This is totally proof of... something
I was cruising around the mighty internet when I found an article about Sarah Palin and Creationism over at the Atlantic. There’s not much to talk about here. Yeah, she’s a creationist, we’ve known it for a while, and the fact that America almost put such a scientifically illiterate person into one of the highest positions of power we have in this country still has me experiencing night terrors. But this really isn’t the proper forum for that type of political talk, and so instead, I want to address your attention to one of the more ingenious comments made on the page. From the commenter “Robert Crowther:”
Mr. Ambinder [author of the Palin post] is misinformed (not surprising, since his compatriots in the MSM have been misinforming the public on the issue for years). There are distinct differences between creationism and intelligent design. See the definition at www.intelligentdesign.org and you will see right away that it is remarkably different from creationism of any stripe.
He might do well to read up on atheists — yes, godless atheists — who are ID advocates like Dr. Bradley Monton, or at least ID friendly like Thomas Nagel. Myself, I’m an agnostic, one of the least religious (alhtough not anti-religious) people you’ll find. I don’t care to be labled as a creationist or in any way biblical.
Ambinder, like so many writers, is simply regurgitating what he’s heard from dogmatic Darwinists, the party line that will safely keep the cocktail party invites flowing. How perfectly blasé. Yawn.
I am… so embarrassed. For years. Literally. Years. I have insisted that intelligent design was inherently both religious and unscientific. But let’s take a look at the agnostic version of ID. Let’s start with the definition of intelligent design, as taken from Mr. Crowther’s website, intelligentdesign.org. And I quote:
Intelligent design refers to a scientific research program as well as a community of scientists, philosophers and other scholars who seek evidence of design in nature. The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. Through the study and analysis of a system’s components, a design theorist is able to determine whether various natural structures are the product of chance, natural law, intelligent design, or some combination thereof. Such research is conducted by observing the types of information produced when intelligent agents act. Scientists then seek to find objects which have those same types of informational properties which we commonly know come from intelligence. Intelligent design has applied these scientific methods to detect design in irreducibly complex biological structures, the complex and specified information content in DNA, the life-sustaining physical architecture of the universe, and the geologically rapid origin of biological diversity in the fossil record during the Cambrian explosion approximately 530 million years ago.
Wow. That’s a swell definition. And I can definitely see how it’s both scientific and agnostic. That is, of course, when we disregard the first sentence where intelligentdesign.org actually points out that it’s not scientific. It’s a small thing, but when we do science, we generally don’t, you know, start with our conclusion. So it wouldn’t make much sense for the definition of science to start with “seek evidence for design in nature.” Science goes the other way. We start with our evidence, and then we try to explain it, all the while looking for more evidence and, if it turns out that the new evidence shows our first explanation is wrong, we create a new explanation that works with both our old evidence and our new evidence. But we can go on from there with it still being science, right?
Except that second sentence… the whole “intelligence” thing. I know this is a nitpick, but I was an English major. When you write out your thesis statement, you need to start out by defining your terms. Let everyone know what you’re talking about. So…. what’s an “intelligence?” And what “designed” that intelligence? Was the intelligence some creature created through natural evolutionary means who just emerged as some hideous misshapen freak and then decided to gallivant around the cosmos, reshaping life wherever s/he found it, hoping that no other creature would ever bear his/her horrible fate? I mean, outside of the hideous alien, I guess the only intelligence that could be defined here is… a deity of some sort. But it couldn’t possibly be a deity, because Intelligent Design is agnostic. Like science. So in Intelligent Design, the designer must be assumed to be a really ugly alien. Who possibly was created through natural means as described through the Theory of Evolution. Great.
So the first sentence doesn’t really work, but the second sentence… okay, it’s shaky. But we’ve got to get to the third and fourth sentences where it tells us how a design theorist sort of figures out how things are designed! They look at things, and they figure it out! They “[observe] the types of information produced when intelligent agents act. Scientists then seek to find objects which have those same types of informational properties which we commonly know come from intelligence.” So they’ll… um… they’ll… OKAY! They take a look at the Mona Lisa! Right? They take a look at the Mona Lisa, and then, they take a look at a cell under a microscope, and if it looks like the Mona Lisa, they know that it’s proof of intelligent design! Right? Okay… Moving on.
The last sentence just sort of… lists things. That they don’t really believe could have happened… naturally. er…
I’ll admit, I’m having some doubts about this whole “Intelligent Design Definition” thing. But wait! Why am I doing all this? There’s a paragraph at the bottom that defines how ID is science! It starts off by asking “Is Intelligent Design a Scientific Theory?” And then, the answer comes. “Yes.” Oh thank the ugly alien. What more can you tell us, oh great Internet Page?
The scientific method is commonly described as a four-step process involving observations, hypothesis, experiments, and conclusion. Intelligent design begins with the observation that intelligent agents produce complex and specified information (CSI). Design theorists hypothesize that if a natural object was designed, it will contain high levels of CSI. Scientists then perform experimental tests upon natural objects to determine if they contain complex and specified information. One easily testable form of CSI is irreducible complexity, which can be discovered by experimentally reverse-engineering biological structures to see if they require all of their parts to function. When ID researchers find irreducible complexity in biology, they conclude that such structures were designed.
This is… totally not… circular reasoning. I don’t see how you could think it was. See? They say that they observe that intelligent agents produce things with CSI (complex and specified information), which totally couldn’t happen naturally because… and anyway, they then hypothesize that intelligently designed objects will have that CSI, and so when they find it, they know it’s intelligently designed. It’s totally straight forward and… really… scientific.
Man… the ugly alien is really going to get him.