Posted on 09/08/2005 1:33:48 PM PDT by snarks_when_bored
Five critiques of Intelligent Design
John Brockman's Edge.org site has published the following five critiques of Intelligent Design (the bracketed comments following each link are mine):
Marcelo Gleiser, "Who Designed the Designer?" [a brief op-ed piece]
Jerry Coyne, "The Case Against Intelligent Design: The Faith That Dare Not Speak Its Name" [a detailed critique of ID and its history, together with a summary defense of Darwinism]
Richard Dawkins & Jerry Coyne, "One Side Can Be Wrong" [why 'teaching both sides' is not reasonable when there's really only one side]
Scott Atran, "Unintelligent Design" [intentional causes were banished from science with good reason]
Daniel C. Dennett, "Show Me the Science" [ID is a hoax]
As Marcelo Gleiser suggests in his op-ed piece, the minds of ID extremists will be changed neither by evidence nor by argument, but IDists (as he calls them) aren't the target audience for critiques such as his. Rather, the target audience is the millions of ordinary citizens who may not know enough about empirical science (and evolution science in particular) to understand that IDists are peddling, not science, but rather something tarted up to look like it.
Let us not be deceived.
An interesting essay posted on discussion forums:
Intelligent Design has Fizzled
Ellery Schempp
August 2005
Despite the flurry of recent articles on Intelligent Design (ID) published in the slow-news days of August 2005, this flurry actually represents the desperation of ID adherents.
The movement called "intelligent design" appears to have passed its peak of support. Started about 10 years ago and promoted with millions of dollars from wealthy supporters at the "Discovery Institute", the plan to replace the Theory of Evolution has failed to attract a strong base of support.
1. Christian evangelical churches have mostly failed to embrace ID. Although initially attracted to a philosophical position that attacks evolution, evangelicals have become split along several lines.
1a. Biblical literalists are worried that ID does not support the Genesis accounts of creation and Noah's flood. ID thus takes momentum away from traditional criticisms of evolution. ID also fails to support the so-called Young Earth Creationists (YEC) who believe that the Bible requires the earth to have been formed about 6000 years ago (usually stated as 4004 BCE, from Bishop Usher).
Fundamentalists are particularly unhappy that ID leaves scientific skepticism about the flood completely unanswered. They are aware that the flood myth is vulnerable to serious scientific critiques, doubting that it could possibly have occurred. ID is not helpful to YEC believers, and they are very disappointed.
1b. Evangelicals have also become increasingly concerned that ID never mentions Jesus Christ--the core of their faith in salvation--and ID only mentions an "intelligent designer" rather than God. They have seen what ID critics have pointed out, namely that although everyone winks and knows that the "designer" means God, it also leaves the door open for any number of supernatural entities or deities to satisfy ID, leaving both God and Christ out of it.
Evangelicals are unsupportive with ID because they realize that ID allows the Islamic Allah or Hindu deities as equal candidates for the "designer", thus dethroning Christianity as the claimant. Moreover, the Roman Catholic Church has been reluctant to embrace ID, suspecting it as part of the general Protestant "heresy".
1c. Major rifts have opened within the ID community as to how to promote ID in such court cases as the Dover, Pennsylvania case. Numerous players in the anti-evolutionist groups, such as Duane Gish, tax-evader Ken Hovind of Dinosaur Parks, and others have not only not joined ID but actively promote their own views in opposition. William Morris, founder of the "Institute for Creation Research, ICR" in California has voiced his dismay that his funding is dropping off as funds shift to ID (the "Discovery Institute"), so the ICR group are not happy with ID. One major anti-evolution website, www.answersingenesis.com, has extensive (but invalid) criticisms of evolution, but is, at best, lukewarm about ID.
2. Traditional Christian churches in the major denominations have not embraced ID either, because, for the most part their members have accepted evolution as a scientifically valid explanation of how life developed on earth. Mainstream Protestants and Catholics have accepted evolution and rejected both YEC and ID. ID offers little to support their religious beliefs.
Moreover, ID has tried to promote their cause as being "religiously neutral" and "scientific". But the major promoters show this to be a lie. Philip Johnson, widely credited as being the founder of the ID movement, said, “Our strategy has been to change the subject a bit so that we can get the issue of intelligent design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools.” And leading ID theorist William Dembski wrote: “Indeed, intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John’s gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.” And Jonathan Wells at the Discovery Institute said, “My prayers convinced me I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism.”
Having said this publicly, ID can no longer claim that ID is outside the realm of the First Amendment's separation of church and state, which most American church-goers support.
3. ID has failed to attract serious support in the scientific community, and practicing scientists find ID provides no guidance for experiments or descriptions of nature. ID has offered no explanations to explain life forms and relationships among life forms other than to say, "God did it." Moreover, ID is presented not in a smooth and compelling way that attracts people, but rather it is presented contentiously, with a chip on its shoulder against the "established evolutionists".
ID's major proponents, lawyer Philip Johnson and DI's Bruce Chapman are not scientists and have little understanding of evolution or scientific processes. ID has been promoted by authors Dembski and Behe, who have developed abstruse concepts like "irreducible complexity" having to do with mouse traps and bacterial flagella that fail to find much popular understanding or support. Complex arguments from information theory, linked to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics--and in which IDists have been proved wrong ("conservation of information")--is not a topic that church-goers or school boards warm to.
From many essays and books trying to define irreducible complexity and specified complexity, ID has failed to specifically define where scientific observation and ID part company. In rejecting evolution, ID tends to agree with the "kinds"--vaguely related to species--mentioned in Genesis, but ID adherents have not been able to define what a kind is. ID also fails to account for why all mammals, for example, are remarkably similar in terms of body plan, metabolic processes, fetal development, blood, bones, and DNA---similarities which are readily explained by evolutionary theory. ID has also become trapped in accepting that some examples of evolution are routinely observed--which they accept as "microevolution"--while they reject what they call "macroevolution". ID has never been able to define a boundary between these two terms, which are not used by mainstream scientists. By accepting "micro-evolution" in the breeding of plants and animals, and in the evolution of antibiotic-resistant germs, ID has implicitly accepted the main tenets of evolution.
4. Within the informed lay communities, ID has failed to gain traction because ID adherents single out the science of evolution to apply "intelligent design" to. ID does not attack the historical and descriptive sciences of astronomy, geology, archeology on similar grounds, nor does ID try to offer its "designer" thesis as an explanation for the sciences of biology, medicine, chemistry, and physics. This serves to undermine ID's claims to a broadly acceptable point of view and allows the IDers to be portrayed as having an axe to grind solely with evolutionary science.
ID has also suffered from adopting a seriously flawed logic, namely that by attacking evolution and "disproving" it, then that shows that ID-creationism must be correct. Many have been quick to point out that even if the idea of evolution is found to have flaws, then that does not make ID correct. And in fact, very large understandings in science, such as evolution or the germ theory of disease or gravity, based on mountains of evidence, are rarely thrown out wholesale, but they become modified to incorporate new ideas. (This, of course, is not always true--the phlogiston and caloric theories of heat have been abandoned entirely.)
This logical flaw and a general interest in science and technology is probably why a large number of political and social conservatives not only have not embraced ID, but actively defend evolution on dozens of internet forums and boards, such as Free Republic. Many conservatives find ID to be an embarrassment to the conservative movement.
5. ID has no record of carrying out scientific experiments or suggesting experiments or providing descriptive classifications or understandings. The major thesis of ID is, "Gee, it is so complicated, so we can explain this only by saying 'God did it.'." Since this idea can be applied to anything we do not understand, it lacks intellectual rigor. As in the case of Paley's The Blind Watchmaker--from which ID derives--it is fundamentally anti-intellectual and rejects the notion that human intellect can puzzle out the complexities. It is noteworthy that IDists do not attempt to apply their notion to quantum mechanics. At the end of the day, ID turns out to be merely a contorted argument for the "existence of a god", and everyone knows that such existence can neither be proved nor disproved. Thus, the whole notion of ID offers neither scientific insight nor a novel theological point of view.
6. As shown in the ID document Wedge, http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.html, ID adherents attribute a slew of moral and social evils to the theory of evolution, claiming that it fosters "materialism", "naturalistic explanations", and is anti-theistic. Some even go further to claim that the "naturalism" of evolution is responsible for most of the evils of the world. However, to many conservatives that ID hoped to attract, the idea of materialism is perfectly fine and not inconsistent with their theological or spiritual views. The idea of an ordered social hierarchy fits with both evolution and conservative and libertarian values. ID thus offers nothing attractive to these groups, and the idea that a grand "designer" directly intervenes to make some people more successful, as suggested by ID, leaves social conservatives uncomfortable.
7. A major problem with ID is that it accepts supernatural forces and actions as being on the same plane with engineering and real science. Since evolution is based on an interwoven network of concepts from geology, physics, astronomy, paleontology, if ID were to win wide acceptance, then all such disciplines are equally discredited. Few conservatives or liberals wish to go there. The problem is the mind-set of ID.
The mindset is superstitious in nature. There are many people who are happy to see science and rationalism debased, because they hold to views about psychic phenomena, UFOs, appearances of the Virgin Mary in weird places, astrology, dowsing, predictions of Nostradamus, hidden codes in the Bible, reincarnation, a heaven/paradise after death, crop circles, psychic healing, and a hundred other non-rational beliefs. The fundamental issue is a rational, healthy outlook on the world, with joy in its beauties and concern for people, vs. a supernatural outlook, in which gods intervene willy-nilly, some people have "hidden psychic powers", and happiness or an "after-life" is determined (or pre-determined) by weird forces that do not stand up to rational inquiry.
8. A major weakness of ID is the matter of implementation. It's one thing to have a design, but how does it get turned into a fabrication? Every engineer knows that a first design runs into "but we can't make that". Design flaws frequently appear until there is sufficient reiteration between makers and designers. This may be the ID explanation for species extinction!
But, now suppose we have an "intelligent design" for an eye. Where and when does this get implemented? Since the coding starts with the DNA of a single cell, maybe each fertilized egg is made by the god-designer? On the other hand, maybe the divine intervention comes only when cells begin to differentiate. Or maybe when humans evolved 2 million years ago and the design has been on auto-pilot ever since? And was the planet earth and its orbit around the sun itself intelligently designed? These are many questions ID has no answer for.
And, I'm guessing, the possible threshold of irrationality. It sounds good anyway. Except for those damned irrational numbers.
I addressed that in the first version of my reply to you! I guess I should've left in my parenthetical "(in the non-mathematical sense of the word)". But even if one considers irrational numbers (such as the square root of 2 or pi), it should be noted that the sequence of digits to the right of the decimal point in their infinite expansions is effectively random. So there is this odd mixture of chance and necessity in the irrational numbers. Quite lovely, really.
Mathematicians see *the theory that irreducible complexity is the result of chance* as signalling the limits of rationality.
There it's fixed.
Mathematically, it is impossible to go backwards from 20 AA to 64 codons. There is no way to know which of four or six codons, for example, coded a given AA when one tries to go backwards against the "Central Dogma." Prescriptive Information has been lost. Various models of code origin often pursue primordial codon systems of only two nitrogen bases rather than three. At some point, such a two-base codon system must evolve into a three-base codon system. But catastrophic problems such as global frame shifts would have resulted from such a change midstream in the evolution of genetic code. Source
Dang.
mathematicians see irreducible complexity as signalling the limits of rationality.Mathematicians see *the theory that irreducible complexity is the result of chance* as signalling the limits of rationality.
There it's fixed.
Your 'fix' is not what I meant. I said what I meant.
Ah, a modest recognition of Darwin Central's contribution to the preservation of Western Civilization.
well, somebody HAS noticed all your hard work!
We always said that while we have no hope of persuading the full-blown creationists, we're doing this for the lurkers.
well, lemme just say it has been an honor and a privilege to be a minor skirmisher flanking you mighty hoplites and cataphracts.
I *said* spare me the pre-programmed in-the-box regurgitated answers, I have heard all of them. Will it help if I say I do see the pre-programmed logic in them??
*Why* can't the TOE say something about origin of life??
Just because you were taught it can't?
Just because you were taught you should not think out of that box?
This is my whole point!!
Think out-of-the box for a change!!
With entrenched thinking like this Darwin's theory would never have never become accepted at all, and worse we would still believe the earth was flat!
Challenge the status quo, after all, Darwin himself did!
On behalf of the Grand Master, I am,
PatrickHenry
CS at least was honest about what it believed and wanted.
"janitorial pool"
...
...
...
don't drink that coffee, Boss...
I put a cigarette out in it
Quibble Alert:
Dawkins wrote The Blind Watchmaker. Paley is known to have originated the "watch" argument in the early 1800s but is not widely read really.
You can't challenge something with nothing. How to argue against a scientific theory.
There's a lot to be said for making money and computers. (grin)
This is only true with probablity one. There are irrational, verily, even transcendental, numbers with non-random decimal expansions.
.10100100010000100000....
An example which no polynomially bound statistical test can prove to be non-random:
1101110010111011110001001101010111100110111101111...
Each of the above has an obcious construction rule.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.