Hexubiss
02-12-2004, 03:37
just finished this little peice, tell me what you think and/or give suggestions
Intelligent design, the Secular Creator
Evolution is undoubtedly the single most debated science. It encompasses everything from ‘modified monkeys’ to an omnipotent creator, blurring the line between religion and science, touching on some of the most provocative and challenging questions humankind has ever faced. Most recently, a secular antievolutionary argument has revived the debate. The 1991 publication of UC Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson’s book, Darwin on Trial, dispensed with the religious overtones common in antievolutionary movements and coined a hot new, secular-sounding, catch phrase: intelligent design. With this phrase, Johnson revived the long ignored argument first proposed almost two centuries earlier by William Paley. But what is intelligent design, why is it a threat to Darwinism , and what are the implications of the debate taking place in a secular arena? After exploring these questions, an editorial will show why I believe that the intelligent design debate is harmful to and not in the spirit of modern secular science.
Evolution, the evolving debate:
The modern evolutionary debate is evolving. No longer is the debate within academia, but instead it is found in judicial courtrooms and school classrooms; no longer is the debate between science and religion, but instead found within the secular world of science. The intelligent design is just that, intelligently designed to avoid the past problems faced by antievolutionary movements. This has been the result of conscience efforts of Stephen Meyer, a professor at Palm Beach Atlantic University’s School of Ministry and Jonathan Wells, the biologist and author of Icons of Evolution. Together, they founded the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, which has created the first substantial challenge to Darwinism’s domination in the secular and scientific arena. Evan Ratliff’s article, The Crusade Against Evolution, explains that while previous antievolutionary movements called for a creator, God, while “intelligent design studiously avoid[s] the G-word and never points to the Bible for answers” (1). This new edge has important consequences to how it is perceived by the American public, but first a further understanding of the history of intelligent design.
The History of Intelligent Design:
Just before the turn into the 19th century, renowned British philosopher and Anglican archdeacon William Paley published his work Natural Theology, wherein he explains a “pre-existing” designed by some “intelligent agent” is the only logical conclusion for the diversity and complexity of living organisms (MacNeill 09/07/2004). In a quick explanation of Paley’s famous stone-watch example , he imagined coming across a stone in a field and safely concluded a stone needs no designer, and if broken just makes smaller stones. But when imagining coming across a watching lying the field, it appears to have been assembled with a purpose, and it could not function without its precise combination of parts. At its core, intelligent design follows this same argument, that complex structures or reactions from the eye to blood clotting cannot be the result of random, non-purposeful adaptations, but instead require purposeful forethought provided by a designer.
Around half a century later, Charles Darwin’s publication of Origin of Species provided the first scientific based argument against Paley’s “argument to complexity”: evolution by natural selection (qtd. Ratliff 2). For almost 100 years, it seemed as if Darwinism had successfully knocked Paley’s argument out of the limelight so that the new focus was exploring evolution, particularly explaining speciation and the development of complexities.
Then, focusing the debate down to the American arena, Paley’s need for a designer was supplanted by biblical Creationism, or the belief that God created all organisms exactly are they are now in their adult form some specific time ago . However, after the Supreme Court struck attempts to give Creationism equal time in the classroom 1987 because they “lacked a clear secular purpose,” antievolutionist movements began to take a new form (qtd. Ratliff 2)
This new form started in 1996, when there was a continuation to Johnson’s argument by a philosopher and mathematician at Baylor University named William Dembski. He continued Paley’s intelligent designer argument, stating that three components are needed to infer design: contingency, complexity, and specification (Ruse Design 317). Although to complex to explain in full here, using mathematics, he shows that ‘random change’ cannot, statically, possibility create order because it is “highly improbable” that a random series, and its nearly infinite possibilities, could every produce anything highly complex (Ruse Design 317).
Expanding this theory, Meyer and Dembski combine on their “no free lunch” theory, which claims it is impossible to get out what you do not put in. Dembski explains, “evolutionary algorithms, apart from careful fine-tuning by a programmer, are no better than blind search and thus no better than pure chance, ergo, cast doubt on power of Darwiniam mechanism to account for biological complexity” (qtd. Ruse Design 316). Even more recently, another intelligent design argument was proposed by biochemist Michael Behe, who in his books, Darwin’s Black Box (1998) and Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe (2000), explains an ‘all-or-nothing’ phenomenon, or that complexities need to be created in ‘one-step processes.’ This theory is simplified to the belief that such complexities could not have occurred over time for too many interlocking components need to be created all at once.
Lead by the Discovery Institute and others, the debate moved into secular arena. This was in part in response to attacks from academics such as Richard Dawkins and Cornell’s own Will Provine who called intelligent design “flabbiness of intellect” caused by religion (Ruse Evolution Wars 266). Michael Ruse, a philosopher of science at Florida State University, points out in his book Evolution Wars that intelligent design responds by saying that the ‘empirical evidence’ found by evolutionary biologist is made to fit their theories, and that scientific method is compromised by these true-believers (279). Now, 140 years after Darwin’s Origin of Species, 75 years after the John Scopes-Monkey Trial, 15 years after the U.S Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana law mandating equal time for Creationism in the classroom, the question of evolution took a new turn with the adaptation of Intelligent design (Ratliff 1).
Intelligent design, Adapted to Prey on Darwinist:
By adapting to become a secular argument, intelligent design may become the most pointed argument against natural selection, but only in the public arena. In this new arena, intelligent design has designed itself to become a ‘viable alternative’ in the public’s eye. Ruse in Evolution Wars, he claims that the argument provided by the intelligent design is “so vague” as to avoid criticism, for it is easy to defend a position of little substance (267). Intelligent design needs no defense because its designer cannot be tested by empirical evidence. Carl Woese, an eminent microbiologist at the University of Illinois says that intelligent design “is not a science. It makes no predictions and doesn’t offer any explanation whatsoever” (qtd Ratliff 5).
With Woese and others complaints falling on deaf years, and with little home turf to defend and little reason for research, intelligent design turns towards the offensive. Ruse sums up several of the main arguments against Darwinism, starting with appearance that natural selection is a tautology since “it tells you that the fittest survive but then the fittest are defined as those that survive! Mutation is also criticized heavily. It is random, and random means random. You cannot get order from randomness… Organisms need something more- they need something in the intelligence line to put them on the road to being” (Ruse Evolution Wars 267).
From a vantage point where they can attack Darwinism while having little to defend, the Discovery Institute under Meyer has focused on capturing the public’s attention using a rhetorical strategy, where he publicly states, “better to appear scientific than holy” (Ratliff 2). Using secular phrases such as “academic freedom,” “scientific objectivity,” and “teach the controversy,” they proudly state they hope to appeal to the public’s sense of fairness, hereby attracting an audience that thinks it is promoting critical thinking (Ratliff 1). This more secular approach has important consequences seen below.
The Implications of a Secular Creator:
By moving into the secular arena, the debate now centers on public policy, specifically schooling. In 2002, the Columbus Ohio State Board of Education was convinced to ‘teach the controversy’. Also in 2002, President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act almost included a phrase added by U.S senator Rick Santorum (R-Pennsylvania) after being lobbied by the Discovery institute that read, schooling should “help student understand the full range of scientific views… that may generate controversy (such as biological evolution)” (Ratliff 4).
Because the debate no longer takes place in scientific journals but instead on radio talk shows, television, and in textbooks, intelligent design has gained the appearance of “scientific objectivity” (a phrase the Supreme Court used in the Scopes-monkey trial). Justifying this move, Meyer claims he is trying to keep “the wool from being pulled over the public’s eyes” (3). This is why he focuses on changing public policy towards education.
Editorial:
I want to start by saying by being careful and clarify that this is not a case against religion, but a case solely against the motives behind intelligent design. ‘Teaching the controversy’ should not mean teaching bad science. Although Discovery Institute states it is trying to achieve ‘fairness,’ it is not acting in the traditional spirit of the scientific community. One tacit used in Behe’s books is to point at Darwinian theories that have admitted faults, and use these faults to tear down the entire theory flawed. Science is about coming up with theories to disprove previous theories and therefore increase our knowledge of the universe around us, it is not about attacking other theories and then replacing them no mechanism or substitute that is testable by empirical science, but only conjectures about the role of a creator. Behe, Dembski, Meyer, and Wells arguments all go to great lengths to point out that natural selection cannot account for complexities (a point many evolutionist admit needs further research), but none provide explanations other then ‘one-step’ adaptations, which, ironically, cannot be tested.
One argument repeated by Behe in his two books is that evolutionary science has not progressed beyond its early 1900s stage, while geometry, physics, and other sciences have. This criticism does not take into account that there have been advancements, such as the Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium Law. And even if the Darwinian science has progressed at a slower rate, it would be a mistake to think that it is because it is a flawed science. Evolutionary biology, like any science dealing with living organisms (and in this case even dealing with dead living organism’s fossils), it is more difficult to conduct studies. Also, the evolution does not have a direct impact on consumers’ lives, and is therefore funded less. Notice how Behe compared to geometry and physics, not psychology, another field that has also failed respectively to produce dramatic changes in the last century.
Furthermore, the birth of the ‘science’ called intelligent design is not out of scientific curiosity, it comes from the need for a secular response to Darwinism. It comes out of a belief that traditional and moral values are under attack. It comes under the masked veil of being a real science. Intelligent design believers’ tactics focus on blurring what is real science with their rhetoric, to the extent that one of the Ohio State School Board Members said, “They’ve used so much technical jargon that anybody who doesn’t know a whole lot of evolution biology looks at it and says ‘It sounds scientific to me, what’s the matter with it?” (qtd. Ratliff 6).
The followers of intelligent design may appeal to a sense of academic freedom and critical thinking, but its inability to provide answers beyond ‘there is a design’ discredit its attempts to be a real science. Because all intelligent design arguments are based off the assumption that complexities must have been achieved all at once and because they assume that if you take a single piece away it all falls part, intelligent design can be cut down using a simple analogy I am provided by Ruse: bridge building (Design 320).
When building an arched bridge made from stone, each stone is held in place against one another. Therefore, you cannot build the bridge upward and inward, it would fall in. Now, if you instead constructed a supporting structure first, you could then lay the stones of the bridge, meeting at the keystone in the center. Afterwards, you can remove the supporting structure, which would in fact be superfluous and a hindrance (you could not walk under the bridge). Indeed, the whole bridge now would collapse if you removed the keystone or any stone surrounding it. It is now no longer a stretch to see how complexities may take several stages to produce. When simpler organs functioning independently link up, the original sequence is eventually removed by natural selection because it is redundant and drains resources. This example also explains why these complexities can no longer stand if you remove a keystone. This example undercuts the main argument of intelligent design against Darwinism, that natural selection cannot explain complexities. Firstly, it explains how complex organs and reactions can be developed in stages, and why the ruminates of these stages may at first not be clear. Secondly, it explains why after supporting structures are removed, the complex organs will fail if you remove a piece.
By understanding the motives of the intelligent design movement, it is clear to understand that they do not intend to enrich the scientific community but instead use targeted rhetoric to undermined evolution. It is harmful to the scientific community as a whole because they are attacking science itself by using rhetoric instead of trying to enhance scientific understanding through thoughtful research. Furthermore, the concept of a designer removes the needs to investigate further, while the Darwinian approach purposes more questions then has yet been answered. Also, by brining the debate out of academia, the Discovery Institute’s attempt use target school children has divorced those knowledgeable on the subject from the decision making process. It normally takes theories decades of scientific scrutiny to end up in the classroom; however, intelligent design movement is using scientific rhetoric to bypass this scrutiny, hurting society as a hole (Ratliff 7).
Intelligent design, the Secular Creator
Evolution is undoubtedly the single most debated science. It encompasses everything from ‘modified monkeys’ to an omnipotent creator, blurring the line between religion and science, touching on some of the most provocative and challenging questions humankind has ever faced. Most recently, a secular antievolutionary argument has revived the debate. The 1991 publication of UC Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson’s book, Darwin on Trial, dispensed with the religious overtones common in antievolutionary movements and coined a hot new, secular-sounding, catch phrase: intelligent design. With this phrase, Johnson revived the long ignored argument first proposed almost two centuries earlier by William Paley. But what is intelligent design, why is it a threat to Darwinism , and what are the implications of the debate taking place in a secular arena? After exploring these questions, an editorial will show why I believe that the intelligent design debate is harmful to and not in the spirit of modern secular science.
Evolution, the evolving debate:
The modern evolutionary debate is evolving. No longer is the debate within academia, but instead it is found in judicial courtrooms and school classrooms; no longer is the debate between science and religion, but instead found within the secular world of science. The intelligent design is just that, intelligently designed to avoid the past problems faced by antievolutionary movements. This has been the result of conscience efforts of Stephen Meyer, a professor at Palm Beach Atlantic University’s School of Ministry and Jonathan Wells, the biologist and author of Icons of Evolution. Together, they founded the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, which has created the first substantial challenge to Darwinism’s domination in the secular and scientific arena. Evan Ratliff’s article, The Crusade Against Evolution, explains that while previous antievolutionary movements called for a creator, God, while “intelligent design studiously avoid[s] the G-word and never points to the Bible for answers” (1). This new edge has important consequences to how it is perceived by the American public, but first a further understanding of the history of intelligent design.
The History of Intelligent Design:
Just before the turn into the 19th century, renowned British philosopher and Anglican archdeacon William Paley published his work Natural Theology, wherein he explains a “pre-existing” designed by some “intelligent agent” is the only logical conclusion for the diversity and complexity of living organisms (MacNeill 09/07/2004). In a quick explanation of Paley’s famous stone-watch example , he imagined coming across a stone in a field and safely concluded a stone needs no designer, and if broken just makes smaller stones. But when imagining coming across a watching lying the field, it appears to have been assembled with a purpose, and it could not function without its precise combination of parts. At its core, intelligent design follows this same argument, that complex structures or reactions from the eye to blood clotting cannot be the result of random, non-purposeful adaptations, but instead require purposeful forethought provided by a designer.
Around half a century later, Charles Darwin’s publication of Origin of Species provided the first scientific based argument against Paley’s “argument to complexity”: evolution by natural selection (qtd. Ratliff 2). For almost 100 years, it seemed as if Darwinism had successfully knocked Paley’s argument out of the limelight so that the new focus was exploring evolution, particularly explaining speciation and the development of complexities.
Then, focusing the debate down to the American arena, Paley’s need for a designer was supplanted by biblical Creationism, or the belief that God created all organisms exactly are they are now in their adult form some specific time ago . However, after the Supreme Court struck attempts to give Creationism equal time in the classroom 1987 because they “lacked a clear secular purpose,” antievolutionist movements began to take a new form (qtd. Ratliff 2)
This new form started in 1996, when there was a continuation to Johnson’s argument by a philosopher and mathematician at Baylor University named William Dembski. He continued Paley’s intelligent designer argument, stating that three components are needed to infer design: contingency, complexity, and specification (Ruse Design 317). Although to complex to explain in full here, using mathematics, he shows that ‘random change’ cannot, statically, possibility create order because it is “highly improbable” that a random series, and its nearly infinite possibilities, could every produce anything highly complex (Ruse Design 317).
Expanding this theory, Meyer and Dembski combine on their “no free lunch” theory, which claims it is impossible to get out what you do not put in. Dembski explains, “evolutionary algorithms, apart from careful fine-tuning by a programmer, are no better than blind search and thus no better than pure chance, ergo, cast doubt on power of Darwiniam mechanism to account for biological complexity” (qtd. Ruse Design 316). Even more recently, another intelligent design argument was proposed by biochemist Michael Behe, who in his books, Darwin’s Black Box (1998) and Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe (2000), explains an ‘all-or-nothing’ phenomenon, or that complexities need to be created in ‘one-step processes.’ This theory is simplified to the belief that such complexities could not have occurred over time for too many interlocking components need to be created all at once.
Lead by the Discovery Institute and others, the debate moved into secular arena. This was in part in response to attacks from academics such as Richard Dawkins and Cornell’s own Will Provine who called intelligent design “flabbiness of intellect” caused by religion (Ruse Evolution Wars 266). Michael Ruse, a philosopher of science at Florida State University, points out in his book Evolution Wars that intelligent design responds by saying that the ‘empirical evidence’ found by evolutionary biologist is made to fit their theories, and that scientific method is compromised by these true-believers (279). Now, 140 years after Darwin’s Origin of Species, 75 years after the John Scopes-Monkey Trial, 15 years after the U.S Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana law mandating equal time for Creationism in the classroom, the question of evolution took a new turn with the adaptation of Intelligent design (Ratliff 1).
Intelligent design, Adapted to Prey on Darwinist:
By adapting to become a secular argument, intelligent design may become the most pointed argument against natural selection, but only in the public arena. In this new arena, intelligent design has designed itself to become a ‘viable alternative’ in the public’s eye. Ruse in Evolution Wars, he claims that the argument provided by the intelligent design is “so vague” as to avoid criticism, for it is easy to defend a position of little substance (267). Intelligent design needs no defense because its designer cannot be tested by empirical evidence. Carl Woese, an eminent microbiologist at the University of Illinois says that intelligent design “is not a science. It makes no predictions and doesn’t offer any explanation whatsoever” (qtd Ratliff 5).
With Woese and others complaints falling on deaf years, and with little home turf to defend and little reason for research, intelligent design turns towards the offensive. Ruse sums up several of the main arguments against Darwinism, starting with appearance that natural selection is a tautology since “it tells you that the fittest survive but then the fittest are defined as those that survive! Mutation is also criticized heavily. It is random, and random means random. You cannot get order from randomness… Organisms need something more- they need something in the intelligence line to put them on the road to being” (Ruse Evolution Wars 267).
From a vantage point where they can attack Darwinism while having little to defend, the Discovery Institute under Meyer has focused on capturing the public’s attention using a rhetorical strategy, where he publicly states, “better to appear scientific than holy” (Ratliff 2). Using secular phrases such as “academic freedom,” “scientific objectivity,” and “teach the controversy,” they proudly state they hope to appeal to the public’s sense of fairness, hereby attracting an audience that thinks it is promoting critical thinking (Ratliff 1). This more secular approach has important consequences seen below.
The Implications of a Secular Creator:
By moving into the secular arena, the debate now centers on public policy, specifically schooling. In 2002, the Columbus Ohio State Board of Education was convinced to ‘teach the controversy’. Also in 2002, President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act almost included a phrase added by U.S senator Rick Santorum (R-Pennsylvania) after being lobbied by the Discovery institute that read, schooling should “help student understand the full range of scientific views… that may generate controversy (such as biological evolution)” (Ratliff 4).
Because the debate no longer takes place in scientific journals but instead on radio talk shows, television, and in textbooks, intelligent design has gained the appearance of “scientific objectivity” (a phrase the Supreme Court used in the Scopes-monkey trial). Justifying this move, Meyer claims he is trying to keep “the wool from being pulled over the public’s eyes” (3). This is why he focuses on changing public policy towards education.
Editorial:
I want to start by saying by being careful and clarify that this is not a case against religion, but a case solely against the motives behind intelligent design. ‘Teaching the controversy’ should not mean teaching bad science. Although Discovery Institute states it is trying to achieve ‘fairness,’ it is not acting in the traditional spirit of the scientific community. One tacit used in Behe’s books is to point at Darwinian theories that have admitted faults, and use these faults to tear down the entire theory flawed. Science is about coming up with theories to disprove previous theories and therefore increase our knowledge of the universe around us, it is not about attacking other theories and then replacing them no mechanism or substitute that is testable by empirical science, but only conjectures about the role of a creator. Behe, Dembski, Meyer, and Wells arguments all go to great lengths to point out that natural selection cannot account for complexities (a point many evolutionist admit needs further research), but none provide explanations other then ‘one-step’ adaptations, which, ironically, cannot be tested.
One argument repeated by Behe in his two books is that evolutionary science has not progressed beyond its early 1900s stage, while geometry, physics, and other sciences have. This criticism does not take into account that there have been advancements, such as the Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium Law. And even if the Darwinian science has progressed at a slower rate, it would be a mistake to think that it is because it is a flawed science. Evolutionary biology, like any science dealing with living organisms (and in this case even dealing with dead living organism’s fossils), it is more difficult to conduct studies. Also, the evolution does not have a direct impact on consumers’ lives, and is therefore funded less. Notice how Behe compared to geometry and physics, not psychology, another field that has also failed respectively to produce dramatic changes in the last century.
Furthermore, the birth of the ‘science’ called intelligent design is not out of scientific curiosity, it comes from the need for a secular response to Darwinism. It comes out of a belief that traditional and moral values are under attack. It comes under the masked veil of being a real science. Intelligent design believers’ tactics focus on blurring what is real science with their rhetoric, to the extent that one of the Ohio State School Board Members said, “They’ve used so much technical jargon that anybody who doesn’t know a whole lot of evolution biology looks at it and says ‘It sounds scientific to me, what’s the matter with it?” (qtd. Ratliff 6).
The followers of intelligent design may appeal to a sense of academic freedom and critical thinking, but its inability to provide answers beyond ‘there is a design’ discredit its attempts to be a real science. Because all intelligent design arguments are based off the assumption that complexities must have been achieved all at once and because they assume that if you take a single piece away it all falls part, intelligent design can be cut down using a simple analogy I am provided by Ruse: bridge building (Design 320).
When building an arched bridge made from stone, each stone is held in place against one another. Therefore, you cannot build the bridge upward and inward, it would fall in. Now, if you instead constructed a supporting structure first, you could then lay the stones of the bridge, meeting at the keystone in the center. Afterwards, you can remove the supporting structure, which would in fact be superfluous and a hindrance (you could not walk under the bridge). Indeed, the whole bridge now would collapse if you removed the keystone or any stone surrounding it. It is now no longer a stretch to see how complexities may take several stages to produce. When simpler organs functioning independently link up, the original sequence is eventually removed by natural selection because it is redundant and drains resources. This example also explains why these complexities can no longer stand if you remove a keystone. This example undercuts the main argument of intelligent design against Darwinism, that natural selection cannot explain complexities. Firstly, it explains how complex organs and reactions can be developed in stages, and why the ruminates of these stages may at first not be clear. Secondly, it explains why after supporting structures are removed, the complex organs will fail if you remove a piece.
By understanding the motives of the intelligent design movement, it is clear to understand that they do not intend to enrich the scientific community but instead use targeted rhetoric to undermined evolution. It is harmful to the scientific community as a whole because they are attacking science itself by using rhetoric instead of trying to enhance scientific understanding through thoughtful research. Furthermore, the concept of a designer removes the needs to investigate further, while the Darwinian approach purposes more questions then has yet been answered. Also, by brining the debate out of academia, the Discovery Institute’s attempt use target school children has divorced those knowledgeable on the subject from the decision making process. It normally takes theories decades of scientific scrutiny to end up in the classroom; however, intelligent design movement is using scientific rhetoric to bypass this scrutiny, hurting society as a hole (Ratliff 7).