Intelligent Design Creationism

I'm gonna talk about a topic that that really is a very controversial one if you've been reading about this and in the papers and in Time magazine even recently it's a God versus Darwin and I've talked about this in a lot of different venues that's the first time I've done it in an arena and and I've been told that the the scoreboard is going to be as we're as we're going along in the talk giving the Darwin score in the gods score so you'll be able to keep track of who's winning as we go along but really that's that's not the way that I'm going to do this and I hope that as we go along you'll see that the stereotypical way in which this controversy gets presented as a battle between science versus religion really miss States the way in which things really happen there is a sense in which this is creationism versus versus evolution but it's not really something about science against religion and I hope that as we go along you'll you'll get a sense of why that sell so I'm gonna start by by just talking about the trial and this is something I'm sure you might have read something about because it was very widely covered as you'll see here just some of the the media sources that that had articles newspaper magazine TV from the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal hell we down to Rolling Stone and and People magazine so this was something that was very broadly covered nationally and internationally a great interest for a lot of different reasons here's the yours truly as I'm walking to the court this is the third day of the trial they the lead lawyer for the plaintiffs Eric Rothschild is there next to me next to him is Tammy Kitzmiller she was the the lead plaintiff of the 11 parents that sued the district now this is the walk from the law office to the courtroom they call it the perp walk it's the one time of course when the cameras are allowed to to film people and they said you know walk slowly enough because the cameramen are going to be running backwards and that's of course the way in which this this happens once you're in court things are much more much more sedate so this was this was a trial that really for the first time put in to the legal decision making process the status of intelligent design creationism and this was a trial that that really the intelligent design group had been looking for for many many years since they had had gotten the movement together it was really aimed at having a test case and they were very very confident about the fact that they thought they would win in court let me just give you a few examples of this this is a quote from William demske one of the leaders of the intelligent design movement several years before there was a court case he says I'll wager is a bottle of single-malt Scotch should it ever go to trial whether I deem a legitimately be taught in public school science curricula that I D will pass all constitutional hurdles so I mean even pretty cocky about this he put together a white paper for the the attorneys that were defending the school district defending intelligent design there and he called it the Weisse strategy and here's a picture from the the document this was to brief the lawyers and how they were to to challenge the expert witnesses and you'll notice that he visualized this with a vise crushing the heads of his opponents on his website months before he had this picture of a little darwin doll with his head in the vise and again the idea here was you know we will we will crush them in this in this circumstance they'll be on the stand they'll have to answer the questions and will will prevail in this case even after the trial got started the the view from the intelligent design group was really very positive with regard to the judge who had been picked and here's something from one of the intelligent design web blogs and common descent where they're talking about the judge judge Jones who's a good old boy brought up through the conservative ranks so they were happy with his choice the the judge gets picked really by a computer at random so no one knew who was going to be picked but they were very happy with this choice they talked about the fact that he was an assistant scoutmaster as well that counted to something a buddy of Governor Tom Ridge and more than that appointed by G W his self so if they really took this as being someone with impeccable conservative credentials mentioned how George W Bush had himself come out just the previous year in favor of intelligent design mentioned how how he's a friend of others who who supported this as well and and say he's not going to go against his political allies here right he's one of us and clearly this is this is a win for us now they expected a win and they said the ACLU was obviously going to appeal so this won't be over until it goes to the Supreme Court I've seen the bottom line there if it says but now we own that too so they were very very sure about about this but what happened in the case what was the final decision not quite what what was expected here's the headline when the decision was announced breathtaking inanity was the quote from the official opinion of the court the federal judgment says no words as he comes down against evolutions rival here you have a picture of Tammy Kitzmiller and Kristy ream and other one of the the parents giving each other a low five and in response to when they heard the verdict I hear a couple of quotes from the judge's decision intelligent design says the the court is a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory more than that intelligent design is creationism relabeled and then the legal decision that teaching it in the public schools is unconstitutional that's the the ultimate resolution the legal resolution here now what was it that that the the judge said about this in general he says I D aspires to change the ground rules of science to make room for religion specifically beliefs consonant with a particular version of Christianity so these are the elements of the of the legal aspect of the case that I'm going to talk about in in part so one of it is the the nature of of science here that it's changing the ground rules of science it's not science and it violates that and more than that it's religion and not just any religion it's a very particular to sectarian narrow form of religion and of course the Constitution not allowing the establishment of religion or preferentially giving benefit to one religion over another wouldn't allow any of these things and that's what leads to the unconstitutionality so that's the the end of the story in terms of how things worked out and as you might imagine the intelligent design group was not quite as happy with the decision and with the judge as they were originally so here's someone from the the intelligent design group John West from the Discovery Institute a pining about the opinion and the judge afterwards he says judge Jones got in his soapbox to offer his own views of science religion and evolution he makes it clear that he wants his place in history as the judge who issued a definitive decision about intelligent design this is an activist judge who has delusions of grandeur and it's interesting that Judge Jones in his opinion itself had predicted that people who objected to this would call him an activist judge I mean this has become such a common term of abuse and he specifically said I will be called this but this is resolutely not in activist court so he anticipated this objection so that was that was quoted from the intelligent design group in a lot of the papers but there was a lot more on websites they objected to this as well so here's from one of the ID websites they called his view the grinch opinion it was issued December 20th so around Christmas time the picture of the Grinch it says a recent interpretive illustration of Judge Johnny Jones the Third's and they were they thought if they miss the Grinch who sold who stole Christmas here's an article from the way Phyllis a flea described it she said he was a false judge who made a mockery of this case Judge John Jones the third could still be chairman of the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board if millions of evangelical Christians had not pulled the lever for George W Bush in 2000 yet this federal judge who owes his position entirely to those voters in the president who appointed him stuck the knife in the backs of those who brought him to the dance in the Kitzmiller V Dover trial okay now this is starting to get to be stronger language right sticking the knife in the back that's that's pretty aggressive and this is the thing that one finds this one reads the the literature from intelligent design they really speak about this in terms of a culture war and described it as a military a military fight that they're they're after in the terms are very pugilistic and militaristic here's something from a new website that just came up oops I missed uh here we go here Judge Jones this is from a site again something that William demske has put up this is their front page there's a little caricature of Jones it says Judge Jones he's a wacky zany activist he's a rogue and he loves that old-time Darwinian religion so you know here now they're they're not as happy with him as they were before and this is actually a site that's encouraging high school students to join up in the movement and as you see in the middle it says join the Oh er me oh he is the name of the site so really here is part of a turnaround in the view following the case there's William Dempsey down to the right Jonathan wells another one of the the IT guys and their new book the design of life and I'll mention that a little bit later ok so this is the shift from before and after now even though some of this is a little amusing it's important to recognize that this is really serious business and this was an article that came out a while ago that talked about what had happened to Judge Jones following the case and he revealed that he and his family had to be put under protection of federal marshals because he had received death threats following the the issuing of the verdict and the quote from Judge Jones here says if you would have told me when I got on the bench four years ago that I would have had death threats in a case like this as opposed to for example a crack cocaine case when I meet out a heavy sentence I would have told you that you were crazy but I did and that's a sad statement okay so this is something we really need to keep in mind the folks who worry about this are very serious and some some dangerously so that's that's unfortunate so let's look now back at what actually happened in Dover what was the policy and how this proceeded so Dover Pennsylvania a small town south of Harrisburg and creationists on the board who got a majority decided to implement a policy that would introduce intelligent design into the science curriculum so they wanted to update the statement they did update the statement saying that students would be required to learn about supposed gaps and problems in Darwin's theory and be told of other theories of evolution including but not limited to intelligent design so explicitly putting this in now actually this is an interesting hybrid policy it was one that explicitly promoted ID which is what the intelligent design group had been doing previously but they had been recognizing that that wasn't working for them so that actually started backing away from that and recommending that you not call for this by name and to talk just about a critical evaluation of evolution and gaps and problems so this was actually something that combined both of them it hadn't quite got the message that they shouldn't have mentioned ID directly and it did include both so it actually made a very good test case for both of the strategies that the intelligent design group was making the second thing that the policy did was bring in the key intelligent design textbook that was designed for public schools of pandas and people that's a cover of it there and that was listed as something that would be available for students and 60 copies of this were anonymously donated to to the library when this happened there was someone who wound up calling me who was in England but who'd come from a school district in Pennsylvania who was so as someone who's a scientist who was so angry at this and he said you know would you mind if I had 60 copies of your book Tower of Babel donated to the school district and I actually should have said yes in retrospect but what I said was you know what would really make a better statement is if instead you had 60 copies donated of different books to give the scientific explanation because there's just a huge huge range of evidence and that would really make a better statement the other thing that was in this was that a disclaimer was to be read when there was evolution taught that students would hear and supposedly the teachers were to read this here's the excerpt from the disclaimer it says because Darwin's theory is a theory continues to be tested the theory is not a fact now this is actually language that we've seen again and again from creationist initiatives contrasting the scientific notion of theory with the way the person on the street here is it which is theory as just someone's guess and so on obviously in science when we talk about theory gravitational theory cell theory grab relativity theory and so on we don't mean it in that sense but they always apply the term here in that colloquial sense essentially to make people think that this is just a guess the scientists are just unsure about this which of course is not the case they talked about here gaps in the theory for which there's no evidence and then it goes on to talk about intelligent design and pandas and people available for students now the teachers were supposed to read this and one of the things that sort of made me stand up and Cheer what I heard about this as the case was developing was when the biology teachers as a unit decided that they would refuse to read the statement that it was professionally irresponsible of them that this misrepresented science and for those of us in the university where academic freedom is really taken for granted that might not seem such a big thing but you really don't have that kind of academic freedom in the public schools and really they were putting their jobs at risk by doing this taking a professional stand for the integrity of science so that really just it just really made me be very proud of the teachers who were on the front line of this okay so now let's talk about what it is that's being proposed as the alternative what is intelligent design so here's a brochure that the Discovery Institute had put out several years ago from their Center for the renewal of science and culture which was a subgroup within it that dealt with this particular issue where they were explaining what intelligent design is now here you see the image with God the Sistine Chapel image of reaching out to DNA in their original logo they actually had the full image with atom there but they had removed adamant and put in the coil of DNA later ones they they took God away a little bit more to make it a little more nebulous and their logo became well actually a nebula God's eye nebula all to sort of progressively hide the religious aspect of their view because what they want people to think is that this is a scientific view and if you look inside this is the way they describe it design theory they say is a new science for a new century and and they appeal to a number of different things and it's important to recognize this it's not just about biology here's an example from it where they say this is true in physics too so they're actually drawing from other other sciences it's not just an attack upon biological views evolutionary views but physics geology a whole range of things wind up getting involved as well but it's biology that's the center so here's a quote biology they say presence of complex functionally integrated machines like this bacterial motor have supposedly cast doubt on Darwinian mechanisms of self-assembly sparked new interest in the design hypothesis so they're using scientific terminology here the the bacterial flagellum actually is kind of their poster child and appeared again and again and again in the in the Kitzmiller trial it almost has seemed as though their entire case was was riding on the tail of the flagellum it was brought up so many times definitely they're they're the main example that they give again and again and again okay now the thing that you hear from them regularly is the claim we're not creationist ideas science these are both quotes from Discovery Institute spokespeople ideas in creationism just not the same ideas not creationism so they'll put this in op-eds and letters to the editor they'll say this very regularly claiming that they're different and this was one of the things that was at issue in the trial because courts had previously ruled on creation science and they wanted to say oh no those rules those court cases don't apply to us and one of the things that that was mentioned was the way in which television design is defined and described in that book pandas and people so here's a quote from textbook intelligent design means it says that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency with their distinctive features already intact fish with fins and scales birds with feathers beaks and wings etc so you can sort of see within this some of the elements that things arose sort of as they are so it's a rejection of evolution and it's through some intelligent agency and they'll often point out look there's no mention of God here there's no direct appeal to to the Bible right why would you say that this is is creationism or has anything to do with that now one of the things that was very nice about the trial and and you able to do in a trial setting is make use of the process of discovery and subpoena and one of the things that we wound up doing was finding out a little bit about the history of the book of pandas and people were able to actually subpoena earlier drafts of that text book look at the manuscripts so let's take a look now at a comparison of this which is what I just read in the published version to one of the earlier manuscripts and here is the way we see in the earlier manuscript creation means that the various forms of life began abruptly through the agency of an intelligent creator with their distinctive features already intact fish with fins and scales birds with feathers and beaks and wings etc okay so what had happened here right you have the very same definition but instead of intelligent design telogen agency you had creation creator they'd taken out the one and put in the other language but kept the content the same now this is just one example but it was pervasive and one could see not just this in one draft but we were able to Sabina actually a whole series of drafts which went back to the early 80s under a different title they changed titles as they went along early it was called creation biology and then they called it biology and creation and then biology and origins and finally the name that was published under pandas and people and in tracking the use of terminology in these earlier drafts a very interesting pattern arose right if you take a look at the two lines in the graph the word count on terminology that says creation creationism creationist is tracked in red and in those early drafts you see that as the dominant one and really nothing at all with regard to the term intelligent design and so on and then suddenly right at this point a total switch okay and just as in the example that I showed you every place that had had creationism we then had intelligent design creationist was changed to intelligent design proponent okay so here you have a very nice switch of terminology in really just a search and replace kind of way and what was it that happened what was at that that switch there if you take a look at that's happened in the middle of 1987 so the early 1987 version has the creationist language the version the manuscript at the end of 87 has the intelligent design language so what happened in between there that's the point where the Supreme Court issued a ruling against creation science and creationism saying that teaching it in the schools is unconstitutional okay this was a case in Louisiana that went all the way up to the US Supreme Court and there you had a ruling and you can just sort of see at the at the meeting that they must have had mm-hmm the Supreme Court has just ruled that were unconstitutional what should we do about that and someone said hmm well maybe we should change the name and literally it seemed as though it was a it was a word processor kind of change and let me just show you one of the nice examples of that here's a scan from one of those earlier drafts where the term was creationists and as I said at the in the published version it was intelligent design proponents but in the second-last of the of the drafts before the published version this form was found can you see it see design proponent cysts okay it's it's the missing link this this is an example that shows you really the transitional form between yes transitional forms do exist between creationism and and intelligent design so this was something that was just very clear in the case there was lots of evidence that well we were able to present but clearly a smoking gun here with regard to that claim now how about this claim that that intelligent sign isn't religion that it's not religious here's William demske making a claim of this sort right he says intelligent design is a strictly scientific theory devoid of religious commitments and again if you look at op-ed pieces and things that they say in public forums this will be something that that's very common in what they say but if you're familiar with their literature and what they say in other forms you'll see that that's not really consistent so here's William demske speaking again but to a different audience an audience of supporters and here's what he says as the world is a mirror representing the divine life the mechanical philosophy was ever blind to this fact intelligent design on the other hand readily embraces the sacramental nature of physical reality indeed intelligent design is just the logos theology of John's Gospel we stated in the idiom of information theory so here it's very clear that this is a religiously based in fact based on a particular religion and there are lots and lots of such examples and what I want to do is just give you a sampling of some of these things to show the religious basis of this here's a quote from Philip Johnson he's the now-retired law professor who's really credited with organizing the intelligent design movement and here's what he has written about this my colleagues and I of the intelligent design movement my colleagues and I speak of theistic realism or sometimes mere creation as the defining concept of our movement this means we affirm that God is objectively real as creator that the reality of God is tangibly recorded in evidence accessible to science particularly biology okay so this is the defining concept so it's really quite disingenuous to say that there are no religious commitments this is base basic to it elsewhere Johnson said you know either the gospel of crisis the centerpiece of the new order or it's nothing okay so really this this is at base a religious position one of the things that came out in the trial was a leaked document from the Discovery Institute essentially an internal fundraising document that laid out a strategic plan for how they were going to get their view into the school so this is from the preamble to that talking about what they see as the social terrible social consequences of materialism the scientific worldview of materialism they say it's been devastating what are some of the social consequences that they're talking about here the the social evils things like abortion homosexuality divorce these are the the standard sorts of things this is from the Discovery Institute which also has very much of a lazy affair pro-capitalist view and so they also mentioned product liability loss as one of the evil consequences of this and so then we have to defeat it we have to defeat materialism and cut it off at the source the source they say is scientific materialism so this is an attack against science as a whole design theory they say promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions so here in this internal document it becomes very clear again the the religious nature of their view and one could go on and on and on I'll just mention one recent example that you may have seen Ann Coulter in her new book godless spends almost a third of the book attacking evolution and promoting intelligent design that's a that's a large part of this that didn't really get too much play in the in the press mostly her her other statements about the the 9/11 widows who was was what got play but really her understanding of evolution was really on a par with her understanding of the the grief of these of these women and you can see the way in which he's putting it forward evolution the claim is is godless we need to replace this with intelligent design now it's interesting right it wasn't just Coulter alone where did she get some of this well it turns out she got it from the intelligent design group here's William demske shortly after the publication and his blog saying I'm happy to report that I was in constant correspondence with Anne regarding her chapter Thunder Arwen ISM indeed I take responsibility for any errors in those chapters and the big smiley face there so now he was he was pretty pleased he said you know Ann Coulter is going to promote our movement more than than anyone else I actually think that it's probably more a sign of how loath this has sunk if Ann Coulter is is the is the leading representative of this that's a that's unfortunate now here's here's the thing right godless is the notion that's operative here the wedge document there talks about the theistic consequences that have undermined this right and we have to replace it with something that supposedly is consonant with a theistic understanding and here's where I wanted to step back and do a little bit about the theological view is it really the case that evolution is godless because this is portrayed as the science versus religion Darwin versus God and here's where I want to to make us think a little bit about that and question whether that's so even though that's put forward in the stereotypical media reports and it's certainly the way the creationist wanted to be promoted let's take a look and see if that's really true so is evolution necessarily godless well not necessarily your so here's a little cartoon that kind of gives an alternative view it's God having created the world resting a little bit and says I'm tired of making decisions let's just go with natural selection now that's kind of an amusing funny way to put this but in fact that's a dominant theological position that's a view that says God creates the world with it's natural laws in place that give rise to all of the complexities of the world and it's not the case the dark that God has to go in and constantly fiddle with things he creates it in such a way that the laws including the evolutionary laws are in place to produce creation as as intended when this is a mainstream theological position as a position that was put forward in the Catholic Church so the previous Pope John Paul the second had an encyclical letter to the Pontifical Academy of Science where he talks about evolutionary theory as it's more than a hypothesis well supported by evidence and not in contradiction to Catholic faith that actually made big news but it shouldn't have been news because this was old an old position within the Catholic Church of Pope Pius the 12th back in the 1950's had said very much the same thing that evolution is not in contradiction with faith now it's not usually from the Catholic side that you get opposition to evolution usually it's been from the Protestant side and so here I'm going to mention someone on on that side and and lots of people that I could pull from but I mentioned benjamin warfield here who was the theologian that princeton theological seminary and here's what he wrote I said I don't think there's any general statement in the Bible any part of the kind of creation in Genesis 1 or 2 or anywhere alluded to that need to be opposed by evolution now why is Warfield important Warfield was the theologian who was responsible for getting together the series of pamphlets called the fundamentals okay and it was out of the series of pamphlets that much of the fundamentalist movement got started so this is an interesting way in which sort of current fundamentalists who oppose evolution have forgotten really their their roots in history and those people didn't see that there was a necessary contradiction here the way that I put it in in Tower of Babel was that evolution is godless sure but it's godless in the same way that plumbing is godless okay as scientists we go about our business as plumbers go about their business and you don't as part of that process appeal to the divine appeal to miracles but it doesn't mean that you're an atheist that doesn't mean that you're your godless that's a different kind of question now this is not an unusual view this is a mainstream view so let me just give you a couple more examples it's called theistic evolution generally there are other other names but here's a statement from the Presbyterian Church there's no contradiction between an evolutionary theory of human origins and the doctrine of God is creator lots of mainstream Protestant denominations have these sorts of statements saying that there is no contradiction that's a dominant theistic evolution is a dominant Christian view and this is the thing that that never really gets across because the way in which the creationists want to put this forward is is though they're representing the Christian view whereas in fact they're rejecting the mainstream Christian view there are much narrower sectarian view and just to hammer this point home here's a quote from William demske explicitly rejecting that mainstream view design theorist he says are no friends of theistic evolution so they're rejecting the mainstream Christian view this is important thing to recognize that the way typically this puts forward as though they're representing Christianity is not so and this is what came across to the judge as well this is a narrow special interest form of religion lots of examples that one could give and and here's some to just show this in a slightly different light here's an interview at Christian Book which is an evangelical book and it is asking someone you know what's been the response of the Christian community to your work and who's being interviewed here this is Philip Johnson again the leader of the intelligent design movement he says I'm extremely controversial or even dismissed out of hand in the Christian academic community in the moderate to liberal mainstream denominations okay dismissed out of hand hey this is not the dominant view how about this here's demske speaking in 1995 he says it's ironic that the design theorists have received an even cooler reception from the theological community than from the Darwinist establishment which not surprisingly isn't well disposed towards the design theaters either which of course is true science has never taken too seriously but it's not recognized that the theological community has also been equally unhappily unhappy with them have things gotten better for them no they haven't here's demske now speaking in 2005 noting a statement from the president of the Institute for religion in the age of science so this is a pro religion group and he says Michael Kavanagh has now issued a formal warning about intelligent design the wedge and Seattle's Discovery Institute urging that people take seriously the threat to education and democracy that these Poe's what was it that Cavanaugh said describing ID he said this is totalitarian religious thought right this is not the kind of religious Christian view that we really want to hold here's one more a recent one from Robert John Russell who's the founder of another similar group and he said intelligent design offers an apparent apologetic hope to believe in Christian Christians when there's none to deliver it makes Christianity seem foolish to agnostic scientists who might otherwise have listened to us it promises only eventual disappointment to Christians who believe in it the lesson to Christians he says is that we should abandon ID as fool's gold okay this is not something that one generally hears about this but this is very common what about the evangelicals go okay those are the mainstream two liberal ones well how about this here's Johnson again and he says the most peculiar reaction I get is the hostility I encounter from many professors at Christian colleges and seminaries you'd be amazed he said I gave you a list of the evangelical institutions that don't want me on campus okay so even from that side there's getting opposition here's one more francis collins right head of the human genome project now a biologist scientists and also a professed evangelical christian so he was asked about intelligent design on interview on the tucker carlson show this was this was just last year and he said that he he thought it in just a scientific way but from his own theological position as well he says I'm not an advocate of intelligent design I think it sets up a God of the gaps kind of scenario so what's he talking about here this is not his own view this is actually a very standard theological objection to a type of argument and here's the way he puts it well you know we haven't yet explained this particular feature of evolution so God must have done that and that's really the strategy that you see again and again and again through all creationist writings they point to something that they say here's a problem with evolution here's a gap here's something they can't explain and the idea is God did that okay that's to say you find God or you say think that you've proven God in the gaps in our understanding of the things that we can't yet explain call the God of the gaps argument because you're finding God and the things that we don't yet know in our ignorance and and Collins is then articulating the theological objection to this he says if science ultimately proves that these gaps aren't gaps after all which is to say science progressively explains more and more about the world then where's God okay God gets crushed out as those gaps get closed and he says we really ought not to ask people to do that so here he's giving really what's a standard theological objection to a standard argument which is the basic intelligent design view and just one final more here's a whole book from a group of evangelical scientists called perspectives on an evolving creation which is arguing for evolution and doing this from what they say is is a clear evangelical perspective so that's a part of the story that I want to try to emphasize it's the reason I've spent so much time on this because you never hear about this it's always portrayed about evolution as being against religion generally against Christianity generally as though their position is representing the whole view and really that's just not at all the case it's a very narrow view and does not represent the general view and evolution really is not equivalent to atheism which is what the judge said as well here defendants the ID defendants in the case and many of the leading proponents of ID make a bedrock assumption which is utterly false presupposition is that evolutionary theory is antithetical to belief in the existence of the supreme beam into religion in general so he was objecting to this saying that it's presuming something claiming to be science and yet making this religious objection and one that really is false so that's a that's one aspect of the case we're showing that intelligent design is religion showing that it's a particular form of religion and then showing how it really makes the same kind of arguments that creationism made before is really just relabeling that now the other part of it was the part having to do with science okay it claims to be science and yet the judge said none of the arguments that are presented by the creationists in the case we're convincing and he concludes that not one defense expert was able to explain how the supernatural action suggested by ID could be anything other than an inherently religious proposition okay accordingly we find that IDs religious nature would have been evident to an objective observer because it directly involves supernatural designer okay now this is part of the testimony that our side gave saying intelligent design like other forms of creationism are fundamentally rejecting the basic requirement of science which is to make appeal to things that one can test against the natural world these are natural explanations empirically testable and so on and although we made that argument it actually turned out that we probably didn't even need to be there because their defense experts were saying pretty much the same thing that they were admitting that this violated the ground rules of science so here's a there are three expert witnesses a Michael Behe Scott Minich and Steve fuller and in the final case opinion you see each of them noted by the judge as having admitted the same thing that be he admits that this is not designed by the laws of nature it's impossible that designer is a natural entity recognizing admitting that the ID group posits a transcendent supernatural designer Minik saying that that this is something that violates the ground rules of science and it has to be broadened to allow supernatural forces to be considered fuller saying the same thing that the veteran the ground rules have to be rejected in this way so their site essentially admitted this and it made it far easier than the know it it was thought to to have been before so here's here's some examples of this from the text book of pandas and people so you can see exactly how this works so here's an example it says this book is going to present you the student with two interpretations right those who hold the two alternative concepts those with the Darwinian frame of reference as well as those who adhere to intelligent design now this is being set up and really exactly the same way that was set up previously under the creation science model right the one that was ruled unconstitutional by the courts before they're the terminology was creation science versus evolution science but the strategy was the same it was put up as though there are only two alternatives and then what they do is go about trying to poke holes in evolution and make you doubt it where the thought was well if you doubt that this is the one that's left over without then having to give any positive evidence for for their own view and in that earlier case the judge said this is a faulty flawed argument it's a false dichotomy it does not represent a valid argument and what we saw here was really the same argument and pandas given in exactly the same way but with just different terminology so here's an example from pandas of how these explanations supposedly work a quote from pandas is there any alternative explanation for their marsupial bones and pouches than that they're homologous and therefore evidence of common ancestry that's the scientific view yes it says there's another sit theory and that's that marsupials were all designed with these reproductive structures now you might expect that they would then go on to explain that okay but that's it that's the explanation they were designed like that and again and again and again throughout the book the pattern is exactly the same here's something that designed to say oh but that's doubtful but there is another explanation the explanation is it was designed like that and that's the end of it okay that's that's the extent of those explanations now in all of my reading of the intelligent design literature only found one place where they're more specific than that and it had to do with Phillip Johnson explaining the Peacocks tail so this is the this is the one case where they get a little more specific so let's take a look at Johnson so we can see how the theory really works the peacock says Johnson this is a quote is something that an uncaring evolutionary process would never allow to develop but which is quote just the kind of creature that a whimsical creator might favor okay so here you see the difference right you've got the scientific explanation the evidence on that one hand and on the other hand you have divine whimsy okay okay so I hope you can see the difference between the scientific explanation and this other it's it's really quite different it violates this basic presumption that in science you have to appeal to a testable natural explanations here's an example in philosophy is called methodological naturalism it's a fancy term but Sidney Harris from science from American scientists had this cartoon that nicely summarizes it you've got this one guy who's been working at the BART board very hard with these elaborate equations but obviously he's he's got a gap in there and then he writes then a miracle occurs and his colleague says you know I think you should be a little more explicit here in step two that in essence is the basis of the ground rules of science you can't appeal to a miracle to explain something that's a gap right you've got to be able to give an explanation in terms of natural processes ones that that are that are testable really this is this is the defining characteristic of science from the point in which science became science we used the term now science but originally science was called natural philosophy okay that's that's actually the the original term and what we meant by natural philosophy was just this kind of approach and what was natural philosophy were reacting against it was reacting against a previous view that did allow explanations in terms of transcendent supernatural forces it was it's called the occult philosophy and really science was a reaction against natural philosophy was a reaction against the occult philosophy and occultism generally so really what's going on here is that intelligent design and other creationists are wanting to bring back this old view this pre scientific view and it came across very clearly in the trial when Michael Behe under cross-examination admitted that under his definition of science this broad definition that astrology would be included as well things that appealed to the supernatural in that way and and this is the thing I think that's important to keep in mind this is really undermining a basic assumption here one of the things that I thought was kind of amusing I found a picture of me he sitting in his office here he is his his books in the background but if you look carefully out the t-shirt that he's wearing you can tell there he's actually got a wizard who looks just like the astrologer up above I think it's probably Gandalf or something but I think it's emblematic of the nature of the intelligent design movement I actually wrote an article at one point called the wizards of Ede and and this is the nature of of their of their view all right here's another example probably the one that's most familiar from the heath this came up again and again in the trial the claim that irreducible complexity is something that that evolution can't explain probably the most common argument that you hear from the intelligent design group and what what what irreducible complexity means according to be he is a functional system such that if you remove any of the parts it doesn't function this example is a mousetrap you've got to have all these parts take away the spring you take away the ham or you take away these things in and gonna catch no mice and so on and his claim is that science can't explain this that evolution can't produce these things here's his argument he says any precursor to an irreducible complex system that's missing a part is by definition non-functional okay so the claim is here's something that science can't explain that evolution can't explain okay and as before what you see here is the dual argument here's a problem for you if you can't do it then then we must be right there are lots of ways of showing what's wrong with this and conceptually one can give an argument in Tower of Babel I showed an argument using clocks which be key and print admitted was a problem for his view and he said I'm going to have to change my definition and fix it but he hasn't yet fixed it and and really doesn't seem to be anything that he can do to fix it this is actually something that we can now observe very clearly and see the evolution of irreducibly complex objects some of the research that that I do with colleagues using evolving digital organisms where essentially you have a little computer programs little viruses that self-replicate randomly mutate their code and are naturally selected can be observed to evolve complex traits and this is something that that was kind of a nice side effect of a study that we did since we're close I'll just go through this rather quickly this was a study where we were actually testing some of Darwin's ideas about how complex functions can arise Darwin was quite aware that organs of extreme perfection would be something that his his view would have to explain it would be a problem and he talked very explicitly and candidly about how he would have to explain this and he had views about how evolution could produce such structures and so what we were doing was trying to see whether Darwin's hypotheses about that could be observed and confirmed in this new digital environment and in fact we found out that that we could see them we see the the evolution in the system of a very complex logical function that arises out of a population that has no ability to do this and in the end does and we're able to track literally mutation by mutation how it is that you go from a code that cannot do it to a specific sequence that can and the the very hypotheses that Darwin suggested that you would see to produce these are just the ones that we saw so this was actually something that was out to test some of Darwin's views and it turned out by happenstance that that one of these complex functions that we discovered at the end if you do knockout experiments you can remove the instructions and turns out by happenstance that they're reduce ibly complex and bt sense so this was not specifically part of the the study itself that was published but you can look at those things and you can see how these things are irreducibly complex and the cool thing is you can watch as evolution produce them okay in just the way that Darwin suggested so you know Darwin was right not surprising this is something where we're now in a position to literally observe very directly why that irreducibly complex argument is is fallacious you can't see evolution producing these things evolution can do the range of things that biologists have for over decades and decades this is a very well-developed and very rich theory and and in science really the ultimate test is is always this practical one right you have confidence in the veracity of a scientific hypothesis if using it works ok we know that something is true because using it makes a difference a practical difference in evolution is like that evolutionary theory isn't a theory in the sense of a gas it's the theory in the sense of an explanatory structure that makes sense of the world it's a cause-effect relationship principles that are observed and tested and can be used ok evolutionary theory is used in medicine you need to have it to be able to understand how and about it antibiotic resistance arises you need to know it so that you have therapies that will work keeping that into account you need to know this in farming situations so that pest resistance to pesticides is taken into account it's even something that's now being used in industry the kinds of digital evolution and computation work that I was talking about is now being used in industry to evolve things to evolve complex designs that are sometimes better than even human designers can do it evolution can produce more complex and useful things so evolution works we're using it all the time and the thing I've said is that Americans will finally believe that evolution is true when they realize that you can make money with it that's the position that we're now in evolution can do that here's just a whole range of things we're using evolutionary computation is producing just these sorts of things that's being used in an aerodynamics computer chip design software design drug design a whole range of things so here's the summary findings from the court ID fails as science on three levels as the judge any one of them would have been sufficient to rule it out of science first violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking permitting supernatural causation that's the key thing really the previous Court had ruled against creation science for the same reason secondly the irreducible complexity arguments have the same flawed illogical contrived dualism of creation science before that and the negative attacks on evolution have been refuted really that's actually a pretty minor one in this it's the other ones that are more central and really the first one in particular so that was the resolution of this the court was very clear this does not qualify as science this is religion this is unconstitutional now there was actually one more thing people always ask what worse than the creationist movement going to be going from now and we already saw the beginning of their movement their new strategy in in the Dover case where they were talking about gaps and problems and the new slogan that they use is is teach the controversy and they wanted to introduce it in that way but the judge recognized that and said no this is this is not acceptable either that claiming that you're going to introduce just the controversy but but not supposedly ID itself directly is a tactic he says that's at best disingenuous and at worst a canard so he he ruled that out as well there was one last thing though that came out in looking at the drafts of the next edition of pandas and people came across the following sudden emergence holds that various forms of life began with their distinctive features already intact fish with fins and scales birds with feathers and wings and so on okay so it looks as though they've got a new strategy they're gonna change the name one more time and and towards the end of the trial the attorney asked Michael Behe in cross-examination are we going to be back here in court in a few years arguing about sudden emergence theory and the judge from the stand said not on my docket because I think at that time he had already recognized that this really was a deception so that was the conclusion what are the take-home points here if you remember nothing else about this talk in the in the conclusions here just a few easy things to remember as to how it all came out in the end intelligent design what was what was the result is two words here not science okay that's the basic view second one creationism relabeled just a new name for the old view that was already found in place and finally the one that was quoted most often in all the papers and certainly my favorite intelligent design breathtaking inanity so please remember that thank you very much

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 70,116

Rating: 4.4871793 out of 5

Keywords: science, Pennock, creationism

Id: J249urOZyo8

Length: 58min 41sec (3521 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 03 2008