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.