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One Long Argument

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John Lynch
John Lynch

This document discusses the relationship between intelligent design and other positions regarding evolution and origins. It notes tensions between intelligent design and young-earth creationism regarding mechanism, identity of the designer, and agenda. The document also discusses the lack of a full theory behind intelligent design and calls for developing testable hypotheses and publishing in peer-reviewed journals to build a stronger scientific case.

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ONE LONG ARGUMENT “it may be convenient to the reader to have the leading facts and inferences briefly recapitulated.”
Data Hypothesis Beliefs Testing Various Methodological Naturalism Non-scientific Positions Theory Public Private Sphere Sphere
WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED The Scientific Revolution saw the acceptance of methodological naturalism among individuals who themselves rejected philosophical naturalism. Both Biblical literalism and natural theology were effectively nullified in the Nineteenth century. There is no scientific support for the two major claims of YEC: that the Earth is young and that discontinuities in nature illuminate the Genesis “kinds”. American YEC arose in the early 20th C out of cultural concerns regarding Modernism in all its manifestations. It received its death blow in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987).
WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED ID clearly arose in response to Edwards as a means by which to reframe YEC. While ID is not perhaps explicitly of religious intent, it is (minimally) implicitly so and thus risks failing under Edwards. ID currently consists of “[a] bag of powerful intuitions, and a handful of notions” – there is no theory of ID – and it thus cannot be taught in public school science classes. This leaves the strategy of “teach the controversy”. However, there is no valid scientific controversy suitable to be taught at the K-12 level.
Semantic Evolution “Strengths & “Teach the Weaknesses” Controversy” Intelligent Design Creation Science Biblical Creationism
Implications Identity Mechanism Detection INTELLIGENT DESIGN Is ID a fruitful scientific program?
DETECTION
MECHANISM Dembski: “ID is not a mechanistic theory, and it’s not ID’s task to match your pathetic level of detail in telling mechanistic stories. If ID is correct and an intelligence is responsible and indispensable for certain structures, then it makes no sense to try to ape your method of connecting the dots.” Wells: “I don't think I'm obligated to propose an alternate theory. I don't pretend to have an alternate theory that explains the history of life.”
One Long Argument
PAUL NELSON ON DESIGN THEORY “Easily the biggest challenge facing the ID community is to develop a fully- fledged theory of biological design. We don't have such a theory right now, and that's a problem. Without a theory, it's very hard to know where to direct your research focus. Right now, we've got a bag of powerful intuitions, and a handful of notions … but, as yet, no general theory of biological design.”
PHILLIP E. JOHNSTON ON DESIGN THEORY “I also don’t think that there is really a theory of intelligent design at the present time to propose as a comparable alternative to the Darwinian theory, which is, whatever errors it might contain, a fully worked out scheme. There is no intelligent design theory that’s comparable. Working out a positive theory is the job of the scientific people that we have affiliated with the movement. Some of them are quite convinced that it’s doable, but that’s for them to prove…No product is ready for competition in the educational world.”
PAUL NELSON ON DESIGN THEORY “There is something deeply dissatisfying about establishing the bona fides of one theory by debunking another. Design simply must put novel predictions of its own on the blackboard.
ADVICE TO ID MOVEMENT Dembski’s stand on peer review positively hurts any hope that ID has in becoming accepted among the larger scientific community. Publish papers. Publish in peer-reviewed journals in philosophy, statistics, mathematics, complexity theory, and theoretical biology while working on the “theory of design.” Generate testable hypotheses that come from the design perspective. Make sure these hypotheses can differentiate between evolutionary and design predictions. Test them using observation or experiment.
Evolution Anti-Evolution Investigation Publication Acceptance Education Education
BRUCE GORDON ON DESIGN THEORY “[D]esign-theoretic research has been hijacked as part of a larger cultural and political movement. In particular, the theory has been prematurely drawn into discussions of public science education where it has no business making an appearance without broad recognition from the scientific community that it is making a worthwhile contribution to our understanding of the natural world.”
One Long Argument
One Long Argument
POSITIONS • Naturalistic Evolution: “God does not • Theistic evolution (2): God set exist, or if He does, He does nothing in conditions, designed natural laws so that the natural world investigated by “their ordinary operation has resulted in science.” (science = methodological the intended outcome. One might call naturalism) this ‘frontloaded’ design.” • Theistic Evolution (1): “God exists, but • Old-age or Progressive Creation: God evidence of his activity cannot be designed laws but also guided process detected scientifically.” Seen as “and/or injected information at key equivalent to Naturalistic Evolution stages in the development of the universe and of life to design new forms of organization that are beyond the powers of chance and law.” • Young-age Creation: Special creation, 6 days, 10,000 years, Flood geology
POSITIONS • Naturalistic Evolution: “God does not • Theistic evolution (2): God set exist, or if He does, He does nothing in conditions, designed natural laws so that the natural world investigated by “their ordinary operation has resulted in science.” (science = methodological the intended outcome. One might call naturalism) this ‘frontloaded’ design.” • Theistic Evolution (1): “God exists, but • Old-age or Progressive Creation: God evidence of his activity cannot be designed laws but also guided process detected scientifically.” Seen as “and/or injected information at key equivalent to Naturalistic Evolution stages in the development of the universe and of life to design new forms of organization that are beyond the powers of chance and law.” Johnson’s “Big Tent” • Young-age Creation: Special creation, 6 days, 10,000 years, Flood geology
Evolution Young Earth Intelligent Creationism Design ? Historical Common Special Narrative Ancestry Creation Pattern Tree of Life Orchard of Life ? Process Observable Natural Processes. Direct Intervention ?
TENSIONS WITH YEC TERRY MORTENSON (AIG) Mechanism: “ID cannot stand on its own feet and is not a science of origins because it has no history to explain when and how the ‘intelligent designer’ worked.” Identity: “How can ID destroy the atheistic legacy of Darwinism when its arguments do not and cannot identify the ‘intelligent designer’ as God and many of the ID leaders accept so much of the evolutionary view of history?” Agenda: “[T]he evolutionists are right to suspect a hidden religious and moral agenda behind the IDM, even though it is religiously vague and eclectic”
ANSWERS IN GENESIS “The IDM biological arguments (regarding design and complexity in living things) and paleontological arguments (with respect to gaps in the fossil record) against Darwinism are essentially the same as those used by YECists; only YECists were using such arguments long before the IDers. ... But YECists have also amassed a considerable amount of geological evidence for a young earth and global Flood, which IDers show little or no evidence of even being willing to consider, much less try to refute.”
PHILLIP E. JOHNSON “I want to develop a challenge to materialistic evolution. Let’s unite around the Creator. After that we can have a marvelous argument about the age of the earth.”
2008 American Religious Identification Survey Protestant Catholic Generic Christian LDS Jewish Other None http://b27.cc.trincoll.edu/weblogs/AmericanReligionSurvey-ARIS/
2008 Protestant Sects Baptist Methodist Lutheran Presbyterian Episcopalian United Church Unspecified http://b27.cc.trincoll.edu/weblogs/AmericanReligionSurvey-ARIS/
One Long Argument
One Long Argument
CLERGY LETTER PROJECT “Within the community of Christian believers there are areas of dispute and disagreement, including the proper way to interpret Holy Scripture. While virtually all Christians take the Bible seriously and hold it to be authoritative in matters of faith and practice, the overwhelming majority do not read the Bible literally, as they would a science textbook. Many of the beloved stories found in the Bible – the Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah and the ark – convey timeless truths about God, human beings, and the proper relationship between Creator and creation expressed in the only form capable of transmitting these truths from generation to generation. Religious truth is of a different order from scientific truth. Its purpose is not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts.”
CHRISTIAN LETTER PROJECT “We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator. To argue that God’s loving plan of salvation for humanity precludes the full employment of the God-given faculty of reason is to attempt to limit God, an act of hubris. We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth. “ Signed by over 12,500 Christian clergy
CATHOLIC THEISTIC EVOLUTION “It is indeed remarkable that [the theory of evolution] has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory.” “[T]heories of evolution which, in accordance with the philosophies inspiring them, consider the spirit as emerging from the forces of living matter or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man.” Pope John Paul II, Address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Oct 1996
One Long Argument
ID PROPONENTS ON THEISTIC EVOLUTION Dembski: “Design theorists are no friends of theistic evolution.” Johnson: “Theistic evolution is exactly the same thing as atheistic evolution only with some meaningless, vacuous God- talk spread around. It's not really an intellectually honest position at all; it's a kind of political compromise.” Johnson: “Liberal Christians are worse than atheists because they hide their naturalism behind a veneer of religion.”
DEMBSKI 2004 “Unlike John Paul II, who seemed to sign off on conventional evolutionary theory save for the divine infusion of souls at the origin of humanity, we can expect Benedict XVI to single out intelligent design for special favors. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Michael Behe invited to an audience with the new pope. … I’m predicting that Bush and Benedict XVI will play much the same role in the distintegration [sic] of evolution ... as Reagan and John Paul II did in the disintegration of communism.”
Implications Mechanism Pathway Fact CHALLENGING EVOLUTION Is evolution an unchallengable orthodoxy?
One Long Argument
“NON-DARWINIAN” TEXTBOOK SCIENCE Mendelianism (1900) Cladistics (1950) Transposons (1950) Neutral mutation (1968) Endosymbiosis (1970) Punctuated Equilibrium (1973) Horizontal Gene Transfer (1977)
ONGOING CONTROVERSIES • Neutralism versus selectionism • Sympatric speciation; in molecular evolution; • Sexual selection; • Adaptationism; • The evolution of sex itself; • Group selection; • Evolutionary psychology; • Punctuated equilibrium; • Darwinian medicine; • The power of “evo-devo”; • Selfish genetic elements • Mass extinctions;
“MANUFACTROVERSIES” “Modern-day sophists skillfully invoke values that are shared by the scientific community and the public, such as free speech, skeptical inquiry and the revolutionary force of new ideas against a repressive orthodoxy. It is difficult to argue against someone who draws on these values without seeming unscientific or un-American.” Leah Ceccarelli
THESE SOPHISTS EXPLOIT 1) the gap between the technical and public spheres. Scientific experts who can't spare the time for public communication are then surprised when the public distrusts them. 2) a public misconception about what science is, portraying it as a structure of complete consensus built from the steady accumulation of unassailable data. Any dissent is cited as evidence that there's no consensus, and thus that truth must not have been discovered yet.
700 Dissenters from Darwinism Engineering Chemistry Physics Medicine Mathematics Rest
One Long Argument
DENIALISM AGW “Darwinism” AIDS/HIV
“GLOBAL WARMING PETITION PROJECT” Engineering Chemistry Earth Science Medicine Biology Computer Science Biochemistry Meteorology Climatology
ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING “Human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures" Gallup Poll (public): 58% American Geophysical Union (earth scientists): 82% Climatologists who “listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change”: 97.4%
One Long Argument
One Long Argument
WHY DOES THE PUBLIC SUPPORT MANUFACTROVERSIES? Sense of “fairness” Attitude to intellectual authority Poor understanding of the nature of science and poor scientific literacy among public For ID, three other factors may be in play: importance of religious belief in American life, overall aversion to fideism, and a sense of cultural decay
One Long Argument
One Long Argument
NSF SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY INDICATORS 2010 Continental drift occurs - 77% Earth orbits the sun - 72% It takes a year for the earth to orbit the sun - 51% Human evolution - 45% Big Bang - 33%
OTHER POLLS Belief in extrasensory perception 60% Belief in guardian angels 55% Belief in scientific validity of astrology 43% Belief in Satan as living being 35% Belief in UFOs 30%
NSF 2008 “If Americans’ performance in answering factual knowledge questions concerning science can be deemed disappointing, the same is true for their performance in other areas of knowledge … Survey data of varying quality have been interpreted to indicate that Americans, especially the young, do not know enough about history, civics, geography, and politics, and are not sufficiently interested in these and other domains of knowledge that, like scientific knowledge, can serve as a foundation for understanding the world around”
Reading OECD/PISA 2006 Over 250,000 15 year -olds from 41 countries
Problem Solving OECD/PISA 2006
Mathematics OECD/PISA 2006
Science OECD/PISA 2006
One Long Argument
ADULT LITERACY
ADULT LITERACY
LITERACY 40% of 4th grade students are reading below grade level. Adult literacy ranked 68th in the world. 23% of American adults are ranked at Level 1 Literacy and thus have “difficulty using certain reading, writing, and computational skills considered necessary for functioning in everyday life.” “[T]he average Medicaid recipient reads at the fifth-grade level” (2002) while most health material is written at 12th grade level.
TEACHING ID?
WHY REJECT ID & YEC Their primary claims are demonstrably false. They do not provide a productive scientific framework. They are demonstrably religious in intent. They are bad theology.
One Long Argument

More Related Content

One Long Argument

  • 1. ONE LONG ARGUMENT “it may be convenient to the reader to have the leading facts and inferences briefly recapitulated.”
  • 2. Data Hypothesis Beliefs Testing Various Methodological Naturalism Non-scientific Positions Theory Public Private Sphere Sphere
  • 3. WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED The Scientific Revolution saw the acceptance of methodological naturalism among individuals who themselves rejected philosophical naturalism. Both Biblical literalism and natural theology were effectively nullified in the Nineteenth century. There is no scientific support for the two major claims of YEC: that the Earth is young and that discontinuities in nature illuminate the Genesis “kinds”. American YEC arose in the early 20th C out of cultural concerns regarding Modernism in all its manifestations. It received its death blow in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987).
  • 4. WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED ID clearly arose in response to Edwards as a means by which to reframe YEC. While ID is not perhaps explicitly of religious intent, it is (minimally) implicitly so and thus risks failing under Edwards. ID currently consists of “[a] bag of powerful intuitions, and a handful of notions” – there is no theory of ID – and it thus cannot be taught in public school science classes. This leaves the strategy of “teach the controversy”. However, there is no valid scientific controversy suitable to be taught at the K-12 level.
  • 5. Semantic Evolution “Strengths & “Teach the Weaknesses” Controversy” Intelligent Design Creation Science Biblical Creationism
  • 6. Implications Identity Mechanism Detection INTELLIGENT DESIGN Is ID a fruitful scientific program?
  • 8. MECHANISM Dembski: “ID is not a mechanistic theory, and it’s not ID’s task to match your pathetic level of detail in telling mechanistic stories. If ID is correct and an intelligence is responsible and indispensable for certain structures, then it makes no sense to try to ape your method of connecting the dots.” Wells: “I don't think I'm obligated to propose an alternate theory. I don't pretend to have an alternate theory that explains the history of life.”
  • 10. PAUL NELSON ON DESIGN THEORY “Easily the biggest challenge facing the ID community is to develop a fully- fledged theory of biological design. We don't have such a theory right now, and that's a problem. Without a theory, it's very hard to know where to direct your research focus. Right now, we've got a bag of powerful intuitions, and a handful of notions … but, as yet, no general theory of biological design.”
  • 11. PHILLIP E. JOHNSTON ON DESIGN THEORY “I also don’t think that there is really a theory of intelligent design at the present time to propose as a comparable alternative to the Darwinian theory, which is, whatever errors it might contain, a fully worked out scheme. There is no intelligent design theory that’s comparable. Working out a positive theory is the job of the scientific people that we have affiliated with the movement. Some of them are quite convinced that it’s doable, but that’s for them to prove…No product is ready for competition in the educational world.”
  • 12. PAUL NELSON ON DESIGN THEORY “There is something deeply dissatisfying about establishing the bona fides of one theory by debunking another. Design simply must put novel predictions of its own on the blackboard.
  • 13. ADVICE TO ID MOVEMENT Dembski’s stand on peer review positively hurts any hope that ID has in becoming accepted among the larger scientific community. Publish papers. Publish in peer-reviewed journals in philosophy, statistics, mathematics, complexity theory, and theoretical biology while working on the “theory of design.” Generate testable hypotheses that come from the design perspective. Make sure these hypotheses can differentiate between evolutionary and design predictions. Test them using observation or experiment.
  • 14. Evolution Anti-Evolution Investigation Publication Acceptance Education Education
  • 15. BRUCE GORDON ON DESIGN THEORY “[D]esign-theoretic research has been hijacked as part of a larger cultural and political movement. In particular, the theory has been prematurely drawn into discussions of public science education where it has no business making an appearance without broad recognition from the scientific community that it is making a worthwhile contribution to our understanding of the natural world.”
  • 18. POSITIONS • Naturalistic Evolution: “God does not • Theistic evolution (2): God set exist, or if He does, He does nothing in conditions, designed natural laws so that the natural world investigated by “their ordinary operation has resulted in science.” (science = methodological the intended outcome. One might call naturalism) this ‘frontloaded’ design.” • Theistic Evolution (1): “God exists, but • Old-age or Progressive Creation: God evidence of his activity cannot be designed laws but also guided process detected scientifically.” Seen as “and/or injected information at key equivalent to Naturalistic Evolution stages in the development of the universe and of life to design new forms of organization that are beyond the powers of chance and law.” • Young-age Creation: Special creation, 6 days, 10,000 years, Flood geology
  • 19. POSITIONS • Naturalistic Evolution: “God does not • Theistic evolution (2): God set exist, or if He does, He does nothing in conditions, designed natural laws so that the natural world investigated by “their ordinary operation has resulted in science.” (science = methodological the intended outcome. One might call naturalism) this ‘frontloaded’ design.” • Theistic Evolution (1): “God exists, but • Old-age or Progressive Creation: God evidence of his activity cannot be designed laws but also guided process detected scientifically.” Seen as “and/or injected information at key equivalent to Naturalistic Evolution stages in the development of the universe and of life to design new forms of organization that are beyond the powers of chance and law.” Johnson’s “Big Tent” • Young-age Creation: Special creation, 6 days, 10,000 years, Flood geology
  • 20. Evolution Young Earth Intelligent Creationism Design ? Historical Common Special Narrative Ancestry Creation Pattern Tree of Life Orchard of Life ? Process Observable Natural Processes. Direct Intervention ?
  • 21. TENSIONS WITH YEC TERRY MORTENSON (AIG) Mechanism: “ID cannot stand on its own feet and is not a science of origins because it has no history to explain when and how the ‘intelligent designer’ worked.” Identity: “How can ID destroy the atheistic legacy of Darwinism when its arguments do not and cannot identify the ‘intelligent designer’ as God and many of the ID leaders accept so much of the evolutionary view of history?” Agenda: “[T]he evolutionists are right to suspect a hidden religious and moral agenda behind the IDM, even though it is religiously vague and eclectic”
  • 22. ANSWERS IN GENESIS “The IDM biological arguments (regarding design and complexity in living things) and paleontological arguments (with respect to gaps in the fossil record) against Darwinism are essentially the same as those used by YECists; only YECists were using such arguments long before the IDers. ... But YECists have also amassed a considerable amount of geological evidence for a young earth and global Flood, which IDers show little or no evidence of even being willing to consider, much less try to refute.”
  • 23. PHILLIP E. JOHNSON “I want to develop a challenge to materialistic evolution. Let’s unite around the Creator. After that we can have a marvelous argument about the age of the earth.”
  • 24. 2008 American Religious Identification Survey Protestant Catholic Generic Christian LDS Jewish Other None http://b27.cc.trincoll.edu/weblogs/AmericanReligionSurvey-ARIS/
  • 25. 2008 Protestant Sects Baptist Methodist Lutheran Presbyterian Episcopalian United Church Unspecified http://b27.cc.trincoll.edu/weblogs/AmericanReligionSurvey-ARIS/
  • 28. CLERGY LETTER PROJECT “Within the community of Christian believers there are areas of dispute and disagreement, including the proper way to interpret Holy Scripture. While virtually all Christians take the Bible seriously and hold it to be authoritative in matters of faith and practice, the overwhelming majority do not read the Bible literally, as they would a science textbook. Many of the beloved stories found in the Bible – the Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah and the ark – convey timeless truths about God, human beings, and the proper relationship between Creator and creation expressed in the only form capable of transmitting these truths from generation to generation. Religious truth is of a different order from scientific truth. Its purpose is not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts.”
  • 29. CHRISTIAN LETTER PROJECT “We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator. To argue that God’s loving plan of salvation for humanity precludes the full employment of the God-given faculty of reason is to attempt to limit God, an act of hubris. We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth. “ Signed by over 12,500 Christian clergy
  • 30. CATHOLIC THEISTIC EVOLUTION “It is indeed remarkable that [the theory of evolution] has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory.” “[T]heories of evolution which, in accordance with the philosophies inspiring them, consider the spirit as emerging from the forces of living matter or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man.” Pope John Paul II, Address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Oct 1996
  • 32. ID PROPONENTS ON THEISTIC EVOLUTION Dembski: “Design theorists are no friends of theistic evolution.” Johnson: “Theistic evolution is exactly the same thing as atheistic evolution only with some meaningless, vacuous God- talk spread around. It's not really an intellectually honest position at all; it's a kind of political compromise.” Johnson: “Liberal Christians are worse than atheists because they hide their naturalism behind a veneer of religion.”
  • 33. DEMBSKI 2004 “Unlike John Paul II, who seemed to sign off on conventional evolutionary theory save for the divine infusion of souls at the origin of humanity, we can expect Benedict XVI to single out intelligent design for special favors. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Michael Behe invited to an audience with the new pope. … I’m predicting that Bush and Benedict XVI will play much the same role in the distintegration [sic] of evolution ... as Reagan and John Paul II did in the disintegration of communism.”
  • 34. Implications Mechanism Pathway Fact CHALLENGING EVOLUTION Is evolution an unchallengable orthodoxy?
  • 36. “NON-DARWINIAN” TEXTBOOK SCIENCE Mendelianism (1900) Cladistics (1950) Transposons (1950) Neutral mutation (1968) Endosymbiosis (1970) Punctuated Equilibrium (1973) Horizontal Gene Transfer (1977)
  • 37. ONGOING CONTROVERSIES • Neutralism versus selectionism • Sympatric speciation; in molecular evolution; • Sexual selection; • Adaptationism; • The evolution of sex itself; • Group selection; • Evolutionary psychology; • Punctuated equilibrium; • Darwinian medicine; • The power of “evo-devo”; • Selfish genetic elements • Mass extinctions;
  • 38. “MANUFACTROVERSIES” “Modern-day sophists skillfully invoke values that are shared by the scientific community and the public, such as free speech, skeptical inquiry and the revolutionary force of new ideas against a repressive orthodoxy. It is difficult to argue against someone who draws on these values without seeming unscientific or un-American.” Leah Ceccarelli
  • 39. THESE SOPHISTS EXPLOIT 1) the gap between the technical and public spheres. Scientific experts who can't spare the time for public communication are then surprised when the public distrusts them. 2) a public misconception about what science is, portraying it as a structure of complete consensus built from the steady accumulation of unassailable data. Any dissent is cited as evidence that there's no consensus, and thus that truth must not have been discovered yet.
  • 40. 700 Dissenters from Darwinism Engineering Chemistry Physics Medicine Mathematics Rest
  • 42. DENIALISM AGW “Darwinism” AIDS/HIV
  • 43. “GLOBAL WARMING PETITION PROJECT” Engineering Chemistry Earth Science Medicine Biology Computer Science Biochemistry Meteorology Climatology
  • 44. ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING “Human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures" Gallup Poll (public): 58% American Geophysical Union (earth scientists): 82% Climatologists who “listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change”: 97.4%
  • 47. WHY DOES THE PUBLIC SUPPORT MANUFACTROVERSIES? Sense of “fairness” Attitude to intellectual authority Poor understanding of the nature of science and poor scientific literacy among public For ID, three other factors may be in play: importance of religious belief in American life, overall aversion to fideism, and a sense of cultural decay
  • 50. NSF SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY INDICATORS 2010 Continental drift occurs - 77% Earth orbits the sun - 72% It takes a year for the earth to orbit the sun - 51% Human evolution - 45% Big Bang - 33%
  • 51. OTHER POLLS Belief in extrasensory perception 60% Belief in guardian angels 55% Belief in scientific validity of astrology 43% Belief in Satan as living being 35% Belief in UFOs 30%
  • 52. NSF 2008 “If Americans’ performance in answering factual knowledge questions concerning science can be deemed disappointing, the same is true for their performance in other areas of knowledge … Survey data of varying quality have been interpreted to indicate that Americans, especially the young, do not know enough about history, civics, geography, and politics, and are not sufficiently interested in these and other domains of knowledge that, like scientific knowledge, can serve as a foundation for understanding the world around”
  • 53. Reading OECD/PISA 2006 Over 250,000 15 year -olds from 41 countries
  • 60. LITERACY 40% of 4th grade students are reading below grade level. Adult literacy ranked 68th in the world. 23% of American adults are ranked at Level 1 Literacy and thus have “difficulty using certain reading, writing, and computational skills considered necessary for functioning in everyday life.” “[T]he average Medicaid recipient reads at the fifth-grade level” (2002) while most health material is written at 12th grade level.
  • 62. WHY REJECT ID & YEC Their primary claims are demonstrably false. They do not provide a productive scientific framework. They are demonstrably religious in intent. They are bad theology.

Editor's Notes

  40. 100 signatories / 3 climatologists / 2 on Darwinism list / 4 on AIDS/HIV list /