ID and Honesty
by KevinApril 4th, 2006
Intelligent Design proponents are fond of phrases like “teach the controversy” and pretending that mainstream scientists are trying to shut down debate when they object to teaching ID to high school students. The problem for them is that there is no science to ID. Take Bill Dembski, for example. He claims to have a scientific method that will determine whether or not something is intelligently designed. Unfortunately for him, his method is a joke:
Dembski has proposed an Explanatory Filter (EF) method for detecting Intelligent Design based on mathematics which he argues will actually test directly for ID and which, he seems to imply or others claim for him, will never make a false positive conclusion. (Note how this diverges from legitimate research into the detection of non-human design such as SETI, which makes no such sweeping statements about false positives.)
The Explanatory Filter is often couched in as much dazzling mathematical notation as he can apparently muster, but thanks to many volunteers who have dissected his methodology we can handily cut through the morass of scary notation and state Dembski’s EF in simplified and elegant terms.
It’s a two station flow chart. The two stations are:
1. Is the object complex?
2. Is the object statistically unlikely to exist, beyond the odds of 10^150 to 1?The problem is that proponents for the EF steadfastly refuse to provide the standardization by which the details of likelihood and complexity can be calculated for objects of various kinds. And when asked to test objects in which the design origin is unknown or concealed, Dembski refuses to cooperate or even provide results.
… Dembski has never published any example of the full and successful application of his technical “design inference” method, whether you consider the one in The Design Inference or the revised method in chapter 2 of No Free Lunch. He has analyzed toy problems that don’t meet the 1e-150 “universal small probability” that Dembski uses to dismiss toy problems utilized by his critics. He has skimped and only made a partial analysis of the bacterial flagellum in chapter 5 of No Free Lunch, failing to give a “specification” that meets the criteria of chapter 2, and also failing to pose any evolutionary hypothesis for elimination.
Dembski is obviously lying. Real scientists don’t refuse to run tests on their methodology, and real scientists don’t refuse to define critical terms in their work. What Dembski is doing in this case is not science but propaganda. He wants his notion of how God created the universe taught authoritatively as the way the world is, but he cannot do so with the existing science. So he lies.
This is the problem in general with Intelligent Design: it has no scientific weight. ID proponents who want to teach the controversy are the equivalent of the spoiled rich kids who demand that their college professors pass them even though they haven’t set foot in class since the first day. They want respect that they haven’t earned. And then when they don’t get that respect they fall back upon tired victomology.
When their results are shown to be flawed, ID proponents should go back to work to eliminate those flaws and perhaps reexamine their thesis. That they don’t, that they hide behind the language of victimhood and oppression, that they attempt to excuse their failures as an attack on religion by scientists tells me that they have no science behind them. Until they do, until they have done the hard work required of all other scientific theories, there is no controversy. And ID proponents would be better served by doing the science than by demanding special rights.
Categories: Church & State, Science |
[...] In Kevin’s recent post on ID, he mentions the oft-given comparison between ID and SETI. This reminded me of something this detailed comparison from Skeptic Magazine. The relevant portion: The problems with Dembski’s Explanatory Filter are many and have been documented in various books and websites, especially his probability calculations as applied to biological systems and the utility of ideas he here hints at in the third stage of the Explanatory Filter, e.g. specified complexity. For the purposes of discussing the value of an analogy between ID and SETI (and other sciences), however, we can accept for the moment the legitimacy of the EF. It is my intent to demonstrate that the analogy fails because, first, in ID the distinction drawn between necessity/chance and intelligence is a terminus, it is the goal and the end of the process. In forensics, cryptography, and archeology this distinction is merely an expedient without which the science itself would not take place. Second, although Dembski wishes to paint ID with a coat of science borrowed from these disciplines, the methodological locus between the two is not analogous. And third, the kinds of phenomena ID investigates are not comparable to those dealt with by SETI, forensics, cryptography, and archeology. ID phenomena are inaccessible to science. [...]