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Cans of worms

This post is no doubt going to open various cans of worms, but things have been a bit quiet here at W4 lately, so a few cans of worms may not do much harm.

Ed Feser recently put up this brief post about Frank Beckwith and Intelligent Design. (See also here.) In reading some responses to a link to Feser elsewhere (on Facebook, to be specific), I was struck and puzzled by a certain approach to this topic. Here's how the response goes, approximately: "The courts were right to ban the teaching of intelligent design in science classes, because ID is by definition not science [insert your favorite demarcationist riff here], so it's a violation of contract, or fraudulent, or academic malpractice, to teach ID in a science class. There would be no problem if it were taught in a class labeled 'Metaphysics' instead." (These statements remind me of this article in First Things by Robert T. Miller from 2006.)

When people say these kinds of things in this context, they are ignoring something. (Miller, to be fair, does a bit better, but he does seem to me to fudge somewhat on the matter.)

It is not unconstitutional to teach in Course A content that should more properly be taught in Course B.

Now, full disclosure--I think all this demarcationist talk is misguided (there goes one can of worms). So I don't grant the premises of the criticism of ID as "metaphysics rather than science" anyway. But even if one did grant them, why in the world is all this high-falutin' talk about mislabeling classes and metaphysics being brought up in the context of a constitutional argument? Schools and teachers teach subject matter of dubious relevance in classes funded by public monies all the time. Has anyone noticed the prevalence of bare-faced political advocacy in humanities classes for the past several decades? We can understandably object to such proceedings, but there's nothing unconstitutional about them.

It wouldn't be an "establishment of religion" to teach metaphysics in science class even if the philosophers who try to make this demarcation were right. This shouldn't need to be said, but since this "ID should be called metaphysics" trope has become increasingly common, especially among, I'm sorry to say, Catholic ID-haters (there goes another can of worms), it gets brought out and proudly displayed whenever someone starts talking about whether ID should be able to be taught in public schools. But in that context, it's just a change of subject.

Comments (126)

What experimental result(s) could show that ID was false? The "you mislabeled courses first" argument is not terribly compelling.

I think it's important to remember that the Popperian model of scientific inquiry definitely has its limitations. By the same token I might ask, "What experimental results could show the committed Darwinist that Darwinism is false?" In my opinion Popper's greatest insight concerned an approach and an attitude to scientific inquiry, not a formal epistemological structure. The advocate of a theory must be willing to admit disconfirmation rather than resorting to ad hoc theory saves, but, contra Popper, confirmation and disconfirmation always come in degrees, so speaking of a theory as "falsified," full stop, can be confusing and misleading.

I can think of experimental results that would _tend to disconfirm_ the theory of intelligent design. For example, if the underlying biological structures were far, far simpler than they are and did not contain elaborate coding, this would tend to disconfirm the theory by removing evidence for it.

I agree with you, Lydia.

I'm not even going to start, because it would turn into a ridiculously long reply, so I'll leave it with the sentence above (and this one).

Steve N., I shd. probably add that the "unfalsifiability" question doesn't settle the constitutional question, either. One of the things that some people don't like about ID is the failure to identify the designer. Even if we allow the rather rarefied notions of "establishment of religion" (which I think the founders would not have recognize) that have become entrenched in jurisprudence, teaching that there is evidence that someone--possibly a finite being--designed life on earth is hardly a matter of establishing religion. Saying that the theory is unfalsifiable or is held in an unfalsifiable way doesn't make teaching evidence for the theory a religious establishment either. Many scientific theories, historical theories, etc., can, unfortunately, be held in an unfalsifiable way.

Here's how the response goes, approximately: "The courts were right to ban the teaching of intelligent design in science classes, because ID is by definition not science [insert your favorite demarcationist riff here], so it's a violation of contract, or fraudulent, or academic malpractice, to teach ID in a science class. There would be no problem if it were taught in a class labeled 'Metaphysics' instead."

The problem with that argument is that you can't do science - any science - without metaphysics. If your metaphysics is wrong, your science will be wrong.

Yes, Jeff, I think that's true. And for that matter, Catholics in particular should see that. I myself am inclined to do science with a fairly "lean" metaphysics, and a largely empirically driven metaphysics--I think that's part of what makes me more of a modern than a Thomist. But to try to make some kind of sharp, never-the-twain-shall-meet distinction is pretty obviously folly.

In addition to getting the metaphysics right, my position is that science, as a knowledge discipline, must necessarily be informed by other knowledge disciplines. If science were to tell our progeny some 1,000 years down the road that there were no earthquake in San Francisco in 1906, then it would need to be corrected by history.

Both theology and history are knowledge disciplines. The Christian must understand science with respect to both of these. When it comes to origins, especially, there is no possibility of science legitimately excluding what is known from revelation: creation ex nihilo, the fact of monogenism (Humani Generis), the creation of the first woman from the rib of the first man (Arcanum Divinae), the historicity of Genesis 1-3 (PBC 1909), etc.

That doesn't necessarily translate into a 24/7 creation week and a 6,000 year old planet, but it doesn't exclude the possibility, while it does exclude macro-evolution with respect to human beings.

Why in the world is all this high-falutin' talk about mislabeling classes and metaphysics being brought up in the context of a constitutional argument?

This seems to be a very distinct question from those that go to the merits of ID itself. The best answer to why there is arguably a constitutional dimension to this question is that the courts seem to regard ID as religion. Modern jurisprudence regards religion as essentially improper for teaching in public schools. Therefore, religion (ID) can't constitutionally be taught in a public school, especially a public-school class that presents curricular material as truth for uncritical consumption (science). (And I think we could agree that even if this is not what science actually is, it's more or less how science is presented to grade schoolers.)

Now, that legal argument is probably bunk. But that, more or less, is the result you get under prevailing American constitutional jurisprudence (itself largely bunk). I don't see that Jeff's argument about the actual nature of ID as metaphysics instead of science really tells us much about the propriety of the legal conclusion. This is the case if for no other reason than that the legal conclusion is predicated on the law's own odd collection of presuppositions (see above).

I don't see that Jeff's argument about the actual nature of ID as metaphysics instead of science really tells us much about the propriety of the legal conclusion.

It doesn't. IMO the whole corpus of church-state jurisprudence needs to be peeled back 150 years or more.

I'm not sure it's the best route to invoke demarcation worries to license the conclusion that ID is sciency enough for science class. The intuitions that motivate the demarcation problem are effectively skeptical ones. We generate the demarcation problem not because we do not know what's science and what's not. No one seriously doubts we know what counts as science except in the philosophy room. We know what counts as a science, otherwise we could not successfully generate pre-theoretical counterexamples to virtually any proposed analysis. What counts as science is well treated as an empirical question, as Kuhn observes. Everything we call science has practitioners engaged in normal science. IDers are not engaged in normal science. But even if we insist on treating this as a philosophical problem (really, as though first philosophy might reveal some platonic idea of science) there are paradigmatic non-sciences and ID is among them. This is consistent with claiming that we can generate some sort of Quinean sorites with physics on one end of the series (the clear cut science) and ID near enough to the other.

the courts seem to regard ID as religion

Which is itself largely bunk, and which the courts have by no means adequately argued. Also, that this "is religion" does not follow from any particular legal premise. It has supposedly been a "finding"--that is to say, a factual finding--in rulings on specific cases. I suppose one of the points I'm making is that to call it "metaphysics" is to say nothing about its being religion. Yet I've seen people bring up the "metaphysics" point as though it somehow supported the court's ruling on constitutionality. It really doesn't support that ruling at all.

I'm not sure it's the best route to invoke demarcation worries to license the conclusion that ID is sciency enough for science class.

As far as I know, I didn't do that.

there are paradigmatic non-sciences and ID is among them.

Don't get me started on the ways in which certain things presently called "science" are being conducted like paradigmatic non-sciences. I fear not all members of my audience would appreciate my examples. My reluctant conclusion is that increasingly the way that the ordinary man is told to use the term "science" is a matter of politics and power over the media rather than a matter of anything with reasonable underpinnings. And when the ordinary man rebels against what he's told about term usage (as he sometimes does) the chattering classes use, wherever they can, the sheer power of the courts to slap him down.

The "ID is religion so it can't be taught in public schools" argument goes out the window if they are going to allow ID to be taught in a metaphysics class.

If it can't be taught in school because it violates the constitution - how can you then allow it in a differently named class?

Titus: Modern jurisprudence regards religion as essentially improper for teaching in public schools.

Jeff: IMO the whole corpus of church-state jurisprudence needs to be peeled back 150 years or more.

Jeff, I would agree with that. The idea that a state that is founded on Christian ideals should erect a barrier to teaching religion in the monopolistic schools of the state is pure stupidity. It is a false idea of what freedom of religion really means, and it _certainly_ is a false idea of education.

Titus, you mean, of course, any religion other than the secular humanistic religion - THAT religion can and must be taught in the schools as if it were "science" or just plain "fact". If only the judicial arena as a whole weren't becoming an evil dictatorship (by biased proponents of the secular religion), we might be able to make headway on reversing this. As it is, I don't see any prospect, unless someone starts several law schools that reject secularism outright and start turning out future judges with both the jurisprudence to run rings around their secular opponents, and a firm grounding in natural law. Got a couple hundred million dollars and a couple dozen good law professors hidden?

As it is, I don't see any prospect, unless someone starts several law schools that reject secularism outright and start turning out future judges with both the jurisprudence to run rings around their secular opponents, and a firm grounding in natural law.

Who would be routinely refused confirmation by the Senate and not appointed to the federal courts by any President because they would be refused confirmation. But now I'm threadjacking my own thread. :-)

I really like what I'm seeing here.

As for ID not being science (I wouldn't know) -- that's fine. But you can add Biology, Botany, Economics, etc to your list of not-quite-sciences. (Maybe Lydia didn't want to go there, but I'm easy. : )

I subscribe to a definition of science (if we need a definition) that I heard Michael Behe give. (This is from memory.) Science is the vigorous attempt to make important and true statements about the physical world.

By the same token I might ask, "What experimental results could show the committed Darwinist that Darwinism is false?"

quite a few.

1. DNA. All living things use the same 'alphabet' and each act of reproduction basically modifies the same set of letters (just as you always draw English letters from the bag in a game of Scrabble). This is consistent with the prediction/conclusion that all living things share common descent. There's debate about whether or not you could have other molecules in place of DNA so we don't know if alien life would or wouldn't use DNA. But suppose if instead of all living things sharing DNA, each species had its own type of 'alphabet system'. That would probably would have been fatal to Darwinian theory.

2. Darwinian timelines can of course be disproven. Finding a human skeleton inside a T-Rex's stomach, for example. Of course evolution could be true but the timelines could be wrong (species B may not have evolved from species A, but both might have evolved nonetheless) but finding all or most timelines being refuted by future finds would demolish the theory's merit quite a bit.

3. Common descent could also be disproven by finding evidence that all present species existed in the past. If humans roamed with the dinosaurs, if all mammels existed (albeit as a tiny minority) hundreds of millions of years ago then there's nothing that evolved.

4. If there's some stop to the amount of genetic variation that can be generated by regular reproduction, that would prove quite problematic to Darwinian theory. If selective breeding can make Poodles, Irish Setters and Great Danes out of the wolf but there's some barrier to how far variation could go even with an infinite number of generations then Darwinian theory would be in trouble since it asserts that you get new species from old species. If you could prove, say, that while reproduction with variation could create a huge array of different breeds of dogs, it could never produce a dog that walked on two legs then evolution would have an issue.

And many, many more....

Of course you might object that should something like the above happen, Darwin would still be defended. A major theory is unlikely to be taken out by a single experimental result. Every now and then, for example, there are hints that some things in the universe might be traveling faster than light....that alone is not sufficient for Einstein to get tossed overboard.


I can think of experimental results that would _tend to disconfirm_ the theory of intelligent design. For example, if the underlying biological structures were far, far simpler than they are and did not contain elaborate coding, this would tend to disconfirm the theory by removing evidence for it.

This is not an experiment but an alternative universe. You already know biological systems are complex. It wasn't known beforehand that the carrier of genetic information would be shared accross all known living things. It wasn't known that to date no evidence of co-existence of all species would be found in the fossil record.

And it wouldn't really refute ID if you think about it. Why couldn't an intelligent designer opt to make a complex system out of many simple systems?

ID, I think, though, refuses to even allow itself to be drawn into experimentation. For example, it refuses to define intelligence nor design. It simply asserts that were there's complexity there's intelligent design. An acid test I'd like to give IDers, if they were really about science, would be to submit several complex systems to them...some created by intelligent people for purposes of the test and others created by non-intelligent systems and ask them to apply their theory and tell us which systems were intelligently designed and which were non-intelligently designed. This, though, is the problem. ID offers no tools, not even ideas for how to really test its 'theory'. A system is 'intelligently designed' if you want it to be and if your religion implies that it is then tada you have intelligent design.

In principle, I don't see why ID couldn't be taught. Nor do I have a knee-jerk Catholic hate of ID. Nevertheless, just from talking to neuroscience and biology majors, it doesn't sound like arguments from irreducible complexity hold water. Structure can change radically from just a few genetic alterations; the assumption of gradual shift that the arguments rely on is mistaken. On top of that, I'm doubtful that laymen have adequate knowledge to critique the theory, unlike many of the social "sciences" or humanities. So why bring it in? There are certainly easier ways to go from an apologetic standpoint - forget the argument from physical constants; how about an argument from the fact that there are natural laws at all? I guess part of the issue there is that it requires you to say that physical objects causal properties are irreducible to their extensional properties, thus requiring a further explanation, but that seems to me obvious... (end aside)

I might add that most ID theorists admit common decent. Now common decent (CD) is not proof of Darwinism (D), but it sure seems like some evidence for it against special creation (SC) because

Pr(CD/D) > Pr(CD/SC).

So Darwinism does have some backing. Also, monogenesis is not Catholic doctrine; HG gives it presumption, but only says it would be difficult to see how to reconcile polygenesis with the creation account, not impossible.

If the question of whether objects are designed intelligently or come into being without being intelligently designed is not a question that can in principle ever be be explored scientifically, that's a monumental indictment of the scientific method. You would think that the scientific materialists who say that would be more embarrassed and would not the next day contradict themselves by arrogantly asserting that anything worth knowing falls within the purview of science. Maybe the science of psychology can shed light on their obvious lack of emotional maturity.

btw it seems to me that metaphysics per se will only get us so far in the area of intelligent design. If intelligent design is not an area for science (information theory, perhaps?) I don't know what is.

John H.

I think quite often the argument over ID, evolution falls into the either or fallacy. If some piece of evidence supports evolution, then it undercuts ID or vice versa. In reality, though, the number of possible theories is almost infinite. If evolution is somehow disproven, that doesn't mean ID walks into the #1 spot. Theories must stand or fall on their own.

So Evolution does predict common descent. If common descent is disproven then evolution is in deep trouble and Lydia's assertion that no possible experiment could demonstrate Darwin wrong is itself proven wrong. Yes a lot of flavors of ID would also go down the tubes if common descent is disproven but that's neither here nor there if your goal is to make true statements about the world.

[BTW, it would depend on how you disprove CD. Consider a sci-fi case where you have a planet filled with animals who share CD but then a huge Ark like ship crashes filled with alien life forms. Millions of years later the life on that planet may be a mix of CD species, alien CD species and possibly combinations of the two. So it really depends on how CD is disproven]


Poly vs mono genesis is very important because it is pretty clear that there's great evidence for polygensis. Again this is predictable by the theory of evolution and the evidence confirms it. If we found real evidence that all species existed at the same time long, long ago then evolution would be off the table as nothing really evolved except maybe the proportion of total life forms that various species made over time. What does ID say? Well ID says nothing. It doesn't tell us if all life forms were designed a the same time or over a long period of time. It doesn't tell us how we can tell the difference between life forms that 'evolved naturally' versus those that were designed. Where are the testable statements? There are none. A big tent works for politics sometimes but not for truth. The world can't be 6,000 yrs old and 6 billion at the same time.

All interesting comments, John H., though I don't agree with all of them. (I'm not Catholic. I would certainly say that polygenesis is inconsistent with orthodox Christian doctrine. If Catholics think they can get away with believing in polygenesis, I'll leave it to their fellow Catholics to tell them otherwise.)

Whether or not laymen are capable of critiquing an argument doesn't really seem to me to be to the point. I think that the best thing is for the people to decide whose job it is to decide whether there is sufficient reason to take ID seriously to teach it. I take it that you and I are in agreement that the constitutional argument blocking it _in principle_ from being taught in public schools is bunk. Now, given that, the obvious people to make the decision are the principals and teachers of the individual schools. Beyond that, we know that at the K-12 level there are all these school boards and even state levels at which "standards" are set and curriculum stipulated, topics to be covered stipulated. I'm not sure that's always a good idea, though at least the school board level is local. But given that such boards and committees exist, it seems to me that they are willy-nilly tasked with deciding on a variety of academic subjects what views are worthwhile to present to students--at least for the students' consideration. They may be laymen, but they have to do a lot of non-laymen's work, and that some of this work will fall in the sciences and on controversial subjects is unavoidable. So if they think that ID has enough going for it that students should at least be presented with that side of the argument, I think they should be left to go for it.

There's no point in saying, "Laymen can't decide on these things, so we should always block any view alternative to the majority view from the classroom." Sometimes that might block kookery, but sometimes the majority view might be maintained for incorrect reasons, and so it's fine for there to be a mechanism in place that at least _might_ admit minority views to the classroom.

As far as apologetics, I think the question has to be what is true. If ID arguments are good arguments, then we should want to know that. Saying, "Hey, there are other arguments that can be used for apologetic purposes, so let's not bother" is an entirely pragmatic consideration. For that matter, I don't know if you're aware of this, but I have a co-written argument in _Mind_ dissenting from the fine-tuning argument on technical grounds. So actually, in my view (admittedly a layman's view on the biology side), the biological argument is _better_ than the fine-tuning of constants argument. All this just has to be hashed out in the hurly-burly of vigorous and open debate. I don't think we should ditch the biology arguments because of a combination of a) "They're really unpopular with mainstream scientists" and b) "We have other arguments anyway." This should just be about getting it right.

Steve P

If the question of whether objects are designed intelligently or come into being without being intelligently designed is not a question that can in principle ever be be explored scientifically, that's a monumental indictment of the scientific method.

I don't think that's the problem. Let's say some type of bacteria suddenly starts showing up that is resists drugs that previously worked against it. I propose that there's a way to tell whether this new bacteria is just a naturally evolved problem or whether it was purposefully altered genetically by people (aka 'intellient designers'). I doubt the scientific community would say "that's not science", it would say "tell us what this is and let's see if its logical and works".

The question then isn't whether this can in principle be explored scientifically but has it been explored scientifically by the crew that calls itself advocates for 'intelligent design'?

Jeff,

Both theology and history are knowledge disciplines. The Christian must understand science with respect to both of these. When it comes to origins, especially, there is no possibility of science legitimately excluding what is known from revelation: creation ex nihilo, the fact of monogenism (Humani Generis), the creation of the first woman from the rib of the first man (Arcanum Divinae), the historicity of Genesis 1-3 (PBC 1909), etc.

That doesn't necessarily translate into a 24/7 creation week and a 6,000 year old planet, but it doesn't exclude the possibility, while it does exclude macro-evolution with respect to human beings.

I challenged Feser and other anti-ID Catholics on a similar point: how can you take the resurrection as fact, but dismiss Genesis? The resurrection is as much a gross violation of secular, materialistic conceptions of how the world works as Genesis. It should be even more controversial since it is not only central to our shared religion in a way that Genesis arguably isn't, but also because it happened relatively recently with a lot of witnesses to the death of Jesus.

**The arguments about how macro evolution can work within God's framework of providence strike me as nothing more than a lot of philosophical hemming and haw and hand-waiving to distract from the fact that the philosopher is embarrassed to find that if he takes his (ostensible) side seriously, he'll become a target of ridicule among other intellectuals.

First I agree that 'mislabeling' is not in itself a big issue. Let's take the academic culture wars off the table and work with a less caustic example. Literature includes a lot of history and history includes literature. Studying ancient Greek history no doubt will make use of Ancient Greek literature. Likewise studying Greek literature like Homer entails at least some history lessons. It's quite possible a teacher or textbook in one subject might put too much of the other. IMO this would not make much of a case except in terms of getting the teacher back on track.

I disagree that the establishment issue isn't the problem. The Founders would certainly recognize this as they were the ones who wrote it into the Bill of Rights! Granted if you raised them from the dead today you'd have to give them a briefing before you could ask their opinion. You'd have to note that public schools are the norm today, they weren't then. You'd have to note that basically the post-Civil War amendments made the Bill of Rights apply to state and local governments which it didn't in their days. Given this they wouldn't be stumped by the question. In their day states established religion directly. A king or legislature would establish a religion by decree and law putting non-believers at various states of disadvantage that ranged from modest (a slight tax to support a state church) to quite dire (exile or death). They certainly wouldn't find it hard to believe that with direct establishment taken off the table it might be snuck in via the 'back door' by calling it something else (like 'science education'). And it certainly isn't hard to make the case that ID is really just a back door for religion.

As for shuffling off ID to philosophy, metaphysics, theology etc..... I'm skeptical it could make it there either. It's basically a religion that 'apologizes' for itself by cloaking itself in science. Those fields do not see it as their job to contradict science but they don't see their work as simply developing theories for scientific testing. ID probably wouldn't be welcome there, esp. not at the pre-college level where you're not going to find many courses in philosophy or metaphysics but if you do they would be broad introductions to the subject and not minute niche topics. "Comparative religion" might work but then ID is a pretty minor religion. If you give it a week of 'air time' in a HS course then Scientology should get at least three. At that scale a major faith like Christianity wouldn't be able to be fitted into an academic year.

And it certainly isn't hard to make the case that ID is really just a back door for religion.

Only in Leiter-world is it not hard. And only in a world where this is all about secret, sinister motives and where, in fact, the culture wars most certainly have not been taken off the table.

Non responsive to the arguments at hand.

The question then isn't whether this can in principle be explored scientifically but has it been explored scientifically by the crew that calls itself advocates for 'intelligent design'?

Nonsense, Boonton. According to your crowd (and it is indeed your crowd; I have ample reason in the past to regard you as a hostile commentator), the entire _question_ of whether life was intelligently designed is beyond the pale, to raise it and present arguments on both sides is an "establishment of religion" and must not be done in the public schools, it is by definition not science. I could go blind reading all the words that have been written to this effect. It certainly isn't simply a matter of getting a different "crew" to make the arguments and to examine them fairly. It's a matter of boycotting the entire issue and getting the courts to tell the public schools that it isn't isn't isn't isn't science and that they will be beggared by lawsuits and court-ordered to stop if they so much as discuss the issue in science class in anything approaching a cool tone. Ridicule, berating, and hysterical ID-bashing might be permitted.

Click my name for more worms.

According to your crowd (and it is indeed your crowd; I have ample reason in the past to regard you as a hostile commentator), the entire _question_ of whether life was intelligently designed is beyond the pale, to raise it and present arguments on both sides is an "establishment of religion" and must not be done in the public schools

Actually I gave you an example where 'my crowd' would be quite happy to entertain a test that could tell whether a life form was 'intelligently designed' or nonintelligently designed.

But yea rolling out a theory in elementary and secondary schools is pretty suspect. These aren't really forums for scientific discovery but forums to introduce people to the field. Cutting edge theories, new ideas, etc. are usually published and debated at higher levels such as journals, conferences, and so on. You can say IDers have been unfairly shut out there but that's their own problem, the solution isn't to open the doors of the elementary schools to what are essentially crank theories. Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, String theory etc. didn't 'roll out' in elementary schools or high schools. Even if they meet with some unfair (as opposed to fair) resistance there's a reason NOT to do things that way.

only in a world where this is all about secret, sinister motives and where,

Who said anything about secret motives? IDers and their supporters are quite explicit about their motives. They believe that the established scientific theory leads to conclusions that contradict their religion and ID is a way to square that circle and establish their faith as a 'scientific theory' when in fact it is not.

More to the point, no court case has ruled ever that no theory that purports to determine whether or not something was the result of design or the result of something else may never be taught as science. Such theories could clearly be developed in the fields of information science, military research (is germ X the product of genetic engineering or not?), and a host of other areas.

The question isn't whether some hypothetical theory could be developed that does what ID claims to do, the question is what is the nature of the theory that is presented in the real world at this time as ID. And that is not science, not a testable theory. Sorry.

Now if you want to claim victimization because you think a real ID theory would be unfairly deemed not worth considering.... well you're getting ahead of yourself. A lot of potential ideas would find a very steep road to acceptance by the present day scientific community (examples, faster than light travel, practical time machines, rejecting thermodynamics, the conservation of mass/energy). Life is short, before worrying too much about whether or not its fair to give such a steep road to accepting a crank idea one should actually come up with a crank idea that's worthy of serious consideration.

As an aside, what exactly is the need for ID as a scientific theory? From a 'metaphysical' POV it seems to be trying to 'prove' God by dividing the world into designed things and undesigned things (i.e. an ameoba is designed but the mountain valley is the product of geological forces). From a theological POV this seems pretty hazardous. How do undesigned things exist in a universe that's supposedly created by an infinite God who created everything? If undesigned things can't exist then there's no 'test' between designed and not-designed. If everything is designed at some level, then ID isn't refuting Darwin in any respect (the 'random chance' of Darwinism is just part of the design anyway). If ID doesn't tell us anything about what is or isn't designed then does it tell us anything about the designer that philosophy, theology and other fields don't do better? Not really, IDers are proud of saying their theory says nothing about the designer....it could be a Greek God, Hindu Gods, Christian God....or a spaceship with a little green man. So ID tells us nothing about science, nothing about philosophy/theology. What exactly is it then and what makes it worthy of inclusion anywhere?

the question is what is the nature of the theory that is presented in the real world at this time as ID

No, the question is whether the theory in question concerns the origin of life or of life forms or biological systems at a time when no human agent could have been the designer and when, therefore, we would have to contemplate either God or some extraterrestrial agent.

You're pretty disingenuous, Boonton. You know quite well that the only reason your example (antibiotic-resistant bacteria) would be considered "within the pale" is a religious reason--on your side. Namely, that the designer in that case could plausibly be a human being. Because the prior probability for "ordinary" agents is a good deal lower in the cases ID-ers wish to discuss, their theories are ruled not simply false or experimental or even poor science but _non_-science, religion, and unconstitutional to teach.

You might as well drop the pretense that this is simply about the strength of the theories. If it were, "your side" would be content to a) call ID "poor science" and b) let teachers, principals, and school boards decide for themselves whether it is or isn't a "crank theory" rather than fleeing to your buddies in the courts to get a double-lock put on the question by way of a "constitutional" ruling.

I don't imagine you'd try to get it declared unconstitutional if string theory were taught in some public high school. Of course not, even if you might think it too advanced and speculative for the educational level. Of course not. You'd admit that that was the educators' decision to make and didn't have beans to do with the Constitution of the United States.

By the way, my local large state university tries to teach nursing students to take seriously Eastern approaches to "medicine." These are undeniably crank theories and also could be argued to have a religious Eastern background. I'm not holding my breath for the ACLU lawsuit.

You're pretty disingenuous, Boonton. You know quite well that the only reason your example (antibiotic-resistant bacteria) would be considered "within the pale" is a religious reason--on your side.

Actually you start small. We know that different bacteria arise naturally, we also know they can be partially 'designed' in a lab. If you're trying to develop a theory of design the logical place to start would be to see if you can detect stuff you know is either designed or not designed. Otherwise you're just doing a 'he said she said'....

More to the point, YOU GUYS HAVE NO TEST! There's nothing to evaluate whether its a bacteria in a lab or the origin of life on earth or anywhere else. ID amounts to a shrug. Is it really complicated? Yea. Then it was designed!

I don't imagine you'd try to get it declared unconstitutional if string theory were taught in some public high school.

Nope I wouldn't because there's a difference between ID and simply a scientific theory that may turn out to be wrong or flawed. You said it yourself, the purpose of ID is to try to force one to 'contemplate God'. The problem is that it's nothing else. As I asked in my previous post, philosophy has thousands of years of history and does a much better job asking one to 'contemplate God' than ID. I'm not seeing any need for a wannabe scientist play amateur philosopher when there's plenty of real and serious philosophy available to study. Does ID actually say anything about life on earth, the alleged designer, the difference between stuff the designer designed or and stuff he/she/it/they didn't? If it does then tell us what it is. If it doesn't then where is the actual science? Manufacturing a fake theory to ease the theological angst of a minority of Christians who don't like the real scientific theories is simply not mere 'bad science' but a backdoor establishment of religion.

You said it yourself, the purpose of ID is to try to force one to 'contemplate God'.

No, I said that in fact the options are more limited so that in fact one would have to contemplate some non-ordinary designer such as God or extraterrestrials. If that's the way the evidence goes, suck it up. That doesn't make teaching the evidence some secret religious plot. Perhaps public schools should also not teach the Big Bang because the kalam cosmological argument can make use of the Big Bang to argue for a divine origin of the universe!

As I said in an online essay (http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2008/04/18/evolution-101/)

"In fact, the dispute [about evolution] can most accurately be summed up by saying: It's all about God.

That is, if you can be sure there is no miracle-working God, then something like Darwinian evolution must be correct. But if there is even a chance that such a God exists, then basic intellectual integrity demands that you take seriously the criticisms directed against Darwinism."

The anti-anti-Darwinians rarely acknowledge that things are fundamentally so simple, except inadvertently, when they become exasperated and say things like "Manufacturing a fake theory to ease the theological angst of a minority of Christians who don't like the real scientific theories is simply not mere 'bad science' but a backdoor establishment of religion."

Lydia's argument seems to amount to this:

ID critics don't like a scientific theory that seems to lend credible support to the idea that God may exist.

Charges that ID is not a valid scientific theory cannot be trusted since no theory that opens the door to God would ever get a fair chance in the scientific community.


Only problem is that this is false. In Physics the "Fine Tuned Universe" concept is seriously considered (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_Universe). And while it doesn't require God it is a lot more honest about where it may be going than IDers coy 'it could be God, Thor or a UFO' concept of a designer. (And to boot it concerns a era deeper in the past than either the origin of humans on earth or life on earth).

By the way, my local large state university tries to teach nursing students to take seriously Eastern approaches to "medicine."

This can't really be evaluated without more details but the two areas of Eastern medicine I'm aware are being taken seriously are herbal medicine and accupuncture. While the theories behind these ('energy flows' and such) may be crank there is serious evidence that there are useful elements to them. On top of that you have the complicating factor that medicine is a practical science that can't ignore the psychological well beign of the patient.

Allan

That is, if you can be sure there is no miracle-working God, then something like Darwinian evolution must be correct. But if there is even a chance that such a God exists, then basic intellectual integrity demands that you take seriously the criticisms directed against Darwinism."

Two problems:

1. A miracle working God can just as easily create a universe where the workings of so-called 'chance' produce life and humans and lots of other things. Darwinism then is only a problem for a subset of beliefs about God, not about God himself. If you believe things had to happen according to a particular pattern X, then Darwinism may be a problem for you if X can't be squared with it.

Notice the either or fallacy at play here. Either God or Atheism. Evolution must mean atheism, we don't want atheism therefore ID must be right. Science doesn't choose its theories as resolution to non-scientific problems (although I'll grant you that individual scientists will see their non-scientific beliefs influence their hunches, prejudices and POV in science). New theories in science supplant old theories not by 'either or' reasoning but because they address the facts better. Einstein didn't say "it's either me or Newton", he said "this explains things that Newton can't". ID, simply, does not do this.

This is why people like Allan and Lydia refuse to defend ID on the science. When asked to defend ID they end up, always, defending belief in God. Pretty interesting for a theory that claims to say nothing about God.

2. As such you give the game away. ID is a theory not to make true statements about the world but to help a minority out of some theological binds they are in. Darwinism wasn't developed in order to figure out how to not believe in God and belief or disbelief in God is not required to evaluate Darwin's theory. But ID was manufactured not to address any deficiencies in the scientific theory but to address perceived issues in some people's theology. If ID is the best you think theology has to offer then religion might as well be ditched entirely. But maybe if you stop trying to squeeze your theology from the bioglogy text and actually look at real philosophy and theology you'd see how childish ID really is.

ID critics don't like a scientific theory that seems to lend credible support to the idea that God may exist.

Well, you don't. When I point out that the reason ID is supposed to be "unconstitutional" is because *as a matter of evidential fact* it would tend to lend support to a theistic conclusion, you play "gotcha" and say, "You said it yourself, it's supposed to force a theistic conclusion." Now, here's a neat game: Start with the premise that if supporters of a theory say that it in fact tends to lend support to a theistic conclusion, and especially if (gasp!) their _motives_ for being interested in the theory have something to do with this fact, then the teaching of the theory in the public schools _is religion_ and not science. Next, having made this definitional move, triumphantly declare that there is no scientific evidence for the existence of God!

Charges that ID is not a valid scientific theory cannot be trusted since no theory that opens the door to God would ever get a fair chance in the scientific community.

Actually, I didn't say that. I said that if you were honestly merely talking about the strength or weakness of the theory, you would conclude from the claim that it "isn't a valid theory" that it is simply bad science and would try to counteract it as such rather than trying to get it ruled unconstitutional so that it is no longer left to the discretion of school boards whether or not to teach students the arguments on both sides of the issue. This is what you would presumably do if some school board tried to include cold fusion in the curriculum.

It's an interesting question as to why fine-tuning is taken more seriously than ID. But here's a challenge for you, Boonton: Suggest to some of your friends that the fine-tuning argument, including the possibility of intelligent design as a conclusion, be taught in a public high school physics class or even that the Dover school board put it into the educational standards that this topic should be covered in this way. Do you think that would survive a court challenge claiming that it was unconstitutional?

Actually, I should correct that phrasing--I should say it's an interesting question as to why fine-tuning is taken more seriously than other, biological ID arguments. Of course, the FTA is one of several different ID arguments, as ID proponents themselves will tell you.

Another thing: For leftists and atheists (two groups that largely, but not entirely, coincide), Darwinian evolution serves as a shibboleth, that is, a means of distinguishing friend from foe. The overwhelming majority of leftists believe in evolution, therefore opposition to evolution is a nearly-certain indicator of being an enemy of the left.

This being so, opposition to Darwinism is, for the leftist, emotionally indistinguishable from opposition to leftism. And as "everybody knows," opponents of the left are incurably wicked.

Quite right, Alan. Hence phrases like "Texas Taliban." Nobody, but nobody who is a serious leftist treats this as a matter of harmless crankery, as he would treat it if he found that someone accepted some obscure and marginal scientific theory. Indeed, I would be willing to bet that if someone in the Leiter camp discovered that an acquaintance (a fellow leftist) was a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, he would treat _that_ as a matter of harmless crankery while continuing to regard ID as a Threat to the Nation.

Boonton:

"New theories in science supplant old theories not by 'either or' reasoning but because they address the facts better"

Darwinism only fits the facts better on the assumption of naturalism (i.e, functional atheism). What is your proof that naturalism is true? And if you can't prove a universal negative, then why do you choose to assume naturalism rather than remain open to the possibility that God acted?

And if you are a theist, why do you choose to reject the Bible when it says God was responsible?

Beckwith assumes for all of his arguments that ID is real science, that it is taught in some college somewhere, and therefore there is something that could be taught.

This is called "begging the question," when one assumes the validity of the argument one is trying to prove (or claiming to be trying to prove).

ID is religion. It doesn't belong in public schools as a "this is something you should believe." It may be discussed in social studies, I think, as a political and religious movement.

But then, a lot of people seem to fail to understand how something that sounds sciency can fail to be science, and why there is a difference between teaching religious dogma and teaching about religious dogma.

Teaching ID as anything other than an interesting religious belief would be teaching it as dogma.

Especially, many of us Christians are offended that so many assume that ID advocates or creationists have the truth about evolution and creation. So we are offended that anyone would propose, for example, to teach against Mormon doctrine, Methodist doctrine, Catholic doctrine, Presbyterian doctrine, Episcopalian doctrine, Disciples of Christ doctrine, and the doctrines of all major Christian sects, to claim that ID is anything other than a cultish belief.

You might as well drop the pretense that this is simply about the strength of the theories. If it were, "your side" would be content to a) call ID "poor science" and b) let teachers, principals, and school boards decide for themselves whether it is or isn't a "crank theory" rather than fleeing to your buddies in the courts to get a double-lock put on the question by way of a "constitutional" ruling.

We don't allow such decisions to be made by teachers, principals and school boards in most other endeavors. We don't allow the school board in Temple, Texas, to disallow Shakespeare from English because they find it "elitist." We don't allow teachers to refuse to teach calculus in math because they find it "too intellectual." We don't allow social studies departments to teach history according only to Howard Zinn, nor revisionist history according to the religionist David Barton.

Disciplines have standards. In biology, experiment and observation count for a lot. We no longer teach that sperm are homunculi, nor that control of the four essential "humors" can heal the sick. We don't pull punches on germ theory, even while acknowledging the right of Christian Scientists to believe differently. We stick to lab-bench-tested stuff.

I.D. cannot qualify on that basis. If there is science in I.D., let someone write up the experiments or observations and tell the world. So far, that hasn't happened.

By the way, I believe that every major intelligent design publication ever submitted to be published, was published. One was retracted. Why don't you see more of the stuff in journals?

Where is there any laboratory doing work on an ID paradigm? Nowhere. Who does research on I.D. hypotheses? No one.

If the I.D. advocates won't write up stuff for publication, it isn't science, and it isn't published. Why don't they write up their work?

What work? It's not science if there is nothing there.

We don't allow the school board in Temple, Texas, to disallow Shakespeare from English because they find it "elitist." We don't allow teachers to refuse to teach calculus in math because they find it "too intellectual."

Really?? Well, knock me down with a feather and point me right to that-there federal court ruling according to which the above educational decisions are unconstitutional. I'm just dying to read it.

Can I get the latest insane (not) teaching reading fad at my local public schools that is going to help to turn out the next generation of illiterate morons ruled unconstitutional, too? Now that might be worth finding a penumbra or two. There's a heck of a lot of extremely serious educational malpractice going around in a public school near you, and last I looked nobody was stopping it, certainly not the courts.

And no, I'm not seriously saying that they should. But let's get real. Teaching _Of Pandas and People_ is a threat to Take Over the World by the Religious, must be stopped by any means necessary (BAMN), while meanwhile, we have really serious educational problems going sailing by.

All science is religion.

ID is the interpretation of physical evidence within a teleological/theological framework.
Naturalist evolution is the interpretation of physical evidence within an atheistic/materialistic framework.
Both are religious positions at their core.

The atheists have managed to redefine "science" as "strictly restricted to naturalism" thereby negating any and all theological interpretations. They then prance around in victory because "science" can't find any evidence for God!

ID scientists should accept this fact and seek out positions at Christian colleges and Seminaries where they won't have to hide the fact that they are interpreting evidence through a theological worldview.

Well, you don't. When I point out that the reason ID is supposed to be "unconstitutional" is because *as a matter of evidential fact* it would tend to lend support to a theistic conclusion,

Quite the opposite. The difference between ID and the Fine Tuned Universe idea in physics is that the latter is a scientific theory that may lead to a theistic conclusion while the former is a theological theory dressed up as a scientific one.

Actually, I didn't say that. I said that if you were honestly merely talking about the strength or weakness of the theory, you would conclude from the claim that it "isn't a valid theory" that it is simply bad science and would try to counteract it as such rather than trying to get it ruled unconstitutional so that it is no longer left to the discretion of school boards ...

Again there's a limit to school board discretion. Dressing up a theological theory as a scientific one isn't just 'bad science', it's theology and no a gov't entity may not mandate the teaching of a theological position as science.

Suggest to some of your friends that the fine-tuning argument, including the possibility of intelligent design as a conclusion, be taught in a public high school physics class or even that the Dover school board put it into the educational standards that this topic should be covered in this way.

I have no problem with any high school that is teaching advanced cosmological theory covering the fine-tuning argument. Is that a subject for an 'intro to physics' course that you'd more likely find in HS? Probably not but I'd have no beef with a school, say, using it as a topic for a book report or incorporating a layman's description of it in a philosophy class or physics class.

Another thing: For leftists and atheists (two groups that largely, but not entirely, coincide), Darwinian evolution serves as a shibboleth, that is, a means of distinguishing friend from foe. The overwhelming majority of leftists believe in evolution, therefore opposition to evolution is a nearly-certain indicator of being an enemy of the left.

And Alan still covers it all. Theology, philosophy, and partisan politcis in his discussion of a scientific theory. well actually he covers all but actual science.

Notice, for example:

Darwinism only fits the facts better on the assumption of naturalism (i.e, functional atheism). What is your proof that naturalism is true?

What assumption of naturalism (by which I assume you mean *only* the natural world exists, not the general assumption of science which says the natural world exists)? Darwinism requires no such assumption nor does any generally accepted scientific theory. The problem is not in the biology department here but the theology departments and philosophy departments. Actually the problem is not even there it's with people who think their answer is sitting in the biology department when it's actually the other two.

And if you are a theist, why do you choose to reject the Bible when it says God was responsible?

Reject the Bible? Hmmmm, I thought Lydia just got done teaching us that ID says nothing about the Bible or even about God for that matter. Odd, isn't it, that a theory that supposedly can't tell the difference between an alien in a UFO, The Trinity, or Buddha is required in order for someone to 'not reject the Bible'. Once again how you live with the Bible or not is an issue for philosophy or theology, not science.

Ed

But then, a lot of people seem to fail to understand how something that sounds sciency can fail to be science, and why there is a difference between teaching religious dogma and teaching about religious dogma.

And the next question is where exactly does this backdoor establishment game end. "Sciency" theories can, are and will be manufactured to accomodate lots of people with theological problems with science or who just want a stamp of 'science' on their beliefs. For example, Young Earth Creationists have a portfolio of 'sciency' theories of geology, hydrology and metrology to conform with a belief that the earth is less than about 10,000 years old and there was a massive worldwide flood several thousands of years ago. This belief is obviously driven by theology (of a literal sort) but it's pretty easy to manufacture a 'sciency' theory that strips out all Biblical and God references. But the game is by no means restricted to Christians. I don't doubt that 'sciency' theories are or can be created to accomodate non-Christian theologies. Hindus have creation stories of their own as do other faiths. Reincarnation, likewise, is a good candidate for a manufactured theory.

How ironic that people like Lydia who probably spend a lot of time bemoaning post-modernism would usher in post-modern science. We can have Christian science in Kansas, Reincarnation science in a county in NJ with many Indian immigrants and maybe even Islamic science and Wiccan science all depending on not actual facts but your local politics. Of course there's precedent for this. In the USSR Darwin's theory was out of favor because Stalin happened to like Lamarkian evolution. Why?

A case study in the same intellectual fallacies. Stalin didn't like Mendal's work on genetics. YOu may recall from HS biology that Mendal was the monk who studied how pea pods inherit various traits. why didn't Stalin like Mendal? Because he thought his genetic work conflicted with communist ideology (aka religion). Hence he pushed Lamarkian evolution on the scientific establishment. What does the theory that traits are inherited from parents via genes rather than traits are inherited from traits that parents acquired during their lives in things like peas and grain have to do with a political/economic system like communism? ABSOLUTELYFREAKINGNOTHING! But Stalin thought it did so he made it important. Of course plenty of communists came before and after Stalin who never gave a fig for Mendal and his pea pods.

So while Lydia began her post with downgrading the importance with putting things in their proper categories (which I also chimed in with some agreement), we see the folly the follows from letting your category fences down too low. while no on here probably thinks much of communism, any communist who honesltly believed how pea pods inherit their traits meant anything in terms of getting communism adopted by the world wasted their lives. People who spend their times fighting theology battles in the bio labs likewise are doing nothing for either field.

Really?? Well, knock me down with a feather and point me right to that-there federal court ruling according to which the above educational decisions are unconstitutional.

I agree here in that Lydia has a point. If a school board decided to drop calculus that may be a poor decision, may lower the quality of the school but is not in itself unconsitutional.

The problem with her dismissal of the establishment clause, though, is that she is basically saying that a school board could use its position to impose just about any religion (or non-religion) that it wants. All it has to do is take its religious establishment and dress it up as something else (math, literature, history etc.). If people who actually care about those fields object that this is totally bogus then just scream very loudly that the establishment is 'biased against the religion' or that the subject is 'in dispute'. Hey who is the calculus establishment to dispute the assertion that we are all reincarnated aspect of the god Vishnu and that can be seen in taking the derivative of functions or that the overlap of the Cartisian plane and Euclidian geometry demonstrates this unity of all? It's a theory and if I can get a school board to vote me some money for my 'textbook' and mandate it be taught then that's not establishment....it's just a disagreement among math teachers!

The response here is that science is just another type of religion with a belief in 'naturalism' that means God isn't allowed. This, though, is a lie. There is nothing in evolution that says anything about God. True God doesn't show up in the theory. He doesn't show up in Newton's Laws of Motion nor a host of other scientific theories either. But the assertion that these theories assume or require one to assume God doesn't exist or that God does not or cannot have any role in the universe is pure imagination by people who have loaded their brains up with too much pulp from the theology/philosophy/polysci or other humanities trash dump rather than giving science its proper due.

I'm going to ask you this directly, Boonton: Suppose that the Dover school board were to put into its requirements that teachers in physics class must cover the fine-tuning argument and must include in their presentation a representative argument from an advocate (perhaps a professional philosopher knowledgeable about the physics--such as Robin Collins, for example) for the intelligent design of the universe from the apparent fine-tuning of the cosmological constants. Do you think that a constitutional challenge on grounds of establishment of religion would be filed against such an educational decision by a school board? Would you support or oppose such a constitutional challenge?

By the way, I'm well aware of what it looks like when schools dress up the advocacy of religion as merely informative education. It looks like the Muslim "education" in California in which students had to make banners extolling Allah.

Somehow, teaching inter alia ID arguments just doesn't look at all like that.

Boonton,

You said

“What assumption of naturalism (by which I assume you mean *only* the natural world exists, not the general assumption of science which says the natural world exists)? Darwinism requires no such assumption nor does any generally accepted scientific theory.”

Yes, by “naturalism” I mean the belief that only the natural exists.

You say that your position (which you call “science”) does not assume that the supernatural does not exist. That is, you say your position allows that the supernatural might exist. That being so, on what grounds do you declare opposition to Darwinism to be invalid (“not science”)? After all, Darwinism says that God was not involved, but a God who exists could have been involved. Saying “assuming God was involved is not science, so it’s out of bounds” is ludicrous: We want the real explanation, not the “scientific” explanation.

If there really is no assumption of naturalism, then God may have been involved, and it is not illegitimate to attempt to delineate the limits of naturalistic mechanisms, which is what ID is about.

You’re saying, apparently, “I only object to ID because it has not produced any scientific results." But if ID means showing what the natural world CANNOT do, and if science is defined to be “natural world only,” then by definition ID cannot produce “scientific” results. But if the truth is beyond science, so be it.

You cannot have it both ways: If naturalism is true, then ID is illegitimate by definition, regardless of whether it has any results the scientific establishment approves of. But if naturalism is not true (or even if it is questionable), then ID can be legitimate on its own terms, not on the atheistic terms of the scientific establishment.

I think you really are a naturalist (i.e., an atheist), but for some reason you don’t want to admit it. So you still have to justify your assumption of naturalism.

To Lydia's direct question(s):

1. I don't know if it would face a court challenged but if it required that physics class covered the fine tuning argument, even including the aspects of the argument that imply the 'fine tuner' might be a deity of some sort I wouldn't object.

2. Now if they took it an additional step and ordered the teacher to imply one particular God, well then I would.

"It looks like the Muslim "education" in California in which students had to make banners extolling Allah."

Good, then you understand my position. I have no objection to CA requiring students to learn what the Muslim religion is, its history and its major theological tenants. Nor do I object to them hearing or reading speakers who may be believers. I would object, though, to projects or homework that is premised on the religion being true rather than just a factual description of it that takes a neutral stance on its truth.

Somehow, teaching inter alia ID arguments just doesn't look at all like that.

Being hyped up on non-science subjects might you consider that the issue here is that you just don't know enough about science? Look you opened the comments by charging that no experiment could ever falisfy evolution. That was flat out wrong. You didn't really present any way that ID could ever be falisfied, nor did you really address the question of what exactly is ID supposed to be telling us either from a theological or scientific POV?

Of course, the FTA is one of several different ID arguments, as ID proponents themselves will tell you.

See here's the problem, making a big tent is great for politics, great for marketing, great for a club. It's a bit problematic for science, though. FTA asserts that the fundmantal building blocks of the universe itself may be designed (although intelligent or not is a different question). If the fundamental building blocks of the universe are designed then the universe itself is a product of design. The 'simple' mountain is designed as well as the 'complicated' tree.

But biological IDers hinge their argument on just the opposite. That there's a whole set of mundane things in this world that aren't designed....'random' pebbels on the beach, falling snowflakes, the flickering mind bending stuff that goes on at the quantum level and 'complicated' things in the world that are the product of design. But with FTA you get everything designed. You're basically in a Darwinian world because once the 'fine tuning dials' were set just right it was a given that out would come a universe with sub-atomic particals that would yield stars which yield heavier elements, which yields more diverse chemical interactions etc.....which in the end yields IDers and their fellow travellers peddling scientific crap that's just as crappy theology/philosophy (bet you never though you'd lead a one woman revival of gnosticism for the purpose of saving the world from 'naturalism')

Allan,

Like Stalin and Lemarkian Evolution, you've got your mind tangled up. Science only makes the soft assumption of naturalism....which is that the natural world exists. I push a ball, it's speed is determined by Force = Mass * Acceleration or Acceleration = Force divided by Mass. I assume only that the natural world exists. That I exist, that I impart a force on the ball, the ball has mass, the ball exhibits acceleration.

This is NOT the hard naturalist assumption that nature is all that exists. Over in your philosophy department, I'm sure there's a naturalist who will like to argue that there's no reason to assume the supernatural. After all, there's I, the force, the ball....why add anything else? But science makes no such assumption nor does its theories require it.

If there really is no assumption of naturalism, then God may have been involved, and it is not illegitimate to attempt to delineate the limits of naturalistic mechanisms, which is what ID is about.

Really? And how does having a 'designer who may be a little green man in a ufo' do that? You imply I'm being coy but really this habit IDers have of being 'a floor wax and desert topping' is really out of hand. If you're a theory about design that can't even tell the difference between supernatural designers, natural designers or non-design then I'm at a loss to figure out what you're a theory of. It would be nice if ID advocates would actually tell us!

Lydia

I doubt that the theory of evolution clashes with theistic belief more than any other scientific theory does. Mike T made a fair point: If we live in a magical universe, what's the formula that uniquely determines the amount of magic in it?

Of course a scientific theory may clash with beliefs which derive from particular interpretations of religious revelation; but here’s where your famous or infamous establishment/disestablishment clause comes in. Are you aware,I wonder, if ID has a place in school curricula in countries not bound by the idiosyncrasies of the US constitution? If not, why not? If yes, what degrees do the teachers deemed qualified to teach ID hold?

that is premised on the religion being true rather than just a factual description of it that takes a neutral stance on its truth.

Boonton, in the final analysis there is no totally "neutral" stance on whether Islam is true, if by neutral you mean the neutrality intended by liberalism generally. There are fake facades of neutrality, but they pretty much all stem from a false naturalism that treats ALL religions as personal preference for superstitious nonsense at best. It is easy to call it neutrality when what you mean is that all religions are equally wrong. But that doesn't make it really neutral.

There are false religions. There are religions which are so definitively false that EVEN THE STATE has a right to call them false. To treat these false religions on the same footing as religions that cannot be proven, on rational bases, to be false religions, is not rational neutrality at all. That's stupidity.

is that she is basically saying that a school board could use its position to impose just about any religion (or non-religion) that it wants.

Yes, well that puts a finger on a large part of the problem of the so-called religion jurisprudence, now doesn't it? See, the Constitution says that CONGRESS shall make no law establishing religion. If a state-paid public school establishes religion, that isn't against the Constitution. All the folderol about the 14th amendment is blather, the Supreme Court got that wrong, and it has been wrecking jurisprudence on the topic ever since.

Not all bad things that a government does are against the Constitution. Not all things that we want to put a stop to should be stopped by calling them unconstitutional.

If there really is no assumption of naturalism, then God may have been involved, and it is not illegitimate to attempt to delineate the limits of naturalistic mechanisms, which is what ID is about.


A side note: This is touching on the fact that there's two different theories here. There's the theory of evolution and there's the historical theory of evolution. I mean the theory of evolution is the mechanisms of evolution (inheritance of traits with variation, the propensity of some traits to have greater survivial than others etc.) and the history of life on earth as seen by evolution (did species B evolve from species A or species Z, when did it happen, was it fast or slow etc.).

The historical part of the theory is like other fields of history. Much of the evidence is lost and its a pretty big puzzle that has to be put together with the little stuff we are lucky to find. To use a silly example, consider that we seem to have strong evidence that a comet of some sort hit the earth and this caused a mass extinction. OK let's say that God was floating around the Oort cloud a hundred million years ago and got angry and kicked the comet which ended up smacking into earth. Is that childish image 'God being involved'? Yes. Does it have anything to do with the theory of evolution? No. The comet hit, the environment changed, traits that were helpful before became problems and vice versa evolution applied. If that's how it went down, your problem isn't with evolution but with Newton's Laws of Motion! The comet suddenly changing its orbit isn't a 'supernatural violation of evolution'...it's a 'supernatural violation of the laws of motion'. If the comet had some type of GPS/flight data recorder we could discover we'd see that.

Now is God kicking the comet because he was angry at dinosaurs a valid scientific theory? Possibly but it seems pretty weak. Comets are all over in all types of orbits and over billions of years all types of collisions and gravitational swings happen....there seems no particular reason to assume that one comet had anything special happen to it than any other comet. But hey, if someday its possible to trace every comet orbit that ever happened in our solar system maybe there was something 'special' about that one.

IMO this is pretty childish theology, though. Why wouldn't an infinite God just set up the universe so the comet would be 'just right' to hit at 'just the time' he wanted. Why the 'superhero type' antics? If you need this to get you out of bed in the morning, hey that's your business but I think most theology departments figured we passed that level of thinking about things at least a few thousand years ago or at least by sixth grade. Then again maybe a few thousand years from now the Starship Enterprise will stumble upon a planet that's been video taping us for the last billion years and there in frame 234,323,234,233 is what looks to be a man with a white beard kicking a comet out in the Oort cloud thereby stumping thousands of volumns of dense and sophisticated theology. Ironically all that theology and philosophy would fall to pieces with such a video but so-called 'naturalistic' theories of evolution and even the laws of motion wouldn't even be dented!

Look you opened the comments by charging that no experiment could ever falsify evolution.

Boonton, I already made it clear that I consider the whole falsificationist issue to be one of people and the way they do things, not a matter of abstract structure. The question is not whether experiments can show Darwinian theory to be probably false. Obviously that is possible in the abstract. The question I was addressing in that comment was that of dismissing contrary evidence. There actually have been pieces of evidence that have tended to disconfirm the Darwinian package, to the point where we are now being told that random mutation with natural selection may not be the engine at all. But hoi polloi are being told to shut up, these are just minor differences, something called "evolution" is still supported by overwhelming evidence. Craig Venter questions universal common descent and the tree of life, he disagrees with the Dawkinsian claim made ad nauseum that all DNA is the same throughout all life forms, yet hoi polloi are still being told that the universality of DNA and the overwhelming evidence for universal common descent are evidence for non-design over design. And so forth. Junk DNA was said to be evidence for non-designed evolution, yet when a function for some junk DNA is found, disconfirmation is not admitted. There have been many, many instances where Darwinists as people have refused to admit disconfirmation. Of course Darwinism can be disconfirmed by evidence, as can ID. Whether people admit acknowledge disconfirmation or not is a more difficult question.

Boonton, you write long comments, and I don't have the time to go through and answer every topic you bring up, but that doesn't mean I don't have anything to say. On the alleged disagreement between FTA and the biological design argument, a little thought should show that the "conflict" is illusory. Obviously designing the constants and initial conditions need not be at all the same thing as designing the blood-clotting cascade. There is no reason whatsoever to insist that in making the earth life-_permitting_ the designer would be making the probability _high_ that life would develop without some further involvement. A life-permitting universe is like a habitat, but a habitat need not, and usually does not, automatically generate its inhabitants.

Boonton, in the final analysis there is no totally "neutral" stance on whether Islam is true, if by neutral you mean the neutrality intended by liberalism generally.

OK is wikipedia's stance on Islam that it's true or that it's not true? Is the Encyclopedia Britainica's assert in stronger terms that Islam is true than, say, wikipedia's? Or for that matter the last episode of Dancing with the Stars, what was its stance on the truth or falsehood of Islam? Gotta be one or the other there's no neutral ground. Answer NoW!

Yes, well that puts a finger on a large part of the problem of the so-called religion jurisprudence, now doesn't it? See, the Constitution says that CONGRESS shall make no law establishing religion. If a state-paid public school establishes religion, that isn't against the Constitution. All the folderol about the 14th amendment is blather, the Supreme Court got that wrong, and it has been wrecking jurisprudence on the topic ever since.


I promise you as soon as the time machine is invented I will pay for a one way ticket to send you back to 1860 or so in order for you to tell everyone to get it right. In the meantime you're making stuff up. Most states have constitutions that likewise prohibit religious establishment and the Fed. gov't has indirectly managed some public schools (for example in frontier territories). So simply pretending the 1st amendment doesn't forbid states to establish religions doesn't resolve the problem.

More importantly, the constitutional doesn't say no infringment of true religions, it says no infringement of all religions and no establishment of all religions. If they wanted to say 'truish' religions could be established or 'really false' religions could be infringed they would have said that directly. The educated mind of the late 1700's was not under the delusion that the only religions in the world were Catholicism and various types of Protestants.

Boonton and Lydia:

You seem to be fighting over what is the correct account of science and whether certain sorts of arguments may permissibly be called "science." All this seems to presuppose that a person has an obligation to get things right, that a proper functioning mind is one whose ideas and concepts are aimed toward the truth and its acquisition. But what's the point of all that? Is it to make life more conducive to the common good, in the sense that both knowledge for its own sake and knowledge for the sake of providing certain goods (e.g., the deliverances of medical science) are in fact goods that lead to human flourishing. But human flourishing itself requires certain ends that are better than others.

Here's the point: even if the ID project fails as a philosophy of nature (as I believe it does since it relies on inexplicable "gaps" in nature that cannot be accounted for by chance or law), and even if science must concern itself with only material and efficient causes, this does not mean that there are not final and formal causes in nature that we can legitimately know (as I try to modestly show in the prior paragraph).

It seems to me that the issue is whether science is the whole story. Some philosophers, like Quine, think it is, and thus they recommend that philosophy be naturalized. But this is the death-knell of first philosophy, which is the only way we can extricate ourselves from the hegemony of scientism. IDers, unfortunately, accept the Quinian assumption and proceed to argue that what they are offering is science too and thus should have a place at the table. I think that's the wrong theatre on which to fight. The right place is to go after the legitimacy of the Quinian project entirely, which means challenging the epistemic privilege of science in areas in which it is impotent to provide any real insight.

IDers, unfortunately, accept the Quinian assumption and proceed to argue that what they are offering is science too and thus should have a place at the table.

Oh, well, Frank, I'll be happy to call myself an "ID-er," and I'm about as anti-Quinean as they come. I co-wrote a whole book on first philosophy in epistemology--a priori metaprinciples, conceptual analysis, the whole shebang. Totally antediluvian and non-naturalized.

The question is not whether experiments can show Darwinian theory to be probably false. Obviously that is possible in the abstract.


Well actually that is a pretty big question as well as the follow up "do the experiments/observations support or detract from the theory". If you have a theory that can't be tested you don't have a theory, period. If you have a theory that can be tested but gives mixed results you may have a theory that needs to be ditched or a theory that needs to be modified. You're a highly educated person in the humanities, much more than I probably will ever be. And I'm not highly educated in science either. But I can tell you while you can live inside the books and arguments and debates in many of the humanities you can't in science. At some point there is no getting around the fact that someone takes the theory and goes out digging in the dirt, getting their hands dirty, etc.

There actually have been pieces of evidence that have tended to disconfirm the Darwinian package, to the point where we are now being told that random mutation with natural selection may not be the engine at all.

So what? What does this have to do with an alleged theory that asserts it can test systems for "design versus non-design" and then test again for "intelligent versus non-intelligent design"? You seem to be falling into the 'either or' fallacy. If evolution isn't perfect, if I can illustrate 'problems' with evolution then that makes a case for ID. It does nothing for ID. If Darwinian evolution has problems it helps ID no more than it helps Stalin's favorite runner up, Lemarkian evolution. Certainly you didn't think Darwin was the only one out there with a theory of evolution besides the IDers, did you???? Hmmmm.

Of course Darwinism can be disconfirmed by evidence, as can ID.

Well not quite. If you don't make claims you can't be disconfirmed. Hence you got 'gnostic ID' (the world is made up of designed and non-designed things) sitting at the same table with FIT-IDers ( the whole universe is designed therefore there's nothing in the universe...simple or complex... that's not designed). But then where are the ID claims?

Obviously designing the constants and initial conditions need not be at all the same thing as designing the blood-clotting cascade. There is no reason whatsoever to insist that in making the earth life-_permitting_ the designer would be making the probability _high_ that life would develop without some further involvement.

So then ID is a theory that asserts it can test for both design inside the universe, design of the universe and non-design inside the universe. And as far as I can tell the way it tests for this is to look at something that's really complex (like the blood clotting cascade) and ask "can I, Mr. regular human, think of a way that could naturally have developed"....if not then its designed. This seems to:

1. Ignore that designers can and do make things that are quite simple. Japanese rock gardens are highly designed to be highly non-complex.

2. The 'test' seems highly subjective or totaly incalculable. Look take simple DNA in a single cell. You're talking billions of atoms. In a single division you're handling a huge number of possible things that may happen. Now times that by a trillion cells in a living animal or plant by thousands or millions individuals who might be alive at point T in time by multiple points in time. Now out of that huge tree of possible paths how exactly does one assert that you can't get to point z from point a? Keep in mind that the total number of possible chess games (much fewer pieces and easier rules) is theoretically uncalculable even by a computer the size of the universe operating for the life of the universe. "Irreducible complexity" might sound OK in principle until you realize it is basically impossible to find the 'irreducible' part.

3. To make matters even worse, even if you established irreducible complexity....say there's no path that could generate an eye out of an organism with no eyes even given infinite generations you haven't really done anything for ID. That only helps ID if you're operating on the 'either or' fallacy (either Darwin or ID, a minus for Darwin means ID it must be!). Problems with one theory do not establish the other theory. Before Einstein came along there were known problems with Newton and other theories in classical physics.

4. Seems to almost leave the other question begging, aren't there limits to intelligent design? In economics this was touched upon in the 'socialist calculation question'. Given a central planner with perfect access to information about tastes and production systems it would remain impossible to efficiently allocate production decisions to produce an efficient mix of goods. But the price mechanism, which does not have anyone 'in the center' of the system does seem to work. At some level in some contexts it seems like 'intelligent design' is actually limited in ways 'unintelligent design' is not. Hence even with genetic engineering a lot of crops and animals are 'created' with old fashioned selective breeding which does NOT intelligently design the genes of the new breeds produced.

Francis,

I think you may have an area where Lydia and I could agree.

Science has done what it seeks to do very, very well. In a relatively short period of human history, we know a great deal about the natural world.

People love a winner, failure is an orphan. Few other fields (maybe mathematics only) have even approached the success rate science has. Philosophy is cool, but let's face it you can fill a library with philosophy tomes. Half of todays well schooled philosophy types will tell me half of tht library isn't worth reading and the other half will tell me the other half isn't worth reading. Kinda natural to start asking if any of it is worth the effort? In the meantime my ipod works great and the antibiotics my doc prescirbed are working just as well!

So it's pretty natural to try to attach yourself to the winner, which is science. I guess you can say the materialists did it first but it was only a matter of time before supernaturalists would do it as well. Why pick on science, why not math? Well science is fun (dinos, rocket ships, lasers, etc.), math is just hard. Plenty of people gobble up popularizations of science from people like Stephan Hawking, Dawkins, Gould etc. Popularizations of math are fewer.

But both sides ("there's no supernatual camp" and the "there is one camp") might just be asking more of science than its designed to give. Aside from refuting some highly literal readings of the Bible, science does not and never presumed to 'assume God' in or out. No one even considers asking a theologian or philospher to apply their knowledge to getting their CDs to stop skipping....or adding mileage to their car. But for some reason it seems quite natural to ask a field devoted to the study of material to comment about immaterial things. Go figure.

"One ought to follow a winner" or "It's good to follow a winner" (if ought claims are not your thing) is a normative claim, and not a deliverance of science. It is a philosophical claim. What's more, the distinction between science and non-science is itself not a claim of science but a philosophical claim about science. So, again, you can't even issue the judgments you do without the insights of philosophy.

Half of todays well schooled philosophy types will tell me half of tht library isn't worth reading and the other half will tell me the other half isn't worth reading. Kinda natural to start asking if any of it is worth the effort? In the meantime my ipod works great and the antibiotics my doc prescirbed are working just as well!

You've got to be joking. There are at least as many bad scientific texts that have been printed as any other discipline, and that isn't even counting dubious lab experiments. Francis Bacon is turning over in his grave because you've humiliated him by an unwitting self-parody. He didn't think it would turn out this way.

I think you really are a naturalist (i.e., an atheist), but for some reason you don’t want to admit it. So you still have to justify your assumption of naturalism.

Alan, I'm late to reading this thread, and if I've missed this point in the top-down read I just did excuse me, but Boonton doesn't need to be a naturalist, or have naturalist assumptions. He's practicing methodological naturalism. On this view, whether or not naturalism is true does not matter. It is merely a view on method, which may or may not track with naturalism. That is why he doesn't declare his view on naturalism, because it is irrelevant to his argument.

So again, if I've missed where someone else already made this point I apologize, but Boonton's methodological naturalism is the target for those who disagree with his assertions about science and religion.

Methodological naturalism, though a far weaker claim, is quite sufficient to carry his project if it is a reasonable method in which to approach our explorations about the world. I don't think it is --I think it is grossly misguided and harmful-- but whether or not he's a naturalist is a sideshow.

How ironic that people like Lydia who probably spend a lot of time bemoaning post-modernism would usher in post-modern science. . . . What does the theory that traits are inherited from parents via genes rather than traits are inherited from traits that parents acquired during their lives in things like peas and grain have to do with a political/economic system like communism? ABSOLUTELYFREAKINGNOTHING! But Stalin thought it did so he made it important. Of course plenty of communists came before and after Stalin who never gave a fig for Mendal and his pea pods.

And you wouldn't be ushering in postmodern multi-whateverism if you were to succeed in imposing a methodological scheme that with some fuzzy language about the "scientific method"? Yet what is the scientific method? I've forgotten Boonton, would you please remind me what that is?

More importantly, the constitutional doesn't say no infringment of true religions, it says no infringement of all religions and no establishment of all religions.

Methodological naturalism. Anything you wish to endorse is "science," and anything you wish not to is "religion." All that other text you churned out is superfluous.

I'm not trying to "attach myself" to anything. That would be stupid. I simply think that if origins questions--"Where the dickens did the eye come from?"--are going to be designated questions of science in our academic taxonomy, then they are questions of science regardless of what answers are confirmed by the evidence. It's foolish and artificial to _raise_ the question, to _treat_ the question as a question in the category labeled "science," and then to rule some answers as unspeakable in the academic context in which we are supposedly discussing the question.

This has to do with what makes sense and with what keeps the lines of inquiry open. It has nothing to do with wanting to attach everything to science. Good grief, I'm a committed anti-naturalist in philosophy and a Cartesian dualist to boot.

Mark,

True there's lot of bad science in the library, science though seems to know pretty well what is the bad science and what is the good. Philosophy has simply not been that clear. My assertion was not one about shoulds but about human nature. People are inclined to follow winners hence the inclination to try to import the certainity of science into fields like philosophy. IMO this is human nature but is a problem we should try to avoid rather than embrace. There's a long history of philosphers trying to import scientific ideas as analogies to philosophical ones often leading to dubious results. This is just a statement of fact, not a damnation of philosophers. If you want consolation, well science does choose an easier subject in most cases. At the most fundamental level science is asking very simple, very easy questions. What happens when I hit this rock with a hammer? What color will this be if I mix these two things? Those types of questions are relatively easy to answer and relatively easy to get the answer right compared to many philosphical questions.

Here, though, the error is flowing in the opposite direction. Taking a philosophical assumption and thinking it must get reflected in science. Hence we have the historical example of Stalin thinking genetic theories were somehow very important to communist philosophy and the need to see Lemarkian genetics trump Mendal's in the field. In retrospect, just about everyone sees how irrelevant that was. Almost everyone, communist, anti-communist, really sees no importance today to that hundred yr old debate in the field of genetics as it relates to communism.

Today, though, we seem to have a population that thinks the theory of evolution carries some relevant weight to supernatural questions. It doesn't. If tomorrow we discover a billion year UFO that has been video taping life on earth with a super HD camera for the last billion years and it shows frame by frame the history of every living thing from the first cell forming from various naturalistic chemical reactions to every single living thing today being the product of evolution proving evolution beyond a shadow of any reasonable doubt....that would say absolutely nothing about questions like does God exist? What things should and should not an ethical person do? What should one make of one's life? Absolutely nothing would be answered by such definitive proof. When people say things like evolution implies people should be selfish and try to screw over one another, or follow a philosphy of might makes right they are not talking about science. Even if evolution did favor certain traits in us over others, that says absolutely nothing about any philosophical duty to faciliate them. I'm not more obligated to, say, act selfishly because evolution put a 'selfish gene' in me than the theory of gravity obligates me to push people off buildings.

If someone was going around bemoaning the theory of gravity because it obligates people to push other people out of buildings, the solution is not to manufacture an 'alternative theory' where people pushed out of buildings don't fall down due to gravity, it's to get them to someone with some brains in their head who can help them sort out their confusion. There's really no difference here, except confusion is being aided and abetted rather than confronted and resolved.

If you want to say that's methodological naturalism, well I suppose so. Since we all live in nature we all tap methods we learn for dealing with nature every day. I used 'methodological naturalism' this morning to cook bacon and so did you (just guessing what you cooked of course). I don't happen to think, though, that its sufficient for your entire life. But we aren't talking about our entire lives here, we are talking about a scientific theory and yea 'methodological naturalism', if you insist, is how things are done and evolution in that regard is no more exceptional than any other scientific theory.

Yet what is the scientific method? I've forgotten Boonton, would you please remind me what that is?

Let me turn the question around on you, what exactly is the 'religious method' (or philosphy method if you wish)? By what process are religious statements created and deemed true or false and how does this method differ from either science or 'methodological naturalism' if it does?

Amen Lydia! The real question here is: are we allowed to think of God as really having something to do with reality? To epistemological bigots such as Boonton, the answer is "NO!," but of course the real answer is yes.

And notice that Boonton has refused to answer the most important question, which I asked him several times: "Can you give some justification for your rule that God is not allowed?" He brushed the question off, simply assuming that God is just a joke.

Boonton, Richard Lewontin disagrees with you about the connection of all of this to religion:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

http://www.drjbloom.com/Public%20files/Lewontin_Review.htm

So, of course, have many, many teachers and thinkers. The narrative goes, "Darwin's theory showed us that we don't need God in biology any more than we need God in physics and astronomy, to keep the planets in place. Since Darwin, more than ever, we can say with LaPlace that we 'have no need of that hypothesis'."

For anyone to deny that that this is the way this plays out is, really, to be disingenuous.

Alan,

I made no such rule. Heck I even put forth sci-fi hypotheticals with God himself kicking around comets being scene through a giant telescope aimed at our solar system and recording for billions of years as well as bringing the Fine Tuned Universe question from physics into the discussion which certainly 'allows' God.

The purpose of the hypothetical was not to argue God is just a joke, but to illustrate even the most childish concept of God could be accomodated by science if it turned out to really fit the evidence.

I will say that I think it would be very challenging to come up with a theory that incorporates God. By definition God has infinite freedom to act whereas variables in a theory are quite limited in their freedom. For example, F = Mass * Acceleration. Force is trapped to being only the product of mass and acceleration. Toss God into the equation and you'll have him 'trapped' there as well. I'm not sure how you could make a theory that bottles up an entity called God while that entity retains the properties one normally would think God has.

Others might say its impossible to do that hence God is 'excluded' from scientific theories. I'm a bit more conservative, if you want to try to come up with such a theory then give it a shot and show us what you got. I'll wait till someone actually does try to make such a theory before passing any judgement.

Recall your ID theory does not do that. IDers, recall, kept saying their designer may or may not be God, a god, gods, or a UFO. So since ID theory doesn't want to talk about God what are you talking about?

For anyone to deny that that this is the way this plays out is, really, to be disingenuous.

So you once again confirm what I said. Your philosophy/theology department says there's a problem with having materialistic scientific theories. So you're not pushing a theory because it fits actual observations better, you're pushing it to solve your philosphical problems. Note how this stands in contrast to the FTU idea which is explored by physics to address problems of physics.

Look if you can describe how planets move better by inserting God then do so. If you can't then you can't. What exactly are you proposing should be done? Do you propose that the Laws of Motion be revised to somehow incorporate God? How exactly? Are you saying that scientific theories be presented with some type of God honorific (like "F=MA, God willing"....sort of like how Muslims put "Pease be upon him" whenever a prophet is mentioned)? To me it seems perfectly logical that God could have the planets move in the way they do because its either the way he wanted it or their nature is somehow an aspect of his nature or something like that. You're saying your philosphy department, though, can't square with that. Sounds to me like an issue with your philosphy, not God or science or planets or evolution.

Your philosophy/theology department says there's a problem with having materialistic scientific theories. So you're not pushing a theory because it fits actual observations better, you're pushing it to solve your philosphical problems.

Um, no, I'm telling you that on _your side_ this is billed as being highly relevant to religion, yet you claim that it isn't relevant to religion. You appear to be wrong by the lights of your own side. This in no way amounts to some sort of admission that my own beliefs are unrelated to observations and empirical facts. It's simply a statement about relevance that contradicts your statements above. That should be pretty simple.

John H. wrote:

Also, monogenesis is not Catholic doctrine; HG gives it presumption, but only says it would be difficult to see how to reconcile polygenesis with the creation account, not impossible.

HG says:

When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.

What is it about "by no means" and "the faithful cannot embrace" that you don't understand?

Yet what is the scientific method? I've forgotten Boonton, would you please remind me what that is?

Let me turn the question around on you, what exactly is the 'religious method' (or philosphy method if you wish)? By what process are religious statements created and deemed true or false and how does this method differ from either science or 'methodological naturalism' if it does?

Boonton, I wish I could say I'm surprised, but I'm not that after all your capitalized rants, chest-thumping bombastic stridency, after straight-facedly taunting that "YOU GUYS HAVE NO TEST!" . . . that you have no test and wish to take the question and "turn it around" on me.

ROTFLSHIBMI (Rolling on the floor laughing so hard I broke my iPod.)

To be fair Mark I did address quite a few direct questions at me. I am thinking about the scientific method but I would like to hear where you think it differs from the philosophical method first....or at least hear your thoughts on it. As for the lack of a test, well yea I'm still waiting for one. I began commenting with 4 examples of tests of evolution.

Lydia,

We have two different ideas on the table. ID which is rejected by the scientific community and FTU which isn't. We agree both theories/ideas are open to God as an actor. So we have two ideas that share some traits but not the same fate, what can account for this. To me it seems the independent variable is the purpose of the ideas. FTU is to resolve observations. ID is to bail out some who think they are in a theological bind.

In geology there's a theory that millions of years ago the earth was covered with ice. This theory was developed because it fits some observations. A highly elaborate theory that the earth was covered with water 6,000 yrs ago or so and then the evidence disappeared IMO would not be an authentically scientific one. It would be one developed not to address actual observation but perceived problems a certain type has (namely Young Earth Creationists).

Lydia

Can you please clarify your position re the assessment that ‘anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything’? It's not clear if you agree or disagree. If you disagree, what are the constraints on the mind of God, in your view, and how can you tell?

Perhaps you missed my earlier comment. I’d asked if you’re aware whether ID has a place in school curricula in countries not bound by the idiosyncrasies of the US constitution, and if it does, what degrees the teachers deemed qualified to teach ID hold. Does anyone know, or is it debatable whether there’s intelligent life beyond US borders?

So we have two ideas that share some traits but not the same fate, what can account for this.

No, actually, no one has ever tried my Dover school district experiment that I asked you about above. I believe that if they did, it would indeed suffer the very same fate, legally.

To be fair Mark I did address quite a few direct questions at me. I am thinking about the scientific method but I would like to hear where you think it differs from the philosophical method first....or at least hear your thoughts on it. As for the lack of a test, well yea I'm still waiting for one. I began commenting with 4 examples of tests of evolution.

There actually is no "scientific method" of the evidentialist sort, so it was a trick question. It is used to confer status without argument. Honest, you can't specify it even roughly, and no one can, or ever has though many imply they can. But turn-about is fair play, and your question was a trick one too. There is no test of what a religion is of the evidential sort as you imply there is or should be.

For a religion, the test is what the Founders thought it to be, the only thing it could be. Namely, what a given community thinks it is. This is why though many of us see certain forms of liberalism to be a religion, or a quasi-religion, you won't hear any sane Conservative argue it ought not to be taught it public school on that basis. It would be a stupid suggestion because obviously their is no public consensus on this. Likewise, it is foolish for you to try to do the same as you are.

If a given community decides that teaching that their students came from an ancient Martian colony, they may well do so if it isn't seen in the public eyes as a religion. If it came to be seen as a religion then they couldn't. Who decides? Well, school boards, and if lawsuits happen how does a judge decide? By looking at what is widely believed in the relevant communities. It's called consent of the governed, and federalism. It's crazy, but it just might work. That said, the breakdown of consensus might mean the breakdown of the public schools after the onset of liberalism and multiculturalism if there isn't enough shared consensus. I personally think the public schools are in a crisis that they may not come out of, and it wouldn't necessarily be so bad if they didn't. I suspect the model is broken and inadequate to present needs for large groups of people, and not just the religious. But all this is entirely separate from the constiutional issue in question.

How else could it possibly be done? So what did the founders think was "religion"? All the major and minor religions at the time of the 18th century? Have any been added since then? Sure, and what they are is pretty widely accepted. Is Liberalism one of them? Nope. Is what you call ID one of them? Nope.

But I'm sure you'll keep trying to tell me you have some test prepared, but if you finally decide to attempt an answer, please to it in a straightforward fashion that would fit in a couple of sentences as I have. If you can't I'd be a fool to continue to debate you on this. The fact is I've given you a definition, the same one that the Founders used, and you have yet to give one of any sort.

Maybe I have to read your post again, what exactly are you asking me. I thought you were asking me what exactly is the scientific method. Were you really asking me what test or conditions I use to assert that ID is religion while FTU is not?

Overseas, I have no idea what the point is supposed to be to this question:

Can you please clarify your position re the assessment that ‘anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything’? It's not clear if you agree or disagree.

No, I don't think that seems psychologically correct. I know lots of people who believe in God who would be highly dubious of many other claims.


I’d asked if you’re aware whether ID has a place in school curricula in countries not bound by the idiosyncrasies of the US constitution, and if it does, what degrees the teachers deemed qualified to teach ID hold.

Never looked into it. My guess from other things I've heard is that things may be a lot more open in publicly funded schools in Northern Ireland. I believe that overtly religious K-12 schools in some other countries can be publicly funded, so that no doubt makes a difference to what is taught.

‘I know lots of people who believe in God who would be highly dubious of many other claims.’

Fine; but Mike T asked, ‘how can you take the resurrection as fact, but dismiss Genesis?’ Outside a specifically religious context based on some particular interpretation of revelation, it’s hard to find anything incompatible between evolutionary theory or any other scientific theory and belief in God.

Don’t forget that schools in most European countries have RE (religious education) on their curricula. I don’t know if ID is taught in any particular European state; the interesting question is what kind of degree would qualify one to teach ID in countries other than the US.

Boonton,

The crew that calls itself proponents of intelligent design is made up of many people, some of whom are less sophisticated than others.

Anyway, if the scientific community were a person and said in one breath "there's a way to tell" (scientifically) "whether this new bacteria is just a naturally evolved problem or whether it was purposefully altered genetically by people" and in the next breath "intelligent design is not (even potentially) a science," you and I would be justified in telling that person he's just precisely contradicted himself.

The nascent discipline of intelligent design is concerned with a careful examination of questions like "is this an artifact?" That a few flat-earth creationists call themselves "proponents of intelligent design." is beside the point. Many formidable intelligent scholars have advanced some sophisticated arguments in regards to design. Sometimes I wish they would distance themselves from some of the less sophisticated "proponents of intelligent design" but I cannot say that I blame them for hesitating from rudely and treacherously distancing themselves from good people who respect them and are kind to them while sucking up to wicked stupid people who are arrogantly contemptuous of them.

Outside a specifically religious context based on some particular interpretation of revelation, it’s hard to find anything incompatible between evolutionary theory or any other scientific theory and belief in God.

Who cares? I want to know what really happened. From where I'm sitting, it looks like evolutionary theory as presented as dogma by the scientific establishment has almost as many problems as the nuclear reactor in Japan. But no one in the establishment will admit it.

Who cares? I want to know what really happened.

What if it turned out to be an alien race who used the same genetic engineering techniques we have available today? Wouldn't that undermine a whole lot of theology? Especially of the literal Genesis omni-being supernatural sort? Honestly, I think that is why so many theists are afraid of ID, because it doesn't require a miracle working God.

On top of that you have the complicating factor that medicine is a practical science that can't ignore the psychological well being of the patient.

That is what some theists need ID for. Would it be constitutional if it were taught as a stress relief, say in a health class?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A2709-2002Apr29

2. The 'test' seems highly subjective or totally incalculable.

Yeah, I don't think they even do the math right, and it is entirely a statistical "science".

"What is funny about us is precisely that we take ourselves too seriously. We are rather insignificant little bundles of energy and vitality in a vast organization of life. But we pretend that we are the very center of this organization. This pretension is ludicrous; and its absurdity increases with our lack of awareness of it. The less we are able to laugh at ourselves the more it becomes necessary for others to laugh at us." ~ Reinhold Niebuhr

Well, Lydia, do you want to know what really happened, or do you mean you already know what happened?

Evolutionary theory is the current paradigm in biology. I see no problem in principle with that; I wonder what may bother you about it. Is the current paradigm what you call ‘dogma’? - because paradigms do shift, and the scientific establishment is well aware of that.

Perhaps religious dogmas shift too: Mike T pointed out that many Christians don’t accept Genesis as an account of ‘what really happened'. Such eclectic Christians can’t have a religious incentive, therefore, for preferring one scientific paradigm over another. Why do most religious scientists stick with the evolutionary paradigm the world over, then? I think US constitutional vagaries distort and muddle up discussions of complicated issues.

I wonder what may bother you about it.

Um, it looks like it's probably false, based on what I, as a layman, can understand about the empirical evidence. When something is false, and I have reason to think that, I don't believe it. That doesn't necessarily "bother" me, but it does bother me when it's being shoved down the throats of people all around me and when there's a lot of "lalalala I can't hear you" stuff going on from those who are supposed to be the guardians of evidence and reason in that area. It "bothers" me even more when all over the country teachers are told that they _may_ not teach the problems with the theory nor evidence for an alternative that seems to me to have some genuine plausibility.

Stuff like that. As usual, your odd attempt to treat all of this as some sort of psychological hangup just meets with a blank stare of disinterest from me.

Lydia, you’re right that the current scientific paradigm is probably false, but it’s the best we have; and school-teachers don’t necessarily teach even that! You can lobby for relativity theory and quantum mechanics to be taught at school if you like; all kids currently get is Newtonian physics, which isn’t just false but superseded. Why the soft spot for biology in particular?

It’s not clear what precisely you want taught in schools, or why: How is ID a better alternative to the Genesis account? I’m sympathetic to your views re demarcation, falsification etc. and I'm trying to be helpful, but there’s just no evidence that science teachers anywhere have jumped at the chance to teach ID simply because are no constitutional barriers to their doing so. Religiously inclined scientists don’t find anything incompatible between evolutionary theory and belief in God; nor does the Vatican. The push for ID seems to come from certain specific religious denominations, and this looks prima facie problematic under a regime with constitutional Chinese-walls between state and religion. Perhaps the US constitution does embody some 'psychological hangup'!

I don't think the Newtonian/Einsteinian example is really a good one. That's a little more like Euclidean vs. non-Euclidean geometries. At the local (e.g., earth-scale) level, Newtonian physics does pretty well as a good approximation. Relatedly, when we ask someone to hand us a straight board, we don't ask him to hand us a "board with minimal curvature." It's possible to subsume that approximation within Einsteinian physics as a better overall theory. And it's not actually the case that, say, Boyle's law is _false_ just because Boyle wrote before Einstein. A lot there is descriptive.

With origins, it's an entirely different matter. To say, "Life originated by purely natural processes operating on a primordial chemical soup over billions of years" is false in a way that can't simply be "reinterpreted" in terms of a later science that supersedes it and says, "Actually, at least the first living cells were probably deliberately designed by a super-engineer who understood computer programming on a level we are only now beginning to dimly grasp and who was able to manipulate matter on a level and with a precision that we cannot yet do."

Really?? Well, knock me down with a feather and point me right to that-there federal court ruling according to which the above educational decisions are unconstitutional. I'm just dying to read it.

I didn't say the other decisions were unconstitutional. I only noted that, generally, in all other fields in elementary and secondary education, we have standards that local districts cannot contravene legally. We have standards in all areas of study.

I made that observation of fact in response to a suggestion that we abandon such statewide standards for biology and "let teachers, principals, and school boards decide for themselves whether it is or isn't a 'crank theory' rather than fleeing to your buddies in the courts to get a double-lock put on the question by way of a 'constitutional' ruling.

Local schools don't get to say Shakespeare is crank literature, even if they believe it. That judgment is left to a larger community of culture.

Since there is no other field in elementary or secondary school where local school boards get to rule that the major ideas of western civilization are crank ideas and therefore not for the local kiddies, why should we make an exception for biology?

That's the bigger question that I suspect Lydia doesn't want to deal with: In the first place, why is she arguing to abandon the Western Canon in biology when it displeases her. In the second place, why is she claiming we leave such decisions to local school boards, when we don't?

Now, one can easily make a case that a local school board in Austin or Dallas would make better decisions on curriculum than the kangaroo Texas State Board of Education -- but the fact is that, even in that case where the state board is run by lunatics and crazies, we don't allow local boards to rule on what is literature and what is not, what is history and what is not, what is math and what is not, and so it should be easy to understand why we don't change that procedure for biology.

The fact that I.D. is religious dogma and, therefore, illegal to teach as science, is icing on the cake of reason in this case.

Of course, I.D. also isn't literature, math, nor history. Heck, it doesn't have much of a way to get into school curricula short of a totalitarian fiat, does it?

All science is religion.

I believe I might drop you off of the Tower of Pisa, and I believe that if you're right, you'll believe in your own salvation to the extent that you'll float to the ground.

But if your statement is in error, you'll know very quickly.

Science is not religion. Belief cannot alter the theory of gravity in its function. Belief may mess up your understanding of gravity, but it won't affect the way gravity affects you.

In other words: Bullfeathers.

Listen to Boonton: Science is not, nor was it ever, a post-modern construct. Evolution cannot be refuted by an argument that is elegant and wrong in application. Science requires proof on the lab bench, or in observation in nature, and what one believes has no effect on the mating habits of the lesser black-backed gull, nor on the velocity of the unladen African swallow.

Religiously inclined scientists don’t find anything incompatible between evolutionary theory and belief in God; nor does the Vatican.

Overseas: Overly broad. It all depends. If one doesn't believe that evolution operates as random chance, it's true it isn't incompatible with Christian theology. If one teaches evolution operates only as random chance, then it is incompatible with Christian theology.

All science is religion.

I believe I might drop you off of the Tower of Pisa, and I believe that if you're right, you'll believe in your own salvation to the extent that you'll float to the ground.

But if your statement is in error, you'll know very quickly.

Ed, it's an obtuse quote, but all it takes is a quick glance of the context of it to see what he meant. Namely, that philosophy is required to undergird any science. That is true. You say "Science requires proof on the lab bench, or in observation in nature" but this isn't adequate. For example, you can't say what the Theory of Relativity means without saying what are the philosophical assumptions about time. In fact, Einstein did do so. This fact explained why all scientists studied philosophy through his day. Because no experiment can be any better, than the philosophic assumption underlying it. It is said that the Theory of Relativity has been proven many times, but it isn't actually true, and many think Einstein made the wrong philosophical position on what time is. If he did, then the conclusions are wrong too. I suspect he was wrong, because I don't think time is relative. Time will tell, pun intended. At any rate Einstein didn't prove this, and knew very well he didn't. He knew and he stated that he assumed it straight up --that is all he could have done. This is the way science was always done, in conjunction with philosophy. But you're missing what Einstein didn't, and you don't seem to understand that describing something and saying what it *is*, or giving the interpretation of what the data means, can only be done by employing philosophy . . .

and what one believes has no effect on the mating habits of the lesser black-backed gull, nor on the velocity of the unladen African swallow.

. . . therefore you are grossly mistaken in your understanding of what science does and how scientific experiments work. Philosophy and science were always related, and scientists in the last few generation have forgotten that when they pronounce the meaning of their lab experiments they are no longer acting as scientists. They are acting as philosophers at the least, and sometimes even as theologians.

An honest and educated scientist wouldn't speak beyond his field without telling you he's changing hat's. For those that do, this is where they go wrong. They speak on things they have no experience in because by definition science can only describe, it can't assign meaning. It can tell us it thinks there is evidence of a big bang if experiments show that, but they can't tell us what caused it. That lies beyond science. There must be an unmoved mover or we have an infinite regress. This is all the stuff of a classic education, whether one is religious or not does not matter.

You say that your position (which you call “science”) does not assume that the supernatural does not exist. That is, you say your position allows that the supernatural might exist. That being so, on what grounds do you declare opposition to Darwinism to be invalid (“not science”)? After all, Darwinism says that God was not involved, but a God who exists could have been involved. Saying “assuming God was involved is not science, so it’s out of bounds” is ludicrous: We want the real explanation, not the “scientific” explanation.

Natural sciences look for the simplest answers. A phenomenon is observed, a cause is hypothesized, a test is developed that can disprove the hypothesis, and the test is run. If the cause is clear, there's no need to invoke God

Find the question that can't produce an answer, and you'll find the realm of the supernatural. But so far, looking for the proximate causes has provided the insights we need into how things work, and so far God has not appeared as a proximate cause to anything. There remain some mysteries, but no one has developed a way to disprove God -- so we continue with a God-neutral assumption, testing to find natural, proximate causes.

Darwin did not assume God was not involved (he remained actively Christian through his life, despite his well-known doubts). Most of the great evolution theorists were Christian well into the 20th century. Many today are.

Darwin's theory doesn't deny God in any way. It's not necessary to invoke God, but unless you belong to some odd cult that claims God gets mad and goes away whenever the universe cycles on its own, it's inaccurate to claim that Darwin or Darwinism deny God.

If there really is no assumption of naturalism, then God may have been involved, and it is not illegitimate to attempt to delineate the limits of naturalistic mechanisms, which is what ID is about.

I.D. doesn't say anything about the limits of "naturalistic mechanisms" in any way. I.D. attempts to deny some of the mechanisms, but there is no research directed at finding the limits of natural causes in evolution. Where limits have been found, it's been by observation, generally, it has sometimes come as a surprise, and not one of the limitations does anything to contradict the five key points of Darwinian theory.

You’re saying, apparently, “I only object to ID because it has not produced any scientific results." But if ID means showing what the natural world CANNOT do, and if science is defined to be “natural world only,” then by definition ID cannot produce “scientific” results. But if the truth is beyond science, so be it.

I object to I.D. because it's loaded with crankery, miscues, misdirection, wankery, and falsehoods. It's impossible to maintain an argument for any form of creationism including I.D. for more than about ten minutes without resorting to outright fraud on the science court.

We've seen the birth of new theories and the birth of new branches of science in recent years, and none of those cases involved scientists or theologians claiming that everything known in some branch of science was fraud, and none of them went to any court other than the court of scientists' collective opinions to "get accepted" anywhere. Watson and Crick didn't sue to get their stuff put in Texas textbooks. No legislature passed a law insisting only a heliocentric solar system be taught.

If anyone had a case to make for intelligent design, they'd get off their duff and make it.

Since there is no such case, we get attempts to muscle science out of the way instead.

That's not science.

You cannot have it both ways: If naturalism is true, then ID is illegitimate by definition, regardless of whether it has any results the scientific establishment approves of. But if naturalism is not true (or even if it is questionable), then ID can be legitimate on its own terms, not on the atheistic terms of the scientific establishment.

It's not that I.D. is, per se, illegitimate. It is that all the hypotheses of I.D. against evolution have been found false. In testing, I.D. fails.

Can you name for us any area in science where methodological naturalism utterly fails? I can't think of one. I.D. advocates keep pushing to philosophical naturalism, but that's not a point used in science, urged nor even studied in science. We don't assume there is no supernatural power as a bias, but instead we assume no supernatural influence on our experiment as a method of study. We assume, for most things, that as Einstein said God does not shoot dice with the universe (we can leave Einstein's error on that point to the physicists and theologians for the moment).

Science isn't atheist so much as it is agnostic. Most ardent evangelical Christians can't tell the difference between agnosticism and atheism, but here it's important. We don't assume there is no God, really; we assume God won't interfere in the experiment or observation. Just as with all experimental variables, we make that assumption only after 200 years of experience show that's the best way to run a test. If we assumed God would interfere, how could we shield our test tubes from God? We can't, but neither have we any evidence that God regularly interferes with science in such tests. It seems a safe, agnostic assumption.

I think you really are a naturalist (i.e., an atheist), but for some reason you don’t want to admit it. So you still have to justify your assumption of naturalism.

What my faith is is immaterial, so long as my experimental methods are clear, replicable, and adequate and accurate. I think most I.D.ists are really anti-Christian cultists since most of them reject so much of the Bible (most of the creation stories, for example), but for some reason you don't want to admit it.

But neither can you show me anywhere God has intervened in the path of evolution with clear and convincing evidence. No claim of creationism is not contravened by the evidence.

Oy -- where does that leave you, really?

Come in from the cold. Admit that Darwin got most of it right, and that his theories work well. It's amazing what that confession can do for you.

But neither can you show me anywhere God has intervened in the path of evolution with clear and convincing evidence. No claim of creationism is not contravened by the evidence.

Um ... there isn't undeniable proof either way. This debate is about whether it is legitimate, and within constutional limits, to teach it in a school.

That's not science. . . . In testing, I.D. fails.

Ed, why don't you take my challenge to Boonton and tell us your formula for determining what is science, and what is religion? He bailed after screaming in CAPS repeatedly that IDers didn't have a test, though he was the only one screaming there should be. You seem to think you've got a test. Well, what is it? Or the scientific method? Buhler?

Mark,
Science is a systematic field of inquiry that uses the scientific method to answer questions about the world, with the intent of drastically reducing or eliminating subjective bias from its predictions. According to Wikipedia, the scientific method has four essential criteria:
* Characterizations (observations, definitions, and measurements of the subject of inquiry)
* Hypotheses (theoretical, hypothetical explanations of observations and measurements of the subject)
* Predictions (reasoning including logical deduction from the hypothesis or theory)
* Experiments (tests of all of the above)
This would make some highly speculative fields difficult to place in the realm of science. For example, evolutionary psychology would not be considered science under this definition since it has virtually no predictive power or experimental verification.

Religion is a systematic belief system that uses narrative stories about supernatural beings and/or agents of those beings acting in the world, with the intent of providing existential relief through a transcendent authority. This means that ID in one form (fine tuning argument) is probably too limited to be considered religious, but any form that proposes direct intervention after the Big Bang probably does qualify as religious.

One difference between them is comprehensiveness, since true scientific explanations are always "in effect", i.e. even when a rocket thrust overcomes gravitational pull gravity is still in effect. On the other hand, there is a kind of escape hatch that monotheists have so when things like natural disasters happen they can say that God established secondary causes that eliminate divine responsibility. So there is the regular natural order and then there is direct intervention that suspends the natural order, during which normal rules of causation are nullified.

The problem for ID taught in the classroom is that their attempts so far have been little more than warmed over creationism. If they limited themselves to criticizing Darwinism they would have a much easier shot at getting past legal barriers.

From the Dover case:
As Plaintiffs meticulously and effectively presented to the Court, Pandas went through many drafts, several of which were completed prior to and some after the Supreme Court's decision in Edwards, which held that the Constitution forbids teaching creationism as science. By comparing the pre and post Edwards drafts of Pandas, three astonishing points emerge: (1) the definition for creation science in early drafts is identical to the definition of ID; (2) cognates of the word creation (creationism and creationist), which appeared approximately 150 times, were deliberately and systematically replaced with the phrase ID; and (3) the changes occurred shortly after the Supreme Court held that creation science is religious and cannot be taught in public school science classes in Edwards. This word substitution is telling, significant, and reveals that a purposeful change of words was effected without any corresponding change in content .... The weight of the evidence clearly demonstrates, as noted, that the systemic change from “creation” to “intelligent design” occurred sometime in 1987, after the Supreme Court’s important Edwards decision.

Religion is a systematic belief system that uses narrative stories about supernatural beings and/or agents of those beings acting in the world, with the intent of providing existential relief through a transcendent authority. This means that ID in one form (fine tuning argument) is probably too limited to be considered religious, but any form that proposes direct intervention after the Big Bang probably does qualify as religious.

Step2's definitions, of course, mean that by definition on his view it could never be _rational_ to believe that a supernatural being had acted in the world. This is very convenient. By definition, then, any argument that purports to bring _evidence_ that this has happened is religious -----> just a set of "narrative stories" for purposes of "providing existential relief" ----> non-rational on Step2's view. Hence the evidence brought can be ignored. Apparently in the case of ID, even when the possibility is held open that the being involved might have been a finite but hitherto unsuspected being, this counts as "religious" as well, since the extraterrestrial option seems to most people even more implausible than the supernatural option. So, once again, we can just ignore the arguments.

Neat, that.

Lydia,
Not exactly. Whether it is rational or not, it is religious. As you know, Mormons believe in a type of extraterrestrial cosmology and there are also UFO religions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_religion

Step2, you'll have to excuse me for thinking that this...

Religion is a systematic belief system that uses narrative stories about supernatural beings and/or agents of those beings acting in the world, with the intent of providing existential relief through a transcendent authority.

does not exactly sound like you think this could be a form of rational belief, a conclusion drawn from good evidence.

step2: There is no agreed upon test for what is the scientific method that could possibly rule out anything within reason. Hypothesis and predictions are speculative, and they are routinely held onto even though the tests do not bear them out for long periods of time, as it should be since when tests do not confirm a hypothesis it doesn't necessarily mean the hypothesis is invalid.

There is no test to determine when something is scientific or not. Surely you must see that hypothesis and prediction come from the imagination. Science also is "a systematic belief system that uses narrative stories" about beings and/or agents. Your assertion that religion involved "the intent of providing existential relief through a transcendent authority" is pretty bizarre. Religion is a truth seeking enterprise, as is science. To some religion provides relief, to others terror. The same with science.

As for "supernatural," well you're right about religion being about that and not science, but philosophy deals with supernatural beings as well, so it isn't a good definition. There isn't a good definition of religion or science, and what the public perceives them to be in a given community is about all we have to go on. Which is where the attempt to rule ID as religion or at least illegitimate by methodological naturalism to win the argument on some constitutional grounds, which is misguided to begin with. The idea that religion can't be taught in schools is a bad idea to begin with. That is well beyond the idea of state religion in the Constitution.

From the Dover case:

step2: Forgot to mention that those who think that case was decided wrong, as I do, have little interest in the details you cite. Even if all you say is true (and I have no idea,) that is what wise people do when SC decisions go against them waiting for an overturn of what they think is bad law. The SC makes wrong decisions very frequently. Taking the legalist route isn't going to do you a lot of good in this forum I'm guessing. Those who know their history and what schools used to do in them know this ruling was an innovation.

lydia,
I personally think religion is the wrong conclusion drawn from the evidence, but I believe there usually is some kernel of evidence from which a conclusion has been drawn. Everyone is a religious skeptic, except for their own religion. Because I am trying to provide an objective definition, it necessarily has to include the connecting reason that various and incompatible religions exist. If you were to try to explain a religion very different from your own, what reason would you give for its existence?

Mark,
You asked for a definition of science and religion, which I provided. Now you want to go postmodern on me and tell me there can't be a good definition for either one. Which is it?

You asked for a definition of science and religion, which I provided. Now you want to go postmodern on me and tell me there can't be a good definition for either one. Which is it?

As I already told Boonton, there isn't one. I'm amazed you think wikipedia description would solve the problem, or that simply saying definitions of either depend on public perception is postmodern. Did you think the judge that announced the entirely sensible truth that she couldn't define pornography, but she knew it wen she saw it was being postmodern? If you think that your view of reality is seriously warped. But you don't think that, of course.

BTW, have you ever read a book on the philosophy of science? I have, and you should. It is a very important subject.

Lydia,

The comparison was between physical versus biological paradigms. Strictly speaking, there is no single current paradigm in physics: The ‘unified’ theory is still to come. Things look brighter for biology: Advances in biochemistry show that all living things are made out of the same building-blocks. So, new evidence from molecular biology and the fossil record converge in confirming evolutionary theory. It is still logically possible to maintain that e.g. humans were miraculously created. But it certainly looks as if humans evolved from earlier life forms; and perhaps God has reasons to make it appear so. Sure there are differences between the sciences, but that physics appeals to ‘supernatural’ processes and biology to ‘purely natural’ ones isn’t one of them.

Hi Mark!

I have no problem with what you say about chance and evolution; nor does the Pope apparently. Re definitions, though, I think that since the US constitution makes explicit reference to religion, the legal test is a question for the courts. Of course courts can get things wrong, but this doesn’t entail that those who've got things right are the 'wise people' who attempt to get round the law with a word-processor and then lie in court. Having said this, I don't understand why RE can't

be taught in schools either!

Did you think the judge that announced the entirely sensible truth that she couldn't define pornography, but she knew it wen she saw it was being postmodern? If you think that your view of reality is seriously warped.

My view of reality must be seriously warped, because I do think he (Potter Stewart, Jacobellis v. Ohio) was being deliberately evasive. This is why I can't stand postmoderns, they'll never allow a definition of the topic at hand. If I'm going to change a commonly understood meaning, as in the gay marriage debate, I'll tell you what I'm changing it to. We can argue the merits or faults in that situation, but this insincere tactic of saying words cannot be defined, even when everyone understands that there are some gray areas and vagueness, is so perfectly ridiculous.
*End Rant*

This is why I can't stand postmoderns, they'll never allow a definition of the topic at hand. If I'm going to change a commonly understood meaning, as in the gay marriage debate, I'll tell you what I'm changing it to. We can argue the merits or faults in that situation, but this insincere tactic of saying words cannot be defined, even when everyone understands that there are some gray areas and vagueness, is so perfectly ridiculous.

step2: You apparently don't know what postmodernism is, but no matter. You are the one who thinks you have a technical definition that would rule some things out without also ruling out things like philosophy, but you don't. It is you who want to say you have some test to determine the religious content or class of a given theory, but you can't.

I can give examples of religion as the Founder's understood the term: Christianity, Islam, Buddism, etc. Since then Mormonism and a number of others have been added. It is what the common understanding of the citizenry take it to be. People have always known what constitutes a religion, and this should not be surprising in the least.

". . . it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs." Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1:3

So people "know" what constitutes a religion, but nobody can give a definition, much less a distinction between religion and science. Brilliant. Aristotle is rolling over in his grave. You forgot to include what the common understanding of science is: physics, chemistry, biology. For some strange and obscure reason, the received wisdom of the citizens do not classify Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism as science, but everyone categorizes those impossible-to-define belief systems as religions. Wonder why that is?

. . . I think that since the US constitution makes explicit reference to religion, the legal test is a question for the courts.

The Constitution also makes explicit reference to "a more perfect union," but doesn't define it. Must the Court? Why?

The Constitution also makes(made) clear reference to slaves and slavery; we didn't fare so well when the Court defined more explicitly what a slave was (not a 'citizen anticipated by the Constitution' in Dred Scott).

The courts have said intelligent design is impermissible to teach in science class because it is religious dogma -- what more do you need, really?

If one teaches evolution operates only as random chance, then it is incompatible with Christian theology.

If one teaches evolution operates only as random chance, then it is incompatible with evolution theory.

Maybe we should study the what the theory is and what it says before we start making judgments about it.

Ah. Happy to have figured out that "FTA" means "'fine tuned' argument" and not what my old colleagues who had served in the Army meant when they said it. The whole thread makes a little more sense now.

Um ... there isn't undeniable proof either way. This debate is about whether it is legitimate, and within constutional limits, to teach it in a school.

Balderdash. Tell me which of your creationist hypotheses you think are not disproven, I can probably show where it's been disproven. There is much proof against all the commonly-held ideas of creationism.

It's not legitimate to teach creationism in schools. Creationism is religious dogma. It arises not from observations of nature, but from absurd claims based on scripture, misinterpreted. You can't teach as science something that offers no evidence, and you can't teach as science something that it disproven at every turn.

Thread over?

. . . does not exactly sound like you think this could be a form of rational belief, a conclusion drawn from good evidence.

Which is why faith is required. You cannot "know" religion through a logical process -- nor, to my knowledge, does any of the major or minor faiths with many adherents claim there is a logical process one might take.

The theological quandary over evolution is driven by the fact that science, and especially evolution, function on evidence that is rather concrete; creationism arose in the 19th century, almost as much in rebellion to religion as to science, in people who thought their sects and beliefs are somehow devalued by not having solid evidence and a pathway of logic to undergird the structure.

But in the end, faith is an irrational act. "A leap of faith" is not a lining up of rational arguments to an inescapable conclusion. Josh McDowell probably makes the most hash out of the effort, distorting the definitions and use of evidence, distorting the evidence, in order to bend it all around enough to say he has a case that leads to a "verdict."

Creationism is borne out of jealousy among the faithful that erodes their faith -- if there is not scientific evidence, maybe faith is unjustified, 'and I've been a fool.'

It's difficult to rope someone in the depths of that despair back into church with well-meaning people lying to the kiddies about things of no import, like the age of the Earth, the distance of the stars, and what science really is.

Faith requires faith. If you're trying to force logic to lift you from agnosticism, or keep you in your after-life reservation, you may have already missed the point.

Oh, rats. Should have been "born" and not "borne." Apologies.

So people "know" what constitutes a religion, but nobody can give a definition, much less a distinction between religion and science. Brilliant. Aristotle is rolling over in his grave. You forgot to include what the common understanding of science is: physics, chemistry, biology. For some strange and obscure reason, the received wisdom of the citizens do not classify Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism as science, but everyone categorizes those impossible-to-define belief systems as religions. Wonder why that is?

step2: I wonder why it is you dropped philosophy from the discussion? And you think I forgot to include a list of the sciences? Nah, it's just that the list of them is large and expanding, and that is telling. See, you only included the *hard sciences*, but you left out the vast number of soft sciences. Didn't fit your narrative.

There are things within any number of disciplines in the sciences (even the hard sciences) that overlap with philosophy, and even religion. This is why people can list systems of religious belief, and the hard sciences and such things. And I suppose you could even try to make a list of rapidly expanding soft sciences, but to solve the overlap problem of the underlying techniques and methods you'd need to have some litmus test. You know this because you imply you have one. The only problem is that you don't.

The Constitution also makes explicit reference to "a more perfect union," but doesn't define it. Must the Court? Why?

Ed: As I said, it was a trick question. I challenged those who imply that there is a test to provide it. That's you.

Apparently when I wrote, "even when everyone understands that there are some gray areas and vagueness", Mark read that to imply that I had a litmus test. However, he did bring up the subject of the soft sciences, or social sciences as they are sometimes called, so we might yet find some recognizable definition of religion by method of exclusion if nothing else.

I wonder why it is you dropped philosophy from the discussion?

Because it can be, as Wittgenstein showed, merely a word game. Philosophy can be about aspects of truth but it isn't required to be. There is a funny polemic about philosophy that describes it as the world's oldest inconclusive profession. Moreover, I find a comparison between religion and philosophy to be strained almost to the breaking point, considering the frequent degree of hostility between the two camps. To the extent that philosophers do sometimes invoke supernatural agents or otherworldly constructs, it is usually presented as figurative instead of literal truth and serves as a dramatic way of reinforcing their viewpoint. Frankly, I find this wrongheaded and would oppose it being taught in a science classroom because it is pseudo-religious.

There is also a rather odd suggestion that ID isn't presented as an alternative to the hard sciences, that it should instead be considered a version of the soft sciences. But ID often does contradict physics and biology, depending upon which variety of it is being promoted, while the social sciences do not.

I don't know why I should provide any standards at this point, when science and philosophy and religion are just synonyms for one cosmic scheme dude just take another drink and it will all make sense. Being a glutton for punishment, here is a basic filter to determine science from religion.

Does the system involve mathematical modeling? Do the theories of causation have predictable outcomes? Do the questions it attempts to answer concern detectable phenomenon? Are the answers capable of being objectively verified?

Conversely, does the system claim to offer the exclusive key to an eternal reward? Do the theories of causation involve worship of natural or supernatural beings? Do the questions revolve mainly around existential concerns and "things unseen"? Are the answers in the form of testimony and revealed in mysterious terms?

On a scale of science to religion I would put the items in this order: hard science, social science, fine tuning form of ID and other untestable fields, philosophy, interventionist ID, and religion.

It's not legitimate to teach creationism in schools. Creationism is religious dogma. It arises not from observations of nature, but from absurd claims based on scripture, misinterpreted. You can't teach as science something that offers no evidence, and you can't teach as science something that it disproven at every turn.

For myself, I have no problem with the idea that Creationism's claims are disproven. But what turns that into a claim that it cannot be taught in schools? How does that follow?

I have in mind these objections: first, many ideas of "science" have been disproven, and yet they continued to be taught in the schools for quite some time thereafter - there is almost always a considerable gap between when a new discovery or proof displaces an old theory, and when that is the accepted standard all the way down into the schools. Heck, a good share of physics text books out there at the high school level and below have no problem teaching physics as if Newton were right, even though his physics is disproven. It took decades after Pasteur proved germs were causing illness before schools caught on. It cannot be unconstitutional to have an old textbook be in use merely because science developed last year and disproved something in it.

Second, what makes it UNCONSTITUTIONAL to teach error in schools? Sure, it's a bad idea, and probably some kind of moral failing to push wrong ideas at kids, but the Constitution is not against it. It just doesn't extend that far. Not everything that is bad is unconstitutional.

Third, religious jurisprudence got it all wrong in creating a legal framework that forbids teaching religion in public schools as against the Constitution: the Constitution forbids that Congress establish a religion, but does not forbid the states from establishing a religion. The 14th amendment should not have been used to reverse-engineer a complete re-design of the relationship between the federal realm and the state authority.

Second, what makes it UNCONSTITUTIONAL to teach error in schools?

Exactly. Even the most rigid YEC 6-day creationism would not be _unconstitutional_ to teach in a school. Moreover, the term "creationism" is used by Darwinists for lots of things that is is possible, as an intelligent and informed person, to think have not been scientifically refuted.

Apparently when I wrote, "even when everyone understands that there are some gray areas and vagueness", Mark read that to imply that I had a litmus test. However, he did bring up the subject of the soft sciences, or social sciences as they are sometimes called, so we might yet find some recognizable definition of religion by method of exclusion if nothing else.

To "find some recognizable definition of religion by method of exclusion" is your burden and project, as you well know. Of course you've implied you have a litmus test.

I wonder why it is you dropped philosophy from the discussion?

Because it can be, as Wittgenstein showed, merely a word game.

Wittgenstein destroyed philosophy? Why am I always the last to hear this stuff? Did he, perchance, use philosophy to do it?

Third, religious jurisprudence got it all wrong in creating a legal framework that forbids teaching religion in public schools as against the Constitution: the Constitution forbids that Congress establish a religion, but does not forbid the states from establishing a religion. The 14th amendment should not have been used to reverse-engineer a complete re-design of the relationship between the federal realm and the state authority.

Exactly. I was only granting this for the sake of argument to see if those who think it unconstitutional could tell us how to go about disallowing what they claim to be in some murky way "religion" if it doesn't mean the bodies of religious belief generally recognized as such.

Why am I always the last to hear this stuff?

Probably because your proclivity for shameless misrepresentation makes it impossible for you to understand what you heard.

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