On Supreme Beings, and Such.
Sorry folks—this one’s a bit long.
I have an issue, folks, a serious issue with these Intelligent Design people. My issue with them isn’t ignorant, either: I keep reading their books, and, mostly, their books (Denyse O’Leary’s By Design or by Chance, Geoffrey Simmons’ laughable What Darwin Didn’t Know suck—tautological junk that presupposes a personal god and ignores or dismisses the overwhelming evidence toward the randomness of reality. Intelligent Design is based on a certain principle: because Darwinian Evolution Science contains incompletion and inaccuracies (the source text The Origin of the Species was published in freakin’ 1859, ferchrissake), there must be an Intelligent God behind this entire thing that we collectively refer to as “the universe.” This argument is akin to espousing that because 2+2 does not equal 5, that it must reflexively equal 723; it suggests that because a rational argument is incomplete and perhaps slightly errant, that a ridiculous argument is necessarily its antidote.
Well let me tell you a little something: flaws in a theory do not, and have not, and cannot prove another theory correct. This idea is a logically invalid argument, akin to my saying, “I don’t fully understand jet propulsion, so I should immediately convert to Judaism.” I will, now, put my biases on the floor: I am an unapologetic secular humanist. I’m not an atheist, because atheism is a faith of its own and not really different from other presuppositive faiths. Atheism is firmly entrenched in the business that there is no intelligent god, and hence has its own belief structure supporting that. I’m an agnostic, which differs from atheism in that I possibly allow for the principle of an intelligent god while espousing (quite accurately) that no scientifically testable evidence for that presupposition has ever actually been offered. Basically, agnostics like me are atheists who are still a bit scared of Catholic Hell should we be mistaken.
But here’s why ID, and especially indoctrinating children with it, bugs me (and all true scientists, and all agnostics, and especially all atheists): the scientific community doesn’t demand that subatomic structure or mitochondrial DNA be taught at seminary. Really, we don’t. Every scientific organization that I’ve run across does not actively seek to impose the scientific agenda upon Jesuit theology, on Roman Catholic dogma, or on Christian, Hindu, or Islamic metaphysics in general. Science allows that kind of formulation a certain side of a fence: things assumed on faith are powerful motivational tools for controlling human behavior, but they aren’t science; call it a separate discipline and teach it in a separate classroom. Science proceeds, by its very nature, according to a method; that method asks questions that faith cannot answer: Is your supposition testable? Can that test be repeated? Can, in the face of all this testing, assertions be materially proved or disproved? ID’s logic (that of proving imperfection of theory through critique) can, admittedly, convincingly prove that the internal combustion engine does not run at 100% efficiency on fossil fuels; it cannot possibly, as it tries to do, assert that the same engine might run better on pureed lettuce.
ID can meet none of the established standards of rationality and empiricism, and hence is fundamentally not an empirical discipline. When anyone can introduce a “god quotient” into the language of human science, a manner in which any god, meaning a supernatural force which presupposes, alters, or predicts the forces of astrophysics, geology or biology, that can be measured, examined, and tested—well then, let’s talk. Until then, prehistoric cave myths really ought to stay in the schools privately funded to propagate them.
Science asks some pretty hard questions of Faith: Where is god (or the Designer, or the Creator, or any other paraphrase one likes)? How can god be measured? Is god predictable? Is experimental proof of god repeatable? Faith, as it argues itself science, offers not even hypothetical responses to the inquiries of actual science. The Faith/Intelligent Design/Creationist community offers a purely negative and circumstantial rebuttal: because evolutionary science (which argues random chance) cannot fully explicate at present the origins of the physical universe and biological life, a wholly different explanation (an animal intelligence) must necessarily be the alternative. That dualism is false and ridiculous—it is akin to suggesting that because modern forensics sometimes (or often) fails to solve crimes, that we should use crystal balls to solve them instead. It replaces the newest and best model of procedure with an ancient, pragmatically useless one.
Science, however, allows for the possibility of god; it merely demands a kind of proof that has never been offered by the teleological community. The teleological community, on the other hand, seeks to undermine the presuppositions of science based on…generally nothing, without even the reciprocal courtesy of allowing that there possibly is no god. The community demands that its presuppositions be given equal time in the forum of educational classroom science without a shred of verifiable evidence that any of its presuppositions are true. And that burns me up. Anyone with a paper in the works proving the existence of a higher power without the childish and facile straw man tactic of attacking 146-year-old data from Charles Darwin is free to disagree. Everybody else ought to shut up and do their homework.
posted by JPS at 10/30/2005 03:01:00 PM
9 Comments:
Descartes said it best. It's kinda like betting on roulette, you don't put all of your chips on one number. You spread it around, cover your bases and that way, there are only a few possible ways you could lose.
Well written post. I am not going to try to pick it apart or disagree with you. We'll leave it at "we agree to disagree".
Thank you, NC. I can't ask that everyone agree and appreciate that you at least like the approach that I chose. I've decided to start responding to comments again, a thing which I stopped doing for no good reason that I can remember.
Anybody else have a take?
While I agree with the post, generally, I think you've painted with a rather broad brush, if you carefully re-read your rhetoric (particularly the last paragraph). You seem to suggest that the "theological community" is this sort of murky, monolithic conspiracy of all people of faith to put ID in classrooms. In fact, the activists pushing for it aren't even the majority of evangelicals (while, of course, a majority of evangelicals do support it.) There are quite a few Darwinist theists out there who find the ID stuff pretty out of place in a science classroom. Moreover, you also presuppose the rather odd belief that all people of faith have never thought about the lack of empirical support for a deity: in fact, quite a few people of faith understand that it's all about that, faith. Which of course means that if it's all about faith, the arguments don't really belong in the public sphere. Politics is about coalitions of the willing, and I think your writing (as opposed to your fundamental position) has the potential to alienate the private religionist who remains a public secular humanist.
I'm glad to see you read some books from the people you don't agree with -- it can be a scary proposition because they could be right and Eek!
I think it's a good post, great analogies and this is the blog Jeremy I know and love.
Jason,
I agree with your assessment--the "faith/I.D./Creationist" bit overstates the point and alienates pointlessly. If this were a paper, I would revise according to your suggestion.
A.B.,
Thank you for stopping by, and I especially agree with your take on the "irreducible complexity" argument: suggesting that because we don't understand something that it can't be understood is like a little kid throwing his hands up in the air declaring his math homework to be "impossible." It's an easily frustrated child's view of the world, but sadly the ruling logic for most human beings--magic, and not reaon, governs most discourse.
Moose,
Thank you as always for the visit and the compliment. I'm glad you liked the post. You also make an important point about reading other views in order to reexamine our own orthodoxies. In this instance, I'm trying to be objective, but the arguments these books are putting forth (like saying that the absence of intermediary species disproves evolution, when the fossil record has already produced countless intermediary species) are silly. It's basically an awful lot of "we're too special to have occured by chance," flattery designed to make people feel good and hence agree with the argument. Homey don't play that.
Jeremy,
This is such an interesting topic, and I'm disappointed that no one is willing to argue for the ID point of view. I'd like to ask them what's wrong with believing in God and evolution. I've never been able to get anyone to explain that to me. We grew up attending Catholic school, and Mass every Sunday, and I would describe the role of religion in our lives as pervasive. And yet, no teacher ever tried to teach us the earth was really made in 7 days. We learned evolution in science class, and God in religion class. I wish I understood why other Christians can't live with that approach.
I suppose harping on you for your rhetoric, with one left-handed compliment sort of makes me look like a jerk.
Jeremy, I enjoyed your post.
LS,
I agree that teaching religion has merit, as long as it's addressed as religion--spiritual practices for the betterment of the individual. Religions (as in their congregations and great books) often intuitively grasp things that the methodical method of science can't explain until much later. For instance, science can now tell you that meditative breathing excercises are good for your heart rate, blood pressure, memory, and stress levels, but Hindu mystics had that figured out 7,000 years ago. As a researcher, I am not out to disprove God; I cannot do that, by the very definitions "unknown" and "unknowable" that Acquinas used in reference to God.
Certain Christians, in this specific context (disguising theology as empiricism) are attempting to muddy the waters and hence undermine science's claim to truth. There is nothing innocent about this, and I applaud the religious people who oppose teaching ID as science while allowing for it to be taught as theology. It may be true, for all I know, but it doesn't fit the bill of disciplines only concerned with what is knowable.
A Bishop of the Vatican just came out today and announced that the church and science can coexist. The church surely can't rule out science, and he rightfully points to Copernicus as the most obvious example. He also makes a wonderful point that science surely could look to religion for some ideas on how to handle moral issues such as cloning.
I with we had something like Francis Bacon wrote about in his utopian piece, the name of which escapes me now. He had a board of "philosophers" that weighed the long-term good and bad of science, and only then chose whether to allow it to be furthered or not.
Then again, who'se to say what's good and bad.
Anyway, a wonderfully thought-provoking post that will, or at least should, make each of us not only question the ground we stand upon regarding this issue, but also solidify that very ground before we go claiming everyone else is on quicksand.
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