Here is the review of Pennock's IDC, for those of us that don't have access
to the Science site. It was posted on the metanexus list.
Happy Easter all,
Steve
A review by Kevin Padian, Waiting for the Watchmaker, Science, 295:5564, pp.
2373-2374, Issue of 29 Mar 2002.
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Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics Philosophical, Theological,
and Scientific Perspectives
Robert T. Pennock, Ed.
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001. 825 pp. $110, £75.95. ISBN 0-262-16204-0.
Paper, $45, £30.95. ISBN 0-262-66124-1.
_____________________________________
Intelligent Design (ID) is the cryptoscientific arm of a sociopolitical
movement of conservative Christians who are upset about the displacement of
their concept of God from institutional life in the United States and are
determined to do something about it. Intelligent Design Creationism and Its
Critics presents the arguments of ID advocates in their own words and
provides closely argued critiques of the science, philosophy, and theology
that underlie their positions. Robert Pennock, the editor, is a philosopher
at Michigan State University whose previous book, Tower of Babel: The
Evidence Against the New Creationism (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999),
exposed the problems and pitfalls of ID, particularly in its logic and
rhetoric. In the present volume, he has assembled two broad, well-qualified
teams for what amounts to a wrestling-style "smackdown" that lays the
current controversies bare.
The vanguard of the ID movement has been the Center for the Renewal of
Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, a conservative think tank in
Seattle. ID Creationism is more or less the brainchild of Phillip E.
Johnson, a now-retired criminal law professor from the University of
California, who in the early 1990s set out a "wedge strategy" for destroying
materialism and reinstating Christian values in education and society.
Johnson found like-minded friends and financial supporters, and today the
Institute is better funded than many federal and nongovernmental
organization programs in science education.
The strategy Johnson developed seeks to undermine evolution and science
education while rallying support for ID Creationism. In an excellent
overview that begins the book, Barbara Forrest details the history and
motives behind ID Creationism as well as its political and cultural
underpinnings. ID itself recapitulates the late 18th-century middlebrow
theology of William Paley, who famously argued that, just as the intricate
design of a watch implies the existence of a watchmaker, the intricate
design of nature forces us to accept the existence of a Creator who made and
maintains it. Decades earlier, Hume had shown (not without sympathy) that
this argument violated both logic and theology. But it persisted--even
Darwin as a Cambridge undergraduate admired its rhetoric, if not its
substance. It currently appears in the insistence of ID proponents that some
biological structures are too complex and intricate to have any possible
evolutionary intermediates. They conclude that these structures must have
been "intelligently designed" by some supernatural force that they prefer
not to name, obviously for fear of violating the U.S. Constitution's
establishment clause.
Yet on less secular stages the advocates of ID are frank about their fervent
Christian beliefs and the crusade to restore Jesus as the center of all
education and culture, including science. To do this, the wedge strategists
have to demonize science and show that its naturalism excludes consideration
of God philosophically as well as methodologically. Johnson continues to
conflate these two forms of naturalism even after being called on the issue
many times, but he has no choice. If he gives up the conflation, he has
lost, because he cannot call naturalism a state-supported, established
religion unless it explicitly denies the existence of God.
The wedge strategy comprises three general approaches: scientific research
and publication, publicity and opinion-making, and "cultural confrontation
and renewal." As Forrest and many other contributors to the volume plainly
show, the ID proponents have not made even a token effort at scientific
research. They prefer instead the "creation-science" approach of distorting
and attacking evolution and related fields. These advocates carry out their
business in popular books and the proceedings of their own conferences; no
article demonstrating ID has appeared in a peer-reviewed journal. But, as
Johnson admits, his goal is not about science at all, but about religion and
philosophy. ID proponents have no intention of playing the game of science.
Why bother, when you can simply walk away from the field, call a news
conference, and declare that you've already won and that the game is invalid
anyway? Forrest's exposé of the wedge strategy should be required reading
for all scientists as well as for government officials and bureaucrats, who
seem particularly gullible when terms like "viewpoint discrimination" and
the "parental right" not to educate children are introduced.
The ID supporters' other two approaches (opinion-making and cultural
renewal) are squarely aimed at a public that is poorly educated in science
and tolerant of their neighbors' religious beliefs. Their theological claims
and the absence of scientific support for their positions would merit no
scholarly attention if the movement were not achieving social and political
successes. But because it is, all scientists should pay close attention to
the arguments presented in this comprehensive anthology.
In the volume's no-holds-barred matches, those who favor ID are hopelessly
underpowered. Pennock nicely disposes of Johnson's critique of naturalism,
removing every foundation and showing that Johnson's arguments depend
entirely on misrepresentation. Johnson considers naturalism anathematic in
any form because, as a creationist, he knows that "a supernatural Creator
not only initiated this process [life] but in some meaningful sense controls
it in furtherance of a purpose" and that "the world (and especially mankind)
was designed, and exists for a purpose." What that purpose is, why it would
be revealed most clearly to one Christian sect instead of more broadly, and
why everyone should believe this purposefulness (instead of, say, some other
people's belief that their God lives on a mountain and cares little for the
ways of humans) are questions that turn the tables on ID proponents' charges
of "viewpoint discrimination" against them. Pennock deftly demonstrates that
Johnson's pleadings are rooted in religious intolerance, not religious
freedom.
As philosopher of science Philip Kitcher notes, some ID supporters are foxes
(they know many things) and some are hedgehogs (they know only one thing,
but it's important). If Johnson is a fox, then Michael Behe (a biochemist at
Lehigh University) is a hedgehog, because he has made much of the notion
that some biological structures are "irreducibly complex" and no
intermediates from simpler functional forms are possible. As Kitcher shows,
Behe is saying that because science has yet to solve (or, in some cases,
even study) some problems, they are insoluble--even though many problems
previously considered insoluble and gaps previously considered unbridgeable
have been solved and bridged. Moreover, evidence of scientific ignorance is
not evidence for creation, which Behe is unable to test in any empirical
sense. Kitcher is equally good at showing how Behe's and Johnson's books are
full of sophistries and cover-ups that deny the truly impressive evidence of
evolution, specific claims of which are explained and vindicated in the
chapter by Matthew Brauer and Daniel Brumbaugh.
Another ID "hedgehog" is William Dembski, who claims to have invented a
probabilistic "explanatory filter" that can distinguish among the
increasingly improbable effects he interprets as caused by regularity,
chance, and design. Dembski seems not to understand that in any attempt to
explain the distribution of a set of phenomena, chance is the simplest
(null) hypothesis, but this is the least of his problems. Even allowing
Dembski most of his questionable propositions, Peter Godfrey-Smith still
easily shows that Dembski's explanatory filter is merely a restatement of
the fact that some events are highly unlikely to have arisen by chance, and
evolution is clearly not driven by chance. Dembski's smoke-and-mirrors
approach to causality (which he never effectively separates from statistical
probability) is exacerbated by the confusion he generates with the meanings
of "information." In information theory, the term can imply increasing
predictability or increasing entropy, depending on the context.
Godfrey-Smith also demonstrates that Dembski does not realize the concepts
of "chance and necessity" that François Monod discussed are merely metaphors
and they do not adequately describe evolution (or any other life process).
Pennock's book is an invaluable compilation for anyone who wants to learn
about the scientific and philosophical failures of intelligent design and
the long-term political and social strategies of its advocates. The book's
principal shortcoming is that one-fifth of its length is spent on the
arguments of and responses to Alvin Plantinga, a philosopher of religion at
the University of Notre Dame. He seems neither fox nor hedgehog, and he has
little to offer except assertions of "what Christians know"--as if other
religious groups know nothing, and as if he could speak for all Christians.
Plantinga's specious logic and his general ignorance of even basic
scientific concepts reveal that he doesn't take science seriously enough to
be considered seriously himself. People like Plantinga and Johnson claim the
high ground without earning it, and so they seldom hold it long. Johnson
believes that the more people learn about the philosophy behind evolution,
the less they'll like it. Wait until they learn what's behind intelligent
design.
The author is in the Department of Integrative Biology and Museum of
Paleontology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-3140, USA, and at
the National Center for Science Education, Berkeley, CA 94709, USA. E-mail:
kpadian@socrates.berkeley.edu
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