Intelligent Design: A Small Point, a Medium Point and a Big Point

Lots and lots of good responses recently out there about the problem of “intelligent design” and its assault on science, reason and educational standards. I have three contributions to the ongoing discussion.

1) Increasingly advocates for intelligent design who aren’t just offering undisguised religious arguments are turning to “complexity” or “information science” to try and shore up their arguments. The most generous thing you could say about this strategy is that it may be offered honestly by people who’ve read a work or two of science fiction that touches on complexity and emergence and carelessly skimmed Steven Johnson’s Emergence. More often, I think it’s another kind of flim-flam intended to briefly nonpluss scientific opponents and razzle-dazzle members of the public who may not be biblical literalists but who think that there’s something about this invocation of “complexity” that sounds like common sense.

I kind of understand what’s going on here. When I first took an interest in complexity, emergence, autonomous agents and related topics, I have to confess I was privately thinking that somewhere in this subject matter was a thermodynamic miracle, a magic trick. I was more thinking that about human consciousness than I was the evolution of life (and I’m still inclined to think that mechanistic approaches to consciousness are flawed). It took me only a little while, however, to see that expectation was a perceptual flaw, related to the common tendency of observers to anthropomorphize when watching examples of agent-based emergent phenomena. Everyone who watches a program like NetLogo has a tendency to ascribe intention and will to the agents: “They’re trying to build a circle”. I think it has to do with a kind of cognitive algorithim we use to divide life from non-life when we observe the world. The same tendency makes us think when a system goes from simple beginnings to a systemically complex later state that there must be some hidden driver, plan, purpose or blueprint that is making that change happen. But completely contrary to what the intelligent design people suggest, there are a great many well-documented, empirically observable cases in the natural and human world in which complex results are obtained from simple initial conditions. Moreover, there’s no thermodynamic miracle: the people who think so are hopelessly parochial. They’re forgetting that the local phenomena they are observing do not exist in thermodynamic isolation from the larger universe. Once you situate life on Earth in the larger context of the solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, the Local Group, the universe itself, as well as in the context not just of new species but the death or loss of old ones, there’s nothing inexplicable about it.

2) On the atheism point. Here I do think there’s a delicate tightrope that needs to be walked carefully. There’s nothing wrong with being both an evolutionary biologist and an atheist, and no reason to smother or or suppress either. However, I think it’s a tactical error at the least to insist that the former intellectually obligates the latter. That may be so in the particular intellect of a given person, but it’s not inevitable. I don’t think there’s any reason to regard someone who has a view of God as the uncaused cause as inevitably having a suspect understanding of evolutionary biology, or even a person who believes in a loving, intervening God as such. I think this much most scientists would agree on, either philosophically or at least as a matter of political realism. There’s a more delicate problem lying beyond that agreement, however. I’ve written about this a bit before in terms of the role of science and expertise in American public life, that at least some of the ground that intelligent design has gained in recent years rests on a deeper antipathy for the way that scientists and technocrats work within and alongside the state to intervene in everyday life.

There’s a kind of popular antipathy towards the interventions of science that is fed by the entrepreneurial activities of some experts who claim the authority of science (often at the protestation of scientists), often in the name of dubious or contestable “facts”. I continue, for example, to be frustrated by the weakness of many studies of the effects of modern media, that once you look closely at the design of such studies, or at the very small effect sizes, you ought take all but the very best with a gigantic grain of salt even if you’re predisposed to their conclusions. Yet there is a huge establishment of policymakers and experts who operate at the peri-professional boundaries of scientific practice who unselfconsciously will proclaim that such tenuous, debatable studies “scientifically” prove their case and justify the construction of huge policy interventions of various kinds.

Deeper still, I think that one of the things fueling the whole debate is the pop-culture representation of the scientist as supreme rationalist, the kind of second-cousin to Javert that Terry Gilliam was aiming his barbs at in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Think of all the entertainments and works of literature you’ve seen where “scientists” show up as white-coated, cold-hearted, amoral figures who cannot accept magic or mystery. Yes, there are important counter-examples of the scientist as hero, or even as the magician himself, the person who romantically brings mystery, beauty and change to our lives. That image works to the advantage of scientists in the debate over intelligent design, so I think it’s important not to feed the other stereotype too quickly or readily. Science should be the enemy of unreason, falsehood, ignorance, but I don’t think it has to be the enemy of awe, mystery or the sublime. Neither do any scientists I know, and that’s something worth reminding the wider public.

3) On mystery from another angle. I guess one thing I’m wondering lately is whether it’s ever worth arguing with a believer about the things he or she believes in terms of trying to point out something about the belief itself within its own terms and self-presentation. For example, is it ever worth arguing with an Islamic fundamentalist who supports suicide bombing that the religious traditions of Islam seem to clearly proscribe or forbid suicide? On the intelligent design question, is it ever worth observing, as Cosma Shalizi did, that many formulations of intelligent design are actually profoundly disrespectful of some of the most central ideas in the religious history of Christianity? For example, there’s really only a very limited number of escape hatches from the problem of evil in God’s universe, if you’re a Christian. One is that evil is God’s punishment for original sin, but the most rigorous formulations of that idea don’t have the widespread support in evangelical Christianity that they once did. More popular and commonly offered is that we cannot understand the mystery of God’s creation and the purpose of humankind within it, that evil may serve some function which we cannot hope to fully understand precisely because we are not God. That’s certainly the kind of view that many Christians offer as a everyday, commonsensical explanation of why bad things happen to good people. But look then at how intelligent design plows right through the mystery of God’s creation and purpose, how it banalizes God, harnesses Him. As Shalizi says, ID essentially says, “Look, God made the world just as we would have.” If God really means to reveal his design in the world, wouldn’t the contemplation of the world lead us deeper into mystery and the sublime?

A more potent example that’s often on my mind, and a reason why my own childhood encounter with religious education was short: is it ever worth arguing with biblical literalism in literalist terms? I found in my own experience when I pushed the nun who was teaching CCD about the contradictions in the Bible, I didn’t get very good answers. Most of them were just the old saw that the New Testament was a fulfillment of the Old rather than a contradiction or repudiation of it, which is just dodging the problem. Basically, a very serious literalist runs into deep, deep problems in the second half of the Old Testament, when about the only way to reconcile some of what God’s doing there with a modern worldview, even a markedly religious one, is to say that what we’re seeing are metaphors about God and man, not literal descriptions of what God did. It ought to be possible, if you’re moderately well educated about the actual contents of the Bible, to question a literalist argument in its own terms, including one about creation and evolution. But my own experience suggests that it’s not especially productive: you very rapidly hit a point in the discussion where the literalist cuts out, or reduces the dialogue to being purely about social enmity (e.g., that they don’t need to talk to you, because your aims are purely mischievious or destructive).

Still, I continue to wonder why this isn’t a more potent kind of fracture within the creationist or intelligent design coalition. Why don’t more devout Christians regard the attempt to rationalize faith as science as a dubious, even profane, exercise? Why do some Christians seem to need the crutch of justifying their faith through pseudo-science? Why isn’t Christianity itself, and its considerable intellectual and philosophical heritage, the best and most powerful answer to the intellectual sleaziness of most intelligent design advocacy?

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35 Responses to Intelligent Design: A Small Point, a Medium Point and a Big Point

  1. Alan Jacobs says:

    The first thing that needs to be said here — because it ought to be said in the MSM but never is, alas — is that nobody knows what the hell they are referring to when they invoke the specter of “Intelligent Design.” The proponents of ID are enormously varied in their interests, knowledge, and purposes. Some are closet creationists; some are running as fast as they can from creationism. You can’t lump fundamentalist members of your local school board and opportunist politicians together with scientists like Michael Behe and assume that they all have the same beliefs and the same agenda. They don’t. They may all be wrong, but if so, they are wrong in different ways and for different reasons. The one-size-fits-all critique which dominates the media (and the blogosphere) right now is tiresome.

    Second, Shalizi’s point that ID (or some amorphous thing called ID) is “bad religion” as well as “bad science” was made almost a decade ago by Jerry Coyne in his review (in *Nature*) of Behe’s *Darwin’s Black Box*. (You can get a PDF of it on Coyne’s U of Chicago webpage.) Coyne, who like Shalizi is an atheist, very appositely quotes from the great passage in in one of Bonhoeffer’s prison letters in which he warns against the danger of constructing a “god of the gaps” — a God whose glory and power can only be seen when there are “gaps” in our knowledge that we can fill with an invocation of divinity. Bonhoeffer rightly points out that the gaps in our knowledge tend to get smaller — which means that the “god of the gaps” gets smaller too. Bonhoeffer thinks that the last thing Christians need is a reason to remain ignorant.

    Incidentally, on this matter the ID people tend to be the exact opposite of the “biblical creationists” (a point Shalizi doesn’t get): the creationists insist that we know just how God created the cosmos because the Bible tells us so, while the ID people emphasize scientists’ *inability* to explain how certain “irreducibly complex systems” arose — thereby leaving a “gap” for God or some other Designer. ID is all about what we can’t explain; creationism explains everything.

  2. Timothy Burke says:

    I think these are interesting and important observations. But here’s what puzzles me, Alan: why isn’t there political as well as explicit intellectual tension between the ID people and the biblical creationists? How are they able to (apparently to me) get along in a coalition together? Because what you’re pointing to is exactly what puzzles me: biblical creationists shouldn’t need or want ID people. Is this pure cynicism? talking past one another? a marriage of intellectual convenience?

  3. Alan Jacobs says:

    Tim, that depends on who you mean by “the ID people.” If you mean the scientists or quasi-scientists who really try to develop an account of how systems of irreducible complexity arise, well, there aren’t enough of them to be politically significant. I think the people you are concerned about are the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of conservative Christians who have a vague and highly generalized suspicion of Darwinism — who have heard heard both from pastors *and* from the Richard Dawkinses and Sam Harrises of the world that anything you might happen to call “evolution” and anything you might happen to call “religion” are utterly irreconcilable: one must die at the hands of the other, like Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort. And, being good Christian folks who want to have the freedom to raise their children as good Christian folk, they leap into the culture wars. Some of them are committed biblical creationists, but not nearly as many as people think — though they have very little scientific literacy, they have enough to be (perhaps secretly) skeptical about whether carbon dating and measurements of the size and age of the universe can really be total shams. They may even know that something that looks an awful lot like evolution by random mutation can be seen in the field and in the laboratory. And they have seen (as Jerry Coyne points out in his new New Republic piece) that American courts have not been sympathetic to the idea that creationism should be taught, at least as an option, in the schools. So ID comes along, and it seems like either the next best thing or an even better thing — an even better thing because it doesn’t require you to reject any of the major findings of modern science about the age of the earth, the basic fact of environmentally adaptive evolutionary development, etc. And its presence somewhere in the curriculum, even as just one of the possible options out there, just might keep teachers from making atheists of their children.

    It works something like that. Jerry Coyne is a very, very smart man, but his claim that ID is, in its origins and essence, a clever ruse fashioned by defeated creationists is just way wrong. The people who started the serious ID argument have nothing to do with the biblical creationists — they come from very different wings of the Christian culture. And there’s no conspiracy here; the sudden popularity of ID is just a lot of half-educated Christian people grasping for ways to prevent “secular” society from undermining the faith of their children.

    (Having said all that, I should add that, as a Christian myself, I don’t support the get-ID-in-the-schools cause, and I wish Bush hadn’t fanned those fires.)

  4. Alan Jacobs says:

    (P.S. to my wife: see, honey, what I do on Friday nights when you’re out of town? Just watch baseball and write comment posts on blogs. I’m the most boring guy in town.)

  5. Caleb says:

    For the sake of argument …

    Why leap to the conclusion that if there is intellectual tension between IDers and creationists, their toleration of it must be craven, ignorant, or both? Why not interpret it as possible evidence that some believers can be more tolerant and patient in the face of disagreement and gaps than they are given credit for? It could be that this is a too charitable interpretation. But then again, why not consider charitableness, rather than cynicism, as an explanation?

    Well, in fairness, because there is also plenty of reason to support an explanation from cynicism. But like Alan, I think it’s unfair to start from the suspicion of conspiracy or hard-headed-ness and then come to the conclusion that there’s an unexplainable mystery here in the way that people behave. It’s somewhat like the “God of the gaps” in reverse: if we can’t understand why people act a certain way, we assuage our mystification by attributing their behavior to a belief in God that is invincible to all of our efforts at persuasion.

  6. back40 says:

    ” . . . the problem of “intelligent design” and its assault on science, reason and educational standards.”

    I have no religion and never have had any. It was a family tradition for many generations and so I had no childhood instruction, and never developed any adult interest. I have no dog in this fight. But it seems to me from my admittedly remote perspective that ID is not an assault on science, it is an assault on scientism, another religion, the one that “the Richard Dawkinses” etc. embrace with seemingly no self awareness.

    This is not, then, an assault on reason and educational standards. In a curious and perhaps unintended way it is the opposite since it seeks to diminish the dominance of scientism, if only by elevating an equally spurious religious view to some sort of quasi-parity. Exposing the unexamined beliefs of those mired in scientism as essentially unreasoning, faith based dogmas is useful. Just as Gould has been called the “accidental creationist” for his work showing problems with the standard models of evolution, work seized on by opponents of evolution as support for their views, ID proponents are in a way “accidental scientists” in that their work exposes scientism, at least for some of us that are sensitive to and suspicious of unreasoning faith when it is presented as something other than religion.

    P.S. there’s an interesting examination of religion in general and scientism in particular (as well as other faiths) in Zindell’s Neverness and RfHS trilogy that you may recall. Though works of fiction there are some useful discussions mouthed by his fictional characters, perhaps something like Wolfe uses some of his characters and situations to make statements. I especially liked his analysis of how ideas degenerate into ideology – for example how holistic ideas degenerated into holism and greenism – something that perhaps echoes your statements about how a naive grasp of complexity science can turn some interesting ideas into something lesser yet more rigid.

    Zindell is a mathematician, and so arguably given to a type of mysticism and perhaps a less than solid grip on reality, but I’m not arguing that his views are comprehensively correct, just that he does a good job of nailing some of the issues with scientism, and provides a useful explanation of how good ideas seem to ossify over time. Religion, like other institutions that have concerned you recently, might also benefit from sell-by dates.

  7. bbenzon says:

    Hm m m m . . . . I’m not interested in ID enough to really look into it. I’m quite satisfied with some version of Darwinism, though just which version . . . . the experts are debating the details and that’s more than I can follow.

    But I’m tired of this whole mess. It’s consumed enormous reserves of time and energy for a century or more and we’re still deadlocked. I was down with Bertrand Russell in my teens, and that seems just right for his brand of atheism. Now Richard Dawkins is the most public proponent of adolescent atheism. It’s tired.

    Three or so years ago I happened to catch a segment in one of those PBS omnibus examinations of, in this case, evolution. This segment was devoted to creationism — more so than ID — and the people who believe. A lot of it was shot on the campus of Wheaton College in Illinois. And you know, those faculty and students seemed like intelligent people. Then there was a segment with a really fundamentalist literalist preacher. And he said — here I’m exaggerating but — it’s not so much that we really care about 6000 years ago and such, but the Bible is the authority. If we put one part of the message in doubt, then the whole thing falls, and then where would we be? He sounded like an intelligent person. I don’t buy the argument, but it’s a human argument.

    So I’m wondering what’s the harm in letting ID and creationism into the high school classroom? As long is Darwin is there too, what’s the harm? If we made some concessions, would this massive wasteful debate diminish, or even disappear all together?

    One thing it seems to me is going on is that, when Mr. Ordinary Everyman looks around, he sees that, yes, human beings are different from every other creature on earth. We really and truely are. And then Mr. Darwinian Biology tells him, no, we’re not different. We’re just a naked ape. And that just plain doesn’t make sense. Plus Mr. Darwinain Biology has a tone of voice and a posture that clearly indicates he things Mr. Ordinary Everyman is a hopeless idiot. Everyman picks up on that, resents it, and decides to dig in. Biology responds in kind. And now we have a mess. And the issue in contention — what do we teach about biology in the schools — is now serving as a vehicle for a somewhat different fight.

    I think science needs to come up with a more reasonable line on the place of man in the universe, one that is consistent with Darwinian evolution, but also acknowledges that something really interesting and deep happened between 100K and 2M years ago or so. And we need to consider easing up on high school biology. The medical establishment and the pharmaceutical industry are not going to perish for lack of scientific talent if we let kids read the sort of stuff in high school biology that they’re getting in church classes on the weekend.

    * * * * *

    Now, I’m not entirely sure I believe all that. But those kinds of issues need to be thrashed out and that kind of intellectual-political compromise needs to be considered. It’s time to move on.

  8. There’s nothing wrong with being both an evolutionary biologist and an atheist, and no reason to smother or or suppress either. However, I think it’s a tactical error at the least to insist that the former intellectually obligates the latter. That may be so in the particular intellect of a given person, but it’s not inevitable.

    It may be tactically unwise to publicly press the point in a society in which self-professed believing Christians constitute an overwhelming majority, but as a logical matter the theory of evolution does logically obligate one to something much closer to atheism than a belief in the activist deity of the Bible and the Quran, and I don’t think it’s at all accidental that religiosity in Europe has gone down just as the acceptance of Darwin’s theory has gone up.

    I don’t think there’s any reason to regard someone who has a view of God as the uncaused cause as inevitably having a suspect understanding of evolutionary biology, or even a person who believes in a loving, intervening God as such.

    The former I readily concede; as for the latter, only if said person is willing to give up on at least one of omniscience and omnipotence. The problem of evil aside, living creatures are simply too rife with design flaws for them to be the handiwork of a being incapable of error.

    So I’m wondering what’s the harm in letting ID and creationism into the high school classroom? As long is Darwin is there too, what’s the harm?

    If we’re going to teach ID and creationism as if they were serious scientific theories, why stop there? Why not include every other religious group’s creation myths while we’re at it, as the constitution would seem to oblige? And what do we do when some religious group decides that there’s a “controversy” over whether Pi is equal to 3 or the world is flat? Scientific truth cannot be determined by the whims of the mob.

    One thing it seems to me is going on is that, when Mr. Ordinary Everyman looks around, he sees that, yes, human beings are different from every other creature on earth. We really and truely are.

    Sure, and they’re all different from each other as well. To the extent that hyenas and owls can think, this world of ours must seem just as created expressly for their habitation as it does to us, and every facet of their physiognomy and behavior just as singular.

    I think science needs to come up with a more reasonable line on the place of man in the universe, one that is consistent with Darwinian evolution, but also acknowledges that something really interesting and deep happened between 100K and 2M years ago or so.

    Science already has come up with as reasonable an answer as it can, which is that we’re just one more ape amongst many which have roamed this planet. “Reasonable” isn’t a synonym for “emotionally satisfying.”

    The medical establishment and the pharmaceutical industry are not going to perish for lack of scientific talent if we let kids read the sort of stuff in high school biology that they’re getting in church classes on the weekend.

    Perhaps you want to take a look at the damage Lysenkoism did to Russian biology before repeating that claim. A biologist without a firm understanding of the randomness of evolution and mankind’s affinities with the rest of the animal kingdom will never have the toolkit to make a meaningful contribution to 21st century science.

  9. bbenzon says:

    “Science already has come up with as reasonable an answer as it can, which is that we’re just one more ape amongst many which have roamed this planet.”

    This won’t do. While it is well established that apes have rudimentary culture, it is not remotely comparable to human culture. It is human culture than must be acknowledged and accounted for. A whole new level of analysis and explanation is required here.

    “A biologist without a firm understanding of the randomness of evolution and mankind’s affinities with the rest of the animal kingdom will never have the toolkit to make a meaningful contribution to 21st century science.”

    I suspect that one can do quite a bit of molecular biology, for example, without having to internalize evolutionary theory. Biology faculty at Wheaton seemed to have managed this. And molecular biology is what the pharmaceutical industry needs. Similarly, one can do quite a bit of work on human physiology without having to worry about evolutionary issues. I think this stuff can be rather conveniently compartmentalized.

    Will such people make Nobel-level contributions to 21st century science. Not likely. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the highly trained worker bees to biotech and medtech.

    “If we’re going to teach ID and creationism as if they were serious scientific theories, why stop there? Why not include every other religious group’s creation myths while we’re at it, as the constitution would seem to oblige? And what do we do when some religious group decides that there’s a “controversy” over whether Pi is equal to 3 or the world is flat? Scientific truth cannot be determined by the whims of the mob.”

    This is an issue, but I don’t know what kind of an issue it is. Is making a few strategic concessions just the first step down a slipply slope to intellectual perdition? Maybe it is, but that’s not at all obvious to me.

    I agree that scientific truth is not open to mob rule. I’m not talking about changing university degree requirements nor am I talking about changing standards for publication in the technical literature. I’m talking about brokering a limited-scope political deal.

    I also think we should have a little faith in the intelligence of high school students. Students whose religious background doesn’t incline them to creationism aren’t going to be harmed by learning it high school and I doubt that they will be casually turned to the “dark side” of creationism. OTOH, I also do not believe that holding the line on Darwinian purity will have much effect on students who are happy in their conservative religious background. They’ll believe whatever they want and cope with high school however the can. I’d rather they cope with a public high school where they must deal with students from a variety of backgrouns than retreat to home schooling.

  10. hestal says:

    I agree with Alan Jacobs:

    “And there’s no conspiracy here; the sudden popularity of ID is just a lot of half-educated Christian people grasping for ways to prevent “secular” society from undermining the faith of their children.”

    I live in the heart of fundamentalist Texas. The Creationist Museum is just four miles from my home. The folks I talk to don’t see any conflict between creationism and ID. They think of them as just two more arrows in the quiver. They are under seige and they need every weapon they can get in order to keep the Christianity alive.

  11. While it is well established that apes have rudimentary culture, it is not remotely comparable to human culture. It is human culture than must be acknowledged and accounted for. A whole new level of analysis and explanation is required here.

    And how exactly is this different from the situation with any other genus in which one particular species has taken a trait to an extreme? Just because it happens to do with us doesn’t make it special, and it most certainly doesn’t mean “God did it” is required as an explanation (or rather, a question-begging non-explanation).

    I suspect that one can do quite a bit of molecular biology, for example, without having to internalize evolutionary theory.

    You couldn’t be more wrong. I direct you to make enquiries of this nice gentleman if you think otherwise: virtually nothing in molecular biology makes sense without the theory of evolution – all you have left is glorified stamp-collecting.

    Biology faculty at Wheaton seemed to have managed this.

    How do you know that the professors actually believe the College’s party line? And who says they even know what they’re talking about in the classroom anyway? There’s no centralized accreditation agency for biology professors.

    . Similarly, one can do quite a bit of work on human physiology without having to worry about evolutionary issues. I think this stuff can be rather conveniently compartmentalized.

    You could not be more wrong. Try explaining sickle-cell disease, trends in obesity or HIV infection rates and resistance without the aid of evolution.

    I’m talking about the highly trained worker bees to biotech and medtech.

    You can’t know much of anything at all about modern medicine or biotechnology if you believe this. To speak of working in either field without an understanding of evolutionary processes is as preposterous as dreaming of working as an engineer at NASA while being ignorant of hamiltonian mechanics.

    Is making a few strategic concessions just the first step down a slipply slope to intellectual perdition? Maybe it is, but that’s not at all obvious to me.

    Once you’ve conceded the principle of the thing, why would you imagine it would stop there? Do you realize just how much of modern mathematics and science conflicts with the Bible? We aren’t just talking biology, but geology (plate tectonics), physics (radioactive decay, the age of the universe), even mathematics (yes, Pi is defined in the Bible as equal to 3). If you think for one second that ignorant peddlers of religious superstition will be satisfied with a single act of appeasement, you’re very much mistaken: anything whatsoever that threatens to undermine their delusional worldview will be fair game.

    There comes a time when one has to take a stand even with the knowledge that one risks extreme unpopularity. Most scientists know full well just how much is at stake, and they aren’t about to surrender all the gains that have been made since the days of Galileo and the Inquisition simply in the name of “compromise” with rank ignorance, as incoherent a concept as a “moderate” pregnancy.

  12. robbo says:

    Alan Jacobs wrote “there’s no conspiracy here” and others seem to agree. I’m a little surprised that nobody here seems to be aware of the Discovery Institute’s “wedge strategy.”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_strategy

    I’ll quote a few passages from the Wikipedia entry:

    Informally known as the “Wedge Document,” it was a fund raising tool used by the Discovery Institute to raise money for its subsidiary charged with promoting its science and education agenda, the Center for Science and Culture, at the time called the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (CRSC). As stated in the Wedge Document[1], the strategy is designed to defeat “Darwinism” and to promote an idea of science “consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.” The ultimate goal of the Wedge strategy is to “renew” American culture by shaping public policy to reflect conservative Christian values.

    The strategy outlines a public relations campaign meant to sway the opinion of the public, popular media, funding agencies, and the scientific community in order that they should effect an “overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies”. Wedge advocates have stated they hope to reinstate a “broadly theistic understanding of nature” to replace materialism. According to critics of intelligent design, the intelligent design movement, and the Discovery Institute, the wedge document, more than any other Discovery Institute project, betrays the Institute’s and intelligent design’s political rather than scientific purpose.

    If ID ain’t a conspiracy then there’s simply no such thing.

  13. bbenzon says:

    “Just because it happens to do with us doesn’t make it special, and it most certainly doesn’t mean “God did it” is required as an explanation (or rather, a question-begging non-explanation). ”

    For the record, I don’t happen to think “god” had anything to do with it. And I don’t care about specialness either.

    But I also do not think human culture is just another “extreme trait.” This is a big and complex subject, and one I’d not care to hash out in a blog debate. You can find my views on this here:

    http://asweknowit.ca/evcult/

    As for the rest of your remarks:

    1.) I don’t think the conceptual framework of biology is as tightly coupled as you are implying. While I believe that the whole thing works best in a Darwinian framework, I also think large swaths of it are intelligible to those who “look the other way” when Darwin comes around. This is certainly true for the ID crowd, but obviously less so for Biblical creationists.

    2.) The only serious issue is the slippery slope issue. I really don’t what would happen. But we’ve played it your way for a century more and have failed to stem the tides of ignorance. Maybe we should reconsidered our tactics.

    3.) I’ve talked with fundamentalists, even lectured before them. They don’t growl, bark, or bite.

  14. Alan Jacobs says:

    So, robbo, you think that the Discovery Institute has let millions of fundamentalist parents in on their strategy, but skillfully kept it hidden from the rest of us? *Of course* Discovery has a “secret strategy,” but among all those protesting Christian families and school-board members who are demanding that ID be taught in the schools, not one in a thousand has even heard of the Discovery Institute. The rise of ID is a social epidemic, not the result of a Vast Fundamentalist Conspiracy.

  15. robbo says:

    No, Alan, I don’t think that the Discovery Institute has “let millions of fundamentalist parent in on their strategy,” and I don’t think they “skillfully kept it hidden” from anyone. They have been quite open about their desire to develop and promote ID as the antidote to evolotionary biology for some time now. They have sponsored and promoted the “ID scientists” that enable anyone to have heard of a thing called ID in the first place. I’m sure they prefer that those “millions” not know that this is all an orchestrated plan.

    In fact, what I just typed out is so obvious that I don’t even understand your argument — just because “milions of fundamentalist parents” are unwitting tools doesn’t mean that the proponents of ID have not consciously conceived of and executed a conspiracy. It means that the Discovery Institute has done their job very well so far.

    Really, I’m fascinated that it’s possible to provide seemingly rational people with the blueprints of an honest-to-God conspiracy, complete with fun stuff like:

    * Phase I: Scientific Research, Writing & Publicity,
    * Phase II: Publicity & Opinion-making, and
    * Phase III: Cultural Confrontation & Renewal.

    The Wedge Strategy was designed with both five-year and twenty-year goals in mind in order to achieve the conversion of the mainstream. One notable component of the work was its desire to address perceived “social consequences” and to promote a social conservative agenda on a wide range of issues including abortion, euthanasia, sexuality, and other social reform movements.
    ______

    And many seemingly rational people will steadfastly ignore this and write things like “The rise of ID is a social epidemic, not the result of a Vast Fundamentalist Conspiracy.” ID is an orchestrated social epidemic — it is the planned result of a small group of conspirators and there would be no “school of thought” known as ID without someone to promote that school of thought. Since no credible universities would presently have anything to do with ID, how do you think any of us have ever heard of this radical new take on creationism that came pre-packaged with such a nifty, market-ready label?

    But the same sorts of things have gone on with tobacco research and climate-change research — a wacky extreme fringe of the scientific community can take on the mantle of contrarian thinkers, proclaim themselves to be just as legitimate as the other 99% (who are naturally part of a conspiracy to repress them and their maverick ways), and achieve a stalemate that polarizes public opinon and hogties policymakers.

    And the public and policymakers need not know — indeed it’s best they not know — that they’re unwitting stooges of a small group of conspirators. Fortunately, human nature seems to be such that one can be presented with the actual blueprints of a vast conspiracy and the normal reaction is to ignore it or to actually ridicule anyone who actually believes that conspiracies exist. Strange but true.

  16. robbo says:

    Reading back through that, I should clarify that it’s not, of course, just a “wacky extreme fringe” that promotes such frauds as all that tobacco research questioning whether there was a danger, or all that climate research questioning whether humans are really affecting the climate in a significant way. Some are wack-jobs, but the most effective ones probably are just shills for the industry that pays them.

    My industry involves land planning, and I know plenty of biologists who shamelessly shill for the building industry — they’re not wack-jobs, they’re just people who’ve decided to go along to get along and who are acutely aware that the developers pay their salaries, often directly. It’s not an organized conspiracy, but few policymakers have felt motivated to change the conditions that produce predictably bad results. So it’s something of an organic arrangement in which all the players know who scratches who’s back and all agree to keep scratching.

  17. Alan Jacobs says:

    robbo, your comments are a classic example of the “post hoc ergo propter hoc” fallacy. You rightly see that (a) the Discovery Institute has a “wedge strategy” for (among other things) bringing ID into America’s classrooms, and (b) millions of fundamentalist parents are clamoring for ID to be introduced into America’s classrooms; you therefore, oddly, conclude that (c) those parents are “unwitting tools” of the Discovery Institute conspirators, who have “done their job very well so far.”

    But the fact that Discovery *wants* something to happen, and tries its best to make it happen, does not at all mean that Discovery was the *cause* of that event when it eventually *does* happen. (Otherwise you’d also have to say that my next-door neighbor, who wanted Bush to defeat Kerry and did everything in his power to make that happen, was the cause of the election turning out the way it did.) Do you really think that there wouldn’t be any forces in American culture making ID attractive to Christians if it weren’t for the “small group of conspirators at the Discovery Institute? Give me a break.

  18. robbo says:

    The employees of the Discovery Institute have worked from a strategic blueprint to devise a novel concept called “Intelligent Design” and to propagate it to the culture at large. It makes no sense to compare that work to the work of a hypothetical citizen volunteering for a political campaign. It’s a pretty desperate comparison, in fact — can’t you do any better?

    I guess it can’t be repeated enough that there would be no entity called “Intelligent Design” without a committed group of people who purposefully decided to create, fund, and promote it. The mere fact that we have all heard of something called “Intelligent Design” is a palpable victory for the architects of this scheme. The term was outside of human consciousness 20 years ago and there’s no organic reason for it to be ingrained there now. Clearly, marketing works.

    BTW, Alan, I have been giving you a pass on the notion that “millions” of Americans are “clamoring” for ID to be introduced into public education. Please provide a credible source for your claim.

  19. Alan Jacobs says:

    robbo, in invoking my neighbor — who, by the way, wasn’t at all hypothetical the last time I checked — I was trying to give a simple example of the kind of logical fallacy you are committing. Apparently that didn’t work. Let me try one more time. You write, “The employees of the Discovery Institute have worked from a strategic blueprint to devise a novel concept called ‘Intelligent Design’ and to propagate it to the culture at large.” Absolutely; we agree about that. But you have given no evidence at all for your repeated claim that Discovery and Discovery alone is responsible for the prominence of ID in our public discourse. Like all conspiracy theorists, you have a monocausal view of the world — these few brilliant conspirators did it *all by themselves* — and I’m just trying to say that, given the many conservative Christians in this country, their thousands of churches and Christian schools and foundations and TV stations and websites, the rise of ID is a lot more complicated than that. In any case, you haven’t given a single shred of evidence for your claim. I guess you think that if you “repeat it often enough” people will start believing you.

    As for the “millions,” here’s what I’m thinking: Gallup polls for the last thirty years have shown that an average of about 40% of Americans identify themselves as evangelicals. (Google it if you don’t believe me.) If that percentage holds in the population at large, that would be around 100 million American evangelicals. I figure at least one-fiftieth of them want very much to see ID taught in the schools. Wouldn’t that be a safe bet?

  20. robbo says:

    Alan, if the term “conspiracy theorist” means that I believe that major conspiracies exist in the world, then yes, I’m that. I believe that there was a decades-long conspiracy by Big Tobacco to suppress what they knew about the dangers of smoking. I believe there was a major conspiracy by Enron and pals to shoot California’s electricity bills through the roof four years ago. I believe that there’s a conspiracy to cast doubt on the vast majority of climatologists, who believe that global warming is a real problem that we should be addressing now. Which of these conspiracies do you believe in, Alan, and which are in the realm of the tinfoil hat?

    I do not have a “monocausal view of the world” and I have never claimed that the small number of Discovery Institute employees “alone are responsible for the prominence of ID in our public discourse.” I provided hard evidence that the very concept of “Intelligent Design” is, in fact, the centerpiece of a conspiracy created by a small group of people. The explicit goals of this conspiracy include getting the concept of “Intelligent Design” accepted into the mainstream of American discourse and to then encourage large numbers of American evangelicals to take up the banner of Intelligent Design — that’s what “propagation” means, and that’s what’s starting to happen.

    I fully believe that a small group of motivated and well-funded idealogues have, in fact, taken concrete steps designed to insert their novel ideas into the mainstream of American discourse with the expectation that hard-core fellow travelers (in this case, the millions of fundamentalist Christians) will pick up their banner once the ball is rolling. Have I been unclear that this is what I think is happening? I believe your argument is that I’m giving too much power to the Discovery Institute in this process. I guess that’s possible — if so, please tell me the names of some people and organizations outside of the Discovery Institute who are providing the Big Ideas that form the ID theoretical/philosophical framework. I’d honestly be interested to know.

    BTW, I think the genius of the conspiracy is that its architects realized that ID need not be consistent with the core principals of Christianity. As another commenter noted, the reason ID is being taken up by many evangelicals is that “they think of [creationism and ID] as just two more arrows in the quiver. They are under seige and they need every weapon they can get in order to keep the Christianity alive.” That is, many Christians don’t care whether ID actually makes sense, or is philosophically consistent with their other professed beliefs. They see ID as just another weapon on their side in the broader “culture wars” that are erupting all around us in this country.

    Finally, Alan, I understand that millions of Americans consider themselves to be evangelical fundamentalists. But your claim was that “millions” of Americans are “clamoring” for ID to be introduced into public education. If this was true, I reckon we’d have heard more about it outside of places like Kansas and rural Pennsylvania. I believe that there’s great potential for millions of fundamentalists to start clamoring for ID in public schools — that’s a primary goal of the conspirators at the Discovery Institute — but you have not backed up your assertion that this is happening now.

  21. Alan Jacobs says:

    robbo, I have tried three times now to explain the error you’re making — it’s a very elementary error — and you still don’t get it. You even think you’ve provided “hard evidence” for a claim that you have provided no evidence *at all* for. Apparently you believe that reiterating a claim is the same as providing evidence for it; and it’s just not possible to have a reasonable debate on those terms. All I can say is: Night-night, sleep tight, don’t let the Discovery Institute bite!

  22. bbenzon says:

    Perhaps ID can be co-opted as a wedge strategy for modern evolutionism. It seems to me that for a Creationist to assent to the teaching of ID is to start down a slippery slope to Darwinism.

  23. robbo says:

    Alan, I’ve done much more than “reiterate a claim” and I’ve tried to show that I’m not making the “error” that you ascribe to me. But if it makes you feel better to dismiss me that way I’m okay with it. You’re not the brightest light I’ve had this debate with and I think your intellectual evasions are pretty obvious to other readers.

    I’ll sign off this episode with a little more context, from the Wikipedia entry for “Intelligent Design Movement.” If anyone believes that this information is incorrect, misleading, incomplete, etc., I urge you to correct the record and to provide links.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design_movement

    The ID movement consists primarily of a public relations campaign meant to sway the opinion of the public and that of the popular media, and an aggressive lobbying campaign directed at policymakers and the educational community. These are both largely funded and directed by the Discovery Institute and conducted across a wide spectrum, from the national to the grassroots levels. The Institute’s near-term goal is greatly undermining or eliminating altogether the teaching of evolution in public school science, and with the long-term goal of to “renew” American culture by shaping public policy to reflect conservative Christian values. Intelligent design is central and necessary for this agenda as described by the Discovery Institute: “Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.”

  24. robbo says:

    bbenzon, that might be true if creationists, ID advocates, and their followers were concerned about maintaining some kind of internal consistency to their arguments. Only true scientists and legitimate philosophers seem to feel the need to maintain such consistency.

  25. bbenzon says:

    BTW, I’ve just discovered that the idea of emergence is old. I knew it wasn’t as new as one might gather from the pop-hype that’s been kicked up, for I remember it from my graduate school days back in the mid-70s. But I just looked in an undergraduate set of philosophy readings and found one entitled “Emergence.” It’s from Joseph Woodger, Biological Principles, Routledge and Kegan Paul, Lts.1929. So this idea’s been percolating through the culture for awhile now.

  26. bbenzon says:

    BTW, I’ve just discovered that the idea of emergence is old. I knew it wasn’t as new as one might gather from the pop-hype that’s been kicked up, for I remember it from my graduate school days back in the mid-70s. But I just looked in an undergraduate set of philosophy readings and found one entitled “Emergence.” It’s from Joseph Woodger, Biological Principles, Routledge and Kegan Paul, Lts.1929. So this idea’s been percolating through the culture for awhile now.

  27. ds says:

    Regarding Point 2, the Atheism Point, I think there is a fundamental problem in reconciling evolutionary biology (i.e. all biology) and religion. It isn’t so much of a “god” problem, but a “soul” problem. The concept of the immortal soul is arguably as central to religion as dieties, and there is no role in science for the soul. Everything in biology is, fundamentally, built on biochemistry: genes, proteins, and metabolites lead to tissues, organisms, and populations. “The emergent soul” is not an acceptable explanation for experimental results.

    Personally, this was the most noticable change in my outlook once I became a professional biologist. In the test tube it’s all just souless, chemical biomass regardless which organism the stuff came from and “alive” and “dead” are merely different states of chemical activity.

    While I understand that this is a politically problematic position, I see it as more fundamental to the scientific worldview than the “design” silliness. Intelligent design credited to an unspecified consciousness is scientifically more palatable than the existence of souls.

  28. Chris Clarke says:

    . Think of all the entertainments and works of literature you’ve seen where “scientists” show up as white-coated, cold-hearted, amoral figures who cannot accept magic or mystery.

    But there’s usually a point at which they take their glasses off, unbutton their lab coats, and pull out a rubber band so that their long, flowing hair cascades down their backs.

  29. joeo says:

    Percentage of Americans that are atheists- 5%

    Percentage of evolutionary biologists that are atheists- 79%

  30. Endie says:

    You ask why more Christians don’t object to the cooky little intelligent designers. As a good Church of Scotland Christian I, for one, couldn’t give a monkey (pun intended). They’re a little mad, and rather unpleasant and unrewarding to argue with (due to an ability to simply reject any scientific theory or data that is inconvenient) and they threaten me not a bit. As a fundamentalist strain, they are also a pretty much unknown problem outside the US, so they don’t impact on me.

    Still, I you are right that I do feel a little sorry for them that they think they have to find some “proof”.

    I find their lack of faith… disturbing.

  31. dominic says:

    On the question of whether it is worth arguing with believers, I think there’s a very specific sort of argument that isn’t worth having, and that’s the one where you try to present a counter-argument to the apologetics that the believer uses to compensate for their inability to square their emotional commitment to their beliefs with their rational sense of the way things are.

    The apologetic argument isn’t susceptible to counter-argument, not necessarily because it’s logically weird in a way that makes it cast-iron impervious to critique (although apologetics often involves a lot of strange loops and special-pleadings), but just because it’s a mask for an inability to simply *believe*, and the believer/unbeliever isn’t going to let you tear that mask away, no matter what.

    I don’t mean to say that the believer’s emotional (and also, quite possibly, practical and even existential) commitment to their belief is secretly hollow, although everyone has their moments of doubt. The crisis isn’t a crisis of sincerity, but of rational justification. Holding something to be true means finding it to be consistent with one’s rational sense of the way things are; and religious belief often directly and purposefully contradicts that sense of things. (The point of miracles is *not* to make one see the world as a place in which miracles can happen: if the world were such a place, they wouldn’t be miracles).

    The apologetics of literalists is an attempt to accommodate that contradiction – to domesticate it – and if it were to be successfully challenged, then their religion would cease to be a safe bet and become instead a maddening irruption into their sense of the world.

  32. Timothy Burke says:

    Great discussion. Thanks, folks.

    Dominic gets pretty much at what worries me here in his second-to-last comment: that it is impossible to engage the apologetics of the faithful. (Or, frankly, the apologetics of secular humanists) because the offering of an apologetic is a defense mechanism, an inability to admit to doubt or reflection.

    In my life, I’d say the religious people who most impress me with their faith are exactly those who can discuss doubt openly, acknowledge contradiction, are awed by rather than confidently mastering of mystery. I don’t think that’s because that’s a secular person’s wish-fulfillment idea of faith, either: there is something there, at those moments, that the ordinary secular life seems to lack. A humility.

    I think this is what bothers me so much about the culturally conservative religious who are strong activists: there is that lack of humility not just about their approaches to the social world, but to God and faith. Such certainty that they know His will, even on those matters about which He said nothing, nothing at all.

    On other points, I think Alan’s right to note a significant distinction between everyday fundamentalist consciousness in the US and the reasons why it is drawn to creationism and the programmatic maneuverings of ID advocacy. I think that’s why I think it’s important to look at the larger way that science, policy and government authority have interwoven in everyday life for the last fifty years, and to recognize that creationism at the everyday life is partly a synecdotal device for a larger antipathy to technopolitan governance.

    Bill is right, btw, that “emergence” is old. In my reading group on the topic, some of the participants have found clear antecedents in early 20th Century social and psychological thought; in some sense, it’s a recent iteration of a very very old debate between atomism and holism.

  33. bbenzon says:

    “. . . to recognize that creationism at the everyday life is partly a synecdotal device for a larger antipathy to technopolitan governance. ”

    Amen, brother Timothy.

  34. dave says:

    Intelligent Design: Debunked?

    http://joot.com/dave/writings/articles/design.shtml

    Look forward to any comments, critiques, or enhancements to the arguments you may have.

    Dave

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