Threads from Henry's Web

We’ve all heard the traditional excuse for missing homework: The dog ate it. Well, intelligent design creationists (IDCs) now have a better one. The dog did their homework. Well, it’s analogous to that in any case.

Thanks to Pim van Meurs of The Panda’s Thumb in his entry Eugenie Scott: The Big Tent and the Camel’s Nose for calling my attention to this quote from William Dembski:

As for your example, I’m not going to take the bait. You’re asking me to play a game: “Provide as much detail in terms of possible causal mechanisms for your ID position as I do for my Darwinian position.” ID is not a mechanistic theory, and it’s not ID’s task to match your pathetic level of detail in telling mechanistic stories. If ID is correct and an intelligence is responsible and indispensable for certain structures, then it makes no sense to try to ape your method of connecting the dots. True, there may be dots to be connected. But there may also be fundamental discontinuities, and with IC systems that is what ID is discovering.
Source (ISCID Forum)

Now you can go to the original discussion (linked above) and to Pim van Meurs’s comments to get more discussion of the details, but I must confess this one really struck me funny. It’s something that many have been saying about IDC and creation science for some time. The IDCs really aren’t bothering to do their own homework. There is no model, no predictions, nothing testable, and yet we’re supposed to admire the great discovery. IDC is most like the older creation science on this major point: They have nothing positive to contribute. This is the student who says, “The dog did my homework, thus there really wasn’t anything to see [the dog can't write], so I can’t show it to you, but trust me, it was done. But Mary’s homework is really lousy, disorderly, doesn’t have enough detail, and there are actual questions that she failed to answer!”

Creationism was at one time clearly based in the Bible. That Biblical basis was the only thing it had going for it. If one assumed that Genesis was a literal account of the origin and early history of the world, young earth creationism fit. One fought for the integrity of the scriptures. I think this particular view of Genesis 1-11 is incorrect, and takes the materials as the wrong type of literature, but nonetheless that was a fixed position. Certain things had to be correct in order for that position to be accepted as true. Such a position is currently advocated by Dr. Kurt Wise in his book Faith, Form, and Time. While this view does not, in my opinion, present a fully testable scientific model, it does give some predictions, and it has form.

Creation science, on the other hand, is without form and void (Genesis 1:2). Advocates try to claim that one can teach creation science without reference to the age of the earth and that the flood is a separate issue. But a worldwide flood is hardly a separate issue. If there was one, there will be significant differences in the geological record than would be the case if there was no such disaster. Consider the results left by various meteor strikes. Compared to a global flood covering the highest mountains, those meteor strikes would be very minor issues. The geological record would be different if the earth is very young than if it is very old. Creation science, without dealing with those issues, could not be a coherent model of anything. The only clearly identifiable notion that linked advocates of creation science together (in their statements specifically about creation science, not what they told church congregations) was their statements that evolution was wrong, summed up in various ad hoc criticisms.

Now here come the IDCs, or rather they’ve been yelling for some time, enough time to have some substance to present. They keep criticizing Darwinists for lacking 100% detailed histories of each evolutionary transition. Critics like Berlinski keep making silly demands of the fossil record (The Deniable Darwin), expecting fully formed explanations of everything at once, with fossils representing every step.

And then what does Dembski claim? Well, because ID isn’t mechanistic, we don’t have to explain it. Evolutionists have explained some things, even many things, and are going on explaining more things, but Dembski, who has explained absolutely nothing tries to criticize others for having done only some work. The dog did the homework, the dog ate the homework, there really wasn’t any homework to do in any case, but your homework isn’t good enough.

Look at this part of the quote again: “True, there may be dots to be connected. But there may also be fundamental discontinuities, and with IC systems that is what ID is discovering.” So if there are dots to be connected, don’t IDCs need to go about connecting them? If there are discontinuities to be found, can they be discovered without doing the hard work of connecting the dots that can be connected? How can any of this be discovered without actually identifying the intelligent designer, and determining his/her/its goals, methods, and capabilities?

In a post on the Compuserve Religion Forum, I wrote the following:

I imagine the first expedition to a planet in another system, made up, of course, of IDCs, since they are such revolutionaries in science. They come upon something that just must be designed. They run it through the explanatory filter. No, it’s not a natural regularity. No, it’s too complext to be the result of chance. Conclusion: It must be designed.

So having made this wonderous discovery, they pack up, jump back in their spacecraft, and begin the long journey home.

I’m sure many will regard this as unfair, but please tell me in what way the behavior of IDCs differs from this. Can’t the “Newton of information theory” or the discoverer of irreducible complexity manage to discover some little thing about the designer? Did the dog not leave just a corner of the homework page uneaten?

There is nothing that would commend ID to anyone except for a presumption that it must be so. Just admit it, IDC advocates, you just believe God has to get his fingers in the pie all along the way, you somehow can’t comprehend a God who could actually get it right in one pass, so you have to find a theoretical basis for that view.

It’s bad theology, it’s bad science, it drives dishonest politics. The real discussion is between people who have done their homework.