James Lileks: Can Intelligent Design Be a Complement to Evolution?

The Newhouse News Service ^ | February 16, 2005 | James Lileks

[AntiGuv]

déjà vu ping..

[Restorer]

James will promptly be shot full of holes by both sides.

[JenB]

Lileks ping...

[snarks_when_bored]

Lileks is a great writer, a clever writer, but I think he mistakes the aims of ID proponents if he believes that they simply want a single freebie 'let's-talk-philosophy' class day situated somewhere amidst the obligatory weeks of study of evolution science.

[AntiGuv]

Opps! My previous ping was meant for you. Silly me..

[samtheman]

excellent

[Coyoteman]

Can Intelligent Design Be a Complement to Evolution?

No.

[Constitution Day]

Thanks. The article is up on Newhouse earlier than usual today.

[GarySpFc]

James will promptly be shot full of holes by both sides.

The Intelligent Design movement does not oppose those who believe in evolution. What they do oppose is the teaching by Darwinists that there is no design in nature and that natural selection is the process involved. If one believes in theistic evolution, then they believe God is involved in the process, which is diametrically opposed to what the Darwinists are teaching. Theistic evolutionists would believe in THEISTIC SELECTION, NOT NAUTRAL SELECION.
Anyone should be able to see design in nature. Indeed, Richard Dawkins admits nature has the appearance of design, but he specifically denies a designer could be involved.

[BRITinUSA]

Can Intelligent Design Be a Complement to Evolution?

Define Evolution: There are two aspects to the word evolution, the first is evolution within a species, ie. The beaks of bird altering to suit the environment such as food sources.

The second is what I believe they refer to as Neo-Darwinism, that states that ALL species, every living thing on the planet evolved from an un-known, un-identified and un-found organism, defined by Darwins Tree of Life.

ID can exist with the first form of evolution but not the second.

[Restorer]

I agree with your position.

However, there are Creationists who denounce even the possibility of any element of natural selection.

Which seems to me a very odd, and perhaps blasphemous, statement.

God cannot use evolutionary methods to reach his goals? Who are we to say what God can and cannot do?

[Constitution Day]

Lileks Ping!
If you'd like to be added or removed, just drop me a line...

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Can Intelligent Design Be a Complement to Evolution?

by James Lileks

It's almost a cliche, or a reality TV show: New York family moves to the Shenandoah Valley and learns that the elementary school breaks in the middle of the day for Bible lessons. You can hear the lawsuits barreling down I-81, can't you?

The family has asked the school district to knock it off, but according to CNN.com, the locals want the tradition preserved. "The classes," said CNN, "began in Virginia in 1929 after a majority of students failed a simple Bible test." One suspects that students might fail a Bible test today as well; if they cannot correctly place the American Civil War in the proper millennium, they are likely to seize up and fall to the floor like stiff boards when asked to conjugate the begats of Old Testament genealogy.

Should the public school be giving Bible tests in the first place? No. Should the school let religious groups use the facilities after school's done? Sure. No harm, unless you believe that letting them soak up heat and air provided by the taxpayers will result in the instant creation of the First Federal Church of America, attendance compulsory. Should schools teach evolution? Depends, some say. Only if they have fair warning.

Kansas is debating anew the application of stickers to textbooks that would warn kids about evolution: It's just a theory! Well, yes. Science is full of theories. The Big Bang, for example. You might re-create it in the lab, but best if you don't. It is hard to weigh quarks on a butcher's scale; it is difficult to know exactly what happens when you throw, say, Rosie O'Donnell into a black hole; it is tough to figure out whether "dark matter" is dark because it repels light, or because the one universal constant is the slimming effect of black, and the universe does not want to look fat.

In short, there are many theories. Some will be proved right; some theories about the universe may look like the astronomical equivalent of phrenology in 10 years. Until then, we teach what we believe to be an accurate model toward which the facts convincingly point. Like evolution.

Which brings us to Darwinism vs. intelligent design, a debate we will now answer to the satisfaction of all!

To the proponents of intelligent design, the facts suggest the hand of the Big Guy. Absent some footage from a security camera that rolled tape throughout the Cambrian Period, this too is difficult to prove. But must students be forbidden to consider the possibility?

Forcing teachers to include an intelligent design lesson would be counterproductive. Your author had a junior high science teacher who thought evolution was hogwash and read the required textbook passages in a contemptuous motormouth monotone, as though he had been forced by law to read the works of de Sade to a room full of nuns.

But perhaps we could avoid conflict if teachers felt free to lead the class in philosophical speculations, just as lit classes deconstruct the era that produced a book, or history classes talk about the hidden stories behind the events. It's permissible to spend a class period discussing whether Texas Masons had JFK shot on orders from the ghost of John Birch (speaking through Jack Ruby's dog), but often verboten to speculate that some metaphysical apparatus used evolution to turn amoebas into creatures smart enough to put cameras in orbit, behold the dazzling beauty, and say, "What a coincidence."

This isn't mandatory Bible class. It's just a plea for both sides to climb out of the trenches and meet in the middle of the battleground. Otherwise no one in a class on the Constitution could chew over the supposition that rights are granted by God, not men. Not to say the issue has to be settled in the seventh grade, but it would be nice if school introduced the great issues before graduation day. So: Does everyone agree to relax, and enjoy the pleasures of open-ended inquiry, just for the joy of letting kids argue over the mysteries of creation?

Great! Next week: Social Security and abortion arguments reconciled. Also capital punishment, space permitting.

Feb. 16, 2005

[GarySpFc]

Lileks is a great writer, a clever writer, but I think he mistakes the aims of ID proponents if he believes that they simply want a single freebie 'let's-talk-philosophy' class day situated somewhere amidst the obligatory weeks of study of evolution science.

You're dead wrong. Their only goal is to stop the Darwinists from eliminating God in the evolution process or denying there is design in nature. Darwinists are teaching a defacto atheism in the classrooms now.

In 1995, the official Position Statement of the American National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) accurately states the general understanding of major science organizations and educators:

The diversity of life on earth is the outcome of evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable, and natural process of temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments.

Or in the words of the famous evolutionist, George Gaylord Simpson, "Man is the result of a purposeless, and natural process that did not have him in mind."

How do they know the process was unsupervised?

How do they know the process was mindless?

How do they know the process was purposeless?

Their statements are problematic in that they are unscientific. It cannot be proven that evolutionary processes are "purposeless" or that humans were "not in mind." Science cannot demonstrate these assumptions either way ... and that's the problem with their position. They become proponents of a religion of atheism; I say religion because their conclusion is NOT science, it is faith ... just as much as OUR conclusion is faith. Clearly, their definition is diametrically opposed to any concept of a personal creator being involved in the evolutionary process.

Likewise in denying there is design in nature they are ruling out a Designer. Mind you, they admit nature gives the appearance of design, but in their hiding behind naturalism they set up rules which rule out any mention of design.

How do they know there is not design in nature?

[Wonder Warthog]

"Define Evolution: There are two aspects to the word evolution, the first is evolution within a species, ie. The beaks of bird altering to suit the environment such as food sources."

Nope---those "two different evolutions" exist as a concept only in the minds of Creationists. As far as science is concerned, there is only one evolution, and it covers both cases.

[Messianic Jews Net]

You are correct and Lileks is mostly. Comparative religion and philosophy are legitimate high-school courses. In science class, comparative methodology when it involves philosophical assumptions is equally legitimate. What creationist public school teachers need is to keep the line careful between science (observation of design and its origin) and philosophy (metaphysical causes) and always officially be pluralist about the latter. Similarly they can exploit another line, between their official and personal pronouncements.

Creation/design uses these legitimate methods of promulgating one's view (marketplace of ideas, adversarial forum). Evolutionists prefer illegitimate methods (censorship, fallacious diversion to authority).

[PeterFinn]

Standing in the middle of a battlefield is a good place to get hurt.

[aculeus]

James Lileks: Can Intelligent Design Be a Complement to Evolution?

No.

[Getready]

Would beg to disagree....most creationists feel there is
some lateral drift ...but not much..there are limits..
Most likely due to physical limitations in the organisms
survivability if it steps out of certain physical bounds...
..many of the "changes"seen have been shown to due to genes that were already
present.or a simple rearrangement......
With all the mutations that an HIV can do, it still stays
a retrovirus....it still hasn't "evolved" to a point where
it can be spread by aerosols, it still attacks or attaches
at the tissues it is known to attach to...it's genetic
framework hasn't changed much...its' fairly constant
genetic products allow it to be attacked with various chemical
compounds...even though the genome is not really known
as a distinct entity....

(by the way, you might be interested in knowing that one
of the reasons it mutates so much, is that it has no
known apparatus for coding for "correction" enzymes..
these enzymes are the ones that in bacterial or mammalian
cells will "edit" or "correct" misplacements of the DNA
bases on the chain if the wrong base is incorporated..
kinda like a proofreading and correction program on ones
computer...(biological of course)..

Also, the labs can't really pin down an "HIV" virus' genome.
The virus mutates so much that during time the test is being
run, the virus will mutate...the "reads" I have seen just
disply a scattergram of genetic products, but cannot pin
down one particular set of products...

One very scary, and hopefully not possible, consideration
would be the viable combination of the HIV genome with a common
cold virus...leading to a virus which could spread by aerosols..

Hopefully, this is just science FICTION...

[ASA Vet]

ID can exist with the first form of evolution but not the second.

So what you're saying is that you don't believe your particular deity is omnipotent?