[Vision2020] Eugenie Scott's Talk at U of I

[Michael]

I attended the presentation by Eugenie Scott last night at the U of I
regarding the scientific qualification of Creation Science and Intelligent
Design.  I enjoyed the talk very much.  Scott is a fabulous public speaker
and has put together a high quality PowerPoint presentation. She also
appears to be highly qualified to speak to the subject. Many aspects of the
talk were also somewhat informative for me. Overall, I think we are
fortunate for her visit to us.  However, I was very disappointed with the
overall argumentative thrust of her presentation. There was plenty of
'rhetoric' of the questionable sort and much of it was clearly directed
towards the settled evolutionary scientist in the audience.  Laughing was
not uncommon as she pointed out the 'stupid' work of Creation Scientists,
displaying a few random examples from a few old books such as Of Pandas &
People and the work of Jonathon Wells.  She was also very concerned about
the bias of the media on this subject; the media is currently making it look
like there are a lot of Intelligent Design Scientists out there; but
according to Scott, we probably could not even fill up the U of I auditorium
if we were to gather all the Intelligent Design Scientists from the four
corners of the earth.  Along this same thought, she spent a good amount of
time (which included even a spreadsheet with the documented statistics)
demonstrating that the work of Creation Scientists and Intelligent Design is
not found within Scientific Journals.  For example, Michael Behe's work is
discussed in only a few scientific journals, and all of those are merely
criticizing his work (I ran into one of these journal articles a few years
ago, and remember it as a highly respectful criticism of Behe).  Yet, given
the nature of the broader cultural debate on this subject and the fully
granted dominion of evolutionary biology within the scientific
establishment, it is not clear what the argument is really supposed to be
here.  And the same goes for the other implied arguments; certainly, this is
not a debate that can be won by pointing out some bad science found in a few
Creation Science publications, some of which were not even posing as
'scientific publications.' To say she was offering insufficient evidence for
a strong thesis would be an understatement.  

 

I wish I could say more to all this; in fact, I wish I could write a full
criticism of the entire presentation.  Unfortunately, I don't have the time
to do this.  However, I don't think I really need to do this given my
analysis of what appears to be an Achilles heel of her overall argument.
And here it is:

 

Running throughout her presentation were claims regarding the "incoherence,"
"logical fallacies," and "false alternatives" of the Creation Science and
Intelligent Design movements (from here 'ID').  These were various, but they
all had a common theme.  Roughly, ID proposes Darwinsim or Tradition,
Evolution or Creation, Atheism or Scientific Explanation of origins, etc.
All this was just asserted.  In fact, the closest Scott came to providing
good evidence here was her explanation of Phil Johnson's Wedge method, which
explicitly claims that we are conceptually left with only two real options:
atheism or evolution.  With the little bit of exposure I've had to Johnson's
work (he visited the U of I last year) it was clear to me that Johnson
labors by arguing for just this point.  He provides arguments for the fact
that atheism or evolution are the only two options. In waiving aside
Johnson's success in this as merely a logical fallacy or a 'false
alternative' Scott has missed the real debate on this point all together.
This sort of false alternative is precisely what Johnson is not guilty of.
But in any case, Scott goes on and concludes with an analysis explaining why
ID gets the categories confused: what ID and associates fail to recognize is
the distinction between Methodological Materialism and Philosophical
Materialism.  Science is all about Methodological Materialism and not about
Philosophical Materialism at all.  Methodological Materialism is simply the
practice of searching for nothing but material explanations: matter, energy,
etc.  Methodological Materialism does not say anything at all about what
else there is in the world, and therefore theists have no reason to
associate atheism with evolutionary biology or pit theism against
evolutionary science.  Philosophical Materialism, on the other hand, makes
the larger claims that theists must deal with.  But Philosophical
Materialism is not what you find in the science room and so the case is
closed. Scott washes her hands clean. 

 

All this seemed a bit suspicious to me; I suspected that the lines are
really a bit more blurry than Scott would like us to think.  I suspected
that even if the lines are not more blurry, Scott would enjoy something of a
Philosophical Materialism to bolster her Methodological Materialism anyway.
After all, it is a bit strange to refer to basic scientific method as any
sort of "materialism" at all.  But then Scott went on and took all the
mystery out of my ponderings.  In criticizing Demski's Design Inference
proposal, which asserts there are algorithmic ways to observationally
discern whether a natural phenomenon has originated by intelligent design or
chance, Scott made the argument that even human intelligent design must be
considered part of the natural system in which science studies.  In other
words, people are "material agents" and hence entirely "natural."  Demski is
therefore making a category mistake which is lethal to the success of his
algorithm.  

 

And hello, we have a problem here.  This mere assertion of Scott just is the
thesis of Philosophical Materialism.  And if there are any doubts in your
mind about this, let me tell you what happened after.  In the brief question
and answer period that followed, one gentleman posed a question regarding
the mystery of how human psychology and the physical body inter-relate-no
doubt a question generated by the Philosophical Materialist thesis asserted
by Scott.  Scott's response was quick, resolved, and emphatic: There is
nothing mystical or mysterious about the mind.  Period.  Scott admitted that
some people like to say that the mind is mysterious, but this is not true.
The Mind can be studied entirely within the methodology of science.  This of
course means that everything there is to know about the mind has a
scientific explanation.  Previous in the talk, Scott criticized the point of
view that if we don't know something, it is likely that we can't know
something.  Scott disagreed: we simply just don't know it yet.  Science
simply hasn't gotten there yet. And so now dear reader, you now have a
wonderful introduction to what Philosophical Materialism is.  Scott has
defined it, exhibited, and illustrated it for us perfectly. In fact, she has
thrown in a couple more 'isms' for free: scientism and reductionism of the
most imperial sort.   Not only do we see the primary distinction that makes
the rest of her arguments throughout the talk fall to the ground, we also
come to realize that ID has been 'refuted' by merely asserting a materialist
position of one of the most extreme kinds.  And Scott wants a theist walking
away assured that atheism, reductionism, and philosophical materialism have
nothing to do with her position? Nothing to do with the battle against ID in
the science classroom?  Wow.  So where does the debate go from here?

 

--Michael Metzler

 

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20051013/d9fb1d1a/attachment-0001.htm