Brief update for Utah

I read the Salt Lake Tribune’s editorial and whole heartedly support its position. Also, check out Bagley’s cartoon!



I wrote this letter to the editor concerning another letter in the Daily Herald:

In his letter, Michael Dalton assumes way too much about evolutionists who believe in God, his comment that evolutionists “cannot brook even the slightest hint that a creator might have been involved” in the creation and design of life is simply not true. I, as both a Christian and an evolutionist, have a very big view of God. To us on a human level, the “pure chance” of evolution may seem chaotic, out of control and beyond the pale of divine order, but I doubt God is even bothered by it. I am sure he positively understands it and sees chaos, randomness and chance as just another part of his created order. I can imagine he is even constantly amazed by it, especially considering his limitless attention span and his incapacity for boredom. When I think about it I stand in awe of God when I look at his extraordinary creation and design of evolution.

And here are a couple of excerpts from articles concerning the testability of ID. The first are comments made by Michael Behe in an interview in Beliefnet:

Judge Jones argues that while Darwinian theory "cannot yet render an explanation on every point" of the natural world, that "should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classrooms." So he says intelligent design is untestable and therefore not a scientific method. What do you say about that?

I think that's simply untrue. Intelligent design is testable. Some scientists have tried to argue that it is false—[but] you can't say that intelligent design is falsifiable, as some scientists have argued and that it is untestable.

Is it verifiable?

Can you confirm it? Well, intelligent design is an inductive argument. In other words, whenever we have seen a particular kind of phenomenon, it has always been produced by a particular kind of cause. So whenever we see complex functional systems, it's always been our experience that they arise by purposeful design. And the way one refutes an inductive argument is by finding an exception to it. For example, if you say that all swans are white, the only way you can test that proposition or falsify it, is to find a swan that is not white. It doesn't do to keep on finding more swans that are white.

In fact, a number of philosophers of science have argued that scientific theories are tested more by withstanding falsification than they are by confirmation.

You're saying that the argument for intelligent design is falsifiable?

Yes, but it has not been falsified.

On what basis do you contend that it is falsifiable?

If somebody went into a laboratory and showed that random mutation and natural selection produced some new, complex system, then it would be falsified on that basis, because intelligent design, at least as I have formulated it, says that these complex systems that we see in the cell require intelligent activity to produce them. So that would show that they did not require intelligent activity

But William Saletan in his article in Slate makes some interesting comments concerning this testability:

… some folks have argued that ID is testable. Michael Behe, the chief scientific witness for ID in the Dover trial, says you could watch a bunch of bacteria in a lab to see whether, through evolution, they produced a flagellum. If they did, it would show that natural causes can account for the flagellum. If they didn't, it would show that natural causes can't account for it, so the cause must be supernatural.

Three months ago, when the trial was getting started, I said this testability claim was a ruse. Here's my argument: The theory that's being tested in the flagellum experiment is evolution. If it fails, ID would be vindicated only to the extent that ID consists of saying evolution would fail. That doesn't make ID an explanatory theory.

Jones makes the same point. "ID is at bottom premised upon a false dichotomy, namely, that to the extent evolutionary theory is discredited, ID is confirmed," he writes. He cites a 1982 court ruling that shredded this "contrived dualism"—the bogus assumption that "all scientific evidence which fails to support the theory of evolution is necessarily scientific evidence in support of creationism." He notes that another scientist who testified for ID in the Dover case admitted this: Irreducible complexity, the problem posed by the flagellum, "is not a test of intelligent design; it's a test of evolution."