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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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).
You've been in these threads long enough to know better. Evolution says that there is evidence for the gradual appearance of species by natural means. Period.
Clipped and Saved.
We agree.
On the other hand, there should be no problem with a short prayer being read by a publicly paid official -- school or otherwise -- over the public address system, and the children being required to listen to it.
That's how it was when I was in school. And look at me now -- a raving evolutionist.
Public prayer is an American tradition going back to the Constitutional Convention -- even in public schools.
Adults are free to pray all day long if they wish. We agree about coercion of children. And did you know that there were no government-run schools in America until shortly before the Civil War? Really. Well, maybe a municipal school or two, here and there, but no state-run system at all. Government schools aren't apple pie. Far from it.
Nope there is not, and here's why, if natural selection is the agent of evolution - as evolutionists claim - then through the millions of years that such transformations would require to take place (again as the evolutionists admit) those individuals, those species would be less fit than they were before. In other words, the theory of evolution is based on mutually contradictory assumptions and even on a philosophical level, it is utterly false.
It is possible for major changes in geography (changes in water levels or moving land masses) to split animal populations. Additionally, changes in climate and predator/prey balance may lead to a sequence of changes, all of which provide survival and reproductive benefits in then-present conditions.
Example: suppose there is an egg-laying animal whose eggs face attack by two predators. Predator A is large enough to attack a mother on the nest, but would not find the nest were the mother not present. Predator B is better able to find the nest, but would be unable to attack the mother were she present. Populations of this animal extend over a geographic fault line, while predator A is mostly concentrated on one side and B on the other.
Now suppose the ground shifts sufficiently at fault line to render it impassible to animals of any of those species, and further suppose that predator A becomes locally-extinct on the east side of the fault and predator B becomes locally-extinct on the west side.
Under such circumstances, the animals on either side of the fault line will considerably enhance their reproductive success if they abandon the defense against the no-longer-extant predator. Such changes in reproductive behavior would change the reproductive costs/benefits of certain biological aspects as well (such as egg-shell thickness, the amount of food pre-supplied in eggs for hatchlings, etc.) and could under the right circumstances potentially result in the splitting of one species into two.
Of course, even if such circumstances could arise occasionally, their effects would be far too limitted to account for much of the biodiversity on this planet. Clearly something else must be afoot.
BTW, how do creationists explain the level of biodiversity that exists today, compared with the maximum amount that could possibly be held on a single boat the size of Noah's Ark?
Problem with the above is that the person who wrote the program to beat people at chess was an intelligent designer himself. Your statement is just as silly as saying that man is weak because a tractor would beat him in a tug of war. Oh, and BTW, neither the chess progam nor the tractor were the result of random mutation.
Problem with the above is that the person who wrote the program to beat people at chess was an intelligent designer himself. Your statement is just as silly as saying that man is weak because a tractor would beat him in a tug of war. Oh, and BTW, neither the chess progam nor the tractor were the result of random mutation.
Now as far as evolution goes, it depends on what you mean.
Evolution: What is it?
There exists more biodiversity today than could possibly have fit in Noah's Ark. How can this fact be reconciled with the Genesis story of the Flood, unless some of the diversity of life we see today developed after the flood?
What I do not get is why IDers are trying to forsake God.
Suggestion. When you want to post your multiple pages of nonsense spam, post it to yourself. That way you will not be filling up some poor Freeper's comments area with crap.
Actually, it's not. And I like how you cast it - "not a standard Trinitarian", when you and I both know that denying the Trinity is heretical ;)
He also denied the divinity of Christ with his dying breath, refusing the last rites. Take a look at "Never at Rest" by Richard Westfall and "In the Presence of the Creator" by Gale Christianson sometime - very interesting books...
That is not at all true. Many of us believe in God and also accept that evolution was God's way creating the Universe.
Now if you had said "To espouse evolution is to deny the literal Bible" then you would be quite correct. Let us not confuse God with the Bible. The Bible is the nothing but a history book muddied by the thought of Bronze Age men. God is an omnipotent being Who is quite capable of saying "Let this quantum event create of universe with no further intervention from me."
Balrog will never do that, evolutionists never define their terms, they need a lot of wiggle room. From usage though, a creationist is a Christian who does not believe in evolution. They can always call any Christian a creationist because if we are Christians we believe in God the Creator. It is meant as an insult and always used as an insult. It should make all Christians cringe at joining up with people who use their religion as a term of oprobium.
Hate to disagree, but methinks you are very wrong. Darwin was a stealth atheist. He always was an atheist, but never admitted it in public. He was surrounded by atheists such as Huxley and Haeckel. Marx wanted to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin, but Darwin refused not wishing to be 'outed'. The biggest proponents of evolution nowadays, Gould and Dawkins are themselves rabid atheists. I agree that there are indeed some true Christians that do believe in evolution. However, they do it at tremendous peril to their faith because evolution was designed by atheists to lead others into atheism.
Why would God use stupid methods when intelligent methods were available to him? Are you calling God stupid??
Were you really as logical with this issue as you claim to be with the rest of godless science, you would see that any number of logical possibilities exist for a source of design. It is not logically necessary that it be the God of the bible; all that is necessary is that it have some kind of existence beyond the physical universe we can see and touch -- because that universe itself is manifestly inadequate to the task of generating the design seen.
But somehow, in spite of yourself, out of the infinity of possibilities, the very specific God of the bible haunts you! Hmmmmmmmmmmm.
Exactly, though exactly how "micro" is perhaps a reasonable topic of debate. I've encountered some people, however, who seem to deny that Darwinian evolution occurs to any significant degree, when--per Genesis--it must.
I wish those who oppose the teaching of evolution would, rather than opposing the theory outright, instead insist that its limitations be made clear. They would appear far less like luddites, while at the same time serving up a much more effective argument against those who would seek to abuse the Theory of Evolution (e.g. by declaring that it shows that mankind is in principle no different from any other animal, when in fact it shows no such thing).
Moreover, as one notes in Roman, Greek, Chinese literature etc., you also had men and animals surviving on high places and on anything which would float for six months to a year. There's no really big contradiction between those stories and the story told in Genesis.
I thought the purpose of the Great Flood was to destroy every living person or animal save for those on the ark. Is there not something amiss with the notion that God would deliberately set out to destroy every living person or animal (save for those on the ark) and then fail to do so? Would that not undercut the notion of God's omnipotence?
Or the flood was (in planetary terms) local, covering only the human populated "world" of that time (Mesopotamia).
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.