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This past Sunday, September
4, 2005, the Dallas Morning News ran a piece of yours defending Intelligent
Design, and as a Ph.D. with twenty-two years of experience teaching Philosophy
and Logic in all of its known forms in university classrooms, I read it with
interest. I'm sorry to have to say I was gravely
disappointed.
I would think that a writer
presenting such a piece would have as his goal the desire to convert the
suspicious, but doing that requires intellectually honest material, and I find
none in your piece.
Your piece fills
approximately 28 column inches. Here's how they break down. Seven and one-half
inches of instances about professors being discredited by the opponents of
Intelligent Design. I don't know what to make of this, for my experience has
taught me that colleges and universities have their share of incompetent
professors, and it is not clear from what you say about any of those you mention
that their advocacy of Intelligent Design is the only reason for their troubles.
But even so, these seven and one-half inches merely amount to an ad
hominem argument, and since that form of argument has been known to be
invalid since at least 400 BCE, only a scoundrel or a grossly ignorant person
would use it.
Another five inches is
filled by your explanation of a second and third misunderstanding of what the
proponents of Intelligent Design are seeking to accomplish. But what such
proponents wish to accomplish has absolutely no bearing on the validity of the
theory.
An additional six inches
comprises an attack on the opponents of Intelligent Design for not investigating
the proponents claims. But you haven't made clear that there is anything to
investigate. And your piece ends with a seven inch peroration citing the many
scientists who express skepticism about the adequacy of the Theory of Evolution.
But attacking that theory does not amount to support of Intelligent
Design.
So what have you given us?
About 26 column inches of absolutely irrelevant and ineffective discourse. And
what is in the remaining two inches? Merely two unsupported claims: (1)
Intelligent Design is not based on religion, and (2) that "the theory proposes
that many of the most intricate features of the natural world . . . are best
explained as the product of an intelligent cause rather than an undirected
process like natural selection."
What evidence do you offer
for either of these claims? I find none. You state that Intelligent design is a
scientific inference based on empirical evidence. . . . What is the inference?
An inference is drawn from premises. What are the premises?
For instance, consider the
following four claims that might be made to explain the destruction caused by
hurricane Katrina.
1. This destruction can be best explained
by Gods wrath on the heart of America's Bible Belt for having elected George
Bush president. (An Old Testament prophetic claim.)
2. This destruction can be
best explained by the stupidity of people who would build a city on ground below
see level which is also surrounded by bodies of water on three
sides.
3. This destruction can be
best explained by the failure of governments on all levels to build the flood
control projects that have been proposed over many
decades.
4. This destruction can be
best explained by calculating the force that 160 mile/hour winds and a
twenty-two foot high storm surge inflict on structures of various
kinds.
For which of these claims
can we cite evidence? Only the latter three. And I won't even get into what
would be required to determine which is best.
The evidence for the second
would be the topography of the land and waterways and the fact that people did
build on that topography.
The evidence for the third
would be a list of all the proposed projects and an indication of which had and
which had not been built.
The evidence for the fourth
would be the mathematical calculations involved.
All of this evidence is
easily accumulatable and verifiable. There is no argument about any of it. This
evidence is factual. It is not mere observation. One cannot say, gee, it looks
like it was made by some intelligence.
So as far as
misunderstanding goes, you appear to misunderstand science altogether. Not
surprising for a political scientist (a misnomer if there ever was
one).
No, Darwin's theory is not
entirely correct or sufficient. But neither were Newton's laws of motion nor
Einstein's theory of relativity. But insufficiency didn't invalidate either. And
the insufficiency of the Theory of Evolution does not invalidate it. There are
piles and piles and piles of evidence that support it. But you haven't offered
even an iota of evidence to support Intelligent Design. All you have given is an
observation that goes something like, gee, when I look at the natural world I
see the hand of an intelligent designer. Ancient peoples looked into the sky and
saw animals, and people, and even gods. How many of us see them
today?
That of course doesn't give
me or anyone else anything to investigate. Because when we look at the earth
from our vistas, it looks flat, but we know it isn't, because Foucault proved it
with his pendulum experiment. So the fact that you and others see a world that
looks to be the result of intelligent design means
nothing.
And, if I told you what the failures of this piece makes you look like, you would not like it one bit. But I know that I don't know nearly enough about you to draw any conclusions about you from this one piece, so my only conclusion is that neither you nor anyone else will ever convince anyone that Intelligent Design is a viable theory by writing articles like yours. The most you can hope to do is preach to the converted, but that won't validate your view or end the controversy. (West 9/9/2005)