Fundamentalism's Tombstone?

I'm absolutely reeling from a recent post by Echidne, who discusses this article about the "Museum of Creation" that will open in Kentucky this spring.

It sounds as though it'll be the ne plus ultra of hallucinatory, high-camp Christofascist freak shows, and it will undoubtedly give America's ever-dwindling population of sane people yet another reason to hang their heads in shame:

[C]ontroversial exhibits deal with diseases and famine, which are portrayed not as random disasters, but as the result of mankind's sin. Mr Ham's Answers in Genesis movement blames the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, in which two teenagers killed 12 classmates and a teacher before killing themselves, on evolutionist teaching, claiming that the perpetrators believed in Darwin's survival of the fittest.

If this is true, all I can say is that they apparently took a rather dim view of their own fitness to survive, since they shot themselves dead.

This next tidbit is so predictable that it's barely worth mentioning:

Other exhibits in the museum will blame homosexuals for Aids.

I must say, the wheels of God's wrath grind very slowly indeed if it took Him centuries to invent a fatal disease with which to punish homosexuals. But maybe He was exhausted after conjuring up dinosaurs with which to terrorize Adam and Eve:

[V]isitors will see a tyrannosaurus rex pursuing Adam and Eve after their fall from grace. "That's the real terror that Adam's sin unleashed," visitors will be warned.

One always wishes to be tolerant of other people's beliefs. But I have to draw the line at people who think that Adam and Eve were not only real, but were chased from Eden by the Giant Lizards of the Lord. To put it bluntly, it strains my credulity.

This museum is further evidence that for all its sound and fury, conservative American Christianity is in utter psychic disarray, having broken not only with reality itself, but with anything remotely resembling its supposed beliefs. Garish monuments to dogma are exactly what you'd expect from a sickly faith that has replaced agape with triumphalist pomp and circumstance. One can only hope that the Museum of Creation ends up being Christian fundamentalism's tombstone.

(This post originally appeared on January 11, 2005.)

Unintelligent Mechanisms

Philip Johnson, the godfather of the ID movement, has written an unwittingly elegaic piece on the early promise and current malaise of his pet discipline.

Here's my favorite part:

My hope was that the scientific community would agree that it is legitimate to question whether known natural (unintelligent) mechanisms can produce the immense quantities of genetic information that would be needed to generate complex new kinds of organisms, provided that the questioning was based upon scientific evidence rather than religious doctrine or scripture.

Of course it's legitimate to question this, and plenty of people have done so. Although Johnson cagily limits his inquiry to known natural mechanisms, the "questioning" he refers to is essentially what biologists do for a living. Unless, of course, he assumes that all unknown mechanisms must be the work of intelligence.

Despite having left an enormous naturalistic loophole in his own disingenuous argument, Johnson persists in seeing science's attempted adherence to naturalism as evidence of a conspiracy against ID:

[O]rthodox scientific bodies have had to take strenuous action to keep it from cropping up in science education, and even in scientific journals.

Lest anyone should think that this "strenuous action" amounts to anything more than peer review, and a reasonable insistence on standards, Johnson makes the self-falsifying claim that ID proponents aren't even allowed to discuss their theories, inside or outside the scientific field:

[T[hose who do not want the concept of intelligent design to flourish find it necessary to enact explicit rules against allowing scientists and others to discuss the possibility that there is a real intelligence behind complex genetic information.

Like most of his co-religionists, Johnson apparently believes that a real discussion hasn't taken place until everyone agrees with him. Little wonder, then, that his humble hopes keep being dashed:

I had hoped that the mainstream scientific profession could be persuaded to consider objections to Darwinism that rely solely on empirical evidence and logic and were directed only to the adequacy of the Darwinian mechanism....Darwinists, including many in positions of authority in science, reacted by stigmatizing the concept of intelligent design in biology as “creationism,” as if it were another attempt to defend the literal creation chronology of the Book of Genesis, rather than a scientific movement that relies only on scientific evidence and logical analysis.

Shorter Johnson: Biblical literalists are hopelessly deluded, and can't be taken seriously. This is more evidence that, as I've argued previously, the Discovery Institute's "Wedge Strategy" is more of a boomerang:

ID's willingness to make certain tactical concessions to science set it on a collision course with young-earth creationism from the start. And as Michael Behe himself noted in Darwin's Black Box, its definitions are vague enough to leave open such naturalistic "escape clauses" as directed panspermia; thus, it provides no real support for the existence of any god, let alone a specific god like YHWH. For Biblical literalists, even the trace amount of science in ID is deadly poison.

The real problem comes in the next sentence:

Although the IDM did not identify the designer as anything more than a source of biological information, there was little doubt that believers in the Christian God, including me, would find scientific acceptance of ID highly encouraging.

Encouraging? O ye of little faith! Once again, American Christianity runs afoul not of the Scientific Establishment's materialism, but of its own.

It's also odd how this exciting new form of science - which is not to be confused with creationism, and relies "only on scientific evidence and logical analysis" - seems to be able to double effortlessly as Christian witness:

I see many signs that dissatisfaction with evolutionary naturalism is spreading throughout the world. One of these signs is the many languages into which some of my own books have been translated, including French, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, Czech, Finnish, and Macedonian....Clearly, reports of the death of God have been greatly exaggerated.

You are following this, aren't you? ID takes no stance whatsoever on the definition of "intelligence." But the translation of Johnson's books into Macedonian nonetheless deals a staggering blow to atheism. (How many languages has Dracula been translated into, I wonder?)

This, mind you, is the movement that claims it will save science by placing its feet back on the path of intellectual honesty.

Coincidentally, an article by Elliot Sober in the Quarterly Review of Biology makes a point I've made here before:

"If ID is to be tested," he says, "it must be tested against one or more competing hypotheses." If the ID claim about the vertebrate eye is to be tested against the hypothesis that the vertebrate eye evolved by Darwinian processes, the question is whether there is an observation that can discriminate between the two. The observation that vertebrates have eyes cannot do this.

Sober also points out that criticism of a competing theory, such as evolution, is not in-and-of-itself a test of ID.... To contend that evolutionary processes cannot produce "irreducibly complex" adaptations merely changes the subject, Sober argues.

True enough. But then, all this presupposes that ID is intended to be a scientific theory, instead of a political strategy.

The Wedge Boomerangs

Red State Rabble makes an astute point (i.e., one that comports with my preconceived notions) about the ID discoverist William Dembski's recent appearance in Kansas:

It may be that biblical literalists, who make up the largest potential constituency for Dembski's ideas, found that the first swallow of intelligent design theory went down smoothly enough, but the more they heard from Dembski as the evening wore on, the more conscious they became of an unpleasant aftertaste the theory tends to leave in the mouths of those who are motivated primarily by biblical literalism.

Those doubts about the utility of ID theory for those motivated primarily by a belief in young earth creationism might have been reinforced by Dembski's admission that he accepts scientific evidence indicating the earth is 4.5 billion years old and existed long before the advent of human beings.

That's exactly right, and that's why the Discovery Institute's vaunted wedge strategy has always posed a far bigger threat to Biblical literalism - and thus, to the primary market for anti-evolutionary dogmatics - than to evolution. ID's willingness to make certain tactical concessions to science set it on a collision course with young-earth creationism from the start. And as Michael Behe himself noted in Darwin's Black Box, its definitions are vague enough to leave open such naturalistic "escape clauses" as directed panspermia; thus, it provides no real support for the existence of any god, let alone a specific god like YHWH. For Biblical literalists, even the trace amount of science in ID is deadly poison.

An Important Theory

I usually try to avoid writing polemics against intelligent design, but this letter by Dr. Philip Skell to the South Carolina Education Oversight Committee made my blood boil:

[T]he issue of how to teach evolutionary theory has been dominated by voices at the extremes. On one extreme, many religious activists have advocated for Bible-based ideas about creation to be taught and for evolution to be eliminated from the science curriculum entirely. On the other hand, many committed Darwinian biologists present students with an idealized version of the theory that glosses over real problems and prevents students from learning about genuine scientific criticisms of it.

Both these extremes are mistaken. Evolution is an important theory and students need to know about it. But scientific journals now document many scientific problems and criticisms of evolutionary theory and students need to know about these as well.

If unresolved "problems" and "criticisms" are grounds for discarding an otherwise successful theory, physics is in very grave trouble (cf. intelligent falling), along with the rest of the sciences, and the humanities, and - oddly enough - whatever slender logical crutches support ID.

The reason high school students get a "glossed over" and "idealized" account of evolution is because you have to start somewhere. By the same token, a high-school history class will tell you the basics about Oliver Cromwell, but it won't spend an entire semester exploring scholarly debates over the role of fen drainage in the English Civil War. That sort of specialized study is what college, and graduate work, and post-graduate work are for. If we applied Skell's logic to physics, we'd be confounding kids with esoteric ontological debates over quantum theory before they'd grasped Newton.

Darwinian evolution is an interesting theory about the remote history of life. Nonetheless, it has little practical impact on those branches of science that do not address questions of biological history (largely based on stones, the fossil evidence)....None of the great discoveries in biology and medicine over the past century depended on guidance from Darwinian evolution---it provided no support.

Frances Crick would argue otherwise, I think, as would John D. Watson. And there's certainly evidence that Mendel read Darwin carefully, and was influenced by him.

Putting aside Skell's calculated use of the misnomer "Darwinian evolution," it's hard to conceive of an area of modern life that evolutionary biology doesn't affect (to say nothing of the stark physical fact of descent with modification). Medicine is an obvious example: the evolution of drug resistance, the identification and treatment of genetic diseases, the yearly creation of flu vaccines...hell, most ID theorists admit that drug resistance is a perfectly obvious example of Darwinian selection, before dismissing it as a "mere" example of micro-evolution.

What does Skell make of the link between sickle trait and malaria resistance? And as far as practicality goes, what about agriculture and animal husbandry? And what about ecotoxicology, microbial hazmat remediation, and forensics? Apparently, it's all castles in the air:

For those scientists who take it seriously, Darwinian evolution has functioned more as a philosophical belief system than as a testable scientific hypothesis.

So Skell thinks evolution's important, and should be taught in schools, but he also thinks that "scientists who take it seriously" are quasi-religious fanatics. Fair enough.

Intellectual freedom is fundamental to the scientific method. Learning to think creatively, logically and critically is the most important training that young scientists can receive.

True. But unless you're a solipsist, intellectual freedom doesn't include the freedom to ignore facts that are reasonably well established. I have no intellectual freedom to say that the sun goes around the earth, or that I was born before my parents, or that I can fly if I flap my arms fast enough.

As it stands now, every biologist has the freedom to believe in a creator, but does not have the right to make that belief a methodological or philosophical obligation for other biologists, or for students. That seems like a pretty good set-up to me.

Philosophy of Intelligent Design

The existence of God is a perfectly respectable topic for a philosophy class. In fact, I'd go a step further and say that it's an essential topic, if not the essential topic. No survey of the philosophy of any era or country is conceivable without it.

That being the case, I'll cheerfully concede that Intelligent Design is a valid and even a valuable subject to discuss in a philosophy class, so long as the discussion is put in its historical perspective, and revolves around questions of inference, authority, justification of truth claims, logic, and so forth. Ideally, such a class would acknowledge every individual's right to a personal belief or disbelief in an intelligent creator, while demolishing false arguments for (and inferences from) those beliefs wherever possible. The argument that evolution couldn't have happened because there are still monkeys living on earth, for instance, would be revealed as fallacious, as would the more general belief that the theory of evolution stands or falls depending on whether or not God exists.

In the real world, of course, things aren't that simple. As PZ Myers reports, A "Philosophy of Intelligent Design" course under discussion in California seems poised to fail as theology, philosophy, and science:

This class will take a close look at evolution as a theory and will discuss the scientific, biological, and Biblical aspects that suggest why Darwin's philosophy is not rock solid. This class will discuss Intelligent Design as an alternative response to evolution. Topics that wlll be covered are the age of the earth, a world wide flood, dinosaurs, pre-human fossils, dating methods, DNA, radioisotopes, and geological evidence. Physical and chemical evidence will be presented suggesting the earth is thousands of years old, not billions. The class will include lecture discussions, guest speakers, and videos. The class grade will be based on a position paper in which students will support or refute the theory of evolution.

I've bolded the last sentence because I find it particularly chilling. The person who'll grade these position papers, Sharon Lemberg, is a soccer coach and special-ed teacher with no background in science or philosophy. Even if she had those credentials, I think it's quite safe to say that no student who takes her class is going to "refute" the theory of evolution - assuming that "refutation" is defined as "disproof" or "falsification" - and that any student who thinks he or she has refuted it deserves a failing grade and a kick in the slats. We can put aside, in this discussion, the question of whether evolution is true or false; a more basic issue for a philosophy class is what would comprise a legitimate refutation of it, and what wouldn't. A Creationist video asserting that the earth is 6000 years old isn't a refutation of evolution; it's a product of ignorance, stupidity, or guile.

One of the many things that IDiots don't seem to grasp is that making or accepting a vacuous, illogical, pseudoscientific argument for God doesn't glorify His name; on the contrary, it misrepresents science, degrades religion, and makes believers look ignorant and insecure. People like Ms. Lemberg want to have their cake and eat it too; they want the scientific gravitas that comes from invoking DNA and radioisotopes, but they also want to ignore the norms and standards from which science derives whatever authority it has. As such, they remind me of Renaissance figures like Athanasius Kircher, whose "miraculous" devices surreptitiously exploited scientific principles in order to demonstrate, by analogy, the operation of occult powers. Except that Kircher was a genius, and these people are fools.

Case Closed

Jeez. You wander away from the Internets for a couple of days, and there's no telling what excitement you'll miss. Having just visited Pharyngula, I'm duly astonished by this quote from Dr. Michael Behe, one of the "heavyweights" of intelligent design, who's been making an abject fool of himself in a Dover courtroom.

Mr. Rothschild asked, "What is the mechanism that intelligent design is proposing?"

Mr. Behe said: "It does not propose a mechanism in the sense of a step-by-step description of how these structures arose."

Like many people, I've made this precise complaint about ID before, under the impression that it dealt a devastating blow to the notion that ID is a scientific theory of even the most tentative sort. It's the sort of claim I'd expect an ID advocate to dispute. But Behe has embraced it openly and lovingly.

This is pretty goddamn droll, given that the precise sin of evolutionary biology, according to Behe, is that it fails to demonstrate "a mechanism in the sense of a step-by-step description" for certain types of biological complexity. But meanwhile, the IDeologues supposedly "triumph" by refusing even to propose such a mechanism. I guess this constitutes a moral victory, by their standards.

At this point, ID isn't merely done; the Fork of Inquiry is probing a small heap of oily ashes. And the only thing Behe is proving is that mouthpieces for creationism have devolved considerably since the passing of William Jennings Bryan.

A Vexing Problem Solved, Free of Charge

Here's a clever idea that came to me while I was responding to a recent post by Echidne.

Suppose that in American public schools, all biology classes were to devote a day or two to exploring creation myths from around the world.

It'd be the sort of compromise that shows America's cultural pluralism at its best. Science would admit that it can't logically prove or disprove the existence of God, and fundamentalist Christianity would admit that there are multitudes of competing religious explanations for life on earth, and would also concede that many Christian sects have no problem with evolution.

Hell, the teachers could even discuss intelligent design for all I'd care, so long as they make it clear that ID theory is just as compatible with Buddhism, and Islam, and Judaism, and Hinduism, as it is with Christianity.

It seems reasonable to me. If fundamentalists want kids to be taught about "Young Earth" theories based on Biblical literalism, they'll also have to let them hear about how Pan Gu took his broad-axe and split open the black egg of the Cosmos; and about how the cow Audhumla was formed from thawing frost, and licked a salty ice block until the hair of Buri, the first man, appeared; and about Oparin's even more fanciful vision of "chemical evolution"; and about the rich pleasures and voluptuous horrors of Echidneism (the one true faith); and all the rest of it.

At the end of the discussion, the teacher can say, "Those are some of the theories about how life got here. Now, for the rest of the semester, we're going to talk about how it works."

There you have it...the problem's solved, and everybody's happy!

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll tackle Israel and Palestine...

PS: Just for the record, I was being kinda facetious here. I know this isn't going to happen! But the thing is, we get locked into hopeless struggles all the time by letting opponents choose the terms of debate. The issue here isn't that Lefties want "atheism" taught in schools; the issue is that a certain subset of Christians wants to stop other types of religion from being discussed. If religion ends up in public-school curricula, it's got to be balanced; one form of it can't claim a privileged position over all the others. A comparative discussion of origin myths is education; teaching "Young Earth" Biblical literalism is indoctrination. If you want to win a debate, you need to go beyond simple "either/or" opposition, and start appropriating your opponent's strength. Instead of saying "You can't have this," you say, "You can have this under these conditions," and let your opponents reveal their true agenda by rejecting it. We come across as the bad guys by "stifling faith." So we need to make it plain that neutral discussion protects all faiths, and it's actually the fundies who are trying to limit religious freedoms.