In a long essay, Orson Scott Card defends Intelligent Design as expressed in “Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution” (Michael J. Behe). I just finished reading it and frankly am surprised by it. Card rehashes the main points made in Darwin’s Black Box, then lists a series of responses that “Darwinists” make to Intelligent Design (ID) arguments. The funny part about his list is that most of the criticisms that he applies to “Darwinists” are true of ID, and of Card’s essay itself. Overall, this essay is more of an appearance by a celebrity at a political rally than an attempt to engage in serious discussion or debate.
Here is the list that Card presents condemning the responses of “Darwinists” to ID/Creationism:
1. Intelligent Design is just Creation Science in a new suit (name-calling).
2. Don’t listen to these guys, they’re not real scientists (credentialism).
3. If you actually understood science as we do, you’d realize that these guys are wrong and we’re right; but you don’t, so you have to trust us (expertism).
4. They got some details of those complex systems wrong, so they must be wrong about everything (sniping).
5. The first amendment requires the separation of church and state (politics).
6. We can’t possibly find a fossil record of every step along the way in evolution, but evolution has already been so well-demonstrated it is absurd to challenge it in the details (prestidigitation).
7. Even if there are problems with the Darwinian model, there’s no justification for postulating an “intelligent designer” (true).
ID proponents and Mr. Card are guilty of
- #1: name-calling- i.e. “Darwinists”, and many many more)
- #2: anti-credentialism- these ivory-tower scientists won’t even come down to our level and debate us
- #4: sniping- this is a hilarious argument to be directed at “Darwinists” because sniping is the very basis for ID and Creationism; ignore the science that doesn’t support your argument and promote a selection of often-outdated results
- #5: politics- “Darwinists” are often branded as liberals
- #6: prestidigitation- ID scientists look at a system, throw up their hands and proclaim it complex; therefore, God (or aliens) did it.
To Card’s list, let me add a few:
- ID proponents use sciency-sounding arguments to advocate non-scientific conclusions (psuedoscience)
- ID proponents clamor about a scientific debate when there is none (charlatanism)
- ID proponents promote the idea of balanced and fair treatment of their legitimate ideas when the true balance is definitely not in their favor (more politics, excessive political correctness)
- Just as I am doing in this list, ID proponents lump all “Darwinists” together as if I and Richard Dawkins have much in common, this disgusting sore on public discussion cheapens us all (stereotyping)
I hope that in this list you detect the tongue-in-cheekism from which I am currently writing. My real point behind that little exercise in bullet pointing is not so much to argue my side of the ID/Creationism vs. Evolution debate, but instead to highlight how ridiculous it has become. If science curricula were set by appointed boards of practicing scientists rather than by appointed boards of no particular science training or background, this whole “debate” would be a whole lot less prominent. Instead, politics gets injected into the process (actually, it’s religion forcing the politics), and kids lose out in the whole process.
A writer of some wonderful science fiction books, Orson Scott Card is an author to be respected and admired. But, when it comes to this debate his essay contributes very little. It’s full of over-generalizations, straw man attacks, and all those lovely things that each side in a nasty partisan debate charges the other of. But most of all, it says the same old things over and over. That kind of writing is not intended to enlighten the debate but instead to inflame the rhetoric.
Evolution is science, ID is not.
orson Scott card may ba a respected science-fiction author, but his piffle about ID/evolution is just mere flapdoodle. When Nilles Eldredge or jared Diamolnd come up with some solid evidence invalidating the theory of evolution, then I’ll listen.
About Intelligent Design (ID)
ID is most often and wrongly linked to God and creationism, as opposed to Darwinism and evolutionism. We are there in fact facing an old philosophical problem transposed this time from man to the universe: the difficult and even impossible distinction between what is innate and what is acquired. But the reader of my pages http://controlled-hominization.com/ will perhaps agree that evolutionism is not in contradiction with all forms of ID. As a materialist, I think that the confrontation between both concepts is sterile and that a synthesis is even possible.
If any great complexity of a feature could not exclude evolutionism, science itself could not reject some forms of ID in the evolution of the universe, at least in some steps of the process. After all, man himself is already a local actor in this evolution, an actor showing little intelligence so far (global warming, life sciences …). He could however be led to play a greater and nobler part if he succeeds to survive long enough (dissemination of life in the cosmos, “terraforming” of planets, planetary and even stellar formation, artificial beings…). The development of this kind of “draft ID” could only be limited by our refusal to do so and by our ability to survive. We would be viewed as gods by our ancestors from the middle Ages, and we would also view our descendants as gods if we could return in a few hundreds or thousands years.
By his refusal to consider that intelligence could already have played a significant part in the evolution of this universe, man takes in fact for granted that he is the most advanced being. It is in fact just another way for placing himself once again in the middle of everything, as for the Earth before Galileo. This anthropocentric view is not very rational.
Within the frame of evolutionism, the concept of ID could however be applied to the future man if he manages to survive long enough to be able to play a significant part in the evolution of this solar system, in the galaxy, and why not more. And it could also apply to eventual advanced ET preceding man in this cosmic part, advanced ET who could for instance, thanks to their science, have already played a significant part, even if they were themselves born from random processes.
Without going back to a controversial God, pure intelligence born from random processes is so far too easily ignored in the evolution of this universe, and I think that this choice has more to do with faith in man’s solitude in the universe than with true science. Even if it appears later that the ID concept has yet never been used by other beings in this universe, what could prevent man from applying it in the future? As with the Big Bang, ID would certainly remain in the field of hypotheses, but science progresses that way, and it would not be scientific to exclude one hypothesis that could be quite credible. ID is too easily discarded and laughed at, somewhat like continental drift not long ago, and a lot of other concepts too.
Benoit Lebon