Response to Bobby Maddex's Whining

Bobby Maddex, senior editor of Crux magazine, has posted a response to my article (posted here and at Panda's Thumb) pointing out several false claims in a couple of blog entries associated with Crux, one by him and one by John Coleman. John Coleman responded both rationally and graciously in a comment on the post in question, saying:

Of course, you are correct that my intial statement that Sternberg lost his job is false. I assure you this was unintentional--a misreading on my part. I corrected this in a discussion with a reader on my blog, but have not yet done so at Crux. Thanks for keeping me honest, and for looking into the matter.

Bobby Maddex, unfortunately, takes a different approach in response to my criticisms, namely whining and passing the buck. Let's take a look.

For the second time (that I'm aware of), Crux magazine is the subject of a series of commentaries by an organization called The Panda's Thumb: www.pandasthumb.org. Now I have no idea how those involved with this anti-ID website came into contact with Crux, nor do I begin to understand why they are so bent out of shape by what is at this point (though not for long) a relatively obscure online journal. All I know is that they seem determined to undermine our legitimacy and with a defensive collection of angry arguments that are as flimsy as they are vitriolic.

This is wrong on several fronts. First, there was no "series of commentaries", there was a single post, and a fairly short one at that. Secondly, there is nothing about my post that was bent out of shape, angry or vitriolic. I pointed out three false statements in the two articles, two of them having to do with Sternberg's job status and the third having to do with whether there is an actual "ID theory" in existence. I also pointed out, quite reasonably, that this new magazine should be a bit more careful in its fact checking. Perhaps Mr. Maddex really does think that merely pointing out his errors is, in and of itself, "angry" and "vitriolic", but it seems to me that this is not an attitude one would expect in the editor of a magazine that pompously declares itself to be "the last bastion of Truth" (yes, with a capital T). One would think that if they were really interested in truth, much less Truth, they would welcome accurate criticism. I would also suggest that if that is the attitude of their senior editors, it would be more reasonable to look in the mirror rather than pointing the finger at me when considering what might undermine their legitimacy.

Ed Brayton notes that the chief failing of my post, basically just a summary of the WSJ piece, is its claim that Sternberg was once an employee of the Smithsonian. Apparently, Sternberg is actually employed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information and merely has access to the Smithsonian's collections.

Brayton then addresses John Coleman's assertion that Sternberg lost his posts at the museum and the academic journal of which he was then editor, saying that Sternberg "is still a Research Associate at the museum and his tenure as editor of the journal was already set to expire."

Disregarding the fact that both Coleman and I were merely relaying the details of the story as set forth by David Klinghoffer (indeed, I began my post with "In an Op-Ed piece for the Wall Street Journal today, David Klinghoffer reported . . ."), I fail to see how Brayton's corrections excuse the basic injustice of the story, which is that Sternberg was made a pariah by the scientific community for publishing an article on intelligent design---one that was PEER-REVIEWED, no less.

My corrections were not intended to address the "basic injustice", but to point out that the reporting done by Maddex and Coleman contained false statements. Perhaps Mr. Maddex thinks that passing the buck to Klinghoffer by making the argument that he was "merely relaying the details" in Klinghoffer's article gets him off the hook for the inaccuracy, but in fact it only proves my point a second time. In point of fact, Klinghoffer's article itself points out that Sternberg still has research space at the museum and access to the collections. But even if that was not the case, the argument I made in my post would still be valid, since I took them to task for credulously taking everything in that article as gospel truth without bothering to check for themselves. The fact that he didn't even bother to accurately repeat what was said in that article makes it even worse, in my view.

As for the larger issue of the "basic injustice" of Sternberg allegedly being made a "pariah", that is an unsupported assertion at this point. The Smithsonian has flatly denied his allegations and there will now be an investigation. To leap from the accusation being made to the conclusion that this is proof of some sort of witch hunt is, at very best, premature. But given the lack of care with which Mr. Maddex approaches getting his facts straight, I doubt that bothers him much. I would also note that unless Sternberg's job is actually in jeopardy - and there is no evidence whatsoever that it is, since he is still employed at the NCBI and still has full access as a research associate at the Smithsonian - all that is left is the accusation that a few people have stopped speaking to him in the halls. But there is another side to that as well. The board of the PBSW has publicly said that Sternberg circumvented the normal peer review process to insure the publication of the Meyer article. If that is true, then should it really surprise anyone that some of the people involved with that journal might be upset with Sternberg and treat him differently after that incident? Doesn't seem farfetched to me.

Lest his readers assume that he is calling attention to these peripheral (and entirely unintentional) inaccuracies to avoid dealing with the arguments of ID, however, Brayton goes on to write that Coleman's reference to the "theory" of intelligent design is likewise misleading. "Until ID advocates actually come up with a theory that makes positive predictions (as opposed to 'I predict evolution can't explain this')," he argues, "it will not be taken seriously as a genuine scientific model."

Where do I begin? First of all, as Denyse O'Leary points out in her post "The Intelligent Design Controversy," I think that scientists such as Michael Behe, Bill Dembski, and Jay Richards would be quite surprised to learn that they have not made any positive predictions on behalf of intelligent design. Permit me to reiterate O'Leary's recommendation that people read Dembski's new book The Design Revolution before furthering this oft-repeated (and categorically untrue) complaint about the intelligent design movement.

Then perhaps Behe, Dembski and Richards should take that up with their fellow ID advocate Paul Nelson, who has stated publicly that there is no ID theory and no positive predictions as of yet. In fact, I quoted Nelson on both of those subjects in my article, quotes that Maddex does not see fit to mention here. Nelson said a mere few months ago, ""We don't have such a theory right now, and that's a problem. Without a theory, it's very hard to know where to direct your research focus. Right now, we've got a bag of powerful intuitions, and a handful of notions such as 'irreducible complexity' and 'specified complexity'- but, as yet, no general theory of biological design." So his argument should be with Nelson, not with me. Indeed, if he wishes to prove either of us wrong, all he needs to do is state a positive ID theory (not a god of the gaps, negative theory) and point to the positive research that has been done in its favor.

Even more frustrating is the extent to which committed Darwinists are engaged in the very practice that Brayton maligns. Aren't scientific naturalists essentially saying, in other words, that they predict creation can't explain the origins of the earth? Moreover, aren't they so stubbornly clinging to this prediction that they choose to ignore the mounting scientific evidence against a material cause for the universe? The real question is whether Darwinism can be considered a "theory" in light of its a priori commitment to atheistic assumptions.

How many silly arguments could you pack into one paragraph? No, evolution is not a negative theory requiring the failure of "creation" as an explanation, certainly not as an explanation for "the origins of the earth", which has precisely nothing to do with biological evolution (or "Darwinism" to use his preferred and irritating term). And no, we are not ignoring the "mounting scientific evidence against a material cause for the universe", again because it simply has nothing to do with biological evolution. It is endlessly annoying to see anti-evolution arguments that purposely conflate evolution with atheism. Evolution (or "Darwinism") has absolutely nothing to do with the origin of the earth, or the origin of the universe, or even, strictly speaking, with the origin of life. Evolution deals only with the origin of biodiversity. More importantly, this line of argument proves that when they say that ID doesn't have anything to do with God because the "intelligent designer" could be an alien, they are lying. They certainly aren't positing that an alien - a material being - could have created the universe, right? Obviously then, ID requires a supernatural designer, not a natural one as they so often claim in order to pretend that they're not talking about God.

When first learning of the existence of the Panda's Thumb and hearing that it was leveling a number of attacks upon Crux, I must admit that I was happy that our fledgling publication was being taken seriously enough by the scientific community to warrant some fifty-odd separate posts on our ID coverage. Now that I've seen the substance of those posts, however, I feel somewhat ashamed of my initial enthusiasm. In fact, this is the last reference to the site that I will make in this blog. Such manipulative and decidedly unscientific ire is simply not worth my time.

I have no idea where he gets this notion of "fifty-odd separate posts" about Crux. There have been exactly two posts at Panda's Thumb about Crux. The first one simply noted that it existed and had a large number of ID advocates on the advisory board. The second was the one to which Maddex is allegedly responding, and it contains only three points, two of them true by Maddex's own admission and the third admitted to by at least one major ID advocate. One really must wonder what color the sky is in Maddex's world, where polite and accurate criticism is called "angry" and "vitriolic", where 2 posts, only one of which is even mildly critical, is translated into more than fifty posts (where on earth are the other 48+ posts, Mr. Maddex?), and where his own failure to check his work for accuracy is turned into a whine festival at how unfairly he is treated. Had he handled it like John Coleman did, simply acknowledged the inaccuracies and corrected them, he might have saved himself some embarrassment. As it is, he has only proven my point much more strongly than I could ever have anticipated with this highly dishonest and juvenile response.