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logo    On Intelligent Design


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)