More on ID

In response to this fellow, who lives just down the road (in Canadian terms - i.e. just a few hundred miles away), a few comments.

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When I were a lad, amongst the Pentecostals, I used to encounter Creationists a lot. I had a brief period of time agreeing with them, found that they were full of misinformation, and abandoned the idea. However, most of the Creationists I met were honest people, and not particularly given to arguing much about it (at least, not on a scientific level). I have a certain degree of respect for some types of Creationism still - the sort that grapples with actual data, tries to cobble together theories that hold water, and doesn't take up its time with trying to win people over by overstating its case to the point of dishonesty. Someone who says "I believe the Bible should be interpreted this way; I take it on faith; I assume that when all the evidence is in, and rightly interpreted, science will agree" can be a Creationist with intellectual integrity; Creationists whose focus is on PR get little respect from me.

Anyway, there was a Creation vs. Evolution debate. Being a Christian, I was naturally interested in how Christian Evolutionists thought; the thoughts of atheists were of no interest to me. (When I was young I read G.K. Chesterton's "The Ball and the Cross" (e-text), and learned from it that atheists make up for being wrong by being so awesome, brave, honorable, honest and Scottish that it just doesn't matter. Alas, Chesterton treated his fictional atheists too respectfully; I was inevitably disappointed with the real thing.) (Also I've never been someone who takes it well when I come across someone who's just plain wrong, to my shame.) The "theistic evolution" position - Christians who believe that evolution was God's tool for creating us - was a pretty broad spectrum, with it being often assumed that God did some occasional miraculous intervention to help things along. (I naturally had never come across the Catholic Thomists, inheritors of the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas, who have serious problems with the idea that "creation" means "God tinkering with stuff".) So this was the dividing line: Creationists on one side, evolution-believers on the other, and what we now call "Intelligent Design" largely on the evolution side, or keeping a low profile.

(It was during this time that I learned to despise scientific philosophy as fraudulent and dishonest, thanks to the abuse of it in such debates.)

Since then Creationism has been more or less routed, as far as I can tell, and the Evolutionism side has split in two: the evolutionary purists vs. the ID-evolutionists. The ID types have, for whatever reason, decided to assume the Creationists' niche of designated gadfly upon the buttocks of Evolution. Or maybe they didn't, and the evolutionary purists decided they wanted a purge. Or maybe a lot of the people who didn't want straight Evolution being taught in schools jumped on the ID wagon as having more potential than Creationism. I dunno. I keep vaguely meaning to read up on it, but the actual arguments for and against ID don't interest me at all; even the thought of investigating them strikes me with unutterable lethargy. It's all the surrounding arguments that interest me - does it matter what kids are taught? Why? Is it really a victory for science to churn out classes of 18-year-olds who believe in Evolution because they've been didactically instructed to do so? How does this have the first thing to do with critical thinking skills? Do we even want people to have critical thinking skills?

(I approve of critical thinking, but it does run the risk of leading to independent thought, which I'm a little skeptical of mostly because (a) it happens so rarely as to seem unnatural, (b) genuine independent thought would disrupt social cohesion, were it ever to become widespread, and (c) I'm not sure I've ever been given a reason to believe it's actually a good thing. The argument in favour of independent thought effectively runs as follows: "Everyone else says it's a good thing! Especially the cool people. Do you really want to disagree with everyone else on this?" It would be obviously self-contradictory to praise independent thought on such a basis.)

On the importance of whether people know about evolution, as opposed to, say, magnetohydrodynamics or quantum mechanics, you (Mr. Tile) maintain: Ignorance in the question of our origin is quite different and frankly more important. Well, maybe. Being cut off from history is not a good thing; our ideas come from somewhere, they're not all as obvious as we think. I work in science; my job is made immensely easier by the heritage of Thomas Bradwardine, the mediaeval archbishop who argued for the necessity of using mathematics in physics - this just wasn't a self-evident idea back then. The idea of momentum took a while to get properly refined, too - under the term "impetus", it got started among the ancient Greeks, got improved on significantly by the Islamic scholars of Baghdad (Avicenna and some guy whose name I forget), got refined by the Merton Calculators in the late Middle Ages and later by Galileo, and finally got the finishing touches from Newton, who rechristened it. These, and all the other stories of our ideas of science, morality, politics, our own self-image, are recent things, the history of the software we install in our heads; our descent from reptiles, or even from chimpanzees, is a lot further back.

You also mention that "as a scientist you should be keenly aware of the stranglehold religion has kept over society... this is yet another example in a long line going back to Galileo et al." If you're talking about, say, the suppression of heretickal ideas, then yes, I'm keenly aware, mostly because I find mediaeval history quite interesting; although this has nothing to do with me as a scientist. But if you mean suppression of scientific knowledge, as the context implies, there is no such long line. Galileo gets quoted all the time because he's the most famous example of a martyr for science, and he's the most famous example because there aren't any others - at least, not within Christian history. (There may have been in Islamic history, but I don't know much about that and neither do most Westerners; and people claim Giordano Bruno and Hypatia as martyrs for science, but you need to squint pretty heavily to make that work [EDIT: I forgot to mention the Scopes guy, whose martyrdom consisted of the inconvenience of being put on trial. There's probably other things Protestants did... if anyone can think of any drop 'em in the combox.]) So as a scientist, I should be keenly aware of the fact that conflict between science and religion has tended to be the exception rather than the rule, and that a lot of the groundwork for science was laid in the Middle Ages by a load of priests and monks and friars; and indeed I am keenly aware of that, although not that many people are, which is a great pity.

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And some relevant links: Tim O'Neill, a sarcastic atheist mediaevalist, reviews a book on the contributions of the Middle Ages to science, and in the process does the downtown stomp on the "conflict thesis" (the thesis - well, the propaganda, really, "thesis" gives it unearned respect - that religion and science have always been at each other's throats) in a storm of impatience, rage, and familiarity with actual facts.

And here's Fred Reed doing the downtown stomp on the Theory of Evolution - or rather, on the idea that it's all proven beyond doubt, and the attitudes of people who rage whenever their theory is questioned. A lot of fun. The problems he notes arise from the fact that "evolution" is two things: scientifically testable process (that organisms adapt) and use of that process as an interpretive and explanatory tool with which to analyse the (pre)history of life. Thing is, history and its interpretation can never be "science" in the way that, say, Chemistry can; you can gather evidence for a sequence of events, like the evolution of reptiles to small mammals to primates to humans or the Battle of Hastings, but you can't the hypothetical events in a test tube - there's always going to be a certain degree of interpretation and speculation involved. It's this philosophical grey area - or philosophical black hole - that gives rise to things like ID: people talk about Evolution as if it's as much SCIENCE! as the Theory of Relativity is, but it isn't. (Neither is the Big Bang theory and the history of the universe... although because of the finite speed of light, the cosmic background radiation allows us to actually see the universe as it was billions of years ago, so the problem is less extreme; and observation can be supplemented by computer modelling. You can simulate the lifecycle of a star, in a way you can't simulate the evolution of a giraffe.)

(A later column discusses the reaction of scientists to him personally when he raises questions he wants the answer to. I've got a few quibbles with his statements on religion - how many archbishops has he met, that he feels able to describe their typical response to heretics? - and it's not as if all scientists are like that either, but it's not good if just asking the questions gets you labelled as a heretic creationist bent on "tearing down science". You can't even liken this to the Inquisition - they'd burn you for heretical opinions, but asking questions wasn't a problem back in the day - there was nothing wrong with nailing heretical theses to the door as a proposal for debate (as Martin Luther famously did, and it wasn't that that got him in trouble).)