The Problem is Clear

Crowther sees the issues as scientific while ignoring the most basic foundation of science: the scientific method. Until that glaring flaw in the Discovery Institute’s position is addressed, its claims lack any scientific credibility.

Andrew Purvis, at 6:05 am EST on February 21, 2006

ID not religious?

Employees, fellows, and symapthizers of the Discovery Institute like to claim in their public rhetoric that the Intelligent Design movement is driven purely by science, not by religion. However, the same group of people routinely invoke religion when it seems to suit their purposes.

If you want to hear it from the horse’s mouth, listen to Day 1 of the Kansas School Board hearings from the summer of 2005. The lead witness (by “lead” I mean “first up") for the ID side was asked by the ID side’s lawyer how he got interested in ID. The previous line of questioning had been a long series aimed at establishing the witness’s credentials as a medical researcher (a specialist in Omega-3 fatty acids). So when the lawyer asked the witnesses how he became interested in ID, based on the frequent claim that ID is scientific and not religious, you might expect him to have said something along the lines of, “As I was studying Omega-3 fatty acids, I became terribly impressed with how complex they are, and I realized that if just a small piece were missing here or there, the whole molecular structure would fall apart. From this, I inferred that these acids must have been designed in just this way and could not have emerged as a result of chance or of a gradual, stepwise process of development.” But that’s not what he said. What he said was (paraphrasing), “I was raised as a Presbyterian but drifted away from faith in high school and college. But in graduate school I met this girl I wanted to date, and she was interested in Bible studies, so I got interested in Bible studies too.” (If you don’t believe me, download the recordings from Audible.com (they’re free). (Paragraph quoted from http://www.heardworld.com/higgaion/2006/02/id-and-religion.html, a longer entry on my blog.)

The Intelligent Design movement produces nothing recognizable as science, which is enough reason to reject it. From my perspective as a biblical scholar, there is also something highly suspect about an organization whose central claims are suffused with religious subtext while its public rhetoric disclaims any religious dimension.

Christopher Heard, Religion Professor at Pepperdine University, at 10:20 am EST on February 21, 2006

Unscientific and blasphemous: What a combo!

Any help that scientists and other rational people can get in this dreary debate should be welcomed.

I’m neither a scientist nor a religious man, but the ID and strict-creationist positions strike me as having big, built-in contradictions that invalidate them from the git-go.

ID proponents claim to be scientific. Yet their attacks on evolution boil down to, “Here is something I cannot at this moment explain. Therefore, the only possible explanation is a supernatural agent.” The argument rests on the notion that humans either already know everything or know everything that is knowable. Believing that we cannot know more tomorrow than we know today is fundamentally unscientific. So shut up, already.

Evolution means that the world’s many creation myths cannot be literally, word-for-word true. The Book of Genesis, for instance, cannot be factual reporting. This notion enrages literal creationists. They seem unable to accept a God who is a sufficiently good writer to work with metaphors, symbols, allegories that his children need to figure out. In the creationist universe, God Almighty is not in the same literary class as, say, Melville or Hemingway. This seems a mighty uppity view, even to a secular humanist like me.

So the “scientific” ID people deny that further science is possible, and the ultra-faithful creationists deny that God can do whatever he puts His infinite, immortal mind to.

Again, shut up, already. Some people have serious work to do, and they’re getting tired of squabbling with chowderheads.

Baktu Basix, Just a layman, at 11:00 am EST on February 21, 2006

to M. Bassett

Yes, you are missing one key element. This is not a debate over whether or not I should feel free to bring it up in my English class. This is a debate over whether or not it should be allowed (or, in some cases, required) in biology or other science classes.

If one were to teach a class, within a science division, about the scientific method, ID might have a place in a discussion about what happens when the scientific method is ignored. In philosophy classes it can be used to explain the difference between claims, warrants, and support (Meatloaf aside, two out of three is not good). I even have use for it in my Critical Thinking class: we can evaluate the respective strengths of arguments for and against the inclusion of ID in a given environment. Then again, mine is not a science class.

Andrew Purvis, at 6:55 am EST on February 22, 2006

theories

Dr. Ballard:

You’ve misunderstood the meaning of the word “theory". Not all theories are equivalent. Some theories have been well-supported, while others have not.

To note one obvious example, the theory of gravitation is not subject to doubt because it’s “just a theory", is it?

The fact that evolution and ID are both theories in no way indicates that they are equally legitimate theories, equally well-supported theories, equally plausible theories, etc. (I had thought that the satirical Flying Spaghetti Monster theory had sufficiently made this point, but perhaps not.)

Dave Truncellito, Assistant Professor at George Washington University, at 4:45 am EST on February 23, 2006

evolution and religious leaders

Dear Dave, I thought it’s called Newton’s Law of Gravity. The author of the article is calling “theory” “truth". There is a big jump between the two.

Dear Andrew, there is still a big jump between theory and law or as this author writes “theory” and “scientific truth". Be honest. Is eveolutinary biology truth? Could this theory be refuted? does the theory have any problems? Your “reasonably in line” is very subjective. Human reason always has some predisposition behind it. If the conclusions of evolutinary biology were not so subjective and full of idiology then we wouldn’t be having this debate. ID just wants equal time or even to considered at all in the world of ideas.

I really didn’t want to debate ID specifically, but consider the law of entropy for a moment. Randomness in the universe always increases. Tell me does your bedroom order itself without some external source of energy to order it. The biochemisty and cellular complexity of anything living is way more complex than your room. We have never seen anything evolve except through the hopes and dreams of Hollywood entertainment. Oh yea, theory. Hilter always said that if you tell a lie long enough and with passion it will become truth in the minds of people.

Because there are no gradual transitions in the fossil record the present theory of evolution has become the theory of punctuated equillibrium. And we have seen that experimentally produced where? Scientific truth? I will go with theory, maybe, but scientific truth, no way.

Now to my liberal fundementalism. It is an appropriate description and not meant to be name calling. Fundementalism within the language of the UM Church means a “close mindedness” or a mind already “made up". A mind that is aleady closed to anything reasonable. Idiology fills in the gap and overrides reason. Liberal is position taken juxiposed to conservative. It is the religiously liberal that have fallen in love with evolution and “punctuated equillibrium". It has all the new age hopes and dreams for humanity without a creator. Anyway we use liberal, conservative, and fundamentalism to describe a lot of things in the UM church, so don’t get offended. Own the language, you’ve used it.

As if it makes any difference. I graduated cum laude from Texas A&M in Biomedical Engineering and yes my post graduate work was at Southen Methodist University, a bastion of liberal Methodism. I loved it.

James Ballard, Pastor, at 8:45 pm EST on February 23, 2006

Intelligent Design

Dr. Ballard: Were you or were you not an orthopedic surgent (D.O.) at the Methodist Hospital at Arcadia, Ca.? Below, I share part of an article that is in review. I hope that resolves some of the issues.

Intelligent Design

These days a similar view about belief in an “intelligent orderer” (“God”) is grounded in the “emergence of DNA” (see Schweiker, 2005). Orr (2005) presents a neo-Darwinian emergent called “Devolution” or “no intelligent design” that is the opposite of the above conception. Dawkins (2005), on the other hand, uses an angle of the creationist logic: that if no fossils are found showing gradual evolution, then evolutionary jumps must exist and thus God’s creation has intervened. He pleads to not attribute to God what we have not discovered yet, however.

The above arguments seemed to me to be to narrow; that is at the level of specific speciation of, for example, millions of insect species, which god could not had created one by one! And yet they offer no laws or a general principle about the process of change that happened for all species. The conception offered here is: that the process of evolutionary change, or the adaptation common to all, by itself is orderly, intelligent, and created by prior design.

Ito (2005) stated that “during evolution nature has employed a common design but divergent components to facilitate folding of polypeptides as they emerge from the ribosomal exit". With this general data, one could argued that a higher being created the variation to increase the potential for survival. In religion too, a similar dichotomy is found between the general revelations and the specific revelations.

Evolution and Intelligence Design resolved: Explanation versus Description

The whole argument is misguided. “Intelligence design” scientists, those scientists who study chaos and evolutionary biologists first describe their finding according to the accepted scientific method, whether ‘orderly Popperian’ in approach or ‘orderly hermeneutic’. Hopefully all apply some form of orderly quantitative analysis of their DESCRIBED observations. And all attempt to EXPLAIN their results. Here is where the difference lies, EXPLANATION not DESCRIPTION. One claims to explain it away using evolutionary selection or change, another uses principles of chaos and the other uses, ironically closer to evolutionary biology, intelligence design. Obviously evolutionary biology does not espouse to chaos, do they or don’t they? If they do, which statistical package can one use!

Evolutionary biologist who accept intelligence design do so because they see order in their data, perhaps common to all species. One can see that design of common codes, even in language, is an orderly process used by all species. Whether one speaks French or English. The point is that communication is common to all beings. And evolution of communication too is common and orderly. Thus, evolution is an intelligent design- whether selective pressure happens in chaos or in order, function is at issue. And function is an explanation. And explanation has levels, lower and higher level. The higher level explains the lower level. May be the process of evolution itself was designed ahead of time for adaptation to occur either chaotically or orderly (Lalezarzadeh, 2005, August).

Paradigm versus Theory: Regularity Versus Variation

The arguments about intelligence design seem wonton and vexatious. As such levels of explanations of the same phenomenon are being complicated. The whole idea of a scientific theory (or set of theories in one paradigm) is to explain many sets of testable hypothesis; as such a theory has explanatory power, may that be intelligence design- ID (which is a paradigm and not a theory) or the evolutionary theory (which is based on a set of testable hypothesis). The paradigm and the theory strive to search for unifying explanatory principles applicable to many repeatable natural phenomenons. As such once observations of natural phenomenon withstand the test of time, they become laws- which themselves comprise into a set of corollaries. My intention is not to repeat what we may know as philosophy of science. But since we are, one can see that a paradigm is not a theory (Lalezarzadeh, 2005, December 21).

Moreover, since we may be discussing ID as a paradigm that can explain much regularity in natural phenomenon, one should make a scientific reference. That will be to the crux of the evolutionary theory (i.e., to see if there is in fact a regularity that is shared by all organisms which can explain the phenomenon). And if one finds such regularity, then natural selection would no longer be a theory of chance happenings by natural selection. It would be a theory with predictable — observable – measurable effect data that are caused by known or unknown factor(s) in the universe. Should the cause and effect relations be always the same, for all organisms, and given many natural variations, then the evolutionary theory would be a paradigm- because many theories could be tested given the regularity in the cause and effect relations.

Should we find that in fact a common cause and effect relation is shared by all organisms, would one not reject the notion that “chance” variation no longer plays a role and intelligence design of these causal-effect relations must be at work? One could refer to the elegant work of Ito, K. (2005, June). Ribosome-based protein folding systems are structurally divergent but functionally universal across biological kingdoms. Molecular Microbiology 57 (2), 313-317. From this crux of evolution we find universality across all species. There is no chance variation here. Why?!

By Kiumars Lalezarzadeh

Kiumars Lalezarzadeh, Ph.D., Psychologist, Minister, Medical Social Services at BHITS, NIHARD, Q’s Ministry of AIWP, UIL, at 4:45 am EST on February 24, 2006

Clergy support for punctuated equillibrium (evolution)

Again, there is a huge difference between natural adaptations within a specie (have you ever noticed our kids feet are bigger than ours)and speciation. Especially, when are talking about punctuated equillibrium. This present theory is aspousing speciation in one generation. We have never been able to recordsuch an event taking place. Andrew, talk about a falsafication test. Oh, I forget the timing for these so called natural events is millions of years. How convenient.

Speciation in a one generational jump really takes huge leap of faith or idiology, because there has never been an obserable punctuated jump, which really if you want to be honest downgrades the theory of evolution to a hypothesis. Oh yeah, but idiology always trumps faith in the present legal environment.

In this present environment of intolerance to God (Christmas), the author wants men and women of faith to jump on this band wagon. They really will have to be men and women of faith or at least fantasy.

James Ballard, at 8:40 am EST on February 26, 2006

ID and the Individual

Long before I had ever heard the term “Intelligent Design” or any of the basic ideas behind it, I developed my own ideas in that line, though I don’t doubt I am centuries behind the curve in that regard. However, while I find plenty of personal reasons for believing—note that this is an issue of faith—in essentially what ID expresses, I have never seen, depsite repeated pleas here and elsewhere, any mention of a way to move ID beyond the realm of faith.

As individuals, we can believe in the basic premise of ID or not, but there is, as yet, no scientific means to test it. Until one can definitively show how the universe began, this will remain a mystery. Indeed, the first chapter of Hawking’s A Brief History of Time suggests that there is a problem here: the universe, if we hold to the Big Bang, could have begun with the acceleration of a single atom beyond the speed of light. The problem, in a void, is generating the force for the acceleration. My reading of the subtext is that Hawking feels there is, or at the very least could be, a creative mind and power behind it all.

This is still a problem, however. Since we cannot get a signed confession from the almighty—whichever almighty that may be for each individual—regarding the formation of the universe, we are stuck, at least from a scientific point of view. This leads to the current debate: should we teach material in science classes when science cannot support that material? It is not enough that science cannot refute it at this time.

Students in science classes are not there to learn what may or may not ever be testable; they are there to learn the processes and the foundations of scientific inquiry. And lest anyone wish to suggest that the failure to present ID in the classroom will result in a lack of ideas in that realm, consider that ID was necessarily developed by people who did not themselves have it in the classroom. This is the nature of human inquiry, but the questions that ID raises—questions for which we hold no hope of answering or even proposing to answer in the classroom—are not proper material for that environment.

I will end by saying this again: The discussion of ID has a place in higher education, but that place is in philosophy an critical thinking course, not science courses. None of us can know whether or not that will change in the future, but that is where the issue rests at present.

Andrew Purvis, at 9:15 am EST on March 1, 2006