Giberson on ID and the Big Bang

Karl Giberson, editor of Science and Theology News, has an interesting commentary making the same argument I made during the Dover trial when Michael Behe insisted on comparing ID to big bang cosmology. He did it so often, in fact, that one morning when they were set to continue Behe's cross-examination, the Judge asked the attorney how long he expected to continue and the attorney replied that he thought it would be proportional to the number of times the big bang is mentioned. The Judge replied, "So you're going to go all day?" and the attorney replied, "It could be quite a while."

As I noted here, the most obvious problem with this comparison is that it doesn't go far enough. The mere fact that the big bang was initially rejected by a few people because they didn't like its religious implications is not evidence for the validity of ID, and in fact if you compare the behavior of those who came up with the big bang theory with that of ID theorists, you can see how silly the comparison is. Giberson notes the same thing:

Under cross-examination, Behe made many interesting comparisons between ID and the big-bang theory -- both concepts carry lots of ideological freight. When the big-bang theory was first proposed in the 1920s, many people made hostile objections to its apparent "supernatural" character. The moment of the big bang looked a lot like the Judeo-Christian creation story, and scientists from Quaker Sir Arthur Eddington to gung-ho atheist Fred Hoyle resisted accepting it.

In his testimony, Behe stated -- correctly -- that at the current moment, "we have no explanation for the big bang." And, ultimately it may prove to be "beyond scientific explanation," he said. The analogy is obvious: "I put intelligent design in the same category," he argued...

However, this analogy breaks down when you look at the historical period between George Lemaitre's first proposal of the big-bang theory in 1927 and the scientific community's widespread acceptance of the theory in 1965, when scientists empirically confirmed one of the big bang's predictions.

If we continue with Behe's analogy, we might expect that the decades before 1965 would have seen big-bang proponents scolding their critics for ideological blindness, of having narrow, limited and inadequate concepts of science. Popular books would have appeared announcing the big-bang theory as a new paradigm, and efforts would have been made to get it into high school astronomy textbooks.

However, none of these things happened. In the decades before the big-bang theory achieved its widespread acceptance in the scientific community its proponents were not campaigning for public acceptance of the theory. They were developing the scientific foundations of theory, and many of them were quite tentative about their endorsements of the theory, awaiting confirmation.

Physicist George Gamow worked out a remarkable empirical prediction for the theory: If the big bang is true, he calculated, the universe should be bathed in a certain type of radiation, which might possibly be detectable. Another physicist, Robert Dicke, started working on a detector at Princeton University to measure this radiation. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson ended up discovering the radiation by accident at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., in 1965, after which just about everyone accepted the big bang as the correct theory.

Unfortunately, the proponents of ID aren't operating this way. Instead of doing science, they are writing popular books and op-eds. As a result, ID remains theoretically in the same scientific place it was when Phillip Johnson wrote Darwin on Trial -- little more than a roster of evolutionary theory's weakest links.

Indeed, Mr. Giberson.