S.J. Dahlman, "Face to Faith - Evolution, ID argument about what’s really science " (2005)

Face to Faith - Evolution, ID argument about what’s really science
> <br> By S.J. Dahlman
> <span>Associate Professor of Communications at Milligan College
> <a class="Author2" href="mailto:[email protected]"><u><font color="#0000ff">[email protected]<font>
> <span class="Author">Story published: 820/2005

Just to be clear: Niall Shanks didn’t get run out of town for being an atheist and an evolutionist. Nor did he move from Tennessee, the site of the first big battle over evolution, to Kansas because he wanted to join that state’s current big battle over evolution.

After 14 “happy” years teaching philosophy and the history of science at East Tennessee State University, Shanks said he simply got a great job offer, being appointed to an endowed faculty position at Wichita State University.

While working here, Shanks gained a national reputation as a vocal advocate for evolution and opponent of intelligent design theory. He debated around the country and wrote extensively on the controversy, including a book published last year by Oxford University Press, “God, the Devil, and Darwin: A Critique of Intelligent Design Theory.”

“To me, (intelligent design) is just flawed, bad science,” Shanks said in a phone interview last week. “I’m concerned with the integrity of science.”

Most scientists affirm what is often called neo-Darwinian evolution as a firmly established principle. It asserts that living beings change over thousands or millions of years as traits that help them survive get passed down by natural selection. Think “survival of the fittest” at the genetic level — a process that is unpredictable and aimless, certainly not the result of some cosmic blueprint.

Intelligent design theory challenges the claim of randomness. According to the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, a pro-ID organization in Seattle, this theory “holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause.” In other words, scientific observation indeed implies a cosmic blueprint, which in turn implies a cosmic architect.

Because that conclusion can’t be proven, ID is a religious statement, said Shanks, an opinion currently shared by much of the scientific world.

“My complaint is with the presentation of religion as a scientific theory,” he said. “It’s an attempt to revive an old theological argument, dress it up in words that sound scientific and then pass it off as a general scientific theory, which it isn’t.”

The argument he referred to is creationism, a claim to use scientific thinking to prove a strictly literal reading of the creation account in the biblical book of Genesis. Design theorists, however, distance themselves from that position as limiting and unscientific. In fact, leading creationists, such as Henry Morris of the Institute for Creation Research, strongly criticize ID because it doesn’t require belief in a specific creator, namely the God of Genesis.

Even so, Shanks believes ID really isn’t science either, certainly not in the same field as evolution. Discuss design in a college philosophy or theology class, he said, but “it doesn’t belong in the science classroom. Its claims are untestable.”

Design theorists counter that objection as being inconsistent. William Dembski, a mathematician and philosopher at Baylor University and a senior fellow with the Discovery Institute, wrote in an article for the forthcoming “Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science” that leading evolutionary lights such as Peter Singer, Richard Dawkins and the late Stephen Jay Gould drew “religious, philosophical, and political implications from evolutionary theory.”

Dembski also noted they too have proposed untestable theories, such as Gould’s idea of “punctuated equilibrium,” which claims evolution occurs in remote populations unlikely to be fossilized, producing a record that shows sudden but frequently interrupted changes.

“Does that make evolutionary theory unscientific?” Dembski asked. “No. By the same token, intelligent design’s implications do not render it unscientific.”

At this point, the debate seems to come down to an argument over the definition of science — what science is and isn’t, what it can discuss and what it can’t.

But there’s more than pure science here. Consider that neither design theorists nor evolutionists can point to a supreme piece of evidence that absolutely, positively proves there is or is not a cosmic designer. At some point, the scientific data ends and speculation must take over. A person must take a final step toward ultimate explanations without solid evidence. So this is a debate about … well, about faith.
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