ID and Evolution

[Beto]

Why aren't religious conservatives content with something on the lines of, "The mechanisms behind the theory of evolution are so complex, that while evidence of the contrary is not shown, there is the possibility they were set in motion by an intelligent agent"?

The further study of the "intelligent agent" should be broad enough to cover all "perspectives" (aka religions).

Who thinks this is unacceptable?

[Jose]

Hmmm....my reading of the discussions is that any contradiction to anything in the bible is forbidden, by definition. If we have to read Genesis in a particular, simple way, and anything scientific conflicts with that interpretation, then the science must be a satanic conspiracy.

I agree with you that the solution you've proposed is reasonable. Many Christians hold this view. But they aren't the ones who are making the fuss. It's the ones who refuse to accept that view who are upset.

I might note that it's not just fundamentalist Christians. There are also rabid anti-evolutionists among fundamentalist Muslims, Hindus, and Scientologists. In some ways, it makes it hard to tell one fundamentalist from another.

[GrumpyMrGruff]

Why aren't religious conservatives content with something on the lines of, "The mechanisms behind the theory of evolution are so complex, that while evidence of the contrary is not shown, there is the possibility they were set in motion by an intelligent agent"?

The further study of the "intelligent agent" should be broad enough to cover all "perspectives" (aka religions).

Jose hit the nail on the head. It sounds like you're describing theistic evolution, which seems (in my experience, anyway) to be fairly common among scientifically literate churchgoers whose beliefs allow for an allegorical interpretation of Genesis.

The intelligent design movement today serves to help religious literalists justify their positions with the appearance of scientific authority. Since many ID proponents were/are interested in introducing ID material in public school curricula, explicit references to the Christian religion tend to be omitted. ("Intelligent agent" is more PC, I guess.) However, the focus of ID material is essentially negative; it aims to show that evolutionary theory is insufficient to explain life. However, ID attempts to provide alternative mechanisms for creation are lacking.

The goal of the ID movement is to discredit evolutionary theory so that literalist believers can insert their preferred creation story in its place. Thus, simply redefining ID as theistic evolution and calling evolutionary biology the "study of the intelligent agent's methods" is unlikely to win over the literal believers who opposed evolution in the first place.

Who thinks this is unacceptable?

I worry about the convenient suspension of methodological naturalism - a key assumption in the sciences - to satisfy a vocal minority. Striving to avoid antagonizing a group is one thing. Redefining science for their benefit may hinder scientific progress as a whole, especially if this position is taught as fact

(Edited to address the second question.)

[Beto]

But they aren't the ones who are making the fuss. It's the ones who refuse to accept that view who are upset.

Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council said on NBC: "What's lacking is a true scientific debate about the merits and weaknesses of evolutionary theory as presented by Darwin." As presented by Darwin!!! It really bums me out that these people and their straw men can actually endanger the curriculum.

[neillos]

My dislike of ID starts with the name. In labeling their ideas "intelligent design" they make the implicit claim that they believe in design and evolutionists don't. This is untrue, as GrumpyMrGruff pointed out. Theistic evolutionists believe in design. Belief in design is not what separates evolutionists from creationists.

The most general difference is that creationists believe in supernatural interference by god in nature. Theistic evolutionists are content with allowing natural law to unfold, since god created the laws of nature in the first place. There is no contradiction between faith and science unless your particular beliefs specify when and how god creates. Then it's miracle time.

Design is an argument creationists use, it is not what really defines their beliefs.

[neillos]

Going back to the oriignal post...

Why aren't religious conservatives content with something on the lines of, "The mechanisms behind the theory of evolution are so complex, that while evidence of the contrary is not shown, there is the possibility they were set in motion by an intelligent agent"?

The further study of the "intelligent agent" should be broad enough to cover all "perspectives" (aka religions).

Who thinks this is unacceptable?

Religious conservatives demand that God perform miracles to demonstrate that He is really God. They don't want some wimpy old god of nature.

Of course, the view of god provided by nature, for those who believe, is much more impressive than the second rate magician creationists call upon. The god of nature sent the entire universe hurling from his hand with all the potential to become what we see today, including us, imbedded in the laws of nature. Creationists reduce God to a tinkerer who has to keep waving his magic wand to make things come out right.

My own resolution to the question posed is that we should teach science as it is without addressing religious issues. Instead, we should make sure kids understand what science is and what it isn't. It is a way of understanding physical reality, which has produced amazing insights and given mankind power over the physical world. It is not about understanding the meaning of life, giving us purpose, providing morals or values. If there is something beyond the physical - a spiritual reality - science can't address that. Science can't confirm or deny it.

This should be enough to satisfy religious people, but I wouldn't bet on it.

[Cathar1950]

We live in interesting times.
Science isn't just methods, it also involves knowledge and world view with an understanding of our limits. Science means all kinds of things as even the name “Scientology” indicates. It always seems the battles are one or two hundred years behind.
I remember reading Wienman's “Religious Experience and Scientific Method” where he writes of a world view that has changed religion. Many view the world as fallen from the “truth” and unless they go back to some imaginary past where everything else is of Satan. The dualism allows them to live in both worlds. But knowledge has increased where they can no longer believe in a literal interpretation for which scholarship seems to indicate was metaphorical and allegorical all along with more fiction then fact being emphasized and promoted. Sadly it seems to leave the knowledge about ourselves behind in the struggle for world views that just happen for the unsuspected. But it should give us some hope.
It is not easy to keep a balance so you don't get lost in the details or swallowed by the whole because it is blurry.

I left the TV on to long, now I got an "extenz" sex-talk info commerical.
I guess I will go back to bed.

[Jose]

The intelligent design movement today serves to help religious literalists justify their positions with the appearance of scientific authority. Since many ID proponents were/are interested in introducing ID material in public school curricula, explicit references to the Christian religion tend to be omitted. ("Intelligent agent" is more PC, I guess.) However, the focus of ID material is essentially negative; it aims to show that evolutionary theory is insufficient to explain life. However, ID attempts to provide alternative mechanisms for creation are lacking.

It is, indeed, negative. And, it comes in enough different flavors that it confuses people. There's the "critical analysis of evolution" lesson plan they tried to foist onto Ohio schools, which is little more than a rehash of Wells' Icons of Evoultion misrepresentations of evolution. Then there's the God-of-the-Gaps bit, where they say that if we don't have the complete story of how a particular system evolved, then we will never know it, and therefore that system was "designed." They rule out the possibility of further discovery, which is an interesting ruse. Then there's irreducible complexity, which essentially states that any system that cannot work when one piece is removed must be too complex to have evolved, because--and here they invent their own private definition of evolution--mutations can't change structures a little bit at a time and modify their functions. And then there's the wonky idea of complex specified information, which posits that evolution has been trying ever since the very beginning to create George Bush, and since the probability of creating his DNA sequence intentionally by random mutation is vanishingly small, then evolution is impossible. Again, they invent their own private defintion of evolution: that it tries intentionally to create certain things.

All of this stuff sounds scientific only to those who don't understand the science. If all those big words kinda run together into a fuzzy blur, then isn't anyone who can say them equally correct? If we could only get science education to get us beyond this...

Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council said on NBC: "What's lacking is a true scientific debate about the merits and weaknesses of evolutionary theory as presented by Darwin." As presented by Darwin!!! It really bums me out that these people and their straw men can actually endanger the curriculum.

Weird, isn't it? We (well, they) had this debate years ago. The true scientific debate was unable to show Darwin's ideas were wrong (at least, his primary idea of natural selection as a mechanism). That debate is over, and we're on to the details of the mechanisms.

I've said for some years that it's science education that needs to be fixed--both in the classroom and here in these kinds of discussions. In particular, we need to present the data, and ask our audience how they would interpret the data. In debates, it's too easy for the anti-evolutionists to turn the argument to one of character and authority, and the evolutionists too easily take the bait and respond ad hominem. It's more successful I think, and less acrimonious, if we respond with data and ask them to tell us their interpretation. That is, challenge them to do what GrumpyMrGruff pointed out above: provide alternative mechanisms for specific data.

My experience in these forums is that the creationists steer the debate by talking always of generalities, but when we challenge them with specifics, they tend to go away. I find this interesting.

My own resolution to the question posed is that we should teach science as it is without addressing religious issues. Instead, we should make sure kids understand what science is and what it isn't. It is a way of understanding physical reality, which has produced amazing insights and given mankind power over the physical world. It is not about understanding the meaning of life, giving us purpose, providing morals or values. If there is something beyond the physical - a spiritual reality - science can't address that. Science can't confirm or deny it.

This is trickier than it sounds. For one thing, one of the popular textbooks used by Schools of Education to train elementary science teachers presents the Nature of Science (i.e., what science is) as follows:

• Take a fossil fragment. Make sure it is one about which you know nothing.
• Now, draw the rest of the organism, and describe where it lived and how it got its food.
• Think about this...did you work completely objectively, or did you use some internal bias?
• See--that's how scientists work. You can tell this in museums when you see those dinosaur skeletons, for which there may be only one or two bones and the rest is all made out of plaster.

Yikes! We are explicitly teaching that scientists make stuff up, and that fossils are wholly meaningless. We are teaching that science is a bunch of Facts handed down from on high, and that scientists guess at them. What's not being taught is that scientists gather data, and then figure out the best possible interpretation--as constrained by the fact that they don't usually have all the data. Bias. Good grief!

When I've asked my colleagues in Education about this, they've typically answered by talking slowly and patiently, telling me that most scientists don't understand the Nature of Science. Obviously, if they believe scientists make up their own work, scientists can't have much credibility when it comes to teaching about what science is.

So yes, we really should make sure that kids know what science is and what it isn't. But this means we have to get scientists involved in education, which has proven to be extremely hard to do. Education is taught by Professors of Education, whose degrees are in Education.

Responding to your comment in a different direction: there's the issue of Purpose. Many people really believe that things have purpose, and that each of us is here for a purpose. I have found that many of my students have this belief so deeply integrated into their fundamental being that they cannot separate the study of "what is" from the study of "its purpose." Perhaps this is because of (or explains why) science teaching focusing so heavily on describing things and listing fancy Science Words. Scientific thinking just isn't out there, except in the rare event that there's an actual science geek in the classroom who "gets it."

[Jayhawker Soule]

Why aren't religious conservatives content with something on the lines of, "The mechanisms behind the theory of evolution are so complex, that while evidence of the contrary is not shown, there is the possibility they were set in motion by an intelligent agent"?

The further study of the "intelligent agent" should be broad enough to cover all "perspectives" (aka religions).

Jose hit the nail on the head. It sounds like you're describing theistic evolution, which seems (in my experience, anyway) to be fairly common among scientifically literate churchgoers whose beliefs allow for an allegorical interpretation of Genesis.

The problem goes beyond a willingness to view Genesis as allegorical. One must also view it as human narrative and, therefore, fallible. Fortunately, many theists are quite capable of holding such a perspective.

[neillos]

So yes, we really should make sure that kids know what science is and what it isn't. But this means we have to get scientists involved in education, which has proven to be extremely hard to do. Education is taught by Professors of Education, whose degrees are in Education.

Jose, Great point. We do an awful job of teaching science even without the interference of creationists. I can’t figure out why science teachers should learn science in special classes separate from science and liberal arts majors. At my son’s college, you basically have to decide in your first year whether you want to teach science or practice it. There is no overlap in the curriculum. It’s nuts. I respect the need for a firm grounding in teaching techniques, but they need to learn the subject from the real experts - PhDs not EdDs.

In particular, we need to present the data, and ask our audience how they would interpret the data. In debates, it's too easy for the anti-evolutionists to turn the argument to one of character and authority, and the evolutionists too easily take the bait and respond ad hominem. It's more successful I think, and less acrimonious, if we respond with data and ask them to tell us their interpretation. That is, challenge them to do what GrumpyMrGruff pointed out above: provide alternative mechanisms for specific data.

In addition to challenging creationists to explain the evidence in their own way - providing an alternative theory, not just throwing tomatoes at evolution - I think it is useful to look at other theories which are not controversial and consider the sort of evidence that supports them. If you ask 100 people why they accept that the earth travels around the sun, how many could provide even one of the real evidences? How many people have a clue why scientists concluded that atoms are real? I think 1 in 100 for either is optimistic.

The evidences of these accepted theories are rather abstract, and yet are generally considered “scientific proof.” Retrograde motion of the planets, parallax, the law of definite proportions. These are subtle, yet the implications are clear. We don’t “see” atoms, no one has ever seen the earth travel around the sun, but we have these observations that are explained by our theory. And no one has come up with an alternative theory.

The evidences of evolution are very similar, and at least as powerful.

I left the TV on to long, now I got an "extenz" sex-talk info commerical.
I guess I will go back to bed.

One result of poor science education is citizens who think they can buy a clinically proved, all natural male enhancer. It is depressing to think of how many customers these folks must get.