Faith & Science

Blogger Ed Brayton is fulminating over my comments about those who wrongly conflate intelligent design theory with religion. Brayton responds with proof-texts supposedly showing that key ID supporters think ID makes religious claims after all. Mr. Brayton doth protest too much. First of all, if he had read the article I referenced in my blog post about why ID is not creationism, he would have known that I never deny that ID can have metaphysical implications. As I wrote in that article:

While it’s frustrating when critics of intelligent design mischaracterize what ID is about, it’s even worse when people billing themselves as friends of ID do the same thing. As the term “intelligent design” has increasingly entered the public discourse, the number of people misusing the term to advance their own agendas by calling it “design” has increased. Take the recent proposal by a Utah legislator for something he calls “divine design,” by which he clearly seems to mean creationism. According to a recent article in the Salt Lake City Tribune:

Evolution has not been a big issue in Utah until now. On June 3, Sen. Chris Buttars of West Jordan said he would propose giving equal time to what he called “divine design,” that is, that the world was created by a superior being.

“The divine design is a counter to the kids’ belief that we all come from monkeys. Because we didn’t,” the conservative Republican told The Salt Lake Tribune.

The long-awaited screening of The Privileged Planet documentary at the Smithsonian takes place this evening in Washington, D.C. Stay tuned for some first-hand reporting of the event later tonight and on Friday from Rob Crowther.

In the meantime, I want to express my heartfelt appreciation to all of the Darwinists who provided free publicity for the screening by denouncing a film they had never even seen. (If they had seen the film, they would have known that it doesn’t deal with biological evolution. See Rob Crowther and Bruce Chapman’s prior posts, here and here, respectively.)

After tonight’s screening, I’m sure we can look forward to still more encores from the pro-Darwin chorus. Keeping in mind that the most vocal critics to this point have neither read the book nor seen the movie, Discovery’s Seth Cooper decided to help out by drafting a few form letters critics can send to newspaper editors tomorrow :

CSC fellow Jonathan Wells wrote a short response taking a Nature letter writer to task for spreading the old flat-earth BS knee deep. The spherical shape of the Earth was known to the ancient Greeks, who even made some pretty good estimates of its circumference. Christian theologians likewise knew that the Earth was a sphere. The only two Christian writers who seem to have advocated a flat Earth were a 4th-century heretic, Lactantius, and an obscure 6th-century eccentric, Cosmas Indicopleustes. And he makes a couple of suggestions of how to keep your feet clean in those Darwinian pastures. For an objective and very readable account of the Flat Earth Myth, see Jeffrey Burton Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth (Praeger, 1991).

There’s no doubt that Nature got an earful for publishing an article in which writer Geoff Brumfiel didn’t adaquately skewer the theory of intelligent design. Nor do the letter writers think he delivered a satisfactorily vicious enough savaging to the theory’s proponents. One letter writer proclaimed:

ID creationism is not science, despite the editors’ suggestion that ID “tries to use scientific methods to find evidence of God in nature”. Rather, advocates of ID pretend to use scientific methods to support their religious preconceptions.

Another was aghast that Nature published a short sidebar that actually verified some of the persecution scientists suffer for criticizing Darwinian evolution or even mentioning ID.

According to Neo-Darwinism, once the first lusty cell leapt onto the stage of the world, purely impersonal, material processes reigned — a blind watchmaker and less than blind. It was a mindless mechanism. This is quite different from the teleological evolution that some, including the Catholic Church, have considered a possibility. Darwininian evolution possesses no distant goal nor is man the twinkle in the eye of any god.

In a homily at his installation on Sunday, Pope Benedict XVI made his first comment on evolution: We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary. It will be interesting to see if the news media will report about this, given their interest in the last Pope’s statement on evolution.

To the Editor:

Jim Holt’s piece “Unintelligent Design” is filled with the usual Darwinist canards about how various designs found in living things are suboptimal according to the writer’s undefined and untested opinions on optimality. That’s all standard fare — chock full of unexamined theological presuppositions (of the “God wouldn’t have done it that way” variety) and not worth a response.

Holt also trots out the usual nonsense about Pope John Paul II somehow accepting Darwinian evolution. The Pope’s 1996 message on evolution simply states that evolution (in the sense of common descent, not the materialist Darwinian mechanism) is “more than an hypothesis,” which is certainly a true statement about modern biology. Yet in the same message the Pope explicitly questioned the Darwinian/materialist explanation of human evolution, calling it “incompatible with the truth about man.”

But Holt does add one brand new and exciting element to the debate: a fabricated quotation from the Pope! No where in the writings of John Paul II has he ever said that evolution (that wonderfully ambiguous word) has been “proven true.” Indeed, the Pope has explicitly rejected the purposeless Darwinian mechanism that Mr. Holt seeks to defend:

John Derbyshire of The Corner, and Darwinists on every street corner, insist that we should never cram God into the gaps of our scientific knowledge.

As if detecting design meant cramming the designer into the work itself: Imagine Leonardo da Vinci trapped inside the Mona Lisa.

Derbyshire proceeds apace: “History shows that these puzzles always get resolved sooner or later in a natural way, … sending the ‘God of the Gaps’ traipsing off to find a new place where he can hang his starry cloak for a while.”

Bracket off for the moment that this particular history of modern science is an urban legend.

Derbyshire’s argument falls apart all by itself, apart from the historical record. Because more and more things have been explained with reference to impersonal causes, Derbyshire argues, we can never assume that something in nature cannot be explained thus.

That simply doesn’t follow. Consider an analogy.

John Derbyshire recently rebutted a series of objections against Darwinism and, in the process, leveled a series of objections against intelligent design. He dismisses design by ignoring the actual arguments of its theorists and shadowboxing with letter writers instead. He shows, thereby, a lack of seriousness on his own part by trivializing and demeaning scholars whose views he apparently has not really bothered to understand.

One problem is that Derbyshire’s objections against design theory often state the positions of leading design theorists–in other words, he agrees with leading design proponents without even realizing it.

For instance, one of his blog visitors tried to refute Darwinism by asserting, “The fossil record is incomplete.” Derbyshire responded, “Well, duh. Fossilization only happens under extraordinary circumstances.” That’s correct.

He then goes on to assert that the fossil record is nevertheless complete enough to make inferences about the origin and history of species. Still agreed.

Then Derbyshire parts company with leading design theorists. He thinks the gaps in the fossil record protect the theory of common descent by natural selection. But the gaps don’t. The fossil record is a growing problem for neo-Darwinism because attempts to explain away the absence of transitional intermediates between phyla and even lower groups have failed.