"The cancer, in short, has continued to spread. It scarcely needs saying that the essays are individually and jointly conclusive in their aims; what makes one shake one’s head is the time, energy and effort these genuine scientists have been obliged to direct towards combating the irresponsible absurdities of Creationism and ID, distracting them from their real work because they have to defend their disciplines, and indeed American education, from the corrosive effects of disguised and confabulated versions of superstition.
It has to be confessed, though, that the essays make for entertaining reading. A prime example is the comprehensive and swingeing demolition by Victor J Stenger of ID theory’s darling, William Dembski, whose quite remarkably dishonest (or ignorant) manipulations of statistics and information theory, to “prove” that biological systems are too complex to have evolved naturally, have been ID’s mainstay. This indeed is the key to the ID challenge, and essay after essay here powerfully shows how this is nothing but an argument from ignorance, usually the ID proponent’s own.
The really surprising thing, though, is this. What is the value of saying, with respect to anything we do not, or do not yet, understand, that it was made by an invisible one-eyed toad (insert an arbitrary agent of your choice)? The child’s question presses: viz. if the universe and life in this corner of it had to be designed by (say) Mother Goose, who is she that she could do such a thing? Is she complex, and therefore did she need a designer in her turn? If so, that designer must have been pretty complex too, if not indeed more so, and would need a fancier designer in its own turn . . . and so on ad infinitum. Explanatory regresses with no first term explain nothing.
In short, the explanatory value of an arbitrary, plucked-out-of-thin-air idea of a designer to “explain” the universe and the complexity of life in it is null, vacuous, empty. What possible sense do the votaries of such a pointless view think they are making? Well, of course, their entire effort is devoted to finding premises for an antecedently accepted conclusion; they know in advance the answer, and are trying to fabricate the right questions to get to it; they know what they wish to prove, and are scrounging around for evidence, or for ways of twisting evidence that points to different conclusions, to do so. They subscribe for non-rational reasons to one of many creation myths from the infancy of mankind, and are scrabbling for justifications in support of it. This is as far from science, rationality and intellectual honesty as you can get."
newhumanist.org.uk |
