Dembski's Word in Court

There is a federal court trial going on in the Dover school district in Pennsylvania--about referencing intelligent design in science classes.
Here is an excerpt from a story by Lauri Lebo in the Daily Record/Sunday News
Thursday, October 6, 2005:

The author of "Creationism's Trojan Horse," Forrest painted a picture of a covert religious movement — one that presented itself as scientific to the media and mainstream public. But under the surface, she said, leaders plotted not only a revolution in science, but also of modern culture.

In repeated accounts, she outlined how intelligent design's founders wanted  nothing more than to have their concept permeate all religious, cultural and political life.

Forrest also pointed to an inherent contradiction in the movement — even as it presented intelligent design as science, its proponents actively courted Christians and promoted creationist beliefs.

"Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory," William Dembski, one of the movement's chief proponents, said in a 1999 interview in Touchstone, a Christian magazine that Forrest cited in her testimony.

[Actually, Dembski wrote those words at the conclusion of his feature article in that issue, "Signs of Intelligence: A Primer on the discernment of Intelligent Design" (p. 84). He did not say this in an interview in Touchstone.]

While its supporters maintain that intelligent design — the idea that the complexity of life requires a guiding hand — is not religious because God is never mentioned, Forrest also referenced numerous examples where the name of the designer is clearly spelled out.

"Christ is never an addendum to a scientific theory, but always a completion," Dembski wrote in his book, "Intelligent Design."

Apparently one best keep one's opinions about religion private, for if you are known to be Christian, then you are rightly suspected of having a religious agenda. One may not have a religious agenda for anything the touches public life.

This is not that far from the sort of reasoning that makes it hard for some politicians to confirm a candidate to the Supreme Court if it is known that he is a Catholic who believes and supports the teachings of his church. Ah, he believes in God, and we know what that means for the future of our god-free public square.

Anyway, Touchstone is getting ID proponents into trouble, it seems.

Comments

[Will S.]

>Anyway, Touchstone is getting ID proponents into trouble, it seems.

Shame on you! ;)

Hey, with those kind of enemies, we know we're on the right side!

(One day, they'll ask Supreme Court nominees this...)

[Mike S.]

Apparently one best keep one's opinions about religion private, for if you are know to be Christian, then you are rightly suspected of having a religious agenda. One may not have a religious agenda for anything the touches public life.

This is surely a destructive phenomenon in our public life, but you didn't answer the charge posed by Forrest - if Dembski et al do, in fact, see ID as part of a larger religious crusade, should they not be up front about it? What is gained by this practice of insisting that ID is a purely secular theory, if it is not, just so that the courts will bless it as acceptable? Is that not merely acceeding to the notion of a naked public square? Conversely, if ID is a purely secular theory, what is gained by insisting that it is the "Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory,"? Do Christian's make such statements about other scientific theories? If we can criticize Dawkins and others for improperly extrapolating from scientific theories to support their preferred metaphysical positions, can we not do the same with Dembski et al.?

[Joe Long]

Kinda thorny, isn't it? But if the secular evolutionist can say that he believes his theory invalidates the Christian religion - and of course, he can say that, in forums public and private outside the actual school setting - then the ID proponent can of course say, in a religious setting, where he believes ID fits in a religious view of the world.

The problem lies in ID being seen as mere camouflage for religious instuction - the perception will be that the religious understanding came first, and ID was just a repackaging - while secular evolutionary theory is seen as possibly a cause of a materialistic viewpoint, but not something invented to rationalize atheism.

Personally I still think that if the public schools teach youngsters to read, write, and "figure", those young people may go on to evaluate theories of life's origin on their own -and if the schools are failing to make literate, logical, critical thinking citizens (as they are), they have no time to waste teaching contentious issues of arguable importance to simple citizenship.

[Guy Coe]

When ID casts its views using the language of secularist science, it is no more guilty of a "hidden agenda" than any apologetic endeavor, nor, for that matter, any attempt at a statement of scientific truth.

The difference here is that the concepts under scrutiny are available to rigorous scientifc (empirical, observational, experimental)testing.

By avoiding religious language, they have maintained the right to be considered in the public square, as disposed as it is towards a scientistic "neutrality."

The naked public square is not so bad as a starting point; but when it's as far as we're able to progress, we have let the despair of the limits of reason overcome us.

When a presuppositional cosmological perspective leads one to ignore the evidence, as it does in the case of philosophic naturalism, then it's right to take to task the outrageous presumptiveness of the resulting science, while at the same time noting any coincidence of the evidence with one's own perspective.

The real test of truth is precisely this --that it will coincide with other truths rigorously examined.

The public school's role in promoting an imaginative and yet evidence-based approach to life, encouraging critical thinking, should be the forum for such questions.

That is precisely what makes a person a "simple citizen" --the recognition that such matters may be honestly debated and refined, to the positive influence upon both perspectives.

The forced imposition of a "scientific" worldview (in the form of philosophic naturalism) under the guise of neutrality must be exposed for what it is. That, in and of itself, does not render it untenable, but breaks the deadlock where all other forms of argumentation from the evidence are trumped from the start.

[Mike S.]

Guy,

"The difference here is that the concepts under scrutiny are available to rigorous scientifc (empirical, observational, experimental)testing."

That is what the ID proponents claim, yet they don't provide any examples of such tests, nor do they carry them out. How, exactly, does one perform empirical, observational, or experimental tests on the origin of a biological artifact, like the bacterial flagellum, that purportedly came into existence via a non-empirical, non-observed event. It explicitly did not come into existence via a regular natural process, which we could in theory subject to scrutiny today, so how are we supposed to verify the ID claim? At its heart ID is a giant non-sequiter: natural processes cannot explain biological diversity, and we can empirically prove this. You cannot empirically prove the existence of a (by definition) non-empirical event.

"The forced imposition of a "scientific" worldview (in the form of philosophic naturalism) under the guise of neutrality must be exposed for what it is."

Who's forcing anyone to adopt a naturalistic worldview? You yourself said that ID is subject to the same empirical rules as the rest of science - does that mean ID is capitulating to a naturalistic worldview? Or does it just mean that science requires natural, causal explanations by definition, which has no bearing on ones metaphysical views about the existence of non-natural entities or forces?

[Guy Coe]

So, by your estimation, then, were we to stumble across a perfect representation of the Mona Lisa, made up of different hues of sand on the beach, would we not be in a position to claim to know that, scientifically, such an anomalous occurrence would have to be the result of intelligent artistic mimicry, rather than the undirected, chance processes of nature?

Isn't it our very empiricism which drives us to reject the second hypothesis? And isn't the order of complexity in even the simplest proposed protocell several orders of magnitude greater than the riddle of our sand painting?

We could perform experiment after experiment, only to find that nothing like the order and coherence in our Mona Lisa sand painting could be the result of a gradually-accumulated order arising by chance.

Ah, but, of course, that's where the disclaimer comes in --it could happen, so it's proposed, if merely given enough time. But that's an unproveable assumption, not the fruit of an empirical methodology.

When scientists cannot recognize the limits of empirical methodology, and agree that an awful lot of what is called "science" is assumptive or conjectural in nature, we have run into practitioners of a religion with its own sacred mantras and unexamined orthodoxies.

When science can't propose and demonstrate natural pathways by which mechanisms of "irreducible complexity" can gradually come into being, we are not being irrational to regard such things as possible artifacts of a supernatural instrumentality.

And to demand that "the rules of the game" reguire everyone to go along with the kind of faith-based naturalistic reasoning substituted for empirical observation and explanation in the face of such evidence, in the name of "pure science" is, in fact, the imposition of a worldview. It's exclusion by definition, not by a preponderance of the evidence.

I have no problem with scientific research which seeks to find and understand the instrumentalities of biological functioning --nor, for that matter, the possible instrumentalities of biological origins. I'm glad for the progress of science.

But it's simply a prejudice to see faith in the supernatural as an impediment to its further progress. In fact, it was the uniquely religious worldview of the monotheistic cultures which opened the gates to scientific study of the world.

To cast anyone who thinks that origins must have included intelligent, supernatural input into the process as unscientific, possessed of an illusion by means of a non-sequitur, is merely to state a tautology of naturalistic materialism.

It is not a violation of scientific methodology to recognize when causes within a closed system are insufficient to account for observed effects.