repair the erosion to "science
    education" that shackling science to a materialist philosophy has caused. It
    can't be good for science to be virtually at `war' with 90% of the
    population. The *real* threat to science is postmodernism, which takes
    Darwinism's anti-design seriously and concludes that there can no such
    thing as science! The atheist vice-president of Australian Ratiionalists,
    Professor Brian Ellis, observes:

            "First, neither science nor religion can survive in an era of social
            constructivism. If scientific theories are social constructs, and
            scientific disputes are power struggles between competing scientific
            elites, as the social constructivists say, and there are no rules for
            resolving these disputes which have any objective validity, then
            science has no natural authority. The test of a theory about reality,
            according to this view, is whether it works for the individual or
            tribe who accepts it." (Ellis B., "Has reason a future?," Australian
            Rationalist, No. 42, Summer 1996/97, pp.14-19, p.18)

    So ID might well be science's last hope?]

    ... both the House and Senate were actively considering legislation to
    overhaul federal K-12 education programs. .... If creationists choose to
    move into this arena and gain support from leading members of Congress,
    good science will face an even tougher challenge.

    [ID is no threat to "science and math education". ID is not even a threat to
    evolution, in the sense that does not support evolution being banned. ID's
    stated position is that it wants *more* about evolution to be taught:
    "Phillip Johnson takes a different approach. `I always say we ought to
    teach the young people much more about evolution than the science
    educators want them to know -- because the science educators don't want
    them to know about the problems, they want them to think that all you
    need to have is variation and everything is perfect."'
    (http://www.cbn.org/newsstand/stories/991007.asp)]

    Applegate directs the American Geological Institute's Government Affairs
    Program and is editor of Geotimes.

    [...]

    (c) 2000 American Geological Institute. All rights reserved. ...
    ====================================================================

    --------------------------------------------------------------------------
    "It was a parable for students of scientific objectivity. Wherever the chart
    disagreed with his observations he *rejected the observation* and followed
    the chart. Because of what his mind thought it knew, it had built up a static
    filter, an immune system, that was shutting out all information that did not
    fit. Seeing is not believing. Believing is seeing. If this were just an
    individual phenomenon it would not be so serious. But it is a huge cultural
    phenomenon too and it is very serious. We build up whole cultural
    intellectual patterns based on past 'facts' which are extremely selective.
    When a new fact comes in that does not fit the pattern we don't throw out
    the pattern. We throw out the fact. A contradictory fact has to keep
    hammering and hammering and hammering, sometimes for centuries,
    before maybe one or two people will see it. And then these one or two
    have to start hammering on others for a long time before they see it too."
    (Pirsig, Robert M., "Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals," Bantam: London, 1991,
    pp.343-344. Emphasis in original.)
    Stephen E. Jones | sejones@iinet.net.au | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jul 16 2000 - 17:04:01 EDT