Is Dell's Piece About Intelligent Design An Accident?

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Is Dell's Piece About Intelligent Design An Accident?

By Frederick Smith
Nov. 21, 2005

Dell Gines wrote a very crafty piece. He is obviously a very good writer. The problem is that his article is as equally misleading as it is well written. Is he misleading us by design, or was it an accident?

It attempts to mislead in three fundamental ways, by stating the following:

Intelligent Design is considered science by scientists
Intelligent Design is a scientific theory
Intelligent Design at least suffers from the same "deficiencies" that evolution “suffers" from

First, let me address the clever analogies, then I will address the above point by point, finally, I will show that ID is nothing more than a political [wedge] issue.


Imagine that you left the house a mess, you know, nasty. You didn’t
flush the toilets, all your dirty close were out, half eaten food was
rotting on dirty plates on the counter, and your dog had poop on the
floor you hadn’t cleaned up. You come home after work, like a pig
returning to a sty, open up the door and…da dah, spotless! I mean Mary
Poppins spoon full of sugar clean, Mr. Bald Head Clean clean, brand new
car smell clean.
.

.

.

Is it simpler to believe that infinite causation created life, and that
life amazingly, and luckily through adaptation, spawned from a simple
single cell organism to the millions upon millions of plant and animal
life that we see on the earth? That each species we see, including man,
occurred by macro adaptation and chance, to the point where we are now?
Or is it simpler to believe that order is the process of intelligence,
and that what we see in the numerous plant and animal species was
purposefully created and designed by something intelligent? 



Hummm…was it your mom, or the alien and the earthquake that cleaned
your house? 



Occam’s Razor.

Is comparing a cleaned house by a mom as opposed to an alien, similar to a life by chance as opposed to God? In the former, obviously “mom” fits Occam's Razor. But why? Well, we have moms. We've seen them clean houses. We've never seen aliens. We've never seen self cleaning houses. We can explain mom. She came from grandma and grandpa, we know what kind of food she likes and what kind of cleaning solutions she prefers. We know when she was born, and we know that the world is full of moms.

As to the latter, we've seen evolution. We are seeing it now with bird flu – rather, we hope not to see it. We've seen it with AIDS. We've seen it in fruit flies and weeds. Yes, both macro and micro evolution have been directly observed. We see it in the mountain of evidence that science accepts. That life changes slowly over time and that all life has a common ancestor is accepted as fact. The details of how fast and under what conditions natural selection occurs is still subject to scientific debate, but the basic frame is considered law.

Most people believe in god(s), but we've never seen one. Intelligent Design purports to be science. Is anyone of faith uncomfortable that God is put in the lime-light? Should science attempt to prove or disprove God? Dell claims this isn't the case – I guess it depends on Dell's definition of a creator. To me, a being that can design the universe must be extremely complex. It, I would presume, must be conscious and sentient. In other words, it must be a whole heck of a lot like the gods from the many religions in the world. Falsifying Intelligent Design, therefore, requires, what, disproving God? We cannot disprove God, because we cannot prove a negative.

Dell claims that the “other side” involves “infinite causation”. But, doesn't the ID side also involve infinite causation? His comparison is flawed, here is the real comparison:

Either we have:

The universe exploded from a dense point, we don't know what came "before"
The first life form came into being, we have several very good ideas as to how this may have happened
Life proliferates from a common ancestor and changes over time, and we know a heck of a lot about the details

Or:

A supremely complex creature came into being, we don't know how
It creates the entire universe to its design, we have no clue how

The former is science. The former is a combination of several, independent theories (each of which could stand without the other two), starting with the Big Bang. The big bang is one of the most solid theories we know about. The latter is pseudo-science. There is absolutely no scientific evidence that anything occurred in an intelligent manner – more on that below.

Now, lets apply the Razor. First, the scales are tilted in favor of the former, since the latter doesn't actually consist of valid scientific theories, but lets assume they do. Where did this first complex creature come from, so complex that it can make universes? What made it? [And then, what made that which made it and on and on] Using the same “logic”, surely it was an even more advanced being. The latter is at least one, but as much as an infinite, level of complexity higher than the former, therefor, Occam's Razor chooses the former.

As to a guiding hand in making, say, humans, why did this being get it so wrong? Why are there blood vessels in our eyes in front of the cells that do the actual seeing? Why do we have a blind spot? Why do some legless snakes still have vestiges of useless leg bones in their bodies? Surely, the extra energy required to grow useless bones is less than ideal, even if survivable. Vestiges and “screw ups” point Occam's Razor sharply away from a guiding hand from above. See talkorigins.org for a rather long list of other such examples.

Remember also that the seemingly remote chances that humans came to be by random chance says little about the process, in other words, it's also amazing that the USA came to be, given all of the twists and turns of history, but here we are nevertheless, and no one claims that America was just popped into being from On High.

Now, for the three points I mentioned at the start:

First, It's very easy to search the Internet and find that science doesn't accept ID as “science”, this, also from WikiPedia – with all of his WikiPedia lookups, I'm surprised he didn't look this one up, the focus of his article:


Intelligent Design (ID) is the controversial assertion that certain
features of the universe and of living things exhibit the
characteristics of a product resulting from "an intelligent cause or
agent, as opposed to an unguided process such as natural
selection."Proponents claim that Intelligent Design stands on equal
footing with, or is superior to, current scientific theories regarding
the origin of life.




The
scientific community largely views Intelligent Design not as valid
scientific theory but as neocreationist pseudoscience or junk science.
The US National Academy of Sciences has stated that Intelligent Design
"and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life"
are not science because their claims cannot be tested by experiment and
propose no new hypotheses of their own.

Second, theories must be falsifiable. The basic tenets of evolution, common ancestry and slow change over time, are easy to falsify. Genetics pretty much confirmed what was predicted – that we are related to bananas in a way as provable as that of Dell being related to his mom. The latter is equally easy to falsify; since animals change slowly over time, and since new groups evolve from older groups, if we ever find a human skull in the same rock as a T-rex, evolution is in trouble. There were no Flintstones, folks, dinosaurs and humans are separated by 65 million years. That's 65 millions years of fossils that could easily give evolution a run for its money. The [relatively] few we have found are in agreement.


So the question has to become has either evolution or intelligent
design been falsified? I would argue no. In terms of evolution, every
time a critique, such as the huge gap in the fossil record, better
known as the absence of transitional fossils, occurs, the scientific
community who believes in evolutionary theory adjusts the theory to
beat the critique

A very misleading bit of text, I'm afraid to say. Intelligent Design is not falsifiable – how could we do this? As for transitional fossils, the very opposite is true.

Take the example of whales, which are marine mammals, not fish. According to evolution, whales must have evolved from land animals. This was predicted and accepted long before we found any transitional fossils. It may surprise many, but fossils are not, in fact, the best evidence for evolution – far from it! We will never have all or even most or even many fossils. Remember the last bit of road kill you saw? Do you think it will turn into a fossil? The odds are probably a million to one. For the very best evidences of evolution, see talkorigins.org.

Anyway, we were lucky enough to find fossils of animals [this happened only within the last 15 years or so] that were “in between” land mammals and a whales - lets call them A. The reaction from the Creationist community was to complain that we lacked a fossil between both the whale and animal A, and lacked a fossil between land animals and animal A! Folks, they keep moving the straw-man fossil bar. We will never have enough fossils to satisfy them. Luckily, it's not necessary.

Three, the deficiencies of both “theories”. Well, that's an easy one too. Intelligent Design cannot suffer from “theory deficiencies” because it's not a theory, being non-falsifiable and having no evidence and being unable to make predictions that can be tested. Evolution has the same deficiencies as all theories do.

For example, volcanism is fairly well understood, but we still find it hard to predict when volcanoes will blow. Gravity is fairly well understood – both Newton and Einstein were correct, but we don't actually know what in the heck gravity itself really is.

Theories explain facts, and science is for the most part a collection of theories, so statements such as “gravity is just a theory” are ridiculous. That “just” theory manages to get communications satellites into orbit and predict precisely where Pluto will be 3,000 years from now. I find it funny that no school board in the nation wants to put disclaimers such as this in text books, “gravity is just a theory, not a fact [a higher power may hold our feet to the ground]”. Only someone ignorant of the definitions involved would think such a disclaimer at all sensible. This may be why Kansas had to first redefine science before ID could pass muster - that alone should tell us much, folks.

Now for the touchy element of this rebuttal. Is he misleading us by design, or was it an accident? Given that he knows about, and uses, WikiPedia, yet refused to actually look up Intelligent Design, I'd have to say that Occam's Razor suggests it was no mere accident...

I'm willing to make an exception for Dell Gines and assume that it is groups such as the Discovery Institute, groups with vast financial resources, groups that realized that Biblical Creation couldn't pass muster, that gave him his faulty information. The connections between donors, fund raising and the like is clear. ID is a political move to re-introduce Creation into public schools – just ask Pat Robertson. It's very clever, I admit, in a nation that knows little about science [that may also explain why this is primary a USA-only deal, as our rich nation-friends in the world typically have better public education than we do] - ID certainly sounds good.

More from WikiPedia:


The Intelligent design movement arose out of an organized
neo-creationist campaign to promote a religious agenda calling for
broad social, academic and political changes employing intelligent
design arguments in the public sphere, primarily in the United States.
The movement claims Intelligent Design exposes the limitations of
scientific orthodoxy, and of the secular philosophy of Naturalism.
Intelligent Design proponents allege that science, by relying upon
naturalism, demands an adoption of a naturalistic philosophy that
dismisses out of hand any explanation that contains a supernatural
cause.




Phillip E. Johnson, considered the father of the Intelligent Design
movement and its unofficial spokesman stated that the goal of
Intelligent Design is to cast creationism as a scientific concept.
Nearly all Intelligent Design concepts and the associated movement are
the products of Fellows of the the Discovery Institute, and its Center
for Science and Culture, who continue to guide the movement. The
Institute follows its wedge strategy while conducting its adjunct Teach
the Controversy campaign.



The conflicting statements of leading Intelligent Design proponents,
that Intelligent Design is not religious, and that Intelligent Design
has its foundation in the Bible, the former being directed at the
public while the latter at their conservative Christian supporters, is
explained by Barbara Forrest, an expert who has written extensively on
the movement, as being due to the Discovery Institute obfuscating its
agenda as a matter of policy. She has written that the movement's
"activities betray an aggressive, systematic agenda for promoting not
only Intelligent Design creationism, but the religious worldview that
undergirds it."

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About the author Frederick Smith: I enjoy writing about the positive virtues of humanism - humanists are the good guys.

This is my second foray into the UK writing discordia. This time around, I want to be a tad more raw - maybe a bit edgier (does that sound "art-see"?) Maybe I'll address even more issues that most Americans consider taboo...

About my personal background and life: I was born, I got some education, worked, ate, and had some kids. It seems I like to write – something that was unknown to me until relatively recently...How's that for detail? ;)

Like so many these days, I too have a blog! But, I haven't updated it since the day after I signed up for it, so I won't bother to give out the link.

Hate mail is welcome unless you are from the Army Of God. Please! It's not that I mind seeing pictures of aborted fetuses in my inbox, but once you've seen one you've pretty much seen them all...

Email: dahlek65@yahoo.com

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