Posted on 12/05/2005 4:06:56 AM PST by PatrickHenry
The leaders of the intelligent design movement are once again holding court in America, defending themselves against charges that ID is not science. One of the expert witnesses is Michael Behe, author of the ID movement’s seminal volume Darwin’s Black Box. Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University, testified about the scientific character of ID in Kitzmiller v. Dover School District, the court case of eight families suing the school district and the school board in Dover, Pa., for mandating the teaching of intelligent design.
Under cross-examination, Behe made many interesting comparisons between ID and the big-bang theory — both concepts carry lots of ideological freight. When the big-bang theory was first proposed in the 1920s, many people made hostile objections to its apparent “supernatural” character. The moment of the big bang looked a lot like the Judeo-Christian creation story, and scientists from Quaker Sir Arthur Eddington to gung-ho atheist Fred Hoyle resisted accepting it.
In his testimony, Behe stated — correctly — that at the current moment, “we have no explanation for the big bang.” And, ultimately it may prove to be “beyond scientific explanation,” he said. The analogy is obvious: “I put intelligent design in the same category,” he argued.
This comparison is quite interesting. Both ID and the big-bang theory point beyond themselves to something that may very well lie outside of the natural sciences, as they are understood today. Certainly nobody has produced a simple model for the big–bang theory that fits comfortably within the natural sciences, and there are reasons to suppose we never will.
In the same way, ID points to something that lies beyond the natural sciences — an intelligent designer capable of orchestrating the appearance of complex structures that cannot have evolved from simpler ones. “Does this claim not resemble those made by the proponents of the big bang?” Behe asked.
However, this analogy breaks down when you look at the historical period between George Lemaitre’s first proposal of the big-bang theory in 1927 and the scientific community’s widespread acceptance of the theory in 1965, when scientists empirically confirmed one of the big bang’s predictions.
If we continue with Behe’s analogy, we might expect that the decades before 1965 would have seen big-bang proponents scolding their critics for ideological blindness, of having narrow, limited and inadequate concepts of science. Popular books would have appeared announcing the big-bang theory as a new paradigm, and efforts would have been made to get it into high school astronomy textbooks.
However, none of these things happened. In the decades before the big-bang theory achieved its widespread acceptance in the scientific community its proponents were not campaigning for public acceptance of the theory. They were developing the scientific foundations of theory, and many of them were quite tentative about their endorsements of the theory, awaiting confirmation.
Physicist George Gamow worked out a remarkable empirical prediction for the theory: If the big bang is true, he calculated, the universe should be bathed in a certain type of radiation, which might possibly be detectable. Another physicist, Robert Dicke, started working on a detector at Princeton University to measure this radiation. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson ended up discovering the radiation by accident at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., in 1965, after which just about everyone accepted the big bang as the correct theory.
Unfortunately, the proponents of ID aren’t operating this way. Instead of doing science, they are writing popular books and op-eds. As a result, ID remains theoretically in the same scientific place it was when Phillip Johnson wrote Darwin on Trial — little more than a roster of evolutionary theory’s weakest links.
| When Behe was asked to explicate the science of ID, he simply listed a number of things that were complex and not adequately explained by evolution. These structures, he said, were intelligently designed. Then, under cross-examination, he said that the explanation for these structures was “intelligent activity.” He added that ID “explains” things that appear to be intelligently designed as having resulted from intelligent activity. |
Behe denied that this reasoning was tautological and compared the discernment of intelligently designed structures to observing the Sphinx in Egypt and concluding that it could not have been produced by non-intelligent causes. This is a winsome analogy with a lot of intuitive resonance, but it is hardly comparable to Gamow’s carefully derived prediction that the big bang would have bathed the universe in microwave radiation with a temperature signature of 3 degrees Kelvin.
After more than a decade of listening to ID proponents claim that ID is good science, don’t we deserve better than this?
The Bible is not a science textbook per se, but where it does speak of science or of the origins of things, it speaks with accuracy.
Does that mean that every single word is literally true? Or is there room in your interpretation for the concept of parable?
If it does not speak accurately where it speaks of any one subject, then it is fallacious in the whole. If you decide that that is the case, you do so to the peril of your self, your family and your nation.
See, I think that "all or nothing" approach is limiting. I think that the Bible may contain moral truths and have historical falsehood in it.
I maintain that confusing the two is what's really dangerous for our nation.
Thank you.
The number of scientists who disagree with evolution is a tiny fraction of the scientists in the world.
Of course that is not true, but it does reveal your faulty premise that it is the percentage of dissenters versus assenters that constitute the evidence. Whereas one would be so quick to mute the ID expert from the public fora and educational systems, they would turn silent as professors and teachers mingle concepts of punctuated equilibria, abiogenesis, speciation, etc allowing for no voice to accentuate the gaping holes in the ToE. It is the equivocation and duplicitousness of the militant proponents of the ToE that will be the downfall of it.
Kindly give some evidence, then, to support this contention that there is a vast scientific conspiracy to suppress the poor, beleaguered mass of scientists who have other theories....
This sums up this debate quite nicely - it is the battle of the dogmas. In this corner we have the Dogma of Deity in which design is the first assumption on which all arguments are based. And in this corner we have the Dogma of Materialism in which materialism is the first assumption on which all arguments are based.
Only problem is "Men of Science" should go where the data leads - not be lead by dogma.
Perhaps you can tell us how science can abandon empiricism and still be science. Give us an example where a supernatural explanation has been demonstrated to be superior to natural explanations.
"ID is shallow comic book brainfood"
It is? Why are all of these PhD's in the hard sciences writing some rather compelling arguments in favor of it? None of them strike me as particularly religious, merely intrigued. Cosmologists, mathmeticians and molecular biologists have weighed in.
One thing I notice about the comments that anyone who even remotely suggests that its worth studying the ID arguments is automatically assumed to not only be a religious zealot in the tradition of a Torquemada, but a consumer of "comic book brainfood" as well. It is possible to be intrigued, find the discusions meritorious and not be a Christians fundamentalist (or any other sort of religious fundamentalist). Recognizing that such people do exist seems to be the greatest intellectual hurdle of all.
"My faulty premise"? You were the one who brought up the number of dissenters. How is it wrong for me to point out that they are statistically a tiny proportion. After your first sentence you unfortunately descended into content-free incoherence.
So, do you agree with Behe's conclusions about the truth of evolution or not? You still haven't plainly answered. And why do you keep telling lies about transitional fossils, when you have been pointed to links showing numerous such finds.
"All these PhD's" appear to be less than 5 people worldwide. And they all appear to be pretty religious people. Behe has made it quite clear that he considers that the Designer is the God of the Bible.
You mean using logical symbols such as A,B,C,D?. When you say possible do you mean merely conceivable, or merely logically possible? Point to any scientific article that demonstrates an ontologically possible path, and not just a metabolic pathway, but the required assemblage of parts. (The flagellum is not just a metabolic pathway.) If that happens, a design hypothesis for this nano outboard motor would be finished off, or at least rendered superfluous.
It does seem though that it is effectively impossible to falsify the Darwinian claim if that involves showing that there is NO conceivable Darwinian pathway by which a flagellum could have evolved, which would require proving a universal negative.
Cordially,
And 90+% of Academe don't know that Socialism is slavery of masochists by government.. and Communism(which is socialism) is slavery of mascochists by by a sadistic government..
What then IS IQ.?.. or intelligence for that matter..
The fool has said in his heart, there is no God..
Nietzsche is dead, God is quite healthy...
Is Jesus GOD.?.. If he WAS he still is, if he wasn't he still isnt..
Darwin recognized this as a possible objection to his views, but felt he adequately answered it (speciation+divergence+extinction=lack of living transitional forms, incompleteness of the fossil record=lack of fossil transtitionals). To suggest otherwise -- that Darwin considered this an open "gaping hole" -- would be, uh, "duplicitous".
Why does Behe claim that he's done it then? Isn't one of the central thrusts of DBB that Behe claims that there is NO conceivable Darwinian pathway by which a flagellum could have evolved?
Showing that claim to be true - that there is no conceivable pathway by which the flagellum could have evolved - is not required in order to falsify the theory of evolution. Nevertheless, that is the claim that ID has chosen to advance. How unfortunate for them that they chose to advance a claim that requires them to prove a universal negative, as you insightfully point out.
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.