Monday, March 13, 2006

ID in Dover: Right decision, wrong premises?

Science and Theology News writer Evan Fales believes Judge Jones did decide correctly in Kitzmiller v. Dover, but based his decision on faulty premises.

...Judge John Jones correctly finds against Dover — but does so employing problematic premises.

It is not difficult to show these premises are mistaken. They are premises that concern the nature of science and scientific method, and they are of significance in this case because they are among the matters fundamentally at issue in the debate between Darwinists and the advocates of intelligent design — and in the larger “culture war” debate.

What are these premises? Well...

...two unsound arguments used to deny that ID is science. The first argument seeks to establish that ID is not scientific by showing that it invokes supernatural causes. The second argument purports to show that criticisms of Darwinism, even if unsuccessful, do not constitute evidence for ID.
IDers regularly allege that science illegitimately and without argument adopts methodical naturalism as a matter of principle and, more fundamentally, that scientists regularly assume without argument the truth of metaphysical naturalism. Unfortunately, the charge — at least as a charge laid at the feet of scientists — is often correct. And it invites the claim that naturalism is simply an article of faith.

I think a large part of that has to do with the definition of "supernatural". Science deals with naturalistic effects. These are effects that can be perceived using our five senses, or using devices which transform these effects into effects we can perceive. For example, we can't see or feel atoms. We can, however, build gadgets that translate atom-sized forces into forces we can detect. Sometimes, investigating some aspect of the natural world involves a chain of inferences: We know about A, because A has a known effect on B, which has a known effect on C, which has a known effect on D, which we can see with our eyeball, E. (Or hear with our ear, E.)

The premise of scientific naturalism is, when all is said and done, A may not actually exist, but to the best of our ability to tell, the universe behaves as if it does. And furthermore, it behaves differently than we would expect if A did not exist.

Fales asserts that science can deal with supernatural events, and that incorporating supernatural entities does not automatically make some field non-scientific:

Supernatural agents are alleged to lie beyond the reach of scientific investigation because they lie beyond human control, can operate outside the laws of nature, and cannot be observed or measured. But there is no reason why suitably precise claims about the supernatural could not have distinctive empirical implications, and hence be testable.

The problem with this is, as soon as a supernatural entity becomes testable by means of the naturalistic methods used in science, it quits being supernatural, at least in the area where it can be tested.

Suppose we wanted to test for miraculous healings at Lourdes. We could administer a physical examination to everyone who makes a pilgrimage to the site, document their medical condition before the visit, and then again some reasonable amount of time after the visit. They would have to make the same observations of a group of people who don't make this pilgrimage, as a control group – a baseline for comparison.

There are three possible conclusions scientists could reach by examining this population. The group that made the pilgrimage might have a higher cure rate than the control group, or it might have a lower cure rate, or the two groups would be equal. If there's a difference in cure rates, can it be explained by any naturalistic cause, such as minerals in the water at Lourdes or something in the air? (Come to think of it, anyone willing to make a pilgrimage has to have some level of faith in the power of the site. The placebo effect is strong enough that drug testing has to use elaborate schemes to reduce its impact on the experimental group. Maybe the control group had better be made up of Hindus making pilgrimages to bathe in the Ganges.)

If it turns out that people who visit Lourdes have a higher rate of cures than people who do something else, even when everything else is controlled for, then we have a natural effect. To the extent that such an effect is consistently observed and reliable, it becomes a naturalistic effect. If people who visit Lourdes experience cures, science can't distinguish between God blessing people who visit the site, or Satan effecting cures to lead people astray, or some force – call it a "sanotropic field" – that makes people healthier when they come in contact with it. The first two are supernatural entities which behave in naturalistic ways, and the third is a naturalistic force, postulated to explain a consistent effect. Until and unless someone comes up with some observation that can be used to distinguish among these three explanations, there's no point in assuming any except the third are correct.

Ultimately, supernatural agents lie beyond the reach of scientific investigation because, if they impact the observable world in a consistent way, there's no way to distinguish between them and natural forces. As the saying goes, "A difference which makes no difference is no difference."

The second "faulty premise", that finding weaknesses in Darwin's theory does not count as proof for ID:

...if there are effective criticisms of Darwinism, it becomes more likely that some competing explanation is true; if ID could offer such explanations, it could happen that difficulties for Darwinism generate confirmation for ID.

Here, Fales' argument ... well ... fails. You can find as many problems as you like with any one explanation, and it still does not make any one competing explanation any more true than it was before.

Instead of ID, let's posit the "theory" that everything was created by Halliburton. I think most of us will agree that's false, since Halliburton didn't exist when everything was created. Now imagine that some amazing discovery completely and utterly disproves every aspect of Darwin's theory. The Halliburton-Made-It-All "theory" would be no more true than it was before the discovery was made.

There are alternatives to both ID and Darwinian evolution. In science, there's always the "unknown cause" option – some cause we have no idea about yet. And there are people who seriously propose that the universe, along with everything in it, had no beginning in time, and so life in some form has always existed. Since there was no beginning, there's no need to explain how it began.

Evan Fales is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.

And here I thought philosophers studied logic.

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