Up to date in Kansas

William Saletan has a Slate article arguing that Intelligent Design, the latest incarnation of Creation Science, and about to be adopted in Kansas, is so much less obnoxious that the previous version that scientists and liberals should take it seriously, or at least give it a fair hearing. To my considerable surprise, I found myself more or less in agreement, subject to the usual caution that selective quotation can make anything look good (or bad).
The new challenger, ID, differs fundamentally from fundamentalism. Like its creationist forebears, ID is theistic. But unlike them, it abandons Biblical literalism, embraces open-minded inquiry, and accepts falsification, not authority, as the ultimate test. These concessions, sincere or not, define a new species of creationism...that fatally undermines its ancestors. Creationists aren't threatening us. They're becoming us.
There are two main aguments against "Creation Science:" by explicitly invoking a deity, it violates the establishment clause, and it promulgates a demonstrably false picture of reality. The 1999 version of CS sinned in both ways. By insisting on biblical literalism, they essentially insisted on a Christian version of creation, and had to explicitly reject the age of the Earth, scientific dating methods, and the stratigraphic sequence. 2005 ID abandons both, according to Saletan.
The board's draft standards said, "The fossil record provides evidence of simple, bacteria-like life as far back as 3.8+ billion years ago." CSA would have tried to remove that sentence. IDnet embraced it and proposed to add a prepositional phrase: "almost simultaneously with the postulated habitability of our earth." This would underscore Calvert's argument that life arose faster than randomness could account for. A few lines later, the board's draft mentioned the fossil record, radioisotope dating, and plate tectonics. CSA would have fought all three references. IDnet affirmed them and asked only for a revision to limit their implications: "Certain aspects of the fossil record, the age of the earth based on radioisotope dating and plate tectonics are consistent with the Darwinian theory. However, this evidence is not inconsistent with the design hypothesis."
Furthermore
Two years later, in a bioethics journal, Calvert and an IDnet colleague, biochemist William Harris, summarized the differences between Biblical creationism and ID. "Creation science seeks to validate a literal interpretation of creation as contained in the book of Genesis," they explained. "An ID proponent recognizes that ID theory may be disproved by new evidence. ID is like a large tent under which many religious and nonreligious origins theories may find a home. ID proposes nothing more than that life and its diversity were the product of an intelligence with power to manipulate matter and energy."
Scientists also fear that letting this camel stick his nose under the tent would lead to the whole camel later, and I sympathize with this argument. I don't believe, though, that the dogmatic insistence on deity free explanations is either wise or justifiable, constitutionally or intellectually. To my mind, atheism is just another religion and the state is no more entitled to establish it than Hinduism. Students do need access to the facts - let them make up their own minds about theories. They will anyway.

Comments

  1. Anonymous9:11 AM

    CIP-I like your blog a lot and hope you persevere, but you're way off base on this one. Have you read the Discovery Institute's wedge strategy? Their hope is to to make science conform to a specific ideology much as the communists did in the former Soviet Union. It is also clear that their intelligent designer is the Christian notion of God no matter how much they deny that in public. So far they are winning the fight for public opinion. That frightens me and should frighten anyone interested in the advancement of basic science in the United States.

    Lee

    PS I do get very tired though of people in science professing loudly either their atheism or theism and trying to get other people to accept their respective belief systems. Spirituality, or the lack thereof, is irrelevant to science.

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  2. I mostly agree, (except possibly about my being way off base). They are trying to sneak that camel's nose into the tent, and not being any too honest about it. Nonetheless, mainstream science choosing to boycott the Kansas hearings still looks like a mistake to me. Scientifically, the Darwin vs. ID battle was fought in the 19th century and Darwin won, and innumerable discoveries since have reinforced that conclusion. But most people don't know that, and I'm not just talking about those who refuse to believe on principle.

    It's not like our system is making some big success of teaching Darwin now. Yesterday NPR identified evolution as a "theory seeking to explain the origin of life." They apologized today, but sheesh.

    The 1999 creationists in Kansas sought to teach obviously false information about the age of the Earth, radioisotope dating, and geology. I'm just grateful that the current crop is willing to accept the main facts and I think mainstream scientists should show up, give factual testimony, and concentrate on trying to keep false statements out of the curriculum.

    There is lots of great stuff written on natural selection, unfortunately none of it in high school text books. If they would have the kids read one book by Dawkins or even Gould, I would let the creationists do their worst for the rest of the school year.

    I happened to serve on my State's science textbook committee one year. All the texts were lousy, but the education bureaucrats were worse. The anti-evolution parents were actually the easiest group to work with. They were there because they cared about what their children were learning (not that I convinced them to go with Darwin, either).

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  3. Anonymous12:02 AM

    I don't believe, though, that the dogmatic insistence on deity free explanations is either wise or justifiable, constitutionally or intellectually. To my mind, atheism is just another religion and the state is no more entitled to establish it than Hinduism.

    Deity-free explanations of scientific facts are absolutely essential; once you talk about God, you're not talking about science anymore. Unless you're willing to have a God that is subject to physical laws (and what kind of pathetic God would that be?), God must be a supernatural entity, which, by definition, would make him incapable of being studied scientifically.

    I agree that actively teaching atheism is as wrong as actively teaching Hinduism or any other religion. I don't see, however, how keeping God out of science class corresponds to teaching atheism. Denying that God played an active, intelligent role in the origin of species is not denying that he exists or even that he created the universe and its physical laws. It just places limits on what he has done, limits that we have learned about through scientific study.

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  4. big Chuckie - Deity-free explanations of scientific facts are absolutely essential;

    Well, I was drawing a slightly artificial distinction between facts and explanations (theories, if you like). I admit myself to be a bit conflicted on the point. I feel confident, for example, that a scientific explanation for the origin of life will be someday be found, but clearly we don't have one today. It seems unreasonable to me to rule out panspermia, divine intervention, or an other internally coherent explanation till we do have relevant facts - and dishonest to hide the absence of a fully satisfactory natural explanation from students.

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  5. Anonymous4:15 AM

    You aren't saying that an explanation and a scientific theory are the same thing are you? An explanation doesn't need to be supported by any emperical observations or facts. Explanations can be derived from any belief system a person happens to be partial to, including those that run counter to observation. The current US Administration relies heavily on this sort of explanation.

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  6. Lee - You aren't saying that an explanation and a scientific theory are the same thing are you?

    I'm saying they are the same kind of thing. Good explanations fit the facts and lead to new insights - bad ones don't. The scientific ideas (explanations, theories, laws, or what have you) that I really like are simple, explain a vast domain, and powerfully predictive. Some of my favorites: natural selection, continental drift, the laws of thermodynamics, and the atomic hypothesis.

    I tend to use terms like "law", "theory," "explanation," "model" and even "hypothesis," somewhat interchangeable, despite the fact that the atomic "hypothesis" is about as well confirmed as the round Earth hypothesis. The idea behind this possibly eccentric choice is partly historical - those usages are common in science - and partly because I think all should be judged by the same criteria - predictivity, economy, generality, and, most crucially, consistency with the facts.

    The last property is just one of the ways ID fails - nature presents plenty of examples of suboptimal design. It is probably even more important that it fails two of the first three - it fails monumentally to explain the patterns of genetic variation and it predicts nothing except optimal design. It is economical.

    I think it was Albert Szent-Giorgi, the Nobel prize winning biologist who said something like "a good theory leads to new discoveries, but a bad theory just leads to more theories to explain the discrepancies in the the original theory." Come to think of it, I'm not sure we have any good theories of quantum gravity yet.

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