Monday, December 12, 2005

Philosopher Forgets What Metaphysics Means

Below is my annotated version of an op-ed piece by Douglas Groothius, professor of philosophy at the Denver Seminary; originally published in the Rocky Mountain News December 10.

Design critics often employ straw men.

Ever since President Bush advocated that the intelligent design critique of Darwinism be allowed in public schools, a riot of public pronouncements has condemned the design perspective as retrograde, unscientific and downright ominous. A number of logical fallacies are routinely employed in efforts to debunk intelligent design. In such cases, intelligent design is criticized and dismissed on the basis of an argument that is illogical and therefore false. One need not be an expert in Darwinian biology to sniff out these basic blunders. In this brief space I will note just one: the straw man argument. In the straw man argument a position is made to look ridiculous and then the caricature is knocked down. Intelligent design is repeatedly presented as a plan to institute religious and unscientific dogma in the public schools. The facts, however, speak otherwise. Intelligent design's think tank, The Discovery Institute, says this: "The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." The controlling premise is the effort to discern the best explanation for a natural phenomenon, given the available empirical evidence: a fundamental precept of scientific investigation.

[Since the best explanation for any phenomenon -- i.e., the one that has nothing that itself is not falseifiable -- can never have a posited first cause, a designer is not part of such an explanation. The unnecessary introduction of a metaphysical agent (the designer) means you are trying to explain a natural phenomenon with a supernatural cause.]

Unlike creationism, intelligent design makes no appeal to religious texts, but invokes empirical evidence, as well as the principles of design detection, which are already used in sciences such as cryptography, archaeology, forensics, and in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

[This is plain false. What is looked for in most of the above fields are patterns that MAY be suggestive of artificiality. When natural patterns mimic these, they are never proclaimed by these fields to be anything but natural. This is a begged question fallacy. The fact of nature mimicking artificiality is taken not as evidence, but as PROOF, by God, that Old Nobodaddy did it.]

Groothius's appeal to SETI research is particularly egregious, pointing either to ignorance of the field or the outright mendacity that permeates Intelligent Design. Seti is not looking for Carl Sagan and Jodi Foster's series of primes. All they need is a continuous radio signal on a single frequency from a single point. Such signals are not known to occur in nature, and thus would have to be built by some one.]Mathematician and philosopher William Dembski argues that certain features of the natural world exhibit patterns that are best explained on the basis of design (or intelligent causes), rather than on the basis of mindless nature (or unintelligent causes).

[Not much of a mathematician. Let's see: I have one apple, go to the tree and pick another apple, and now I have two apples. That state of being in which I have two apples simply by picking another is way too deep to be anything but by some one's design! All levels of complexity are simply variations and extensions on the act of picking a second apple.]


For example, even if we didn't know from history that an eccentric artist was responsible, we would identify the presidential faces carved into Mount Rushmore as designed because natural patterns of erosion cannot explain them. The complexity of the phenomenon fits a specifiable pattern: the faces of the presidents, which we recognize from other sources. Similarly, archaeologists distinguish ancient artifacts from naturally occurring objects on the basis of design detection. The complexity discovered in certain objects fits a specifiable pattern indicating that intelligent causation was at work. Intelligent design proponents argue that some organisms indicate specified complexity, and that these organisms are better explained by intelligent causes than by natural law and chance alone. The DNA code is an example of specified complexity. It contains a language that is not reducible to the laws of chemistry and physics, which do not specify its content. The odds against all the factors required for DNA to come together through the operations of mere matter and chance are vanishingly small.

[Bullshit. The formation of DNA is a chemical reaction, like any other. It is not even unique in being self-replicating. If one chemical reaction is evidence for a designer, then all are. Singling out DNA is meaningless in advancing the argument from design.]

Similarly, biochemist Michael Behe argues in Darwin's Black Box that certain molecular machines are irreducibly complex, which means that all of its basic parts are required for its function, as with a mousetrap. The bacterial flagellum, for example, is a highly complex outboard motor attached to a bacterium. A gradual process of mere chance and natural law is insufficient to explain this irreducible complexity, Behe argues, since the motor function could not exist in evolutionary predecessors that lacked any of the many necessary parts. However, Darwinists insist that intelligent design invokes God to cover ignorance of natural processes. This is exactly wrong. The design inference is not based on ignorance, but on increased knowledge of the microscopic realm and on the well-established principles of design detection.

[Sad. He's a professor of philosophy, yet has no understanding of the argument from design or refutations of it from Hume on.]

When Darwinists refuse to admit intelligent cause as a possible explanation for specified complexity, this only reveals that they define science such that intelligent causes are disallowed in principle.

[Who says refuse? The question is not whether such an explanation is a possibility, but whether such an explanation is 1) necessary; and 2) valid as science. It is incredible to me how some people keep their jobs.]

But this approach is not a discovery of science itself. It is rather a philosophical commitment to materialism (the belief that reality is reducible to impersonal physical laws).

[The professor forgets that there are two ways to view the world, and science is one of them. Nothing that is not science is a fit subject for science. Michael Behe famously declared astrology to be science while under oath.]

May these few considerations spur readers to assess rationally intelligent design's actual arguments and to avoid the logical fallacies so often employed in place of intelligent thought about life's origins.

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