Boneheaded statement of the week

March 12, 2013 • 2:39 pm

I’m reading an interesting book: a series of interviews by Steve Paulson of various bigwigs who talk about the relationship between science and religion.  It’s called Atoms & Eden: Conversations on Religion & Science (Oxford University Press, 2010). The interviewees are diverse and interesting: they include Francis Collins, Karen Armstrong, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Simon Conway Morris, Jane Goodall, Robert Wright, Elaine Pagels, John Haught, Daniel Dennett—23 in all, a broad mélange of believers, “strident” atheists, and accommodationists. It’s well worth reading, for there are some surprises (E. O. Wilson, for instance, calls himself a “provisional deist”).

I’ll post any interesting tidbits I find, but here is one, a statement by Francis Collins, NIH director, giving his take on the origins of intelligent design (ID). It’s on pp. 34-35, in response to Paulson’s followup to an earlier statement by Collins: “I think many of the current battles between atheists and fundamentalists have really been started by the scientific community.” Collins says this is a tragedy, and Paulson asks why he says this. Collins’s response is this:

“If you look at the history of the intelligent design movement, you will see that it is a direct response to the claims coming from people like Dawkins.  They could not leave this claim unchallenged—that evolution alone can explain all of life’s complexity. It sounded like a Godless outcome.”

Yep, blame it on the militant atheists!

The problem is that Collins is completely wrong, and he should know better. ID was a direct and deliberate strategy of creationists to circumvent court rulings that deemed creationism a religious theory that, according to the U.S. First Amendment, couldn’t be taught in science classes. In response, the faithful cooked up a theory in which God now appeared in a lab coat instead of robes—as an “intelligent designer” of unspecified provenance. He might be a space alien!

The IDers didn’t fool anyone.  And, if you look at The Wedge Document” (pdf here), a manifesto drafted in 1998 as the master plan for the “godless” ruse of ID, you’ll see that it’s blatantly motivated by faith.

It also contains no mention of Dawkins, and was written seven years before The God Delusion came out.

ID was not a direct response to Dawkins or any other atheists. It was a direct response to courtroom defeats and the fear that creeping materialism would displace religion in America. Anybody who’s studied this issue even cursorily knows that.

But Collins, like many accommodationists, wants to argue that loudmouthed atheists are responsible for the truculence of creationists. If we’d only shut up, creationism would go away.

The evidence, which Collins ignores, says otherwise.

57 thoughts on “Boneheaded statement of the week”

  2. Boneheaded statement of the week

    A brave claim. We’re barely half-way through the week (if yours starts on a Sunday). There’s a high chance of a more boneheaded statement coming along.
    In other news … religious person doesn’t let the facts get in the way of a good sound bite. “Film at eleven (sense (1).”

  4. Sometimes I want to hold my breath to learn whether God will intervene… but my faith is weak… I am appalled that someone who has done so much in science can make such a statement… 🙁

    1. I think that when ones lies to oneself constantly — which is what it takes to accept impossible and contradictory propositions — that the lie detector gets busted after a while. Pretty soon, anything coming out of the frontal meat flaps HAS to be true, because… y’know… *I believe it*.

    2. Yes. It illustrates that intelligence and a good education are not enough to prevent becoming, or remaining, beholden to religious types of belief. In fact believers conveniently employ these things as high quality tools to better rationalize to themselves, and to fellow believers less well equipped than themselves, their religious belief.

  5. Dawkins was hardly the first to argue that evolution alone can explain all of life’s complexity. That’s been the working assumption of evolutionary biology for decades, and no one has yet found a convincing counterexample. If Collins has one, let him produce it.

  6. I’m sure all the regulars are aware of this already, but don’t forget about ‘cdesign proponentsists’ in Of Pandas and People, and early ID textbook. They took an earlier draft that was explicitly creationist, and literally replaced ‘creationism’ with ‘Intelligent Design’ and ‘creationists’ with ‘design proponents’. Unfortunately for them, the replacement was incomplete in one of the drafts, and instead it read ‘cdesign proponentsists’.

    1. Was it not trying to replace “creationists” with “design proponents” and failing to select all of “creationists” for the paste-over?

      2. What a happy coincidence. It is the pattern of errors here that gives us direct evidence about the history of this book and, in exactly the same fashion, it is the pattern of errors that gives us direct evidence about the evolutionary history of genomes.

        2. As (I believe) Barbara Forrest said on Judgement Day: Intelligent Design On Trial, it was the missing link.

  7. Good on you for calling Collins on this. The man is deserving of respect for his contributions to biomedical research and administration, but I sincerely hope that someone confronts him face-to-face and asks him what, exactly, it is that he thought would be accomplished by this lie.

    1. You can have your chance (sorta)! For those readers in the Washington DC metro area this Saturday March 16th Francis Collin’s organization BioLogos (courtesy of Dr. Darrel Falk) will be presenting their theistic evolutionary model. To double the pleasure Dr. Fuz Rana of Reasons to Believe will be presenting the Old-earth creationist position.
      Sat March 16, 9am-12pm Seneca Creek Church, Gaithersburg, MD
      http://faithandscience-rss.eventbrite.com/

      1. I don’t suppose they invited someone to represent science, did they? And will the opening prayer be Islam-friendly?

    2. I hear that there is a rebuttal to that idea, entitled “The God Delusion Delusion Delusion” 😉

  9. You quote the 1998 Wedge document, the hair raising statement of aims by the Discovery Institute, which spells out the plain fact that the espousal of Intelligent Design by the Discovery Institute is religious, and also (though Jerry might regard this as a tautology) obscurantist in motivation.

    You could have quoted the farcical provenance of Of Pandas and People, first edition 1989, long before the “new atheists” were a major topic of discussion, which as court documents show was originally written in terms of “Creation science”, which was then crudely and with farcical incompetence rewritten in terms of Intelligent Design. Giving in one draft what Nick Matzke has described as the “missing link”; crintelligent designism.

      1. Wedge document drafted 1998, leaked 1999. Your page shows 1999.

        Possibly worth adding to the site (I leave this to you, Ant, me being a technophobe) Henry Morris, Scientific Creationism, 1974, Stephen Meyer et al Exlore Evolution (the title shows that the Creationists had discovered mimicry), and on the side of reason Scott, evolution vs Creationism 2004, Isaak, Counter-Creationism Handbook, 2005), Dawkins Devil’s Chaplain 2003; this last is notable for almost apologising for blaming religion for 9/11 – so much for “aggressive atheism” at that time.

        I’m sure others here will also have suggestions

          1. Signature in the Cell, Meyer, 2009. And as evidence that we can and should make common cause with accommodationist believers against creationism, let me mention Dennis Venema’s stinging critiques of that book and of the whole ID program, on Biologos and in Science and Xian Faith, 62 (2010) 276 and 63 (2011), 183. Free on line, I think.

          4. The evolution of the atmosphere as a proof of design and purpose in the creation, and of the existence of a personal God;: A simple and rigorously scientific reply to modern materialistic atheism
            by John Phin (1908)
            Explicitly uses the phrases “Intelligent Design” an “Intelligent Designer,” which it unambiguously identifies as the Christian God. Called by one reviewer “by far the most honest book on Intelligent Design creationism I have read to date.”
            Your welcome.

          6. Spot on. Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk has excellent review by Darby McGraw. Out of print; Abe Books has at $75.

            Amazon.com lists what sounds like a more blatantly creationist work by him, “Chemical history of the six days of creation” as well as “The seven follies of science”.

          8. How about Mark Twain “Letters from the Earth”?

            Kind of hard to put a date on… written in 1909-1910, finally published in 1962 long after his death.

          9. This is a reply to Ant’s “v4″, which could not be indented further.

            Ant:

            You should at least consider the following additions:

            (On the ID side)
            “The Creation Hypothesis” (subtitled “Scientific Evidence for an Intelligent Designer”), edited by J. P. Moreland, and published by IVP in 1994

            (On the real science side)
            “Why Darwin Matters” (subtitled “The Case Against Intelligent Design”) by Michael Shermer, 2006

            “Scientists Confront Creationism” (subtitled “Intelligent Design and Beyond”), edited by Andrew J. Petto and Laurie R. Godfrey, 2007

            “Why Evolution Works (and Creationism Fails)” by Matt Young and Paul K. Strode, 2009

            These are all books I’ve actually read, and that I would consider major enough for you to include in what is admittedly not an exhaustive list. If you want to add a pair of books with contrasting titles, on the specific topic of the fossil evidence (though I see that most or all of the books you’ve listed are general works), an obvious choice would be Gish’s “Evolution: The Fossils Say No” (1973; yes, I know it was updated in 1992 by adding the word “still” to the title) and Prothero’s “Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters” (2007). Also, since you have Meyer’s “Signature in the Cell,” you may want to add Carroll’s “The Making of the Fittest,” subtitled “DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution”.

            One last comment: Anything by Stephen J. Gould?

  10. Some have been attracted to science in part through the belief that they will not need to write. Francis must have felt he wouldn’t need to know any history.

  11. Man, is that dude irritating. There was a video of an interview he did for the Washington Post a few years ago. He accused atheists of caricaturing believers. Well, Francis, when somewhere between 40 and 85% of believers are creationists of one stripe or another, can you blame us for calling them anti-science?

  12. It is simply not possible to believe that of all the accommodationists and IDish/evolutionish/kinda-sortas, represented by Collins and others who are regularly pointed out on this website, are truly ignorant of the completely religious (by that I mean, not partly religious, partly scientific, but exclusively religious) nature of the ID movement’s foundation. The Wedge document is explicit, as are any number of explicit statements from the leaders of the movement before about 2003 or so. Kitzmiller vs. Dover clinched it. If they really, truly don’t know this, it can only be by keeping their heads firmly buried in the sand.

    If anyone is interested in the gory details, Barbara Forrest’s book “Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design” (co-written with Paul R. Gross) is a stupefyingly complete, more or less statement-by-statement and conference-by-conference history of the early ID movement. Her conclusion? “Everything except Science” (the titles of chapters 6-7) and “Religion First—and Last” (the title of chapter 9).

    My updated paperback edition dates from 2004, with the 2007 printing having an additional chapter on the Kitzmiller trial, so the book is a tiny bit dated, but when it comes to the ID movement, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”

    From the last two pages of chapter 9: “The Wedge has not once broken its stride over the last ten years, despite its total failure in genuine scientific productivity—and despite the rapidly rising volume of expert criticism of its “science” and accompanying philosophical pretensions. But no matter: in his more candid moments, [Phillip] Johnson admits that this purportedly scientific/academic movement is religious to the core. A movement based on religion does not need the credibility afforded by scientific evidence. At the Reclaiming American for Christ conference, Johnson highlighted again the Wedge’s driving religious purpose: (quote from Johnson omitted)…
    Our hope is that readers will see that Johnson’s optimistic assessment of the Wedge’s progress and present status is justified, albeit not by the scientific, or philosophical, or legal, or even generally religious merits of his case. In the story of the Wedge to date, we see a demonstration of the power of public relations to shape public opinion and policy on the largest scale—in ways that have nothing to do with the true state of scientific knowledge. And our final hope is that readers will consider serioulsly the question of what they ought to be doing about it.”

    1. keeping their heads firmly buried in the sand

      Only if they ate enough sand first.

  13. And lets not forget that ID has its antecedents from Paley (..’But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place..’) and even earlier. No, that old movement certainly does not come as a reaction to recent strident atheists.

    1. Darwin in his student days accepted Paley’s argument, but came to believe that everything happens according to natural laws, thus making such an argument baseless.

      Accommodationist believers, such as the Free Church minister and professor, Henry Drummond, explicitly rejected the God of the gaps (a meme that we owe to Drummond). If creationism is a reaction against anything, it is against such accommodationist religion, and certainly not against the very recent phenomenon of “aggressive atheism.”

  14. COLLINS
    They could not leave this claim unchallenged—that evolution alone can explain all of life’s complexity. It sounded like a Godless outcome.

    CARR
    But Collins says the fact that evolution can explain all of life’s complexity is NOT a Godless outcome.

    What Collins means is – ‘They could not leave this claim unchallenged—that evolution alone can explain all of life’s complexity. It sounded like I, Francis Collins, was unable to face facts and that this meant a Godless outcome ‘

  15. … some surprises (E. O. Wilson, for instance, calls himself a “provisional deist”).

    Not that surprising since he’s been calling himself that since at least 2006.

    “Yeah, I don’t want to be called an atheist.”
    “That is the distinction. So I am not a theist, but I’ll be a provisional deist.”

    Which makes it all the more embarrassing for those organizations which have been putting him in lists of “Top N adjective atheists.”

    1. Wilson’s “provisional deist” self-labelling pushed back at least to 2004:

      Palmer, C.T. and L.B. Steadman (2004) With or Without Belief. A New Evolutionary Approach to the Definition and Explanation of Religion. Evolution and Cognition 19(1):138-147.

      As cited in:
      Palmer, C.T. (2005) ‘Talking About God With The “High Priests” Of Evolution Human Nature Review, 5: 95-98
      <a href="

      1. Oh, heck, he’s been calling himself that since the 80’s or 90’s, at least (and no doubt before), whenever I read Free Inquiry’s first interview with him after my subscription started. This is not news.

    1. Thanks for the link.

      Collins: “Faith is not the opposite of reason. Faith rests squarely upon reason, but with the added component of revelation.”

      Dawkins: “What I am skeptical about is the idea that whatever wonderful revelation does come in the science of the future, it will turn out to be one of the particular historical religions that people happen to have dreamed up…If there is a God, it’s going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.”

      Pretty obvious who’s thinking rationally, and who isn’t.

  18. Wow, the whole “response to evolution” thing is a response to Dawkins? I’ve got to look through some old photos of the Scopes Trial and see if he’s in there somewhere.

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