Plantinga: Whether ID [Intelligent Design] Is Science Isn't Semantics

Here ya go! ~ Janice

Whether ID [Intelligent Design] Is Science Isn't Semantics
Science and Theology News | Alvin Plantinga
http://www.stnews.org/Commentary-2690.htm

Judge John Jones gave two arguments for his
conclusion that ID is not science. Both are unsound, says Alvin Plantinga.

Judge John Jones’ 139-page opinion in Kitzmiller
et al. v. Dover Area School District raises
questions that go far beyond the legalities of
this specific case. I won’t offer an opinion on
whether the judge’s decision is correct ­
although apparently he’s never met an objection
to intelligent design he doesn’t like and some of
his “findings” seem vastly more sweeping than is appropriate.

First, a general question: What sorts of issues
can a judge decide just by fiat?

Jones rules, among other things, that:

* ID is just warmed-over creation science

* ID tries to change the very definition of science

* The scientific community has refuted the
criticisms of evolution brought by the IDers

* ID involves a kind of dualism and that this dualism is doomed.

But how can one hope to settle these matters just by a judicial declaration?

Consider, for example, the claim that ID is just
creation science in drag, as it were. That ruling
is relevant in that previous court decisions have
gone against creation science.

But the kind of creation science those decisions
had gone against is characterized by the claim
that the world is a mere 6,000 to 100,000 years
old, rather than the currently favored age of 4 billion or so years old.

Second, those creationists reject evolution in
favor of the idea that the major kinds of plants
and animals were created in pretty much their
present form. ID, as such, doesn’t involve either of these two things.

What it does involve, as you might guess, is that
many biological phenomena are intelligently
designed ­ indicated by their “specifiable
complexity” or “irreducible complexity” ­ and
that one can come to see this by virtue of scientific investigation.

Indeed, Michael Behe, a paradigmatic IDer and the
star witness for the defense, has repeatedly said that he accepts evolution.

What he and his colleagues reject is not evolution as such.

What they reject is unguided evolution.

They reject the idea that life in all its various
forms has come to be by way of the mechanisms
favored by contemporary evolutionary theory ­
unguided, unorchestrated and undirected by God or any other intelligent being.

Anyway, isn’t this question ­ whether ID is just
rewarmed creation science ­ a question for
philosophical or logical analysis? Can one settle
a question of that sort by a judicial ruling?
Isn’t that like legislating that the value of pi
is 1/3 rather than that inconvenient and hard to remember 3.14?

And consider that presumably the judge means the
scientific community has successfully refuted the
criticism of unguided evolution brought by the
IDers. Otherwise, what he says wouldn’t be
relevant. But again, is that the sort of thing a judge can legislate?

  A judge can declare until he’s blue in the face
that an objection has been successfully refuted.
Couldn’t it still be perfectly cogent? But this
is not the place for that interesting question.
Instead, let’s examine the judge’s reasoning in
support of his decision. Here is part of his ruling:

After a searching review of the record and
applicable case law, we find that while ID
arguments may be true, a proposition on which the
court takes no position, ID is not science. We
find that ID fails on three different levels, any
one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science.

They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old
ground rules of science by invoking and
permitting supernatural causation; (2) the
argument of irreducible complexity, central to
ID, employs the same flawed and illogical
contrived dualism that doomed creation science in
the 1980’s; and (3) ID’s negative attacks on
evolution have been refuted by the scientific community (p. 64).

The judge gives at least two arguments for his
conclusion that ID is not science. Both are unsound.

First, he said that ID is not science by virtue
of its “invoking and permitting supernatural
causation.” Second, and connected with the first,
he said that ID isn’t science because the claims
IDers make are not testable ­ that is verifiable
or falsifiable. The connection between the two is
the assertion, on the part of the judge and many
others, that propositions about supernatural
beings ­ that life has been designed by a
supernatural being ­ are not verifiable or falsifiable.

Let’s take a look at this claim. Of course it has
proven monumentally difficult to give a decent
definition or analysis of verification or
falsification. Here the harrowing vicissitudes of
attempts in the 50s and 60s to give a precise
statement of the verifiability criterion are
instructive. But taking these notions in a
rough-and-ready way we can easily see that
propositions about supernatural beings not being
verifiable or falsifiable isn’t true at all.

For example, the statement “God has designed
800-pound rabbits that live in Cleveland” is
clearly testable, clearly falsifiable and indeed
clearly false. Testability can’t be taken as a
criterion for distinguishing scientific from
nonscientific statements. That is because in the
typical case individual statements are not verifiable or falsifiable.

As another example, the statement “There is at
least one electron” is surely scientific, but it
isn’t by itself verifiable or falsifiable. What
is verifiable or falsifiable are whole theories
involving electrons. These theories make
verifiable or falsifiable predictions, but the
sole statement “There is at least one electron”
does not. In the same way, whole theories
involving intelligent designers also make
verifiable or falsifiable predictions, even if
the bare statement that life has been intelligently designed does not.

Therefore, this reason for excluding the
supernatural from science is clearly a mistake.

But, there is the judge’s claim that science
excludes reference to the supernatural,
independent of concerns about verifiability and
falsifiability. Reference to the supernatural
just can’t be part of science. This idea is
sometimes called “methodological naturalism.” But
what is the reason ­ if any ­ for accepting
methodological naturalism? Apparently, the judge
thinks it is just a matter of definition ­ of the word ”science,” presumably.

Here the judge is not alone. Michael Ruse, a
philosopher of biology, said in his book Darwinism Defended:

The Creationists believe that the world started
miraculously. But miracles lie outside of
science, which by definition deals only with the
natural, the repeatable, that which is governed by law.

Do Ruse and the judge really mean to suggest that
the dispute can be settled just by looking up the
term “science” in the dictionary?

If so, they should think again. Dictionaries do
not propose definitions of “science” that imply methodological naturalism.

Therefore, it looks as if Jones and those whose
advice he followed are advancing their own
definition of “science.” But how can that be of
any use in an argument or controversy of this sort?

Suppose I claim all Democrats belong in jail. One
might ask: Could I advance the discussion by just
defining the word “Democrat” to mean “convicted
felon”? If you defined “Republican” to mean
“unmitigated scoundrel,” should Republicans
everywhere hang their heads in shame?

So this definition of “science” the judge appeals
to is incorrect as a matter of fact because that
is not how the word is ordinarily used. But even
if the word “science” were ordinarily used in
such a way that its definition included
methodological naturalism, that still wouldn’t
come close to settling the issue.

The question is whether ID is science. That is
not a merely verbal question about how a certain
word is ordinarily used. It is, instead, a
factual question about a multifarious and
many-sided human activity ­ is the very nature of
that activity such as to exclude ID?

Does this important and multifarious human
activity by its very nature preclude references
to the supernatural? How would anyone argue a thing like that?

Newton was perhaps the greatest of the founders
of modern science. His theory of planetary motion
is thought to be an early paradigm example of
modern science. Yet, according to Newton’s own
understanding of his theory, the planetary
motions had instabilities that God periodically
corrected. Shall we say that Newton wasn’t doing
science when he advanced that theory or that the
theory really isn’t a scientific theory at all?

That seems a bit narrow.

Many other constraints on science have been
proposed. Jacques Monod, the author of Chance and
Necessity, says that science precludes any form
of teleology. Other proposed constraints are that
science can’t involve moral judgments ­ or value
judgments, more generally ­ and that the aim of
science is explanation, whether or not this is in the service of truth.

Additional constraints that have been proposed in
various contexts include: Scientific theories
must in some sense be empirically verifiable
and/or falsifiable; scientific experiments must
be replicable; science can study only repeatable
events; and science can’t deal with the
subjective but only with what is public and sharable.

Some say the aim of science is to discover and
state natural laws. Others, equally enthusiastic
about science, think there aren’t any natural
laws to discover. According to Richard Otte and
John Mackie, the aim of science is to propose
accounts of how the world goes for the most part,
apart from miracles. Others reject the “for the
most part” disclaimer. How does one tell which,
if any, of these proposed constraints actually do
hold for science? And why should we think that
methodological naturalism really does constrain
science? And what does “science” really mean?

I don’t have the space to give a complete answer
­ as one says when he doesn’t know a complete
answer ­ but the following seems sensible: The
usual dictionary definitions suffice to give us
the meaning of the term “science.” They suggest
that this term denotes any activity that is:

(a) a systematic and disciplined enterprise aimed
at finding out truth about our world, and (b) has
significant empirical involvement. Any activity
that meets these vague conditions counts as science.

But what about methodological naturalism and all
the rest of those proposed constraints? Perhaps
the following is the best way to think about the matter:

There are many related enterprises, all
scientific in that they satisfy (a) and (b). For
each of those proposed constraints, there is an
activity falling under (a) and (b), the aim of
which is in fact characterized by that
constraint. For each or at any rate many of the
proposed constraints there is another activity
falling under (a) and (b), the aim of which does
not fall under that constraint. Further, when
people propose that a given constraint pertains
to science just as such, to all of science, so to
speak, they are ordinarily really endorsing or
recommending one or more of the activities the
aim of which is characterized by that constraint.

Now how does this work out with methodological
naturalism? Well, there are some scientific
activities that are indeed constrained by
methodological naturalism. The partisans of
methodological naturalism are endorsing or
promoting those scientific activities and
recommending them as superior to scientific
activities not so constrained. But of course
there are other scientific activities ­ Newton’s,
for example ­ that are not so constrained.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of
doing science in accord with methodological
naturalism? There is a good deal to be said on
both sides here. For example, if you exclude the
supernatural from science, then if the world or
some phenomena within it are supernaturally
caused ­ as most of the world’s people believe ­
you won’t be able to reach that truth scientifically.

Observing methodological naturalism thus
hamstrings science by precluding science from
reaching what would be an enormously important
truth about the world. It might be that, just as
a result of this constraint, even the best
science in the long run will wind up with false conclusions.

Alvin Plantinga is a leading philosopher known
for his work in epistemology, metaphysics, and
the philosophy of religion. He is currently the
John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.
Received on Thu Mar 16 15:37:56 2006