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May 11, 2005
a kansas compromise?
J. David Velleman: May 11, 2005
The theory of "intelligent design" (ID) is not science, and insofar as it pretends to be science, it is a fraud.1 Shorn of its scientific pretensions, however, ID has a point -- not a terribly good point, but a point all the same, and one that I would not be averse to including in a high-school curriculum. Unfortunately, the curriculum in which ID belongs doesn't exist in high schools. If it did exist, it would be a curriculum, not in science, but in philosophy.
No scientist would deny that there are gaps in our current ability to
explain the origins of human life. The theory of evolution is, not a
complete explanation, but what philosophers of science call an explanation-schema --
a general template for developing explanations of many different phenomena. The template outlines how to explain life-forms in terms of inheritable
mutations and natural selection; the specific mutations and the
specific forces of selection vary from one case to another. This
template has enabled scientists to explain innumerable observations of life now existing or preserved in the fossil record. But scientists
have nothing like a complete, step-by-step account of how our species
developed from the first organic molecules, and there is plenty of room
for controversy as to how the evolutionary template should be applied
to some cases, whether it has yet been applied successfully to others,
and how the template itself might be elaborated or tweaked.
Given a successful explanation schema, the scientific approach (I won't call it a "method") is to continue
applying it to new cases, adjusting it as the
need arises. Those who have devoted their
lives to such an enterprise tend to be optimistic that it will ultimately
yield explanations for all of the phenomena. Their optimism about the
enterprise is encouraged by its successes to date; and in any case,
pessimists would probably look for a different line of work. But
optimism about the ultimate reach of science is not itself a scientific
thesis. Whether science carried to its ideal limit would leave a
remainder of unexplained phenomena is a question that science does not
attempt to answer. It's a question for metaphysicians and epistemologists.
Yet this question is the one to which intelligent-design theory is addressed -- or should be addressed, if it is to be plausible. The question, in this case, is whether the evolutionary explanation-schema, if developed and applied to its ideal limit, would leave a remainder of unexplained phenomena, which could be explained only by the workings of an intelligent designer. If proponents of ID claim to have identified such a remainder already, then they don't understand the incomplete and progressive nature of science. Whatever has not yet been adequately explained is a topic for ongoing research, and that research continues to make more than adequate progress with the evolutionary schema.2 But if ID theorists are asking about a remainder that would be left at the ideal limit of materialistic or (as we philosophers prefer to say) naturalistic inquiry, then they are asking a perfectly sensible question -- perfectly sensible, but not scientific. It's not a question for Doctor Science; it's a question for Doctor Philosophy (who doesn't yet have a website).
Many of the topics that the religious right would like to insert in to high-school curricula naturally arise in philosophy courses. We philosophers talk about the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the possible limits of scientific inquiry. Of course, a philosophy curriculum would not just teach the religious view on these topics. But the current proponents of ID are not asking that it be taught exclusively; they are merely asking that it be given a hearing. And it could easily be given a hearing in a unit on the philosophy of science, a unit on the philosophy of religion, or a unit combining the two.
I'm under no illusion that this proposal would satisfy the religious right. But I think that resistance to their pressures on school curricula would be more credible if it included an alternative proposal.
1For some online sources that support this claim, see this op-ed by P.Z. Myers of Pharyngula; the articles featured on Kenneth R. Miller's Evolution Page; the materials at Talkdesign.org; a debate sponsored by Natural History magazine; this and other posts at The Panda's Thumb; and these papers by philosopher of science Elliott Sober.
2Says who? The biologists -- and they are the experts. What makes them the experts? I address that question here and here.
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» Another ID Blog Entry from prosthesis
J. David Velleman at Left2Right has a decent post about ID and highschool education. I agree with the main thrust of it - that we should have philosophy classes in highschool and ID should be taught in them. I disagree with the other main thrust of h... [Read More]
Tracked on May 11, 2005 08:19 PM
» Intelligent discussion of intelligent design? from blogs for industry
David Velleman offers a compromise on how to handle teaching ID:
Shorn of its scientific pretensions, however, ID has a point -- not a terribly good point, but a point all the same, and one that I would not be averse to including in a high-school cur... [Read More]
Tracked on May 12, 2005 03:26 AM
» More on ID and Science from Parableman
David Velleman has a nice, balanced post up about ID and schools. I don't quite agree with everything, but he's close to being right on everything. My first comment makes my views clear enough, as if my post here didn't... [Read More]
Tracked on May 12, 2005 07:46 AM
Comments
Posted by: Paul Shields
Good post. So why is it that we don't do more philosophy in secondary schools?
Posted by: Paul Shields | May 11, 2005 04:50 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Bernard
I think that the problem with teaching religious ideas in a philosophy class is the usual one that a proper logical analysis of those ideas is, rather than just not satisfying the pressure groups, likely to alienate them further.
In my experience, the more philosophical viewpoints are thought about, the more doubt becomes apparent, and ID is no exception. The idea that intelligent life is indicative of design, which is indicative of intelligence (which is indicative of design) becomes clearly flawed as a first principle with even a basic analysis, and it would be a fairly poor philosophy course which discouraged students from addressing the circular reasoning put in front of them.
Because science is analogous to a reverse engineering exercise, it's more than optimistic to assume that it will deliver first principles either, as every finer detail we've so far discovered is based on a set of still finer details we have yet to discern.
In both cases, I'd be all for gearing education toward explaining how we've arrived at the popular conclusions we have and where the key areas of doubt are so that students are equipped to draw conclusions for themselves, but I suspect that the religious right would see this as an even more serious attack than they face now rather than a step in the right direction.
Posted by: Bernard | May 11, 2005 05:09 PM | Permalink
Posted by: vk
Hi,
Is this not too many if's. Besides, the scientific approach is based on an assumption of always incomplete knowledge. More generally, if one considers a consistent system based on axioms, there is Godel's theorem of the improvability of certain statements.
Incidentally, there is a concrete example where the scientific approach has its limits. Quantum Mechanics is based on the principle that it is impossible to have a completely microscopic knowledge of physical reality, and that there are limits to observation. However, there is no point to the mechanism of an intelligent agent to explain what happens below these limits of observability, because it would make no difference.
Posted by: vk | May 11, 2005 05:32 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Bret
What's wrong with combining science and philosophy of science into one course?
Posted by: Bret | May 11, 2005 05:38 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Colin Danby
I dunno about trying to fix problems by adding things to the curriculum, especially as compromises. I've seen enough undergrads to be persuaded that resources going into science and math teaching should be doubled, and I'd include a full course in logic as part of an enlarged standard math curriculum, which might go some way to resolving chronic confusions about argument, evidence, and proof.
One of the great benefits of doing a proper lab science is that you get some sense of how to move between a theory and actual evidence, get a sense of difficulties of measurement, units, and so on. People who don't have this have real difficulty dealing with other kinds of theory when they encounter them later.
So much though I love metaphysics, I'd put that part off and just try and get a few things learned well.
Posted by: Colin Danby | May 11, 2005 05:50 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Achillea
Bret: What's wrong with combining science and philosophy of science into one course?
Probably the fact that science is a core subject, and philosophy (if it's present among the curricula at all) is an elective, at least in secondary school. There's a lot to teach, and finite educational hours in which to do it.
Posted by: Achillea | May 11, 2005 05:51 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Bret
Achillea,
David Velleman proposed the compromise that ID be given a "hearing in a unit on the philosophy of science". I'm just proposing that philosophy of science and science be combined. It would take no more time. The ID proponents (who really are anti-evolution proponents in sheep's clothing) want Evolution and ID side by side. If you're going to have ID in schools at all (where I don't think it really belongs), then you might as well put it where the parents want it to be - and that's right along with the teaching of evolution.
Posted by: Bret | May 11, 2005 06:02 PM | Permalink
Posted by: David Velleman
Bret: Putting ID alongside evolution, in biology class, is precisely what I am not willing to do. Evolution is science; ID is not. Putting them side-by-side is incoherent. Also, I doubt whether science teachers would be good teachers of philosophy.
Posted by: David Velleman | May 11, 2005 06:10 PM | Permalink
Posted by: D.A. Ridgely
An excellent analysis of the issue, insofar as I think the ID proponents can be taken seriously and are not merely covert creationists, and a very reasonable resolution.
I hope this isn’t too far off topic, but I have often wondered why, with very few exceptions, philosophy is not offered in secondary schools. Well, there are some obvious possible answers; namely, lack of funding, lack of qualified teachers, resistance from parents who don’t want their children taught, for example, the arguments against the arguments for the existence of God, competing curricular requirements, etc.
On the other hand, watching my son wind his way through high school these last four years, I’ve noticed (with occasional distress over the qualified teacher issue) works of philosophy assigned in his English, government and history courses. Also, I note a rising popularity of the International Baccalaureate program, which requires a course entitled Theory of Knowledge, which I assume is some sort of introduction to epistemology (not available at my son’s high school, although it is one of those Newsweek “Top 100” high schools that stress AP courses). So I can think of no per se reason why philosophy ought not be included at least as an elective in the standard, college preparatory high school curriculum. (Just to grind a quick axe, I think the same about economics and I especially think some sort of introduction to law course should be available in an undergraduate college curriculum.)
On the other hand (how many hands is that now?), many high school students who take biology are not in a college prep track and the overwhelming majority of them are not taking AP or IB courses. Are we to be Platonic elitists, consigning these students only to courses teaching scientific orthodoxy and reserving the sublime pleasures of philosophy to only our potential Guardian class? Moreover, is there a developmental reason beyond intellectual elitism and lack of resources to do so? That is, is it simply asking to much of average intelligence 14 through 17 year olds, given their still developing cognitive abilities, to expect them to understand (let alone appreciate) the likes of epistemology and metaphysics?
Posted by: D.A. Ridgely | May 11, 2005 06:20 PM | Permalink
Posted by: D.A. Ridgely
[sigh] Quick correction: “asking to much” should, of course, be “asking too much.” Either Bill Gates or I don’t know spelling and grammar and I’m beginning to suspect it’s both of us. Back before spell-checkers, I used to try to proofread my text much more carefully. Of course, I couldn’t spell worth beans even then, and don't even get me started on my life-long love affair with commas.
Posted by: D.A. Ridgely | May 11, 2005 06:26 PM | Permalink
Posted by: pedro
More generally, if one considers a consistent system based on axioms, there is Godel's theorem of the improvability of certain statements.
I don't doubt that there are some interesting philosophical ideas surrounding Godel's incompleteness theorem, but there is an annoying tendency to extrapolate its domain of applicability in truly amazing ways. Godel's incompleteness theorem talks about first-order logic, and about a particular concept of proof that bears little resemblance to any plausible reasoning that takes place in scientific research. If scientific theories were the result of the repeated application of modus ponens from first axioms, then scholasticism would be alive and well, and modern science wouldn't exist.
In fact, when Godel gives us examples of first-order statements which are true relative to a set of axioms, but which don't have a finitary proof from those very axioms, the concept of truth there involved is--modulo philosophical quibbles I do not understand--Tarski's concept of truth. Namely, a statement is true if it holds in any L-structure (in the first order language L in question) for which all the initial axioms hold. The quest for scientific truth seems to me to be more like an attempt to verify truth in this sense (replacing axioms by previously observed facts) than like an attempt to derive provable consequences from first principles. And thus Godel's incompleteness theorem seems even more irrelevant.
Posted by: pedro | May 11, 2005 06:37 PM | Permalink
Posted by: D.A. Ridgely
Mr. Danby: Excellent point about logic, though I think what high school students need is informal logic and not, say, 1st order predicate calculus. For that reason, having the math faculty teach such a course might not work all that well. (I haven’t noticed that people trained in science and math are that much less likely to indulge in informal fallacies, especially outside their areas of expertise, than equally well educated people in other disciplines.)
(Oh, and did I mention my life-long love affair with parenthetical expressions?)
Posted by: D.A. Ridgely | May 11, 2005 06:39 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Bret
David Velleman wrote: "Putting them side-by-side is incoherent."
Incoherent? It seems pretty coherent to me contrasting the scientific and non-scientific viewpoints on the subject. Well then, how about moving both Evolution and ID to the philosophy of science? They could both be discussed during a unit on Creation myths along with discussion on how strong beliefs in an "explanatory schema" resembles religious faith. I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me what it means to "believe in" Evolution.
Posted by: Bret | May 11, 2005 06:40 PM | Permalink
Posted by: miab
DV writes: "The theory of "intelligent design" (ID) is not science, and insofar as it pretends to be science, it is a fraud . . . . Yet this question is the one to which intelligent-design theory is addressed -- or should be addressed, if it is to be plausible. The question, in this case, is whether the evolutionary explanation-schema, if developed and applied to its ideal limit, would leave a remainder of unexplained phenomena, which could be explained only by the workings of an intelligent designer."
I agree that the problem is that ID has been shoehorned into a role that is inappropriate for what it has to offer, but I think even DV's re-casting of its legitimate goals (while not exactly wrong) misses what should be the core point or use of ID.
ID makes *no attempt* at any predictive power, nor as "explanatory schema" nor any other statement about science, and therefore cannot even be properly understood to be philosophy of science. Rather, ID is really an argument (or a piece of evidence) for the existence of God. As such, properly understood it speaks neither for nor against evolution, as its reasoning works equally well (or equally poorly) regardless of whether evolution or creationism is or is not true.
Whether the world as we know it, fossils & laws of physics included, suddenly appeared 6000 years ago, or whether it evolved from a big bang over billions of years, an ID proponent would say essentially the same thing: "That whole thing is pretty damn impressive and unlikely. Only God could have created all that stuff out of nothing or set up such elegant processes that over billions of years we ended up in this beautiful web of interconnected nature on Earth and in the Universe. However we got here, [only] the existence of a super-being basically fitting our conception of God can explain it."
Therefore, the problem with teaching it in biology classes isn't that it contradicts evolution, but that it makes absolutely no assertions one way or the other about evolution.
It's hard even to know what a biology teacher would say or teach about ID, because it's in such a different sphere that it just doesn't relate to trying to understand biology or evolution. I guess the one thing they could do is present ID, and say "If ID is correct and God does in fact exist, then new-world creationism is a possibility." But you could say exactly the same thing about any other "proof" of the existence of God.
ID can be (and is) taught in Philosophy courses in college as one of many attempted proofs of the existence of good. It is analyzed with the same methodology and the same respect as any other examples of philosophical approaches to God. I think that's quite appropriate.
Whether high schools should have more philosophy courses, and whether teaching any theology-related philosophy would be too volatile to even approach, are a different question.
Posted by: miab | May 11, 2005 07:37 PM | Permalink
Posted by: miab
In that last sentence ". . . one of many attempted proofs of the existence of good" should read " . . .one of many attempted proofs of the existence of God." An interesting slip.
Posted by: miab | May 11, 2005 07:40 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Jeff Younger
I'm neither expert in science nor expert in the evaluation of scientific theories, but (the inevitable 'but') several questions seem obvious. First, what distinguishes an explanation-schema from dogma? Second, do scientific theories give us "the way things are" or models of the way things are? Third, can intelligent design theories be formulated as scientific theories with empirical consequences?
If I had to venture answers to these three questions, I'd answer "none", "models", and "it seems yes" respectively.
Posted by: Jeff Younger | May 11, 2005 07:47 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Mark Olson
David, Posted by: Mark Olson | May 11, 2005 08:09 PM | Permalink
Jeremy Pierce made a similar point recently (here
Posted by: miab
J.Y. writes: ". . . can intelligent design theories be formulated as scientific theories with empirical consequences? . . .it seems yes"
Could you elaborate?
Posted by: miab | May 11, 2005 08:48 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Colin Danby
I'll let other people weigh in on whether ID counts as science, but it seems to me the key characteristic of a scientific theory is that it's in principle falsifiable and adopted on the basis of its explanatory power; a good theory also generates interesting research questions and builds a literature of results.
ID certainly counts as a doctrine about the world, but so does astrology and all manner of occult and new age systems of thought -- does every doctrine about the world need teaching in the schools? This is compounded in the case of Kansas by massive confusion between "teaching" in the sense of indoctrinating, and teaching in the sense of building skills and giving people capacity to use a system of thought. If you take a class in chemistry you are learning a specific way of thinking about a specific part of the world. It's up to students to make of these systems of thought what they will.
I'd rather, at each level of education, do a few things well (and where appropriate give students interesting choices) than try to do a bit of everything. When one talks about curriculum there's a tendency to fall into the attractive trap of thinking that the perfect curriculum will build the perfect student, like the socialist "new man." It won't. Add to that the problem of constituency politics and you end up with curricula that are mainly designed to make different people outside the classroom happy -- witness the weird exhortatory "standards" we now have, and the dumbed-down textbooks. People also tend to latch on to and politicize very small features of curriculum like they're going to make the difference betwen civilization and barbarism.
There's a larger quasi-Austrian point that it's just administratively very hard and complex to deliver education in this sort of inevitably-politicized setting, and private institutions may be better set to follow one particular vision rather than pleasing everyone. It's a pity, though, to see public ed reduced to this. And the really sad thing is that no matter how the Kansas monkey trial turns out, a lot of kids are going to be going into science class thinking it's atheist propaganda.
p.s. I liked Knoll's 2003 _Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth_ (Princeton) which is interesting both on genetic questions and on the interactions between geology and biology.
Posted by: Colin Danby | May 11, 2005 09:09 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Mona
Well, I entirely concur with Prof Velleman on this one, so I have little to add. The Creationists/IDers won't be satisfied with anything less than calling their fantasies "science" and seeing these taught in science classrooms.
The web sites Prof Velleman links to in his footnote 1 are very good and I've followed several of them for some time.
Posted by: Mona | May 11, 2005 09:44 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Doug
I think DV's proposal is headed in the right direction. In general, I think that high school science would be well served by including a unit of the philosophy of science. Every time a thread like this comes up on Left2Right, many people will mention concepts like "falsifiabilty" that are intrinsic to understanding what science is and does. I suspect that teaching these concepts directly would do quite a bit to innoculate students against their future encounters with junk science, be it ID or any other flavor.
Along those lines, D.A. Ridgeley's description of a Theory of Knowledge class sounds like a potentially excellent idea for a high school college prep curriculum. This type of "applied epistemology" is obviously helpful for academic success, but is also invaluable for anybody working in a knowledge-driven field.
Posted by: Doug | May 11, 2005 10:08 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Jim Hu
Not surprisingly, I agree pretty much with everything in this post - more Philosophy for all!
I'm wondering about something in the trackbacks, though, where prosthesis points to this article at an ID website as a cogent argument regarding whether ID can be excluded from the realm of science. My sense is that there's the usual sleight of hand going on in the reasoning leading to the following:
If philosophers of science such as Laudan are correct, a stalemate exists in our analysis of design and descent. Neither can automatically qualify as science; neither can be necessarily disqualified either. The a priori methodological merit of design and descent are indistinguishable if no agreed criteria exist by which to judge their merits.but I'd appreciate those with stronger backgrounds in the philosophy involved could opine about whether my instinct here is correct, or if I'm just being biased by the source.
My instinct is along the lines of "I can't define pseudoscience, but I know it when I see it"
Posted by: Jim Hu | May 11, 2005 10:11 PM | Permalink
Posted by: bakho
ID is religion, not philosophy or science. Most of the ID scenarios I have seen are easily debunked by philosophical arguments. Most ID arguments distill down to
X currently exists
X could not have evolved without Y
Y does not currently exist
Therefore, evolution is wrong and X was created by intelligent design.
Of course the argument misses the evolutionary scenario that
Y existed in the past and went extinct.
Therefore, X could have evolved.
"X was created by an intelligent designer" is still strictly an unproven tenet of faith.
ID does little to advance philosophy or science. ID is a "God of the Gaps belief".
Posted by: bakho | May 11, 2005 10:40 PM | Permalink
Posted by: bakho
Since ID is religion and not philosophy or science. Is it proper to subject ID to debunking? Is trashing someone's religion or subjection the religious faith of some students to scientific or philosophical scrutiny appropriate?
I think the answer is no. That is why religions such as ID cannot be discussed in public schools.
Posted by: bakho | May 11, 2005 10:45 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Jim Hu
Is trashing someone's religion or subjection the religious faith of some students to scientific or philosophical scrutiny appropriate?It seems to me that while the latter might result in the former, they are not equivalent, especially if the scrutiny is directed at alternative explanations of a subject at hand, and is not because some students hold a particular set of religious beliefs.
Are there religions that are unlike ID that can be discussed in the public schools, backho?
Posted by: Jim Hu | May 11, 2005 10:59 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Macht
Jim Hu,
It's important to note that in the passage you quoted, Meyer isn't really talking about design or descent per se. He could have just as easily been talking about astrology or dowsing or economics or mathematics. All he is saying there is that the demarcation problem hasn't been solved and perhaps it cannot be solved.
There are, of course, many aspects that we would wish scientific theories to have (it has explanatory power, it makes testable predictions, elegance, consistency with known facts and theories, falsifiability, beauty, intelligibility, etc.), but to say beforehand that theories must meet certain criteria to be scientific is philosophically and historically untenable.
Posted by: Macht | May 11, 2005 11:04 PM | Permalink
Posted by: David Velleman
backho writes:
Since ID is religion and not philosophy or science. Is it proper to subject ID to debunking? Is trashing someone's religion or subjection the religious faith of some students to scientific or philosophical scrutiny appropriate?I think the answer is no. That is why religions such as ID cannot be discussed in public schools.
That's what I'm questioning. The proponents of ID say that they don't want it to be taught as the truth; they only want it to be given a hearing. And I'm imagining a forum in which it could legitimately be heard.
I don't see why religious beliefs would have to be "trashed" in such a forum. Arguments for and against them would be raised. But philosophers are accustomed to presenting arguments for and against various views without treating them disrespectfully.
Now, if people don't want their religious beliefs subjected to that sort of critical scrutiny, then they shouldn't lobby to have those beliefs included in the curriculum. But I am sincerely entertaining the possibility that some people, at least, would be happier if religion were discussed in the schools, even if it were discussed critically, without being taught as the truth. Their complaint is that turning schools into religion-free zones actually has the effect of of presenting students with an implicitly anti-religious worldview. So let's talk about religion: I really have no objection, so long as religion is not being taught as truth -- or as science.
Posted by: David Velleman | May 11, 2005 11:06 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Bret
Mona wrote: "The Creationists/IDers won't be satisfied with anything less than calling their fantasies "science" and seeing these taught in science classrooms."
I think they would be satisfied with not teaching Evolution. I think that's preferrable to introducing ID in any form. Evolution isn't critical to understanding science. ID and the introduction of superempirical elements is just too confusing, in my opinion.
But a closely related issue, that no one here has commented on yet, is how much input should parents be allowed to have into what is taught to their children? Keep in mind that some of the IDers think that Darwinism is a great evil. Should parents be forced to allow their children to be taught a great evil?
Posted by: Bret | May 11, 2005 11:11 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Mona
Controversy rages as to what science is. But my understanding is that virtually all agree it operates from empiricism. That empiricism has yielded good, life-enhancing and life-prolonging results and so a lot of intellectual cachet, which is why Creationists/IDers insist their notions should be included under the rubric of science. They seek the respectability science has earned even as they diss the "materialistic" premise.
If they believe -- and there may be some truth to the claim -- that empiricism is an insufficient epistemology for reaching Truth, then they should make that argument. But they should not be allowed to let their non-empirical notions be accepted as science.
Posted by: Mona | May 11, 2005 11:23 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Mona
Bret asks: But a closely related issue, that no one here has commented on yet, is how much input should parents be allowed to have into what is taught to their children? Keep in mind that some of the IDers think that Darwinism is a great evil. Should parents be forced to allow their children to be taught a great evil?
My view, shared by many but not all libertarians, is to adopt school vouchers. Let the fundamentalists send their kids to schools where Creationism is taught and evolution dismissed as Satanism. But in state schools religion should not be taught as science.
Posted by: Mona | May 11, 2005 11:30 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Jeremy Pierce
David, you are one of the few non-supporters of ID who will actually admit to what ID supporters want and not pretend it's something else entirely. Most of them would be pretty happy if biology teachers presented the ID arguments and then presented arguments against them.
My post wasn't accurately portrayed, so I want to supplement Mark's description of it. I do think ID arguments are philosophy. Those who claim they are science are strictly speaking not telling the truth, but I think they can be excused, because all sorts of philosophical arguments show up in scientific reasoning. Any view in theoretical physics involves some metaphysical assumptions. Evolutionary theory usually involves philosophical reasoning. So I don't have trouble calling ID science if science includes those things.
On the other hand, those who say ID is pure religion should not be excused. The latest person to disprove that claim is the now-deistic Antony Flew, who accepts the ID arguments but is about as unreligious as you can get. He absolutely detests most religions. He isn't the first, however. Michael Denton is an atheist, and he's critiqued evolutionary theory with arguments that would fall under ID. He's agnostic on the actual mechanism, but he thinks the ID people are onto something. He's just not sure what. He doesn't think it's God.
You don't need to turn to non-religious people to show this, though. All you need to do is look at what ID proponents are saying. The ID arguments are not religious. They're simply teleological arguments, which have always fallen under the category of philosophy. The conclusion is not that the God of the Bible is real and that the Bible is true. It's not that Christianity is right. It's not that the designer didn't work through evolution. It's not even that the designer is good. It's that design has occurred at some point and somehow. In the physics ID arguments, the designer has to be responsible for the creation of the universe (or at least for the cosmological constants' having the values they have). In the biological ones that ID opponents like to pretend are the only ID arguments, the conclusion is simply that if evolution occurred it was helped out by some designed process. That's consistent with evolution not having occurred, and it's consistent with some designed process speeding it along. It's consistent with miracles that violate the laws of nature, and it's consistent with a deterministic process that the designer set into motion that in microscopic view might look like random chance. The conclusion is thus far from any religious view. It's some set of conditionals or disjunctions, however you might express them, and the options involve ones consistent with the most popular religions but also some that are consistent with the falsity of all religions. One possible conclusion is even the view that aliens helped our evolution along, though hardly anyone who seriously knows these issues opts for that as their favored view.
The only arguments I've ever seen that claim that this is not philosophy are not really arguments that ID isn't philosophy. They're arguments that it's bad philosophy in the same way that a materialist will argue that dualism is bad philosophy. That doesn't mean it's not philosophy anymore than the failure of Descartes' arguments could mean that he wasn't doing philosophy. It also wouldn't mean it's not science under the extended account of what counts as science that includes the kind of philosophical reasoning involved in evolutionary theory. At best it would mean it's bad science, as racial essentialist biology was a hundred years ago. Bad science isn't not science, in the way biblical interpretation is not science, and bad philosophy isn't not philosophy in the way that sociology is not philosophy.
Posted by: Jeremy Pierce | May 11, 2005 11:36 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Bret
Mona responds: "But in state schools religion should not be taught as science.
A school funded by state vouchers is a type of state school. No? Nonetheless, I agree with the concept of vouchers, though with some curriculum limits. For example, what if a group of parents decided that arithmetic was a great evil? The children would be significantly harmed if they didn't learn to add, so I think the state would need to intervene, even in a voucher system. For me Evolution is right at the border of where the state might consider intervening if any schools choose not to include it in the curriculum. But perhaps that's because I use genetic algorithms, which are based on Darwinian processes, in my work.
But my question was more whether or not some science (i.e. Evolution) can be excluded from state schools, not whether religion could be taught in schools (the answer is no, IMO).
Posted by: Bret | May 11, 2005 11:46 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Jeremy Pierce
On the issue of teaching philosophical analysis of religious views, I think the response varies depending on who is teaching it. My students have always told me that they consider me balanced on the issue. That's because I've been trained in a department that's biased toward naturalistic views, as almost all philosophy departments are, but I know religion from within, so I can be fair to the reasoning for both. Every Christian I know in philosophy can say that. People who aren't in that position are liable to be unfair to one side, and I can testify that some of my philosophical colleagues don't do justice to the arguments for and against the existence of God because they simply haven't bothered to absorb the philosophy of religion literatre and simply teach Mackie on the problem of evil as if what he says is the final word rather than the beginning of a whole literature that basically made him look philosophically ignorant the way Gettier and the subsequent literature makes Plato's account of knowledge as true, justified belief look philosophically ignorant.
Posted by: Jeremy Pierce | May 11, 2005 11:49 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Jim Hu
Macht,
Thanks... I also found this critique of Meyer on the website of a science and Christianity organization...the author is from the philosophy dept. of the very fundamentalist (I'm told) Wheaton College (the Illinois one, not the Massachusetts one), so it is all the more interesting to me that he writes:
...the argument for full and fair consideration of all competitors is absolutely crucial; it does, however, cut both ways. To render this judgment, a scientist must explore all available natural accounts in order to gain a fair reading of the prospect for the success of each. Different natural hypotheses will carry different probability assignments, and so will compare more or less favorably with appeal to agency, based on its "theological plausibility" for the given case.55 Even for the inclusivist, then, at some juncture a comparison must be made between the best available natural account, and appeal to divine agency as the nonmediated cause of the phenomena. That is, in order for this analysis to reveal the best overall theory, the comparison must be between the best account restricted, noninclusive "science" has to offer and the best direct interventionist "theological" account.56emph in original.Yet, for this comparison to carry maximal epistemic authority, we must have full confidence that natural science has in fact proffered the strongest natural account. Traditionally, this confidence has been born along on the steadfast devotion of the scientific community to relentlessly seek and evaluate natural, and only natural, explanations. The tenacity attached to this methodological constraint has ensured that any plausible natural account will have been given due consideration. It has also, in fact, served to uncover the nature of reality - the sanction of inclusivity stems, then, from the belief that science has established a notable track-record for providing insight into reality precisely when constrained by MN. Science has enabled us to make progress in our understanding and comprehension of the nature of reality, and MN must be considered a central part of that story.
I'm not exactly sure what MN stands for (I don't think he means Minnesota). Materialistic Naturalism?
Posted by: Jim Hu | May 11, 2005 11:54 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Jeremy Pierce
Bob Jones University is fundamentalist. Wheaton College is most certainly not fundamentalist and not even close to very fundamentalist. It's solidly evangelical, and it's probably the most mainstream evangelical institution of higher education. It's certainly the most respected academically.
I'm told that a fair number of biology professors at Wheaton will teach standard evolutionary theory as it's taught at most colleges, so this is completely unsurprising.
Posted by: Jeremy Pierce | May 12, 2005 12:18 AM | Permalink
Posted by: Jim Hu
Jeremy,
Mea culpa. As a nonchristian I forget which term to use sometimes, but I do know that there's a distinction.
Posted by: Jim Hu | May 12, 2005 12:42 AM | Permalink
Posted by: Justin
Mona, I thought the traditional liberterian response to education was not vouchers but NOTHING, and that if people want an education, they can pay for it. I'm pretty sure (old) Nozick would reject the idea that you would have to pay for someone else to be able to get a fundamentalist education, even if that education is not directly designed by the government.
Posted by: Justin | May 12, 2005 12:51 AM | Permalink
Posted by: Doug
Jeremy Pierce said: "Evolutionary theory usually involves philosophical reasoning."
Care to elaborate? All the presentations of modern evolutionary theory that I've read (e.g. Dawkin's Blind Watchmaker) are argued from evidence and experiment, i.e. not much different from the reasoning behind any other broadly-supported scientific explanation. Evolutionary theory certainly shares premises common to all the sciences - empiricism, naturalism, etc. - but I certainly don't remember any extended philosophical argument from my science education.
So what did I miss?
Posted by: Doug | May 12, 2005 12:55 AM | Permalink
Posted by: Jim Hu
p.s. For what it's worth, a couple of years ago I convinced a colleague that she should accept a seminar invitation to Wheaton. Being a liberal secularist biologist, she was unnerved by this on the Wheaton Biology Dept. website
The goals of the Wheaton College Biology Department are to introduce students to the concepts and role of biology as an integrative science, to help them discover and interpret the characteristics of nature as part of God’s creation, and to aid students in the development of both Christian and biological perspectives for their careers and practices as stewards of God’s creation.She went and had a perfectly fine visit, and her reports were consistent with what Jeremy hears about the fact that the standard evolutionary synthesis is taught at Wheaton. As I recall, she did report that the Wheaton faculty have thought a lot about how to teach this subject within the larger religious context of the school, and to a student/parent population that is more sympathetic to anti-Darwinist ideas than even what we see here in Texas...perhaps when if I had thought more about it before posting, I would have concluded that it's not only unsurprising...it makes sense that Wheaton faculty would be thinking more about the questions than those of us who only preach to the choir.
Posted by: Jim Hu | May 12, 2005 12:56 AM | Permalink
Posted by: Macht
Jim,
MN stands for methodological naturalism. MN is basically the hypothesis that science should only use naturalistic explanations. The website that you got that article from is the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA) and it has a lot of interesting reading on the relationship between science and Christianity.
You are also correct that many evangelical institutions (e.g., Wheaton, Calvin, etc.) are thinking about these issues a lot.
Posted by: Macht | May 12, 2005 01:31 AM | Permalink
Posted by: vk
Pedro,
I agree that godel's work is irrelevant with respect to the scientific process, however, the situation being talked about is not the current one but a limiting situation where some kind of a scientific theory has reached a certain level of consistency and completeness. In such a situation one can talk of godel type theorems because one is talking about a complete and consistent mathematical model. In any case, I accept that my understanding of this may be flawed, but even with the scientific method and with physical reality, there are certain boundaries beyond which one cannot make *any* provable statements (i.e experimentally or otherwise). This is the fundamental paradigm shift that underlies the difference between classical and quantum descriptions of nature. For the last 70+ years that quantum mechanics has existed, many mathematical theories have been proposed that are completely microscopic, but cannot be proven or disproven through experimental measurement. In this situation it is really inconsequential what hypothesis about this is proposed (either Intelligent agents, or thousand headed snakes, or hidden variable theories). This is a counterpoint to Mr Velleman's post. The inability of the scientific method or physical observation need not uniquely imply intelligent agents.
Posted by: vk | May 12, 2005 03:48 AM | Permalink
Posted by: vk
Incidentally, the religious arguments for ID can be used against them. The hindus (and buddhists) believe in the cyclic nature of existence, and if ID is allowed, I don't see how a demand to teach these other "theories" cannot be accomodated.
Posted by: vk | May 12, 2005 03:52 AM | Permalink
Posted by: Shag from Brookline
To what extent is philosophy currently taught in secondary schools? Some of us (I'm 74) were first exposed to the subject in college, in particular Logic as part of a then pre-legal course of study. Biology was not offered back at my high school (Boston English, Class of '47) but we did have physics and chemistry, although rudimentary. I wonder what an introduction to philosophy in high school might look like. Might it result in confusion to a young student? Might it be taught like U.S. History in high schools that focuses only on the good things that have happened, neglecting the dark side? Might not the ID concept be applied across the board to all courses in secondary schools, not just philosophy? If a philosophy course were an elective, how many high schoolers would take it? Should a high school course on religion include scientific views on the subject? But what the heck, the idea might serve to provide full employment for philosophers. Hemlock, anyone?
Posted by: Shag from Brookline | May 12, 2005 07:22 AM | Permalink
Posted by: Jeremy Pierce
As you acknowledge, empiricism and naturalism are philosophical theses, and the motivation for evolution originally came from the desire to have a naturalistic theory of the origins of the human species. That was a philosophical motivation. Empiricism is an epistemological thesis (a controversial one that many philosophers recognize as self-undermining, I might add, because you can't observe that empiricism is true with your senses, but it claims that you shouldn't accept something without knowledge through your senses). The justification for pushing off explanations that don't involve entities we can observe with our senses or entities whose causal effects we can observe with out senses is thus based on a philosophical argument. Therefore the reason people are so opposed to ID is not a scientific one except in the extended sense that philosophical arguments like ID can be part of scientific reasoning. The very argument against ID is self-undermining.
One philosophical issue in any field of science is what counts as a good explanation. That's especially important in evolutionary theory, because you're trying to observe something you can't see and can't reproduce. It's not proposing a hypothesis of some general principle and then testing to see whether it's true. That's science. It's science that relies on philosophy, though, because our discovery that such methods are good methods is essentially an epistemological question. Hume's challenge to scientific laws (or at least our knowledge of them) must be overcome if we can have scientific knowledge at all. So the elements of evolutionary theory that the biological ID people like the Discovery Institute will accept are science but in ways that require philosophical argument, just as is the case for any scientific reasoning.
Now when you come to the parts they question, you're certainly getting into less secure science. You're trying to propose a theory that explains what happened millions of years ago. You're not simply proposing something that we can now test. You can do that, but all you get is what all the Discovery Institute admit to, things like development within a species over time through natural selection and random chance. You don't get what some of them deny or aren't sure of, things like common ancestry of humans and all other species. That's a historical thesis, not an immediately empirically testable one, and thus it involves more philosophical argumentation than other scientific theses. It's thus more like the Big Bang. Stephen Hawking's books basically deal with more sophisticated versions of classic philosophical arguments like the cosmological argument and the cosmological constant teleological argument (what I've been calling the physics ID argument). That's philosophy just as much as it's philosophy to interpret the equations of quantum behavior in terms of wave form collapses and the metaphysical status of the existence of cats. You can argue that it's still science, as this philosophically informed discussion does, but that's an argument that requires certain philosophical moves, and so it's not the kind of science that disallows things like ID arguments as being science on the ground that they're philosophical arguments, because philosophical arguments are part of science in the evolutionary argument.
Another key philosophical question that comes up in evolutionary theory is speciation, which assumes a theory of what it is to be a species. That's a question in the philosophy of biology. See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on it for more. Also, since the origin of life is at issue, what counts as life is relevant, and that's a metaphysical question as well, one hotly debate in philosophy of biology. See the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on that. Teleological notions also play a role in evolution, both historically with vitalism and its rejection and more recently with the shorthand kind of talk that treats evolution as having a goal. Both issues have to do with teleology and at least partly come under philosophy. Again, see the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on that for more. Michael Ruse claims that there are further philosophical theses in evolutionary theory that have actually caused the ID debate to surge.
Posted by: Jeremy Pierce | May 12, 2005 07:41 AM | Permalink
Posted by: D.A. Ridgely
Bret writes: A school funded by state vouchers is a type of state school. No?
No. No more so, in any case, than a can of tuna bought with food stamps is a state fish.
Posted by: D.A. Ridgely | May 12, 2005 07:56 AM | Permalink
Posted by: Mona
Justin: I have no idea what Nozick thinks about vouchers, but I am familiar with Milton Friedman's views and those of other libertarians:
Friedman is opposed to public money in schools, but led the voucher charge. "I see the voucher as a step in moving away from a government system to a private system." Vouchers are a good answer, however partial, to government involvement because they are attainable. The best answers are the ones you never achieve because they put Uncle Sam out to pasture.
Whole thing in Reason here.
And then there is a Cato Institute Policy Analysis paper Vouchers and Educational Freedom: A Debate. Libertarians are not in as universal agreement on the vouchers issue as they are on, say, the evils of drug prohibition. But it is also true that they have been in the vanguard of the push for vouchers. The state has funded education since before the founding of the U.S., and those with a pragmatic streak are not going to militate for this long-accepted assumption of state responsibility to cease. We are pushing for the good and achievable over the perfect.
Among the benefits of vouchers that I see is exactly the diminution of raging debates such as that going on in Kansas, or those that go on about sex ed. The U.S. population is ideologically and religiously diverse, and education regularly brings students into areas hotly disputed among their parents. Let the parents pick the schools they want rather than forcing all into the same mold, and the rancor should tone down.
D.A Ridgely writes: No. No more so, in any case, than a can of tuna bought with food stamps is a state fish.
Or, no more so than Notre Dame becomes a state school when a student uses a Pell Grant there.
Posted by: Mona | May 12, 2005 10:41 AM | Permalink
Posted by: Dooble
Jeremy Pierce: 'That's a historical thesis, not an immediately empirically testable one, and thus it involves more philosophical argumentation than other scientific theses.'
I'm not sure what the point is supposed to be, but it *sounds* like you're suggesting that there is a sense in which historical theses are less empirically secure and more speculative or in some sense philosophical than nonhistorical ones. And that seems to me obviously wrong. Many historical theses are overwhelmingly well confirmed, such that anyone who understands them and understands the evidence would be unreasonable to seriously doubt them (the widely accepted theory that the Sun existed last night, for instance). And many widely accepted theories about non-historical fact (aspects of relativity theory, say) are, despite being subject to empirical "tests" of their current truth, far less secure than that (because empirical "tests" do not really ever stamp check-marks in "proven" and "disproven" boxes on a list of theories).
Posted by: Dooble | May 12, 2005 11:02 AM | Permalink
Posted by: Jim Hu
Jeremy, nice collection of links!
With respect to Ruse, based on the article you linked (I don't know anything more about him - I had never heard of him before), I think there are aspects of his critique of evolutionism that are fair, but overall I think his analysis (as presented) is misguided.
I do agree that many evolutionists are counterproductive and ineffective in their argumentation. IMHO, this is primarily because of how they characterize those who disagree with them, not how they present their own worldview. Opponents of evolution may use Dawkins flamboyant antireligiousness, combined with his annoying injection of liberal political orthodoxy into discussions of biology, to confirm their view of the kind of people evolutionists are, but I believe that the influence of these foibles of evolutionists is miniscule as causation for the periodic attempts to purge or water down the teaching of Darwin. I think Ruse's claim overestimates the influence of the secondary traits of the defenders of Darwin. Darwin's theory, and its modern variants, provide a plausible, if incomplete, mechanism for evolution by common descent, which is fundamentally incompatible with special creation of humans. At the end of the day, common descent contradicts literal readings of Genesis, and Wilberforce would have objected to Darwin even without Huxley.
Note that, unlike some of my colleagues, I am not saying that the epistemological questions related to design vs. descent require literalist Creationism on the ID side. But I don't think the heat in the conflict has really been about epistemology and the interesting philosophical questions being discussed here. Those are, after all, applicable to all of human knowledge, and the demarcation between historical and nonhistorical science is itself not as sharp as some physicists would like to think...as you raise in your pointing to cosmology.
I think most scientists - or at least the ones who spent their college days in late night bull sessions with philosophy majors in their dorms - would, at some level, say. "Descartes, Hume, yes, yadda, yadda...but given all the caveats about epistemology it is reasonable to operate as if we can make statements about the world are true, or reasonable approximations of the truth". To the extent that ID wants to be called science, the ID advocates would agree with that methodological approximation. If I understand it correctly, this is the central to O'Conner's critique of Meyer, which I linked to above.
Behe and Dembski seem to be arguing (disclaimer - this is based almost entirely on secondary sources that I believe to be accurate), as David V. implies in his original post, that within the framework of conventional science, however defined and with its baggage of epistemological caveats, unexplainable phenomena that require recourse to intelligent agency have been identified. I don't think they've even come close, and while ID claims to make predictions (or retrodictions), they tend to be either based on nonsequiturs, or are specialized subsets of the larger universe of design hypotheses that just happen to be identical to what conventional evolution predicts. At the technical level they are so bad that biologists tend to be scornful of them in a way that is politically unwise but scientifically justified. And being arrogant jerks, we are often unjustifiably rude about it too.
On the other hand, I strongly disagree with Ruse's critics who claim that just because some Creationist might distort what is said, discussion should be self-censored. This just adds to the sense that the opposition to ID is only based on hidden leftist, antireligious agendas.
Posted by: Jim Hu | May 12, 2005 11:22 AM | Permalink
Posted by: DBL
For what it's worth (and I'm a very conservative Republican), I agree completely with David on this. ID may or may not be true in some absolute or metaphysical sense, but it is not falsifiable, hence it's not science. It belongs in a class on philosophy where unprovable questions (does God exist? what is moral? why do good people die?) are debated, not in a science classroom.
Posted by: DBL | May 12, 2005 11:24 AM | Permalink
Posted by: JeffS
Great idea. Some ID proponents, though, are less worried about being heard – that happens in Sunday School, anyway – than about whether scientism or various other naturalistic, meta-scientific worldviews are being indoctrinated along with empirical science.
Such theories (naturalism, materialism, non-Creationism, etc.), usually reductionist in one way or another, are every bit as non-scientific as ID – in the sense that they don’t stick to casually accounting for observations and predicting future ones. But there’s a justified fear that these are inculcated as the more “scientific” way of thinking (“evolution – and only evolution – explains why we’re here”). Maybe they, too, should be banished from science class.
Posted by: JeffS | May 12, 2005 11:30 AM | Permalink
Posted by: Jim Hu
JeffS,
I don't think I understand your last post. Are you objecting to naturalism, materialism, and reductionism as applied to science itself, or only to the notion that these tools, which are powerful for the advancement of science, should be the only things one uses for everything else in life? If the latter, I agree - science doesn't help that much for ethics, IMHO.
But what do you mean in the objection to “evolution – and only evolution – explains why we’re here”? I might not word it that way*, but the objection implies that you think an alternative should also be discussed in science classes. If so, what?
*I think "and only evolution" is superfluous. If I was teaching intro bio, I would separate the descent issue from the mechanism issue, but mostly to describe what phenomena the mechanism is trying to explain.
Posted by: Jim Hu | May 12, 2005 11:43 AM | Permalink
Posted by: JeffS
Jim Hu,
I’m afraid the comment was, after all, “objecting to naturalism, materialism, reductionism as applied to science itself.” These terms denote a more general worldview – a dogma -- that might be called “Scientism”: the belief that successful scientific explanations of observed phenomena are all there is to know (about natural reality). Or, more modestly, that absent a good reason, we should accept ONLY what the successful hypothesis of scientists tell us about anything. An example: the dogma that not only is , eg., physics the best explanation of physical reality, but the best explanation of ALL reality; or the Faith that there definitely, positively, was no Creator or Designer who set the physical world, including evolution and the laws of science, on its natural course. Or that we don't survive our deaths.
These beliefs, and other reductionistic meta-scientific dogmas, are not necessary for properly teaching biology, even evolution. But ID types worry they are being taught alongside it; that evolution = non-creationism (which it doesn't). It is this worry that ought to be addressed, if possible.
Posted by: JeffS | May 12, 2005 12:07 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Jeremy Pierce
Dooble, I don't think you understand what I'm saying. All I'm saying is that conclusions that we normally consider good science are derived from good science are arrived at via philosophical arguments. The same is true of what we consider bad science. The question isn't whether it's science but whether it's good or bad science. Therefore, why isn't the same true of ID?
In the process of saying that, I gave Hume's distinction between something that's empirically obvious because it's right before your eyes and something that's derived from an argument that's less secure given his philosophical framework of empiricism (because he can't rule out that the world didn't just begin a minute ago with all the signs, including fake memories, that it has been around much longer) and so on. If empiricism is taken to its radical result, the only thing we can know is that something appears to be the case right now. Most of us don't believe that, and we think historical arguments are good ways to know things, including in science. Why? Because of a philosophical premise that the kind of skepticism Hume raises is illegitimate. We can know things through science without being such hardcore empiricists. This takes philosophical reasoning beyond just trusting your senses, though. That's why a hardcore empiricism doesn't allow most of science. Once you do that, though, it allows philosophical arguments to be part of scientific reasoning. When we argue that evolutionary theory is a good explanation for the things we immediately observe, we're doing philosophy in the guise of science. So why is ID not the same thing?
Posted by: Jeremy Pierce | May 12, 2005 12:33 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Mona
Just FYI, Michael Ruse was an expert witness in the case McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education and Ruse's position on what science is and is not clearly influenced the Court's decision to strike as unconstitutional a law mandating the "equal time" presentation of Creationism in public school biology classes.
The brief bio entry for Ruse at Talkorigins says this: Ruse's philosophical viewpoint is clearly reflected in Judge Overton's decision. Ruse came under fire from fellow philosophers Larry Laudan and Philip Quinn for his testimony in the Arkansas trial; he has subsequently backed away from the stance he took. (See "But Is It Science?" and Ruse's talk at the 1993 (?) AAAS session sponsored by the NCSE.) (No links.)
Posted by: Mona | May 12, 2005 12:39 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Jeremy Pierce
Jim, I don't think it's technically accurate to say that a literal reading of Genesis 1:1-2:3 requires denying evolution. I think that's a misuse of the word 'literal'. It's not as if those who believe evolution can be part of what that passage speaks of are taking the words in the account as metaphorical. What they're doing is taking tha entire account as speaking to something other than a chronological telling of what happened in historical order. Within the account, the terms are being used literally. There is a progression of days within the seven-day framework. See here for a more in-depth defense of this.
I linked to Ruse not because I agree with him but because his claim fits in the same category as what I'm saying. Evolutionary theory involves philosophical reasoning. He takes that too far, but the claim is true, and he supports it for wrong and well as right reasons.
I think you've indicated the key to my thesis. Within science, these unexplainable phenomena occur. The argument for a designer kicks in. It's a philosophical argument, but it occurs within science, and this sort of inductive argument is not the sort of thing that doesn't happen in science. It's just that most scientists don't accept it as good science in this case.
I think JeffS is basically getting at a common claim among ID people, especially in Philip Johnson. As science is commonly taught in high school, the assumption of naturalism as a philosophical thesis is taught as well, either through the assumptions of the teacher or through explicit statements. That's philosophy. What I don't understand is why teaching ID (even if just to criticize it) would be any different from that, which does go on (though I do wonder if the people who complain about it are qualified to distinguish between real teaching of scientism or naturalism as a philosophical thesis and simple statements that science avoids appealing to supernatural hypotheses).
Posted by: Jeremy Pierce | May 12, 2005 12:43 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Jim Hu
I don't have a problem with objections to teaching scientism as you describe as science, but I wouldn't call limiting discussion within the science curriculum to materialism, reductionism and so on. Am I missing something or are we just agreeing that science doesn't explain everything, or eliminate nonscientific possibilities? In other words, not all knowledge is scientific knowledge in the current usage of science as what should be taught in science class. Fine, but I think that's a straw man. I doubt that many science teachers do that, or even want to do that.
But while I would object with you to teaching, for example, that a scientific worldview demands atheism, I can't imagine teaching biology without stepping on some ID toes without removing the substance of teaching evolution. For example, while it is epistemologically true that I can't prove that a designer didn't guide the occurance of mutations, or anything else, I don't think I should have to kowtow to that caveat every time I talk about DNA sequence analysis and protein evolution any more than the American history teacher should have to say that all the historical records could have been created a millisecond ago.
Posted by: Jim Hu | May 12, 2005 12:45 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Jeremy Pierce
Philip Quinn? That's interesting. As far as I know, he only ever wrote in ethics, epistemology, and ethics-related and epistemology-related philosophy of religion, including some history of philosophy, especially medieval. I didn't know he did philosophy of science. This is also interesting because he was a theist who identified with the Christian tradition. You don't happen to know what their criticism was, do you?
Posted by: Jeremy Pierce | May 12, 2005 12:47 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Bret
Jeremy Pierce wrote: "Within science, these unexplainable phenomena occur. The argument for a designer kicks in."
Is that "unexplainable" or "not yet explained"? The former is "argument for a designer", the latter is not. Which phenomena in the realm of Evolution are "unexplainable"?
Posted by: Bret | May 12, 2005 12:56 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Mona
Jeremy Pierce: According to a review of Ruse's book "But is it Science?"
Ruse includes this chapter: Creationism, methodology and politics and The philosopher of science as expert witness both by Philip L. Quinn.
This is an interesting Boston Globe piece on how Ruse is getting criticized more recently by fellow opponents of Creationism and ID.
This piece Naturalism and (Non-)Teleological Science: A Way to Resolve the Demarcation Problem Between Science and Religion by Keith Abney addresses Quinn's criticisms of Ruse. A quote:
Laudan submits that such a statement is sufficient to render Creationism tentative or revisable, testable, and falsifiable -- and in fact is exceedingly likely never to be falsified. In a further criticism of these three criteria as demarcating science from non-science, P. Quinn notes that tentativeness is a psychological rather than epistemic condition on a state of belief - the ferocity (or lack thereof) with which a proposition is maintained is usually assumed to have nothing whatsoever to do with its truth-status (1984, 378). Hence, only falsifiability and testability are potentially legitimate criteria - and YEC can meet them. So, Laudan and Quinn both find that the first two criteria are too strong to count as essential to science -- if in fact they are necessary conditions for science, then many (if not all) of the historically exemplary cases of science would in fact fail to count as scientific.
Posted by: Mona | May 12, 2005 01:10 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Jeremy Pierce
I was just using Jim's term. The term itself is ambiguous, because the suffix '-able' involves possibility, and there are different kinds of possibility, generally due to being possible or impossible with respect to certain contextual consdierations. If it's impossible for us in our current state to explain them, then they're unexplainable in the weaker sense that I was assuming Jim meant. That doesn't mean they're in principle unexplainable, and ID people don't want that conclusion anyway, because they want to offer an explanation.
Posted by: Jeremy Pierce | May 12, 2005 01:30 PM | Permalink
Posted by: pedro
vk- thanks for your thoughtful response. I don't think I have any serious disagreement with you. If anything, I'm just being either a bit pedantic or a bit obtuse. Given a language L, the set of L-statements which are true of any particular L-structure (say the known physical universe) is indeed a consistent and complete theory. It may not be recursively axiomatizable, but it is both consistent and complete. The key concept involved in Godel's incompleteness theorem is recursive axiomatizability. And just what its analogue is in the situation of QM is what isn't clear to me at all.
Posted by: pedro | May 12, 2005 02:15 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Doug
Jeremy, thanks for the lengthy reply. We can agree that people often raise philosophical questions when they talk about evolution, but I'll assert that these aren't much part of modern biology and aren't a major issue for working biologists. To respond to a couple of your comments.
You're trying to propose a theory that explains what happened millions of years ago. You're not simply proposing something that we can now test. You can do that, but all you get is what all the Discovery Institute admit to, things like development within a species over time through natural selection and random chance. You don't get what some of them deny or aren't sure of, things like common ancestry of humans and all other species.
I think most biologists believe that the proposed mechanisms of evolution have been confirmed by present-day observation and experiment. That is, natural selection, speciation, the origin of new genes/proteins,etc. have all been observed both the laboratory and in the wild, so biologists are confident in the basic mechanisms involved.
In terms of getting the history right (that is, a correct narrative of which species descended from what other species in what time periods), we're certainly limited by the evidence available to us. But there is an abundance of solid evidence from geology, paleontology, genetics, radiology, astronomy, etc, supporting the current narrative. If future evidence forces some changes to the historical narrative, I don't think any biologist would regard that as deadly to the theory of evolution (this happened several times in the 20th century, as genetics gave a clearer picture of the actual similarities between different species). And by the same token, any competing explanation for, say, the relative ancestry of humans and chimps would have to clear a massive hurdle in explaining existing data.
That's philosophy just as much as it's philosophy to interpret the equations of quantum behavior in terms of wave form collapses and the metaphysical status of the existence of cats.
Your comparison to Quantum Mechanics is illustrative. There's a whole industry devoted to producing books examining the supposed philosophical unity between QM and various spiritual traditions (Fritjoff Capra, I'm looking at you here!). And even among physicists, there are a variety of explanations for the "reality" that QM describes - the Copenhagen interpretation, the many-worlds interpretation, and so forth. The thing is, most physicists would tell you these are superfluous to the actual physics. When you're doing QM, the important thing is that the math works out, the theory is rich enough to support the investigation of many interesting problems, the predictions it makes are confirmed by experiment, real-world devices can be build to exploit quantum phenomena, etc. While speculations about the underlying reality behind QM are interesting, settling those questions isn't very high on the list of most physicists' agendas and they aren't usually taught as part of the coursework on the subject.
Therefore the reason people are so opposed to ID is not a scientific one except in the extended sense that philosophical arguments like ID can be part of scientific reasoning. The very argument against ID is self-undermining.
I won't deny that some people are very opposed to ID for non-scientific reasons, but many scientists are opposed to it simply as bad science. DV's link to Gishlick, et. al. gives a good feel for the critique. ID is weak science because it ignores rather than explains the existing body of observation and experiment, its claims (such as irreducible complexity) are not well supported by actual research, and it offers little in the way testable predictions or explanations for heretofore-unexplained phenomena.
So to make some attempt to bring this back on topic, while there are interesting philosophical questions around evolutionary biology, they aren't really part of the science proper and aren't typically taught in a science classroom. Nevertheless, they are interesting questions, and might make a good subject for a philosophy classroom as DV originally suggests. And I don't really have a problem with ID being covered in that same philosophy class - there's actually a lot of interesting stuff in the differences and similarities between the knowledge claims of ID vs. those of modern biology.
Posted by: Doug | May 12, 2005 02:24 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Tad Brennan
from a local Kansas City newspaper :
A couple of weeks ago, [the columnist] watched in dismay as intelligent design backers put on a pitiful display at a state board public hearing at a high school in Kansas City, Kansas.
The speakers took to a microphone, urging a board subcommittee to insert intelligent-design wording into the state's public-school curriculum. But did anyone cite the Bible? Did anyone stick up for God's version of what happened thousands of years ago?
Oh, no. ID wussies stepped up one after another to talk about the "weaknesses" in biological evolution, the "controversies" that they wanted their children to hear about.
The complete surrender of religion to the onslaught of science was a pathetic sight.
The utter defeat was not lost on Celtie Johnson, a God-fearing Johnson County mom who was largely responsible for the last battle over evolution in Kansas schools. Back in 1999, she led an honest fight for biblical truth, attempting to get the Genesis creation story taught to schoolchildren. She's back again, fighting evolution once more, but this time she's standing up for the watered-down ID agenda.
We asked how she really felt about intelligent design's unbiblical assault on the schools.
"It's pitiful. But what can I do?" she told this curious cutlet. "It's not that difficult to understand the Earth being 6,000 years old. But they [the ID crowd] tell me it's an incremental program."
An incremental program. Johnson was referring to people such as lawyer John Calvert and University of Missouri-Kansas City med-school professor William Harris, who have spearheaded the Kansas school effort with a Johnson County organization they call the Intelligent Design Network. Johnson claimed that the ID bigwigs assured her they have the same ultimate goal that she does -- to get religion into science classes -- and that ID allows them to take small, less controversial steps toward that goal.
(via Brian Leiter)
Posted by: Tad Brennan | May 12, 2005 04:12 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Robert Johnson
I think a philosophy course for High School has some attractive features. But most philosophers I know would probably not put the ID view anywhere near the top of the list of issues to address in suc a course. Perhaps a little on informal logic, a little ethics, perhaps a little bit of skepticism, and, yes, maybe the cosmological argument, a little history. Once you sprinkle these standard, central bits of philosophy in, there'd simply be no room for ID. It's just not a very good or original bit of philosophy, and surely not anywhere near to the center of the discipline.
Posted by: Robert Johnson | May 12, 2005 04:19 PM | Permalink
Posted by: D.A. Ridgely
Of course, such a course would not be taught by philosophers any more than biology is taught by biologists in public high schools. It would be taught by education school graduates, certified by the state, using a curriculum approved by the state board of education with ample, um, input from, um, concerned citizen groups.
What Mr. Velleman's suggestion properly avoids is the improper admixture of philosophical issues in the science curriculum. As I implied before, I'd like to see that clarity of purpose in the high school history, government and English curricula, too. (Don't even get me started on my son's English teacher's views of existentialism.) But I have to admit that the thought of who would be teaching a high school philosophy class and what the sausage-grinder curriculum process would produce does give me pause.
No one took me up on my earlier question, but I do think pushing theory on most adolescents too soon can be a problem. We don't, for example, explain why division by zero is an impermissible operation in elementary school arithmetic class, and with good reason. (For that matter, I’ve heard some pretty screwy views about the epistemological implications of the Incompleteness Theorem and the Uncertainty Principle from college graduates, too.) It’s perfectly possible to teach high school science without getting into the philosophy of science, even implicitly, at all.
Posted by: D.A. Ridgely | May 12, 2005 05:27 PM | Permalink
Posted by: JeffS
There's a difference between philosophical topics and philosophical method.
High school may not be the best time or place for the latter, or for anything like "theory." But seems like as good a forum as any for raising the questions that science can't answer, like Was our natural order designed or random; or Are we material beings? These and other "philosophical" topics can be treated at varying levels of rigor, and science has nothing to say about them. And these questions are already plaguing teenagers, anyway, as proven in episode after episode of "My So-Called Life."
Posted by: JeffS | May 12, 2005 06:02 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Robert Johnson
Presumably the content of a high school philosophy course would present issues, methods and ideas from contemporary academic philosopy, just as a high school biology courses present issues, methods and ideas from comtemporary academic biology. No one favors a course in high school that would, roughly, consist in a bullshit session.
The 'big' philosophical questions--including those having to do with whether there is a god and her role--are all far more competently discussed by philosophers such as Aquinas, Anselm, Descartes, or, more lately, Alvin Plantinga, than they are by those touting ID. Really, they are a pathetic bunch, philosophically speaking.
Posted by: Robert Johnson | May 12, 2005 08:34 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Robert Johnson
Excuse my bad typing.
Posted by: Robert Johnson | May 12, 2005 08:37 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Jim Hu
A quibble with Robert Johnson. Although high school biology should reflect our contemporary understanding of biology, it should decidedly not be about "issues, methods, and ideas from contemporary academic biology". There is too much background information that is needed - much of it no longer of contemporary research interest - for students to come close to understanding what a lot of the recent stuff is even about.
Posted by: Jim Hu | May 12, 2005 08:43 PM | Permalink
Posted by: David Velleman
Robert -- I wasn't imagining that the course would incorporate material from the current ID movement. Those people are pretending to be scientists -- which they aren't. I was imagining that the course would discuss issues about the limits of science, on the one hand, and the design argument for the existence of god, on the other, all in a philosophical context. God would get a hearing, but not via the ID crowd.
Posted by: David Velleman | May 12, 2005 08:53 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Robert Johnson
OK, right, not 2005 papers in 'Nature'. But no Biology teacher wants to do anything other than to conform to what would be accepted by the center of the discipline in biology, right? ID just isn't anywhere near anyone's conception of the center of the discipline of philosophy. It's a really very small, very marginal interest.
Posted by: Robert Johnson | May 12, 2005 08:57 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Robert Johnson
I see. ID is just a stalking horse for older, well-vetted arguments from our own hollowed sources. But no one could be against presenting those, could they? The only real issue is whether, if there's room for philosophical issues in the high school curriculum, what issues should those be? I can see a class on the creation issue...maybe. But really what high school students need from philosophy is a critical perspective, some tools to wade through editorials and sermons. They don't need much on this topic.
Posted by: Robert Johnson | May 12, 2005 09:59 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Robert Johnson
Hallowed.
Posted by: Robert Johnson | May 12, 2005 10:05 PM | Permalink
Posted by: JeffS
Is there a name for a subject that treats (critically) the questions answered by religion, but from an agnostic and objective, rather than traditional religious, perspective? "Philosophy" is too broad; "Religion" too parochial and sociological, "philosophy-of-science" too narrow and far afield. A new name?
p.s. Robert Johson, bullshit is underrated -- there's even some recently revived philosophy on it!
Posted by: JeffS | May 12, 2005 10:26 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Jeremy Pierce
Pretending to be scientists? Suppose I do some work that I become famous for, and it's not science, but I have a Ph.D. in biochemistry or worked as a physicist for 5 years before getting a Ph.D. in philosophy of science. Am I a scientist? You'd have to say no.
Philip Johnson is not a scientist. He's a law professor. He isn't pretending to be a scientist, though. He never claims that. Michael Behe is a tenured biochemist at LeHigh University. Stephen Meyer's Ph.D. is in history and philosophy of science from Cambridge, but he worked in industry as a geophysicist. William Dembski has Ph.D.s in math and philosophy and publishes primarily in probability theory. If that's science, then he does science, but my impression is that he considers himself a mathematician primarily and doesn't claim to be doing science per se. Walter Bradley has a Ph.D. in materials science and is a professor of engineering at UT-Austin. Hugh Ross is a theoretical physicist who works primarily in cosmology. J.P. Moreland has a doctorate in philosophy of science but also a masters in chemistry and worked as a chemist in industry for years. Some of these people are indeed scientists, even if you don't think the work they've become famous for is science. Others aren't scientists but don't claim to be. They acknowledge that what they're doing is philosophy or mathematics. It's a bit unfair to say they're pretending to be scientists.
Posted by: Jeremy Pierce | May 12, 2005 11:01 PM | Permalink
Posted by: bakho
The comment was made that evolution is not necessary to teach science. Well gravity is not necessary to teach planetary motion. But without the theory of gravity, planetary motion is reduced to memorizing a series of locations and periods.
Without evolution, biology is reduced to a large set of unrelated facts. Without evolution, there is no explanation for drug resistance. Without evolution, modern plant and animal breeding cannot be understood. Without evolution there is no theoretical basis for drug testing in animals. Without evolution there is no good explanation for biogeography. Why do different continents contain different sets of animals and plants? According to the Bible, Noah did not put the there. Without evolution, there is no understanding of island biogeography.
Interestingly, the mechanism of evolution is not controversial at all. Even the most diehard creationists will admit that they accept the basic tenets of evolution. Descent with modification. No one argues that. Natural selection, or differential fecundity. No one argues that either. Descent with modification and natural selection are the entirety of the evolutionary mechanism. The basic mechanisms of evolution are entirely acceptable to creationists. Creationists do not object to the mechanism of evolution or the theory of evolution. Creationists object to the conclusions that are made based on evolutionary theory. Creationists object to the interpretation of scientific facts. For instance, the age of the earth is independent of evolution or evolutionary theory. Scientists date the earth to about 5 bya (billion years ago). Short earth creationists object. They claim the earth is less than 10,000 years old. However, the scientific fact of the age of the earth has nothing to do with evolution. Creationists jump through all kinds of hoops to make their age of the earth try to fit the facts. They deny some facts and select only those facts that support their idea. This is not science. Science tests ideas against the facts. Ideas inconsistent with the facts are modified or discarded.
Posted by: bakho | May 12, 2005 11:23 PM | Permalink
Posted by: bakho
Pretending to be scientists-maybe unfair. Pretending to use scientific method to evaluate their beliefs- guilty as charged. They pretend that their conclusions can withstand the rigors of scientific challenge. They don't.
This is precisely why it is a bad idea to present these religious beliefs in a science class and subject them to scientific challenge. It would get very ugly very fast. People who believe in ID would be crushed- forced to deny reality and mocked as fools. It is not the place of public education to critique the religious beliefs of students.
Posted by: bakho | May 12, 2005 11:31 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Bret
bakho wrote: "The comment was made that evolution is not necessary to teach science. Well gravity is not necessary to teach planetary motion. But without the theory of gravity, planetary motion is reduced to memorizing a series of locations and periods."
I made that comment. Your reply illustrates and supports my point. Clearly you don't need to know anything about Evolution in order to teach and understand planetary motion or any of physics from quantum mechanics to cosmology. Those are all scientific endeavors. Thus you don't need Evolution to teach science.
Posted by: Bret | May 13, 2005 12:59 AM | Permalink
Posted by: Bret
bakho wrote: "Without evolution, modern plant and animal breeding cannot be understood."
Plant and animal breeding has been practiced for thousands of years starting with the original domestication of crops. Ironically, "modern" plant breeding methods in the form of genetically modified organisms explicitly eliminate the random mutation and natural selection steps of Evolution normally required for the creation of new traits in a species. Indeed, GMOs are proof positive of Intelligent Design (where humans are the intelligent designers)!
Furthermore (and more to the point), no understanding of Evolution is required to understand the process for creating GMOs. DNA, transcription, and gene splicing are not dependent on Darwinian processes.
Posted by: Bret | May 13, 2005 01:40 AM | Permalink
Posted by: Jim Hu
Bret,
GMOs are proof of ID in the same sense that tatoos are proof that humans can design skin. Maybe someday...but that's irrelevant. I don't know of anyone who would deny that an omnipotent designer could create new species. That's just a tautology, without even having the interesting part about so big that He couldn't move it.
Whether Darwinism is needed to understand the items on your list depends on what you mean by "understand". You cite transcription. A lot of what we know about transcription comes from studying it in different model systems, and understanding why the interchangeability of parts works sometimes and not other times requires at least a vague sense of the differences in relatedness of different organisms, and the notion that certain components arose before or after the divergence of different groupings of species. This knowledge comes with an assumption of consistency with descent from common ancestors that predate the Cambrian explosion by millions to billions of years. Our ability to build the trees is based in part on inferences about different rates of mutation at selected and unselected sites in the DNA, and the predictions of models built on these evolutionary inferences apply to everything from identifying regulatory sites in promoters to dissecting the structure-function of the transcription machinery...and everything else we're seeing in genomes.
Posted by: Jim Hu | May 13, 2005 04:30 AM | Permalink
Posted by: Paul Shields
When you're doing QM, the important thing is that the math works out, the theory is rich enough to support the investigation of many interesting problems, the predictions it makes are confirmed by experiment, real-world devices can be build to exploit quantum phenomena, etc. While speculations about the underlying reality behind QM are interesting, settling those questions isn't very high on the list of most physicists' agendas and they aren't usually taught as part of the coursework on the subject.
I mainly agree with you, Doug. That the math works out is indispensible. In the normal course of events it might also be sufficient. However, I suspect there is also an important role for architectonic and visual imagination in science, especially in the process of theory building. In the case of QM, I think that Einstein’s unease represents a significant problem--not indeed for experiment and prediction but for incorporating the theory into a coherent whole.
We now have computers that can solve certain difficult chess endgames; but when grandmasters study the solution they cannot fully understand what the method is. We also have computer proofs in mathematics, e.g. the four-color theorem, that are generally accepted but highly unsatisfying to most mathematicians. In each case, we might say that the theory works and can be confirmed, but that there is missing some important explanatory component. I would not want to rule out the possibility that such an explanatory component, if it can be found, might be key to the generalization of the theory, or to the process of building better theories in other areas.
How does this relate to evolution and intelligent design? I am not entirely sure. I am basically in agreement with Jeremy, in that I think that science is inherently more philosophical than is commonly thought, and that popular biases regarding empiricism and materialism in science need qualification. On the other hand, I also agree with those who see difficulties in introducing philosophy to young students -- especially in politically charged contexts. Maybe vouchers are the answer...
Posted by: Paul Shields | May 13, 2005 09:51 AM | Permalink
Posted by: murky
'The theory of "intelligent design" (ID) is not science, and insofar as it pretends to be science, it is a fraud.'
Amen.
Posted by: murky | May 13, 2005 10:28 AM | Permalink
Posted by: Bret
Jim Hu wrote: "Our ability to build the trees is based in part on inferences about different rates of mutation at selected and unselected sites in the DNA, and the predictions of models built on these evolutionary inferences ..."
Well, given that you work in the field and I don't, I'll accept your explanation and retract what I said about understanding Evolution not being required to understand the process for creating GMOs, at least for those intimately involved in doing it.
But I do have a couple of questions regarding the statement above. When you wrote "in part", how big a part? When you say "different rates of mutation", how does that differ from saying "accumulated mutations", and how do both of those differ from just saying that "the DNA is different by some amount"? Lastly, is the word "evolutionary" required? For example, could I rewrite your sentence as "Our ability to build the trees is based in part on how much the DNA differs at selected and unselected sites, and the predictions of models built on these inferences..." and still have the same meaning?
Posted by: Bret | May 13, 2005 11:38 AM | Permalink
Posted by: Jim Hu
I said "in part" to be careful. The data that goes into the tree building comes from processes (sequencing, for example) that are arguably like what you described - connected to evolution but where the evolution of DNA polymerases is no longer needed to run the machines.
You could certainly rewrite the sentence that way. But if all of life is a set of information modules assembled by a designer, why organize the sequence information among different organisms in a way that is consistent, across so many cases, with descent from common ancestors? I use the plural to remind readers that the descent argument isn't just about the ancestor at the first cell billions of years ago. The shared ancestors along different branches later in time - and the unshared ancestors after each branch diverges - are more central to our view of evolution by descent.
Histones are found in all eukaryotic lineages. Chaperones and replication/transcription/translation machinery are found in all cellular life forms. For these, and many other cases the trees tend to agree. ID requires that when assembling the collections of these genes for the human genome, the designer chose the versions that look like they are closer to chimpanzees than the versions that are found in other species that diverged in other lineages at around the same geological time. This choice has to be made even when the sequence differences are functionally silent to the best of our ability to assay function - which is pretty good in those cases where a human gene can replace its homolog in yeast or mice. We don't do the reverse in whole organisms for obvious ethical reasons, but genes from other organisms often work in human tissue culture cells. I'm reasonably sure that the cases that do or don't work make sense in terms of our inferences about descent...this is getting far from my knowledge of the literature, though.
Contrast this with the way a computer programmer who is working on different projects reuses code...a case of design in the real world. At least when I code, the module I use to implement the same function in different projects tends to be what I used most recently. An analysis of the code idiosyncracies (indentation, typos in the comments) looks more like horizontal transfer than common descent. There is natural horizontal transfer in biology, and it has a naturalistic explanation, and it's an example of where biologists happily falsify the hypothesis that the same function arose by common descent from a particular ancestor set.
I am ignoring the formal possiblity of a designer who created each organism with fooling us as a goal of the program.
Posted by: Jim Hu | May 13, 2005 12:34 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Bret
Jim Hu,
Thanks for detailed and thoughtful response. I think I actually completely agree with what you're saying (though it's stretching the limits of my knowledge, so I'm not completely sure).
Please note that I'm not trying to argue against the merits of the Theory of Evolution or for the merits of ID (my spewage about GMOs proving ID was an attempt at humor - unfortunately I apparently don't seem to have D.A. Ridgely's amazing wit and timing). I'm more questioning the importance of teaching Evolution, particularly in high school and younger. For example, if the choice was between teaching either both or neither Evolution and ID in science class, what would your choice be? Mine would be neither.
Posted by: Bret | May 13, 2005 01:28 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Don Herzog
Jim Hu mentions the formal possiblity of a designer who created each organism with fooling us as a goal of the program.
Shades of Gosse, though he took pains to distinguish his intricate view from a deception thesis.
Posted by: Don Herzog | May 13, 2005 01:47 PM | Permalink
Posted by: OldMountainGoat
J. David Velleman: From a devout Latter Day Saint, I say, "Amen." I wouldn't change a word of your excellent post and I'm on board with your proposed direction for curricula.
Disclaimer: I do not speak for my fellow members. Many would probably agree, since we place great value in education and expanding the bounds of human knowledge. However, I'm ashamed to say that a few of us view science with suspicion verging on contempt.
Posted by: OldMountainGoat | May 13, 2005 02:30 PM | Permalink
Posted by: CTW
"I do think ID arguments are philosophy. Those who claim they are science are strictly speaking not telling the truth ... "
"The ID arguments are not religious. They're simply teleological arguments [ed note: "for the existence of god" in the original article referenced in mark olson's post above], which have always fallen under the category of philosophy."
"It also wouldn't mean [ID's] not science under the extended account of what counts as science that includes the kind of philosophical reasoning involved in evolutionary theory. At best it would mean it's bad science ..."
"Evolutionary theory usually involves philosophical reasoning. So I don't have trouble calling ID science if science includes those things."
"The question isn't whether [a conclusion] is science but whether it's good or bad science. Therefore, why isn't the same true of ID?"
note the progression: ID isn't science and it isn't religion, it's philosophy, specifically an argument for the existence of god; but (some? much? most? all?) science is, at base, also philosophy in the guise of science, in particular evolution; so the issue isn't whether a process of reaching conclusions is science but whether it's "good" science; if evolution is science, so is ID and the only legitimate question is whether it's "good" science.
I must admit the logic of some steps in this progression escapes me, but the objective doesn't, viz, a foot in the door of science - not philosophy - education. beware of greeks ...
Posted by: CTW | May 13, 2005 02:50 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Colin Danby
Paul: I think I'd want to distinguish between natural science as a dynamic, forward, moving, question-asking activity, and natural science as a set of static ideas at a given moment in time. It's entirely possible that someone might use a metaphor or belief, even a silly metaphor or belief, to generate a useful hypothesis or research question. At times a lot of scientists may buy into a metaphor or even a whole ideology, for example teleological progressivism. But the larger system of question-asking, and thinking hard about data and theoretical rigor, makes it possible for other folks to come along, toss out the teleological ideology, and show that more data is explainable without it. That's where the difference lies -- the possibility for that kind of internal debate.
So I agree that the practice of natural science is philosophical, but that's the start of a conversation, not the end of one -- we still hve to figure out in what way or ways it's philosophical. I'm also not clear what the worry is with computer proofs. On the one hand, we may simply be moving toward different kinds of knowledge. On the other hand, it may be that computer proofs are simply useful as a way to indicte where to put in effort doing other kinds of proofs ... computers are still very crude, stupid things themselves. In any case it's a good thing if mathematicians and natural scientists are uncomfortable with their theory because they'll work on better theory, and even if 95% of their hunches and resistances are wrong, new stuff gets learnt.
Part of why I'd want more math taught is it's one of the ways humans have *made* themselves human. The *making,* the forward motion, matters.
Posted by: Colin Danby | May 13, 2005 05:52 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Jeremy Pierce
CTW: The reason your straw argument doesn't succeed against what I said is because I said what matters is whether it's good or bad science. If it's bad science it should only be taught to confront it and refute it. How is that getting your foot in the door (as if getting your foot in the door is a bad thing anyway; it isn't necessarily, depending on what foot of what person is getting in the door)?
It's amazing the conspiracy theories some people will try to read into a simple declaration of what something is and what it's like. I've already declared myself incompetent to evaluate biological
ID arguments in virtue of not knowing any biology beyond what I learned 9th grade. I know enough philosophy to know that most biologists don't know enough philosophy to evaluate them either, so I think it would be a bad idea if these were taught in high school biology classes. My point was simply that the argument I keep seeing against doing so is unfair and based on a false premise. Read into it all you want, but know that it's your own warped view of my goals. [Not all of that applies to the physics ID arguments, which I do think I'm qualified to judge some aspects of, but I'm still not sure if most high school physics teachers are so qualified, so it may not matter in the end.]
Posted by: Jeremy Pierce | May 13, 2005 06:37 PM | Permalink
Posted by: D.A. Ridgely
One can certainly agree that science is more philosophical than commonly thought, even (or especially) by many scientists, that there are probably naïve versions of materialism and empiricism and logical positivism lurking not far beneath the surface of much science instruction and so forth, and still conclude that what is required and appropriate at the high school level of instruction in the natural sciences need not concern itself with much of any of it.
“Look, kids, here is what we know about physical forces and chemical compositions and reactions and biological processes, and here is how we went about figuring it out and how it (mostly) fits together and how the model both explains and predicts physical phenomena,” works, for the most part, just fine. Most high school science teachers are completely unqualified to deal beyond a fairly rudimentary level with the occasional question of what exactly we mean by knowledge in this context, what sort of ontological commitments are being made or not, whether the Uncertainty Principle is an epistemological limit or a metaphysical reality (or whether that’s a nonsensical way of framing the issue), etc., etc. For that matter, I expect most high school math teachers would flounder rather badly trying to explain mathematical Platonism and its alternatives, how and why the Incompleteness Theorem drove a stake in the heart of Logicism and what, if anything, that says about the possible nature and limits of mathematical knowledge, or why infinite sets are kinda like numbers only they don’t always act like numbers, etc.
I don’t much care who is pretending to be a scientist or a philosopher or a puppet-on-a-string. I do care whether unjustified dogmatism, whether of the religious or ‘scientific’ variety, insinuates itself into the high school classroom, and it is only for that reason (coupled with the haughty and preemptive dismissiveness of ID which I have heard all too often from the Solons of the Church of Science, often themselves not scientists) that I have any sympathy for the ID crowd.
As Mr. Velleman originally noted, ID has a point. It almost certainly isn’t a very good point. Quite possibly, the majority of its proponents are urging philosophy posing as science and, for that matter, theology posing as philosophy and faith posing as theology. But, regardless of their, your or my theological, philosophical or scientific beliefs, it is intellectually dishonest to treat the claims of ID with mere contempt prior to investigation and drive off merrily in our Darwin-fish adorned Volvos. (No, of course I don’t own any such damned car!)
The more I thought about this topic, the more I came to harbor concerns (as I discussed above) over just how to go about avoiding that sort of intellectual dishonesty in the high school curriculum in the specific context of the ID debate. If anything, the resulting discussion has reaffirmed my suspicions that it would be very difficult indeed to resolve those concerns and still make sure that the legitimate need for intellectual honesty, which is the crowning strength of science, was met at the high school level. I still think, however, it's an excellent idea if we can figure out how to pull it off.
Posted by: D.A. Ridgely | May 13, 2005 07:10 PM | Permalink
Posted by: Colin Danby
Hmm -- but the lengths that DV had to go to make the ID question sensible required him to make it unanswerable. Not that one has anything against posing unanswerable questions from time to time but do we want to build curricula around them?
There is of course a larger point about teaching a lot of things, which is that whatever the handwaving you do up front about how this is contingent knowledge or a model or a framework or rests on axioms (and however sincere you are), that will mean little to most adolescents, especially because they know that they will have to pass tests, and in this context the tests will ask them to state facts and solve problems and in other ways show fine-grained competence *within* the particular system of knowledge they're learning.
Nor is the increasing importance of standardized multiple-choice tests in evaluating U.S. schools going to incline teachers to do more of this stepping-back and question-asking.
It's real hard, especially teaching a relatively formalized or technical subject, *not* to move into the pedagogical position of the Unchallengeable-Truth-Knower, and perhaps a lot of people think of science as unchallengeable dogma because they've encountered it in that way. This may also have to do with science pedagogy in general which, especially at the college level, tends to have rather formulaic present-and-test classes for the masses, and then creams off a small elite of potential future scientists who get interesting small classes and a very different view of the whole enterprise.
I think I could figure out how to meet the worthy goals DAR sets in his last paragraph at the high school level, but it would require smaller sections, lots of labs, instruction in the history of science, and so forth -- it would take a lot of resources.
Posted by: Colin Danby | May 13, 2005 08:37 PM | Permalink