The Rhetorical Situation Surrounding Intelligent Design

This weekend, in the midst of fun stuff like a 3 1/2 mile family hike through part of Newport News Park (the largest city park east of the Mississippi, I'm told), and not-so-fun stuff like painting a hallway at home, I encountered a couple interesting items on the rhetoric of the Intelligent Design controversy. The first was Thomas Woodward's book, Darwin Strikes Back: Defending the Science of Intelligent Design. I'm only a few chapters into it, and I'll come back with more to say about the book later; but it was enough to tune my hearing to the currents underlying this interview with Dr. Michael Egnor.

I encourage you to listen to that entire podcast, so you can get a taste for how the dogmatic evolution community has handled a serious scientific question from someone who supports Intelligent Design. Dr. Egnor tells of interactions on two blogs, the TIME Magazine science blog and Pharyngula.

In a February 12 comment on the Time Magazine blog entry, he had written this (later repeated on Pharyngula):

"There are two reasons that people you trust might not find arguments like mine very persuasive:

"They're right about the science, and they understand that I'm wrong.

"or

"They're wrong about the science, and they're evading questions that would reveal that they're wrong.

"My 'argument' is just a question: how much new information can Darwinian mechanisms generate? It's a quantitative question, and it needs more than an ad hominem answer. If I ask a physicist 'How much energy can fission of uranium generate' he can tell me the answer, without much difficulty, in ergs/ mass of uranium/unit time. He can provide references in scientific journals (Journal, issue, page)detailing the experiments that generated the number. Valid scientific theories are transparent, in this sense.

"So if 'people you trust' are right about the science, they should have no difficulty answering my question, with checkable references and reproducable experiments, which would get to the heart of Darwinists' claims: that the appearance of design in living things is illusory.

"Ask your friends that you trust to answer my question. No spin, no recourse to 'Authority', no ad hominem attacks, no credentials thumping. Just an answer: how much new information, in bits/organism/ unit time, or any units your friends choose, can Darwinian natural selection generate? Just give me a number, and references.

"If your friends can answer the question, and the new information generated by Darwinian mechanism is substantial, I stand corrected.

"If they can't answer the question, then you, as a leading science reporter, might be curious as to why they can't answer such a fundamental question. I'm perplexed as to why you seem so incurious about this question, and so deferential to authority."

In the podcast, Dr. Egnor compares the interchange on these blogs to other scientific discussions, in which questions are generally welcomed. This question in particular could lead toward years of profitable research for evolutionists. What Dr. Egnor got instead was vilification, much of it resembling middle-school name-calling: people thinking they're scoring points by spelling his name backwards and pronouncing it aloud, or expanding his name to "Egnoramus." (Now, there's real strong, scientific and logical argumentation for you. Panda's Thumb is, if anything, even more juvenile.) He also got an answer from PZ Myers that was more to the point, but only barely, and really just as dismissive though in a more sophisticated way (listen to the podcast for more on that).

I have trouble seeing what's wrong with the question, myself.

Now, couple this with the constant misrepresentation of Intelligent Design--see here for a recent example, and in a short while today I'll publish another--and I think you'll see it comes to this: Intelligent Design is raising serious scientific questions. Some of them certainly seem out of bounds to some researchers: a committed philosophical naturalist will not countenance the idea of an intelligent source behind anything in nature. Some of them, though, like the one Dr. Egnor raised, should be legitimate in any scientist's mind. The evolution community's response, though, is nothing but a rhetorical barrage of misrepresentations, name-calling, dismissiveness, changing the subject ("ID is all about politics and religion"), and the like.

Is this the reasoned response of a confident science? As a non-biologist I'm not qualified to say whether ID's empirical claims have been demonstrated. But here is something that gives me considerably more trust in ID than its opposition: I see Intelligent Design advocates taking honestly engaging the question. I see evolution advocates mocking the question; but they are really mocking a straw man version of the question. There's nothing persuasive in that at all. It rather sounds like the blustering of a schoolyard bully who tries to win by intimidation when he can't win by being right.

Posted: Mon - April 2, 2007 at 10:30 AM |

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The Rhetorical Situation Surrounding Intelligent Design

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson