"Darwin Strikes Back: Defending the Science of Intelligent Design"
Book
Review
I've previously mentioned Thomas Woodward's book Darwin Strikes Back: Defending the Science of Intelligent Design, for its helpful perspective on the ID controversy as rhetorical drama. I've had the pleasure of spending some time with the author. With a warm heart and a ready smile, he's someone you immediately feel comfortable with; you can sense it even from the distance of a podcast interview. That friendly nature does not keep him from being effective in his specialty, which is the rhetoric of science--the way scientific controversies are played out in their public communications.
I've previously mentioned Thomas Woodward's book Darwin Strikes Back: Defending the Science of Intelligent Design, for its helpful perspective on the ID controversy as rhetorical drama. I've had the pleasure of spending some time with the author. With a warm heart and a ready smile, he's someone you immediately feel comfortable with; you can sense it even from the distance of a podcast interview. That friendly nature does not keep him from being effective in his specialty, which is the rhetoric of science--the way scientific controversies are played out in their public communications.
His
writing is highly pictorial; he's not afraid to use rhetoric of his own,
especially in the form of striking and powerful metaphors. The book has more of
a narrative tone than his earlier, more scholarly
Doubts
About Darwin: A History of Intelligent
Design; nevertheless, it is also well
researched. The opening of Chapter One will give you a
taste:
"It was a surreal window in time. Beginning in August 2004, and stretching out over a year to the fall of 2005, the insidious threat spread across the globe. Month by month one could hear in the American media the staccato of increasingly shrill warnings. Editorial writers thundered across the land; journalists were scolded for inadequately reporting the danger on the horizon. Images of an impending catastrophe were conjured.
"Then Oxford University Press joined the chorus, releasing two books that pinpointed the individuals who were linked to the new international threat. Cultural devastation, said the Oxford Press authors, was now lurking as a real possibility in the West. This was no small-scale matter--at stake was nothing less than our democratic values inherited from the Enlightenment. Scientists and ordinary citizens needed to wake up and combat the menace: the health of our modern civilization was at risk.
"This scenario sounds highly fictional.... "
But it is not fictional, as he goes on to show--with footnotes. Opponents of ID have painted Intelligent Design as a threat to education and science, a religious movement that will spawn ignorance and feed dark motivations for world violence. All of this is just silly, of course. In my own excursions through the media and scientific writings, I have often noted the persistent distortions in the way ID is presented. Woodward treats these as the rhetorical strategies they are: illegitimate, yet impervious to correction.
Some of the rhetoric obviously has to do with genuine controversies in science: has Michael Behe genuinely demonstrated his points regarding irreducible complexity? Was Jonathan Wells telling the truth in Icons of Evolution? What do we know about the Cambrian Explosion and how does it affect the discussions? Is Dembski out to a not-so-free lunch? In order to place these discussions in rhetorical context, Woodward presents both sides of the story. Here's the message that rings clear: all the evolutionists' pronouncements about the battle being just a bothersome gnat, a distraction, not a question of real science--these pronouncements are prematurely triumphalist. This is particularly the case, of course, in the matter of origins of life and cosmological design. My own pet peeve in this is the way ID is consistently portrayed as having just religious origins.
ID proponents will be particularly intrigued by his closing question: are we at the tipping point toward ID? (Opponents may not be pleased.) He sees the Kuhnian paradigm crisis, "symbolized in Michael Denton's Evolution: A Theory in Crisis [as] no longer on the horizon but ... come to powerfully dominate the current scene." This paradigm flux is indicated by such things as the international expansion of ID and the non-substantive, predominantly rhetorical nature of the opposing responses. "Cross-examinations"--rejoinders of contrary opinions--are too weak and unsupported to halt this momentum, he says. Is he right? Time will certainly tell. It is a prediction, after all.
For quite some time I've been observing ID opponents' treatment of the theory, especially their stubborn refusal to engage it for what it really is. I have ascribed that either to ignorance of ID (sometimes willful, sometimes innocent), or to imperious disregard, which is willful ignorance on a grander scale. Darwin Strikes Back shows us we can sometimes call it what it really is: coldly calculated rhetoric--words designed more for argumentative advantage than for truth. (Nisbet and Mooney, would you care to contradict me on that?)
I've seen the same thing at times from some ID proponents: neither side is pure and innocent. There is one significant overriding difference, though, which you can observe for yourself in a snapshot, without having to pore over past media releases or the other types of communication I have mentioned. Among blogs that encourage two-sided discussion in their comments, Telic Thoughts is the prime representative of the ID side. Evolution is primarily represented by Panda's Thumb and Pharyngula. Take a few moments and see the tone of the writing and especially of the comments on each of these blogs. (You can also explore the comments on this blog.) When ID engages the issue, we really engage the issue. When evolutionists engage the issue, you more often find them framing it as a religious battle or about what gets taught in schools (which it is not); or in that dismissive way that often descends to juvenile name-calling. Pure rhetoric in action.
Rhetoric as such has a noble history going back at least to Aristotle. There's not a thing wrong with it, even when used to persuade, if it's delivered in good faith and honesty. Rhetoric turns wrong when it is empty, when it is just emotion-grabbing, when its content is distorted and its intent manipulative. There's far too much of that attached to this controversy. Ultimately such rhetoric will give way to what comes out of the laboratories and the work of clear philosophical and scientific thinkers. For now it's an unfortunate distraction to that progress being made.
Darwin Strikes Back: Defending the Science of Intelligent Design, by Thomas Woodward, Foreword by William Dembski. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2006. 189 pages plus Appendix (an excerpt from "How Not to Critique Intelligent Design Theory," an Ars Disputandi article by Del Ratzsch), Endnotes, and Index. Amazon Price US $10.19.
"It was a surreal window in time. Beginning in August 2004, and stretching out over a year to the fall of 2005, the insidious threat spread across the globe. Month by month one could hear in the American media the staccato of increasingly shrill warnings. Editorial writers thundered across the land; journalists were scolded for inadequately reporting the danger on the horizon. Images of an impending catastrophe were conjured.
"Then Oxford University Press joined the chorus, releasing two books that pinpointed the individuals who were linked to the new international threat. Cultural devastation, said the Oxford Press authors, was now lurking as a real possibility in the West. This was no small-scale matter--at stake was nothing less than our democratic values inherited from the Enlightenment. Scientists and ordinary citizens needed to wake up and combat the menace: the health of our modern civilization was at risk.
"This scenario sounds highly fictional.... "
But it is not fictional, as he goes on to show--with footnotes. Opponents of ID have painted Intelligent Design as a threat to education and science, a religious movement that will spawn ignorance and feed dark motivations for world violence. All of this is just silly, of course. In my own excursions through the media and scientific writings, I have often noted the persistent distortions in the way ID is presented. Woodward treats these as the rhetorical strategies they are: illegitimate, yet impervious to correction.
Some of the rhetoric obviously has to do with genuine controversies in science: has Michael Behe genuinely demonstrated his points regarding irreducible complexity? Was Jonathan Wells telling the truth in Icons of Evolution? What do we know about the Cambrian Explosion and how does it affect the discussions? Is Dembski out to a not-so-free lunch? In order to place these discussions in rhetorical context, Woodward presents both sides of the story. Here's the message that rings clear: all the evolutionists' pronouncements about the battle being just a bothersome gnat, a distraction, not a question of real science--these pronouncements are prematurely triumphalist. This is particularly the case, of course, in the matter of origins of life and cosmological design. My own pet peeve in this is the way ID is consistently portrayed as having just religious origins.
ID proponents will be particularly intrigued by his closing question: are we at the tipping point toward ID? (Opponents may not be pleased.) He sees the Kuhnian paradigm crisis, "symbolized in Michael Denton's Evolution: A Theory in Crisis [as] no longer on the horizon but ... come to powerfully dominate the current scene." This paradigm flux is indicated by such things as the international expansion of ID and the non-substantive, predominantly rhetorical nature of the opposing responses. "Cross-examinations"--rejoinders of contrary opinions--are too weak and unsupported to halt this momentum, he says. Is he right? Time will certainly tell. It is a prediction, after all.
For quite some time I've been observing ID opponents' treatment of the theory, especially their stubborn refusal to engage it for what it really is. I have ascribed that either to ignorance of ID (sometimes willful, sometimes innocent), or to imperious disregard, which is willful ignorance on a grander scale. Darwin Strikes Back shows us we can sometimes call it what it really is: coldly calculated rhetoric--words designed more for argumentative advantage than for truth. (Nisbet and Mooney, would you care to contradict me on that?)
I've seen the same thing at times from some ID proponents: neither side is pure and innocent. There is one significant overriding difference, though, which you can observe for yourself in a snapshot, without having to pore over past media releases or the other types of communication I have mentioned. Among blogs that encourage two-sided discussion in their comments, Telic Thoughts is the prime representative of the ID side. Evolution is primarily represented by Panda's Thumb and Pharyngula. Take a few moments and see the tone of the writing and especially of the comments on each of these blogs. (You can also explore the comments on this blog.) When ID engages the issue, we really engage the issue. When evolutionists engage the issue, you more often find them framing it as a religious battle or about what gets taught in schools (which it is not); or in that dismissive way that often descends to juvenile name-calling. Pure rhetoric in action.
Rhetoric as such has a noble history going back at least to Aristotle. There's not a thing wrong with it, even when used to persuade, if it's delivered in good faith and honesty. Rhetoric turns wrong when it is empty, when it is just emotion-grabbing, when its content is distorted and its intent manipulative. There's far too much of that attached to this controversy. Ultimately such rhetoric will give way to what comes out of the laboratories and the work of clear philosophical and scientific thinkers. For now it's an unfortunate distraction to that progress being made.
Darwin Strikes Back: Defending the Science of Intelligent Design, by Thomas Woodward, Foreword by William Dembski. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2006. 189 pages plus Appendix (an excerpt from "How Not to Critique Intelligent Design Theory," an Ars Disputandi article by Del Ratzsch), Endnotes, and Index. Amazon Price US $10.19.
Posted: Tue - April 17, 2007 at 08:45 AM |
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