Thinking Christian

Last week I posted an article in which I attempted to show that evidence against evolution can legitimately be evidence in favor of Intelligent Design. I ran into some serious opposition on that, and even though my interlocutors’ objections there were often mis-aimed, they did lead me to think through the matter more deeply. I got the argument wrong last time. I’m stating it here in a corrected form. I’ll borrow some of my wording from the previous version so that this article can stand alone, though I’m going to change terminology somewhat for clarity’s sake. This article divides naturally into three separate sections, so I am going to divide it into three posts published simultaneously. For those who followed the earlier discussion, there is some new material in this post, and I would draw your attention especially to the fifth through seventh paragraphs (counting this as number one). The second and third sections are quite different from what I posted previously.

The question is whether it is legitimate to regard evidence against evolution as evidence in favor of ID. Evolutionists often complain that positive arguments for ID are lacking, and that ID offers nothing but negative arguments against evolution. I’m going to refer to that as The Complaint. It is indeed true that ID makes part of its case (though certainly not all of it) on the basis of arguments against naturalistic evolution, so ID proponents must take The Complaint seriously. Is there something inherently wrong with ID arguing its case this way? Can a negative argument against evolution really be a positive argument for ID? Or is negative argumentation conceptually flawed from the start?

I’m going to begin with the simplest level of analysis and work upward from there to a fully realistic level. This argument becomes complex later on. I have placed a tree-diagram representing the whole of it at the end of the third post in this series. You may skip ahead and use it to guide you through if you like.

I begin by noting that at this time there are only two possible explanations for biological origins on the table: either some intelligence was guiding it, or there was no such intelligent guidance. If the first is true, then some form of Intelligent Design is the true explanation. If not, then the only explanation currently on offer is undirected random variation coupled with natural selection, which I will refer to here as Naturalistic Evolution, or NE.

At the end of the movie Expelled, Richard Dawkins speaks of the possibility that life on earth was designed, and opines that ID could explain earth’s life if the designers were some alien creatures. That raised some hearty chuckles from ID proponents, but in our laughter many of us missed what else he said: that those aliens, if they existed, must have come about by Darwinian processes. For Dawkins there is only one route up “Mount Improbable” (the term he used for life’s increasing complexity in his book The Blind Watchmaker). That one route is the gradualistic path of natural selection acting on random variations.

If he is in fact right about there being only one naturalistic route to biological complexity, then there are only two options open for consideration: Intelligent Design in some form (which of course is not an option Dawkins would consider), and NE. These are fully dichotomous: if one is true, the other is false, and vice-versa. Mainstream evolutionary scientists insist that NE is fact, and that we know it is fact. One helpful way to express their certainty is to express it in terms of probabilities: their view is that p(NE)=1 and p(ID)=0.

For this analysis I define evidence E for theory T as any information that, if true, increases the probability that T is true. I distinguish evidence from proof: it is that which adds to the probability of T, not that which proves T. Evidence is not unidimensional or unidirectional; there can be evidences for and against T, and each piece of evidence E must be considered in light of its own virtues and faults, in context of all other evidences for and against T. Further, there is a time factor factor involved. E is evidence for T if p(T) at T2 is greater after the introduction of E than at T1, before the introduction of E. This before/after relationship could be logical rather than chronological; whether E existed or was known at T1 is not as important as whether it was included in the probability analysis at T1.

There are many mainstream scientists who insist, as Michael Ruse has, that “Evolution is fact, FACT, FACT!” In other words, the matter has been settled, and regardless of any possible future evidence,  p(NE)=1. There is no possibility that ID is true: p(ID)=0. I can’t fathom how they can take that position. Evidence has to have some capability of influencing a theory, doesn’t it? Or is evolution true regardless of evidence? That’s hardly science.

Since “fact, FACT, FACT!” in that form is therefore fallacious reasoning and also bad science, I’ll proceed by entertaining the possibility that there is at least conceivably some evidence E that could reduce our confidence in evolution (even by the smallest fraction) such that  p(NE) < 1. That’s not assuming much. It’s a lot more reasonable than insisting that NE is true no matter what evidence might surface.

Now, if Dawkins is right that NE is the only possible naturalistic route up Mount Improbable, the probability equation for origins must include only the terms stated so far here; thus, p(NE) + p(ID)= 1. These are the only options on offer. If the probability of either term is 1, then the probability of the other is 0; if the probability of either term increases or decreases by some degree n, then the probability of the other term decreases or increases by n. 1 – p(NE) = p(ID), and 1 – p(ID) = p(NE).

ID theorists argue that certain features of the natural world are inconsistent with NE. The Cambrian Explosion is one of them. It is hard to explain on NE terms how it came about. This is an example of a negative argument against NE. This post is not about whether that argument is true or not; it is about whether, if there is merit to the argument, it counts legitimately as an argument in favor of ID.

And it seems to me that given a binary, dichotomous relationship between ID and NE, it must; for p(NE) + p(ID)= 1. Suppose for the sake of argument there is some merit to ID’s concerns about the Cambrian Explosion. The effect of that must be to reduce confidence in NE by some non-zero amount. Now suppose also that before this argument was presented, the universal consensus was that p(NE)=1. To the extent that the Cambrian Explosion argument has merit, confidence in NE must be reduced by some degree n, with the result that p(NE) = 1- n, and p(ID) = n. (The degree of change, n, depends on how successful the argument actually is.) Increased confidence in ID (its increase in probability) must be numerically identical to the decrease in confidence in NE, because the sum of the two probabilities must equal 1.

Therefore any evidence E that reduces the probability of NE as an explanation for origins increases the probability of ID as an explanation.

That brings us to the end of the first stage of this argument. To recap:

1. The Complaint is that ID’s negative argumentation against NE is somehow illegitimate, unscientific, or otherwise weak or wrong.
2. ID and NE are mutually exclusive.
3. On Richard Dawkins’ view, NE is nature’s only available method for developing biological complexity.
4. Therefore on that view, ID and NE fill the entire probability space for origins: p(NE) + p(ID)= 1.
5. And therefore any successful negative evidence against NE is successful positive evidence for ID:

That is the simplest view of the argument, and it seems pretty cut-and-dried if random variation coupled with natural selection (NE) is nature’s only option for building biological complexity, as Dawkins thinks.

But when I have written of this before, some have objected to my considering only two possibilities: ID (in some form) and NE. “How do we know these are the only two possibilities?” they ask. “Science marches on, and who knows what we might discover? Why do we assume that ID is the only alternative to NE? How could we know that?”

That question takes us to the second section of this article.

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This is the second stage of an argument responding to what I have called The Complaint: that Intelligent Design’s (ID’s) negative argumentation against naturalistic evolution (NE; defined here as the development of life and its complexity through undirected random variation coupled with natural selection) is somehow illegitimate, unscientific, or otherwise weak or wrong. If you have not read the first stage, that would be the place to begin.In it I showed that in the simple case where we assume there are only two options on the table, negative evidence against NE is quite clearly positive evidence for ID. I expressed this in the probability equation 1 – p(NE) = p(ID), where p(NE) is the probability that NE is the true explanation of origins, and p(ID) is the probability that ID is the true explanation.

Now we must examine the possibility of more than two options. As I said last time, this argument becomes complex. I have placed a tree-diagram representing the whole of it at the end of the third post in this series. You may skip ahead and use it to guide you through if you like.

Recall that ID stands for origins being brought about by a designer. If there is a third option it cannot involve a designer, for that frame is already filled by ID; it must be another naturalistic explanation. At this point there is no naturalistic explanation on offer besides NE, so it must be an unknown naturalistic explanation. I will refer to it as the Unknown Naturalistic Theory, or UNT.

If we are to grant the entirely reasonable assumption that science could develop some other, new naturalistic explanation for the development of life and its complexity, then the probability equation we started with must be expanded:

p(NE) + p(ID) + p(UNT) = 1

We have no way of assessing UNT’s probability, but we can deal with that by considering two possibilities.

A.
p(NE) + p(UNT) = 1;
  p(ID) = 0

B.
p(NE) + p(ID) + p(UNT) = 1;  
0 < p(ID) < 1;
0 < p(UNT) < 1

I will deal with A in this post and save B for the next in this series.

A is a mathematical restatement of, “We won’t claim we’re absolutely certain that NE explains life’s origins; but we’re certain that whatever the explanation is, Design had nothing to do with it.” Often coupled with this statement is something to this effect: Science has made continuous progress in finding naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena. Attempts to use God (or some other Design process) to explain natural phenomena have consistently had to give way to naturalistic explanations. Therefore we think it’s reasonable to conclude that science will eventually demonstrate that the origin and complexity of life have fully natural explanations, whether NE or some other theory not yet conceived of.

The question there is, what evidence is adduced for this opinion? There is one kind of evidence that is offered, and another kind that is not even in the picture. What is offered is the history of science, and what is inferred from that is an extrapolation to the future of science. What is not even in the picture is evidence from nature. No matter what evidence E might surface in nature at any time in the future, E can only count as evidence for naturalism (NE or UNT), for p(ID) = 0, world without end, Amen. The probability of naturalism today, T1, is 1; the probability of naturalism tomorrow T2 will be 1, and the probability of naturalism at T3, T4, T5 … to infinity is 1. And this we are assured of, regardless of what evidence E might be introduced at some time Tn in the future.

That is either begging the question, simply stating ID is wrong and that’s that, regardless of what evidence should ever appear! or else, if it is not begging the question, it is placing enormous load on the evidence that has been offered on its behalf: the history of science. We must recall that science has not had uniformly increasing success in explaining what we observe in the world. It has gotten nowhere with explaining realities like consciousness, reasoning, purpose, meaning, free will, moral responsibility and even the origin of the first life. (Claims to the contrary abound, but as I — and many others — have argued elsewhere, they are philosophically uninformed.)

But even if that were not the case, extrapolation in a matter like this is hardly more than an expression of faith. To extrapolate without a supporting theory is bad statistics and bad science, and the only theory that could support this particular extrapolation is one that begs the question: the theory that all of life’s features will someday be explainable naturalistically.

So version A above is unsuccessful. To introduce p(UNT) into our probability equation that way is logically fallacious. We’ll have to pUNT (I’ve been saving up for that pUN) to version B and see whether it works. That will be the topic of the next post.

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This is the third post in a series exploring The Complaint of evolutionists: that Intelligent Design’s (ID’s) negative argumentation against naturalistic evolution (NE; defined here as the development of life and its complexity through undirected random variation coupled with natural selection) is somehow illegitimate, unscientific, or otherwise weak or wrong. (This is not the place to begin if you have not read the first two posts; start here instead.)

So far I have shown that if NE and ID are the only explanations on the table for discussion, The Complaint is unjustified. I have also begun to address the possibility that NE and ID are not the only options; we have to consider that some currently unknown naturalistic theory (UNT) could surface someday as a third possibility. Using probability math, I have expressed two ways UNT could enter into consideration:

A.
p(NE) + p(UNT) = 1;
p(ID) = 0

B.
p(NE) + p(ID) + p(UNT) = 1;
0 < p(ID) < 1;
0 < p(UNT) < 1

And I showed in the last post that A is question begging.

But there is a non-question-begging way to introduce UNT into analysis, and that is B. It doesn’t assume ID is false and naturalism is true. So on first appearance it seems more hopeful, for those who would want to justify The Complaint. Could they be right, under B? Let’s take a look at this.

First, let’s recall that The Complaint has to do with how ID theorists use evidence against evolution in favor of ID. So let’s introduce our term E now. We’ll assume that at time T1 our confidence in NE was perfect: p(NE) = 1. But now we consider E, and find that it is evidence against NE, so that at time T2, our confidence in NE is reduced by n: p(NE) = 1 – n at time T2.

We can substitute 1 – n for p(NE) in our equation from B:

(1 – n) + p(ID) + p(UNT) = 1

Which is equivalent to

p(ID) + p(UNT) = n

Both terms on the left side of this equation are greater than 0 and less than 1. The question that The Complaint addresses is, can we rightly conclude that p(ID) varies directly with n? If p(ID) increases when n increases then negative evidence against evolution is positive evidence for Design.

It’s possible, mathematically, for p(ID) not to vary directly with n. It could happen in either of two ways:

Mathematically it’s possible that p(ID) is constant. In that case p(UNT) varies directly with n. Whatever evidence E appears that counts against NE, counts equally in favor of UNT. That’s really just a special case of what I argued in the previous post, however: no matter what evidence comes in at any future time, it cannot under any conditions count in favor of ID. All evidence is evidence for one naturalistic explanation or the other. For the deliverer of The Complaint to resort to that as support would plainly be question-begging.

It’s also mathematically possible that p(ID) varies inversely with n. That would require p(UNT) to vary directly with n, with some multiplicative factor such that when n increased, p(UNT) increased even faster. But that would be strange, to say the least, especially since UNT is by definition unknown. To assume that its probability varies with n that way is to assume that we know something quite unexpected and remarkable about the unknown. For The Complaint to rely on that would be nothing but special pleading.

But it’s worse than that, in reality, for in fact we do know something about UNT: it hasn’t been thought of yet. Richard Dawkins says it doesn’t even exist. So while we can’t eliminate the possibility of UNT completely, we can safely set its value near zero. And the closer p(UNT) is to zero, the more likely it is that p(ID) varies directly with n.

So how shall we assess The Complaint now? We have to allow that it is conceivably legitimate, but only if p(UNT) varies directly but multiplicatively with n. Only if we resort to special pleading, in other words. My conclusion is that negative evidence against evolution can legitimately be taken as positive evidence for ID.

This has been an extended argument with multiple branches. I have attempted in my ham-handed way to illustrate it through the following diagram, which may be useful as a guide to you in re-reading and re-evaluating these three posts. Or (since my space was limited, and so is my experience with these things) it may not be that helpful.

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I have a telephone interview scheduled with Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, author of Signature In the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, this afternoon (update: find that interview here). Part of my preparation has been reading through reviews of the book on Amazon, where I noticed some patterns that I decided to quantify. The results do not represent the whole world of the Intelligent Design controversy—there’s nothing random about the sampling—but they are intriguing nonetheless.*

Strong Reactions

Of the 200-plus reviews of the book posted on Amazon, 75 percent were highly positive (5 stars) and 17 percent were very negative (1 star). Six percent were 4-star ratings, and the remaining 1 percent (percentages are rounded) were either 2 or 3 stars. This is about as non-normal a distribution as you’ll ever see; an upside-down bell curve, with a skew toward the positive. The obvious interpretation of a response set like this is that the book produces strong reactions. One way or another it’s a great book, according to its reviewers: either great in its contribution to science, or else greatly upsetting and disturbing to science.

As I went through the reviews in detail I coded each one on five factors:

• Had the reviewer actually read the book?
• Did the reviewer introduce theological considerations into their assessment of the book?
• Did the reviewer come out with a dogmatic statement for or against Intelligent Design?
• Did the reviewer use negative and/or abusive language in describing representatives of the position they oppose?
  

Did They Read the Book?

On the first of these I gave the benefit of the doubt to each reviewer: I assumed they had read it unless they stated otherwise, or unless they said something that clearly demonstrated they had not read it. One reviewer I placed in that latter category said that the book presented no research and no scientific predictions. That’s an old anti-ID trope that I’m guessing he or she pulled out of the usual set of anti-ID talking points. In the case of this book, it’s just obviously false, as anyone should be able to see even by taking a quick look at the book’s Amazon preview. Obviously this reviewer did not even invest even that minimal effort into the book before giving it a negative review.

Some reviewers said they “skimmed” the book or read only portions of it. I placed them into a middle grouping. There were a small number who seriously misrepresented the content of the book, which would strongly indicate they hadn’t read it, yet they said they had read it. Rather than concluding that they were lying, I placed them into the same middle group. Thus there were three categories:

• LIkely read the book (granting the benefit of the doubt).
• Communicated that they read only part of the book, or communicated they read the book but made errors of representation that makes that statement doubtful
• Communicated that they did not read the book

So then, who read the book? Of those who rated the book favorably (5 stars), 94 percent likely read the book, and 2 percent communicated they had not read it, and 4 percent were in the middle grouping. Of those who gave the book a 1-star rating, only 26 percent likely read the book. About 43 percent of very negative ratings came from people who read the book only in part (or whose reading of the book was in doubt), and 31 percent came from people who felt free to pronounce their opinion without even reading it.

Here’s another way to look at the same information. Three-quarters (75 percent) of reviews on Amazon were very favorable. Counting only those who (with the benefit of the doubt) actually read the book, however, that proportion jumps to 87 percent.

Theological Considerations?

What about theology? I used a simple yes/no distinction for this one. If theological considerations were present in the review, either in the arguments (pro or con) or in the conclusions the reviewer drew, I coded the review as a positive on the theology scale.

I’ll start again with those who gave the book a 5-star rating. In this group, only 8 percent introduced theological considerations into their reviews. But among those who gave the book a 1-star rating, 51 percent made theological considerations a part of their case. The positive reviewers got it right: the book is about science and philosophy of science, not about theology. One wonders how those 51 percent missed that.

Dogmatic In Their Views?

The above two analyses showed significance of .000 on a chi-square test. The third analysis did not have enough cases to allow for significance testing, and I must make it clear that it’s not as reliable a measure as the first two. The question was, Did the reviewer make a dogmatic statement for or against ID, to the point of saying that the question is settled once and for all? That was hard for me to operationalize in a bias-free way, so please take all due care in interpreting what I present next, because its reliability is not at all certain.

As I coded the reviews (keeping that disclaimer in mind), this is how it came out:

Of those who rated the book with 1 star, only 9 percent avoided dogmatism of the sort just described. More than nine-tenths said something to the effect that the question is settled, there’s no need to pursue it any more. Many of them were more colorful than that: The question is settled, and attempts to keep pursuing it are just lies from the “Dishonesty Institute.”

But those who rated the book highly had more open minds to the issue: only 20 percent of that group made statements to the effect that “the question is now settled.”

I wondered whether those who had not read the book might be more (or less) dogmatic in their view of ID than those who had read it. The result: if the analysis included just those who reviewed the book negatively, no significant difference was found (those who read the book were neither more nor less dogmatic than those who had not read it). If I included all the reviews, there was a definite difference between those who had read the book and those who had not read it. But that doesn’t reveal anything we didn’t already know from earlier analysis showing that among the 75 percent of reviewers who rated the book with 5 stars, the overwhelming majority had read the book and had also avoided dogmatism in their conclusions.

Personally Negative or Abusive Language

Another analysis that was significant to the .000 level was that related to personally negative language. Negative reviewers of the book were very negative: 86 percent of 1-star raters used personal pejorative language (accusations of stupidity, unthinkingness, or worse) with respect to Meyer or ID proponents generally. Positive reviewers were not perfectly kind to their opponents: 13 percent made personally critical comments with respect to their opponents.

But ID opponents’ language was considerably stronger. My coding for negative language was such that I included any negative personal reference whatsoever made to holders of the reviewer’s viewpoint, even at mild levels like, “Those who disagree with x must not be thinking clearly.” Some of the language was actually abusive (accusations of dishonesty, lying, or even “mendacious intellectual pornography”). Abusive language to that degree was present in fully 57 percent of 1-star reviews of the book, but only 3 percent of 5-star reviews.

Conclusions

I can’t say what larger population these reviewers represent, so these conclusions can only fairly be taken as a description of the actual reviewers on Amazon. Negative reviewers were much less likely than positive reviewers to have read the book and to have their opinions of the book affected by theological considerations. To the (unknown) extent that my third analysis was reliable, they were probably also much more likely to deliver closed, dogmatic conclusions about the overall issues involved. The Personal Negativity analysis showed that ID opponents among this set of reviewers are putting a lot of negative emotion into the controversy. Other reviewers have wondered why, and have made suggestions. Is it anger? Fear (feeling significantly threatened)? They don’t know, and neither can I conclude what’s going on, but one way or the other it’s clear that ID opponents among this set of reviewers are not behaving very well in public.

And for my final comment I’ll draw upon my own impressions of the larger world of controversy on this issue. ID antagonists, in my experience, typically complain that proponents are closed-minded and theologically driven. This group of reviewers turns that completely upside down. ID opponents often charge proponents with anti-intellectualism, too. But who in this group of reviewers was more likely to spout an opinion without bothering to read what they were talking about?

*Note 1/16/10: I have re-visited the reviews and taken a slower, more thorough look at each of them. I generated more reliable operational definitions for the factors, and I have slightly revised some of the numbers in here based on that review, and I have added another factor. My coded datasheet is available for your inspection and review.

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Thank you, Larry Fafarman, for answering this, written by Nick Matzke at Panda’s Thumb:

Just last week over at the Thinking Christian blog there was a huge stink raised over the alleged inappropriateness of linking ID to creationism. After much argument the anti-linkage people more or less conceded that there were some good reasons to link ID to a somewhat generic definition of creationism (relying on special creation), but still protested loudly about how inappropriate it was to make the linkage, because most people (allegedly) would assume that creationism = young-earth creationism, and linking ID to young-earth creationism was oh-so-wildly unfair.

Larry wrote,

No, the “huge stink” was not “over the alleged inappropriateness of linking ID to creationism” — the huge stink was over the term “ID creationism,” which represents the notion that ID and creationism are so intimately linked that ID cannot or should not be mentioned without also mentioning creationism in the same breath.

That is correct. Note that Nick acknowledges we got somewhere at the end of all the discussion. (Thank you for noticing, that, Nick.) But he got it wrong.

I did not protest that “linking ID to young-earth creationism was oh-so-wildly unfair.” I never said, “unfair;” I said, “confused, and poor communication.” I said that to carelessly link ID to creationism, without specifying what you mean by it in context, is to obfuscate issues that should not, must not, be made more muddled than they already are. It is poor communication because it is so likely to be misleading. False conceptions abound on both sides of this issue, and for ID opponents to be careless with their terminology this way is no help.

For Nick to be so careless with his assessment of our discussion does not speak well either for his own awareness of what is going on, or else for his willingness to address it honestly.

In fact it is no help to his own position. In any conflict, dispute, or battle, the last thing a wise contender wants to do is to enter with a distorted view of the other side’s position. Military commanders want to know the enemy’s true strength and position, not some watered-down version that makes them look weaker or stupider than what is real. To see a conflict falsely is to reduce your own readiness for it. Thus the more that opponents misunderstand and misrepresent ID or its proponents, the easier they make it for us in the long run.

So do I think it’s “unfair” that ID gets distorted by careless, unspecified linkage to creationism? Sure, it’s an annoyance: I think in the short run its effect is detrimental to ID’s position, because of the time we have to waste on clearing away misconceptions. In the long run, though, ID’s opponents are the ones being damaged; they’re hurting themselves with it.

In other words, Nick, you’re being unfair to yourself.

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Commenter John on one of the recent Intelligent Design threads said that science never interprets results after bringing them in. I think there’s truth in that as a general principle, though its extreme nature makes it subject to frequent exceptions, and not the absolute truth he seemed to want it to be.

Anyway, I’m about to make an interpretation after the results, and it’s by way of a postscript to all this recent discussion, so by John’s standard this might count (with abject apologies to Kierkegaard) as a concluding unscientific postscript.

Here’s my observation and interpretation. Once I commented on Panda’s Thumb, using the user id TomG (I later found there’s a regular there who also uses that handle), making a very specific point about a very specific aspect of how the controversy has been played out in public discussion. I really can’t remember what the question was now, but it wasn’t about ID’s scientific, legal, or religious status; it was about something more obvious and more narrowly focused than that.

Those of you who have seen PT in action can guess what happened. Of course I got jumped on; that was expected. But I wasn’t jumped on for that point I made. I was held personally responsible for the Wedge document, the Discovery Institute’s political agenda, Michael Behe’s stupid mistaken theories of irreducible complexity, all of ID’s idiotic arguments for incredulity, and every creationism court case since the Scopes trial. (I exaggerate, but only slightly.) It was impossible to get any traction on the one point I made, and it was impossible for me to make it clear that all I was taking responsibility for was that point.

This last discussion has been focused on a very specific question: whether calling Intelligent Design “creationism” (without specifying what is meant by that) is helpful to clear communication and productive communication, or whether it is a source of confusion; and if it is a source of confusion, what motivates ID antagonists to keep calling it that. It was a specific issue that should have had a focused discussion following it.

But I have been challenged with ID’s scientific status, all the court cases since (not quite) Scopes, Behe’s (allegedly) mistaken views on the edge of evolution and irreducible complexity, the Discovery Institute’s political purposes, the definition of science, the exclusive nature of Christianity’s claims, what I personally think about old-earth creationism and common descent, and even why I haven’t decided to go to grad school and become a biologist!

I do this for fun and it still is fun; I’m not whining about being jumped on. I’m more amused, bemused, or perplexed at the way ID’s antagonists seem to be ready to spread the argument around. I’m not sure we got anywhere on whether calling ID “creationism” without specifying what is meant by that is a bad thing, as I have proposed. Objectors said ID isn’t science, as if that meant that it was therefore that vague “creationism,” they said it was found unconstitutional, as if that meant it was that vague “creationism,” they said that the people who do ID don’t have the right to name what it is they are doing, as if that gave detractors grounds to call it that vague “creationism,” they said that ID is political, as if that made it that vague “creationism.”

What the ID detractors commenting here really never did was consider that there are varieties of meanings to the word “creationism,” that some of those meanings properly apply to ID and some of them don’t, and that to be either intentionally manipulative or carelessly confused in applying “creationism” to ID without specifying what one means is to obfuscate communication. That, along with my tentative wondering about what might be at the root of that obfuscation, has been my only point throughout all of this.

Two terms with contrasting and/or ambiguous denotations/connotations, brought together as in “Intelligent Design Creationism,” will result in ambiguity at best, contradiction at worst. It seems so straightforward and so simple.

Oh, well.

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In my earlier post this morning I covered definitions of creationism quite thoroughly but I didn’t include a definition of Intelligent Design. There was one in the post I wrote last Sunday, but not all readers would know that. I wrote:

ID sees phenomena like the high information content in biological organisms, instances of apparent irreducible complexity, or fine-tuning of the cosmos for life, and argues that the best explanation for them is to be found in a designing intelligence.

That’s fairly close to the definition used by the Discovery Institute. I’ve been amused to see scorn heaped on me at Panda’s Thumb for following the DI line. To them I’m some kind of brainless zombie unable to think for myself about what ID is or what it is worth. I can only parrot what I’ve been instructed to say; I’ve been duped into thinking DI has the goods on what Intelligent Design is all about; I should have realized that others, far more scientific than they, had figured out the real story, and that everything from the DI was a dishonest hoax.

But this is a continuation of a previous post on the communication question, and whether “creationism” appended to “ID” helps us understand what ID really is. I argued that it confuses communication rather than clarifying it, because of ambiguities and contradictions between different versions of creationism (defined in that post) and ID (belatedly defined here). There is no denying those discrepancies, and I closed that last post by saying it’s an open-and-shut case against those who would carelessly tag ID as creationism.

But there is one last piece of business to finish: am I the mindless idiot I am represented to be at Panda’s Thumb, in accepting what the DI says about ID? I would certainly prefer that not be true, but is it?

The problem with the DI and their view of ID seems to be (according to PT and others who think similarly) that ID is all fluff and nonsense, there’s no reality to it, there’s no science to it, and it’s all just posing and PR instead. Let’s suppose that’s true, for argument’s sake. Does that mean ID antagonists, who understand what’s really going on in Intelligent Design, own the definition for ID, and can correct the rest of our opinions as to what it really denotes?

Consider a parallel case, one in which almost everyone would agree that the word means nothing real: voodoo. I don’t think there is any reality to claims of supernatural power through voodoo, and I doubt most people involved in the ID/creationism debate do either. Suppose I go to some voodoo practitioner and ask him to define voodoo for me; and suppose then I go to my blog and say, “This is how voodoo is defined.” Am I being a mindless zombie to say so? (Careful how you answer: if mindless zombies really exist, then maybe voodoo really exists! Let’s take it in the metaphorical sense instead.). No, that would not be foolish for me to do; the practitioner’s definition of voodoo has real authority.

As an outsider I can evaluate voodoo’s reality, but in order to do so, I have to evaluate it according to some definition; I can’t change the definition and then evaluate it, because then I am evaluating something other than the voodoo that the practitioner told me about. The practitioner can define the term.

That’s an extreme case of an obvious fake. Some readers here consider ID an obvious fake, but even for them, the definition of ID rightly comes from its practitioners.

The other charge that flies around this debate is that the DI keeps changing the definition of ID, so that it’s a moving target. I’m sorry, but I just don’t see evidence of this over the past ten to twelve years. This is still a young field, so that’s a relatively long period of stability. My own very direct involvement goes back only about five years, and in that period I am quite sure it has not been a moving target.

That doesn’t mean it has to remain static forever. Bradley Monton in his book Seeking God In Science has proposed a refinement of ID’s definition. He has taken a sensible route to it: Does the DI’s definition really convey what the DI intends it to convey, or can the definition be improved to better communicate what it is intended to communicate? People can learn along the way. But there’s nothing wrong with looking to the chief practitioners of ID to define what they mean by ID.

Here’s another way of looking at it. If some ID antagonist says, “I don’t believe in ID creationism,” the DI could easily say, “I don’t either. Whatever ID creationism is, it’s something we’re not promoting or practicing here. If you try to re-define our terms, you’re going to end up criticizing something we’re not doing. Why would you want to waste your time on that?”

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