The Sad Parade Of Creationist Hucksters Are A Public Nuisance
The universe is deteriorating.
A mere 10 years ago, any decent search engine would reveal 100s of YouTube videos and thoughtful articles from people like Christopher Hitchens, Stephen Hawkins, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris if you searched for Intelligent Design or Creationism.
Today, most of those entries have disappeared or moved 100s of pages back in the queue and instead there is a plethora of pseudoscience nonsense much of which intentionally being passed off as science, much of which can be traced back to the Discovery Institute or Discovery Science - anything from these sources is propaganda masquerading as science. It's a con job.
And like in the political realm, people are apparently easy marks.
Don't be duped. The pressure is on.
The invisible and the nonexistent look very much alike.
I find this particular type of con job must disdainful.
Here's the deal. I don't believe, nor do I elevate the subject matter by disbelief,
There is NO evidence one way or another on this subject.
I can not intellectually accept something to be true if there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest it is true. But to a degree at least I can respect your decision to accept such a thing if you admit it's a matter of faith (believing in spite of no evidence for support). I can't do that, but more power to you if you can and you don't bug me about it. I can not abide any attempt to raise that "faith" into the realm of logic or science. That is an insult. An affront to honest science.
That is the bridge too far that makes me go off and pen something like this post.
Intelligent design creationism (often intelligent design, ID, or IDC) is a pseudoscience that maintains that certain aspects of the physical world, and more specifically life, superficially look designed, and hence were designed, by an intelligent being (usually, but not always, the God of the Christian religion). The concept is pre-scientific, it only really came into common circulation in the 1990s with the advent of dim people sharing dim stuff on the internet.
Supporters of intelligent design (termed design proponents, less respectfully, IDiots) usually claim that the idea is not based on Christian creationism, although the existence of the Wedge Document is a pretty big hint that there is a link, and a now-infamous epic editing fail in an early draft of the ID textbook Of Pandas and People also accidentally revealed the Middle Eastern God man behind the curtain. Although it attempts to present itself as a form of agnostic creationism, it is made abundantly clear that intelligent design in its various incarnations inevitably invokes a God, and as such, is inherently religious. Attempts to have ID taught in public schools have been defeated in court, and science papers proposing a "designer" rarely if ever get past peer review — although not for reasons of prejudice against the subject matter (Which is what the whiney authors oft claim).
Intelligent design is widely criticized for its failure to state what mechanism drives it, its lack of falsifiability, and many other problems that find it wanting as a scientific theory Merely writing these blogs and particularly podcasts presenting such fallacies lowers the average IQ of the human race at large.
Various presenters of these ridiculous nostrums have attempted to subvert mankind's use of logic and reason in their heartfelt but entirely bogus attempts to pass off their personal beliefs as "scientific".
Proponents such as Ken Ham are easy enough for even an 8 year old to debunk.
But one thing that's become obvious in recent years is that people will bend over backwards and reject all critical thinking to embrace some notion that suggests something they wish were true, simply because it makes them feel good on some level well below the threshold of conscious thought.Somewhere in the primordial ooze of the lizard brain where demons haunt and authoritarians seem like a good thing.
Stephen Meyer is a huckster that some of my well intended believer friends and family have suggested I should listen to. Well I did. He's a little better at sounding "science-ey" than most but his arguments do not leave the realm of logical fallacy and would never get past scientific peer review nor are they falsifiable which simply means it's NOT SCIENCE, just his wishes and beliefs masquerading as science.
Who is this guy?
Stephen Meyer is a major figure in the American Intelligent Design creationism movement.
Along with fellow simpletons William Dembski, (who is extensively quoted in Meyer's books), and Jonathan Wells (who’s on record as setting out to destroy Darwinism), he’s one of the intellectual leaders of this regrettable movement.
Meyer graduated with a degree in Physics and Earth Science from the christian Whitworth College, and worked for a while as a geophysicist before undertaking a PhD in the philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge. Meyer then held teaching positions at Whitworth and at Palm Beach Atlantic University (another college with a distinctive christian ethos), before settling at the Discovery Institute, where he’s been a leading light in the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture.
Somewhere along the line Meyer became convinced that life on Earth must have originated with a designer of some kind. According to his book, Signature; this was a realization that followed his study of the many hypotheses of life’s origins that have been advanced over the years. Meyer is credited as one of the authors of the Wedge Strategy document, which sets out the Discovery Institute’s strategy for intelligent design. To quote from the Wikipedia page:
The document sets forth the short-term and long-term goals with milestones for the intelligent design movement, with its governing goals stated in the opening paragraph:
“To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies”
“To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God”
There are three Wedge Projects, referred to in the strategy as three phases designed to reach a governing goal:
Scientific Research, Writing & Publicity
Publicity & Opinion-making
Cultural Confrontation & Renewal
Recognizing the need for support,
the institute affirms the strategy’s Christian, evangelistic orientation:
Alongside a focus on the influential opinion-makers, we also seek to build up a popular base of support among our natural constituency, namely, Christians. We will do this primarily through apologetics seminars. We intend these to encourage and equip believers with new scientific evidences that support the faith, as well as to popularize our ideas in the broader culture.
I’m including this outline of the position of ID creationism as seen by the Discovery Institute
because I think it reveals an overall agenda in pushing a set of religiously motivated objectives,
an agenda that initially was covert. And the identity of the ‘Designer’ is clear from the Wedge Document (though proponents of ID creationism like to keep this vague). Looking into the history of Intelligent Design creationism, one sees that the Wedge Document reflects a neo-creationist strategy that began in the early 1990s, and in specific response to successive legal defeats of co-called creation science in the USA, where the teaching of creationism falls foul of the constitutional separation of religion and state.
So while Meyer is not a stranger to science, his background isn’t in biology, or molecular biology. His involvement in Intelligent Design can be traced back to around 1992.
Pretty much all IDiots and Creationists arguments boil down to these two fallacies -
1. The argument to complexity (It's too complicated so it must be the work of a supernatural dude of some kind...most likely related to a middle eastern legend!)
2. God of the Gaps - a position that assumes an act of God as the explanation for an unknown phenomenon, which according to the users of the term, is a variant of an argument from ignorance fallacy. Such an argument is sometimes reduced to the following form:
There is a gap in understanding of some aspect of the natural world.
Therefore, the cause must be supernatural.
It just isn't scientifically fruitful to invoke "intelligent design" in this context, as if it solves a problem, rather than just raising another one (who designed the super-complex designer, and so on).
Meyers is not a dimwit which makes his brand of folderol particularly pernicious, he is educated and there are grains of truth mixed in with his bitterness over his theories not being accepted in the scientific community at large & religious yearnings.
However, Meyer is trained as a geologist, historian and philosopher of science, not a biologist.
So we might forgive the missteps around biology matters, but one would think he would know
what his own field has to say about the relationship between science, religion, and naturalism.
Yet in his book, "Signature in the Cell"--and especially in Chapter 6, "The Origin of Science and the Possibility of Design"--he selectively uses historical science research to claim that modern science can still be infused with a sense of the divine. In the process, Meyer selectively ignores important developments from the 19th century forward. Historians of science like Ronald Numbers have shown, after the Darwinian revolution, science became closely tied to methodological naturalism and a sense of fixed natural laws that are unchanging--and therefore capable of being studied in controlled experiments.
In this context, appeals to miracles, divine intervention, intelligent design, and so on, were ruled out by practicing scientists, whether they were personally religious or not--and for very good reason!
They were seen as an inappropriate hinderance, and not based on testable data or inference.
They were vague, and didn't have any explanatory power.
They might be religiously satisfying, but as science, they were bunko, a cop-out.
Granted, we have to go a bit closer into what Meyer is saying,
as there is a grain of truth mixed into the sands of dubiosity.
In citing early modern scientists like Kepler, Boyle, Newton, and so on, Meyer rightly notes that these pioneers felt that the order in the nature that they could detect was the work of an organizing intelligence--a great clockmaker for the clockwork universe.
Therefore, science itself was, in a very strong sense, inquiry into the nature of the divine.
And so Meyer asks: How could the act of invoking something so foundational to the history of science as the idea of design now completely violate the rules of science itself, as I had repeatedly heard many scientists assert? If belief in intelligent design first inspired modern scientific investigation, how could mere openness to the design hypothesis now act as a "science stopper" and threaten to put an end to productive scientific research altogether, as some scientists feared? Clearly, the idea of intelligent design had played a formative role in the foundation of modern science. Many great scientists had proposed specific design hypotheses. This seemed to suggest that intelligent design could function as a possible scientific hypothesis. But many contemporary scientists rejected this idea out of hand. Why? The answer to this question is obvious, and if Meyer is a historian of science, he should know it. In the 19th century especially--but it began even earlier--science differentiated itself from religion and decided that supernatural appeals were no longer testable or within the purview of science. Great battles were fought on this head, by the likes of John Tyndall, Thomas Henry Huxley, and many more. "The more we know of the fixed laws of nature, the more incredible do miracles become," wrote Darwin in his Autobiography. This is why, when lightning strikes, we no longer fear it is godly punishment. Rather, we know it is electricity. This is why, if patients' symptoms improve after they pray or are prayed for, we know it is the placebo effect. Or at least, we know that is all that science can say about the matter. Meyer is right about how Kepler and Newton thought, but modern scientists have long since decided that they don’t work in the way Kepler, or Newton, or Paley did. Religious or otherwise, they leave claims about the supernatural out of what they do professionally, because there is no way to test such claims, or get other scientists to agree about them. For instance, you couldn’t convince an atheistic scientist, or even many Christian scientists, to accept the idea of supernatural design as a scientific, testable hypothesis.
Science has left behind the supernatural for very sound methodological reasons; ID wants to bring it back. But that just isn't going to happen. Stronger distinctions have been built between science and religion as science advanced and professionalized, and that’s a good thing. Vast progress has been made in this way; many pointless discussions have been avoided. There is no way that ID is going to pull science back to the 17th century, and as a historian of science,
Meyer damned well ought to know that.
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