Intelligent Design Is Creationism in a Cheap Tuxedo
(June 2002 issue Physics Today)
Adrian L. Melott
My deliberately provocative title is borrowed from Leonard
Krishtalka, who directs the Natural History Museum at the University
of Kansas. Hired-gun "design theorists" in cheap tuxedos have met
with some success in getting close to their target: public science
education. I hope to convince you that this threat is worth paying
attention to. As I write, intelligent design (ID) is a hot issue in
the states of Washington and Ohio (see Physics Today, May 2002, page
31*). Evolutionary biology is ID's primary target, but geology and
physics are within its blast zone.
Creationism evolves. As in biological evolution, old forms persist
alongside new. After the Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925, creationists
tried to get public schools to teach biblical accounts of the origin
and diversity of life. Various courts ruled the strategy
unconstitutional. Next came the invention of "creation science,"
which was intended to bypass constitutional protections. It, too, was
recognized by the courts as religion. Despite adverse court rulings,
creationists persist in reapplying these old strategies locally. In
many places, the pressure keeps public school biology teachers
intimidated and evolution quietly minimized.
However, a new strategy, based on so-called ID theory, is now at the
cutting edge of creationism. ID is different from its forebears. It
does a better job of disguising its sectarian intent. It is well
funded and nationally coordinated. To appeal to a wider range of
people, biblical literalism, Earth's age, and other awkward issues
are swept under the rug. Indeed, ID obfuscates sufficiently well that
some educated people with little background in the relevant science
have been taken in by it. Among ID's diverse adherents are engineers,
doctors--and even physicists.
ID advocates can't accept the inability of science to deal with
supernatural hypotheses, and they see this limitation as a
sacrilegious denial of God's work and presence. Desperately in need
of affirmation, they invent "theistic science" in which the design of
the Creator is manifest. Perhaps because their religious faith is
rather weak, they need to bolster their beliefs every way they
can--including hijacking science to save souls and prove the
existence of God.
William Dembski, a mathematician and philosopher at Baylor University
and one of ID's chief advocates, asserts that: " . . . any view of
the sciences that leaves Christ out of the picture must be seen as
fundamentally deficient."1 Whether or not they agree with Dembski on
this point, most Americans hold some form of religious belief. Using
what they call the Wedge Strategy,2 ID advocates seek to pry
Americans away from "naturalistic science" by forcing them to choose
between science and religion. ID advocates know that science will
lose. They portray science as we know it as innately antireligious,
thereby blurring the distinction between science and how science may
be interpreted.
When presenting their views before the public, ID advocates generally
disguise their religious intent. In academic venues, they avoid any
direct reference to the Designer. They portray ID as merely an
exercise in detecting design, citing examples from archaeology, the
SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) project, and other
enterprises. Cambridge University Press has published one ID book,3
which, the ID advocates repeatedly proclaim, constitutes evidence
that their case has real scientific merit. ID creationist
publications are nearly absent from refereed journals, and this state
of affairs is presented as evidence of censorship.
This censorship, ID advocates argue, justifies the exploitation of
public schools and the children in them to circumvent established
scientific procedures. In tort law, expert scientific testimony must
agree with the consensus of experts in a given field. No such
limitation exists with respect to public education. ID advocates can
snow the public and school boards with pseudoscientific
presentations. As represented by ID advocates, biological evolution
is a theory in crisis, fraught with numerous plausible-sounding
failures, most of which are recycled from overt creationists. It is
"only fair," the ID case continues, to present alternatives so that
children can make up their own minds. Yesterday's alternative was
"Flood geology." Today's is "design theory."
Fairness, open discussion, and democracy are core American values and
often problematic. Unfortunately, journalists routinely present
controversies where none exist, or they present political
controversies as scientific controversies. Stories on conflicts gain
readers, and advertising follows. This bias toward reporting
conflicts, along with journalists' inability to evaluate scientific
content and their unwillingness to do accuracy checks (with notable
exceptions), are among the greatest challenges to the broad public
understanding of science.
ID creationism is largely content-free rhetoric. Michael Behe, a
biochemist at Lehigh University and an ID proponent, argues that many
biochemical and biophysical mechanisms are "irreducibly complex."4 He
means that, if partially dismembered, they would not work, so they
could not have evolved. This line of argument ignores the large
number of biological functions that look irreducibly complex, but for
which intermediates have been found. One response to Behe's claims
consists of the tedious task of demonstrating functions in a possible
evolutionary path to the claimed irreducibly complex state. When
presented with these paths, Behe typically ignores them and moves on.
I admire the people who are willing to spend the time to put together
the detailed refutations.5
The position of an ID creationist can be summarized as: "I can't
understand how this complex outcome could have arisen, so it must be
a miracle." In an inversion of the usual procedure in science, the
null hypothesis is taken to be the thing Dembski, Behe, and their
cohorts want to prove, albeit with considerable window-dressing.
Dembski classifies all phenomena as resulting from necessity, chance,
or design. In ruling out necessity, he means approximately that one
could not predict the detailed structures and information we see in
biological systems from the laws of physics. His reference to chance
is essentially equivalent to the creationist use of one of the red
herrings introduced by Fred Hoyle:
A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747,
dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the
yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled
747, ready to fly, will be found standing there?6
Having dispensed with necessity and chance, Dembski concludes that
design has been detected on the grounds that nothing else can explain
the phenomenon--at least according to him.
Of course, design has no predictive power. ID is not a scientific
theory. If we had previously attributed the unexplainable to design,
we would still be using Thor's hammer to explain thunder. Nor does ID
have any technological applications. It can be fun to ask ID
advocates about the practical applications of their work. Evolution
has numerous practical technological applications, including vaccine
development. ID has none.
As organisms evolve, they become more complex, but evolution doesn't
contravene the second law of thermodynamics. Dembski, like his
creationist predecessors, misuses thermodynamics. To support the case
for ID, he has presented arguments based on a supposed Law of
Conservation of Information, an axiomatic law that applies only to
closed systems with very restricted assumptions.7 Organisms, of
course, are not closed systems.
ID's reach extends beyond biology to physics and cosmology. One
interesting discussion concerns the fundamental constants. There is a
well-known point of view that our existence depends on a number of
constants lying within a narrow range. As one might expect, the
religious community has generally viewed this coincidence as evidence
in favor of--or at least as a plausibility argument for--their
beliefs. The ID creationist community has adopted the fundamental
constants as additional evidence for their Designer of
Life--apparently not realizing that many fine-tuning arguments are
based on physical constants allowing evolution to proceed. Physical
cosmology is largely absent from school science standards. Where
present, as in Kansas, it is likely to come under ID attack.
I have only scratched the surface here. Don't assume everything is
fine in your school system even if it seems free of conflict. Peace
may mean that evolution, the core concept of biology, is minimized.
No region of the country is immune. Watch out for the guys in
tuxedos--they don't have violins in those cases.
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Adrian Melott is a professor of physics and astronomy at the
University of Kansas in Lawrence. He is also a founding board member
of Kansas Citizens for Science.
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References
1. W. Dembski, Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science &
Theology, InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, Ill. (1999), p. 206.
2. See http://rnaworld.bio.ukans.edu/id-intro/sect3.html. Another
source is http://www.sunflower.com/~jkrebs/JCCC/05%20Wedge_edited.html
3. W. Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small
Probabilities, Cambridge U. Press, New York (1998). For a review by
W. Elsberry, see
http://inia.cls.org/~welsberr/zgists/wre/papers/dembski7.html.
4. M. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to
Evolution, Free Press, New York (1996).
5. See http://www.world-of-dawkins.com/catalano/box/behe.htm. See
also http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~lindsay/creation/behe.html
6. F. Hoyle, The Intelligent Universe, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston,
New York (1983), p. 18.
7. W. Dembski, No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be
Purchased without Intelligence, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Md.
(2002).
Continue to Part 2: Philosophy Is Essential to the Intelligent Design Debate
Adrian Melott's Additional ID Resources
Fliers suitable for distribution when advocates of intelligent design
show up in your area, as well as short essays:
http://home.kc.rr.com/bnpndxtr
http://www.sunflower.com/~jkrebs/Resources/Fliers.html
More general information sites related to ID and creationism:
http://www.kcfs.org (Kansas Citizens for Science)
http://www.natcenscied.org (National Center for Science Education;
numerous links). http://www.talkorigins.org (for those who want
details on science issues)
http://astrosun.tn.cornell.edu/students/kornreich/lfg/tactics.html
(common creationist tactics)
Publications of value in dealing with ID: R. T. Pennock, Tower of
Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism, MIT Press,
Cambridge, Mass. (1999). R. T. Pennock, ed. Intelligent Design
Creationism and Its Critics: Philosophical, Theological, and
Scientific Perspectives, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. (2001). See also
the review of the book by K. Padian in the 29 March 2002 issue of
Science. An excellent collection of short position statements by ID
advocates and critics appears in the April 2002 issue of Natural
History, which is also available at
http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/nhmag.html.
On the relation of religion to some ID issues: K. R. Miller, Finding
Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground between God and
Evolution, Cliff Street Books, New York (1999). R. Dawkins, Blind
Watchmaker, W. W. Norton, New York (1994). S. Weinberg, Facing Up:
Science and Its Cultural Adversaries, Harvard U. Press, Cambridge,
Mass. (2001). http://www.natcenscied.org/article.asp?category=11
(Congregational guide to the PBS TV series Evolution)
Elementary school enrichment curriculum in evolution and cosmology:
http://kusmos.phsx.ukans.edu/~melott/phyed.html
© 2002 American Institute of Physics
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