Recently in Intelligent Design Category

Expelled {Documentary} - Ben Stein's new documentary Expelled is a Rorschach test for revealing people's true feelings about intellectual freedom. Not surprising, many people--especially academic and media elites--loathe the film. While these groups often claim to value freedom of expression and thinking that challenges the status quo, they are often rigidly doctrinaire. Most blog readers will find this point obvious, for the blogosphere is crowded with young academics that use pseudonyms for fear that they will never get tenure if they speak their minds.

But there are many Americans that are surprised by the McCarthyite tactics that are used to quell dissenting views. It is this group that Stein and company are aiming to shock in this amusing, intriguing polemic.

The film doesn't attempt to present the scientific case for ID (though Stein promises this will be included on the DVD version) nor does it attempt to undermine the credibility of neo-Darwinism (though the Darwinists in the film do a masterful job of that, albeit unintenionally). Stein's primary focus is on the freedom of academics to merely consider an idea that is deemed verboten in the Ivory Towers. He uses a series of interviews, interspersed with Cold War imagery, in a way that that is both entertaining and enlightening. It is only when it veers off into the historical connection between Darwinism and Nazism that the film stumbles. The conjunction between the two is indisputable, though ultimately as irrelevant as the connection between religion and ID. Scientific theories must be judged on their merit, not on unfortunate outcomes that may result.

Another caution is that Expelled isn't a fair movie. When Stein interviews advocates of ID he selects scientists and philosophers that are thoughtful and sober while the Darwinists tend to be either a bit nutty (Bill Provine) or unable to keep from damaging their own cause (PZ Myers). Likewise, he stacks the decks in ID's favor by interviewing intellectual heavyweights like David Berlinski while allowing neo-Darwinism to be defended by Richard Dawkins, a man who is highly educated but of only modest intellect. The result is a film that isn't balanced and isn't fair. But it is both funny and infuriating. At least it is, as Stein would no doubt say, if you value freedom. Rating: B+

Salvo {Quarterly Journal} -- Salvo has been described as "Adbusters for Church Kids" (by a detractor) and "like Richard Weaver back in the flesh with cyberpunk clothes" (by a fan). Both the praise and the criticism are apt; Salvo is both snarky and sincere, ultra-hip and uber-conservative. But it's also one of the few journals for people who can appreciate Adbusters, cyberpunk, and Richard Weaver.

A publication of The Crux Project, Salvo is "dedicated to the cultural myths that have undercut human dignity, all but destroyed the notions of virtue and morality, and slowly eroded our appetite for transcendence." Such an anachronistic mission statement seems more fitting for dusty church bulletins than for a journal filled with satiric faux ads and articles on cutting-edge topics. Yet the quarterly manages to fill a void for its target audience (which ranges from sharp young Christians to oldheads like me who miss re:generation Quarterly). Not everyone will "get it" and not everyone will like it. But for those who are looking a quirky, culturally relevant, and intellectually stimulating read, Salvo may be just what you're looking for. Rating: A-

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War {Audiobook} -- Zombies have become the monster metaphor of choice for our post-9/11 culture. Whereas vampires and werewolves once fulfilled the role as Threatening Other, zombies show us the Threatening Us. The attack from within--from our own friends, family, and neighbors--is what makes the threat of zombies so poignant. But while most zombie tales focus on the geographically local (New York City in I Am Legend, England in 28 Days Later), Max Brooks offers a global scale apocalypse in World War Z.

Brooks frames the story as an oral history, a series of post-war interviews with notable survivors of the "Zombie World War." Each interview provides an intriguing personal perspective while revealing the larger events that transform a world plagued by the "living dead." This structure lends itself well to the audiobook format. The abridged version, which won an the 2007 Audie Award for best Multi-Voiced Performance, is read by a host of actors, including Alan Alda, Mark Hamill, Henry Rollins, Rob Reiner, and John Turturro. (Here's a sentence I never imagined I'd write: Alan Alda's performance is absolutely riveting.)

Brooks' has a superb eye for the intriguing how-did-he-ever-think-of-that detail. He also manages to keep the focus on humanity, even when fighting an enemy that has lost theirs. Even those who aren't fans of the horror genre will find themselves hooked by this gripping alternative history. Rating: A+

[Note: This is the third part in the list of ways in which critics of Expelled and other neo-Darwinist apologists are helping to promote the theory of intelligent design. Click here to read Part I]

Why do so many people have such difficulty accepting the theory of Darwinian (or more precisely, neo-Darwinian) evolution? Is it due to a resurgence of religious-based creationism? Or is it that the Discovery Institute and other advocates of Intelligent Design are more persuasive? I believe the credit belongs not to the advocates of ID but to the theory's critics.

Just look around at the reaction to Ben Stein's new film Expelled. The film was trashed by numerous critics, dismissed by the blosphere's intelligentsia, and yet still managed to pull in the second largest gross box office receipts on opening weekend of any political documentary (second only to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11).

Had the critics remained silent over the past decade, ID might possibly have moldered in obscurity. If they had given the theory the respect accorded to supernatural explanations like the "multiverse theory" it might even have faded from lack of support.

But instead the theory's critics launched a irrational counter-offensive, forcing people into choosing sides. The problem with this approach is that the more the public learn about modern evolutionary theory, the more skeptical they become about it being an adequately robust explanation for the diversity of life on earth. For instance in Expelled, Michael Ruse and Richard Dawkins provide two explanations for how life probably began. Ruse says that we moved from the inorganic world to the world of the cell on the backs of crystals while Dawkins says that life on earth was most likely seeded by aliens from outer space.

When even Dawkins admits that intelligent agency is involved in creation of life on earth it isn't difficult to see why other people think it is plausible.

I won't argue that critics of ID are always wrong or that ID is always--or even mostly--right in its claims. But I do think a compelling case can be made that the anti-IDers are losing the rhetorical battle--their frothing at the mouth reaction to Expelled is a symptom--and that they have only themselves to blame.

Here is the first five in a list of ten reasons ways in which the critics of Expelled (as well as other neo-Darwinist apologists) are helping to promote the theory of intelligent design.

What do you call someone who implies original authorship of material which he has not actually created and incorporates material from someone else's work into his own work without attributing it?

His honor.

Consider, for example, U.S. District Judge John Jones III. The man Time magazine hailed as one of the world's “most influential people” in the category of “scientists and thinkers” may need to be re-categorized as one of the most influential “cutters-and-pasters.” According to a new report by the Discovery Institute (DI), a significant section of the judge's ruling in last year’s controversial intelligent design decision appears to be copied-and-pasted from an ACLU document:

Last week I wrote three posts listing the reasons I believe that critics of Intelligent Design (ID) are losing the rhetorical battle and helping to promote the theory. Since then at least three rebuttals have popped up claiming to show that my claim is in error. Because I�m growing bored with writing about this subject, my initial response was to ask you to read each of the rebuttals and then merely say, �I rest my case.�

But at the risk of wearing out this topic, I�ve decided to respond to the criticism of PZ Myers. Not only does he have the most well-read blog among the critics, he also makes my case better than I ever could. It is therefore worth responding to in detail.

Before reading my rebuttal to his rebuttal, I recommend reading his entire post, �Joe Carter strings together some noise� (catchy title). I�ve included his comments in blockquotes with my response following each entry.

Joe Carter is making a curiously convoluted argument. He's trying to get at why the majority of the American public does not accept the theory of evolution, and he's made a ten part list of reasons, which boils down to placing the blame on the critics of intelligent design creationism. We're all bad, bad people who are doing a bad, bad job of informing the public and doing a good job of antagonizing them.

Hmm. I don�t recall saying that they critics of ID are �all bad, bad people.� Richard Dawkins, yes. He�s an idiot. And a bad man. But the rest are simply guilty of doing a bad job of informing the public. Whether they are right or wrong, I think it is clear that they are doing a poor job in this regard�as PZ admits in the next line.

[Note: This is the third part in the list of ways in which neo-Darwinist critics are helping to promote the theory of intelligent design.]

#8 By separating origins of life science from evolutionary explanations. � Nature is too complex to be encompassed in any one field. That is why it�s necessary for scientific disciplines (physics, biology, chemistry) to be broken down into sub-disciplines (cosmology, zoology, biochemistry, etc.). But while most scientists may not have no problems thinking in unconnected categories, the average person expects the various parts to be stitched back into a seamless whole.

That is why when looking for an explanation for the origins of mankind, most people naturally start at the beginning. The neo-Darwinists, on the other hand, prefer to jump ahead to the middle and begin the argument with �specifies evolve.� If you ask them how �life� (a necessary feature for any evolving species) began in the first place they will claim that the issue is outside the theory.

Perhaps. But since naturalistic theories rise or fall based on the plausibility of this issue, it would probably be a good idea to make sure that this one is nailed down.

[Note: This is the second part in the list of ways in which neo-Darwinist critics are helping to promote the theory of intelligent design.]

#6 By invoking design in non-design explanations. Anyone who wonders why so many people find intelligent design explanations plausible need only to listen to scientific community discuss the evolutionary process. Scientists have a complete inability to talk about and explain processes like natural selection without using the terms, analogies, and metaphors of design and teleology.

Take, for instance, the recent finding that leads researchers to believe they have found a second code in DNA in addition to the genetic code. On The New York Times science page we find an explanation by Eran Segal of the Weizmann Institute in Israel:

A curious feature of the code is that it is redundant, meaning that a given amino acid can be defined by any of several different triplets. Biologists have long speculated that the redundancy may have been designed so as to coexist with some other kind of code, and this, Dr. Segal said, could be the nucleosome code. [emphasis added]

Or consider this, my favorite example, taken from a primer on evolutionary psychology:

Design evidence. Adaptations are problem-solving machines, and can be identified using the same standards of evidence that one would use to recognize a human-made machine: design evidence�.. Complex functional design is the hallmark of adaptive machines as well. One can identify an aspect of the phenotype as an adaptation by showing that (1) it has many design features that are complexly specialized for solving an adaptive problem, (2) these phenotypic properties are unlikely to have arisen by chance alone, and (3) they are not better explained as the by-product of mechanisms designed to solve some alternative adaptive problem. Finding that an architectural element solves an adaptive problem with "reliability, efficiency, and economy" is prima facie evidence that one has located an adaptation (Williams, 1966).

Design evidence is important not only for explaining why a known mechanism exists, but also for discovering new mechanisms, ones that no one had thought to look for. [Proponents of this theory] also use theories of adaptive function heuristically, to guide their investigations of phenotypic design.

After reading that passage you might wonder if I had copied the wrong passage, providing a selection from a primer on ID rather than on evolutionary psychology. It seems improbable that a paper on evolutionary processes would use the word design 85 times(!), often in conjunction with explaining how natural selection �designed� a certain function (i.e., �Principle 2. Our neural circuits were designed by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during our species' evolutionary history.�)

Eighty years after the Scopes �Monkey� Trial, the public still refuses to accept the idea that Darwin�s theory of natural selection is a sufficient explanation for complex biological phenomena. In fact, opinion polls show that fewer people are willing to accept the idea that human beings developed from earlier species than they were just ten years ago.

In Britain�a country that is not exactly known for fundamentalist Christianity�fewer than half accept the theory of evolution as the best description for the development of life. (And more than 40% of those polled believe that creationism or intelligent design (ID) should be taught in school science lessons.) Even doctors, who are more informed about biology than the general public, overwhelmingly (60%) reject the claim that humans evolved through natural processes alone.

Why do so many people have such difficulty accepting the theory? Is it due to a resurgence of religious-based creationism? Or is it that the Discovery Institute and other advocates of Intelligent Design are more persuasive? I believe the credit belongs not to the advocates of ID but to the theory�s critics.

Had the critics remained silent, ID might possibly have moldered in obscurity. But instead they launched a counter-offensive, forcing people into choosing sides. The problem is that the more the public learns about modern evolutionary theory, the more skeptical they become.

I won�t argue that critics of ID are always wrong or that ID is always�or even mostly�right in its claims. But I do think a compelling case can be made that the anti-IDers are losing the rhetorical battle. Here is the first five in a list of ten reasons ways in which they are helping to promote the theory of intelligent design:

�There are reverent minds who ceaselessly scan the fields of Nature and the books of Science in search of gaps,� wrote Henry Drummond, �gaps which they will fill up with God. As if God lived in gaps?�

In his Lowell Lectures on the Ascent of Man , Drummond continues:

When things are known, that is to say, we conceive them as natural, on Man�s level; when they are unknown, we call them divine�as if our ignorance of a thing were the stamp of its divinity. If God is only to be left to the gaps in our knowledge, where shall we be when these gaps are filled up? And if they are never to be filled up, is God only to be found in the dis-orders of the world? Those who yield to the temptation to reserve a point here and there for special divine interposition are apt to forget that this virtually excludes God from the rest of the process. If God appears periodically, He disappears periodically. If He comes upon the scene at special crises, He is absent from the scene in the intervals. Whether is all-God or occasional-God the nobler theory?

Drummond, a 19th century evangelical writer and lecturer, originated the term �God of the gaps� while chastising his fellow Christians for their unscriptural view of natural history. Unfortunately, this confusion about �natural� and �supernatural� continues today even though it is, as philosopher Alvin Plantinga explains "at best a kind of anemic and watered-down semideism" that "is worlds apart from serious Christian theism."

For Christians, though, a �natural� process is just a normal-appearing process which remains the providential design and control of God. The difference between natural-appearing and miraculous-appearing processes is not whether God is acting�His action occurs in both processes�but the way in which He chooses to act.

So what then does �God of the gaps� mean? The phrase, according to chemist Craig Rusbult, actually encompasses four different views based on distinctions between a �science gap� (a gap in our current scientific knowledge) and a �nature gap� (a break in the continuous cause-effect chain of natural process) that may or may not be bridged by miraculous-appearing theistic action. The four views are:

[Note: Although I had intended to complete the post on the God-of-the-gaps fallacy for today, it looks like it won�t be ready until Thursday. In the meantime, here�s a recycled post on a related theme: plausibility structures and intelligent design.]

Upon returning home from a year-long research trip to the Galapagos Islands, the esteemed English zoologist Dr. D. Richard finds his wife undergoing a process that looks remarkably similar to childbirth. Calling upon his maid for an explanation, the woman tells him that �Yer wife, sir, is hav�en a baby.� Dr. Richard pauses to contemplate the possibility before deciding that the notion is preposterous. Examining the evidence inductively -- he is impotent, infertile, and has been away for over nine months -- the professor determines that while his wife may have the appearance of being pregnant it is impossible that she could be with child.

While his psychotherapist would likely say that he is in denial, the problem with Dr. Richard is that he suffers not only from a narrow urethera but from an overly narrow plausibility structure. Because he is unable to even consider the possibility that an idea might be true (i.e., his wife being unfaithful), he is unable to recognize the undeniable truth of the situation.

Everything that we believe is filtered through our plausibility structure � a belief-forming apparatus that acts as a gatekeeper, letting in evidence that is matched against what we already consider to be possible. For example, I believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ; the truth of which has, for me, the most justified epistemic warrant. It would be easier for me to believe that my wife was an alien from the planet Tatooine than for me to consider the possibility that the resurrection never occurred. Because of that belief, if someone were to claim to have found the bones of Christ I would not merely be skeptical but would consider the claim to be an empirical, if not a logical, impossibility.

Plausibility structures can prevent us from forming beliefs that are inconsistent with experience and evidence. But they can also have a negative impact, preventing us from forming true beliefs about reality. This appears to be the case within a broad segment of modern science. By accepting a plausibility structure that is limited to purely naturalistic explanations, many in the scientific community have imposed self-limiting and irrational criteria for explaining reality. As philosopher of science, and advocate of Intelligent Design theory, Stephen Meyer explains: