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First, the background: Casey Luskin, a well-known proponent of "Intelligent Design", decided to attack an article in National Geographic written by science writer Carl Zimmer. But Luskin seems to make a major slip-up in Part III of his attack:

Zimmer thus presents a straw-man argument against intelligent design, based upon his view that a designer must design things to withstand a certain type of malicious physical attack. This is not a scientific objection, but a theological objection. As a scientific theory, intelligent design does not require that systems always survive malicious physical beatings: as a science, ID requires the detection of specified complexity, and the moral purposes of the designer or the "perfection" of the design are irrelevant when determining whether an object was designed. But Carl Zimmer's personal theological views have no bearing upon the science of intelligent design. A more interesting question is, Why has National Geographic become a mouthpiece for a view of theology that states that a designer must design things to withstand certain types of physical attacks? (emphasis in original.)

Oops. Notice something there? You would if you'd read the National Geographic article first. Zimmer didn't mention theology. He does not describe the "Intelligent Designer" in religious terms. In fact, the only mention of the designer comes when he describes creationists as arguing "that such complexity must be the direct product of 'intelligent design' by a superior being." And that's it. It's not some sort of polemic, or a discussion of the religious motivations of ID proponents. Nope, he just mentions a designer and all of a sudden he's discussing theology,

Kind of a... peculiar "scientific" theory. Figuring out whether organisms were purposefully "designed" by an "intelligence" is supposedly scientific, but as soon as you wonder about who or what "designed" them, or wonder about the nature of the "intelligence" responsible, then you're talking theology.

There's the spirit of scientific inquiry for you. ID proponents doggedly try to limit themselves to whether or not design happened. The "who", "what", "when", "where", "how"... who cares about that?

(For more, you can follow the links at Zimmer's rebuttal to the rebuttal.)

Bill Adds: It's interesting that DaF brings this up, as I've been reading Richard Dawkins' new book, which attacks what he terms artificial barriers between religion and science. I actually tend to believe that some barriers are helpful, as the spiritual and scientific disciplines each have their place in the human condition, but the barrier between them is not as arbitrary as Dorkafork's target would have it; if one is willing to advance the proposition that life on Earth shows elements of design, it is a fairly natural scientific question to wonder about the nature of the intelligence and the designers of any designer. In this way, Dawkins describes Intelligent Design as creating a vicious infinite regress:

An infinite regress in a series of propositions arises if the truth of proposition P1 requires the support of proposition P2, and for any proposition in the series Pn, the truth of Pn requires the support of the truth of Pn+1. There would never be adequate support for P1, because the infinite series needed to provide such support could not be completed.

Distinction is made between infinite regresses that are "vicious" and those that are not. One definition given is that a vicious regress is "an attempt to solve a problem which re-introduced the same problem in the proposed solution. If one continues along the same lines, the initial problem will recur infinitely and will never be solved. Not all regresses, however, are vicious." [1]

But more on this in a later post where I review the book. And take heart, religiously-inclined readers: Dawkins' obnoxiousness, ill-informed politics and even an aspect of his presentation of ID as a vicious infinite regress merit some heat as well.

Posted by Dorkafork at November 26, 2006 12:10 AM | TrackBack (5)

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Posted by: gail at November 26, 2006 09:52 AM