better news than not, break out the noodles

[foxtongue]

from the NY Times On-Line:

Intelligent Design Might Be Meeting Its Maker
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: December 4, 2005

To read the headlines, intelligent design as a challenge to evolution seems to be building momentum.

In Kansas last month, the board of education voted that students should be exposed to critiques of evolution like intelligent design. At a trial of the Dover, Pa., school board that ended last month, two of the movement's leading academics presented their ideas to a courtroom filled with spectators and reporters from around the world. President Bush endorsed teaching "both sides" of the debate - a position that polls show is popular. And Pope Benedict XVI weighed in recently, declaring the universe an "intelligent project."

Intelligent design posits that the complexity of biological life is itself evidence of a higher being at work. As a political cause, the idea has gained currency, and for good reason. The movement was intended to be a "big tent" that would attract everyone from biblical creationists who regard the Book of Genesis as literal truth to academics who believe that secular universities are hostile to faith. The slogan, "Teach the controversy," has simple appeal in a democracy.

Behind the headlines, however, intelligent design as a field of inquiry is failing to gain the traction its supporters had hoped for. It has gained little support among the academics who should have been its natural allies. And if the intelligent design proponents lose the case in Dover, there could be serious consequences for the movement's credibility.

On college campuses, the movement's theorists are academic pariahs, publicly denounced by their own colleagues. Design proponents have published few papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

The Templeton Foundation, a major supporter of projects seeking to reconcile science and religion, says that after providing a few grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, they asked proponents to submit proposals for actual research.

"They never came in," said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned.

"From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don't come out very well in our world of scientific review," he said.

While intelligent design has hit obstacles among scientists, it has also failed to find a warm embrace at many evangelical Christian colleges. Even at conservative schools, scholars and theologians who were initially excited about intelligent design say they have come to find its arguments unconvincing. They, too, have been greatly swayed by the scientists at their own institutions and elsewhere who have examined intelligent design and found it insufficiently substantiated in comparison to evolution.

"It can function as one of those ambiguous signs in the world that point to an intelligent creator and help support the faith of the faithful, but it just doesn't have the compelling or explanatory power to have much of an impact on the academy," said Frank D. Macchia, a professor of Christian theology at Vanguard University, in Costa Mesa, Calif., which is affiliated with the Assemblies of God, the nation's largest Pentecostal denomination.

At Wheaton College, a prominent evangelical university in Illinois, intelligent design surfaces in the curriculum only as part of an interdisciplinary elective on the origins of life, in which students study evolution and competing theories from theological, scientific and historical perspectives, according to a college spokesperson.

The only university where intelligent design has gained a major institutional foothold is a seminary. Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., created a Center for Science and Theology for William A. Dembski, a leading proponent of intelligent design, after he left Baylor, a Baptist university in Texas, amid protests by faculty members opposed to teaching it.

Intelligent design and Mr. Dembski, a philosopher and mathematician, should have been a good fit for Baylor, which says its mission is "advancing the frontiers of knowledge while cultivating a Christian world view." But Baylor, like many evangelical universities, has many scholars who see no contradiction in believing in God and evolution.

Derek Davis, director of the J. M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies at Baylor, said: "I teach at the largest Baptist university in the world. I'm a religious person. And my basic perspective is intelligent design doesn't belong in science class."

Mr. Davis noted that the advocates of intelligent design claim they are not talking about God or religion. "But they are, and everybody knows they are," Mr. Davis said. "I just think we ought to quit playing games. It's a religious worldview that's being advanced."

John G. West, a political scientist and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, the main organization supporting intelligent design, said the skepticism and outright antagonism are evidence that the scientific "fundamentalists" are threatened by its arguments.

"This is natural anytime you have a new controversial idea," Mr. West said. "The first stage is people ignore you. Then, when they can't ignore you, comes the hysteria. Then the idea that was so radical becomes accepted. I'd say we're in the hysteria phase."

In the Dover trial, where intelligent design finally got its day in court, the movement faces perhaps the greatest potential for a serious setback.

The case is the first to test whether intelligent design can be taught in a public school, or whether teaching it is unconstitutional because it advances a particular religious belief. The Dover board voted last year to read students a short statement at the start of ninth-grade biology class saying that evolution is a flawed theory and intelligent design is an alternative they should study further.

If the judge in the Dover case rules against intelligent design, the decision would be likely to dissuade other school boards from incorporating it into their curriculums. School boards might already be wary because of a simple political fact: eight of the school-board members in Dover who supported intelligent design were voted out of office in elections last month and replaced by a slate of opponents.

Advocates of intelligent design perceived the risk as so great that the Discovery Institute said it had tried to dissuade the school board in Dover from going ahead and taking a stand in favor of intelligent design. The institute opposed the Dover board's action, it said, because it "politicized" what should be a scientific issue.

Now, with a decision due in four or five weeks, design proponents like Mr. West of Discovery said the Dover trial was a "sideshow" - one that will have little bearing on the controversy.

"The future of intelligent design, as far as I'm concerned, has very little to do with the outcome of the Dover case," Mr. West said. "The future of intelligent design is tied up with academic endeavors. It rises or falls on the science."

Comments

[breklor.livejournal.com]

*runs around in little circles, giggling and throwing bits of styrofoam around*

[porphyre.livejournal.com]

why styrofoam?

[breklor.livejournal.com]

It flutters like snow, and looks kinda neat.

[envoy.livejournal.com]

Hah! I was wondering who would be the first to comment on the lovely return of Lore. He's been stale for a while.

[porphyre.livejournal.com]

I luves the lore. Lore was the reason I continued to hit up brunching shuttlecocks for the longest time.

[porphyre.livejournal.com]

As well as the sexists and the racists and the all sorts of -ists, I guess.

Think we could herd them off a cliff?

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

It's been tried. They don't herd easily.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

I take that back somewhat. They do herd easily, just not in the right directions, like off of the aforementioned cliffs.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_flybaby_/]

Burn the witches, burn...
Oh wait it's not the 1800's, so why is the US so fucking retarded?

[porphyre.livejournal.com]

They're not all made of madness, that's the point. Also, it's not that bad. You could offer your hand in marriage to the hot intelligent ones who want out.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_flybaby_/]

Yeah it would be like mail order brides, Are you a democrat, do you feel oppressed by the amount of propaganda that is generally accepted by the public, do you want to leave the US before they go economy crashes, well than marry a Canadian, there the sensitive boy next door you've never met, just with a picture and a short write up about your self, you'll be living in the in the great white north in no time. (South of France of course)
PS sorry if I offended any Americans, I’m just pissed off at their administration right now.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

[frector.livejournal.com]

Intelligent design is untestable, so it falls outside the domain of science. You can teach kids about it in religion class if you want. Sheesh, people! Why are you debating this!

[arrogant-gamer.livejournal.com]

Hi

I know, isn`t it strange? I mean, seriously:

"This is natural anytime you have a new controversial idea," Mr. West said. "The first stage is people ignore you. Then, when they can't ignore you, comes the hysteria. Then the idea that was so radical becomes accepted. I'd say we're in the hysteria phase."

"They`re just jealous because they know we`re right."

Hmm. Science is something that people rely on, everywhere. Every joe Ziggy out there will paticipate in discussions about science without ever having been properly educated in the field. People will act irrationaly when prompted by "scientists". Science is in our minds, in our movies, and in our class rooms, but what is "science"? Most people don`t know, they have a vague, sci-fi sort of concept of it. This "popular science", the science that people believe in, is more like a world religion, and I think that this idea of scientificalizing fundamentaly religious ideas is a marketing strategy: trying to put religion back in the place that popular science now occupies in the common man`s mind.

I think it would be wonderful if we could "reconcile" science and religion, but these two things are just different. It`s like saying "I wish we could reconcile oranges and ford production lines" what are you even saying? It`s just nonsense that relies on ambiguity: which is exactly what "popular religion" is nowadays. Non religious people like, say, Joe Ziggy, who don`t know much about religious history, believe that fundamentalist religion is garbled nonsense. That`s what is happening here: fundamentalism is thrashing about (which might be the last stage in the advent of a "new controversial idea" say, science).

May His Noodly Appendage reach through your lies!

z.

[porphyre.livejournal.com]

best line from a film:

I'm a scientist! We don't believe in anything!

[mallinson.livejournal.com]

The quote rings true. I'm an agnoiologist/global sceptic; I piss most PHILOSOPHERS off with my scepticism.

[frector.livejournal.com]

Argh, that quote is so arrogant. You're quite right, I see it as religion becoming hysterical when it turns out that science provides new explanations for certain things that used to be explained by holy books.

So yes, this is a big problem I think! People don't understand the basic philosophy of science. We learn about the findings of science, and take it as truth, without really understanding where that truth comes from; in that sense it is, indeed, much like a religion.

I presume we all learned about the scientific method in high school, but I didn't really get it until just this year. Science consists of: observing the world, forming a testable theory about what you saw, and testing your theory. If you ever manage to find a test that contradicts your theory, you need to come up with a better theory. Theories are useful if they help you make accurate predictions about the world. Anything that's not testable - such as the existence of a god, its role in creating the universe, whether His Noodly Appendage is changing the results of your tests, etc. - science lets these questions go unanswered. This is why, as you say, the two philosophies do not conflict (as long as religion sticks to the unanswerable questions and keeps its nose out of science's business).

[arrogant-gamer.livejournal.com]

Hi

But that would meen obscurity, which is where ideas are born and die. In the future we will pray to machine gods! "Oh great Deep Thought, most powerful of all computers."

z.

[leftoftheedge.livejournal.com]

If'n you're interested, there's a debate on evolution v. intelligent design going on in the letters pages of one of the newspapers here in Dublin. My own contribution:

Niamh Dempsey (Metro, Mon 5th) questions people who think "they evolved from a piece of dirt". I wonder what she makes of Genesis 2:7, "And the Lord formed man of the dust of the ground"? Another reader (Metro, Fri 2nd) challenges believers in evolution to explain the apparent elements of Intelligent Design in the world. I can't, but I do wonder what sort of intelligent designer would make bipeds more physically unsuited to giving birth than quadrupeds (the necessity of a comparatively smaller birth canal as the pelvis becomes more load-bearing) or include redundant biology (such as the appendix). Or fail to fit infants with a volume control, for that matter.
Evolution may be "only a theory", as Niamh says, but so are relativity, Copernicus' model of Earth revolving around the sun, continental drift, the existence of atoms and electricity. Yet these theories, far from being imagined hypotheses, are explanations that have been so confirmed by observation and experiment that they may reasonably be accepted as fact - until, of course, a better explanation comes along, one that can be equally confirmed.
Sadly for Niamh, I seem to disprove her theory that people believe in
evolution "not because they believe it, but to accommodate their sinful lifestyles". My life is no more or less sinful than any of the many Christians I know, although I may fall to a teensy bit of gluttony and sloth over the next few weeks.

To be honest, the debate is making about as much headway as slapping a kipper against a battleship, but that's to be expected. I reckon it's worth taking part in though - any time ideas that are the tip of a very big and dangerous iceberg get a public airing, you've got to be ready to stand up for your own views.

Nice pic, by the way.

[porphyre.livejournal.com]

I wanted something appropriate, and I've been wanting to air at least something on all this after announcing that Kansas voted Yes to teaching Intelligent Design in Schools. I like your clip. It reminds me of something fun that someone, (who I think we mutually have friended, but damn if I can remember this late at night), wrote to do with a scientist kneecapping an intelligent design inherent to prove a point.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

I remember that. "How can you prove that I just broke your knees? Your memory? The fact that the hammer is still in my hands?"

[abmann.livejournal.com]

I alway wondered how deeply religious people believed that science killed god. I mean, everything gets so complex, so delicate that there's reasopn to argue that some intelligent designer could be behind it.

Science as avenue to god?

It would seem that intelligent design proponents want to say, "We can't explain X area of sciecne, therefore all science is bunk and God did it." What about, "maybe God set all this up for us to figure out."

Silly people. Trix are for kids.

[arrogant-gamer.livejournal.com]

Hi

Like, maybe the God we`re looking for is a scientist himself, who delights in instruction but knows that humans are too arrogant to learn from something they do not fear. Ahem.

z.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

"I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even known that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck."

Part of the I believe monologue from Neil Gaiman's American Gods.