Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Donald Williams from SpareOom comments on ID

DW: I finally got around to reading the article someone
(Mary?) posted on evolution from the Washington Post.
The author tries to present a balanced view of the
controversy, but fails miserably to do so, presenting
a horribly unfair caricature of the Intelligent Design
(ID) argument.

ID is presented as an argument from silence,
equivalent to the mere claim that science has not yet
explained organs like the rotifer or the eye, as if
that were evidence against naturalistic evolution. But
this completely misrepresents Michael Behe's argument
in Darwin's Black Box. Behe does not simply claim
that Science has not explained irreducible complexity;
he argues that Natural Selection CANNOT explain it.
Since organs consisting of many coordinated parts
impart no survival advantage until they are complete
because they cannot work at all until they are
complete, natural selection provides no mechanism
whereby the many random mutations allegedly leading to
such organs could be preserved until they are all
ready to work together. Behe and other ID theorists
hope science will in fact explain such organs, but
they argue that natural selection by its very nature
will not and cannot be that explanation. And
evolutionists simply dismiss their argument without
responding to it.

I find it difficult to understand how anyone committed
to honesty and fairness could actually have read
Darwin's Black Box, which is not the least bit unclear
about this, and then misrepresent it so badly. It
tempts one to fling back in the face of the
evolutionist camp Dawkins' claim that anyone who
disbelieves evolution is either ignorant or stupid.
Anyone who could characterize ID as badly as this
article does either has not bothered to read the ID
material and hence is therefore ignorant, or is being
blantantly dishonest and deliberately unfair (I
eliminate stupidity as an explanation based on the
rest of the article). The argument that critics of
evolution are being treated very badly by the
establishment is upheld, if you actually know anything
about ID, in ways that simply do not comport with the
author's deceptively evenhanded tone.

If evolutionists want to convince us that Lewis was
right to refer to evolution as a "great myth," they
are surely going about it the right way. Science as
such has nothing to do with the way Darwin's critics
are being treated.

1 comment:

John H. Watson said...

Case in point. Oh the irony.