A Muslim Defense of ID

A couple weeks ago, in response to an article about the Miami police staging random "shows of force" at hotels and banks, surrounding the place with swat teams and forcing everyone to show ID to go in or out for no apparent reason, Radley Balko sarcastically commented that if the terrorists hate us for our freedom then clearly attempts to reduce our freedom amount to "appeasement." Oh, blessed irony. I thought of that while reading this article in the National Review by Mustafa Akyol, a Muslim creationist from Turkey, arguing, apparently in all seriousness, that America should embrace "intelligent design" because it will make Muslims like us more. Needless to say, he commits a lot of factual and logical errors attempting to support that silly argument. After a longwinded introduction about why Muslims hate "Western decadence", Hollywood and MTv, he finally gets around to saying that just as Islam needs to reform, so the United States must shed its "materialism" in order to bring about a good relationship with Islam. And that's where the fun begins.

Yes, but what exactly is materialism? Isn't it more obviously represented by the extravagance of pop stars than by the sophisticated theories of atheist scientists and scholars? Isn't the cultural materialism of, say, Madonna, quite different from the philosophical materialism of Richard Dawkins?

Well, it is self-evident that they look dissimilar, but the worldviews they represent are intertwined. Cultural materialism means living as if there were no God or moral absolutes, and all that matters is matter. Philosophical materialism means to argue that there is no God to establish any moral absolutes, and matter is all there is. The former worldview finds its justification in the latter. Actually, in the modern world, philosophical materialists act as the secular priesthood of a lifestyle based on hedonism and moral relativism. The priesthood convinces the masses that we are all accidental occurrences who are not under any Divine judgment; and the masses live, earn, spend, and have relationships according to this supposition. A popular MTV hit summarizes this presumption bluntly: "You and me baby ain't nuthin' but mammals; so let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel."

This argument is nothing more than a repeat of the standard fundamentalist line - "If you tell children they're nothing but animals, they'll act like animals." And it's all quite absurd. There isn't a shred of evidence that those who hold to "philosophical materialism" - meaning atheism or any other non-theistic worldview, including mine - behave worse than those who believe in "Divine judgement". Indeed, there is some correlational (important term; I'm not arguing for causation) evidence to the contrary. In the US, for example, teenage pregnancy, abortion, STDs and divorce are all higher in the so-called "red states", where a much higher percentage of the population holds a traditional religious viewpoint and believes in divine judgement. Likewise, Western nations with far lower rates of belief in divine judgement do far better than the United States by those same measurements, as well as having far lower rates of violent crime than we do.

That's why something called the Wedge Document -- although horrifying to America's secularist intelligentsia -- offers a message of hope for Muslims. The Wedge Document is a 1999 memorandum of the Discovery Institute (DI), the Seattle-based think tank that acts as the main proponent of ID. In this document, the Institute explains that its long-term goal is "to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies." Much of the fuss made about the Document by its opponents is absurd; it does not propose the transformation of the U.S. into a theocracy. But, as official DI documents point out, there is nothing wrong in expecting cultural impact from a scientific theory; Darwinians, after all, revel in the cultural impact of their own doctrines.

One can really only laugh at such an absurd argument. It's basically a three step argument:

A. Evolution = "materialism"
B. Materialism causes lots of bad things
C. "Darwinists" like that it causes bad things.

A is false. B is false. C is slanderous and idiotic. Three strikes and I think you're out.

By its bold challenge to Darwinian evolution -- a concept that claims it is possible to be an "intellectually fulfilled atheist" -- ID is indeed a wedge that can split the foundations of scientific materialism.

No, Mr. Akyol, you're just spreading manure around now. Concepts don't make claims; people make claims. The claim that evolution made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist was made by Richard Dawkins. It is an inference he draws from evolutionary theory; that does not mean that evolutionary theory claims anything. You're conflating ideas with people. You're also ignoring the fact that one can just as easily draw the opposite inference, and many do. And the inference one draws has no bearing at all on the validity of the theory. Besides, you've got it all wrong. It's not evolution that leads to materialism and hence to immorality and the downfall of all that is righteous and good - it's heliocentrism! It's not Darwinism that set us on the wrong path, it's Copernicanism! Don't believe me? Ask the geocentrists, who make an argument almost identical to the one Akyol makes above:

So, since it is essentially beyond argument that man's knowledge (what he thinks is true) is ultimately determined by his beliefs about the ORIGIN of all that exists, it follows inexorably that all five categories of knowledge held by an individual or a whole population will be colored and shaped by what is thought to be true about ORIGINS. (The Five Categories of Knowledge are: Physical Sciences; Natural Sciences; Social [and Behavioral] Sciences; Arts & Humanities; Religion.)

Thus, as we've seen, when Copernican "science" (in spite of ALL observational and experimental evidence to the contrary!) captured the Physical Science "disciplines", a great change in man's beliefs about the place of the Earth and of mankind in the universe gradually took over and became "fact". Reduced by Copernicanism to just another speck of flotsam in the universe, man's image of himself and the Earth as special creations by God for a special purpose was steadily eroded. Since then, mankind has been relentlessly conditioned by "education" and ever increasingly sophisticated media indoctrination to add yet other levels of nihilistic philosophy to his "knowledge" of what theoretical "science" tells him is true.

The argument is virtually identical, isn't it? Copernicanism = materialism and materialism = really bad things. The argument is no less silly in its second form than in the first. But now we're getting into his attempt to support ID, and this is where the illogic really starts to fly.

To see that premise, we first have to note how ID theorists criticize Darwin. They do this by applying his own criterion for falsification. "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications," said Darwin, "my theory would break down." ID theorists, such as biochemist Michael J. Behe, apply this criterion to complex biochemical systems such as the bacterial flagellum or blood clotting and explain that they could not have been "formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications" -- because they don't function at all unless they are complete.

Interesting choice of words. Behe "explains" that complex biochemical systems could not form by numerous, successive, slight modifications. Well, no. Behe claims that such systems can't be formed that way, but his argument just doesn't hold up under scrutiny. Every single step of Behe's argument has been debunked by his fellow biochemists. But Akyol would have us believe that the only argument that scientists have offered is an argument from ignorance:

What is the Darwinian response to this? Here's Jerry Coyne again, in The New Republic: "In view of our progress in understanding biochemical evolution, it is simply irrational to say that because we do not completely understand how biochemical pathways evolved, we should give up trying and invoke the intelligent designer." Note that Coyne is here denying the falsification criterion that Darwin himself acknowledged. According to Darwin, if you demonstrate "that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications," the theory will break down. According to Coyne, you will only be pointing to a system about which "we do not completely understand how [it] evolved."

In other words, Coyne leaves no way that the theory can break down. Whatever problem you find with the theory today will somehow be solved in the future.

How amusing. Akyol picks out one single argument about one single component of Behe's argument, pretends that it's the only argument that has ever been made against Behe's position, and bravely defeats that argument. I'll take straw men for $1000, Alex. There is of course a difference between demonstrating that a biochemical system could not have evolved, and claiming that a biochemical system could not have evolved. And Behe's claim cannot survive even his own attempts to support it. Behe himself accepts quite casually an evolutionary explanation for untold numbers of complex biochemical systems that fit the criteria for irreducible complexity. His own computer simulations, by his own admission under oath, show that irreducibly complex biochemical systems can evolve in a relatively short period of time even if you rig the simulation to make it infinitely less likely to happen than it would be in the real world.

Akyol is simply being dishonest when he pretends that the single statement above constitutes "the Darwinian response" to Behe's position. In the very article that he cites, Jerry Coyne, himself a biochemist, spends a good deal of time debunking Behe's argument. He discusses cooption (something Behe fully accepts in explaining the evolution of other complex biochemical systems, then inexplicably rules out as part of any potential explanation for the three systems he focuses on) of components from other systems, adapted for use in a new function, for example. And in other articles, he has gone into great detail in critiquing Behe's position. To whittle all of that detail down to one simplistic statement and declare it "the Darwinian response" is, frankly, lying.

There are many other attacks on ID in the media, and they are all useful in that they demonstrate the true intellectual force behind Darwinism: a commitment to materialism. The most common argument against ID, that it invokes God and so cannot be a part of science, is a crystal-clear expression of that commitment. Instead of asking, "What if there really were an intelligent designer active in the origin of life?" the Darwinists take it for granted that such a designer doesn't exist and limit the definition of science according to that unproven premise.

More lies. Here Akyol is pretending that all arguments against ID and for evolution are based on atheism. How, then, does he explain the thousands and thousands of working scientists who accept and continue to advance evolutionary theory with their research and are not atheists? Ken Miller certainly has no "commitment to materialism" as he is not a materialist but a Christian. Yet he runs a lab that every day works to expand our understanding of evolutionary theory, and he has written one of the most popular textbooks on evolution in the United States. Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, is a Christian who has no commitment to materialism at all, yet he argues strongly against ID and says that the more data we gather from comparing genomes, the stronger the evidence gets for evolution. There are thousands of scientists like them who accept evolution without any commitment to materialism. Why doesn't Akyol bother to answer their arguments for evolution and against ID? Well, because it's easier to just dismiss all of these people as atheists and therefore not worth listening to. It's absurd and irrational, but it's quite convenient.

Of course, Darwinians have the right to believe in whatever they wish, but it is crucial to unveil that theirs is a subjective faith, not an objective truth, as they have been claiming for more than a century. This unveiling would mark a turning point in the history of Western civilization, by reconciling science and religion and letting people become intellectually fulfilled theists.

More absurdity. There are plenty of intellectually fulfilled theists in the world. Whether they accept evolution or not has no bearing on whether they are intellectually fulfilled. But having already erased all such people from the world in his argument above, pretending that they do not exist, it's hardly a surprise that now Akyol wants to recreate them. This whole article is just bad, bad, bad. It's dishonest in its representations of reality and completely illogical in its arguments. If we are required to give in to such inane arguments in order to please the Muslim world, then the Muslim world is in far more trouble than it appears.