Obvs, he did it.
Larry Moran discusses some apologetics from Jonathan McLatchie, in which McLatchie briefly argues for intelligent design. I think the fact that it’s in the context of Christian apologetics already gives away the store, but at least he gives a succinct definition of intelligent design:
The study of patterns in nature which bear the hallmarks of an intelligent cause
Oh, so it’s 19th century natural history? Been there, done that. About two centuries ago and a little less, that was the underlying assumption of natural theology: that studying science was for the purpose of seeing the fingerprints of the creator on its creations. Darwin himself was a fan of Paley, and made his voyage on the Beagle with a head full of such ideas. We all know how that turned out.
But we could define science in a similar way: the study of patterns in nature. Notice what I left out? The presumed conclusion. That’s one of their problems, that they are not open to interpreting the science for what it is, but are trying to shoehorn their desired interpretation into the data, no matter what it is.
McLatchie also makes an analogy to forensic science — here’s a crime scene, let’s figure out who did it. But sometimes no one did it, and it’s an error to try and force a conclusion. If someone is struck by lightning and killed, could I examine the scene and come up with a string of arguments and innuendo that lead to the conclusion that Jonathan McLatchie did it? Sure I could. I could also obsess over it and write long-winded, tenuously logical books that claim that all those natural explanations for lightning are false, and that we need to recognize them as McLatchie-Associated Phenomena.
But that would make me a crank. Just like ID is a crank movement.
Larry also succinctly summarizes ID.
The main goal of the movement is to provide scientific justification for the belief in a creator god. No amount of twisting and turning (apologetics) is going to fool us into thinking that the ID movement has nothing to do with the belief in a creator. The entire movement is just another version of creationism and all you have to do is look on the main ID blogs and websites to see that this is true. That’s why we refer, correctly, to the movement as Intelligent Design Creationism.
True. And it’s been exposed as religiously motivated over and over again.
This has led some of the cranks to claim that pointing out the source of their crankiness is an example of the genetic fallacy. This would only be the case if we were saying ID is wrong because its proponents are religious. That isn’t the case at all: it’s wrong because they fail to support their arguments with good evidence, because they solely make poor arguments against evolutionary theory, and because they all seem to be painfully ignorant of what evolutionary theory is. That leads us to ask why they make such ludicrously bad arguments, and their religious motivation is the answer to that question. They aren’t following the evidence honestly, they are trying to distort it to support their mythology.
As has been pointed out already on Sandwalk, all you have to do to refute McClatchie’s claim is to remind him of “cdesign proponentsists”. Game, set, match.
Well, not all the folks who advocate Intelligent Design are religious; some of them are spiritual.
What’s the difference? Semantics, basically. Some cdesign proponentsists think that if they can verbally distance themselves from “religion” or “God” by screwing around with definitions then we (and possibly they) will all be fooled into thinking that hey, they’re secular and working on reason and evidence alone.
Yeah, right. All those unjustified leaps and assumptions and distortions are still there. So that tactic won’t work either.
PZ:
Recently, while browsing books, I came across Cold Case Christianity, written by a former detective, who claims to have been a staunch atheist for 35 years, prior to looking into the evidence, and you know the rest. One thing this guy goes on about is “undesigned coincidences”, which made me laugh. It caused a serious head shake too, because it seems so easy to baffle people with bullshit.
There are partially intelligently designed living beings out there. They’re commonly known as GMOs. So if there is some intelligent designer out there besides humans, wouldn’t we notice it by the evidence of transgenes or other signs of unnatural genetic modification?
Before you can study the patterns in nature that bear the hallmarks of an intelligent cause, you have to demonstrate that there actually ARE hallmarks of an intelligent cause. You can’t presuppose that such hallmarks already exist.
Before you call in the forensics team, you first have to determine if a crime actually DID take place. You don’t presuppose that everything you come across is a crime scene.
Even that weak analogy fails justifying ID. The word I embolded there is the key.
ID is instead saying “Let’s figure out X did it.” Without letting evidence lead them to the conclusion. ID forms a conclusion and tries to lead the evidence to it.
I seem to real Feynman saying something about that.
They aren’t following the evidence honestly, they are trying to distort it to support their mythology.
And then there are the ones who go all tu quoque and say, “Well, the evolutionists do it, too, because they are motivated to reach a non-religious conclusion!” IOW, they try to turn the default position of no one being responsible into an assumption. Painful.
If we were intelligently designed then the designer did a piss-poor job of it. But then, if certain writings are to be believed, he whipped up the sperm-providers of the species in a day only to realize a little later that, oops, those sperm need ova to be of any use.
“Intelligent Design Creationism.” It sounds like the Department of Redundancy Department is earning it’s keep.
I think the analogy to forensic science is more on the nose than McLatchie imagines.
The issue with forensic science (and I am really tempted to put science between ”) is that often forensic researchers go into a case with a lot of unfounded assumptions, eg: a crime has taken place and there is a perpetrator. There have been cases where in the end after renewed research it showed no crime actually had taken place and the person convicted has been released. The person convicted was found due to the researchers and detectives starting with the premise that a perp could be found, and ended up at the poor sod who was in the end convicted of a crime that never took place.
As stated, IDers do exactly the same.
Then there is no intelligent design, because no one is studying said natural patterns in any way resembling what goes on in other disciplines when we use that term. “Wow, that shit is complicated, therefore God” =/= “studying”.
Well. Sometimes we are. For example, when an ID proponent makes the case (sometimes in court) that ID is an acceptable theory to teach in public schools, opponents present a lot of evidence that ID is in fact a religious idea. But that’s not the genetic fallacy either because the origin (genesis) and motivation of the theory is relevant by the Establishment Clause.
@10…or worse.
Cameron Todd Willingham. Executed by Rick Perry and the good state of Texas for a crime that wasn’t a crime.
zenlike@10: “There have been cases where in the end after renewed research it showed no crime actually had taken place and the person convicted has been released.”
And then there have been cases where renewed research showed no crime actually had taken place—but the person convicted had already been executed.
So who was the Intelligent Designer who came up with birth defects, fatal mutations, viruses, etc?
busterggi @ 15
well that is easy it they are all the result of the original sin of Adam and Eve as are things like death & disease and probably bad weather too.
uncle frogy
No, bad weather is the result of homosexuality. Everybody knows that.
It’s time for the question that no creationist I have ever encountered has ever answered:
Is there anything that happens on its own or is god required for everything?
That is, if I were to take a handful of coins and drop them on the ground, will they take up their final positions showing heads or tails all on their own or does god come down and deliberately, purposefully, and consciously place the coins according to his direct will?
I have a follow-up to that question: If god isn’t required for everything, if there are some things that happen all on their own, why can’t the diversification of life be one of those things?
But, I never manage to get that far because no creationist ever answers the first question.
@17, John Harshman:
That must be why when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the French Quarter where all those ho-mo-SECK-shuls were having their “Southern Decadence” party was pretty much OK while all them Christian parishes were destroyed.
So I would like some guidance here.
I was recently on a business trip and the salesperson I was out in the field, very conservative, had been arguing politics with me the whole time. This is fairly common with the two of us so I just enjoyed the argument as I usually do. But, somehow he rolled around to creationism, or ID which he insisted on calling it saying it wasn’t the same thing as creationism. We got interrupted at that point. But, i realized that I really didn’t even want to have the discussion with him.
Over the years I have argued the cause many times but I have come to the conclusion that there are only two reasons that someone takes the Creationist position and those are blatant dishonesty and willful ignorance. Neither is a position that is ethically or intellectually defensible and a person who takes such positions is not someone I care to discuss the issue with.
So, all of that being said, is there any real reason to engage people like this? Should I just politely say that I won’t discuss the topic and change the subject? or is there something else I’m missing.
re @18:
Good question. Surprised at silent responses.
I would imagine that the first response (from a godbot) would be:
re 20:
I too think that IDers deny Creationism, to avoid all the Religion nonsense. As in, maybe someone who agrees with Science etc, yet sometimes gets baffled when things get into the questions science retains unanswered, so desperation leads them to “something CAUSED it to happen, so why not a designer? [case closed]”
[to clarify that point I tried to make there]: I would concede that some IDers get to ID out of bafflement, not to justify the Bible stories. To equate ID to Creationism says the latter, to which they object; even though it’s essentially equivalent.
no advice, re your question. I too would fall back on, “uhhhh.. let’s talk about something else, okay?”
Intelligent design was invented by Phillip Johnson, a lawyer, to get around the inconvenient First Amendment prohibition about teaching religious dogma in public schools.
@21: slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem))
I’ve had the other side of that: So if god is not required for the coins, then suppose I take a handful of coins and toss them on the ground over here. But over here, I take another set of coins and place them in the identical positions, how could you tell the two apart? One was made by conscious, purposeful, deliberate actions and the other wasn’t. It happened all on its own.
How can you distinguish the two? What on earth would make you conclude that one of them was “designed”?
“The study of patterns in nature which bear the hallmarks of an intelligent cause.”
Aha! Superconductivity at relatively high temperatures qualifies. Must be god toying with magnets.
“That’s why we refer, correctly, to the movement as Intelligent Design Creationism.”
I prefer IDiocy, producing creacrap.
All forms of creacrap consists of three characteristics:
1. some version of Paley’s Watchmaker Analogy;
2. Evolution Theory is wrong;
3. Goddiddid.
Calling it mythology looks too much like a compliment.
re 24:
to continue that train of slippery thought…
duplicating a random pattern disqualifies as “designed”. If the coins I tossed randomly landed with all 20 landing same side up, or in some kind of pattern, then ID might have an argument. IOW, design is not random.
Don’t consider Jackson Pollock as counterexample. his random flinging of paint streaks were well crafted…. so to speak.
oh dear, I’m disproving my argument.
Looking out of the window of my flat, I can see lots of “patterns in nature which bear the marks of an intelligent cause”. Difficult to account for the railings that stop people falling off the balconies in any other terms, for example. I suppose they could in principle be the result of purely instinctive activity, like an ant’s nest, which we probably would not regard as produced by “an intelligent cause”, but could the same plausibly hold for the LHC, for example?
ID is not wrong because its proponents are religious. ID is wrong because ID is religious.
@26, slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem))
Well, we know that design isn’t random. Humans are incapable of producing truly random things. But the question is, how does one distinguish between something that is “natural” and something that is specifically crafted to look “natural”?
The goal is to get them to provide a means to determine if something is “designed.” If they are going to insist that there is a designer who designs things, how do we separate that which is “designed” from that which happens on its own? Is there anything that happens on its own? If so, why can’t whatever it is that we’re looking at be one of those things that happens on its own? How does one tell the difference?
I get the feeling they know this is the point which is why they never answer the direct question but always deflect and evade.
As somebody pointed out, the watchmaker argument was based on the idea that a watch could be told from the beach pebbles surrounding it as an obviously made thing. ID is arguing that the beach pebbles are also obviously made.
@30, Menyambal – torched by an angel
Indeed, but there’s more to it than that:
How can you tell that the watch was made by a watchmaker as opposed to a watch-making machine? Indeed, a watch is different from pebbles on the beach, but that just means its origin is likely different from the pebbles. That doesn’t mean a watchmaker made the watch.
What lets us conclude that there’s a watchmaker involved is our understanding of what machines can and cannot do with respect to the watch that we found. We’ve seen watchmakers. We’ve seen machines. If this is some intricate watch with jewel bearings and the like, machines aren’t likely to be the source. But if this is some cheap, digital thing with a plastiform band, then very little human action went into making it, if any at all.
So that leads back to my original questions the creationists always avoid: Is there anything that happens on its own? Why isn’t this one of them? How can we tell things that happen on their own from things that require the assistance of others?
Menyambal – torched by an angel @ 30:
It also makes the assumption that the watch is found utterly without context, instead of in a world in which watches of many shapes and sizes roam free and breed in massive numbers, and in which a rich fossil history of watches shows forms of watches developing over time.
In other words, the watchmaker argument simply serves to highlight most of the criteria we use to tell watches apart from living things.
As far as ID goes, I’ll give their claims of being an actual scientific field of study seriously when they bring me the results of the experiments they have done describing the process their creator used to adjust evolution, past or present. The utter lack of any such work – or even apparent curiosity – about that sort of “ok, what’s our next step in proving this?” topic speaks volumes about the real internal rigor being applied in ID.