How pro-Darwin Catholic biochemist Ken Miller came to be hated one fifth as much as non-Darwin Catholic biochemist Michael Behe
| September 10, 2006 | Posted by O'Leary under Intelligent Design |
Bill Dembski noted that the inimitable PZ Myers has attacked Ken Miller, anti-ID Catholic poster boy, for thinking there is any evidence for theism.
I agree that PZ is having another junior moment, but it is nonetheless instructive.
National Center for Science Education’s Eugenie Scott, who knows more about retailing crude Darwinism to middle American shopaholics than anyone, has insisted, “One clergyman with a backward collar is worth two biologists at a school board meeting any day!”
 (Yes, she really apparently told Science and Theology News that in April, 2002. I would be curious to know if she would say the same thing in the same terms today.)
When I first started writing By Design or by Chance?, my recent book on why there is an intelligent design controversy in North America today, I found constitutional lawyer Phillip Johnson’s comments on theistic evolution (the point of view Miller espouses) illuminating. Johnson is the godfather of the ID guys, but don’t let that deter you. He wrote that it is culturally okay to say
As a Christian, I believe by faith that God is responsible for evolution.
but
It is emphatically not acceptable to say, “As a scientist, I see evidence that organisms were designed by a preexisting intelligence, and therefore other objective observers should also infer the existence of a designer.”
because
The former statement is within the bounds of methodological naturalism, and most scientific naturalists will interpret it to mean nothing more than ‘It gives me comfort to believe in God, and so I will.’ The latter statement brings the designer into the territory of objective reality, and that is what methodological naturalism forbids.
Miller, alas, seems to have drawn some conclusions from believing in God that do not amount simply to joining a mob against ID – hence genuine Darwinists attack him.
But what intrigued me most about Johnson’s analysis was his thoughts on the hatred directed against ID biochemist Michael Behe. Behe wrote, in Darwin’s Black Box ,
For the record, I have no reason to doubt that the universe is the billions of years old that physicists say it is. I find the idea of common descent (that all organisms share a common ancestor) fairly convincing, and have no particular reason to doubt it. Although Darwin’s mechanismâ€â€natural selection working on variationâ€â€might explain many things, however, I do not believe it explains molecular life.
That would seem to make him a theistic evolutionist. But as Johnson notes at the beginning of the passage quoted above, that is not what “theistic evolution” currently means:
The defining characteristic of theistic evolution, however, is that it accepts methodological naturalism and confines the theistic element to the subjective area of “religious belief.”
In other words, theistic evolution today means believing things for which there is no evidence. Behe’s sin is that he thinks he has evidence. He is not supposed to have evidence; he is only supposed to reassure pious old ladies that no matter what is happening in the world of science, everything is just fine, just fine, just fine.
It would also help if he would wear fake hair and a slick preacher suit instead of having the fashion sense of a research biochemist. But First Things first.
As I like to say, no wonder there is an intelligent design controversy.
52 Responses to How pro-Darwin Catholic biochemist Ken Miller came to be hated one fifth as much as non-Darwin Catholic biochemist Michael Behe
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tinabrewer said:
Second, while it is true that the instruments of science, being material, cannot detect the substance of the supernatural directly, they are certainly able to detect effects.
This seems a fundamental divide. Do you have an example of a scientifically detectable supernatural effect?
avocationist asked:
Well, if the supernatural is affecting the observable universe in some way, then, yes, those effects must be capable of being detected. But they would be real effcts. It is semantics again. For me, whatever cannot be observed by the scientific method is the realm of philosophy, faith and belief. Science is not equipped to deal with the supernatural.
Alan Fox: “For the record, there is nothing about the Modern Synthesis that would mandate that only gradual accumulation of mutations can cause reproductive isolation.”
The tilma of Juan Diego in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.
Sorry about the previous post. I erroneously inserted a prior quote and not the quote from Alan that is found below.
Alan Fox: “This seems a fundamental divide. Do you have an example of a scientifically detectable supernatural effect?”
The tilma of Juan Diego in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.
Alan Fox: Well, I would give the simple example of existence itself as evidence of something ‘above nature’.
PaV wrote:
You don’t need science’s permission to invoke design. However you will find it difficult to convince mainstream scientists that detectable phenomena have supernatural causes, since, as I said before, science has no tools with which it can examine the supernatural.
PaV said:
From a brief Google search, I couldn’t find an example of a scientifically confirmed supernatural effect in relation to the icon. Do you have a link?
Mentok wrote:
I would be fascinated to learn of extra-terrestrial civilisations on other worlds. I have no idea whether such beings exist or have existed. I hope we keep looking for them and they for us. Science can make no judgement on the issue because there is no evidence at the moment. Similarly no-one is prevented from looking for evidence of supernatural design, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
tinabrewer wrote:
Current OOL theories are far from producing any convincing explanation of how life began on Earth. Professor Robert Shapiro (who has published on the subject) remarks:
“I feel however that the origin of life is a topic that is more
fundamental to the debate over intelligent design. The difference between a
mixture of simple chemicals and a bacterium is much more profound than the
gulf between a bacterium and an elephant.”
I doubt we will ever have a scientific explanation of abiogenesis. There is plenty of room for religious and philosophical speculation here.
PaV: When the space shuttle is up in orbit, there are no rocket boosters to be found, since they’re jettisoned on the way up. Now, if you searched the shuttle while it was up in orbit for the means by which it got there, you would find that the fuel on board, and the size of its rocket engine are not sufficient to have gotten the shuttle in orbit. Now a closer examination of the Shuttle might show certain features that from an engineering point of view suggests that the shuttle was once attached to something. One would not be far off in inferring that some kind of a booster engine was attached.
(snip)
If, then, a biological structure is so precisely constructed as to exceed anything that human intelligence has been known to produce, why is it unscientific to attribute this effect to a Designer?
I think you just answered the question of your second paragraph with the scenario of your first paragraph. Just because a structure is observed today that gives the appearance of being irreducibly complex, one cannot exclude the possibility that at a prior time there were additional components that enabled its generation. You could, of course, argue that this additional component was “designed†as well, but one can argue with just the same validity that it came about by an evolutionary mechanism.
Alan,
You have been given quite a few very goos answers, to which you seem inpervious. Your responses indicate to me that you have checked the bare meaning of the words just to the extent that you can make a semi-coherent and pat, regurgitated answer.
Ack!
Good answers. Wise, insightful answers.
At risk of leading you to wonder just whose side I’m really on, I wonder if “methodological naturalism” can be effectively isolated from “metaphysical naturalism.”
Beckwith raised the excellent point above that a commitment to methodological naturalism does not provide us with an a priori exclusion of the “supernatural.” But it does provide with an a posteriori heuristic for disregarding it: science that took the supernatural seriously turned out not to be good science. (I’m thinking here of scientific research into occult phenomena, which was a big thing in the 19th century.)
The problem is a chicken-or-egg: if science tells us what there is, and science is always changing, then what’s off the books today (ghosts and angels) could be on the books tomorrow, if there’s a new development in our ability to repeatedly measure, quantify, and intervene. Yet that just leaves the content of science entirely open-ended; science is just “what scientists do.” But how, then, can we tell what it is that scientists are doing? There’s no way to do so, that I can think of, without a commitment to metaphysical naturalism, however minimal.
Your responses indicate to me that you have checked the bare meaning of the words just to the extent that you can make a semi-coherent and pat, regurgitated answer.
The words may be pat and semi-coherent, avocationist, but I promise you, they are my own.
You don’t need science’s permission to invoke design. However you will find it difficult to convince mainstream scientists that detectable phenomena have supernatural causes, since, as I said before, science has no tools with which it can examine the supernatural.
Since intelligent design hypothesizes intelligent causality, rather than the supernatural, science would have detection tools. Those tools can be applied to genomic features like the genetic code and a number of coding functions to test for causality.
Alan Fox:
Does science have tools to examine cavemen who painted on cave walls? This seems to me to be no more than prejudice.
But I thought you said that science cannot deal with the supernatural, so why would you be looking for a “scientifically confirmed supernatural effect”? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms for you?
Instead, you have an image–not an icon–that defies scientific explanation for its production, let alone any explanation involving known artistic methods. You also have human beings who have testified as to how it came about. Perhaps all this indicates that methodological naturalism necessarily involves methodological doubt when it comes to anything but natural causes. That is, it is a very limited view of human experience.
Ofro:
I think you’re a little mixed up here. I wasn’t concerned in the example I gave with how the “complexity/design” of the space shuttle came about, I was concerned with how it got into orbit–a completely different question. Spandrels won’t do, I’m afraid.
Just because a structure is observed today that gives the appearance of being irreducibly complex, one cannot exclude the possibility that at a prior time there were additional components that enabled its generation.
And one cannot invoke the possibility either in the absence of supporting data. That is the point for an empirically based discipline.
pk4 paul: kudos to your last post
pk4 paul: And one cannot invoke the possibility either in the absence of supporting data. That is the point for an empirically based discipline.”
Providing a potential mechanism of how a structure could have evolved is empirically at least as valid as providing an argument based on contested probabilities. At the least, the jury is still out on which mechanism has a better chance of resembling what actually happened.
PaV wrote:
But I thought you were offering evidence to contradict my assertion. Did you not want me to examine your evidence?
I would be the first to say that some things (currently) defy scientific explanation. How life got started on Earth, for example. As to your image “defying scientific explanation”, Wikipedia suggests that not much careful scientific scrutiny has been done. Unless I have missed something, in which case, I should be pleased to look at any material that you can point me to.
Alan Fox:
Why would ask for something you assert can’t exist? The realm of the supernatural cannot be explored by empirical methods. No one asserts that. Many assert the existence of the supernatural. No one has “seen” an atom. But we can test for its existence indirectly. My earlier point regarding the cave paintings was meant to indicate that if we can logically infer intelligent causal agents by their effects and call it science (as in the case of cave paintings), then why is science completely shut off from detecting evidence of a supernatural intelligent being by the effect this being causes? Why the disconnect?
As to the “image” of Our Lady of Guadalupe, upon inspection it was found that the intensity of the image on the garment is directly proportional to the inverse of the distance from the surface, just as occurs with light. That is, the image seems to have been produced by light itself. There is no known process to duplicate these effects.
PaV:“As to the “image†of Our Lady of Guadalupe, upon inspection it was found that the intensity of the image on the garment is directly proportional to the inverse of the distance from the surface, just as occurs with light.”
Would you have a link to that study? Just from looking at the image I can’t make that quantitavive judgement. I can see several parts of the clothing that are closer to the observer than others but are not any brighter. In addition, all that depends on an exact knowledge of how far the light source was away from the garment when the image was formed on the canvas.if a quantitative measurement were possible. Finally, one would expect that intensity is proportional not directly but to the square of the inverse of the distance from the surface.