Over at The Daily Beast, Karl Giberson reports on a debate he had with Intelligent Design (ID) advocate Stephen Meyer in Richmond, Virginia: “My debate with an ‘intelligent design’ theorist.” (For some reason the article is headed by a picture of Sarah Palin.)
The topic of their debate was “Should Christians embrace Darwin?” and of course you already know which positions were taken by Giberson and Meyer. (You can read the IDer’s own take on the debate over at Evolution News and Views, though I hate to give them clicks.)
You have to hand it to Karl to go up against a fellow Christian in public, but what he should have realized, and finally did after the debate was over, is that this isn’t the way to resolve the conflict. After all, if you’re debating what Christians should do, presumably in front of a Christian audience, is touting the evidence (something that Karl apparently did) going to change people’s minds? I’d suspect that to do that, one would have to convince Christians that evolution doesn’t have the dire implications they think it does. The problem is, of course, that it does have those implications: naturalism, evolved moral tendencies, humans aren’t special, natural selection is wasteful and painful, there’s no evidence for a human “soul,” and so on. End of story.
According to the Evolution News and Views account, Meyer used an ID version of the Gish gallop, something guaranteed to flummox his opponent, and refused to engage Giberson’s presentation of the fossil evidence—evidence that is, of course, very strong:
Steve clarified the several definitions of evolution and put common descent to one side as a “secondary argument” and not the focus of the debate. Then he described some problems with neo-Darwinian theory. He told about Francis Crick’s revelation to biology in the 20th century and presented the origin of biological information as the central mystery to be explained. He discussed the combinatorial problem for the selection/mutation mechanism, sharing Douglas Axe’s work on the rarity of functional proteins in sequence space. He explained epigenetic information — the information beyond DNA and stored in cell structures — that plays a crucial role in the formation of animal body plans.
Now what audience is going to understand stuff like that, especially if Meyer avoids confronting the tough questions? Karl notes the same thing:
I have no idea how Intelligent Design theorists explain humans with tails. And apparently Stephen Meyer doesn’t either, as he completely ignored this point. In his book, Signature in the Cell, he offers a “prediction” that all such examples of bad design will turn out to be “degenerate forms of originally elegant or beneficial designs” (p. 491).
To be sure, Karl did make some telling points, but they appear to have gone over the head of the audience. As he recounts:
The many interesting examples that dominate the ID discussion—the little tail on the bacterium, our eyes or our blood-clotting mechanism, the explosion of new life-forms in the Cambrian period—are just snapshots of things in nature. They are not “evidence” for anything and won’t be until the ID theorists develop a theory of how their “designer” works. Once they provide a well-articulated version of their central claim, we can decide whether or not our eyes—or our tails— support their theory.
I mentioned in the debate that I thought this difficulty—acknowledged as it was by other ID theorists—was the deepest and most interesting challenge facing ID. But Meyer assured me that this is no longer an issue and that they now had a theory, although whatever it is appears to remain a well-kept secret. I objected that, as a physicist with a Ph.D who had studied some real theories—quantum mechanics, classical mechanics, electromagnetism—ID did not remotely resemble any other theory in the natural sciences and was thus hard to see how it might work. The response was that ID was under no obligation to satisfy the expectations of the scientific community for what a theory should look like.
And right there, to a scientist, is the huge failure of ID. They have no predictions (only criticisms of accepted evolutionary theory and facts), and they have no theory. The statement that “ID was under no obligation to satisfy the expectations of the scientific community for what a theory should look like” is an explicit admission that intelligent design is not science. It doesn’t have to make predictions, it doesn’t contain a coherent group of propositions about how the designer operated—it doesn’t have to play by the rules of science. If the audience had its wits about it, at that point they should have realized why ID can’t win in the courtroom.
But the debate wasn’t about which “theory” was right, but about what view Christians should accept. And to many, that means accepting what they find congenial, and then rationalizing it. Here’s one example of that from the Evolution News and Views article:
A few interesting questions came up in the Q&A afterward. One audience member asked both speakers how they thought life began. Giberson was frank in saying he doesn’t find any presently available explanation satisfactory. At some point, someone will find the answer, he mused. Meyer suggested making an inference to the best explanation, given what we do know about the origin of information.
I wonder what that “best explanation” is? Could it be. . . God?
Karl’s summary of the debate is sad. He seems to have truly hoped that this debate would provide an opportunity for some interesting scientific questions to be addressed objectively. Instead, he appears to have been steamrollered by Meyer’s slick and dismissive arguments. But what did Giberson expect? If materialism (the despised heart of Darwinism) is at issue, Karl, Christian or not, is going to be thrown under the bus. And so he left Richmond, a sadder and wiser man. As he says:
And so we see why debates accomplish so little. The Virginia audience left that night having learned little about ID, as Meyer’s presentation was very technical, although anything but “chock full of evidence.” My rather serious claim that ID had no theory and thus no evidence at all was dismissed, not addressed. The ID folk are now assuring their readers that their guy won; my defense of evolution was apparently pitiful: “Where was the new evidence?” the reviewer asks. “Where were the cutting-edge studies supportive of [my] view?” Such questions seem profoundly irrelevant, given that evolution has been an established scientific theory for many decades. The theory is long past needing new evidence and new discoveries are never presented as offering new “evidence” for evolution, any more than new photographs of the earth from space provide “new evidence” for its shape.
I could have told him that. Meyer is under no obligation to address Giberson’s issues: creationists always put their opponents on the defensive. That, plus the inability to resolve complex scientific issues in an hour on stage, the overweening influence of rhetorical abilities, and the issue of giving creationism unwarranted credibility by engaging them, is why I and many other evolutionists simply refuse to debate these folks. Yes, evolution is true, and Giberson is welcome to present that evidence to Christians in his own talks and writings. That might work a bit, as it has for me, but what won’t work is telling evangelical Christians to accept evolution because it’s compatible with their faith.
“ID was under no obligation to satisfy the expectations of the scientific community for what a theory should look like”
Once again, the “ID” advocates admit that their pursuit is not science.
Of course, we agree with Meyer’s statement: because only science is expected to conform to scientific expectations.”
What a flipping dufus!
I think THIS would be an excellent topic for discussion. If ID is under no obligation to satisfy the expectations of the scientific community, it should be kept miles away from every science class.
//
Given that topic, i would have spent the entire time asking why Meyer lied about the quotes, data, and papers he presents in his book. There are many, many, many quotemines and outright lies in his book. I’ve documented a ton of them here (http://www.skepticink.com/smilodonsretreat/2013/07/09/darwins-doubt-a-review/) and I haven’t touched on the entire book yet.
It’s interesting that a Christian would purposefully lie and misdirect his audience. I wonder what Meyer would have said to that charge.
We could also have brought up that Meyer doesn’t know what the “god of the gaps” fallacy even is.
“It’s interesting that a Christian would purposefully lie and misdirect his audience. I wonder what Meyer would have said to that charge.”
Of course asking a liar explain the truth of why he lied is an exercise in futility, but if you were able to pin him down I’m sure he would say that lying to prevent a soul from being damned is perfectly justified.
“It’s interesting that a Christian would purposefully lie and misdirect his audience”
Interesting, perhaps, but only surprising if you don’t know them.
I bet Meyer is familiar with the “god of the gaps”. Like many other god-bots, he just insists his idea isn’t filling a gap in some way for which there are no words.
How can there be a gap when doG is all including science?
“What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church . . . a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them.”
-Martin Luther
Fascinating, so even Martin Luther rejected parts of the Bible (like the ten commandments). I never really studied him.
Yeesh, no wonder we have such a problem.
By way of context, Philip of Hesse (1504-1567), an important Christian nobleman committed bigamy in 1540. Luther counseled him to lie about the bigamy, saying it would be for the good of the Christian church. This incident is described in a collection of the correspondence of Phillip of Hesse, entitled Briefwechsel Landgraf Philips des Grossmüthigen von Hessen mit Bucer.
It’s an ancient tradition in Christianity, particularly dating back to Eusebius who got the concept from Plato.
Here’s Praeparatio Evangelica, Book XII, Chapter XXXI in its entirety:
The expansion in context could be paraphrased into modern terms by saying that it’s good to teach children or other idiots about Santa because they can understand that; then, if they ever grow up, you could explain that Jesus is just like Santa but real. Lie to them for their own good.
…did I ever mention how much I wish Plato had faded into the obscurity he so richly deserves?
Cheers,
b&
Been also copied on the other side, arguably: Avicenna’s doctrine of “double truth” is to protect himself, not insulate the masses. (Debatably that’s what Descartes is doing in the Meditations, too.)
Gotta go with Jerry on this. That point should have been as telling to the audience as Ham’s “no evidence would change my mind” comment in his debate against Nye. It’s a killer anti-ID point made by the ID debater themselves. Any reasonably well-educated audience member should have seen that as an immediate surrender by ID. I almost suspect that Gilberson is being too self-effacing here. It sounds like the audience was handed all the information they needed to come to the right conclusion about ID. If they didn’t, its probably not Karl’s fault.
See, that’s the thing. What’s blindingly obvious to you and me may not be to a general audience, especially one inclined to regard the scientific community as a collection of radicals committed to destroying faith and free markets.
🐡
I’d hammer away at this point. Much of the ID argument hinges on the notion that the only way for information to appear is for intelligence to create it. If this can be clearly demonstrated to be false, a lot of the ID rhetoric becomes useless.
Meyer is of course making an inference to the best explanation, given what we know about the existence of God. Given that both the audience and the debaters concede that the ultimate explanation is a supernatural one, it’s hard to fault Meyer for appealing to this.
“Should Christians embrace Darwin?” is realistically answered with “Not if they don’t want to.”
Aye, ye can lead the naive to knowledge, but ye canna make them think.
It is a pretty open flaw to exploit. Start by asking Meyer for his mathematical definition of information, and how he calculates the amount of information in a string of characters. I’d bet dollars to donuts that you’re going to get one of only two responses: prevarication, or something resembling Shannon Entropy. Neither response supports ID’s belief that only intelligence can produce it.
It has *already* been proven false, clearly and repeatedly. Vic Stenger, Jeff Shallit and others have written about information theory and showed those notions of information – which is what Dembski blathers about – are not conserved, etc.
“Yes, evolution is true”
With a little tweaking, that might work as the title of a book. 😉
You don’t ever again need to boost these people’s hit counts. Simply go into HTML mode in WordPress and replace
[linked text]
with
[linked text]
You seem to have added rel=”nofollow” to both links. Presumably that’s the code the does the magic.
/@
It’s supposed to keep the web crawlers that index the web from following the link. You’ll have to ask someone better informed than I whether it really works.
Unfortunately it is a “honour system” thing – I don’t see how else things would work. Google and the other big folks likely do, but …
God “works” through psychokinesis, which is defined as “movement of physical objects by the mind without use of physical means.” It would be funny if the Discotute was doing experiments on the paranormal in their super secret basement lair.
Hail Hydra!
/@
lol!
Ah, secret theories. Yeah, that’s how science works.
Cue the scene from “Animal House”, with Dean Wormer saying “You’ve been on double secret probation”.
Really, is Uncle Karl so desperate for attention that he’s trolling creationists?
Karl surprised by Meyer? Give me a break! Karl is surprised to see the sun come up every morning!
“Hey, honey, that big yellow thing is back!”
What a freaking doofus.
Alex Rosenberg has bullet proof arguments why no theist can or should accept evolution. It is either one or the other or label oneself as some kind of creationist follower.
cf. How Physics Fakes Design, and Makes Things Difficult for Theism” – Alex Rosenberg (You Tube)
or visit Sean Carroll’s page and view lecture (third video):
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/04/15/talks-on-god-and-cosmology/
I would take Myers on with the whole fallacy of “intelligent design” in the broadest sense. Look at their favorite example of a modern jetliner and then have them identify the “designer” of the plane and the parts in the plane and the processes that make the parts in the plane and the history of the processes that make the parts that make the plane and all of the many designers that must take part in the design of the airplane that knew nothing about making airplanes….etc.
One doesn’t have to chase this reasoning very far to realize that there is no such thing as an intelligent designer….it’s evolution all the way. Replication with change subject to not “design” but selection. There is no “designer” of the airplane.
Designers and engineers must flesh out the properties of real things to even know what the “best” “design” even looks like. What makes bad architecture bad is when the architect worked as an intelligent designer rather than as an evolutionist. If one doesn’t stand on the shoulders of countless others, one is likely to fall or be selected against.
Where was this? I know, Richmond. But where in Richmond?
To paraphrase B. Traven
Giberson
“All right,” Giberson shouted back. “If you are scientists, where are your theories? Let’s see them.”
Meyer
“Theories, to god-damned hell with theories! We have no theories. In fact, we don’t need theories. I don’t have to show you any stinking theories, you god-damned cabrón and chinga tu madre!”
Lawrence Krauss was the guest on this week’s Rationally Speaking podcast; the show was recorded with a live audience who were given a lengthy Q&A opportunity.
I was gratified when Krauss corrected himself for using “theory” when he was describing string theory hypothesis(es) — he noted that misuse of lay terminology in scientific context is (I paraphrase from memory) a grave disservice to biological evolutionary theory.
One or two sentences later Krauss reverted to calling every wild-assed guess & informed speculation as a “theory”, habit asserting itself. and plugged the lay definition in a couple of dozen times where either WAG, speculation, or hypothesis was wanted.
Above Meyer is quoted saying:
‘… They are not “evidence” for anything and won’t be until the ID theorists develop a theory of how their “designer” works. Once they provide a well-articulated version of their central claim, we can decide whether or not our eyes—or our tails— support their theory.
I mentioned in the debate that I thought this difficulty—acknowledged as it was by other ID theorists—was the deepest and most interesting challenge facing ID. But Meyer assured me that this is no longer an issue and that they now had a theory, although whatever it is appears to remain a well-kept secret. I objected that, as a physicist with a Ph.D who had studied some real theories—quantum mechanics, classical mechanics, electromagnetism—ID did not remotely resemble any other theory in the natural sciences and was thus hard to see how it might work. …’
Let’s see. An audience comprised of a significant proportion predisposed to disbelief in evolution, and at best willing to let students ‘choose’ (Jesus H. Christ!) between the competing “theories” of ID and evolution, listens to a debate in which the proponent of the Theory of Evolution verbally concedes that ID is also a theory. And the scientist attempting to impeach Intelligent Design can’t figure out why the audience does not hear him. Talk to Karl, Larry Kraus, please.
There are maybe 6 billion people who do not understand the difference between what constitutes theory and claims offered in opposition to actual theory that lack the merit to warrant that rigorous term of identification.
And there are some several millions of scientists, science teachers, and science journalists. Which group is most likely to be able to conform to consistent correct usage first (ever?)?
Won’t happen; too much imposition on conversational shorthand and habit. Burn that hole card, educators. Don’t take advantage of opportunity if you can avoid it. Richard Olson
I have high hopes that experiences like this one will help Ex-Uncle Karl come to realize that the rest of his (and every other) religion is just as absurd, fallacious, and dishonest. There’s hope for him yet.
Rember, Karl: we have kittehs, and fudz, and boots, and music, and real science, and…
…and, most of all, much less cognitive dissonance!
Cheers,
b&
That’s just the thing. Maybe getting the whole dishonest schtick first-hand from one of ID’s heavy hitters (ahem) was an educational experience for the good doctor.
This side may be abrasive sometimes but it has standards in a whole bunch of areas that the creationists don’t!
Jerry: “creationists always put their opponents on the defensive.”
That happened right here on WEIT a couple of days ago. A jrdondhue made a comment about “failed atheists” in rather stilted and arcane language, breezily introducing the concept of “metaphysical truth” as if it were a legitimate concept. By accepting that language we tacitly agree to play on their turf. Ben of course was able to play masterfully on their turf, but we should generally avoid doing so. Stop them before they set the rules of debate.
Information does not imply an information benefactor anymore than a scientific law implies a law giver. This is a post hoc, vernacular description of how matter and energy interacts in the universe.
I can do the ID proponents a favor and at least outline a plausible hypothesis for an intelligent designer, along the lines of the computer simulation argument; I.e., we’re living in The Matrix.
This hypothesis can (and has been) logically justified in published papers, however, assuming the God as a Software Engineer deity, we’re left with the options, as with any other creative deity, that God is either intervening, or not intervening.
Using “the best argument for God” that Hart puts forth, we can declare Software Engineer God who has published the release build equivalent to Hart’s Ground of Being. This God may have sophisticated, non – intrusive logging mechanisms built into the Universe and could presumably judge it at the end of the program execution. This leaves no room for intervention, as a software engineer can’t step into a released version of the code and change things without leaving evidence, even if that evidence is a patched change in the instructions. Under this scenario, a vindictive judgmental god such as Yahweh has no one to blame but himself. And, if he does, his boss probably won’t be very happy with Engineer God blaming the program for executing the instructions he gave it.
If we’re running in debug mode, that’s a different story. I never realized how easy it is to do woo…
Now, apply the Halting Problem to your Matrix, and you’ll discover two especially relevant facts.
First, there is no way, even in principle, from us absolutely eliminating the possibility that we are in such a simulation — or, indeed, are subject to some other type of delusion, such as aliens controlling our thoughts by beaming mind rays into our brains.
Second…that also applies to the ones controlling our hypothesized delusions. The Matrix could itself be a small part of an Hyper-Matrix. Thus, even the gods themselves are as ignorant about the ultimate nature of reality and their role within it as we ourselves are.
Cheers,
b&
Indeed. Suppose Software Engineer God really is some sadistic prankster who decided to perform miracles when there was no way to reliably verify they happened and then disappear as scientific knowledge gained ground. There’s no way in principle to show that if he “damns people to eternal torture” that he even has the capability to do this. Suppose his father walks in, see’s what Yahweh has done, grounds him and then restores the Matrix to normalcy. Insert any of what probably at least approaches an infinite number of logically possible scenarios here, mathematically making the likelihood of any of them occurring approach 0. It’s precisely why these absurd “sophisticated” hypotheses about God aren’t doing anything but needlessly killing a lot of trees and wasting disk space that would be more useful for something else.
Take it even a step further. How are YHWH and his dad to know that they’re not merely part of Alice’s Red King’s dream? And so on.
b&
Of course, the irony here is that the ID movement would label these types of arguments as absurd. They’ve yet to propose a better mechanism than the natural line between logical consistency and observable evidence. Until they do, they can’t even begin to make headway. There is no way to logically discern whether my Software Engineer God, FSM, YHWH are more likely. In light of current evidence, they’re all equally likely, as are all the beings in your proposed infinite regress. It’s simply a silly exercise to partake in if one is going to try to derive any meaning from it in the real world. Frankly, I can’t fathom how Hart and others can’t see the obvious equivalency (not to be confused with likelihood) of any logically consistent idea that has no supporting evidence. As Andy Dufresne asks the warden in the Shawshank Redemption, “How can you be so obtuse?”