Posted on 09/19/2005 6:01:22 PM PDT by gobucks
In 1993, the journalist Jonathan Rauch published a book called Kindly Inquisitors, in which he catalogued contemporary threats to the Enlightenment tradition of seeking truth through logical or empirical discourse. One of Rauch's points was that, while this (classical) liberal system for amassing knowledge appeared to be under attack from both the religious right and the multicultural left, in fact the two groups were making a version of the same argument: Mainstream science didn't accord their beliefs the respect they deserved, whether it was creation science on the one hand or feminist or Afro-centric science on the other.
Rauch's book has held up remarkably well in the twelve years since it was published. This is particularly so in light of the current debate over intelligent design (ID)--the idea, popular on the right, that life is too complex to have resulted from random variation. Even President Bush has suggested, as the creation scientists (and multiculturalists) of the 1980s and 1990s did before him, that both sides of the supposed debate be treated as legitimate in public school curricula.
But there was one thing Rauch didn't anticipate. At the time, he suggested that, even though creationists had adopted the tactics of the academic left--the demand for equal time--they still believed in objective truths. They just didn't think all of these truths were discoverable by science. By contrast, today's IDers have gone further and adopted the epistemology of the left--the idea that ostensibly scientific truths may be relative.
The animating principle of the postmodern left is the notion that truth follows from power and not from its intrinsic rightness. It's a conceit that began in the humanities but eventually spread to hard sciences like physics. "The point is that neither logic nor mathematics escapes the contamination of the social," as postmodern pooh-bah Stanley Aronowitz has put it. What makes this approach so radical is its implication that the way to win intellectually is to win politically.
In making their arguments, the postmodernists rely heavily on the work of historians of science like Thomas Kuhn. It was Kuhn who famously argued that scientific knowledge proceeds as a sequence of "paradigm shifts"--revolutions in the way we understand the world--and that the shifts occur not simply when the evidence in favor of the new paradigm becomes overwhelming, but when the people invested in the old paradigm are in some sense defeated (which may not occur until long after they're proved wrong). Mainstream science has taken from Kuhn the belief that evidence and logic are necessary, if not quite sufficient, conditions for a paradigm shift and that, in the long run, successive shifts bring society closer to objective truth. Where the postmodernists go awry is in their emphasis on Kuhn's relativism.
Unfortunately, these postmodernist ideas have become a staple of the ID movement. As laid out in a strategic memo produced by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, the leading backer of intelligent design, "Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud portrayed humans not as moral and spiritual beings, but as animals or machines who inhabited a universe ruled by purely impersonal forces." There was nothing particularly objective about this view, according to the IDers. Instead, applying the same reading of Kuhn that the postmodernists embrace, they argue that it was simply the result of a political struggle between insurgents and the establishment. (In fact, the IDers frequently cite Kuhn to this effect.) Probably the clearest example of this comes courtesy of Bruce K. Chapman, the Discovery Institute's president. "All ideas that achieve a sort of uniform acceptance ultimately fall apart, whether it's in the sciences or philosophy or politics, after a few people keep knocking away at it," he recently told The New York Times. But that's nuts. Germ theory, relativity, the idea that the earth is round--with apologies to Tom Friedman, the fact that all have withstood the occasional challenge suggests that truth counts for something.
Chapman might protest that he's simply proposing a more accurate alternative to evolution, the same way Darwin proposed a more accurate alternative to creationism. But ID isn't a new theory, just a new attempt to advance an old one, with some new empirical claims thrown in for good measure. As Jerry Coyne has pointed out ("The Faith that Dare Not Speak Its Name," August 22 & 29), scientists can discredit ID using the exact same evidence they used to debunk creationism. Once you realize this, it's no longer possible to interpret Chapman as echoing the belief in a steady progression toward truth.
Like all conservatives, of course, the IDers claim to decry relativism and to embrace absolutes. But, for them, the claim is logically incoherent in a way it wasn't when it came from their creationist predecessors. When a proposition is empirically false, as both creationism and ID (to the extent that it makes empirical claims) are, you're free to assert its truth; you just can't call it science. The creationists had no problem with this; they just rejected any science that contradicted the Bible. But the IDers aspire to scientific truth. Unfortunately, the only way to claim that something empirically false is scientifically true is to question science's capacity for sorting out truth from falsehood, the same way postmodernists do.
Conservatives were quick to point out the danger of this view in the '80s and '90s. They argued that a science that rejected the idea of truth was vulnerable to the most inane forms of intellectual hucksterism. And they were right. It's not hard to imagine scams like cold fusion or the Scientologist critique of psychiatric drugs gaining ground in a world where science's ability to identify knowledge has been undermined. (Among other monuments to postmodern thought was the idea that E=mc² might be a "sexed equation" that "privileges the speed of light over other speeds," as Belgian-French theorist Luce Irigaray once asserted.)
Americans don't like thinking of themselves as backward. As a result, the risk from science-rejecting creationists hasn't been particularly acute in recent decades. But most people don't have very strong views on the philosophy of science. If, unlike the postmodern left, the ID movement can enlist mainstream conservatives in questioning science's capacity to produce objective truth, then it's by no means clear the effort won't succeed. In that case, it will end up threatening a whole lot more than just evolution.
Aha! Great article. I've been thinking that a lot myself, that postmodernism and creationism/stealth creationism are secret friends.
Hear! Hear! Note well the NYT impish coverage of Intelligent Design. For some time now their science articles, particularly about cosmology, have always gotten in little digs, at least.
BTW - Peer review is not all there is to science...particularly when creationist research is rejected a priori.
A presumptive error on your part.
Whoops! You weren't supposed to reveal that to anyone below Invoking Deity Level VIII
You might want to Google "RATE team" (Radioisotope and the Age of The Earth) for starters.
You might also want to do a little reading on Information Theory...and the source of information in living things...and how evolution explains the same.
Bottom line: Do you believe human beings were here before 10,000 years ago? Do you have data supporting that contention?
Limiting scientific inquiry to natural forces has nothing to do with faith. Scientists only look for natural causes because they do not know of any way to detect supernatural ones.
And that's exactly why ID adherants do not adhere to "accepted scientific practices."
"Accepted scientific practice" dictates that the investigator limit himself to theories and causes that are detectable. For instance, evolution postualtes that biological diversity is caused by genetic mutation and natural selection. Both of these phenomena are easily detectable.
Intelligent design theorists, however, fail to say how their designer or his work can be detected. It is therefore not science.
ID gives the illusion of being science by attempting to use empirical data to falsify Darwinism. Their attempt fails, but even if it did not, it would not make ID theory science.
To make your theory scientific, you have to do more than just knock down an existing theory. Just because the theory you're knocking is false does not make your theory true. You have to come up with independent evidence that supports your theory.
And that's what ID "theorists" fail to do. They point to something, like a Bacterial Flagellum, assert (wrongly) that it could not have evolved in a Darwinian fashion, and then conclude it was designed. But their conclusion does not follow even if their assertion were correct. After all, it's easy to come up with dozens of potental other untestable naturalistic explanations. How do they know their explanation is better than any of these other ones? Unless there is some positive evidence that it was designed, then the design explanation is no better than any other explanation I can pull out of my rear end.
By mentioning God you just proved my point. I guess you didn't read the Discovery Institutes's memo on not to mention the G word.
It's not a coincidence that all IDers just happen to be Fundamentalist Christians or Moonies. ID is just a backdoor way to get creationism back into the schools. So you're not fooling anyone when you claim ID is different from creationism.
Or are you saying that those that believe that a fair assessement of evolution should include its many flaws are all liberals?
No, however I've yet to hear a fair assessment of the flaws in Evolution from the Creationist (which yes includes the IDers). All you get is one of the following.
1) Argument from ignorance (i.e. Why are there still monkeys, etc)
2) Flat out Lies (i.e. quote mining, sound bytes over substance - Evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics,)
3) Hate filled rants (i.e. Darwin is responsible for Hitler, Stalin, the Designator Hitter rule, etc)
Thanks for the ping!
What do I do next?
Johnson is not a scientist.
In addition, he fails to propose any empirical test of ID. Nor has anyone else proposed any test for it. The only thing ID people have attempted to do is find evidence against Darwinism. But evidence against Darwinism, even if valid (and the evidence they have presented isn't), is not evidence for ID.
They argue ID as a default position, and that is fundamentally unscientific.
LOLOLOLOL! Ah, this truly makes my day.
I don't know if the author is a leftist or not, but I think you missed an essential aspect of this article: The article assumes that postmodernist epistemology is a bad thing.
"They argue ID as a default position, and that is fundamentally unscientific."
And Evo argues "chance" as a default position.
No Johnson is not a scientist, but his book is well documented. uses sound logic and reasoning, and pretty much throws a monkey wrench into Darwinsism....so to speak. But, I don't expect any of the evo devo..tees to ever read it. Oh well...
I was an evo devo up till I read his book a few months aga. I was devastated by it. Being a geologist by training I was given the standard line about evo in college and I bought it hook line and sinker. It still may be a valid theory but it is seriously flawed, as Johnson so eloquently points out.
Also, Johnson doesn't argue for ID in the book, it is moslty just a critique on Darwinism, and quite well done.
I don't ask that ID be taught in schools, I ask that Darwinsim be treated like any other theory and be open to criticism. Instead it has become scientific dogma and held as the absolute truth when in fact, it is simply a theory and a weak one at that.
If you were looking for a tagline a bit more comprehensible than the one you currently use, I suggest your own words, quoted above.
Such were my own thoughts when I came upon this thread. Normally I would have refrained from pinging the list to a gobucks-initiated thread, as the others I've seen are of no scientific value. But when I read this article, I swiftly deployed the ping list -- with a song in my heart! The author nails it!
Whoa, reality check, please! New Republic is actually admitting that we were right about the perils of ding-bat relativism?
Has New Republic really published an intelligent article with which I find myself, in large measure, in accord?
And has gobucks actually posted said article, which makes the same compelling case I've argued--that ID is appalling chicanery, using liberal 'special pleading' to assault science and education, and thereby does great damage to genuine conservative issues?
Will you people please stop messing with my mind like this!
...Hey, hang on just a minute here...
...Am I on Candid Camera?
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