In the last couple days I've encountered two brilliant arguments concerning ID that I'd never thought of before. One was offered by Steve Reuland, a fellow Panda's Thumb contributor, in a comment following my post about Dembski's duplicity on whether the "intelligent designer" has to be supernatural or not. He says:
What sense does it make to have a movement whose stated purpose is to overthrow "naturalism" and "materialism" if your designer is natural and made of matter?
Excellent point. The ID crowd, as usual, wants to have it both ways. On the one hand, they pretend that the designer could be a natural entity like an alien. They need to say this in order to avoid the obvious truth that they can only be talking about God. On the other hand, they endlessly argue that if ID is true then "naturalism" and "materialism" is overthrown and proven false. But that argument could only be true if the designer being inferred is not itself natural or material. So there are now four very compelling reasons why the common ID claim that the designer might be an alien is false:
1. Their definition of ID includes cosmological ID and only something outside of the universe, hence supernatural, could have created the universe.
2. If the designer was an organism or entity within the universe, it must be a result of natural processes itself, and surely something complex enough to create complex life on earth would, itself, be far too complex and improbable to have evolved and hence one would be forced to make the same design inference about the designer.
3. Their own words admit that the designer could only be outside of nature.
4. If ID is in opposition to naturalism and materialism, then the designer cannot be a natural, material being itself.
Game, set, match on that issue, don't you think? The second argument comes from Jason Rosenhouse in a post on his blog about, coincidentally, a speech by Genie Scott. He writes:
One insight, attributed to Nick Matzke of the NCSE, that I found especially interesting was the following: The first use of the term Intelligent Design to refer to a scientific theory came in the book Of Pandas and People. That's intended as a high school biology text. How many scientific theories can you name whose first mention came in the form of a high school biology text? The usual procedure is for a scientific theory to be kicked around among scientists for a while, gradually gain acceptance via proven usefulness, and only then trickle down into the science texts.
Bingo. This provides powerful support for my argument that ID advocates are putting the educational cart before the scientific horse. It also provides further ammunition against Behe's big bang analogy for ID. The analogy is simply that both ideas were initially rejected by scientists because of their supposed religious implications. But big bang theorists didn't immediately demand equal time in science classrooms for their ideas, they first went about the task of testing those ideas and establishing them as valid in the scientific literature. It was only after it was a well established theory that it found its way into science textbooks, and that is the way it should be done.
Which goes back to the point that ID advocate Bruce Gordon made so eloquently, that his fellow IDers have improperly inverted the procedure for getting a new scientific idea accepted and put political activity ahead of scientific acceptance. He said:
design-theoretic research has been hijacked as part of a larger cultural and political movement. In particular, the theory has been prematurely drawn into discussions of public science education where it has no business making an appearance without broad recognition from the scientific community that it is making a worthwhile contribution to our understanding of the natural world.
Dead on. If ID advocates really want their ideas to be taken seriously, they'll do the difficult theoretical and experimental work necessary to establish those ideas as valid. But they prefer public relations to science, and prefer to cast themselves as martyrs and victims than to do the necessary work. No other idea in the history of science has been advanced in this manner. Alfred Wegener didn't whine when his ideas on continental drift were rejected, he continued to gather data and look for potential mechanisms and eventually his views won the day. The same is true of big bang cosmologists. If the IDers want to claim to be just like those advocates of initially rejected ideas, let them follow their example, drop the persecution pose, and do some real science rather than engaging in PR battles.
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Ed wrote:
Ed, how would you counter an argument to the above that goes like this:
I think that's part of the allure of the creationist approach -- they say to Joe Q Public "don't rely on some secret cabal of scientists out there, you're just as qualified to have an opinion about origins as they are!" And being Americans (where 90% of people think they are "above average"), we like to hear that. We like thinking we know as much as the "experts", and when someone who actually DOES know more than us tries to correct us, we get pissed.
I suspect that reflex is part of the reason Creationism has gotten much more traction here in the US than it has abroad. The challenge IMHO is to craft a response that makes the case for qualified expertise without making it seem like we're saying "Shut up and trust us".
But then, I'm no historian or anthropologist :-)
Jeff
Why is it that most people are willing to defer to the judgement of "experts" in other fields of knowledge (i.e., medical doctors, plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics) yet, when it comes to evolution, suddenly everybody knows more than professional biologoists and paleontologists?
Yet medicine, plumbing, electricity, and mechanics are every bit as "atheistic" (materialistic) as evolutionary theory. Can you imagine a mechanic telling some poor customer, "Sorry, your car won't start because that's God's will. Don't let those Atheistic Mechanical Dogmatists at Pep Boys tell you there's a mechanical solution to your problem."
What other classroom subjects are determined by appeal to the public? Does the public set the agenda for math classes? If that were the case, you could kiss Algebra and Trig goodbye. How many parents know, let alone appreciate, Algebra and Trig?
As for acceptance of controversial new theories, I'm sure Einstein, Schrodinger and Heisenberg didn't go around pressuring local schoolboards to "teach the contoversy" in Physics. Yet the IDiots conveniently forget about this little step of the process - prediction and peer review.
But John Q. Public doesn't care about math, to be honest. He didn't have Mom and Dad and The Minister whispering "Math creation tales" to him in the cradle. There isn't a "Math Bible" that contradicts the Theory of Addition.
The thing about evolution is, it's a subject people CARE about. It arouses passionate feelings in a lot of folks, in a subject they have personal experience in -- we're all biological, after all, and Christians have been getting read the Bible and Genesis from very early ages. That they have no qualifications to be an evolutionary biologist is irrelevant -- they THINK they do. Telling someone "You're an idiot and have no right to speak on this subject" is satisfying in a flame-war kind of way, but it ultimately doesn't accomplish anything except making the person in question hate you. And people don't listen to people they hate.
Just because previous scientists didn't have to face opposition as savvy in public political discourse is no reason that we should refuse the fight now that it is offered.
Where I fear we are losing that fight is in the hearts and minds of non-scientists, in the political arena. And ultimately those are the people who make laws, school board standards, and public policy -- not scientists. Readers of this blog in particular should be aware of how much progress the religious right has made in swaying the courts and the legal system into accepting all kinds of positions that would have been unthinkable 30 years ago, when science ruled the day. Ultimately, in this country the people make the laws and if we're not careful, they're going to repeal whole chunks of the Enlightenment, starting with the basic definition of science (Kansas, anyone?).
It's not enough any more for scientists to huddle in their labs, refusing to take the field in public political discourse -- there is a war being fought out in the public sphere, and there are too few warriors from science out there duking it out.
Sites like this and Panda's Thumb are great. Scientists like Miller who are willing to go out there and make their case are vital. We need more of them. If I could order up a thousand Carl Sagans, I would do so -- men and women who understand their subject but who also understand how to talk to non-scientists.
I'll climb off the soapbox now. The question I had for Ed and for the rest of you stands, though: how to craft a response that makes the case for qualified expertise without making it seem like we're saying "Shut up and trust us".
Hmm. To try to make the case for qualified expertise, I'd want to appeal to the literature, possibly with a lengthy list of references. (And I mean *lengthy*. The more the better.)
Something like "Well, there's all this ... It might be wrong, but shouldn't you at least look at it all before you say that?"
They might even take you seriously, in which case you've won by removing someone from the argument for a year or so, if you've got ENOUGH references.
Jeff Hebert asked me how I would counter the following argument:
I would counter it by pointing out that it completely misundersands how science operates in the real world. Scientific theories are not "sold" using the techniques of marketing. Indeed, use of such techniques is pretty much a sure sign that one is dealing with pseudoscience. The process of convincing an uneducated public and convincing one's skeptical scientific colleagues is nothing like "fundamentally the same", they are entirely different.
The process that one goes through to convince scientists involves a good deal of difficult work over the course of many years. It requires theoretical work, experimental work and publishing the results of one's work for everyone to see. It's especially difficult when one is trying to overturn or significantly modify a successful theory that has proven fruitful in explaining our observations - and it damn well should be more difficult. On the other hand, it's quite easy to convince a large portion of the public when your views conform to their deeply held religious views and when you can convince them that the other side opposes those religious views. They aren't even remotely the same. One is the work of a genuine scientist, the other the work of demagogues.
Thanks for the response, Ed. And I laughed out loud at Sotek's -- that was funny!
Now that I've had some time to think about it, I wonder if a better approach to counter that argument would be to use the FDA as a comparison. Joe Q. Public understands the FDA and comes into contact with some kind of pharmaceutical every day, so it's something they can relate to. To wit:
I think that's a more accessible way to argue the issue in a public arena without seeming to appeal to authority too much, or telling people they're ignorant.
Zachary Smith wrote a brilliant comment above, but Jeff is correct when he says that we don't win the public's assent by calling them idiots. We have to understand one thing about this debate. There is one and only one reason why the public doubts evolution, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the scientific evidence. The public doubts evolution because they have been convinced that evolution = atheism and they don't like atheism.
On the whole, the public is completely ignorant of the evidence for evolution and, quite frankly, impervious to such evidence even if it was presented to them. They are in essence inoculated against such evidence by their automatic association of evolution with atheism and their automatic rejection of atheism. That's why I maintain that Richard Dawkins, while he often does a brilliant job of explaining how evolution works, does at least as much damage in terms of the public's acceptance of evolution as he does good in terms of their understanding of it as a result of his almost evangelistic zeal against all things Christian. He makes it all too easy for people to equate evolution with atheism because he rarely bothers to distinguish between science and the inferences he draws from science to support his philosophical views.
The most powerful weapon we have in the fight against the anti-evolution forces are folks like Ken Miller, Howard Van Till, Glenn Morton and Fransisco Ayala - committed Christians who are able to at least get heard. The rank and file, the folks in the pews, simply aren't ever going to listen to someone like PZ Myers. PZ does a great job of explaining the scientific data, of poking logical holes in the arguments of creationists, and so forth. But his aggressive anti-religious views means that the folks in the pews aren't ever going to reach the point of evaluating the strength of his arguments, let alone being convinced by them; they will simply tune him out before even considering his well supported positions on the scientific matters. Like it or not, that's the reality.
Coincidentally, this is the subject of my radio interview with Jim Babka from last week, which we will continue for a second hour on Sunday. Jim is a Christian, and theologically a very conservative one, but he has become convinced that ID is bad science and bad theology and he is looking for ways to reach his fellow Christians on this subject. I really wish I could put him in touch with my old friend Glenn Morton, who went through a painful (for him) conversion from young earth creationist to theistic evolutionist with his faith intact. Unfortunately, Glenn is in China now looking for oil.
What I would really like to see, and I have urged some of these folks to do this, is for Ken and Howard and Glenn to join up with others like Chuck Austerberry and Keith Miller and Davis Young and the hundreds or thousands of like-minded scientists and form an organization. Whenever this subject hits the media, they call the Discovery Institute and the NCSE for comment (locally, they call groups like MCFS). There needs to be a group of theistic scientists with a real presence in the major media, a group that reporters automatically think of to call for information and comment the way they think of the DI and the NCSE now. There are similar groups, like the American Scientific Affiliation, but they are invisible in the media and known only to members, and they don't really get involved in the public fight.
Ken Miller has always been at the front of the battle. We've managed to drag Howard Van Till into it (when I first approached him about this idea a couple years ago he said something like, "I'm really an academic by nature. I'm much more comfortable being in my ivory tower writing out nuanced critiques than being involved in political maneuvering") by convincing him to join the board of MCFS. Coincidentally, of the 7 MCFS board members, only one (possibly two, but I'm not certain of the second one) is an atheist.
Ed said:
100% agreed. Go make that happen now. We'll even wait. ::taps foot::
Seriously, great post. I couldn't agree more with all of it, and I think you're absolutely right about the approach needed to fight on the battlefield at hand.
I do love reading PZ and I think Dawkins is brilliant, but in this particular front of the overall war, their weapons aren't necessarily the best ones.
Well, the ASA has been around for years, but no one bothers to call them.
Ed -
I'm afraid I have to agree with you with regarding the "recruitment" of Christian (or Jewish or Muslim) scientists to step into the spotlight. Unfortunately, in the case of an outspoken atheist like Dawkins, it's too easy for the public to conflate a person's worldview with his/her scientific work. It's a shame that atheists or agnostics almost have to apologize for holding such views. It's not fair, and it pisses me off, but that's political reality in this country.
I guess what I was getting at in my first post was that perhaps one tool to use against the IDiots is to expose the backdoor tactics they use, i.e., beating up local schoolboards or appealing to what parents "want" to be taught rather than trusting the judgement of professionals. Point out that this is just not how science is done. Ask if this is how they'd want their doctor or the engineers who design their cars to be trained.
The FDA analogy above illustrates this nicely. Maybe I'm too optimistic, but it might just get some people thinking.
People don't like politicians and fatcats making deals in smoke-filled rooms. Yet this is exactly how the IDiots operate. Let's call a spade a spade and shout it from the rooftops!
Jeff Hebert at December 2, 2005 04:13 PM
I sincerely don't know where this came from, but regardless.
Regarding Einstein (relativity), his theory of gravity (general relativity) was largely based on his formulation of special relativity (for which there was more than a bit of evidence), an investigation of the general force equation
f=ma+mg+(a term relating to an artificial "coriolis force" also involving "m")+(a term relating to an artificial centrifugal force, also involving "m"). The values of "m" in all the terms are the same.
The artificial coriolis and centrifugal forces are, of course, ficticious forces induced by accelerated reference frames, but that can be eliminated by changing the reference frames. Einstein's idea in GR was that gravity could be explained by an appropriate choice of reference frame. His predictions turned out to be quite useful, and are used in, for example, the global positional system (GPS).
Schroedinger's formulation of the wave equation in quantum mechanics was actually a long process. It began in the early 1900s by Max Planck's explanation of blackbody radiation, in which he explained what he was seeing by assuming that electromagnetic radiation was radiated in quanta, not in a continuous stream. This was further confirmed in the Stern-Gerlach experiment (around 1920) which confirmed that electron spin was quantized. Schroedinger's formulation (around 1926) was based on de Broglie's suggestion that "particle" waves should be described by similar equations as "force" waves." Schroedinger took up the challenge which gave rise to Schroedinger's wave equation.
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is interesting, but it is little more than an application of the Fourier transform to the wave equation. This is not to denigrate Heisenberg's contributions to quantum mechanics, but that's the case in regards the uncertainty principle.
I have read that many believe that GR and QM are fundamentally incompatable, and I understand the reasons. On the other hand, it strikes me that Einstein's formulation of GR seemed to suggest that gravity is not a force, but, instead, a distortion of spacetime that is imposed by mass/energy. I don't know where that might be going, but it would be interesting to live long enough to see how it is resolved.
Raj, I didn't write that, the bit you quoted was from
Zachary Smith :-)
Jeff
Jeff, I acknowledge that it didn't come from you--hence my original comment. I couldn't find where it originally came from.
Not sure if this tactic would work in general, but I once succeeded in startling and confusing a small group of creationist parents by telling them that the belief that we ought to allow "both" points of view in the science classroom so the children can choose was nothing more than warmed over "self-esteem movement" propaganda from the 70's and 80's. "Teacher, teacher, that theory hurts my feelings." "Well then, nothing is more important than feeling good about yourself -- let's see if we can come up with a truth you will like better."
Christian fundamentalists just hate the empower-the-child movement and the way it tried to undermine legitimate authority and fact in favor of namby-pamby anything-to-feel-good bromides. In this situation, they are very strong on the value of accepting authority.
I don't know. There might be enough similarity in the analogy to give them pause. Something to consider, perhaps.
Sastra wrote:
Actually, I think you're on to something here. The current issue of Harper's has an article arguing that the fairness argument is borrowed from the postmodern left and I think that's true. In the Dover trial, Steve Fuller explicitly took the postmodern left position in his testimony in defending ID. They certainly borrow the rhetoric of the left about science being primarily about dominant political power and not about an honest search for truth.