Why Intelligent Design is “Horseshit”
Good post today at Panda’s Thumb / Pharyngula about the merits of debating creationists :
Creationists often pretend that getting criticism that points out their ideas are completely invalid is a validation. It’s enough that they can get a scientist into a debate; even if they are hopelessly outclassed, babble and lie and treat a scientific debate as if it were a tent revival, they will afterwards strut and preen and pretend that their participation alone makes them a legitimate member of the scientific community. Dawkins made this point in his essay, “Why I won’t debate creationists”.
. . .
Intelligent Design creationism is a load of horseshit. What has happened is that the movement has made some inroads solely in the political and legal arenas, where the absence of a scientific basis for the belief is little handicap, and now scientists are rousing themselves to point out its glaring deficiencies. This is not a sign of its growing importance. It’s a sign of growing corruption that demands a response. Read the books. Scientists are not coming out and saying that there is something to this intelligent design idea; they are announcing, with near unanimity, that it is worthless crap, junk that has no place in the lab or the schoolroom.
And the reason ID doesn’t have any place in the scientific or academic communities is because it doesn’t play by the rules of science.
In order for ID to be considered a scientific theory (as opposed to a religious hypothesis), it needs to jump through all the other hoops that legitimate theories do. The two most important things are that it needs to be testable and it needs to incorporate and/or explain every other bit of scientific data that’s come along so far (and no, “the devil’s trying to trick you” doesn’t count). If we can’t find ways to scientifically bolster the ID hypothesis, then it doesn’t deserve to be considered science, just like every other crackpot idea that’s come and gone.
If you pick up a soccer ball with your bare hands and run toward the goal, you might score a lot of points, but that doesn’t mean you’re playing soccer. Likewise, if you explain everything by saying it’s the work of a god supreme being intelligent designer, it doesn’t mean you’re playing science. This fact needs to be repeated again and again.
Perhaps the most disingenuous thing about arguing tactic of creationists is that they’re allowed to keep going back to the drawing board and change their story. By letting them keep retreating long enough to reinvent new justifications for the garbage that they’ve (as Kevin Drum put it) “reverse-engineered” from the Bible, we’re essentially serving as beta-testers for their “horseshit”. Each time we point out he tiny flaws in their hypotheses, they come back with a slightly modified version of the same crap.
Which leads me to the ultimate problem with Creationism. Perhaps the biggest scientific rule they’re breaking is that they’re starting with their conclusions and working backward from there. Science is all about using the facts that are available to us to try to explain the world. Creationists on the other hand are trying to find the facts that support their predetermined view of the world. This isn’t science, but they already knew that.
To go back to my half-assed analogy for a moment, by taking the debate out of the scientific community into school boards and local legislatures, not only have creationists picked up the ball and started running, but they’re ignoring the real referees and appealing to their friends sitting in the stands instead. So, while arguing our case is probably the best tactic, it’s hard to resist the urge to refuse playing with a bunch of cheaters.
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Testing Makes the Science
Now, I’m not saying Intelligent Design theory has merit (I really haven’t looked into it) but Greg’s criticism of it isn’t quite fair:In order for ID to be considered a scientific theory (as opposed to a religious hypothesis), it needs…
Trackback by Pandagon — March 30, 2004 @ 6:06 pm
No offense, but the Scientific Creationists are merely doing the same thing that the regular scientists are doing. They see that our universe and world exists and are trying to figure out how it has come to exist.
Take the Big Bang, for instance. The Big Bang works as a causal theory of matter’s distribution in the universe, but The Big Bang doesn’t explain the creation of the many structures in our universe, so other scientists are working to develop theories to account for those structures, working within the framework they’ve established for themselves. That is to say, they develop a conclusion and look for evidence to support it because of the impossibility of actually observing the creation of a universe. No theory of the universe’s creation would be testable without the ability to “test” it, and to my knowledge, we are a long way from being able to build a universe from scratch. Similarly, while we are able to examine the mechanisms for the evolution of life in our world, we are unable to examine or test the the absolute creation of life here. Thus, you can have a theory, but you can’t test it. If you could test it, it would become, after all, a law.
Anytimeany scientist has a theory with a hole in it, it’s back to the drawing board. The flaw Intelligent Design proponents and other scientists share is that both start with the given that the opposition’s underlying principles are false. The thing is, at some point, all thought about the creation of the Universe and our world is theoretical. This was more evident when Science was called “Natural Philosophy” than when it became the religion of modernism.
When scientists are testing observable things in our world, using the Scientific Method, they are performing science. When they are hypothesizing about the nature of the universe, they are engaging in philosophic exploration, which the ID crowd should have equal access to. It’s not that the ID crowd keeps changing the rules, they don’t get to establish the rules, which should state “all of this is theoretical”. Really, neither side should ever debate unless they can agree that they are talking about stuff that they can’t really know for certain.
Comment by E-Rock — March 30, 2004 @ 7:33 pm
What the hell is E-Rock talking about? Science is not some quest to take existing phenomena and postulate how they arose from the Big Bang. Quite the opposite, the Big Bang Theory was created as an attempt to postulate how the phenomena scientists had uncovered might have come to be.
There are whole fields of science that don’t rely on the Big Bang at all. How is a scientist testing the role of the colon in digestion, or a zoologist studying the breeding habits of frogs, or even a paleontologist uncovering the history of trilobites, attempting in some way to to “prove” or “disprove” the big bang or any alternate version of creation?
No, no, scientists try to discover how the world works, or how it used to work. They may make hypotheses, but they test them to see whether they are false, not try to give tests that prove a foregone conclusion about the origin of the world. The problem with Christianity posing as science (not that I have a problem with Christians as a whole, most of whom don’t go in for this bunk) is that Christians deny any test that disproves their “hypothesis” because they came up with it FIRST and are trying to force existing phenomena to reflect their beliefs.
Christianity should compete against Judaism, Buddhism, Shintoism, and what have you, for my spiritual buck. I’m fine with that type of huckstering. But it has no place competing against science. And fuck it if it wants my tax dollars.
By the way, the word “theory” does not mean wild speculation. It means a hypothesis that has held up to all the tests available to us and that still is the best explanation for how things work. God creating the world in seven days does not meet that definition and does not belong in the realm of valid theories of science.
Comment by dAnimal — March 30, 2004 @ 9:15 pm
What I’m suggesting is that there are some phenomena which are beyond being tested but which you accept because they work as an explanation of the things you see around you. You CAN NOT test the Big Bang! The paleontologist isn’t concerned with proving whether the big bang happened, but, most likely, he or she is working with a schema that says “The Big Bang Existed”.
The Big Bang, according to this website rests on two pillars: the theory of relativity and the Cosmological Principle. The Cosmological Principle is an assumption which scientists are actively searching for information to support. Thus scientists are trying to prove an assumption accepted as a basis for a general idea about the creation of the universe. By searching for support for The Cosmological
Principle rather than looking for information which would disprove it, I would suggest that scientists are testing to prove a foregone conclusion about the origin of the Universe. Just to make sure that we’re coming from the same place, the big bang model was taught as the generally accepted mechanism for the creation of the Universe in your school, too, wasn’t it?
I’m not saying that religion should act as a substitute for science. By no means! The only thing I’d assert is that our primary causes are generally unknowable, and we can, at best, guess what happened, which is what Creationists do.
Comment by E-Rock — March 30, 2004 @ 10:15 pm
Earnest, I have to say that your post shows a fundamental lack of knowledge of just how scientific theory works.
The big bang model isn’t supposed to explain the creation of any structures. It’s not even really a theory, it is simply a model that fits the observation that everything in the universe it moving away from everything else. By extrapolating we can prove that everything must have been at one point at some previous time. It’s not a theory that is designed to predict anything, just a model used to be convinient.
Again that’s not true. Take for instance quantum theory. We can’t see quarks. We also haven’t found all the particles that it predicts. However, the parts of it we can test agree so perfectly that we know that quantum theory is a fundamental part of the universe. Because we know that quantum theory is correct, we know that there must be a theory of gravity that agrees with it. We are never going to be able to see the gravitron particle that we suspect is required (it would require a particle accelerator the size of the galaxy). We’re also never going to see the strings of pure energy that most likely exist to cause all these interactions. However, if we do discover a mathmatical relationship that predict gravity (which we can measure) and it agrees with quantum theory, we will know it to be correct even if we can’t validate it all experimentally. At that point, we can test the theory of everything simply by plugging in known constant values and seeing if the predictions it makes matches up with what we see in real life. Now even if we had this theory tomorrow, we couldn’t validate it with anything more than a trivial example because the math is just too damn hard; but as time passes we will be able to solve harder and harder problems. Solving these problems is what will actually test our theory of creation. If it ever spit out a wrong predicition, we’d have to refine it, or come up with a new theory. Just like we refined Einstein and Newton before him. And that’s were ID fails as being science. It doesn’t make any predictions. It’s a model that explains why things are the way they are, but it makes no predictions about the way things are going to be tomorrow and can therefore never be disproven. It’s actually pretty easy to tell if something is philosophy or science. All science is at is essence math. Biology is a subset of chemistry, chemistry is a subset of physics, and physics is applied math. That means with the right equations and a powerful computer you could describe any living organism by a set of equations. ID can never be broken into math and is therefore not science.
Comment by andrew — March 30, 2004 @ 10:41 pm
But what are those guesses based on? The big bang theory is based on over 75 years of observations in fields of astrophysics and cosmology. Over those years, the theory has evolved to include all available evidence. The theory has held up to numerous tests (as pointed out on this page of the site you referenced) to the point of becoming “a broadly accepted theory for the origin and evolution of our universe.” It’s not perfect and it’s still the subject of minor controversies within the scientific community, but it’s a hell of a lot more than a “guess”.
Creationism, on the other hand, is based on the opening passages of an ancient culture’s mythology that have been loosely translated at the whim of various religious and political leaders into multiple laguages before it was ever adapted to English. This may be fine for something that is taken on faith like religion or philosphy, but it ain’t science.
Comment by greg — March 30, 2004 @ 11:50 pm
I am unpersuaded by the ID folks: it’s more or less “creationism lite”–and, like lite beer (which is surely an abomination in the sight of God!), it’s low on caloric content and on taste. The essential component of the ID hypothesis is that the existence of the universe requires there to have been a creator. Otherwise, you get stuck in a nasty regress argument and would have to accept an infinite succession of universes, which is obviously a contradiction in terms. This line of reasoning is known in philosophical circles as the Teleological Argument, and it is generally considered valid (i.e., there aren’t any logical flaws in the argument itself). Trouble is, as David Hume pointed out a couple of hundred years ago, while the Teleological Argument gets you a designer, it doesn’t necessarily get you a designer that is unitary, perfect, or spiritual–all attributes that most of the people pushing the ID hypothesis would insist that the designer they’re aiming at would have to have.
All that said, however, I have to point out that the ID hypothesis is really trying to answer a question that science simply cannot. A scientist cannot ask “what happened before the Big Bang?” because that question makes no sense in her frame of reference. But to my way of thinking, the biggest flaw in the Big Bang hypothesis is that it has to leave unanswered the question of where this incredibly hot, dense, tiny point of proto-matter came from. Yes, the hypothesis appears to account very well for the phenomena that followed the appearance and subsequent explosion of that point of proto-matter. But I’d prefer a hypothesis that could account for all of that and also where the stuff came from in the first place.
Comment by Michael — March 31, 2004 @ 6:25 am
Greg, any theory (not law) which you accept until proven wrong has been accepted on faith. You’re right that what separates science from religion is that it allows for its faith-based concepts to be disproven. What I suggest, though, is that The Big Bang is something that we will have to necessarily accept on faith because it is too monumental and unique an occurrence for us to know happened.
Andrew, I believe I already stated that the Big Bang Theory is nothing more than a model for the distribution of our universe. It’s ridiculous to say that the Big Bang isn’t a theory. It is, by definition, a theory!
Do you honestly believe that we will ever reach a point where we can prove that the Big Bang Model is, in fact, fact? I doubt it, but I also am fine with simply accepting it as true. My defense of Intelligent Design theorists (who, focus more on evolution than cosmology)isn’t because I favor their theory but because my own agnosticism keeps me from suggesting that a Creator (or Creative Force) couldn’t have, at some point, set this whole Universe into motion. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, the two concepts are not even really mutually exclusive.
Comment by Earnest — March 31, 2004 @ 6:53 am
Earnest, I still don’t think you understand the fundamental difference between theories, laws and models. They are not all interchangeable and they are very, very different. In science we have certain things that we call laws. However, even they are just the results of our observations. Gravity always appears to be attractive. There only appears to be two electric forces which are equal and opposite. The entropy of the universe is always increasing. Evolution takes place. Most would consider these laws, but they aren’t really. It is possible that any number of these act different than we think. For instance a black hole may not increast the entropy of the universe or there may be a 3rd electric charge. It is impossible to prove anything totally. It is always based on some assumption. Therefore laws really do not exist, and any arguement that tries to differentiate theories and laws is a strawman.
Theories are put in place to account for these observations that we accept as fundamentally true and make valid predictions about the future based on known past states. From there, we get things like the theory of relativity. We know certain physical aspects of the way light travels and how that effects time. Relativity is a mathmatical theory to make future predictions based on known states. We also have models. These are best guesses designed to fit with the current observations, but don’t make any predictions about future events. The big bang model fits with our observation of the universe, but it doesn’t tell me anything about how fast the universe is expanding or what it’s going to do tomorrow. Evolution is another thing that is a model. We know evolution takes place, but we don’t have a good enough theory to make any predictions about the actual outcomes in anything but trivial cases. For something to be a theory it actually has to make predictions. Evolution and the Big Bang in and of themselves do not. However, there are theories that incoporate them.
My problem with ID comes from the fact that it is impossible to disprove. They can argue any point and say “the creator set the universe, earth, etc. in motion this way.” That works for saying the dinosaur bones are fake. It works for saying that god created man. It works for anything you want. That keeps it from being science. To actually be science you have to have the ability to invalidate it. If I discover a particle tomorrow that quantum theory doesn’t predict, I’ve invalidated quantum theory. With ID I could simply say god created a new particle.
ID and science are not mutally exclusive. It is possible to interject a creator at the time just before we can make any predictions. In our current state of knowledge that means anything happening before the first few seconds of the universe. Of course, once our science improves and we can predict everything up to the big bang itself; we have to push god back farther. And so on for forever. This just shows why it’s stupid to worry about a creator in real science at all. For your work to mean anything you have to limit god to the areas which we currently don’t understand. If you want to make sense of those areas, you have to push god out of them too. So god just gets in the way of good science.
We also have to accept that we may never know some of the secrets of the universe simply because of limitations of our human brains. We have a hard enough time thinking in 4 dimensions, but current string theory says there may be as many as 20 dimensions. Most people simply can’t deal with that. Now to know what happened before the big bang we have realize that there is no such thing as time and space. You can’t say that this ball of concentrated energy existed for 1 sec or 1 million years because time is a product of the big bang and therefore didn’t exist before it. I don’t foresee in my lifetime humans able to grasp those concepts completly let alone theorize about them. We’ve had 50 years of quantum theory and still no one really understands it.
Comment by Andrew — March 31, 2004 @ 9:10 am
I’d like to add that this is the view that most mainstream Christians take. Most people who believe in the Bible are smart enough to realize that it should be taken metaphorically and not literally. In this view, it’s entirely consistent that everything we know about science (including evolution, the big bang, etc.) was set it motion by god.
It’s only the fundies that think that science is another religion or that there really was a woman made out of a rib who ate an evil apple. Unfortunately for mainstream Christians (and the rest of us), a vocal minority has taken over and insisted that their views should be injected into every aspect of secular life.
Comment by greg — March 31, 2004 @ 10:24 am
I disagree with you about the Big Bang since it predicted the presence of cosmic background radiation and the expansive nature of the universe. I agree with you about the relationship between science and religion. Religion for obvious reasons deals with the unknowable, and science deals with the observable. There are very few things that are unobservable– the creation of the Universe is one, so we’ll only ever have theories as to what happened way back when.
Comment by E-Rock — March 31, 2004 @ 10:40 am
The big bang didn’t predict the expansion of the universe or the doppler shift. Those were detected and the big bang model was introduced to deal with them.
Comment by Andrew — March 31, 2004 @ 12:01 pm
The above discussion is interesting, especially in that the tenor of the conversation is so typical of debates about ID. No one in this thread purports to have any substantial credentials in the scientific community, but the same flaws and misrepresentations are to be found almost everywhere one reads about this debate, even among those who ought to be debating the issue on a higher plane.
For example, if you go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design and look at their ‘External Links’, all but one of the links is either ardently pro or con. What about an interested, objective, thoughtful stance in which one doesn’t have a ferocious predisposition to misrepresent the other side of the argument?
Examples of what I am talking about:
1. It is a seriously fallacious mistake to keep equating ID with creationism, or neo-creationism, or disguised creationism. Creationists are simply trying to impose a particular, literal-minded interpretation of their religion on a scientific issue. Creationists as a whole are just as anti-ID as the Darwinists.
2. Similarly, it is a misrepresentation to keep insisting that at the heart of ID there is an attempt to invoke God as an explanation for the alleged inadequacies of traditional Darwinist theory. Read the ID books- you won’t find that.
3. On the other hand, it is a detriment to the ID theorists that, having identified what they perceive to be inadequacies in the mechanisms identified by neo-Darwinian theory, they traditionally stop there and keep coming back to the vagueness of “intelligence”. What intelligence where and how? A genuinely scientific approach begs the question of what other mechanisms might better account for the complexity of the life systems we observe. This sort of thing is traditional in the world of physics, where many topics are often out of the reach of experiment. For example, the Big Bang- read in Scientific American recent theories about a history that might have preceeded the Big Bang- scientific speculation, but interesting and not so subject to confusion with a religious inference.
4. Bottom line, my personal view is that I have read a bunch of the ID stuff (e.g. Behe) and find the arguments fascinating and worth considering. To me the logical sequella to those arguments should be either:
a) An attempt to explain the phenomena using current evolutionary theory. This has been attempted (most prominently by the anti-ID Darwinian defendants), but I find most of the arguments unconvincing, or
b) Why not speculation about other natural, observable mechanisms in addition to the already known natural selection and mutation, as prime factors in the fact of evolutionary history? If anyone is interested, I could offer up some examples…
It’s in my mind a copout not to propose natural, scientific alternatives or additions to known evolutionary mechanisms, but equally a copout to try to refute ID through misrepresentation, name calling, etc.
There ought to be a debate about evolution, but a scientific one. I propose that the real Horseshit here is the level of the discussion…
Comment by Questioner — July 29, 2004 @ 10:24 am