Posted on 07/01/2002 7:25:44 AM PDT by aculeus
My deliberately provocative title is borrowed from Leonard Krishtalka, who directs the Natural History Museum at the University of Kansas. Hired-gun "design theorists" in cheap tuxedos have met with some success in getting close to their target: public science education. I hope to convince you that this threat is worth paying attention to. As I write, intelligent design (ID) is a hot issue in the states of Washington and Ohio (see Physics Today, May 2002, page 31*). Evolutionary biology is ID's primary target, but geology and physics are within its blast zone.
Creationism evolves. As in biological evolution, old forms persist alongside new. After the Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925, creationists tried to get public schools to teach biblical accounts of the origin and diversity of life. Various courts ruled the strategy unconstitutional. Next came the invention of "creation science," which was intended to bypass constitutional protections. It, too, was recognized by the courts as religion. Despite adverse court rulings, creationists persist in reapplying these old strategies locally. In many places, the pressure keeps public school biology teachers intimidated and evolution quietly minimized.
However, a new strategy, based on so-called ID theory, is now at the cutting edge of creationism. ID is different from its forebears. It does a better job of disguising its sectarian intent. It is well funded and nationally coordinated. To appeal to a wider range of people, biblical literalism, Earth's age, and other awkward issues are swept under the rug. Indeed, ID obfuscates sufficiently well that some educated people with little background in the relevant science have been taken in by it. Among ID's diverse adherents are engineers, doctors--and even physicists.
ID advocates can't accept the inability of science to deal with supernatural hypotheses, and they see this limitation as a sacrilegious denial of God's work and presence. Desperately in need of affirmation, they invent "theistic science" in which the design of the Creator is manifest. Perhaps because their religious faith is rather weak, they need to bolster their beliefs every way they can--including hijacking science to save souls and prove the existence of God.
William Dembski, a mathematician and philosopher at Baylor University and one of ID's chief advocates, asserts that: " . . . any view of the sciences that leaves Christ out of the picture must be seen as fundamentally deficient."1 Whether or not they agree with Dembski on this point, most Americans hold some form of religious belief. Using what they call the Wedge Strategy,2 ID advocates seek to pry Americans away from "naturalistic science" by forcing them to choose between science and religion. ID advocates know that science will lose. They portray science as we know it as innately antireligious, thereby blurring the distinction between science and how science may be interpreted.
When presenting their views before the public, ID advocates generally disguise their religious intent. In academic venues, they avoid any direct reference to the Designer. They portray ID as merely an exercise in detecting design, citing examples from archaeology, the SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) project, and other enterprises. Cambridge University Press has published one ID book,3 which, the ID advocates repeatedly proclaim, constitutes evidence that their case has real scientific merit. ID creationist publications are nearly absent from refereed journals, and this state of affairs is presented as evidence of censorship.
This censorship, ID advocates argue, justifies the exploitation of public schools and the children in them to circumvent established scientific procedures. In tort law, expert scientific testimony must agree with the consensus of experts in a given field. No such limitation exists with respect to public education. ID advocates can snow the public and school boards with pseudoscientific presentations. As represented by ID advocates, biological evolution is a theory in crisis, fraught with numerous plausible-sounding failures, most of which are recycled from overt creationists. It is "only fair," the ID case continues, to present alternatives so that children can make up their own minds. Yesterday's alternative was "Flood geology." Today's is "design theory."
Fairness, open discussion, and democracy are core American values and often problematic. Unfortunately, journalists routinely present controversies where none exist, or they present political controversies as scientific controversies. Stories on conflicts gain readers, and advertising follows. This bias toward reporting conflicts, along with journalists' inability to evaluate scientific content and their unwillingness to do accuracy checks (with notable exceptions), are among the greatest challenges to the broad public understanding of science.
ID creationism is largely content-free rhetoric. Michael Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University and an ID proponent, argues that many biochemical and biophysical mechanisms are "irreducibly complex."4 He means that, if partially dismembered, they would not work, so they could not have evolved. This line of argument ignores the large number of biological functions that look irreducibly complex, but for which intermediates have been found. One response to Behe's claims consists of the tedious task of demonstrating functions in a possible evolutionary path to the claimed irreducibly complex state. When presented with these paths, Behe typically ignores them and moves on. I admire the people who are willing to spend the time to put together the detailed refutations.5
The position of an ID creationist can be summarized as: "I can't understand how this complex outcome could have arisen, so it must be a miracle." In an inversion of the usual procedure in science, the null hypothesis is taken to be the thing Dembski, Behe, and their cohorts want to prove, albeit with considerable window-dressing. Dembski classifies all phenomena as resulting from necessity, chance, or design. In ruling out necessity, he means approximately that one could not predict the detailed structures and information we see in biological systems from the laws of physics. His reference to chance is essentially equivalent to the creationist use of one of the red herrings introduced by Fred Hoyle:
A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there?6 Having dispensed with necessity and chance, Dembski concludes that design has been detected on the grounds that nothing else can explain the phenomenon--at least according to him.
Of course, design has no predictive power. ID is not a scientific theory. If we had previously attributed the unexplainable to design, we would still be using Thor's hammer to explain thunder. Nor does ID have any technological applications. It can be fun to ask ID advocates about the practical applications of their work. Evolution has numerous practical technological applications, including vaccine development. ID has none.
As organisms evolve, they become more complex, but evolution doesn't contravene the second law of thermodynamics. Dembski, like his creationist predecessors, misuses thermodynamics. To support the case for ID, he has presented arguments based on a supposed Law of Conservation of Information, an axiomatic law that applies only to closed systems with very restricted assumptions.7 Organisms, of course, are not closed systems.
ID's reach extends beyond biology to physics and cosmology. One interesting discussion concerns the fundamental constants. There is a well-known point of view that our existence depends on a number of constants lying within a narrow range. As one might expect, the religious community has generally viewed this coincidence as evidence in favor of--or at least as a plausibility argument for--their beliefs. The ID creationist community has adopted the fundamental constants as additional evidence for their Designer of Life--apparently not realizing that many fine-tuning arguments are based on physical constants allowing evolution to proceed. Physical cosmology is largely absent from school science standards. Where present, as in Kansas, it is likely to come under ID attack.
I have only scratched the surface here. Don't assume everything is fine in your school system even if it seems free of conflict. Peace may mean that evolution, the core concept of biology, is minimized. No region of the country is immune. Watch out for the guys in tuxedos--they don't have violins in those cases.
Adrian Melott is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. He is also a founding board member of Kansas Citizens for Science.
Letters are encouraged and should be sent to Letters, Physics Today, American Center for Physics, One Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740-3842 or by e-mail to ptletter@aip.org (using your surname as "Subject"). Please include your affiliation, mailing address, and daytime phone number. We reserve the right to edit.
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References 1. W. Dembski, Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology, InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, Ill. (1999), p. 206. 2. See http://rnaworld.bio.ukans.edu/id-intro/sect3.html. Another source is http://www.sunflower.com/~jkrebs/JCCC/05%20Wedge_edited.html 3. W. Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities, Cambridge U. Press, New York (1998). For a review by W. Elsberry, see http://inia.cls.org/~welsberr/zgists/wre/papers/dembski7.html. 4. M. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, Free Press, New York (1996). 5. See http://www.world-of-dawkins.com/catalano/box/behe.htm. See also http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~lindsay/creation/behe.html 6. F. Hoyle, The Intelligent Universe, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, New York (1983), p. 18. 7. W. Dembski, No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Md. (2002).
One thing I'd also like to point out: expansive research is continuous regarding Evolution - I doubt anyone would argue that. However, the same cannot be said for Creationism; it's total source of researchable data consists of less than a chapter in the Bible. Unless you attempt to puzzle out some hidden meaning from a very small amount of text, your research ends pretty briefly. That, I think, is the fundamental downside downside to Creationism (please note I didn't say disqualifier): no verification or testing is possible. Although many people are happy with that, imagine what our world would be like if all branches of science simply ended before they could be researched.
What are yor thoughts on the end results of Evolution?Evolution has no "end results". It is a process, not a goal. Organisms do get "better", but only if you define "better" as "more likely to survive and reproduce in the environment they inhabit."
Mendel was a monk. Keppler, by all accounts, was pretty fanatic in his faith in God, as well. Both are huge names in the history of science. I'm sure you have ample opposing evidence to prove your point, right? Or are you simply making this up as you go?
Science can be as dogmatic as any religion. Dogma isn't caused by faith but by an inability of certain forms of faith to deal with any data that falls outside of the belief system and a switch from a search for the truth to a smug feeling that you have all the answers.
The current issue of Scientific American has an article titled 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense by John Rennie. In the article, he writes (underlined emphasis added by me):
Evolutionary biologists have written extensively about how natural selection could produce new species. For instance, in the model called allopatry, developed by Ernst Mayr of Harvard University, if a population of organisms were isolated from the rest of its species by geographical boundaries, it might be subjected to different selective pressures. Changes would accumulate in the isolated population. If those changes became so significant that the splinter group could not or routinely would not breed with the original stock, then the splinter group would be reproductively isolated and on its way toward becoming a new species.
Note that there isn't a statement in there that isn't speculative. And some of the other answers are similar. This is "preaching to the choir" stuff. It sounds convincing if you already believe all of the premises but it is does nothing to refute the alternative claims.
In Carl Sagan's book, The Demon Haunted World, he wrote up a "Baloney Detection Kit" which is a quick primer on how to spot fallacious or fraudulent arguments. Follow the link for a quick summary and see how many of these items you can spot in Rennie's article. A Biblical quote about splinters and eyes comes to mind here.
Sorry, but that's way less than clear. Having all the mass of the universe collapsed to a point would be the mother of all black holes; how's anything supposed to "big bang" its way out of that??
Basically, the idea of a big bang arises from a misinterpretation of the redshift phenomenon which has since been explained. There never was a big bang, and the universe is not expanding. The most likely reality is that the universe and the intelligence content of the universe which we call God, has always been there. The creation stories which we read in the bible and elsewhere are generally speaking of new orders and realities as they appear after cosmic events. In particular, when Isaiah speaks of the new heaven and new Earth which shall not pass away (i.e. new heaven and Earth starting from somewhere around 600 - 800 BC) he meanxs the heavens and the Earth as they appeared after the catastrophes of his own times.
Check out the links to Halton Arp and plasma cosmoligies in the list of links I posted above for modern thinking on the subject of "big bangs".
No. This is the rallying cry of the Creationist-Deconstructionist wing of thought. One goes with the best evidence, which in turn may mean changing beliefs as new phenomena obtain.
How about as a tree dweller that would live in the very top of the canopy. Long arms for reaching could be an advantage like the neck of a giraffe. Light bones to navigate even the most fragile branches, keeping away from predators.
No, actually it's located west of the West Pole ;-D
Why limit it to just your version of ID? Let's be fair and evenhanded!
Let's bring in the Titans! Vishnu! A giant Chicken from Pasadena who farted the world into existence.
Quarks are particles theorized to have existed less than a millionth of a second after the birth of our universe, sometime between 12 and 15 billion years ago. You won't see any quarks lying around in your garage, of course. For one, they are beyond microscopically small. And also researchers think they are now hidden in packages of twos and threes, held together by gluons, the ultimate invisible Elmer's.
Big Bang theory puts it this way: As the universe aged and cooled, a plasma of quarks and gluons coalesced into protons and neutrons, then nuclei and finally atoms. Only then could molecules develop, setting the stage for places like Earth and perhaps the most bizarre result of all, life.
Psa 19:1 The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.
Psa 19:2 Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.
Psa 19:3 There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.
Psa 19:4 Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world...
Evolution is just another tool the atheists use to turn people from God.
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