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The 'anything goes' academic left is coming to the support of the 'God did it' religious right

Peter McKnight, Vancouver Sun
Published: Saturday, April 22, 2006

The religious right has a new ally, and it's none other than its erstwhile arch-enemy -- the academic left.

The latest evidence of this unholy alliance comes from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which recently rejected a research proposal aimed at studying the impact of popularizing intelligent design, the theory that the complexity and supposed design in nature reveal that there must have been a designer.

The proposal, by McGill University's Brian Alters, was titled Detrimental Effects of Popularizing Anti-Evolution's "Intelligent Design Theory" on Canadian Students, Teachers, Parents, Administrators and Policymakers, and that title alone was enough give the SSHRC's review panel the willies.

In its terse rejection letter, the SSHRC said "the proposal did not adequately substantiate the premise that the popularizing of Intelligent Design Theory had detrimental effects" and there was inadequate "justification for the assumption in the proposal that the theory of Evolution, and not Intelligent Design Theory, was correct."

Now those reasons would be laughable if they weren't so pathetic. First, Alters's reference to the detrimental effects of popularizing intelligent design isn't a premise, but a hypothesis. This is what the study was designed to test, so it's a bit much to expect Alters to have the evidence in hand prior to conducting the study. Indeed, were he already in possession of the evidence, there'd be no need to conduct the research.

But as it turns out, the panel's second reason for rejecting funding provided exactly the evidence Alters was looking for. That a committee of "experts" could suggest that ID and evolution are equally plausible theories reveals just how great the detrimental effects of popularizing ID have been.

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It's not really fair to say "the academic left" is giving aid to the IDers. I think the committee made an error in rejecting the proposal for the reasons they apparently rejected it. But, in contrast to the author of the Sun article, it's not fair to conclude that the academic left is now supporting ID.
That being said, I think it is worrysome when academic scientists concede any ground to ID. ID is not amenable to scientific analysis. It's simply not science. It's theology.

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Right?

I mean, how bad can a theory be if it embodies both Intelligence and Design -- two cornerstones of human activity??

My only concern is that in teaching our children alternatives to the Holier-Than-Thou Darwinian Orthodoxy, we should not impose a single alternative. Let a hundred flowers bloom! Our children, like our scientists, can be trusted to figure things out for themselves. That's why I strongly urge us to open our minds and reach out to other options, such as:

The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

The following is from a sample letter to be written to U.S. school boards, but it could be adapted for use in Canada:

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I am writing you with much concern after having read of your hearing to decide whether the alternative theory of Intelligent Design should be taught along with the theory of Evolution. I think we can all agree that it is important for students to hear multiple viewpoints so they can choose for themselves the theory that makes the most sense to them. I am concerned, however, that students will only hear one theory of Intelligent Design.

Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him.

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So, just as Sokal showed many years ago, post-modernism cannot evaluate scientific ideas.

So now we should have "God did it" as an explanation in science classes? Why not "The Great Penis did it"? There is no more evidence for the one than for the other.

Anyone who is "open" to intelligent design as science is simply ignorant of science. Darwin died many years ago, but his theories have vast explanatory power. Nothing remotely compares to this power to explain the state of the world and the beings in it.

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Anyone who is "open" to intelligent design as science is simply ignorant of science. Darwin died many years ago, but his theories have vast explanatory power. Nothing remotely compares to this power to explain the state of the world and the beings in it.

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Judge Jones Ruling

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Hooray for judge Jones. His popularity could rival judge Judy and judge Mills Lane, perhaps.

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Originally posted by virge47:
I believe the above statement should read anyone who believes in Darwin's theory of evolution and that everything just happened by total chance...

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Neither Darwin nor modern evolutionary theory holds that evolution by natural selection occurs by chance.

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To conceive of evolution as nothing more than blind chance and randomness is the most serious conceptual mistake one can make. Evolution does contain a component of chance, but there is far more to the process than that, and it is precisely the existence of the non-chance components that allows evolution to work. The process of evolution is driven by the engine of natural selection, a filter that extracts order out of chaos according to a fixed and non-random set of rules. It is for this reason that many of the most common creationist caricatures of evolution fail. Source

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Originally posted by Brian White:
...My opinion is that inteligent design should be steered away from "science" and tacked onto religion where it belongs.(But that may be harder than it appears)

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Originally posted by Contrarian:
Yes. The trouble is that the creationists do not understand the difference between religion and science.

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Amen (irony unintended) - I think that's the heart of the issue. There are criteria that must be fulfilled for a theory to be considered scientific and ID doesn't fulfill them.

Logical criteria:

A scientific theory must be:

1. a simple unifying idea that postulates nothing unnecessary ("Occam's Razor")
2. logically consistent
3. logically falsifiable (i.e., cases must exist in which the theory can be imagined to be invalid)
4. clearly limited by explicit boundary conditions so that it is clear whether or not particular data are or are not relevant to verification or falsification

Empirical criteria:

A scientific theory must:
1. be empirically testable or lead to predictions or retrodictions that are testable
2. actually make verified predictions and/or retrodictions
3. involve reproducible results
4. provide criteria for the interpretation of data as factual, artifactual, anomalous or irrelevant

It is also important to understand that today's Darwinism includes elements unknown to Darwin, and undreamed of by him.

For example, Darwin's original theory required a mechanism of heredity, but did not specify one, because Darwin was unaware of the work of Mendel on genetics.

It was only in the late 1940s that a fully synthesized genetically-informed Darwinism was developed by people like Sewell Wright, Dobzhansky, and others.