Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Intelligent Design

  • Why Talk about Evolution in Church?

    Watching recent commentary on the Answers in Genesis creation museum, that huge waste of $27 million designed to proved that dinosaurs lived with human beings and even were preserved on the ark has led me to believe that education on this subject in church and Sunday School is even more important than I thought.

    I do not believe the Museum glorifies God. It presents one rather lousy interpretation of Genesis, one that is at war with the facts, and in the long term will turn more people away from Christ by making Christians look as though they have no interest in honesty and integrity in science.

    There are two major problems that I see in terms of public education about science. The first is the quality of science education in public schools, which is not good, and the quality of the public’s knowledge about science in general, however acquired. Many people who claim to reject evolution, for example, reject a caricature of what is actually taught by professional scientists in the relevant fields. Often that rejection comes about because of conclusions drawn from evolution which are not part of the science at all. I’ve written about this before.

    A good, basic education based on the best scientific research available is essential. This is why I have regularly opposed the teaching of ID. My assessment of the scientific value of intelligent design (ID)–it has no value at all–is not the important thing here. The bottom line is that ID has not gone through the kind of rigorous research and testing required for a new scientific theory to be accepted as consensus science, which should be a prerequisite to its presence in high school science textbooks.

    But more importantly, I know that a very large number of Christians do accept the theory of evolution and are also very serious about their Christian faith. The problem is that very often they are quite vague both on what evolutionary theory is (see above), and on how it relates to their faith. The standard response to such a discussion is simply that they don’t take the Bible all that literally, but that leaves open the door for groups such as AiG to come in and claim that they represent the real “Bible believers.”

    It is not simply a matter of taking the language of Genesis less literally. One needs to carefully examine it to discover just what type of literature it is, and then interpret as one would normally interpret that type of literature. It is not just that AiG is taking Genesis literally; they are taking it as a form of narrative history. It’s not. Their interpretation is fundamentally flawed, and has created the huge clash they present between the findings of modern science and what they teach from the Bible. The clash is not necessary, however, if one simply deals with Genesis as what it is. (For introductory material, see my essays Genesis Creation Stories – Form, Structure, and Relationship and The Two Flood Stories. I link to many other essays from those posts.)

    When I try to talk to people in churches about creation and evolution, however, most are quite resistant, even when they accept evolutionary theory. It’s easier to be quiet and just hope that the extremists will go away. But many in the church need to know not only that pastors and teachers can accept the theory of evolution and still be Christians. They need to know how they do it. Too often I hear, “I don’t see the problem.” Well, having grown up young earth creationists–and I literally mean from the earliest memory I have of thinking of creation I was educated YEC–and having accepted evolutionary theory later in life, I do see the problem. Doctrines are stated in terms that seem to support the literal, narrative history view.

    Again, some have suggested to me that they don’t want to waste their time on such a non-spiritual issue. But here I agree with the young earth folks. Creation is an important spiritual issue. (For my view of a Biblical doctrine of creation, see the pamphlet God the Creator.) But even further Bible study is falling off in our churches today and people are losing Biblical literacy. Genesis provides an excellent workshop for teaching methods of Bible study and ways of discerning the literary genre of various passages. It can provide the foundation for a much more effective Bible study discipline for church members. Their Bible study will become much more enlightening when they understand how to handle various literary genres. What information can you get from them? What are they intended to convey? What value might they have other than conveying propositional truths?

    I think that we, as Christians, would do well to talk about this more, to preach it and to teach it in our Sunday School classes. And in spite of my own strongly held views, I do suggest that this happen no matter what your position. I no more want theistic evolution to become a Christian doctrine than I want young or old earth creationism to become enshrined in doctrinal statements. I think that we should use doctrinal statements to describe God’s relationship to us, and allow scientific study to determine how things work in the physical universe. I would be and have been perfectly willing to share Sunday School classes and even the platform with advocates for young earth creationism.

    But the discussion needs to get out in the open, especially in those mainline churches who tend to hope that such arguments will go away. If we in mainline churches are embarrassed by the creation museum, we need to get more vocal about how we understand science, our faith, and their relationship.

    Expect me to continue to be vocal on this issue for a long time to come.

  • Reactions to Behe’s New Book

    I haven’t read it yet, it’s on my list, but not very high on my list. I already linked to a couple of reactions, but here are plenty more, courtesy of Science After Sunclipse.

    I’ve noticed a trend in that many reviewers seem to think that Behe’s writing style has deteriorated considerably. Since the one positive thing about Darwin’s Black Box was the style, that would be sad. If one has to read such stuff, at least there ought to be some fun in it.

  • Behe’s New Book

    Michael Behe is about to release a new book. I like Behe’s writing style, even though I think he goes nowhere as far as his arguments are concerned. Regarding his previous book, Darwin’s Black Box I wrote:

    Thus Behe’s beautiful description of the advance of knowledge as various “black boxes” are opened up is used as an ode to ignorance, rather than to knowledge. We have discovered great things, and thus we can now extract the very powerful idea that we really can’t know certain identifiable things. [More extended note at the link above]

    I do think Behe writes very well. It’s too bad he didn’t put his considerable talents in explaining complex scientific topics to use in popularizing actual science.

    His new book is titled The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism. The subtitle suggest that we’re on the same quest as last time. Rather than laboring to extend the boundaries of knowledge as much as possible Behe is likely in the process of trying to state what scientists simply cannot discover. I will surely get a copy of this book soon and take a look at it myself. In the meantime, here are some responses to enjoy:

    Good Virus, Bad Creationist from ERV. This is delightfully written and helped improve my understanding of a fitness landscape. Though I did well enough in math as far as I went, I didn’t go very far, and such simplified explanations are nice to locate.

    Behe’s Dreadful New Book: A Review of “The Edge of Evolution”. This one is pretty interesting, and I see that it has also infuriated Bill Dembski. Anything that does that can’t be all bad. As for Dembski’s challenge, my concern would be more the humor impairment of the ID crowd than their technical ability. In general the ID camp’s attempts at humor have been just a bit heavy handed and easily recognizable. But we’ll see.

    I’ll save further comments until I actually get my hands on the book, which all things considered will probably be a little while. As always, I’m interested in the theological implications, which I think the ID folks don’t always consider. Anything that masquerades as an argument for God’s existence must be good.

  • Brownback on Faith and Science

    There have been quite a number of responses to Senator and presidential candidate Sam Brownback’s discussion of faith and science. These have varied from extremely favorable, from some Christians who think Brownback has managed an extraordinarily good balance between faith and science, while others are quite angry because Brownback has clearly injected faith into science.

    Having read his piece several times, trying to get past the probable political motivations, I have to say that I cannot join those who applaud this statement. Though I certainly do not believe that science can or should answer all questions, and faith plays a very strong role in my life, there is a clear line that should not be crossed. That line is crossed when we let faith determine something that should be determined purely by scientific evidence.

    The most blatant example of this problem can be seen in the creation museum. The sponsors of that museum believe that the earth is only 6,000 years old. This conclusion comes purely from scripture. More importantly they come from scriptural text which is clearly not designed to provide scientific information and has only a minimal historical content. Rather than allowing scientific study to determine what it is best able to study, young earth creationists come to a faith-based conclusion, and then impose it on the scientific evidence, no matter what happens.

    A better approach would be to let each element do what it does best. Genesis addresses meaning and the relationship of God to the universe, though even to understand those elements of the story one must be careful to understand the type of literature involved and why it was written. Genesis does not attempt to provide a scientific discussion. When people claim to discover wonderful, scientific things in Genesis, their example always involves taking a vague statement and claiming that it fits precise scientific data exceptionally well. But one can make such vague statements agree with almost any set of scientific data proposed. One would never derive the details from Genesis; they are not there.

    So where in Brownback’s statement does he cross this line? He starts out quite well:

    The heart of the issue is that we cannot drive a wedge between faith and reason. I believe wholeheartedly that there cannot be any contradiction between the two. The scientific method, based on reason, seeks to discover truths about the nature of the created order and how it operates, whereas faith deals with spiritual truths. The truths of science and faith are complementary: they deal with very different questions, but they do not contradict each other because the spiritual order and the material order were created by the same God.

    This statement uses appropriate words such as “complementary” for the questions addressed by science and by faith. But we already have the seeds of the problem here. Brownback asserts that faith and science can’t contradict one another. Yet if they are truly answering different questions, how could they contradict? If there are baseball games going on in two separate fields, one would hardly find it necessary to assert that the outfielders in one game can’t produce outs by catching balls from the other. We wouldn’t imagine that would happen. We would only make such a rule if we thought someone was going to try it.

    In this case, Brownback seems to be saying it’s OK for the questions to cross over, as long as they don’t contradict.

    People of faith should be rational, using the gift of reason that God has given us. At the same time, reason itself cannot answer every question. Faith seeks to purify reason so that we might be able to see more clearly, not less.

    In what way does faith seek to purify reason? If we would say that the goal of faith is to make a more open, more truth-seeking person, then I would find that acceptable, though many, many people of faith have done quite the opposite. Yet as a goal of faith (or better spirituality) I would regard that as good. But just what is it that faith is supposed to do to my reason that would make my scientific conclusions differ from those of an atheist?

    Unless one is first accusing a scientist who is an atheist of falsifying his conclusions, then there is no reason to assume that faith is purifying reason. I would like to think that my faith helps purify my reason, because I believe that my faith helps deal with my motivations and with who I am. But for all of those who read what I write and see what I do my words and actions–the effectiveness of my reason–can be judged by what I produce.

    Faith supplements the scientific method by providing an understanding of values, meaning and purpose. More than that, faith — not science — can help us understand the breadth of human suffering or the depth of human love. Faith and science should go together, not be driven apart.

    Again, I ask, in what way does faith supplement the scientific method? This is one of those statements that sounds balanced and well considered, but doesn’t seem to have much meaning. Is there something about Kenneth Miller’s science (he’s a Catholic) and the late Stephen Jay Gould’s (he was agnostic) that is different? Is one a better scientist than the other? Fit any scientist who is also a believer into the first slot and any who is not into the second, and tell me where it is that faith improves the functioning of the scientific method for the scientists of faith. (I do note some cases in which faith, however little I like the particular version involved, does harm to the science.)

    The question of evolution goes to the heart of this issue. If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I believe it to be true. If, on the other hand, it means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence, then I reject it.

    And here we see the problem. The questions of microevolution and macroevolution may be debatable. Personally I think that the distinction is simply a technical one. People who believe in microevolution but not macroevolution usually simply don’t comprehend either one. Yet whatever they are both are processes of the natural world and should be studied as such. So having said that science and faith are complementary and can’t contradict, Brownback immediately asserts (though without admitting it) that they do contradict, and that when they do, he’s going to take faith.

    Biologists will have their debates about man’s origins, but people of faith can also bring a great deal to the table. For this reason, I oppose the exclusion of either faith or reason from the discussion. An attempt by either to seek a monopoly on these questions would be wrong-headed. . . .

    Again, we contradict the “complementary idea. What precisely is it that people of faith, in other than their role as scientists if such they are, have to contribute to origins? They can discuss the spiritual values of humanity, but there will be no new interpretations of fossils, or of genetic clocks, or of the relationships between lineages that are provided by faith. All of those elements of understanding origins will be managed by scientists doing science.

    I believe the “monopoly” language is to be read as favoring the incorporation of intelligent design creationism in classrooms. Of course science should have a monopoly on determining scientific questions. That’s how science works. Senator Brownback is a politician trying to trade on people’s dislike of the word “monopoly.” Truth, however, needs a monopoly. Compromising intelligence and stupidity doesn’t produce greater intelligence, it produces more confusion.

    While no stone should be left unturned in seeking to discover the nature of man’s origins, we can say with conviction that we know with certainty at least part of the outcome. Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order. Those aspects of evolutionary theory compatible with this truth are a welcome addition to human knowledge. Aspects of these theories that undermine this truth, however, should be firmly rejected as an atheistic theology posing as science.

    “An image and likeness unique in the created order” goes beyond both science and faith. We have a Bible addressed to humans, and humans are (shockingly!) the subjects. That doesn’t mean that we are unique in the whole created order. We don’t even know whether there is life in the rest of the universe and if so whether there are other intelligent species that hold a similar position in their ecosystems.

    When he continues that “[a]spects of these theories that undermine this truth, however, should be firmly rejected” we understand that despite any lip service given to science, Senator Brownback places his particular faith, and his particular doctrines of that faith over and above the scientific evidence. The origins of human beings are to be discovered by science. The relationship of human beings to God can be discussed in religion. But if my conclusions in religion deny the evidence of science, then I’m crossing the boundary.

    As a scientist who comes to realize that the earth must be older than 6,000 years must adjust his understanding of Genesis accordingly, so a scientist who has based some aspect of man’s relationship to God on a scientific conclusion that is superceded by a better one must adjust his understanding accordingly. To do anything else would be to deny the revelation of the creator as given directly in his creation. But in this case, the most important thing to note is that such a person is not supporting science.

  • Distortion Not Good for Faith

    I blogged previously about the Answers in Genesis creation museum that’s going up in Kentucky in How to Waste $25 Million. Now the museum is about to be opened, and they held special events for the true believers yesterday.

    This museum is a monument to the desire to avoid scientific evidence and to present an interpretation of the Bible that has clearly failed. Young earth creationism serves to place the Bible squarely in opposition to science, and by “science” in this case I do not merely mean “the data of science as currently understood.” Young earth creationism goes contrary to the data that we have. But the approach of young earth creationism is also contrary to the very methods of science. It takes one interpretation of a religious text, determines a very large body of “things that must be facts” from that meager information, and then sets out to impose those results on whatever observations are made. This is not a search for truth.

    This indictment doesn’t apply as I’ve stated it to all creationism. Old earth creationists, for example, take a substantially different approach. It’s easy to forget that there are many conservative Christians who don’t have a problem with the age of the earth as determined and confirmed by multiple branches of science using many different approaches. While they disagree with varying portions of the theory of evolution, the collision is much smaller.

    It is worthwhile noting that ID (intelligent design) creationism differs again by only asserting the need for divine intervention at various points in the development of life. I think it is still right to call ID creationism precisely because of that demand for a special type of intervention. Many young earth creationists are now spending their time arguing for ID. Why? It’s a simple public relations strategy. If you challenge people with the idea that the earth is only 6,000 years old, that dinosaurs lived with humans, you are running against such an overwhelming body of evidence from fields ranging from archeology to geology to biology, that many will reject you out of hand. So what you do is try to attack the scientific method in small ways, and do so in ways that some theists who believe in common descent can agree with you.

    But at the bottom line there are still the same group of organizations out there who are pushing a 6,000 year old earth, because, in their view, the Bible says so. But numerous Biblical interpreters don’t believe that the Bible says that at all. So what this amounts to is equating “faith” with their specific interpretation of a small portion of the Bible. And that, in itself, is a distortion. This is not faith versus science. It’s not the Bible versus science. It is a contest between a bad interpretation of scripture and the overwhelming body of scientific evidence. (I have some comments on the various interpretations here.)

    There’s an excellent article on the creation museum on the Panda’s Thumb. I like in particular the contrast between the spending done on creationism and that on scientific projects and education. Distorting the evidence and the record is not good for faith. It is building on the sand, a flawed building on a useless foundation at the cost of $27 million.

  • ID and Probability

    It seems that the probability arguments related to creationism don’t change much at the core, they just get more complex and verbose. The old “747 from a hurricane in a junk yard” argument just gets reformatted and reused about different things.

    Ed Brayton has a response to DaveScot that is so good I need to link to it. It’s very helpful for all the non-statisticians/non-mathematicians amongst us.

    DaveScot uses a deck of cards as his analogy, and the key thing to remember is that one can calculate the probability of a particular outcome because we know the precise process by which the cards get shuffled. All things being equal, each card has an equal probability of appearing in any particular position. Proteins are not like cards in that sense.

    I’ve heard a few times that one has to be a mathematician to respond to Dembski on things like specified complexity and the “no free lunch” theorem, but I think the GIGO principle is more applicable. If you don’t know what the processes you’re analyzing actually are, it is silly to talk about how probable it is that they will occur. The problem here is logic. No matter how good your algorithm, it will not produce good information with bad input, and the input used by the ID proponents is bad.

    Ed does a better job of analyzing it, though. Go read his.

  • Homeschool Textbooks and University Admission

    It’s been a few days since this was front and center, triggered by the presentation of an expert report by Dr. Michael Behe, but I wanted to write a few notes about the issue of admissions at UC and homeschooling. There’s an article ACSI v. Stearns, aka Wendell Bird vs. UC on Panda’s Thumb article here. I agree with the criticism of the textbook content. In addition, here’s an older article that contains a good summary:
    Culture war pits UC vs. Christian way of teaching : Religious schools challenge admission standards in court    .

    My issue is not with the assessment of these textbooks, but rather with priorities and appropriate diversity in education. I was homeschooled eight out of 12 years through high school, and the four years in formal schooling were spent in a very conservative Christian school. I knew nothing about evolution except that it happened and it took a long time. My textbooks on science were deficient in all the areas noted. On the other hand, I took a GED and went on to college and graduate school. I had no difficulty with science or math courses (as in getting As with no exceptional amount of study), and when I began to study the appropriate material, I had no difficulty coming to understand evolution, at least sufficiently for my needs as a non-scientist.

    My question on this issue is this: Can this possibly be the most pressing issue in admissions at UC or any university? Is there some ongoing problem with home schooled students failing out of introductory biology? I’m not saying that any university shouldn’t have standards, but I am wondering if this is more about academic culture than about standards. I’m not certain from reading what I see, but while I often deplore what certain home school parents do (lax discipline and schedules, very narrow curricular material), there are also many, many parents who home school quite effectively, and whose children are well above standards.

    I was never in a situation of playing catch-up in any of my classes from the moment I entered college. I moved to upper division courses in my second semester (with some annoyance to the academic affairs committee). Any deficiencies in my curriculum were easily overcome by the fact that I knew how to study, how to sort out information, and was ready to pick up new material in a hurry.

    I’m not sure of the legal aspects of this case, but to me it seems appropriate to keep the diverse options open. I oppose teaching creationism and intelligent design in high school classrooms, because I think in the limited time we should teach consensus science and do it as well as possible. Evolutionary theory is the overwhelming consensus. But in addition, I believe it’s important that people who disagree with me have options, if they’re willing to put in the time and money. Private schooling and home schooling are two of those options. They have to pay for it. They have to live with it.

    If there is some evidence of home schooled children struggling with their college courses because of deficient curricula, then there’s a point here. Otherwise, I’d let the results speak for themselves.

  • Academic Freedom and ID

    Intelligent Design advocates are trying to make us believe that their struggle is primarily about academic freedom, about allowing a new idea to get the examination it deserves, and about ensuring that people are not persecuted for their beliefs. Similar arguments are used from the high school level on up, with the phrase “teach the controversy” setting the tone. People attuned to fair play like the sound of “teach the controversy.” It sounds like a fine idea–whenever it’s done in somebody else’s sandbox.

    Recently a firestorm has arisen in the blogosphere over the decision at Iowa State University to deny tenure to Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez. You can find some of the controversy via the following links:

    I don’t have any new revelations from the Gonzalez case. The arguments over the facts surrounding it are going full steam around the various blogs involved. I want to think just a bit about academic freedom, priorities, and how serious we are about them.

    You see, I don’t think the ID people put a high priority on academic freedom as such. What they put a high priority on is freedom specifically for their point of view. That is not actually all that uncommon. Most of us get hostile about attacks on freedom of speech when the person speaking does not support our particular point of view. When we despise them, it’s much harder. This isn’t a left or right phenomenon. When I see footage of a KKK demonstration, at some level I’d really like to see their mouths forcibly shut and have them hauled off the streets. I feel even more strongly about the Westboro Baptist people (not to be associated with any other variety of Baptist), who protest at funerals.

    But I have a stronger belief in freedom of speech. I think that in the long run we are worse off if I get to cart the people who anger me at the most basic level off to jail. For me, freedom of speech is more important. The ACLU is frequently criticized for supporting free speech for people who are despicable, but their finest work, in my opinion, is done when they are under attack from the right and the left. They stand up and demand freedom for people that they themselves despise.

    There are some similarities in academic freedom. I see this from a slightly different perspective because I was homeschooled, and then completed both undergraduate and graduate work at private schools (Walla Walla College and Andrews University respectively). These are Seventh-day Adventist institutions, and are not only conservative, but in the area of origins are (or at least were) generally young earth. I started as a young earther myself with a view of Biblical inspiration that was compatible with inerrancy.

    During my studies I came to reject both inerrancy and young earth creationism. But that wasn’t where I got into trouble. My studies had nothing to do with that. Where I got into some difficulty was in the area of comparative literature. Just what of the Biblical text is original, and what might have its source, either literarily or in terms of ideas, in other ancient near eastern literature? When it came time to write my thesis, it turned out that due to timing, we could find two, but not three professors who were open to my research subject. I am a controversy avoider, so my adviser and I did a count, we demoted my thesis to “project” and I took four more hours of classwork, completing a non-thesis MA. Now there’s no reason to sympathize with me here. The university was private, religious, and I was writing a thesis in Biblical studies. I took the path of least resistance and took my degree. But just beyond the edges of my path of least resistance I knew there was the fact that academics are not entirely free.

    Should academics be entirely free? That depends on what one means by freedom, and the range over which the problem is discussed. In discussing freedom of speech, I argue that speech should be almost entirely free. I accept obvious exceptions such as incitement. But there are those who will argue that one’s speech cannot be free unless one is provided a platform. I see that differently. I don’t have to provide a platform to everyone, no matter what they have to say. They can provide their own platform.

    I believe that applies even more in academic freedom. For some people, academic freedom means that no matter what a person teaches, no matter how bizarre, no matter how untested, they should have a university platform from which to say it. Now they don’t usually make such a broad claim. What happens in fact is that when my favorite idea is not given the hearing that I think it deserves, I yell “academic freedom.” But academic ideas are not created equal. Professors are not equal. In general those in academia approve of standards of some type. They just want those standards to let them in and keep others out.

    But I don’t see academic freedom threatened by one wrong decision on tenure at one university. (Note that I am not calling the decision on Gonzalez at ISU wrong. Let’s call this a hypothetical wrong decision.) First, there are numerous universities. Other people who are denied tenure go find themselves more fertile ground. Students then examine various universities and decide where they want to get their education. A pattern of wrong decisions on tenure would be destructive of any academic program in the long term. Good decisions will tend to make a strong department. DIs blog has just such a suggestion.

    Intelligent Design activists could try to model the type of behavior they advocate by creating departments at their various religious schools and seminaries that include “Darwinists” and atheists, and of course Christians of various other denominations to “teach the controversy” in all of their various departments. I think Baptist schools should have Methodist professors to “teach the controversy” about baptism by immersion. Certainly, Richard Dawkins should be a regularly invited speaker for programs at seminaries to “teach the controversy” over the existence of God.

    You may think I’m joking. I truly believe that Christian education could do with a huge dose of the academic freedom that is now advocated for public and/or secular institutions. I’ve carried out such projects in Sunday School classes and small groups. I recommend Bible study with commentaries from traditions that get on your nerves. Anything that will tend to prevent inbreeding.

    At the same time there need to be boundaries. Another popular definition of academic freedom is freedom from criticism. The inverse of that is the definition of any criticism whatsoever as “persecution.” Scientific ideas need to be tested and challenged. Amongst the questions that should be raised are whether the idea itself is a scientific idea that generates explanations and new questions that can be objectively studied and tested. Few people would argue that an astronomy department should grant tenure to someone who believes that the earth is flat, or that the sun revolves around the earth, or that the earth is the center of the universe. Few would argue that a chemistry department should invite an alchemist to teach or grant him tenure.

    Where one draws the line is going to be difficult. Most importantly, however, different departments are going to draw that line in different places, and thus we will get to see how things work. It may be sad for people refused tenure who might have deserved it, though I suspect if someone truly deserved tenure and was refused, they will find an institution to grant it. It may be sad for the students who study at the university that makes a series of poor decisions. But those students also have a choice of where to study.

    But in the end, the fact that we have a very large academic community in many institutions under many different organizations will tend to bring things out to better conclusions. The ID community is itself proving how free ideas are through their ability to keep the waters stirred in public discourse even while they claim academic persecution. If rejected by all of academia, one can, as a last resort, write popular books.

    And there is where I think the real failure of the ID community lies thus far. They are more anxious to play the PR war than to demonstrate their ideas. I personally don’t think they will ever be able to do so. I think their ideas are philosophical and religious despite their claims. But the one way to push the scientific community into seeing their work as science is to work on their formulations to provide testable material and then get into the lab or the field and test those predictions. If the existing publications won’t publish, publish those articles yourself. Build a substantial body of research literature that demonstrates your claim that you’re being frozen out. I don’t think you can, but that’s the proper way to gain acceptance for a scientific idea, and it’s the proper response to skepticism.

  • ID and Theistic Evolution

    Ed Brayton calls attention to the “exchange of views” between P. Z. Myers and Wesley Elsberry. As any reader of this blog will know, I’m siding with Wesley Elsberry.

    But this whole debate continues to annoy me. Why is it that people have to care what someone believes about something that is not going to impact their science. Even Myers agrees, for example, that Kenneth Miller (with Levine) have written some excellent science texts. So who cares precisely what they believe when the issue is science?

    Yes, when dealing with political issues, that is going to come up. Even my name, as poorly known as it is, gets brought up in church. “Henry’s a Bible teacher and he accepts evolution.” Depending on the position of the person saying it, imagine a tone either of passing a dirty secret or of triumph, as in “It’s OK then.”

    The fact that I accept evolution is not in any sense a scientific reason for someone to accept the theory. But such is life in this fine world of ours. Some people accept or reject things because people that they respect accept them. In fact, much of the following of creationism exists, not because people have actually studied the issue, but because they are following the opinions of people who have the “right” theological views.

    That’s not good. They should change it. But it’s a fact of life.

    In the meantime, for those challenged by nuances and gradations in ideas, try this. ID advocates think God tinkers along the way in an identifiable way. Theistic evolutions expect to find the same physical things as atheistic evolutionists, but they also believe in God. There won’t be any difference in a science text written by a theistic and an atheistic evolutionist–unless they get off the subject. Kenneth Miller’s scientific writings are exhibit A.

    Now in politics and theology, all bets are off. 🙂

  • Natural Production of New Information

    One of the key arguments for Intelligent Design (ID) is that new information cannot be produced by natural processes, and thus there must be intervention by an intelligent designer for this new information to appear. That’s a crude statement, but it covers the ground pretty well.

    One problem I saw with the argument when I read Darwin’s Black Box, was one that was implicit in Behe’s writing, but which he did not acknowledge: Science discovers new things all the time. In the midst of describing how much we know now that was unknown in Darwin’s day, Behe suddenly seems to expect the reader to accept a stop sign in this one direction. For the production of an IC system, there must be intelligent intervention. There are at least two branches to that argument. First, no new information can be produced and second, that information can’t be organized as an IC system. Creating an IC system would require both, and that view has been challenged in both directions. Systems that appear to be IC have been proved to be no such thing, and many ways of producing new information through natural evolutionary processes have been demonstrate.

    Art has a post on the Panda’s Thumb that discusses such a structure in about as much detail as a non-biologist can take. It’s pretty clear writing, however, so if you’re willing to look up a couple of terms to make sure you’re on track, you should be able to follow it in its essentials. The key point can be summarized:

    The take-home message of all this is: portions of the maize mitochondrial genome that do not normally encode any protein were shuffled, extensively, so as to cobble together an expressed gene that encodes, not just any old polypeptide, but a multimeric gated ion channel. In other words, an irreducibly complex structure arose in one fell swoop, using DNA sequences that do not encode proteins. Basically, this is a case of IC from scratch.

    Much of the information that refutes Behe’s arguments was already available when he wrote, and much has appeared since. I appreciate those folks who are willing to write up this sort of complicated material for the rest of us.

    If I might add my theological note, as is expected of me as a theistic evolutionist, my question for my fellow Christians is why they would assume that a universe designed by God would be incapable of producing pretty much anything. I do not mean by front-loading for specific elements, but simply the design of a universe that functions. This is not an argument for or against intervention. It’s simply an observation that special intervention is not required. (By special intervention I mean action that contravenes the normal processes. As a theist, I believe that all things happen “because God,” but that God’s will is so consistent that we can call it natural law.)