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<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'>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. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'>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:<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'>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. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'>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. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'>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?<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'>--Michael Metzler<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
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font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
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