ThiChi said:
: Here is what to look out for in debate:
Obviously this is plagiarized from somewhere else, just like the above post.
: Conflate intelligent design with creationism. I'm not sure how much longer this tactic will work because the public and press are now catching on to the difference, but as long as there's mileage to be obtained, go for it.
Let me rephrase what I told Simwitness: While in principle the general notion of "intelligent design" doesn't necessarily require religious backing -- the Designers might be superintelligent space aliens -- the practitioners of Intelligent Design are just Christian creationists in disguise. In practice the Designer proposed by the Intelligent Design "community" is none other than the Christian God. ID's most vocal proponent, Phillip Johnson, stated forthrightly that his motives are entirely religious. In his 1997 book Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds he stated:
I therefore put the following simple proposition on the table for discussion: God is our true Creator. I am not speaking of a God who is known only by faith and is invisible to reason, or who acted undetectably behind some naturalistic evolutionary process that was to all appearances mindless and purposeless. That kind of talk is about the human imagination, not the reality of God. I speak of a God who acted openly and who left his fingerprints all over the evidence. Does such a God really exist, or is he a fantasy like Santa Claus? That is the subject of this book. [p. 23]
I will explain in subsequent chapters why the biologists insist that evolution must be unsupervised and why God?s purposes are not listed among the things that might have affected evolution. [p. 15]
When critics of ID recognize what ID proponents themselves say, and take them at their word, then there's nothing amiss when they conflate ID with creationism (not young-earth creationism) -- for that's what Johnson himself admits it is.
Statements such as ThiChi has plagiarized show how effective a campaign Johnson and his buddy ID'ers have waged to fool some of their audience into thinking that their program is not religious in nature.
: Emphasize science as a great force for enlightenment
There's no denying that science has given people great enlightenment, and all kinds of benefits such as the ability to argue on the Internet.
: and contrast it sharply with fanatical religious fundamentalism.
A very workable program, given the ridiculous nature of "fanatical religious fundamentalism."
: Then stress that intelligent design is essentially a religious and political movement.
That's simply telling the truth, as stated by Phillip Johnson.
: Generously use the "C-word" to confuse intelligent design with creationism,
It's not confusing to anyone but those naive enough to believe what comes out of one side of the mouths of folks like Johnson while ignoring what comes out the other side.
: and then be sure to liken creationism to astrology, belief in a flat earth, and holocaust denial.
Well? Isn't it?
: 1. Argue for the superfluity of design.
As I showed in my post above, scientists like Paul Davies, who believe in some sort of creator who set the universe and its physical laws in motion, have no problem with this in the realm of evolution.
: This action point is also getting increasingly difficult to implement simply on the basis of empirical evidence,
What empirical evidence? Things like "the design inference" and "irreducible complexity" don't cut it. They're philosophical concepts, period.
: but by artificially defining science as an enterprise limited solely to material mechanisms, one conveniently eliminates design from scientific discussion.
Whoever wrote this obviously has no real understanding of the issue he's trying to discuss. In everyday science, when someone tries to come up with a cause for some set of observations, he naturally excludes supernatural causes. If Watson and Crick had invoked a supernatural cause when trying to figure out the mechanism of heredity, they would have quit immediately after deciding, "this is a miracle of God's creation and we'll never be able to understand it." And if every time a scientist has trouble explaining something, and finds a gap in knowledge, he resorts to a "God of the Gaps" explanation, then science would go nowhere. And because scientists don't know everything, they can't say a priori just where to draw the line (if one even exists) between phenomena that are explainable via non-natural causes and those that aren't. So in a practical sense, scientists must not resort to "God" as an explanation for anything, because the history of science shows that they've always been wrong if they did. In a philosophical or metaphysical sense they might well be justified in allowing that certain things are only explainable supernaturally, but because no supernatural being has declared itself to the world's scientists, they can't invoke him or it to explain anything in particular. So, demanding that scientists give a priori weight to the Christian God as an explanation for, say, life on earth, is demanding something of science what it ought not to do -- teach religious ideas.
: Thus any gap in our knowledge of how material mechanisms brought about some biological system does not reflect an absence of material mechanisms in nature to produce the system or a requirement for design to account for the system, but only a gap in our knowledge readily filled by carrying on as we have been carrying on.
A right good summary. But obviously the writer is just dumbly copying words he doesn't understand.
: 2. Play the suboptimality card.
It's a powerful card alright.
: For most people the designer is a benevolent, wise God.
Right here is a good example of how ID proponents can't separate the Christian God as the Designer from the general notion of any supernatural or superintelligent being as Designer. It shows that their agenda is to promote Christianity, with creation/evolution only a convenient means of doing so.
: This allows for the exploitation of cognitive dissonance by pointing to cases of apparent incompetent or wicked design in nature.
Exactly. And their are certainly examples of incompetent (from an engineering standpoint) and wicked (from a moral standpoint) design in nature. I won't bother to point these out here, but will leave them for a future post if anyone wants to see some.
: I believe intelligent design has good answers to this objection,
I have yet to see one. Readers will note once again an appeal to the Christian God as the Designer.
: but the problem of evil is wonderfully adept at clouding intellects.
The problem of evil is a concept, not an entity. It is not "adept" at anything.
Of course, critics of ID are often adept at showing why the problem of evil is a huge moral problem for ID proponents. The lack of good answers from Christians generally about this problem is precisely what makes the argument so powerful. It's so powerful that cognitive dissonance is indeed often set up in Christians who contemplate it. Why, indeed, would a benevolent God create a natural world "red in tooth and claw"?
: This is one place where skepticism does well exploiting emotional responses.
True as a general rule of thumb, but not especially applicable to the problem being discussed in this thread.
: 3. Achieve a scientific breakthrough. Provide detailed testable models of how irreducibly complex biochemical systems like the bacterial flagellum could have emerged by material mechanisms.
Biology is still in its infancy, so expecting answers to hard problems is like wondering why the Wright brothers couldn't build a spaceship to take us to the stars.
: I don't give this much hope, but if you could pull this off, intelligent design would have a lot of backpedaling to do.
Given Michael Behe's forced backpedaling on his bacterial flagellum problem already, the author ought to give it some hope.
: 4. [And finally] Paint a more appealing world picture.
Always a good argumentative technique.
: Skepticism is at heart an austere enterprise. It works by negation. It makes a profession of shooting things down.
How to shoot oneself in the foot: this is what ID is all about. Be skeptical about all sorts of things about the mechanisms of evolution, then declare that IDism is true by default.
There's nothing wrong with negation in science. Indeed, it's an integral part of the scientific method. Scientists constantly challenge each other and each other's ideas. Ideas that don't stand up to repeated challenge are discarded. Ideas that survive repeated challenges are gradually accepted as fact.
: This doesn't set well with a public that delights in novel possibilities.
Nor with a public that delights in astrology, ghosts, UFOs, etc.
: In his Pensées, Blaise Pascal wrote, "People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive." Pascal was not talking about people merely believing what they want to believe, as in wish-fulfillment. Rather, he was talking about people being swept away by attractive ideas that capture their heart and imagination.
Sure, but again this has nothing to do with the facts of science -- the notions that have stood the test of time.
: Poll after poll indicates that for most people evolution does not provide a compelling vision of life and the world.
Of course not, because most people have been exposed to the braindeadening ideas of religion most of their lives. And of course, the popular media such as movies and television tend to reinforce stupid beliefs because that's what sells.
: Providing such a vision is in my view skepticism's overriding task if it is to unseat intelligent design. Good luck.
The author is asking scientists to do the job of philosophers and religious teachers. How silly. Science tells us about the way the world is. Philosophy and religion tell us about the way their practioners think it ought to be. The great mistake of people like this author are to confuse the two areas of human endeavor.
AlanF
