Fisking a Very Bad Post on the Dover Case

I did a technorati search to see who else was writing about the Dover case and came across this badly reasoned post by someone named Josh Bozeman. While insulting the parents who filed the suit as "idiots", he throws out some real whoppers himself. He begins:

The idiot 8- that's how I'll refer to the 8 families who sued in Dover, PA over the school boards 1 MINUTE statement that students would be able to check out a book on intelligent design from the school library IF they WANTED to, and that was the end of it...it's called the freedom to have open discussion, for students to see other views if they want.

If that was all the statement said, it wouldn't have caused nearly such a ruckus. But the 1-minute statement and the accompanying change in the curriculum text is a mishmash of nonsense that isn't even internally coherent. And the book that they are offering as an official supplemental text is a bluntly creationist text of the same sort that has already been declared unconstitutional in public school science classrooms. We don't offer religious alternatives to ideas we teach in school, and there are religious alternatives to almost all of them. If we did, we would have to make geocentrist books available for people to "see the other side" and "teach the controversy" - nonexistent, of course - over whether the earth is the center of the universe. We would also have to make available flat earth books, and perhaps even hollow earth books, as alternatives to mainstream earth science. We'd have to make available Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science books claiming that illness and disease are not caused by microbes but by spiritual trouble, and so forth. But we don't do that because those are all bad ideas that have long been replaced by better ones.

ID IS a scientific theory- even the most radical of neo-darwinists admit this...

Uh, no. In fact, even some ID advocates admit that they do not have an actual ID theory. Paul Nelson, one of the foremost ID advocates and a fellow at the Discovery Institute, told Touchstone magazine last year:

"Easily the biggest challenge facing the ID community is to develop a full-fledged theory of biological design. 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."

If Josh thinks that there is a scientific theory of ID, I would urge him to offer it up. ID has a set of criticisms of evolutionary theory, and it has a handful of catchphrases, but it does not have an actual theory or model for the natural history of life on earth. IDers cannot agree on such basic things as the age of the earth and common descent, without which you cannot have a model that explains the data from natural history. What they have is a purely negative argument - "evolution can't explain feature X, therefore God must have made it that way" - and not a positive theory of how life developed.

on the one hand they claim it isn't a scientific theory, but then they proclaim they have falsified the theory of intelligent design.

Here Josh commits the same fallacy that Jonathan Witt committed the other day, confusing an argument for ID with a theory of ID. They are not the same thing. As Paul Nelson noted above, they have a set of arguments, but no actual theory. What makes ID ultimately unfalsifiable is that it posits a supernatural designer. But that doesn't mean that various arguments put forth for ID, the factual claims upon which their inference is based, can't be falsified. Indeed, as I noted the other day, they can often be falsified on the basis of the initial factual claim without even having to examine the deductive inference at the end. Is it true that the blood clotting cascade is irreducibly complex, as Behe states? No, it's not. Some species are missing some components of the system and their blood still clots. So without even having to look at the inferential part of the syllogism, the argument is falsified because the factual premise is false.

If it isn't a theory to begin with, how can you falsify it?! You can't.

Josh has it backwards here. You can falsify some ideas that are not theories, but you don't have a theory if an idea is not falsifiable.

One side just wants to have it all ways...if we go by their definition of what is and isn't science- then they must admit that macroevolutionary theory cannot truly be science. You cannot falsify events that supposedly happened millions of years ago and supposedly take millions of years to happen at all.

Here Josh is making a category error. Falsifiability doesn't mean you have to falsify events; it means you have to be able to falsify an explanation for those events. Just as a forensic scientist explains how a murder took place by making logical inferences based on data, a scientist seeking to explain past events looks at the evidence left behind and makes logical inferences from that evidence. To say you can't falsify an event is to say nothing at all; the coroner can't "falsify" a murder, but he doesn't have to. He only has to be able to posit an explanation for that murder that can be falsified.

And in this context, falsifiability means that there must be some potential set of data that would disprove the explanation. For example, if the forensic scientist posits that the murder was committed by person X, you can make predictions about the nature of the evidence that would be found. If you have fingerprints on the murder weapon, they should belong to person X; if they don't, then the explanation is most likely (though not always) falsified. But if he posits that the murder was committed by an invisible leprauchan who isn't a material being and therefore leaves behind no evidence, then he is offering an explanation that is not, even in the hypothetical, open to being disproven. That is precisely the problem with positing a supernatural creator for a given biological system - there is no means, even in principle, of disproving that hypothesis. Any set of data would be consistent with this explanation because a supernatural being could do whatever it wanted according to whim.

The ACLU is the group that started this lawsuit, they surely recruited families (the idiot 8 I mentioned)...and the ACLU has a history of pushing an atheistic, socialistic model for society. Their history from the start exposes this. A new book called The ACLU VS America is out soon and you should pick it up to learn even more about the ACLU's history, their anti-God views (especially anti-Christian agenda), and figure out what's truly going on in Dover.

More hysterical anti-ACLU propaganda. If the ACLU is so anti-Christian, then why do they continually defend the free speech rights of Christians, as I've documented here again and again? From the very start, the ACLU included Christian ministers, for crying out loud.

Many thousands of PhD's have made it clear that they cannot accept mud to man evolution. Many have proposed intelligent life from space that implanted life here on earth (Sir Fred Hoyle, a giant in astronomy proposed this idea- it's called "panspermia"), others have proposed a being one could see as God, others have proposed other intelligent forces that were responsible...they come from all walks of life, many religions (Christianity, Islam, and others), and many of these proponents aren't religious at all, but nonetheless realize that the darwinian model cannot explain species changes.

Not only a naked appeal to authority, an appeal to anonymous authority. The only one named is Hoyle, and Hoyle accepts common descent completely, he just argues that the first organic molecules were transported here by asteroids and the like.

The rest of it just repeats the same empty rhetoric about the ACLU. Was it worth fisking? Probably not. But I had some time to kill and some angst to relieve after watching MSU blow the football game.