Intelligent Design Is Creationism in a Cheap Tuxedo

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).

28. Albert Einstein (1879-1955), formulator of the theory of relativity, which is one of the single greatest intellectual accomplishments in the history of man.

Einstein was a bright fellow and he probably has other credits to his name which will stand the test of time. Relativity will not.

Albert Einstein was trying to use relativistic time to account for the fact that light does not obey the ordinary additive laws for velocities. This was based on what he called "thought experiments", such as the mirror-clock experiment, rather than upon anything resembling real evidence or real experiments. Thought experiments, it turns out, are not a terribly good basis for physics. Moreover, the basic approach is unsound. Louis Carrol Epstein ("Relativity Envisioned"), uses the following analogy: a carpenter with a house in which everything worked flawlessly other than one door which bound, would usually plane the door until it worked. He COULD, however, purchase a couple of hundred jacks and jack the foundation of the house until the one door worked, and then try to somehow or other make every other door and window in the house work again... Light is the one door in the analogy; distance, time, mass etc., i.e. everything else in the house of physics are the other doors and windows. Epstein assumes that relativity is the one case you will ever find in which that sort of approach is the correct one, nonetheless, common sense tells us it isn't terribly likely.

It turns out there is another way in which one could account for light not obeying additive laws, and that this other way is the correct one. That is to assume that light simply does not have a velocity; that it is an instantaneous force between two points, and that the thing we call the "velocity of light" is the rate of accumulation of some secondary effect.

The story on this one lives HERE

The basic Ralph Sansbury experiment amounts to a 1990s version of the Michelson/Moreley experiment using lasers and nanosecond gates, which Michelson and Moreley did not have. Wallace Thornhill, an Australian physicist, describes it:



>I mentioned a few weeks ago that an epoch making experiment had been
>performed in the realm of fundamental physics which had great
>importance for Velikovskian style catastrophism (and just about
>everything else for that matter). The experiment, performed by Ralph
>Sansbury, is amazingly simple but has amazing consequences.
>
>Sansbury is a quiet spoken physicist from Connecticut.  He is
>associated with the Classical Physics Institute, or CP Institute, of
>New York which publishes the Journal of Classical Physics. In the
>Notes to Contributors we find the focus of the journal: "Marinov's
>experiment, Bell's theorem, and similar works reveal increasing
>discontent with the dogmas of modern physics. Some physicists
>postulate that blackbody radiation, atomic spectra, nuclear reactions,
>electron diffraction, the speed of light and all other phenomena which
>Quantum Wave Mechanics and Relativity were designed to explain will
>require different explanations. It is the viewpoint of this journal
>that the new explanations probably will be consistent with
>Aristotelian logic and Newtonian or Galilean mechanics." Volume 1,
>Part 1, in January 1982 was devoted to an article titled "Electron
>Structure", by Ralph Sansbury. The title itself should raise
>physicist's eyebrows since electrons are considered to have no
>structure. They are treated as being indivisible, along with quarks.
>
>The fallout from Sansbury's idea, if proven, is prodigious. To begin,
>for the first time we have a truly unifying theory where both
>magnetism and gravity become a derived form of instantaneous
>electrostatic force. The Lorentz contraction-dilation of space time
>and mass is unnecessary. Electromagnetic radiation becomes the
>cumulative effect of instantaneous electrostatic forces at a distance
>and the wave/particle (photon) duality disappears. Discontinuous
>absorption/emission of energy in quanta by atoms becomes a continuous
>process. And there is more.
>
>Sansbury's was a thousand dollar experiment using 10 nanosecond long
>pulses of laser light, one pulse every 400 nsec. At some distance from
>the laser was a photodiode detector. But in the light path, directly
>in front of the detector was a high speed electronic shutter (known as
>a Pockel cell) which could be switched to allow the laser light
>through to the detector, or stop it.
>
>Now, light is considered to travel as a wavefront or photon at the
>speed of light. Viewed this way, it covers a distance of about 1 foot
>per nanosecond. So the laser could be regarded as sending out 10ft
>long bursts of light every 400ft, at the speed of light. The
>experiment simply kept the Pockel cell shutter closed during the 400ft
>of no light and opened to allow the 10ft burst through to the detector.
>
>What happened?
>
>The detector saw nothing!!!
>
>It is as if a gun were fired at a target and for the time of flight of
>the bullet a shield were placed over the target. At the last moment,
>the shield is pulled away - and the bullet has disappeared; the target
>is untouched!
>
>What does it mean?
>
>Only that Maxwell's theory of the propagation of electromagnetic waves
>is wrong! Only that Einstein's Special theory of relativity (which was
>to reconcile Maxwell's theory with simple kinematics) is wrong! Only
>that, as a result, the interpretation of most of modern physics is
>wrong!
>
>As another classical physicist using a theoretical approach to the
>same problem succinctly put it:
>
>"... there emerges the outline of an alternative "relativistic"
>physics, quite distinct from that of Maxwell-Einstein, fully as well
>confirmed by the limited observations available to date, and differing
>from it not only in innumerable testable ways but also in basic
>physical concepts and even in definitional or ethnical (sic) premises
>as to the nature of physics. Thus a death struggle is joined that must
>result in the destruction of one world-system or the other: Either
>light is complicated and matter simple, as I think, or matter is
>complicated and light simple, as Einstein thought. I have shown here
>that some elegant mathematics can be put behind my view. It has long
>been known that inordinate amounts of elegant mathematics can be put
>behind Einstein's. Surely the time fast approaches to stop listening
>to mathematical amplifications of our own internal voices and to go
>into the laboratory and listen to what nature has to say." -
>Modifications of Maxwell's Equations, T E Phipps, The Classical
>Journal of Physics, Vol 2, 1, Jan 1983, p. 21.
>
>Ralph Sansbury has now done precisely that!
>
>In simple terms, Sansbury gives the electron a structure by proposing
>a number of charged particles (he calls subtrons) orbiting within the
>classical radius of an electron. A simple calculation gives the
>surprising result that these subtrons are moving at a speed of 2.5
>million light years per second! That is, they could theoretically
>cover the distance from Earth to the far side of the Andromeda galaxy
>in one second. This gives some meaning to the term 'instantaneous
>action at a distance'. (Note that this is a requirement for any new
>theory of gravity). (Also I have always considered it evidence of
>peculiar naivety or arrogance on the part of scientists, such as
>Sagan, who search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) by using
>radio signals. What superior intelligence would use such a slow, and
>therefore useless, interstellar signalling system?) Such near infinite
>speed requires that there can be no mass increase with velocity. The
>speed of light is not a speed barrier. All of the experiments which
>seem to support Einstein's notion are interpreted by Sansbury in a
>more common-sense fashion. When an electron or other charged particle
>is accelerated in an electromagnetic field, it is distorted from a
>sphere into an ellipsoid. The more electromagnetic energy applied to
>accelerating the particle, the more energy is absorbed by distortion
>of the particle until, ultimately, at the speed of light, there is an
>expulsion of the subtrons. Under such conditions, the particle only
>APPEARS to be gaining mass.
>
>Notably, in the past few months, scientists in Hamburg using the most
>powerful electron microscope have found on about a dozen occasions out
>of 10 million trials, relativistic electrons recoiled more violently
>off protons than had ever been seen before. This may turn out to be
>direct experimental proof of Sansbury's model of the electron having
>structure.
>
>To return to the experiment involving a "chopped" light beam: One of
>the major requirements of the new theory is instantaneous
>electrostatic forces between subtrons. This forms the basis of a
>radical new view of the basis of electromagnetic radiation which is
>now the subject of stunning experimental confirmation. In Sansbury's
>view, a signal from a light source is received instantly by a distant
>detector and the speed of light delay in detecting the signal is due
>to the time taken for the ACCUMULATED RESPONSE of the subtrons in the
>detector to result in a threshold signal at the electron level. This
>is totally at variance with orthodox interpretations which would have
>the light travelling as a discrete photon or wave packet at the speed
>of light.
>
>In terms of the gun and target analogy, it is as if particles of the
>bullet are being absorbed by the shield from the instant of firing, so
>that when the shield is pulled aside there is no bullet left to hit
>the target.
>
>It is not possible to overstate the importance of this work because it
>lends direct support to a new model of the electron in particular, and
>matter in general, which EXPLAINS magnetism, gravity and quantum
>effects without any resort to the kind of metaphysics which allows our
>top physicists to think they can see "God" in their equations.  The
>new classical physicists can mix it with the best of them when it
>comes to the mathematics but they are more prepared to "go into the
>laboratory and listen to what nature has to say."
>
>This work is of crucial importance for Velikovskian re-arrangements of
>the solar system in recent times because astronomers have been able to
>say that such scenarios defy the laws of physics - which is true,
>insofar as they know the laws of physics. To discover that gravity is
>a form of charge polarization within the particles that make up the
>atom, rather than a warp in space (whatever the hell that means),
>gives us a simple mechanism by which the solar system can be rapidly
>stabilised after a period of chaotic motion.
>
>There is an impression, as I reread the work of Sansbury and other
>classical physicists, that what we are facing is something like "Back
>to the Future". And like the movie of that name, the possibilities
>that we encounter will seem like science fiction come true. But it is
>well-known that science fiction writers are better at predicting the
>future of science than experts!

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