For this blog post, I wanted to address both a specific Facebook thread originated by my friend Vocab Malone as well as associated points deriving from the interview that Vocab had linked to and commented on; core elements of the modern intelligent design movement and supporting and dissenting views from people like William Dembski, Michael Behe and Ken Miller. (The series of In Our Time episodes originally broadcast on BBC4 Radio, can be found here.) I felt that it was better to start getting this series out sooner than later. Consequently, though I’ve linked to and been specific with regard to many sources, a more formally structured references section will have to wait for the end of the series. I appreciate your patience and hope that the “in-text” references that I have provided will prove helpful to you.
Note: Where I don’t give specific references to
comments by William Dembski or Ken Miller it can be assumed that the editorials
that such comments come from will be covered and linked to more thoroughly in
the next part. Those specific editorials are, STILL SPINNING JUST FINE: ARESPONSE TO KEN MILLER, linked to by Vocab in response to my posting of The Flagellum Unspun: The Collapse of ‘Irreducible Complexity’
The initial
discussion – chasing a moving target
The depth of
my response and my decision to address it in a blog post, as opposed to within
the thread itself, comes about from the rabbit hole that was uncovered within
just a few questions of the original comment: “the Cambrian Explosion
demonstrating the nature of the problem that atheists face”. I wished, and
still wish, to keep my original questions nearer the surface than buried under
deeper points and moving rhetorical goalposts. To be clear, the most basic
issues boil down to one fundamental question: Are theists falling back –
directly or indirectly – to an argument from ignorance or personal incredulity?
Are they just terribly misunderstood, as both Dembski and Vocab suggest?
Individual components of this question (as taken from the Facebook discussion)
included, but were not limited to the bulleted points:
- “What are you noting as the problem, Vocab; the variety, the strangeness, the ‘special preservation?’” (The specifics were derived from comments made with regard to the Burgess Shale finds and the Cambrian Explosion by the researchers being interviewed in the BBC program that Vocab had linked to.)
Though Vocab’s response to this can be viewed within the thread itself by many, the summation was essentially, “I appreciate their expertise, collegiality and candor. I'm just saying that evolution leaves lots of unanswered questions - in fact, I would say too many to be viable.” This response included another link to an abstract for a paper by one of the subjects of the interview, Simon Conway Morris, originally linked to on BBC4: Walcott, the Burgess Shale andrumours of a post-Darwinian world.
It’s
probably better to note earlier than later that “evolution” can mean one of
several different things in the context of this controversy. First, and most
basically, it can refer to “change over time.” It can describe a process or
processes by which organisms transition from the simpler to the more complex.
It can also refer to ultimate origins and it is not unusual, in this sense, to
find biological evolution placed on a continuum with cosmological evolution by
scriptural literalistic theists. Another meaning is more specifically
biological and is usually equated to Darwin’s model (often slavishly so when it
suits the rhetorical needs of ID proponents or creationists) of natural
selection (including sexual selection and, more recently, group selection). The
more modern, specifically biological, definition also includes mutation,
migration and genetic drift. The popular, non-theistic explanation for these
mechanisms is that they are largely random, though that tends to represent a
statistical oversimplification. It is this randomness that excludes deliberate
design via an intelligent agent that ID proponents tend to take most strenuous
issue with. Lastly, “evolution” can refer to ultimate biological origins. This
is probably the most persistent source of the perception of arguments from
ignorance, as in, “Sure, you can explain the ‘micro-evolution’ that
circumscribes the study of immunology, but you can’t explain how cells,
cellular machines, organs, etc. came to exist or were organized.”
Though I
know Vocab personally and happen to know that he is an “old-earth” biblical
literalist, it should not be taken for granted that he has made a sweeping
proclamation with regard to “evolution” generally and what it can or cannot answer
or predict (though prediction seems seldom to be on the mind of the scriptural
literalist). For instance, Vocab is intelligent and well-educated and I have no
doubt that he accepts the hair-splitting particularity of micro-evolution and
its effects on “kinds” as opposed to the “speciation” of macro-evolution.
From within
the context of that original interview, I was still somewhat confused as to the
specifics of Vocab’s point – particularly now that he’d introduced not an
article, but an abstract that utilized the term, “Darwin fatigue.” So, I
continued to question and comment, suggesting, particularly as he had raised
the point of irreducible complexity, that he might put a little time into
studying the field of complex systems itself.
- One of the more pressing questions that I’d asked (at least to my mind, and particularly as I’d repeated it at least once) was, “And I really would love to have your response on this point, Vocab: ‘I'm just saying that evolution leaves lots of unanswered questions - in fact, I would say too many to be viable.’ How many “answered” questions would you need to make it viable [, Vocab]?”
As it turned out, this is not what Vocab was “just saying.” (And no, he did not answer the “how many questions” question.) He had more in mind still that was not even hinted at in the original post – which did indeed suggest a kind of “argument from ignorance or personal incredulity” by way of continually asserting that there were unanswered questions and things that atheists would “need to explain.” It would be a mistake to naively assume that this is all that was meant in Vocab’s original comment. The most probable implication would be that there are unanswerable questions – at least when taken from within an evolutionary or “Darwinian” framework. If the framework that these questions could be answered from isn’t theistic, I have yet to hear what it is.
At this
point, though Vocab had responded to my questions – or perhaps simply to the
fact that I wrote something that he assumed he’d disagree with – he hadn’t
actually answered any.
- I had – again – given Vocab choices from which to respond from, i.e., “This was my first, most basic point regarding the "nature of the problem that atheists face:" "What are you noting as the problem, Vocab; the variety, the strangeness [of the fossilized creatures found within the Burgess Shale], the ‘special preservation?’ ... or are you simply, again, referring to the number of unanswered questions? Is that the "nature" of the problem?”
Vocab responded with, “Wade: here is a paragraph I just read from Dembski's book on intelligent design that you may find helpful as it expresses my viewpoint for the most part…” (Vocab cited neither the name of the book, nor a page number.). Finding which book that he was referring to and pinning the quotation down specifically was a tedious enterprise. Importantly, I wasn’t at a loss with regard to Vocab’s views; this wouldn’t be the first time that he and I have discussed the ID/evolution controversy. It was that I had asked specific questions, not to be “helped” with regard to understanding his worldview or its component parts.
(The book in
question was titled, Intelligent Design: Bridging the Gap Between Science and Theology (p. 113). I’ll include some of the search process in the “References”
section at the end of the series as the process in itself, as both in the form
of dead ends and related results may be helpful to readers on each side of the
debate. And, at the risk of sounding a little pissy – yes, it was a tedious
enterprise. Thanks, Vocab.)
- In fairness to Vocab, when I point out what appears to be the inadvertent expression of a cognitive bias in his responses to me I received, “I thought this was in line with the question you asked. My bad.” Vocab had – again – glossed over that I’d asked not many, but certainly more than one, question. This happens because Vocab disposes himself to being “chased down” by both answering questions that haven’t been asked, and throwing out new points before he has answered the questions that have already been asked. However, perhaps by virtue of an inability to surmount a persistent tendency toward viewing this issue in a biased fashion (Something that I’ll cover in another blog post specific to cognitive bias.), Vocab went on, while explicitly stating that people like the misunderstood Dembski really did have positive information and concepts to offer (not personal incredulity) he continued to allude to ignorance or personal incredulity with phrases like, “utterly intractable” (from a quotation attributed to Dembski), “That evolutionists realize they have problems when they're by themselves” (This said in light of the fact that the entire discussion that Vocab linked to was aired publicly on BBC4; more of an ad hominem specifying a lack of integrity and compartmentalization of the “problems” that atheists/Darwinists face – a cheap shot that I’ll have to remember the next time I’m admonished by him to be nicer or more “generous” with intellectually lazy, dishonest or hypocritical Christians), “too many [unanswered questions] to be viable;” “The question is does the theory even have the right narrative for life, the right mechanism(s), the right big idea in place. No, it seems certain it does not. That is why these problems won't go away” (Vocab has asked and answered his own questions here, which make the questions themselves meaningless in the context of this discussion – begging the question. He hasn’t troubled himself to even pretend to entertain alternatives to what “right narrative” might be here.), “And I was not impressed with Miller, especially the tie clip illustration. That almost seemed like bad comedy - almost.” (ad hominem; dismissive; again belying that this is not encouragement or prescription of real discussion.) Vocab was obviously finished before I asked my first question.), “… not only do they [“evolutionists”] need to find…” (more allusion to unanswered questions, with the implication being that an answer must be “filled in” or another model “wins” by default – basically, a functional definition of an argument from ignorance or personal incredulity.); and lastly “… don’t have a clue” (Dembski).
(As an aside for Vocab, the “tie clip” (a mousetrap with the holding bar removed, pinning Ken Miller’s tie in place) was a figurative “prop” first utilized by Michael Behe on page 42, and others, of Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challengeto Evolution.)
Again, all
of this seems to begin and end with, “You can’t explain “x,” so…” It’s
reminiscent of the Scientific Creationism of the 70’s and 80’s that I’d become
quite familiar with as a conservative Christian myself. I see no “positive”
evidence or a model that is not “preclusive” in nature (to anything but ID) –
meaning that the lack of an answer to one or more questions precludes a broader
explanation from the model from which the questions originate. The questions
seem/are intractable; therefore, the model from which they originate must be
bad. (Dembski, at least discusses the idea of intractability in The DesignInference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities (p. 92). I have yet
to see Vocab discuss intractability and the idea that some of these questions –
again, from an evolutionary perspective – might be unanswerable. So far, I
think “wrong narrative” is as good as it gets.
For an
interesting rebuttal to The Design Inference and many of the ideas that Dembski
lays out alongside of Behe’s irreducible complexity (i.e., “specified
complexity”) see The advantages of theft over toil: the design inference andarguing from ignorance (Williams, et al, 2001).
