Creationism

Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission was quoted in the Washington Post about the Kitzmiller v. Dover decision: “This decision is a poster child for a half-century secularist reign of terror that’s coming to a rapid end with Justice Roberts and soon-to-be Justice Alito,” said Richard Land, who is president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and is a political ally of White House adviser Karl Rove. “This was an extremely injudicious judge who went way, way beyond his boundaries–if he had any eyes on advancing up the judicial ladder, he just sawed off the bottom rung.” Apparently Mr. Land believes that 1965-2005 in the United States was something like Robby Berry’s “Life in Our Anti-Christian America." Timothy Sandefur rebuts Land’s nutty comment at The Panda’s Thumb. UPDATE (February 6, 2007): An updated link for Robby Berry’s “Life in Our Anti-Christian America."

It’s an excellent decision. I did spot nineteen errors, none of significance to the legal arguments (three are typos, one’s a mistaken word choice, and fifteen are instances of the same erroneous character substitution, probably facilitated by the ever-helpful Microsoft Word). Will ID advocates find them and make rhetorical use of them? The typos are on pp. 51, 114, and 120, the mistaken word choice is on p. 96, and the three examples of the incorrect character are on pp. 104, 106, 117, 118, 120, 124, 129, and 130. Warning: Reading these pages (which I strongly recommend–in fact, read the whole thing) will expose you to documentation of dishonesty and sleaziness by Christian school board members, including taking a mural depicting evolution from the classroom and burning it. Buckingham and Bonsell come across as sleazy, lying, manipulative bastards, and the rest of the board come across as ignoramuses rubber-stamping their actions. The citizens of Dover certainly did the right thing by voting out the entire school board. The science teachers of Dover, however, come across as very reasonable people who made a few compromises with the board early on in order to get the textbooks they needed to teach, but who were unwilling to teach unscientific materials or read a misleading disclaimer to their students.

Judge John E. Jones III has issued his ruling in the Dover, PA intelligent design case–Dover’s ID Policy violates both the Lemon Test and the endorsement test, and so the Dover Area School District must discontinue reading the statement at the beginning of the evolution unit about Intelligent Design and the availability of Of Pandas and People in the library. The decision covers much broader ground than this, and though the orders are only directed at DASD, this decision is likely to be influential in much the way Judge Overton’s McLean v. Arkansas creation science decision was in 1982. Ed Brayton has the text of the decision and some key quotes and commentary up at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

Of late I’ve often thought that drugs developed on the basis of evolutionary biology should have warning labels indicating that their effectiveness is predicated upon the fact of evolution, and creationists should not make use of them. Today’s Doonesbury is along similar lines. (Of course, creationists will say that this is microevolution, not macroevolution, and they only disbelieve in the latter.) This is as good a place as any to recommend Randolph M. Nesse and George C. Williams’ book, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine (1996, Vintage). ...

I’d like to call attention to two recent articles over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. The first is about Casey Luskin, blogger for the Discovery Institute. The second is about William Dembski, the “Isaac Newton of information theory." In the first piece, Brayton writes about how Luskin has referred to Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education as “Darth Vader.” Brayton quotes Luskin: “In the past I’ve compared Eugenie C. Scott to Darth Vader because she is full of internal contradictions, knows in her heart she’s lying, powerful, persuasive, and most importantly, she travels around representing the dominating power (the Empire) and fighting the good guys. All in the name of …well, I’m not exactly sure what her motivation is yet. It’s certainly not truth." Yet Luskin provides no examples of lies or ulterior motives, and has used false statements to argue against statements she has made. In one example: “I asked her why she thinks ID isn’t science. She said it isn’t science because it does not refer to natural law (a reference to Ruse’s testimony which he later recanted).” Brayton, speaking directly to philosopher Michael Ruse, asked him if, in the face of criticisms from other philosophers about his position on the demarcation between science and non-science (e.g., see Larry Laudan’s piece in Ruse’s book But Is It Science?), he holds that Intelligent Design is non-science. As Brayton writes, “He replied that it is non-science because it does not refer to natural law. If Ruse has recanted, he appears to be unaware of it." As Brayton notes in the same piece, when he’s made charges of dishonesty against William Dembski, he’s backed them up–and he’s done so yet again, showing that Dembski has continued to misrepresent the work of Douglas Axe. In a 2000 paper, Axe did work which focused on a particular gene which confers resistance to certain antibiotics. As Brayton summarizes the paper, “it showed that this particular enzyme could retain most of its function even if it was hit with a major mutational event that resulted in changing as many as 10 of its amino acid residues simultaneously, could retain some of its function (and thus still be capable of selection) even if a mutation resulted in as much as 20% of its total amino acid residues being substituted simultaneously, and that if 40 mutations happened simultaneously, it would stop functioning." Dembski, however, summarizes it this way: “But there is now mounting evidence of biological systems for which any slight modification does not merely destroy the system’s existing function, but also destroys the possibility of any function of the system whatsoever (Axe, 2000)." Brayton points out that Matt Inlay criticized Dembski for this misrepresentation on The Panda’s Thumb back in February, and that Inlay has shown that Dembski has known this is a misrepresentation for at least two years. Brayton concludes: Dembski has crossed over a line at this point, I think. I don’t think it’s any longer possible to maintain that he is merely an ideologue undergoing cognitive dissonance, or that he’s just engaging in wishful thinking of the type we are all probably prone to when defending ideas we have a personal stake in. He is now simply lying outright, and he has to know that.

Dembski still doesn’t admit error–he says his copy of the filing (plaintiff’s response to defendant’s motion for summary judgment) doesn’t have the Shallit deposition, implying that it wasn’t part of the filing and Ed Brayton must be mistaken. The Shallit deposition (in uncorrected form–the draft transcript of the deposition without errors corrected and edited) has been online at the NCSE’s website at least since September 21. It has been pointed out that the link above is to Shallit’s expert witness statement, not the uncorrected deposition, which is in Appendix III, Tab O of the plaintiff’s brief opposing the defendant’s motion for summary judgment. Tab N is Shallit’s disclosure statement. ...

William Dembski continues to dig himself a deeper hole with respect to his false claim that Jeff Shallit did not testify in the Dover case because his deposition went badly and was an embarassment to the plaintiffs. In fact, Shallit did not testify because he was a rebuttal witness to Dembski, who withdrew from the case, and because the defense filed a motion to prevent it. Dembski also continues to claim that the Shallit deposition is somehow being concealed, when in fact it was filed in the case and is a public document. (More at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)

William Dembski has posted (from Ian Bibby) the following “Darwinian Trilemma”: Science cannot test the proposition that biological features are designed.Darwinism explains the appearance of design in biology not as actual design but as the product of natural selection and random variation.Darwinism is science. Commentators have offered a number of responses, such as rejecting an apparent equivocation on “design” between premises 1 (an objective feature of nature) and 2 (a psychological appearance). While I think there’s something to this objection, I would also reject premise 1 as stated. Surely there are scientific mechanisms for distinguishing natural features from artifacts of the sorts we are aware of (e.g., forensic science can distinguish at least some murders from deaths by natural causes). What science cannot distinguish is a hypothesis that biological features are the product of evolution from the hypothesis that a divinity created biological features that look just like the product of evolution. Similarly, science cannot distinguish automobiles that are created by people from automobiles that are created by a divine being to look just like automobiles built in a human-built factory, nor can it distinguish human beings who were born of a man and a woman from human beings who are directly created to look exactly as though they were born of a man and a woman (Omphalos included). (In other words, God could choose to work directly, simulating evolution, or indirectly, using evolutionary mechanisms or setting up the initial conditions and letting evolution run its course, and those hypotheses are empirically indistinguishable. Some religious believers advocate a view where events have natural causes, yet are also caused by supernatural beings such as Satan. In such an anti-Ockhamite, unparsimonious view, there is no scientific way to distinguish an event with both natural and supernatural causes from one which didn’t have the latter.) If a God-based hypothesis can be formulated in such a way as to have empirically testable consequences which are distinguishable from evolution, I don’t see why it couldn’t be science. This means there could be an “intelligent design” that qualifies as scientific–but what’s been promoted in Dover is simply a renamed creationism, rather than a new field with any scientific content. The real problem for such God-based hypotheses is that there really are no limits or definitions around what God does or would do–no empirical evidence is ever considered to be evidence against God by the advocates. I think there actually is empirical evidence against many specific gods which have been endorsed through the millenia, including commonly held views of contemporary monotheism. If you say that humans are psychologically similar to God (being created in his image), that God is perfectly rational and desires particular outcomes, then actions (or inaction) inconsistent with those desires, intentions, and facts of the world are evidence against such a God’s existence. This gives evidential weight to atheistic arguments such as the argument from evil, the argument from (reasonable) non-belief, arguments based on the dependency of consciousness on physical brains, the facts of evolution, religious disagreement, and on the distribution of religious beliefs (indicative of cultural transmission rather than supernatural intervention).

In yesterday’s election, the entire Dover School Board was voted out of office. Four of the new board members were Republicans running as Democrats; the incumbents were all Republicans. Four of the new board members are part of an organization called Dover CARES, which supports the teaching of intelligent design in a context such as an elective comparative religions course but not in the science classroom. The new board will take office on December 5 and have indicated that they will not change policy for a month, which presumably will be after the judge makes a decision in the lawsuit. This will likely mean that the decision (which I fully expect to go against the Dover school board) will not be appealed. More at the Panda’s Thumb, Questionable Authority, Pharyngula, and Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Update: Pat Robertson warns the people of Dover that now that they’ve forsaken God, God will not be there to help them in time of need: I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover. If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city. And don’t wonder why He hasn’t helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I’m not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that’s the case, don’t ask for His help because he might not be there.Nothing like argumentum ad baculum… ...

Ed Brayton comments on the “Isaac Newton of Intelligent Design”’s crazy accusations of obsession against his critics. Dembski’s latest is to accuse mathematician Jeff Shallit of being removed as a witness in the Dover trial because “his obsessiveness against me and ID made him a liability to the ACLU.” Actually, Shallit did not testify because he was a rebuttal witness to Dembski, Dembski withdrew from the trial, and the defense did not use Dembski’s ideas in their case. Dembski then dug the hole deeper, stating that this couldn’t be the reason. Why not? Because he withdrew before Shallit’s deposition was taken. He went on to challenge the ACLU and Shallit to release a transcript of the deposition. Unfortunately for Dembski, it was the defense that took the deposition, to make sure they would be prepared in case Shallit would be used as a witness–and the deposition (at least in the preliminary, uncorrected transcript) is already a public record. Perhaps Dembski should work on responding to his critics, rather than accusing them of stalking him. ...