Mark Twain once famously said, approximately, "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."
For some reason people love to pronounce as dead those ideas -- and perhaps people -- that they don't like, even while they are very much alive and walking around with great vigor. In 1972 America's greatest foe of evolution announced that the theory was dead in a book titled The Twilight of Evolution. Almost 40 years later The Death of Evolution repeated the claim. Another book with the same title will be published later this year.
The blogosphere is alive right now with eulogies about the death of Intelligent Design, the movement having been slain by biologist John Avise in an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).
In a recent Huffington Post blog, Michael Zimmerman put the case like this: "In case you had any doubt, the last nail was just placed in the coffin of intelligent design (ID)."
Don't believe it.
ID is alive and well and, if it is ever slain, its slayer will not be yet another account of how badly designed things are in nature. ID enthusiasts have sore backs and twisted knees just like the rest of us and understand that nature is not uniformly well-designed. Finding flawed blueprints in our genomes to go with the flawed mechanics of our bodies simply adds to an already long list of challenges to ID -- unsuccessful challenges, I might add.
ID's coffin is far from being nailed shut. Several things are propping it open:
1) The complex designs of many natural structures that have not yet been explained by science. As long as there are ingenious devices and intricate phenomena in nature (origin of life, anyone?) that we cannot understand, there will be ID arguments.
2) The remarkable, finely-tuned structure of the cosmos in which the laws of physics collaborate to make life possible. Many agnostics have had their faith in unguided materialism shaken by this, most recently Anthony Flew.
3) The widespread belief that God -- an intelligent agent -- created the universe. The claim that an intelligent God created an unintelligent universe seems peculiar, to say the least.
4) The enthusiastic insistence by the New Atheists that evolution is incompatible with belief in God. Most people think more highly of their religion than their science. Imagine trying to get 100 million Americans to dress up for a science lecture every Sunday morning -- and then voluntarily pay for the privilege.
ID's coffin will remain open -- and empty -- as least as long as these props remain. Science is working successfully only on the first prop above and is a long way from having explained all the mysteries of nature. The argument that because science has explained many things, it can explain all things, is not entirely compelling in a world as wonderful as this one. Many people think that sounds like blind faith. And long lists of bad designs in nature are not really more effective than short lists, especially when they seem attached to an anti-religious agenda.
Scientific arguments, unfortunately, often just do not work -- no matter what the subject -- if there are other factors involved.
Consider astrology. A 2009 Pew Poll showed that some 25 percent of Americans "believe" in astrology. President Reagan "believed" in astrology. Twenty million astrology books are sold each year. What is going on here? Didn't science thoroughly discredit astrology at roughly the same time it was establishing the motion of the earth? How can an idea so thoroughly refuted be so popular?
If the scientific community cannot successfully convince Americans to abandon belief in astrology -- which is not tied to any powerful religious tradition or even to belief in God -- what hope is there to refute an idea like Intelligent Design, which is so much more complex than astrology?
If the scientific community wants to dislodge ID, they need to start by admitting that their efforts have been an abysmal failure so far. And then they need to turn their considerable analytical skills on the problem of explaining that failure. If they do this, they might discover that enthusiastic pronouncements like "ID is dead" or "science has proven God does not exist" or "religion is stupid" or "creationists are insane" are not effective. They might discover that affirming that the universe is wonderful, despite our bad backs and the nonsense in our genomes, makes it easier for people to accept the bad design in nature.
And above all, they need to decide that it is OK for people to believe in God. For millions of Americans belief in ID is tied to belief in God. Unless people can find a way to separate them -- and not be told by agnostic bloggers this is impossible -- ID's coffin will remain empty.
Follow Karl Giberson, Ph.D on Twitter: www.twitter.com/gibersok
Are you comparing ID with astrology; that's rather insulting, what have astrologers ever done to you?
Welcome to a dead thread ...
But not a dead issue ...
Some say that embracing ID is like drinking Kool Aid ...
Can I buy you a drink? ;~}
LOL. That "dismal failure" was enough to convince a Bush-appointed Federal judge that "Intelligent Design" is purely religion, not science, and isn't suitable for teaching in public schools. ID is now officially mythology.
Sure, if you can get 25% of people to believe that constellations have some influence on their lives, you can get them to believe in ID. Not to mention numerology, crop circles, and Bigfoot. Such myths never die, and it's not reasonable to expect them to. I'm quite content to know that today, Intelligent Design is officially numbered among these pseudo-science hoaxes.
The primary operative here is rational thought, something we strive for but fall short. Our sense of reason is based on what little we can observe and comprehend. Nonetheless, we employ it as it's all we have, congitively.
Creation, whether guided or unguided, is a historical fact. We can choose to look at the scientific data, judge it rationally (to the degree possible), or not. Or we can go on faith alone, historical scriptural accounts included.
Or, we can utilize both. Scriptural accounts vary according to which are accepted, canonized or not, and/ or to which monotheistic religion one chooses, none of which were written in stone (save for the tablet from Mount Sinai, perhaps).
But rather than discount supportive scientific evidences entirely, why not utilize them to aid in dismantling the materialist obstacles strewn across the playing field, so that one may more definitively chooses, or decline to chose faith as a perspective?
So rationalize yes, since rational thought preceeds our decisions in most cases, and is really all we have to go on. That, and the existent data, of course. But in the end, faith in a Creator, or even of ancient bio-designers of questionable motive will remain a personal choice.
Religion is all about an intercessory God - a God that DOES things, gets you a parking place at WalMart, opens your clogged artery, or magically saves your child's life in a traffic accident. Is there a God that does stuff? That "knows" you?
Religion says yes - there is a God that knows you and magically effects every hair on your head.
My hunch is -- no such God exists, because I've had bad hair days since 1976
Consider numerology.
Consider the spirits of dead ancestors.
Consider luck rabbits feet.
The human mind is not a true-false engine. The association of an idea with the idea of truth or the idea of falseness is tenuous. An association with falseness which is not renewed regularly has been shown to erode. Ideas which lack a strong association with the idea of falseness have been shown to be treated as associated with truth. That is the default.
The bottom line is that humans can and do simultaneously believe in many things - among them being one God, many gods, good and evil, astrology, numerology, the spirits of ancestors, and lucky rabbits feet.
As it stands now the entertainment field repeats all these ideas over and over in every venue.
Only a different repetition can change our multifaceted regular beliefs.
It as difficult as visualizing "chaos."
"I have studied this Plague, and found that the onset in humans is directly relevant to tiny flea bites, carried by rat hosts. We should look into it further." - Some nut the Church wanted to burn.
"The earth is the center of the universe and everything orbits around it because God wanted to so." - The Church. Again.
"This tube allows the viewer to see into the heavens, and, due to my numerous observations that I have recorded with exacting accuracy, I have discovered that the planets revolve around the sun and not the other way around." - The Heretic Galileo.
"God made a man named Adam. And then he made a woman he named Eve. And He told them to go forth and multiply. It says so in this book, written, not by man, but by God Himself! I believe it, therefore, it is truth!"
"A species is not made as is, but comes to be as we know it now through centuries of adaptation, change, survival of the fittest and the dropping off of what is no longer needed to survive in its environment. But science cannot explain everything. Yet. We must keep seeking. And then not everything will be given a certain and definitive answer." - Some kook named Darwin.
Religion: 0 Science: 18 katrillion.proofs.
Do we listen to science lectures often? Not on Sunday mornings, and we don't dress up for them, but yes, millions of Americans regularly listen to science lectures.
What else is Mythbusters, if not a science lecture? People talk about the physics they learn the next day at work. There are lots of science lectures, quite enjoyable ones, on the Discovery channel, the History channel, the Science channel, the Green channel, and PBS stations. Millions of Americans constantly learn more about physics, cosmology, biology, geology, anthropology, paleontology through watching and listening to science lectures - and we do pay for the privilege.
We love the products of science, too. Mmmmmm, the internet. Mmmmmm, condoms. Mmmmmm, modern medicine.
This guy's assertions all fall apart if you think about them briefly.
Either at the Center For Inquiry in Hollywood or the Skeptic Society lectures in Pasadena at Cal tech.
I do pay for it, but no...I do not dress up ;)
Karl Giberson wants to have his cake and eat it too.
meh forgive my ranting -
The Anthropic Principle ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle ), just like the Torah and the New Testament, can be interperted an infinite number of ways. Now I could hit you with the typical atheistic riddle of who designed the designer? But I won't because I'm not an atheist. I'm a Pantheist. And the Pantheistic belief, just like the Buddhist philosophy, denies the existence of a designer but believes that all sentient beings are worthy of respect, esteem, and admiration because what drives our Universe to create conditions suitable for life here on earth is operative in all parts of the Universe. And the forces which have created the suitable conditions are operative in all possible universes. If you imagine that this is the only possible Universe, then you have no imagination.
So endeth, Point 1 above, and by the writer's own argument, should end the arguments supporting ID:
1) The complex designs of many natural structures that have not yet been explained by science. As long as there are ingenious devices and intricate phenomena in nature (origin of life, anyone?) that we cannot understand, there will be ID arguments.