The Intelligent Design v Evolution debate isn't going away

Both ID and evolutionary theory attempt to explain how life came to be as it is today. Each side appears to be driven by its own motives, but those motives are largely irrelevant to the scientific debate.

On the one hand we have evolutionary theory, which says that random mutation plus natural selection produces gradual change in populations of living organisms such that subsequent generations become progressively more suited to prevailing conditions, and these small changes accumulate to the big changes we see over geological time. Though the theory seems sound (and immensely elegant), I understand there are some stages in the process that science has yet to explain adequately.

Michael Behe

And on the other hand we have intelligent design theory, which says that unexplained stages in evolution can be explained by positing an intelligent designer. To me this is no more than an "intelligent-designer-of-the-gaps". My main objection to the ID argument is that it isn't an explanation. Hypothesizing an intelligent designer isn't testable by science, so ID can't legitimately be described as science. If I suggest that the gaps in evolutionary theory can be explained as the intervention of magic pixies I don't expect anyone to accept this as a scientific explanation — but as explanations go, it has as much science in it as ID.

Justin Brierley

Despite this, however, there are some scientists who claim that ID is science. One such is Professor Michael Behe of Lehigh University, and he will be touring the UK next month, giving illustrated lectures. One of these, at 7 pm in Westminster Chapel in London, on November 22nd, will be hosted by Justin Brierley of Premier Christian Radio's Unbelievable? programme. All are invited, at a ticket price of £10 (which includes a DVD), but bookings must be made in advance.

Behe's tour is in conjunction with the newly announced Centre for Intelligent Design based in Scotland (where apparently school curricula have no prohibition on teaching ID or creationism in school science lessons).

Paul Sims

Paul Sims at the New Humanist blog suggests that journalists should ignore Behe's lectures, starving him and the C4ID of the oxygen of publicity. This is tempting but in my opinion misguided. Anyone who cares about science education in the UK should be prepared to challenge those who aim to corrupt it. Intelligent design as a concept may be a fit subject for a philosophy class, but it has no place in science teaching.





UPDATE 2010-10-30:
Some useful resources related to ID:

Fake ID:
http://www.thetwentyfirstfloor.com/?p=1302

British Centre for Science Education
http://www.bcseweb.org.uk/

(Image positions also tweaked.)

Should Christianity be silent? Ann Widdecombe projects

Once again I'm reacting to a post on the New Humanist blog — this time it's about a Daily Express article by Ann Widdecombe. I responded in the comments to the Express article, but apparently their commenting system accepts plain text only, so my carefully formatted HTML appears very untidy. (I've pasted the properly formatted version below.)

Has anyone noticed that what the opponents of religion really want is that Christianity should be silent?

What I have noticed is that Christianity is definitely not silent, and that as soon as opponents of religion raise any objection to Christianity's lack of silence on matters with which it has no business to be concerned, they are labelled "strident" or "shrill" or "militant" (or in this case, "bigoted").

Those who run the zoo have established workshops which cover the national science curriculum but do not include discussion of religion and do not promote the extreme creationist view that the world was created 6,000 years ago. In other words it is a moderate, education-focused organisation that challenges children’s minds and produces evidence from fossils.

That the zoo promotes a slightly less extreme version of creationism does not make it "moderate". It may be "education-focussed", but that's because it has a religious agenda it wants to get into British science classes. Creationism and "intelligent design" are not science.

In short the British Humanist association does not believe that children should be allowed even to discuss creation or to be exposed to any evidence that might support it.

I'm a member of the BHA myself, and I'm not aware of any prohibition on children being allowed to discuss any subject at all. As for children being exposed to "evidence" for creation, there isn't any. The only authority for creationism is in scripture, but the Book of Genesis is not a science textbook.

With regard to scientific testing of the efficacy of prayer, most properly conducted tests are negative, but this is a distraction anyway because whenever negative results are obtained, the religious can explain them away (God is not susceptible to testing; it's impossible for an omniscient deity to conform to the protocols of a randomised double blind clinical trial; how do we know that other people who are not part of the trial aren't praying for opposing results. And so on.) I'm not surprised that Ann Widdecombe should cherry-pick a supposedly positive test of prayer while failing to mention the many that have shown no effect — her grasp of scientific method was exposed in her TV programme about Mosaic Law: she prefers to believe the Exodus took place (because it's in the Bible) despite there being no archeological evidence for it.

She is probably right in saying that the BHA and NSS will be vocal during the Pope's visit in September.

It is as well therefore to understand their bigoted approach from the outset.

I believe the bigotry of Ann Widdecombe's church of choice was clearly displayed in her debate with Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry in October last year.

That Ann Widdecombe accuses opponents of religion of wanting Christianity to be silent is a classic piece of projection.

An agnostic manifestly confused

Via the New Humanist blog I came across this Slate article by Ron Rosenbaum: "An Agnostic Manifesto". Paul Sims (NH editor) describes it as "excellent", but I can only hope he's being ironic. He invited comments on the New Humanist blog, so I posted the following:

Much of this comes down to definitions. Agnosticism and to a lesser extent atheism are oft-misunderstood terms. Even theism as a description of a certain kind of religious belief leaves a lot undefined.

With this article Ron Rosenbaum is engaging heavily in the straw man fallacy. Richard Dawkins, forever portrayed as the ArchAtheist, says clearly in The God Delusion (in his chapter entitled "The God Hypothesis") that he is agnostic on the matter of the existence of God.

Rosenbaum is also mistaken if he thinks that science purports to "know everything". If that were the case there would be no point in science continuing, as there would be nothing left to discover. There's no evidence that scientists the world over are quitting their jobs and attempting to find something else to do. Science isn't yet — nor is it ever likely to be — redundant.

Faced with the fundamental question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" atheists have faith that science will tell us eventually. Most seem never to consider that it may well be a philosophic, logical impossibility for something to create itself from nothing.

Whether "most" atheists have or have not considered this is a moot point, but it has been addressed, by Lawrence Krauss, Adolf Grünbaum and others. There's also the entirely acceptable response, "We don't know," which Rosenbaum rightly describes as the agnostic position, and which most of the so called "New Atheists" (or to use a term I've seen recently, "Gnu Atheists") would embrace wholeheartedly as valid. Their position on the existence of God is derived not from a dogmatic stance, but on the balance of probabilities. It's a position based on evidence, and on logic. And most important, given this discussion, it's open to revision in the light of new evidence and new arguments.

Rosenbaum on Aquinas:

His eventual explanation entailed a Supreme Being standing outside of time and space somehow endowing it with existence (and interfering once in a while) without explaining what caused this source of "uncaused causation" to be created in the first place.

When someone talks about a source of "uncaused causation" they're unlikely to feel obliged to explain the cause of that source. It's in the description.

I should point out that I accept all that science has proven with evidence and falsifiable hypotheses but don't believe there is evidence or falsifiable certitude that science can prove or disprove everything.

I don't believe there's a reputable scientist that does believe science can prove or disprove everything.

Straw man, straw man, straw man.

(Rosenbaum's confused article was picked up by Jen Peeples on yesterday's Atheist Experience  TV show (#669) The mp3 audio of the show is available for download, and the Blip.TV video version is embedded below.)

http://blip.tv/file/3984616

"Leap of Faith" — Ruth Turner writes in New Humanist

The current (March/April 2010) issue of New Humanist magazine contains an article by the Chief Executive of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, Ruth Turner. I've had my doubts about the true purpose behind our ex-Prime-Minister's ill-conceived foundation from the start, and Ruth Turner's article does nothing to dispel them. The article, "Leap of Faith", is also available online. There's not much of substance in the article — mostly it's a hope that people of different faiths (and none — that's a first, I believe) can just get along. I've no quibble with that, but there's an underlying assumption that faith is, of course, a "good thing". Though there is a rather odd statement early on:

[Religion] is at the very core of life for billions of people, the motive for their behaviour, the thing that gives sense and purpose to their lives. Gallup predicts that by 2050, 80 per cent of the world’s population are expected to be of faith.

Is Gallup predicting an expectation of a percentage rather than an actual percentage? I'm not sure what she's getting at here.

[A]t its core religious faith represents a profound yearning within the human spirit. It answers to the basic, irrepressible, irresistible human wish for spiritual betterment, to think and act beyond the limitations of selfish human desires. More than that, it is rooted in a belief that the impulse to do good is not utilitarian but is being aware of something bigger, more central, more essential to our human condition than self. It says there are absolutes – like the inalienable worth and dignity of every human being – that can never be sacrificed. Religion does not provide the only ethical framework, but it is an enduring one. 

This, at its core, is the problem: "It says there are absolutes". The Tony Blair Faith Foundation is trying to reconcile different religions that, at their core, say "there are absolutes ... that can never be sacrificed". Fine, if they all share these absolutes — "like the inalienable worth and dignity of every human being" — but they don't. Not even these. What about the inalienable worth and dignity of women and gays, for example? Many religions maintain absolutely that large portions of society are of decidedly less worth than others.

There is no point in ducking this issue. Religious faith can give rise to extremism. But even if a minuscule minority of religious people use terror, there are people who hold extreme views in virtually every religion. And even where there is not extremism expressed in violence, faith is problematic when it becomes a way of denigrating those who do not share it, as somehow lesser human beings.

This is where the Tony Blair Faith Foundation does indeed seem to be ducking the issue. It's not just a matter of denigrating those who do not "share faith" — many faiths denigrate those who don't share their own particular faith, never mind those who profess no faith at all. Some religions say absolutely that those who don't share their own particular faith are on the path to everlasting damnation. Some say, absolutely, that they deserve to be killed. To me, this doesn't seem like a mere minor impediment to faiths getting along with each other.

Religious people can show how their faith motivates them to do good for others, as well as providing spiritual support and salvation for themselves. And we would all think more highly of religion, if the stories we heard were about care for the poor and the sick, the environment and society, not about prejudice, conflict and violence.

The Tony Blair Faith Foundation doesn't appear to be doing much about the prejudice, conflict and violence, other than saying it would be nice if we didn't hear about it.

Of course you don’t need to be religious to be good. Those we support do so in collaboration with many non-religious agencies. But in these areas the faith community is making a contribution that, in reality, only they can make. We have trained a group of young people from five of the world’s main religions – and a humanist – who work together to mobilise communities in the West and link them with faith communities in the affected malarious regions.

This is no more than a sticking-plaster covering the fundamental disease. If the problem at the core is faith itself, it will take something other than faith to solve that problem.

For religious and non-religious alike, I believe that interfaith understanding and multi-faith social action initiatives perform a valuable function that should be welcomed. Those who seek to cause religious conflict are small in number but highly motivated, well organised and well funded. Those who want to create a more positive alternative need all the support we can get. While there are billions of people who are loyal to their own religion, there is no natural constituency for interfaith – but there needs to be.

Yes, it would be nice if different religions could get along, but the Tony Blair Faith Foundation isn't providing anything concrete to promote the formation of a "natural constituency for interfaith" because — given what religious faith is — such a natural constituency is impossible.

Without organisations that help facilitate relations between people who have different cultures and belief systems, the world is a much colder, potentially much more dangerous place. In a crowded, constantly changing and interdependent world, the Foundation attempts to bring people of different religions and none together to understand each other better, and to live peacefully and with respect, by providing opportunities to collaborate on practical projects that make a real difference to the challenges of modern life. That’s a mission I’d have thought anyone – religious or not – would be happy to support.

I'd be happy to support it, if I thought that its stated goals were achievable. They're not.