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).
Anywhere it wants to.
So, where are the non-fossilized dinosaur remains mixed in with the remains of more recent critters? You've never been able to show any evidence for this claim except for a few questionable petroglyphs of uncertain pedigree and a few ancient monster stories. If you have any real physical evidence for your claims then put it out there where honest-to-goodness researchers and scientists can study it.
Interesting. I've been working on algorithms to solve the 'travelling chickian problem' lately...
Crossing a road with what?
The mountain climber is a scaler. (scalar)
To get to the other side dish.
If you're talking about atoms, then the laws came first, definitely. Atoms are composite objects.
At the most fundamental level, there is no distinction between the laws and the material. Matter and force arise from the same fundamental symmetries. Matter is force, and force, matter.
Please allow me to interrupt by noting that space-time is relevant within the common four dimension understanding of existence. There are higher dimensional considerations. Kaluza-Klein theory (super-strings) is one (my least favorite.)
The Fermi lab is investigating:
Right now, we imagine space and time as a static question, and we solve equations as a function of space and time. But, what we're learning is that, at the very large scale or the very small scale, space and time are dynamic. What is happening at those scales, we cannot explain. So we have to wonder, do these scales hold some extra dimensions?"
There are additional proposals that a higher dimensional dynamic (some Jewish physicists suggest a sound like quality) - is at the root of the big bang, manifesting the illusion of existence in four dimensions.
Some of my favorites:
The Structure of the Big Band from Higher Dimension Embeddings
Just my two cents…
I don't agree that using space/time to explain the origin of space/time is circular reasoning. I will agree that, given space and time are properties of this universe, they cannot be assumed beyond it. That doesn't mean they don't apply there, just we have know way of knowing whether or not they do, and therefore need to take care how we structure the argument.
Well, aside from the fact that what you listed is not one of the possibilities I mentioned from my previous post in this thread
You are correct, I was unresponsive to your question (just something I apparently do from time to time, my bad). To me, the most preposterous explanation of those you listed is, "The other option is that the universe and all that exists are the exquisite creation of an infinitely intelligent mind." The problem lies in the basic debate of the thread: we're (humans) are too complex to have occured accidentally, so something infinitely more complex must have done it by design. I'm not saying it's impossible, simply that it's the most difficult to postulate.
Haw haw haw - nice try, Glendalian....
That's a pretty broad question. It could mean anything from, "why are the fundamental symmetries of the universe what they are" to the fine tuning of physical parameters to the structure of cells to the origin of individual species. "Intelligent Design" usually refers to the latter two (and occasionally to the fine-tuning question). If that's what you mean by ID, then no, I don't believe in it.
If the choice of the highest-level symmetry counts as "Intelligent Design", then I might even say yes, but that's so hopelessly broad a definition that there's no point in giving it a name, much less promulgating it as a theory.
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