Thinking Christian

Yesterday we heard about claims that Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed employed deception in interviews with Intelligent Design opponents. Today, the other broiling controversy:

As for publicity, the filmmakers are apparently relying on bribery to promote their propaganda. Gotta spend money to make money, right? Schools will be “paid” according to the number of ticket stubs they collect. You’d think that a creationist propaganda movie would have other publicity options at Christian fundamentalist schools. But apparently, nothing is a sin when you’re doing the work of God. Bribery, brainwashing, crusading … it’s all for the greater good.

Aaron Elias, New University Online, University of California, Irvine

The charge is that the film’s producers are bribing Christian schools to bring their students to see it. L. Ron Brown (The Frame Problem) echoes:

Producers of the Intelligent Design propaganda film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed are trying to bribe Christian schools in America to facilitate or even force their students to go see their movie.

It’s a marketing tactic. Schools that purchase large blocks of tickets for their students will receive donations from the production company.

Does anybody remember the Golden Compass movie? Its producers tried to market it through an “Amazing Student Sweepstakes (pdf)” and by trying to persuade teachers to make the related books required reading. Sure, I raised a big complaint about that. It was not, however, that it was so horrible to try to market a film through schools, or to use monetary incentives. My complaint was just that it was wrong–on Constitutional grounds–to make required reading of materials that were so markedly hostile toward religion.

So what’s the problem with Expelled? It’s “propaganda,” says Aaron Elias, “brainwashing, crusading … ” The problem, in other words, is that Aaron Elias and L. Ron Brown disagree with the movie’s message. Which they haven’t even seen yet. What if the movie makes its case successfully? Maybe that’s the real fear.

Next in this series: How ID proponents ought to deal with the pre-controversy, and prepare for the real controversy when the movie appears.

Related:

Expelled: Then What?

The number one Google or Yahoo! search phrase by which new visitors are coming to this blog now is “Expelled.” Hundreds of you have looked it up on this website alone. This is surprising, since I’ve only blogged on the movie once, way back in September. More than six weeks ahead of its April 18 release, this movie is already drawing a lot of interest.

The film’s premise is that for academics, believing in Intelligent Design–no, even having a certain level of sympathy toward it–is asking for trouble. Real, significant, career trouble. I haven’t seen the film, so I can’t comment on how well it makes its case. I’ve been watching the controversy, though. Pharyngula’s P.Z. Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota, Morris, represents the contrary position. Based on his IM address I conclude he is a Macintosh user–we agree on that, at least! We disagree on much else, though. To say he opposes Intelligent Design is an understatement on about the same scale as “The Ku Klux Klan is unfavorable toward African-Americans.”

The movie’s producers, in pursuit of a balanced perspective on their topic, requested interviews from evolutionists like Myers, Richard Dawkins, and others. They agreed–and now they’re crying foul over it. I think it’s comically sad. When Richard Dawkins produced a BBC television series on the alleged evils of religion, he presented some of the worst examples and edits representing the Christian position, and left (for example) a very intelligent discussion with fellow Oxford professor Alister McGrath on the cutting room floor. Expelled’s producers invited comment from the best of the evolutionist side.

Myers’s specific complaint is that he was deceived into appearing in an anti-evolution film. He could have asked a few questions if he was worried about that. The request for interview they sent him included,

We are interested in asking you a number of questions about the disconnect/controversy that exists in America between Evolution, Creationism and the Intelligent Design movement.

Did he just assume that nobody in the world who raises that question might disagree with his position? The producers sent him an advance copy of every question they were planning to ask him. You can be quite sure Dawkins did not do that for Ted Haggard. In fact, it’s quite out of the ordinary. Expelled’s producers went out of their way to give fair treatment to the contrary side.

Myers’s complains that the production company gave him a fake name. There was no deception there. It is common industry practice for subdivisions to have different names than their parent companies, which was the case this time.

Myers also says he was misrepresented:

What? I didn’t do any interviews for pro-creation films, and I certainly haven’t said that “freedom of thought and freedom of inquiry” aren’t part of the university. There must be some mistake.

I haven’t seen the film, but it’s easy to see that the mistake is Myers’s, and a rather grandiose one at that. No one said these were Myers’s words. Does he think the whole film is about what he had to say?

Further distortion:

I’m wondering why the Discovery Institute would be so enthused about this movie. It lays it’s [sic] premise on the line: science is flawed because it excludes god [sic--some people don't know that proper nouns are capitalized in English] and the supernatural. It’s one big promo for religion — which means it’s going to further undercut Intelligent Design creationism’s [sic] claims to be a secular idea.

He appears to believe that if the movie exposes institutions’ bigotry favoring philosophical materialism, it is therefore “one big promo for religion.” The two issues do not equate, however. Myers, who hasn’t seen the film either, at least as of the date he wrote this piece, is jumping off a cliff to a conclusion. He doesn’t know what the film is going to say about religion. What we do know about the film–because this is what has been publicly released–is that it is a promo in favor of First Amendment free speech and academic freedom.

I think Myers’s closing was intended tongue-in-cheek, and we ought to take it with a sense of humor. Either that, or he’s back in a grandiose mode. We shouldn’t blame him for that, I suppose; after all, Expelled is making him a movie star. Here’s how he ends his article:

Oh, well. I have two warnings for the creationists.

One, I will go see this movie, and I will cheer loudly at my 30 seconds or whatever on the screen, and I will certainly disembowel its arguments here and in any print venue that wants me. That’s going to be fun.

Two, next time I’m asked to be recorded for a creationist propaganda film, I will demand more money, and a flight and a limousine to the premiere. They can pay for my tuxedo rental, too. And my hotel room will have a jacuzzi and a bowl of M&Ms — green ones only.

It’s all a transparent attempt to discredit in advance something that the evolutionist side may have genuine reason to be worried about. What if the film actually succeeds in making its case? What if there really is evidence of unfounded bigotry and thought-suppression in academia? What if it’s presented credibly?

Aside from his caustic communication style, which I can’t say I really enjoy, I wouldn’t mind watching Myers’s having “fun” trying to “disembowel” the film’s arguments. I would even bring him green M&Ms. I wonder if he will actually address the film’s points, though. So far, based on this post of his, he’s exposing straw-man caricatures instead.

Related:

• The controversy over Expelled’s promotional tactics
• Then what?

The film’s producers’ perspectives were drawn from these sources:

• Interview with Walt Ruloff, Part 1 and Part 2
• Interview with Mark Mathis

Book Review

A friend of mine has an overly strong commitment to things she learned when she was growing up. “Doctors say you need to drink eight glasses of water a day” is one. I ran across a repot in which a leading researcher in this field told of his attempts to track down the source of that belief. He found no medical evidence for it. Apparently it just showed up one day in some magazine, and grew. He said there was no truth to it whatever. My friend’s response: “I don’t believe it.” She wouldn’t look at the source material; she already had her facts.

There is research out this week casting doubt on the belief that stretching before sports activities reduces injuries. I’m not going to bother telling my friend. She won’t read the report, and she wouldn’t believe me if I said. She knows we should all drink eight glasses of water a day, and that stretching before exercise reduces injuries. She knows it because that’s what she has always heard.

I expect similar reactions from evolutionists to Mike Gene’s The Design Matrix: A Consilience of Clues. Everyone in the pro-evolution, anti-Intelligent Design crowd knows that:

• ID is thinly disguised creationism
• ID is just negative science (nothing but picking points against evolution)
• ID has no positive research program
• ID makes no predictions
• ID relies on a “God of the gaps” approach to knowledge
• ID presents no testable hypotheses
• ID is dogmatically driven by people with a theological/philosophical agenda

Everybody knows these things. Mike Gene shows that none of them are true. The evolutionists, I fear, are not going to read it; they’re just going to say, “I don’t believe it.” Like my friend, they will stick with what’s always been “true” for them in the past.

The author uses a pseudonym, obviously, and as far as I know no one has cracked his real identity (or if they have, they’re not telling). He says in the intro to the book that he remains anonymous so that his ideas can be evaluated for themselves, without regard for who has presented them. It seems likely he’s also carrying out some career protection, too. If he’s working in a university biology department (and yes, he does know his science), it could obviously risky for him to “come out” as an ID supporter. (See his Design Matrix website for more.)

The way that he supports ID is refreshingly unique, however. He doesn’t argue for a conclusion of Intelligent Design at all. He argues more modestly, for a suspicion of Intelligent Design. He would have a beef with dogmatists on either side of the issue. Quite helpfully he distinguishes between the strong evidence required for conviction by a court of law, and evidence required by an investigating detective. A detective arrives on the scene with nothing but questions. His first objective is to move toward reasonable suspicions. A little hint there, a vague clue there: these things can move him toward a theory of a crime; and from there he can begin to look for more definite signs. Eventually, much further down the road, proof may come. Mike Gene believes we should recognize ID is in the developing suspicion stage: there is no hard scientific proof of design, but there are hints and clues that raise a most reasonable suspicion, and which can lead to a search for more definite signs.

These hints and clues he summarizes into his “Design Matrix,” four relatively independent factors to test for in nature:

• Analogy with known instances of design
• Discontinuity with observed or means by which evolution works
• Rationality apparent in the design of the natural feature
• Foresight apparent in the design of the natural feature

These are defined such that they can all lead to testable research hypotheses. We’re not talking about black/white, unambiguous research results, however (”Evolution never could have done this!” or “Evolution absolutely could have done this, it’s easy!”). Natural phenomena can be scored on a continuum, Mike Gene says; we’re still in the detective stage, not the judge and jury stage. We’re looking for suspicions of ID, so we should be open to gradations on the scales of the Design Matrix. Only one of them, by the way (Discontinuity), bears any relationship to the tired stereotype that ID is nothing but a negative science that resorts to god-of-the-gaps thinking.

Mike Gene wrote this book with a sense of humor. (Thank God for an evolution/ID-related book with a sense of humor!) The book wraps around a theme of the Rabbit and the Duck. It’s a metaphor about our preconceptions, and the way they can color our perceptions. I won’t try to replay it for you; I’ll just quote the book’s final paragraph, and leave it to you to read the book and chase down the metaphor for yourself:

So as we begin our journey, these lessons, coupled with all the lessons in these chapters, must be kept in mind. We are not engaging in a Duck Hunt; we are going to chase the Rabbit. So, do you see that rabbit hole over your shoulder? Yeah, that one. Wanna have some fun? Well, grab your Design Matrix, and follow that Rabbit.

(There’s much more Rabbit fun on the Telic Thoughts blog, where Mike Gene writes frequently.)

Some of you reading this “know” that ID is nothing but negative science, it’s just god-of-the-gaps, and it’s a mere religious ploy. You won’t read the book; you won’t accept that ID-related thinking can lead to genuine research questions; you’ll just say, “I don’t believe it.” I strongly urge you to get your hands on a copy of this uniquely creative approach to Intelligent Design, and find out where the Rabbit leads you.

The Design Matrix: A Consilience of Clues by Mike Gene. No City: Arbor Vitae Press, 2007. 291 pages plus index. Amazon Price US$16.47.

Two weeks ago the CBS affiliate in Dallas/Ft. Worth presented a  5-minute television news commentary segment (Tracy Rowlett’s Perspective) on “Teaching Evolution in Public Schools” (click on the video of that name). It’s one of the better overviews of the issue I’ve seen in the media.

HT to Evolution News and Views

From BRITES:

The veiled agenda of Intelligent Design bleeds through its empty rhetoric like a gushing chest wound staining a freshly bleached T-shirt. ID is a fascist politico-religious movement that masquerades as science and attempts to force a wedge between the scientific community and the wider culture. The ultimate goal of this wedgie is to establish a theocracy in which the Bible becomes federal law and the Biblical creation account in the book of Guinness is taught as fact.

You owe it to yourself to learn the truth about this menace!

“Pantalaimon,” a commenter on Thinking Christian, supplied a number of quotes yesterday to show that (in his words)

ID is not a scientific research program in any sense, and never has been. Scientific understanding is of no intrinsic interest to ID. Any “research” they may undertake is strictly subservient to the philosophical goal of crushing naturalistic science for religious and philosophical purposes.

Strong generalities like that are risky; nobody is one-dimensional, and in fact Pantalaimon’s quotes were a great example of quote-mining out of context. When I pointed that out to him, he graciously offered me the opportunity to track down the source of the quotes myself and put them in correct context. I have declined his generous suggestion. Instead I’m going to try to put the issue in its proper full perspective, based on my entire experience with Intelligent Design.

Intelligent Design is entirely a ploy, manipulating science in order to win religious/political battles. That’s the charge. This statement touches, albeit lightly, on something like the truth of the matter. Many leaders of the Intelligent Design movement are Christian believers, and one (Jonathan Wells) represents the Unification Church. (Unification Church theology as I understand it has little in common with Christianity, other than a belief in some spiritual reality.) These ID leaders recognize strong opposition between a certain dominant form of evolutionary theory–naturalistic neo-Darwinism–and their religious beliefs. Not surprisingly, they consider their religious beliefs not only true but also important. Thus there is a conflict.

I don’t know anybody who has ever handled a major conflict perfectly. I do not need to be convinced that everything ID leaders have done was done just right. The infamous “Wedge Document” was a strategic mistake, in that opened a wide and inviting door for interpretations of evil scheming. The Discovery Institute has worked hard to correct misinterpretations related to the Wedge, not entirely successfully. I think it’s fair to acknowledge errors, to learn from them, and move on wiser than before.

Phillip Johnson is regarded to be the father of the ID movement. At the core of his message is a direct, unflinching, head-on assault against philosophical naturalism, a form of atheism. From his first foray into this field, Darwin on Trial, Johnson has highlighted the close association between Darwinism and philosophical naturalism. His disagreement with Darwinism has been based in part on its assumptions that nothing could have happened, and nothing ought to be explained, by any means other than strict natural cause and effect.

Johnson has been accused of falsely assuming all evolutionists are Richard Dawkins; that is, that evolution is equivalent to atheism. I don’t know that he has actually always made that error. Nevertheless there is a strong association between evolution and atheism in this sense: evolution may not entail atheism, but atheism certainly entails evolution. Without evolutionary theory, atheism has no explanation for nature whatsoever.

Confronting philosophical naturalism has been one aspect of Johnson’s approach to the issue from the beginning. Further, he took a very long and careful look at the scientific literature, and came to the conclusion that evolutionary theory is not well supported by the evidence. Though he is a lawyer, let that not blind you to the fact that he was approaching the question from the basis of science and the available evidence. He concluded that evolution’s explanatory strength depends critically on the assumption that all explanations must be in terms of natural causes and effects and nothing else. This, he rightly noted, is a philosophical assumption that is open to question, which puts evolution itself open to question.

So in Johnson, back at the start of it all, there were three intersecting streams: religious, scientific, and philosophical. He was not an expert in all three (with apologies to all of you out there who are). He proceeded to gather conferences and symposia of scientists and philosophers to explore the question further. Out of this the Intelligent Design movement was born.

The three intersecting streams still pervade the question, but not monolithically so. When David Berlinski’s new book, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions comes out, don’t expect a shrill screed for some kind of fundamentalist American Christianity. He is a secular Jew living in Paris. Whether or not Michael Denton wants to be associated with ID now, the fact is his Evolution: A Theory in Crisis critiqued evolution strictly on scientific grounds, and set a course that is still being traveled.

Anti-theists also follow the same three threads. Daniel Dennett employs philosophy and evolution in service of dissolving what he calls religion’s “spell” of misunderstanding. Richard Dawkins uses science, and something reminiscent of philosophy (I can’t call it better than that), to call God a delusion. They both have a strong interest in defeating religion, but that hardly means they are uninterested in science–though it would be easy to quote-mine them and make it appear that way.

By the same token, if ID leaders have an interest in philosophy and/or religion, as represented in the quotes Pantalaimon pulled, that hardly means they are uninterested in science. The relation between science and design is controversial; commenter Holopupenko is convinced design cannot be detected through the sciences and that ID scientists are philosophically naive; meanwhile ID-supportive philosophers like Stephen Meyer, Paul Nelson, J. P. Moreland, William Lane Craig, and my friend Rob Koons are confident it potentially can be. On that basis, the scientists in the ID movement proceed with their research.

Let’s grant the obvious, looming in the background, which is that ID’s record of published science is hardly stellar. That in itself does not show there is no interest in science, which was the charge Pantalaimon made. The activities of Minnich, Behe, Marks, Dembski, Seelke, Gonzalez, and many others put the lie to that. Their low published output could be attributed to the difficulty of defining relevant research problems, the fiery-hot hostility toward ID among other scientists and journal editors, the relative youth of the field, or many other explanations. Many observers think they know another reason, which is that ID cannot actually produce science. My somewhat educated word of caution is not to rush to judgment on this. Whatever science ID could produce, conditions are so set against it being published that it’s worth giving it considerably more time.

There is a fourth stream that has been sometimes bundled in with ID, the political, especially in regard to public education in America. Where schools have been pressured to teach a positive theory of Intelligent Design, that has been nothing but a mistake. On the other hand, schools’ resistance to bringing up evolution’s evidential difficulties seems puzzling to me, except as just another facet of academics’ ID-phobia. In hindsight, though, I believe it would have been preferable to leave even that question off the political table, innocuous though it should have been. ID miscalculated the opposition and ended up stirring up even more antipathy without much advancing its primary agenda, which is research. Now it has become difficult to pull out of the PR battles and get focused. Nobody gets everything right.

So to Pantalaimon, in summary, I see your own deep animosity toward ID seriously distorting your view of the matter. ID is not uni-dimensional. (Not even Richard Dawkins is uni-dimensional!) Intelligent Design cannot be defined by mined quotes. It has to bear responsibility for its missteps, but so do we all. It wasn’t very long ago that evolutionists confidently spoke of the useless, vestigial appendix and junk DNA as evidence for their theory, after all.

Book Review

Science, Evolution, and Creationism, richly illustrated and printed on glossy stock, is a marvelous scientific defense of evolutionary theory from the National Academy of Sciences. If that were all it tried to accomplish, it would be quite a fine little book (just 54 pages plus bibliography, index, and author bios). What it attempts to do instead, though, is to show the compatibility of religion and evolution, and the utter worthlessness of Intelligent Design and other “creationisms.” Like so much else that has been written on this topic, it oversimplifies in some places, misrepresents in others, and is thoroughly wrong in others. It’s hard to know where to begin addressing it all.

I’ll dive in with this from page 37, the opening words of a chapter titled “Creationist Perspectives.” Several of the book’s major distortions crop up in these two-plus paragraphs:

Advocates of the ideas collectively known as “creationism” and, recently, “intelligent design creationism” hold a wide variety of views. Most broadly, a “creationist” is someone who rejects scientific explanation of the known universe in favor of special creation by a supernatural entity. Creationism in its various forms is not the same thing as belief in God because, as was discussed earlier, many believers as well as many mainstream religious groups accept the findings of science, including evolution. Nor is creationism necessarily tied to Christians who interpret the Bible literally. Some non-Christian religious believers also want to replace scientific explanations with their own religion’s supernatural accounts of physical phenomena.

In the United States, various views of creationism typically have been promoted by small groups of politically active religious fundamentalists who believe that only a supernatural entity could account for the physical changes in the universe and for the biological diversity of life on Earth. But even these creationists hold very different views. Some, know as “young Earth” creationists, believe the biblical account that the universe and the Earth were created just a few thousand years ago. Proponents of this form of creationism also believe that all living things, including humans, were created in a very short period of time in essentially the forms in which they exist today. Other creationists, known as “old Earth” creationists, accept that the Earth may be very old but reject other scientific findings regarding the evolution of living things.

No scientific evidence supports these viewpoints. On the contrary, as discussed earlier, several independent lines of evidence indicate that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old and that the universe is about 14 billion years old…

Defining Terms
In any social or political discourse, being successful at defining vocabulary is the equivalent of taking the high hill in military battle. If you can pin an emotionally laden label on your opponent, you can cut thinking short. That’s why abortion supporters won’t use “pro-life” for their opponents, but label them “anti-choice.” A “creationist,” the NAS says, is “someone who rejects scientific explanation of the known universe in favor of special creation by a supernatural entity.” They don’t mention that “creationist” has a history of anti-intellectualism and poor science, but they do toss in some great buzzwords: “politically active religious fundamentalists.” Yes, indeed.

To label Intelligent Design as a form of creationism is a rhetorical ploy with some emotional force. Tactics like this have been successful already in leading many to believe that ID “rejects scientific explanation of the known universe,” and science in general. (I’m willing to bet some readers here have bought into that error.) Ironically, the book in previous chapters acknowledged that there is no scientific explanation of the known universe, i.e., the Big Bang; nor is there a scientific explanation for the first life on earth. There’s nothing there to reject.

Intelligent Design could be considered anti-science on one definition. On page 10 the book says, “In science, explanations must be based on naturally occurring phenomena.” That’s a perfectly sound and true statement, except that it’s used immoderately, with an assumption that explanations must be scientific to be of value. I’ve never read any ID author even hinting that scientific explanations be sought and applied in every conceivable circumstance; but they reject the view that every explanation must be based on naturally occurring phenomena, on grounds that there could be some causes that are not natural. This is the distinction between philosophical naturalism (or materialism) and a broader view that refuses to suppose that nothing exists besides matter, energy, and their law- and chance-based interactions.

So if one equates disagreement with naturalism to being “anti-science,” then much of ID is anti-science. That’s rather a twisted perspective, however. It’s like saying I’m anti-books because I believe I can read, enjoy, and learn from sources outside the bound, printed page.

Mixing Terms
I cut short the third paragraph of this quote because it continues in a very similar vein. Note how, after describing young Earth and old Earth creationism, it says “no scientific evidence supports these viewpoints,” but proceeds to refute just one of them. The rest of the passage is about the same. This is slippery work. Yes, young Earth creationism seems to be rebutted quite effectively by science. Given the definition of science as requiring natural explanations, though, what could it mean for scientific evidence to support the old Earth creationist viewpoint? It would have to support the finding that a non-natural cause was involved in natural history; but science, by definition, can’t do that. What they should have said with respect to old Earth creationism is that scientific evidence cannot speak to it.

I it cannot yet be a legitimate scientific finding that all life came about on Earth by strictly material, natural causes. Science can and does show the relatedness of all life. From there, the inference of common descent is a reasonable one to make (disputable on some grounds, yet certainly reasonable from the scientist’s perspective; more on that in a future blog posting). The further inference they want us to make, that common descent happened entirely from within a closed system of natural cause and effect, is philosophical and theological, not scientific. This is because the methods of science restrict it to knowledge of what happens within its sphere. If there is anything happening outside that sphere, science does not have the tools to comment on it.

Compatible With Politics, Too

“As was discussed earlier, many believers as well as many mainstream religious groups accept the findings of science, including evolution.”

The earlier discussion referred to was intended to show that religion is not incompatible with evolution. I don’t know anybody, though, who believes in religion. I know people who have very specific beliefs about the nature of God, His work in the origin of the universe, His relationship to people, and the like. Some of them agree with evolution in all its materialist glory, some accept theistic evolution, some who remain uncommitted, some are ID proponents, and some are young Earth creationists. I struggle with understanding the value of showing, as this book attempts to do, that evolution is compatible with religion. You might as well say it’s compatible with politics.

The only conceivable purpose of this could be to try to persuade readers to change their religious beliefs. There’s nothing wrong with that in general, but in this instance it’s another example of the immoderacy of science. Certainly my beliefs take scientific evidences into account; that’s why I’m not a young Earth creationist (there are Biblical reasons as well). To suppose that readers will alter their beliefs only on account of science, however, is presuming far too much. Our beliefs take in far more than that: history, philosophy, personal experience, God’s revelation, and more.

Just a Couple of Paragraphs
In just two-odd paragraphs we see several confusions and distortions. I’ll write further on this later, for these are not all that there were.

Let me reiterate, though, what I said so briefly earlier: the explanation of evolution in this book is excellent. I am strongly encouraging my two children to learn as much as they can about evolution, including the arguments in its favor. Even if it’s wrong, it’s essential education. You could say the same about the Bible–though I obviously I wouldn’t agree that it’s wrong. Both evolution and Bible are essential parts of the intellectual landscape in the Western world, and they are both mighty forces to contend with. If this book was intended to bring some reconciliation between people who reject one or the other, it has unfortunately not done the work necessary to succeed.

Related:

• I Had No Idea Intelligent Design Proponents Were So Stupid
• The NAS and the Fact-Value Dichotomy
• Naturalistic Evolution: Underdetermined by the Evidence

I had no clue that ID proponents were so stupid, until today when I heard the Diane Rehm NPR podcast about teaching evolution vs. creationism. Intelligent Design proponents think bacterial antibiotic resistance has nothing to do with selection pressure and population genetic changes, nothing to do with evolution at all. We think everyone should get all their knowledge about natural history from Genesis 1-3, and that all public schools should teach the Bible. We’re doing our best to confuse children into misunderstanding everything about science. And if we succeed, Western civilization will surely collapse.

The podcast was a discussion on this report from the National Academy of Sciences. I’ve ordered my copy, and I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to say about it in a week or two.

By “discussion,” I mean that for the most part, Diane Rehm let us listen to several anti-ID scientists; and she repeatedly cut off the pro-ID spokesperson, John Calvert, in the middle of his sentences. I’m not sure he was ever given the chance to complete a thought. If he had been, I believe he would have put the lie to claims of ID idiocy.

It’s not that he didn’t try. He mentioned “materialism” several times. She asked him once, about halfway through, what he meant by it. She cut him off in the middle of his answer. It became apparent later on that she really knew nothing about philosophical materialism, and that she thought he was talking about buying expensive things. Near the end he almost had another chance to explain it, and she cut him short again. In spite of this she was ready at the end to pronounce him wrong and his disputants right. Alan Leshner, one of his disputants, got materialism wrong too. I don’t know how Calvert kept his patience–especially since he was being presented as the one who didn’t know what he was talking about.

At least NPR was honest about one thing: they made no pretense of presenting a balanced view. This is what their web page (linked above) said about the program:

A new report by the National Academy of Sciences emphasizes the importance of teaching evolution in public schools. We’ll look at what the Academy says and why creationism does not belong in the science classroom.

They looked at what the Academy says. They had an ID proponent on the show, but they displayed little interest in what he said. ID’s (”creationism’s”) definition was provided only by its detractors. If ID were indeed what they said it was, yes, it would be idiotic. True to the typical course of these things, however, ID was in fact badly misrepresented throughout. Real ID proponents bear no resemblance to the show’s straw-man stereotypes.

Toby Horn was the one who said “creationists” are confusing children about what science is. I’d like to talk with her about what confusing means. She and the other Academy representatives misused terminology throughout the whole discussion. For them, Intelligent Design equals Creationism. This misuse happens enough to convince me that for many, it’s a rhetorical strategy intentionally employed to promote confusion.

Let’s see how deeply we have to analyze things in order to figure it out. Take a deep breath now, for this might be difficult; after all, a whole lot of prominent scientists have stumbled over it. Ready now? Here we go:

• Creationism is a word with a distinct meaning;
• Intelligent Design is a term with a distinct meaning;
• Their meanings are not identical; therefore,
• Intelligent Design does not equal Creationism.

Whew, that was some tough sledding. Are you still with me? (Feel free to take a short break if you need one.)

They misused the term evolution, too, though perhaps not intentionally. (I’m granting them some benefit of the doubt.) For example, they illustrated “creationist’s” scientific intransigence with the old story about evolutionary theory being essential to understanding bacterial antibiotic resistance. But Intelligent Design proponents–and even genuine creationists–have no quarrel with that kind of evolution. This has been said over and over and over again. But what rhetorical advantage would it leave the evolutionists actually to acknowledge this fact?

Halfway through the show, someone asked why ID has to keep bringing religion into this issue. I always find that an ironic question, since ID doesn’t do that, its opponents do.

(For more on these issues, see the Intelligent Design topics here.)

The main question on the table, though, was whether evolution conflicts with religion. I’ll spend a lot more time on that after I read the NAS report, which I expect to arrive in 3-4 days. For now I have an easy answer to the question:

2. Yes, evolution conflicts with religion.
3. No, evolution does not conflict with religion.
4. It’s an entirely wrong way to present the question.

You could define “evolution” and “religion” to make either 1 or 2 true, or both. So where would that get you? Nowhere. Thus, answer number 3.

More to come later.

Related:

• The NAS and the Fact-Value Dichotomy
• The NAS on Science, Evolution, and Creationism
• Naturalistic Evolution: Underdetermined by the Evidence

This is going to be interesting. I’ve just ordered my copy, which should be here within a week.

On Thursday, [the National Academy of Sciences] produced a third [book on teaching evolution]. But this volume is unusual, people who worked on it say, because it is intended specifically for the lay public and because it devotes much of its space to explaining the differences between science and religion, and asserting that acceptance of evolution does not require abandoning belief in God.

[From Evolution Book Sees No Science-Religion Gap - New York Times]

I blogged previously on this, but that was based on a news report and focused on an aspect other than evolution and faith. When the book comes, I’ll have more to say about that.

Here we go again:

According to an article appearing in the January 2008 issue of The FASEB Journal, the introduction of “non-science,” such as creationism and intelligent design, into science education will undermine the fundamentals of science education. Some of these fundamentals include using the scientific method, understanding how to reach scientific consensus, and distinguishing between scientific and nonscientific explanations of natural phenomena.

Let’s say it again:

• No credible Intelligent Design advocate is calling for anyone to stop teaching evolution.
• ID advocates want more of evolution taught, not less; the inclusion of scientifically acknowledged difficulties in the theory. This is not the same as introducing ID.
• “How to reach scientific consensus.” Well, in addition to the time-tested method of coming to agreement over time on clearly supported theory, there’s also chasing dissent out of the academy, and the No True Scotsman method (see also here).
• “Distinguishing between scientific and nonscientific explanations.” How about true versus false explanations–or logical versus illogical explanations? Because “scientific versus non-scientific” seriously begs the question of origins, when “scientific” admits only naturalistic causes, as I’m quite sure this group believes.

I would happily admit “scientific vs. non-scientific” if “scientific” were properly defined as being just one of the many valid routes to genuine knowledge–immensely useful in its proper sphere, but not unlimited in its scope and power. That, by the way, would also go a long way toward resolving that other straw man in this short quote: the “non-scientific” epithet applied to ID.

The coalition of scientific organizations mentioned in the articles headlines includes 17 different groups. Among them are the National Academy of Sciences, the American Institute of Physics, and the National Science Teachers Association.