Letters to the Editor
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Intelligent Design
The fight over "Intelligent Design" has stumped many scientists. Since its arguments are largely philosophical and not scientific, scientists often feel they are playing baseball against a football team; some have refused to even debate the issue. They miss the truly interesting thing about the logic games of I.D., namely, that they are far more blasphemous to Christian beliefs than anything Darwin ever dreamed up. The fundament of I.D. is the assumption that anything sufficiently complex must have been designed, i.e., "design requires a designer." This is an old argument, as is David Hume's rebuttal that this assumption leads to an infinite regression. If one assumes that life as we know it is so unlikely and fantastic it must have been created by an intelligence, then one must also assume that that intelligence --life as we don't know it-- was also created by an intelligence, and so on. The idea that the cosmos is made up of an infinite number of "universes" created by an infinite number of tinkering Gods is not a possible outcome in I.D. philosophy, it is the only possible outcome. And who knows? That may in fact be the order of the cosmos. The problem for I.D.ers is, that ain't what's in the Bible. Not even close. Maybe I.D. isn't so "harmonious with the Christian faith" after all.
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The most depressing thing about this?
The fact that this trial is even taking place says far more about the intelligence level of our nation than anything, and the outlook is pretty sorry.
Thompson forces the issue between pure black and pure white because that is the only way it works for him. There is nothing wrong with teaching intelligent design and other creation stories (because that's all it is) in other courses and in relation to other subjects, whether it be sociology, world cultures, theology, or another far more appropriate area. This is the gray which he avoids to play up to the extremity of all or nothing. His advocacy of ID is nothing more than a cover for promoting Christianity in the biology classroom. Imagine if the foundation for women's health was based on the notion that she actually derived from a rib!
To claim that things such as moral relativism, secularism, atheism, and Darwinism are what's wrong with society, specifically American society, shows his own insecurities in the very lifestyle he is looking to reinstitute. This is typical of any individual who likely has too many skeletons in his or her own closet and worries too much about the business of others. The vast majority of Americans say they believe in God and they identify themselves with the Christian faith. Roughly only ten percent of the population calls themselves atheists. Surely you can't expect me to believe that this very small minority is the cause of all this moral decay, especially since things are far worse as a whole in states that are unabashedly conservative and Christian.
It is getting to the point where the only thing I can be thankful from all of this is the fact that I do not have children and will never have them. The thought of my offspring being subjected to such ridiculous nonsense being passed off as veritable truth in the very institution where they are supposed to become informed of the makes my blood boil.
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intelligent designer
I am fascinated by the notion that "no god means no purpose, no morality". Since my faith in an attentive god (who keeps a scorecard on each of us)evaporated 40 years ago, I find life increasingly interesting,worthwhile and important. It is brief,sad and beautiful. Am I mentally ill? Would that be Mr. Thompson's conclusion?
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Better defense
Re: David Harnden-Warwick's letter: creation and ID advocates are already denied a seat at the table of scientific discourse, which is the best we can do. Public discourse, of course, is another story - in this country, you're free to advocate for any damn fool idea you want. That cannot be changed without fundamentally altering the basic fabric of civil liberties in the United States. What we can do instead is to stand up to meet them with reasoned, articulate discourse that is actually intelligible to nonscientists. The scientific community has been unwilling to do this, and I believe that it may prove to be a fatal flaw unless corrected soon.
While the comparison to Holocaust deniers is seductive - evolution defender Eugenie Scott has used it more than once - this seductiveness masks a fatal flaw. The reality of the Holocaust can be easily demonstrated in terms understandable to non-historians: documentary footage and testimony of survivors. To counter this, Holocaust deniers must fashion a narrative of Zionist conspiracy that quickly crumbles under its own weight. The abstraction of relevant evolutionary concepts from the understanding of most non-scientists leaves the door wide open for ID proponents and other creationists to muddy the waters with scientific- sounding "arguments" and "theories." We have to play better defense, or we risk losing this fight.
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Science or not? Here's the test
I think it would suffice to remember Karl Popper's statement that a scientific theory is something that can be falsified. In other words, describe an experiment for whose outcome my theory makes a certain prediction, and if the outcome is different from the prediction, I accept that my theory is wrong.
For example, Einstein's theory of gravity (the theory of general relativity) became accepted, and Einstein famous, when the theory's prediction of gravitiational lensing was confirmed by the Eddington expidition to observe the positions of stars behind the sun during a solar eclipse. If Einstein's prediction had been wrong, he would have scrapped the theory.
So, if the ID-ists can describe an experiment that would convince them that ID is wrong if the outcome was not the one they predicted, that will be science.
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Intelligent Designer
I would ask Mr. Thompson why in the world he would use the same bolts to make both a car and a plane? I'm no mechanical engineer, but I imagine cars and planes are made using bolts specially designed for either vehicle. Why would an Intelligent Designer need to have humans and chimpanzees share 98 percent of their genes? Why wouldn't He produce entirely different sets of genes specialized for the needs of either humans or chimpanzees?
Why are some genes so similar between organisms as different as, say, fungi and humans? An evolutionary biologist would say that these "highly conserved genes" code for proteins so necessary to life that evolution preserved the integrity of these genes during the long process of natural selection that eventually resulted in both fungi and humans. But why would an Intelligent Designer need to use the same proteins for the same purposes in very different organisms? Certainly He could come up with more than one way for different creatures to carry out the same crucial life processes.