'Intelligent Design' rant, after all
Aug. 5th, 2005 09:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lederhosenSince ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lokicarbis and msmanna egged me on...
To start with, defining terms. Wikipedia currently defines 'intelligent design', as an "assertion which states that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by positing an intelligent designer(s)".
In practice, ID is hard to distinguish from creationism. The central argument for ID is that life is too complex to have evolved by chance, and so must have been purposely created. But unless we're willing to accept that complex entities can arise from simpler things (which would undermine that same argument!) that leaves us with a bigger problem than before: "Who made the maker?"
So, unless you want to postulate an infinite chain of ever-more-complex creators, which is not a terribly popular worldview, you eventually get back to some sort of "Well, he was there from the start, and Just Is". Combined with the ability to create life, this is as near to a 'God' as makes no difference.
[While I'm here, BTW, not all 'creationists' are of a single stripe. At one end, there are the Young-Earth creationists, who take Genesis 1 literally and believe the world was made a few thousand years ago, in 144 hours, with modern species more or less ready-formed. This stance has become less and less fashionable in the last couple of centuries as advances in geology, paleontology, and astronomy make it increasingly hard to defend.
At the other end, there are creationists who pretty much accept mainstream evolution & astronomy, believing that God used these things as mechanisms for creating the world he wanted to create. This school of thought is quite compatible with mainstream science, since they're not really arguing about anything that science can meaningfully address (not that scientists haven't tried...) and so they're not the target of the above.
Most of the controversy happens somewhere in between. William Dembski, for instance, seems to admit that the Earth is billions of years old - and it's not clear to me whether he acknowledges himself as a 'creationist' - but maintains that life couldn't have arisen without intelligent intervention, so I'm going to class him as a creationist whether he likes it or not.]
However, creationism has a bad rep; even among those who believe in it, many are willing to acknowledge that it's religion, and as such doesn't belong in a science class. ID is essentially a way of repackaging creationism to make it look more like science, because there are places where 'science' has access that 'religion' doesn't get.
Accordingly, the IDers do make some effort to play down the religious overtones and distance themselves from creationism. Dembski's book suggests an alien life force as a possible designer, presumably to reinforce the message that ID Isn't Religion, Honest. However, he's made some revealing comments elsewhere: "Intelligent design is a winner in the public debate over biological origins not only because it has the backing of powerful ideas, arguments, and evidence (sic) but also because it does not turn this
debate into a Bible-science controversy. Intelligent design, unlike creationism, is a science in its
own right and can stand on its own feet. Christians need to view this as a strength rather than as a weakness of intelligent design... Accordingly, intelligent design should be understood as the evidence that God has placed in nature to show that the physical world is the product of intelligence and not simply the result of mindless material forces." No ambiguity there as to who the designer is. This sort of weaselling is fairly typical of the ID movement.
As to science, there is a great deal of argument (see Wikipedia for detail) about what, exactly, it is. I'm not going to offer a definitive answer to that, but I will offer a couple of key characteristics of science.
(And FWIW, I'm describing ideals here. Every real-life scientist on earth falls short of those ideals sometimes, or has to balance them against other considerations, because nobody is only a scientist. But ID, for the most part, doesn't even aim for these ideals.)
1. In science, evidence drives arguments. Imagine a court case in which a man is on trial for murder. He has been granted a state-appointed lawyer to defend him, his lawyer argues back and forth with the prosecutor, and at last it's time to sum up the defence. His lawyer turns and says "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury... honestly, the evidence against my client is pretty strong, isn't it? If I were in your place, I'd convict."
This would be a gross breach of professional ethics. Jurisprudence in British-tradition countries is based on an adversarial system. One side does their utmost to defend, the other does their utmost to convict, and what they actually believe about the case doesn't come into it; individually, they're tasked not with discerning the truth but in making sure their side of the case gets its day in court. Theoretically, truth is stronger than falsehood and will win if given a fair showing.
But science does not work this way. A scientist's job is *not* to pick a position and champion it to the bitter end, but to discern truth; while adversarial debate is sometimes a useful way to examine a theory, scientists must remember to treat it as a tool to be put back on the shelf when it is no longer needed.
In Richard Dawkins' 'Sadly, an Honest Creationist', he quotes young-earth creationist Kurt Wise: "I had to make a decision between evolution and Scripture. Either the Scripture was true and evolution was wrong or evolution was true and I must toss out the Bible... It was there that night that I accepted the Word of God and rejected all that would ever counter it, including evolution. With that, in great sorrow, I tossed into the fire all my dreams and hopes in science... As I shared with my professors years ago when I was in college, if all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate. Here I must stand."
It is not a viewpoint I can really fathom; and yet, what makes Wise unusual is not that he allows faith to trump evidence, but that he acknowledges it. There are a vast many IDers who also place faith ahead of evidence, but pretend otherwise. This, we can confirm by looking at how they treat their evidence and arguments.
Because a scientist is concerned with establishing the truth, there is little occasion for dishonesty. If an argument or a piece of evidence is spurious, a scientist will not want to use it to 'prove' his/her theories: if those theories are founded on better evidence, then that evidence should be used instead, and if the evidence is flimsy then the scientist shouldn't be trying to prove this theory in the first place. By and large, when an argument or a piece of evidence develops holes, scientists will stop using it; it may take a while for this to happen, because it's hard to let go of an idea (and embarrassing to admit that you made a mistake). But, for example, no respectable paleontologists now invoke Piltdown Man as proof of evolution, even in front of audiences who don't know it was a fake.
This willingness to abandon individual pieces of evidence if they turn out to be flawed has often been misconstrued by creationists as "evolution in crisis". We're weeding the garden of a Sunday afternoon; they're seeing Day of the Triffids.
By comparison, the ID crowd have no compunction about using evidence that has been rebutted elsewhere. As long as there's one person in the audience who might not have heard the counterargument, they'll pull it out. For instance, one of the ID posterboys is a fellow called Michael Behe, whose big argument is 'irreducible complexity'. As defined by Behe, IC is "a single system which is composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning".
Behe's argument - and this is one of the most commonly-cited arguments for ID - is that such systems disprove the theory of evolution because there's no way for them to have evolved; the preceding stages in their evolution would have been nonfunctional, and so would have died out before they ever reached completion.
At first glance, it seems like a pretty good argument. But there are two major holes in it. The first is the issue of 'scaffolding': by placing bricks on scaffolding one by one and then removing the scaffolding, I can form a catenary arch that collapses if any of those bricks are removed, and the same process can create IC in nature. The second is that most of Behe's alleged examples of IC really *aren't* - they are based either in misunderstanding of the systems involved, or in failure of imagination. (For instance, systems may adapt to a different purpose; a flagellum may fail as a flagellum if any of its component proteins are removed, but some of those will work very nicely as toxins.)
If a scientist offers a theory, and some smart listener points out a flaw in it, the proper course of action is to withdraw the theory, bringing it back if and only if that hole can be fixed. But if an IDer offers a theory, and some smart listener points out a flaw, the usual response seems to be to put that theory away for the day and then pull it out again, unmended, at the next stop down the road. (If somebody points out that your pants have a great big hole in the bum, do you keep wearing them day after day? That's how I feel every time I see IDers citing Behe.)
2. Science is concerned with falsifiable statements. This causes some confusion, because it's easy to take that as meaning "false statements". What it actually means is that scientific theories must be formed so that if they were false they could be proved to be so.
"There are no tomatoes in my desk drawer" is a (true) scientific statement, because it could be disproved by opening my drawer and finding a tomato.
"There are no aliens on other planets" is also a scientific statement, because it would be disproved by the appearance of a flying saucer full of little green men.
"God made the world last Wednesday, and gave us false memories, records, and 'evidence' to make it look like it had been around for much longer" (omphalos) is not a scientific statement, because by its very nature it does not admit any way it might be disproved.
So, what are the falsifiable elements of ID? What does ID tell us to expect that we would not expect from evolution? At least Young-Earth creationism *makes* falsifiable statements, like "nothing in the universe is over 6000 years old, so we shouldn't see anything more than 6000 light years away" (which is one of the reasons why YEC isn't doing too well any more ;-)
But ID weasels. It posits a divine intervention somewhere along the track, but it doesn't commit itself to any detail on when, or what traces such intervention should leave... without which, how can we possibly prove that such a thing didn't happen?
To an IDer, this presumably seems like a strength: after repeated batterings, the creationists have learned to mutate their belief into something so nebulous that there's nowhere left to hit it.
BTW, although I didn't end up working it into the above, Don Lindsay's evolution/creation site is a great source of information on the failings of 'creation science'.
lokicarbis and msmanna egged me on...To start with, defining terms. Wikipedia currently defines 'intelligent design', as an "assertion which states that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by positing an intelligent designer(s)".
In practice, ID is hard to distinguish from creationism. The central argument for ID is that life is too complex to have evolved by chance, and so must have been purposely created. But unless we're willing to accept that complex entities can arise from simpler things (which would undermine that same argument!) that leaves us with a bigger problem than before: "Who made the maker?"
So, unless you want to postulate an infinite chain of ever-more-complex creators, which is not a terribly popular worldview, you eventually get back to some sort of "Well, he was there from the start, and Just Is". Combined with the ability to create life, this is as near to a 'God' as makes no difference.
[While I'm here, BTW, not all 'creationists' are of a single stripe. At one end, there are the Young-Earth creationists, who take Genesis 1 literally and believe the world was made a few thousand years ago, in 144 hours, with modern species more or less ready-formed. This stance has become less and less fashionable in the last couple of centuries as advances in geology, paleontology, and astronomy make it increasingly hard to defend.
At the other end, there are creationists who pretty much accept mainstream evolution & astronomy, believing that God used these things as mechanisms for creating the world he wanted to create. This school of thought is quite compatible with mainstream science, since they're not really arguing about anything that science can meaningfully address (not that scientists haven't tried...) and so they're not the target of the above.
Most of the controversy happens somewhere in between. William Dembski, for instance, seems to admit that the Earth is billions of years old - and it's not clear to me whether he acknowledges himself as a 'creationist' - but maintains that life couldn't have arisen without intelligent intervention, so I'm going to class him as a creationist whether he likes it or not.]
However, creationism has a bad rep; even among those who believe in it, many are willing to acknowledge that it's religion, and as such doesn't belong in a science class. ID is essentially a way of repackaging creationism to make it look more like science, because there are places where 'science' has access that 'religion' doesn't get.
Accordingly, the IDers do make some effort to play down the religious overtones and distance themselves from creationism. Dembski's book suggests an alien life force as a possible designer, presumably to reinforce the message that ID Isn't Religion, Honest. However, he's made some revealing comments elsewhere: "Intelligent design is a winner in the public debate over biological origins not only because it has the backing of powerful ideas, arguments, and evidence (sic) but also because it does not turn this
debate into a Bible-science controversy. Intelligent design, unlike creationism, is a science in its
own right and can stand on its own feet. Christians need to view this as a strength rather than as a weakness of intelligent design... Accordingly, intelligent design should be understood as the evidence that God has placed in nature to show that the physical world is the product of intelligence and not simply the result of mindless material forces." No ambiguity there as to who the designer is. This sort of weaselling is fairly typical of the ID movement.
As to science, there is a great deal of argument (see Wikipedia for detail) about what, exactly, it is. I'm not going to offer a definitive answer to that, but I will offer a couple of key characteristics of science.
(And FWIW, I'm describing ideals here. Every real-life scientist on earth falls short of those ideals sometimes, or has to balance them against other considerations, because nobody is only a scientist. But ID, for the most part, doesn't even aim for these ideals.)
1. In science, evidence drives arguments. Imagine a court case in which a man is on trial for murder. He has been granted a state-appointed lawyer to defend him, his lawyer argues back and forth with the prosecutor, and at last it's time to sum up the defence. His lawyer turns and says "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury... honestly, the evidence against my client is pretty strong, isn't it? If I were in your place, I'd convict."
This would be a gross breach of professional ethics. Jurisprudence in British-tradition countries is based on an adversarial system. One side does their utmost to defend, the other does their utmost to convict, and what they actually believe about the case doesn't come into it; individually, they're tasked not with discerning the truth but in making sure their side of the case gets its day in court. Theoretically, truth is stronger than falsehood and will win if given a fair showing.
But science does not work this way. A scientist's job is *not* to pick a position and champion it to the bitter end, but to discern truth; while adversarial debate is sometimes a useful way to examine a theory, scientists must remember to treat it as a tool to be put back on the shelf when it is no longer needed.
In Richard Dawkins' 'Sadly, an Honest Creationist', he quotes young-earth creationist Kurt Wise: "I had to make a decision between evolution and Scripture. Either the Scripture was true and evolution was wrong or evolution was true and I must toss out the Bible... It was there that night that I accepted the Word of God and rejected all that would ever counter it, including evolution. With that, in great sorrow, I tossed into the fire all my dreams and hopes in science... As I shared with my professors years ago when I was in college, if all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate. Here I must stand."
It is not a viewpoint I can really fathom; and yet, what makes Wise unusual is not that he allows faith to trump evidence, but that he acknowledges it. There are a vast many IDers who also place faith ahead of evidence, but pretend otherwise. This, we can confirm by looking at how they treat their evidence and arguments.
Because a scientist is concerned with establishing the truth, there is little occasion for dishonesty. If an argument or a piece of evidence is spurious, a scientist will not want to use it to 'prove' his/her theories: if those theories are founded on better evidence, then that evidence should be used instead, and if the evidence is flimsy then the scientist shouldn't be trying to prove this theory in the first place. By and large, when an argument or a piece of evidence develops holes, scientists will stop using it; it may take a while for this to happen, because it's hard to let go of an idea (and embarrassing to admit that you made a mistake). But, for example, no respectable paleontologists now invoke Piltdown Man as proof of evolution, even in front of audiences who don't know it was a fake.
This willingness to abandon individual pieces of evidence if they turn out to be flawed has often been misconstrued by creationists as "evolution in crisis". We're weeding the garden of a Sunday afternoon; they're seeing Day of the Triffids.
By comparison, the ID crowd have no compunction about using evidence that has been rebutted elsewhere. As long as there's one person in the audience who might not have heard the counterargument, they'll pull it out. For instance, one of the ID posterboys is a fellow called Michael Behe, whose big argument is 'irreducible complexity'. As defined by Behe, IC is "a single system which is composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning".
Behe's argument - and this is one of the most commonly-cited arguments for ID - is that such systems disprove the theory of evolution because there's no way for them to have evolved; the preceding stages in their evolution would have been nonfunctional, and so would have died out before they ever reached completion.
At first glance, it seems like a pretty good argument. But there are two major holes in it. The first is the issue of 'scaffolding': by placing bricks on scaffolding one by one and then removing the scaffolding, I can form a catenary arch that collapses if any of those bricks are removed, and the same process can create IC in nature. The second is that most of Behe's alleged examples of IC really *aren't* - they are based either in misunderstanding of the systems involved, or in failure of imagination. (For instance, systems may adapt to a different purpose; a flagellum may fail as a flagellum if any of its component proteins are removed, but some of those will work very nicely as toxins.)
If a scientist offers a theory, and some smart listener points out a flaw in it, the proper course of action is to withdraw the theory, bringing it back if and only if that hole can be fixed. But if an IDer offers a theory, and some smart listener points out a flaw, the usual response seems to be to put that theory away for the day and then pull it out again, unmended, at the next stop down the road. (If somebody points out that your pants have a great big hole in the bum, do you keep wearing them day after day? That's how I feel every time I see IDers citing Behe.)
2. Science is concerned with falsifiable statements. This causes some confusion, because it's easy to take that as meaning "false statements". What it actually means is that scientific theories must be formed so that if they were false they could be proved to be so.
"There are no tomatoes in my desk drawer" is a (true) scientific statement, because it could be disproved by opening my drawer and finding a tomato.
"There are no aliens on other planets" is also a scientific statement, because it would be disproved by the appearance of a flying saucer full of little green men.
"God made the world last Wednesday, and gave us false memories, records, and 'evidence' to make it look like it had been around for much longer" (omphalos) is not a scientific statement, because by its very nature it does not admit any way it might be disproved.
So, what are the falsifiable elements of ID? What does ID tell us to expect that we would not expect from evolution? At least Young-Earth creationism *makes* falsifiable statements, like "nothing in the universe is over 6000 years old, so we shouldn't see anything more than 6000 light years away" (which is one of the reasons why YEC isn't doing too well any more ;-)
But ID weasels. It posits a divine intervention somewhere along the track, but it doesn't commit itself to any detail on when, or what traces such intervention should leave... without which, how can we possibly prove that such a thing didn't happen?
To an IDer, this presumably seems like a strength: after repeated batterings, the creationists have learned to mutate their belief into something so nebulous that there's nowhere left to hit it.
BTW, although I didn't end up working it into the above, Don Lindsay's evolution/creation site is a great source of information on the failings of 'creation science'.
