The Caveman’s Corner

This is an essay I schlepped together for a different purpose (which I never used it for) about a month ago. The writing’s not so great, but I think I make some ok points, and as that’s about the best you’re going to see from this blog, I think it a fitting inaugural.

It’s more-or-less a rebuttal to the essay “Evolution as Dogma: The Establishment of Naturalism” by Cdesign proponentist Phillip Johnson.

In 2005, the Kansas State Board of Education changed, in Kansas public schools at least, the definition of the English word “science” from “[…] the human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us” to a longer definition which removed the concept of “natural explanations.”It wasn’t a matter for the state’s spelling classes, nor did it greatly impact English teacher’s vocabulary assignments. The shift was in concert with the board’s now infamous decision to introduce Intelligent Design into its science classrooms alongside traditional evolution. How are the two related and what could “seeking natural explanations” possibly mean to anyone?

To Phillip Johnson, it means a great deal. He is a leading proponent of Intelligent Design and decrier of what he calls the “dogma” of naturalism, the working assumption that natural explanations exist to be found for all phenomena in the natural world. He puts the issue thus:

“Philosophical naturalism is so deeply ingrained in the thinking of many educated people today, including theologians, that they find it difficult even to imagine any other way of looking at things. To such people, Darwinism seems so logically appealing that only a modest amount of confirming evidence is needed to prove the whole system […] Even if they do develop doubts whether such modest forces can account for large-scale change, their naturalism is undisturbed. Since there is nothing outside of nature, and since something must have produced all the kinds of organisms that exist, a satisfactory naturalistic mechanism must be waiting to be discovered. “

Johnson’s conviction that naturalism is blind faith, and destructively anti-religious at that, has lead him to speak forcefully for the intellectual equivalency of traditional naturalistic science (i.e. “evolution”) with Intelligent Design, the belief that a supernatural Creator was principally and necessarily responsible for the universe as we see it today and that evidence for Him can be seen in the gaps in current scientific understanding.

Johnson’s argument is sound on rarefied, purely logical terms. What is the difference between assuming a natural cause for an unknown rather than a supernatural cause? Reasoning based on the sentimental assumption that since science has “always come through in the past” with explanations is no more valid than reasoning that the sun will rise tomorrow morning “just because it always has.” Hume pointed that out in the 17^th Century. But his argument stalls there, because, on practical terms, science works, and it works because of methodological naturalism. What if Newton had reasoned, as he sat beneath his apple tree, as ID proponents want biologists to think? “God must have made that apple fall and God must hold the moon in orbit around the Earth!” We would have no universal gravitation, no Laws of Motion, no f=ma. Human knowledge would not have been advanced; we would still be right there with Newton under that apple tree.

Johnson betrays himself when he asks, after surveying some difficulties in current evolutionary biology, “why the scientists won’t admit that there are mysteries beyond our comprehension, and that one of them may be how those complex animal groups could have evolved directly from pre-existing bacteria and algae without leaving any evidence of the transition.” He attributes this reluctance to an atheistic refusal to open the door to Creationism (read “God”), but in reality scientists persist on these difficult questions because that is what science exists to do. Science lives in the gaps between the perfectly known. Without them, there would be no purpose to scientific inquiry.

ID, like science, tries to bridge these gaps. But unlike science, it does not offer instructive answers to further man’s intellectual progress, but only the untestable and informationally-bankrupt “God did it.” Believers often hold that their faith is justified because it works in their lives. “Faith” in naturalism has given humanity innumerable and lasting intellectual achievements. Science works only when the naturalistic assumption is in place. Newton was a Creationist, like most every other scientist before Darwin, but Newton is remembered for his physics and not for his Creationism precisely because his Creationism contributed nothing to the world or human understanding. Only his naturalistic science outlived him.

We as a society have science, and support scientists, for no better philosophical reason than because science works to explain and reap benefit from nature. If we strip ourselves, as ID asks us to do, of the one key to why science works then we effectively abandon the institution altogether and all it has done for us hitherto. The battles in the classrooms of Kansas and Dover and Dayton were about much more than Australopithecus and Flood geology. They were part of a war that rages to this day over the very soul of science and its future relevance in the United States. There could not be a cause more vital to the health of our state.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 7:54 pm and is filed under Science Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.