Abusing Science

Number 231 of a series

Three decades ago the creationists saw the handwriting and started to make a concerted effort at dressing creationism up in a fancy suit. We call that suit “Intelligent Design,” and it does involve serious academics, people with real degrees and people doing what they want to pass off as real research. A big push—actually the central theme—is to infer intelligence from curious aspects of nature. Curious to them.

The above is a screen shot from a posting to the Discovery Institute’s Evolution News site. Follow the link. Read the posting. Here is an excerpt.

Paul Nelson speaks to the pervasive use of design detection in how we infer intelligent agency in various fields of investigation, from archaeology to arson:

What turned my head around about ID — in a good way — in 1991, well before I met Bill Dembski, was a single paragraph in one of his early papers. He pointed out that design detection, far from being an esoteric and inscrutable inference, lay in fact at the center of many normal human inquiries and activities.

That will do for a fair overview of the Evolution News post. The argument goes that if something appears to be massively improbable by chance, then there must be some sort of intelligence behind it. This is not one of their examples, but if you look at the Golden Gate Bridge, then you are bound to conclude a bunch of engineers were involved to make it happen. You would safe in coming to that conclusion, because the bridge is something we see being designed and built by people every day.

What the creationists want to focus on is stuff not designed and built by people. Stuff like how the Universe works. Serious thinkers rightly conclude if any of the values that describe how our universe works were tweaked ever so slightly, then you would not be reading this posting. Yes, somebody must have planned the Universe from the very beginning.

For a long time the creationists refused to associate the designer with any of society’s favored gods. That has changed. The gloves are off. A reading of creationist literature over the past decade will inform you the designer is no less than YHWH, the chosen god of the ancient Jews. Christians and Muslims buy into this particular god, giving great weight to the need to prove YHWH’s existence.

Yeah, that thinking does not go very far. The first lines of the Bible have YHWH creating the Universe, but if you want to be objective about the matter, then any one of the many imaginary gods could have been the creator. My perspective is the creationists want to get the camel’s nose inside the tent and eventually get the entire camel. You will accept there was a creator, and next you must accept YHWH as the creator.

As noted previously, the Discovery Institute people have ramped up their publicity campaign over the past few years. It is beginning to look like a full-court press. From past experience we note the creationists’ first line of attack is to infiltrate public schools—private and religious schools are already there—with Intelligent Design teachings. Fact is, recent hearings on science texts for Texas public schools involved a push for these teachings. A later post will dive into that matter.