Over at Interpreter, Gregory Smith has written a longish review of several books on the theme of evolution and religion. I haven't read his review in detail, but my skimming (and past experience) suggests that Smith has what I take to be a pretty healthy view on the issue. One of the books reviewed was written by William Dembski who, although I don't hear much about him anymore, was once one of the leading lights of Intelligent Design at the Discovery Institute. Several of the comments below Smith's review are supportive of ID, with one person wondering why LDS scientists don't align with ID more than they do.
It has been a while since I have mentioned ID. Although it hasn't gone away, it is much less of a public issue lately than it used to be. Nevertheless, I thought I would take a moment to review why I do not accept ID (something I first articulated here.) For fun, I have arranged it in a question-answer format.
Q: Isn't Intelligent Design a scientific idea?
A: ID is more of a religious/cultural movement than a scientific one. Defenders of ID complain about ID being lumped together with young-earth creationism and assert that it has secular intellectual merit on its own. However, it is a matter of historical record that the ID brand, so to speak, was formulated as a response to court rulings prohibiting the teaching of creationism in public schools, and as a weapon in an ideological battle against naturalism. The scientific component of ID has always been minor, which is to say that scientific research has not been a focus of ID proponents. ID is mostly polemics, and it was the Discovery Institute that sought to introduce ID into public schools notwithstanding the fact that it had scant support in higher education and among professional scientists. When the background of ID and its proponents are considered, it becomes clear that ID is a religiously/ideologically motivated movement.
Q: Don't some scientists advocate Intelligent Design?
A: There are a few practicing scientists, such as Michael Behe, who openly advocate ID, but most ID proponents tend to be non-scientists (e.g. lawyers, philosophers, mathematicians, etc). Others have an educational background in science, but did not pursue a career in science. For example, as a member of the Unification Church with a Ph.D. in religious studies, Jonathan Wells went on to obtain a Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology with the specific intent of fighting against 'Darwinism,' and has spent his career doing so. Again, ID is not really a scientific movement.
Q: OK, but if we put aside motivations and history, couldn't Intelligent Design have some merit?
A: Sure, any part of this world and life on it might have been designed, but ID arguments for such have been unconvincing. Usually the arguments boil down to simple disbelief that things found in nature could have been produced by nature. Many biological features that appear designed can be understood in the light of normal biological principles, although the exact step-by-step history may forever remain unknown. That is simply not good enough for ID proponents like Michael Behe, who once demanded each mutational step,
And not only a list of mutations, but also a detailed account of the selective pressures that would be operating, the difficulties such changes would cause for the organism, the expected time scale over which the changes would be expected to occur, the likely population sizes available in the relevant ancestral species at each step, other potential ways to solve the problem which might interfere, and much more.
In other words, ID is impossible to falsify. So sure, it could be true on some level, but so could many other unprovable or unfalsifiable propositions.
Q: Well what is the harm in just having another perspective to consider?
A: None, as far as it goes. However, in advancing their arguments, ID proponents seem to chronically either misunderstand or deliberately misrepresent mainstream science. One gets the sense that they must do this in order to make their arguments look strong by comparison. As Nick Matzke
recently wrote in a review of Stephen Meyer's latest book,
To anyone familiar with [the science], it is simply laughable and pretty much insulting to see Stephen Meyer proclaim throughout his book that fossils with transitional morphology don’t exist, that the Cambrian body plans look like they originated all-at-once in one big sudden step. These statements don’t respect scientific process, they don’t respect the peer reviewed literature, they don’t respect the intelligence and knowledge of people who actually do know what they are talking about, they don’t respect the hard work of all the scientists that went out in the field and found these fossils, and then spent countless hours preparing them, describing them, inspecting them in microscopic detail, coding them in a morphology database, and analyzing them, all with care and effort and detail never taken by any creationist/IDist writer in any effort of comparative biology. And most importantly, Meyer’s statements don’t respect the data. They don’t follow the evidence wherever it leads, mostly because Meyer is ignoring most of the evidence.
In my experience, Matzke's critique applies more generally to many ID proponents. They not only spread an idea that is scientifically dubious, they damage scientific understanding in the process.
Conclusion:
My basic conclusion is that ID proponents are, to be frank, mostly a bunch of hacks and cranks. The hacks have all the characteristics we see in political hacks: they stick to a central message, they never admit to being wrong about anything substantive, and they distort facts and knowledge to support their talking points. It is therefore entirely appropriate that the main driver of ID is a think tank. The cranks are less evil, just obtuse. They seem simply to enjoy being in an intellectual insurgency, while overestimating their grasp of science. Neither group is interested in genuine scientific and intellectual inquiry. This is not to say that all people who are attracted to ID are hacks and cranks; I have no doubt that many who find ID persuasive are thoughtful and honest people. But this is certainly how I feel about the leaders of ID at the Discovery Institute.
So there you have it.
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