Intelligent Design is warmed-over creationism

Melanie Phillips is irate. Why? Because Ken Miller says Intelligent Design is nothing but creationism relabeled. Miller is right, Phillips is once again raving in ignorance.

In an item on the growing popularity of Intelligent Design, John Humphrys interviewed Professor Ken Miller of Brown University in the US who spoke on the subject last evening at the Faraday Institute, Cambridge. Humphrys suggested that Intelligent Design might be considered a kind of middle ground between Darwinism and Creationism. Miller agreed but went further, saying that Intelligent Design was

nothing more than an attempt to repackage good old-fashioned Creationism and make it more palatable.

But this is totally untrue. Miller referred to a landmark US court case in 2005, Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District, which did indeed uphold the argument that Intelligent Design was a form of Creationism in its ruling that teaching Intelligent Design violated the constitutional ban against teaching religion in public schools. But the court was simply wrong, doubtless because it had heard muddled testimony from the likes of Prof Miller.

No, the court testimony was crystal clear, and it wasn’t just Miller who demonstrated the fact that Intelligent Design was a false front laid over old-school creationism. The lawyers demonstrated, among other things, that a) the textbook in question had been crudely revamped from a creationist text by simply substituting “design” for “creation” (with revealing errors — anyone remember “cdesign proponentsists“?); b) that the books were bought with money collected by a conservative church, and that the defendants lied about the source; c) that the people who tried to introduce ID into the Dover schools were motivated entirely by their religious goals (Bill Buckingham to the school board: “Nearly 2,000 years ago someone died on a cross for us; shouldn’t we have the courage to stand up for him?”); and d), that the instigators didn’t have the slightest clue what ID was. We can also go directly to the words of the big names in ID, like Bill Dembski (“Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory“) or Phillip Johnson:

I have built an intellectual movement in the universities and churches that we call The Wedge, which is devoted to scholarship and writing that furthers this program of questioning the materialistic basis of science…Now, the way that I see the logic of our movement going is like this. The first thing you understand is that the Darwinian theory isn’t true. It’s falsified by all of the evidence and the logic is terrible. When you realize that, the next question that occurs to you is, well, where might you get the truth?…I start with John 1:1. In the beginning was the Word. In the beginning was intelligence, purpose, and wisdom. The Bible had that right. And the materialist scientists are deluding themselves…

In summary, we have to educate our young people; we have to give them the armor they need. We have to think about how we’re going on the offensive rather than staying on the defensive. And above all, we have to come out to the culture with the view that we are the ones who really stand for freedom of thought. You see, we don’t have to fear freedom of thought because good thinking done in the right way will eventually lead back to the Church, to the truth-the truth that sets people free, even if it goes through a couple of detours on the way. And so we’re the ones that stand for good science, objective reasoning, assumptions on the table, a high level of education, and freedom of conscience to think as we are capable of thinking. That’s what America stands for, and that’s something we stand for, and that’s something the Christian Church and the Christian Gospel stand for-the truth that makes you free. Let’s recapture that, while we’re recapturing America.

Or how about this from Johnson?

My colleagues and I speak of “theistic realism” — or sometimes, “mere creation” –as the defining concept of our movement. This means that we affirm that God is objectively real as Creator, and that the reality of God is tangibly recorded in evidence accessible to science, particularly in biology. We avoid the tangled arguments about how or whether to reconcile the Biblical account with the present state of scientific knowledge, because we think these issues can be much more constructively engaged when we have a scientific picture that is not distorted by naturalistic prejudice. If life is not simply matter evolving by natural selection, but is something that had to be designed by a creator who is real, then the nature of that creator, and the possibility of revelation, will become a matter of widespread interest among thoughtful people who are currently being taught that evolutionary science has show God to be a product of the human imagination.

Intelligent Design creationism is all about hiding Jesus under a blanket of pseudoscience and smuggling him into the public schools. Nothing more, nothing less.

Melanie Phillips clearly knows nothing about the case. So what possible reason could she have for claiming ID is distinct from creationism?

Whatever the ramifications of the specific school textbooks under scrutiny in the Kitzmiller/Dover case, the fact is that Intelligent Design not only does not come out of Creationism but stands against it. This is because Creationism comes out of religion while Intelligent Design comes out of science. Creationism, whose proponents are Bible literalists, is a specific doctrine which holds that the earth was literally created in six days. Intelligent Design, whose proponents are mainly scientists, holds that the complexity of science suggests that there must have been a governing intelligence behind the origin of matter, which could not have developed spontaneously from nothing.

Intelligent Design creationism does not come out of science. The initial founders of the Discovery Institute were lawyers, philosophers, venture capitalists, businessmen, and theologians, with a scarce few recruits who were once scientists, like Michael Behe. Science emerges from evidence, not ideology, and these gomers had none, and still have none. They have a claim that there is a “governing intelligence”, but have shown no evidence for such a being, nor have they even speculated openly about the nature of that intelligence…because when they do, they have to admit that they believe it was the Christian god. Again, without supporting evidence.

This is why Miller is completely correct to say Intelligent Design creationism is “an attempt to repackage good old-fashioned Creationism and make it more palatable”. Overt admission that their ideas are based on religion means they are non-scientific, and gets them excluded from science classes. By lying and concealing their motives, they hope to sneak it in past people who are too stupid to recognize the obvious, or who share similar underhanded motives for denying the truth. I wonder which of those two alternatives best fit Melanie Phillips?

Our own Jonas Brothers?

There’s a funny Cat and Girl comic that makes fun of our success as atheists, saying that we’ve gone mainstream. Read it, I got a chuckle…but one of the panels listing factors in our loss of indie cred says, “We have our own Jonas Brothers.” Now I’m stuck. I can’t figure out who our equivalent would be.

In case you don’t know, the Jonas Brothers are a band that plays a kind of Christian pop — they’re on the Disney Channel and appeal to prepubescent girls like David Cassidy did to my generation, only they are even more wholesome and extremely overt in their religiosity.

I’m pondering this, and can’t even imagine a proudly atheist band that plays bubblegum for kiddies, or has a show that sucks in adolescent eyeballs quite like the Jonas Brothers do. Maybe the cartoon is wrong. Maybe we aren’t quite that mainstream yet. Or maybe I’m just so out of it I’ve missed the latest godless sensation.

ICR loves them some scientists!

What do Louis Pasteur, Robert Boyle, Charles Bell, William Kirby, James Clerk Maxwell, and George Washington Carver all have in common? They all have facebook fan pages…created by the Institute for Creation Research!

Carver is representative: here’s the kind of thing the ICR writes about each one, and is the actual reason they’ve created these fan pages.

George Washington Carver was one of the great scientists who honored God as the Creator. Carver revolutionized agricultural science, and his studies of nature convinced him of the existence and benevolence of the Creator.

They don’t give a damn about the science — all that matters is that they were creationists. It seems a rather dishonorable reason to honor people known for their scientific works. It’s also absurd, in that all but Carver lived and worked before Darwin … heck, I would have been a creationist if I’d been a 18th century scientist, too.

Looking at the list, though, there’s a significant omission. Where’s Louis Agassiz? You’d be hard pressed to find a more vehement opponent of Charles Darwin who was also a contemporary and a renowned scientist…you’d think they’d rush to embrace him. He was also such a friend to the southern conservatives who wanted a scientific argument to support slavery…

(via Jokermage)

Say, Ireland, you might want to pay more attention to this blasphemy law

It looks like trouble, and some ministers are defending the proposed blasphemy law — you people aren’t going to let this violation of civil rights pass, are you?

We have some more details on the law, too: it authorizes fines up to €100,000, and gives the police the right to seize blasphemous materials from your home. If you’re reading Pharyngula right now on your home computer, you may have broken that law, and they can come take your computer away…and then they’ll notice all those books by Hitchens and Harris and Dawkins and so forth on your bookshelves, and next thing you know, you’re locked up in the Catholic Prison, stamping out communion wafers for 20 years.

And then there are the other implications. The Scientologists must be rubbing their hands with glee: their outrage will be sufficient to arrest people who protest their cult. If you draw a doodle that looks vaguely like Mohammed, and some nearby Moslem is outraged, you are guilty, guilty, guilty.

I know that Turkey is one of those countries I’d be wise to avoid unless I want to risk arrest…do you really want Ireland to share that distinction, too?

Another disappointment from the Collins site

I could hardly believe it when I saw it, but the BioLogos site uses the familiar creationist second law of thermodynamics argument.

Francis Collins has a Ph.D. in physical chemistry, and he should know very well what the meaning of entropy is (he should be far more familiar with the concept than a mere biologist like me should be), and he’s using the concept of entropy to argue against natural causes in the expansion of the universe … and then he turns around and explains that it is not an obstacle to biological evolution. The man is confused and inconsistent. This is crap I’d expect from Ken Ham or Ray Comfort, but not from a well-respected scientist.

Ich werde reisen an den Bodensee

Good news for me! I get to spend a week in Germany, attending the Nobel Laureate meetings at Lindau on 28 June-3 July. I get to have all the fun, but at least you’ll benefit indirectly, since I’ll be regularly blogging the talks here. In English. You wouldn’t want to see the butchery I would do to the lovely German language.

I was looking over the schedule, and what jumped out at me right after seeing all those great titles was that they are actually confining Nobel laureates to only half-hour talks. That will be something to see, too.

Ireland proposes a blasphemy law

I need details of this law against blasphemy. If “Begorrah!” and “Saints preserve us!” are outlawed, then Irish stereotypes will be utterly demolished. On the other hand, one Irish fellow I knew used the peculiar expression “fewkin'” as every other word…I presume charming references to sexual acts will not be regarded as blasphemous? Otherwise, the charm of the Irish vernacular will be lost to us forever.

Here is the only definition I’ve seen so far.

“Blasphemous matter” is defined as matter “that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion; and he or she intends, by the publication of the matter concerned, to cause such outrage.”

Wait, they’re going to make this work in Ireland? So the government plans on censoring every mention of “Catholic” and “Protestant” because they’ll spark outrage in some subset of the population? I think that, in general, prohibiting things because some fraction of the population will feel outraged at the concept would effectively mean that everything should be outlawed. I know I could stand outside any church or cathedral, stamp my foot, and fulminate at length — if only I were Irish, I could stroll the land, casting the priestly snakes off the island.

BioLogos?

Oh, no…it’s an irresistible magnet. Francis Collins and Karl Giberson, with funding from the Templeton Foundation (who else?), have put together a whole website full of fluffy bunnies and pious weasels to reconcile science and faith. It’s a rich vein of the worst of pseudo-scientific apologetics, and I am stunned by it — not because I am impressed by the substance, but because it is such a target-rich environment. Having read both Collins’ Language of God, with it’s amazing conversion experience that had to have impressed all with its depth and majesty, and the equally wooly-minded Karl Giberson’s book, Saving Darwin, I can say I knew these two would have put together a web site exactly like this.

Like I say, I’m overwhelmed with the tripe available on that site, so I’ll just have to take a poke at one small example. They actually have a page to address the question of How does the evil and suffering in the world align with the idea of a loving God?. As one who often hears the atheists accused of being philosophically shallow, this page is a consolation: it’s a collection of tired cliches that don’t answer the question. There’s the usual “Free will!” blather, and the “god works in mysterious ways” nonsense, and as a special bonus, there’s the extra-special “We Christians are special because our god suffered, too” excuse (which answers nothing, but raises many more questions about this contradictory deity of theirs). One curious thing about the approach this site takes is that it is slathered with Jesus everywhere — if you aren’t already a New Testament lovin’ evangelical, you are not going to be at all impressed.

But here’s one special case of their problem of evil logic, of interest to us non-Jebusites.

Suffering is Also a Problem for Atheists

Evil also poses problems for the nonbeliever. Claims that torture is wrong even though the victims of torture might be terrorists with useful information appeal to some external standard. But what is this standard? Such claims need to be grounded in something if they are to be asserted with such confidence. So, while some naturalistic philosophers have developed ethical systems without God, many other naturalists acknowledge this doesn’t work and that such ethical systems are entirely arbitrary. If God does not exist and there is no grounding for how things ought to be, then moral — as opposed to emotional — outrage at horrendous evil has no basis. The fact that we cannot escape our sense of horror and outrage at evil actually points us to God’s existence.

Um, no. This is all wrong. Evil is not a problem for us. I believe that we are a rare cosmic accident in an impersonal and hostile universe — the natural state is one which is largely inimical to our existence. I also don’t think human beings are designed at all, but evolved by natural mechanisms, and that we are not by any means optimized for anything, let alone any kind of local definition of goodness. That bad things happen, that accidents occur, that many normal events can lead to our death or suffering, that humans are flawed and can harm one another…all of that is to be expected. We atheists certainly do not have the kind of problem with evil that a believer in a universal benignity would have, so this is a bit of a dodge.

Now you could turn it around and say that atheists have a problem with goodness, which is ultimately what Collins/Giberson are trying to say. But once again, Collins makes the same mistake he did in his book — he can’t imagine any source of morality other than an external imposition by a moral entity, and reveals again that he doesn’t actually have any understanding of evolution.

We are social animals. We are the children of a particular kind of animal that improved their chances of survival and reproduction by cooperation, working together as a family/tribe/nation. We have an operational, working definition of what is good and evil that is defined by our history: goodness is that which has promoted the survival of our community and ourselves. Anyone who has a reasonable grasp of Darwinian logic ought to be able to see that this is the kind of property that can emerge from forces entirely within a group’s history, with no exogenous agent required.

I certainly do have grounds to be outraged at the use of torture. Those are fellow human beings who are experiencing pain: I empathize with them, I see them as fellow members of the greater community of humanity, and I can rationally see that a society that allows torture is one in which I and my family are less safe. I do not need a little god sitting on my shoulder, whispering in my ear, “Oh, PZ, you aren’t supposed to enjoy that person’s suffering”.

My sense of horror and outrage points me to a common humanity, not some invisible magic man who wills it because he works in mysterious ways.

Oh, and by the way, any rationalization that claims that “if god doesn’t exist, then you have no reason to be moral” is making the fallacy of arguing from consequences. It does not imply the truth of the statement. You’d think a couple of high-powered Christian apologists flying high on buckets of money from a billionaire might have been able to avoid errors in logic 101, but nah…these are guys with brain-poisoning from an overdose of faith.

Also by the way, Jerry Coyne has his own favorite parts of the site. Maybe you do too!

Poll time! Everyone take a poke at Florida

You’ve all seen the hideous Florida license plates, right? Well, the Orlando Sentinel has a poll to see whether people think it’s reasonable for a secular state government to be punching out plates endorsing a weird sectarian faith. So far, the kind of people who read the Sentinel think it is. I wonder what the kind of people who read Pharyngula think…

Should Florida lawmakers allow specialty state license plates with religious messages?

Yes. Floridians who are religious should have the right to pay more to show it on their plates. (3592 responses)
58.3%
Yes. Why is this any different than letting Floridians buy plates to benefit other causes they believe in, like saving manatees? (1131 responses)
18.4%
No. This goes crashing through the wall that should separate church and state. (1325 responses)
21.5%
No, because every religion — and atheists — will be able to demand a license plate. (112 responses)
1.8%

Not enough Christians read books, I guess

In a promising sign of the decline of some forms of Christianity, a major Christian book show has been cancelled.

The show won’t go on in Dallas. The Christian Book Expo, an innovative consumer-focused book show, won’t be repeated next year. The board of Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, show sponsor, decided not to stage another event in 2010. Attendance at this year’s show, held March 20-22 at the Dallas Convention Center, was 1,500; organizers had hoped for 10,000 to 15,000. The show left the organization with a $250,000 shortfall, according to ECPA president and CEO Mark Kuyper. “We want to clean up the debt before we consider future options,” Kuyper told PW in an e-mail.

Once you’ve got your Bible and your copies of the Left Behind books, your good evangelical doesn’t need much more. And most of ’em won’t even read those.