Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

Report on the Sixth International Conference on Creationism, Part II
(Jason Rosenhouse, ScienceBlogs.com, August 18, 2008)

....from the closing presentation of the conference, entitled “The Creation Model: It's Past, Present and Necessary Future,” by Andrew Snelling:

"What if there was absolutely no evidence that the universe was young? No scientific evidence the universe was young. Would you still believe that it was young? Why? Because God's word teaches it. That's the only reason you need to have to believe the universe is young. God's word says it, therefore I believe it. That's not to say the evidences are not important. Of course they are. Because we're commanded to have a reason for the hope, and to give reasoned answers for what we believe and why we believe it. But we must always remember our Biblical foundations. So often we fight over the scientific evidence, but are we winning by leaving out our Biblical foundations? Too much of our creation apologetics has therefore been based on the evidence alone. We need to keep arguing from the level of world views. Because ultimately the problem that people have is spiritual, the deliberate rejection of God's word."

If their current arguments are the result of an overconcern for evidence, I can't imagine what they would come up with after throwing that concern overboard!

As I said, this was the conference closing. It came after three and a half days of wall-to-wall creation science. For most of the days there were four parallel sessions going on, from which the poor conference goer could only choose one. Such an embarrassment of riches!

The talks themselves had an interesting format. They were held in ninety minute sessions, with hour long talks and thirty minutes for Q and A. Here I must give them their due. The Q and A's were frequently lively and contentious, and there was no attempt to shut anyone down. Questioners were allowed to stay at the microphone as long as they liked, asking follow ups, and even aggressively criticizing the speakers at times. With one exception (stay tuned!) no one got angry at me for asking questions.

Here is a typical example. On the first day I attended a talk entitled “A Nuanced Lakatos Philosophy of Theology and Science,” by Doug Kennard, a Biblical studies professor from Bryan College. This was a hard-core philosophy talk, so naturally I lost interest about ten minutes in. The thrust of his talk, however, was clear. Kennard was arguing that some of the hostility directed at creationists by scientists was the result of naive philosophical beliefs on the part of creationists. They would be more likely to get a hearing, Kennard argued, if they hewed to a more sophisticated view of things.

During the Q and A I said the following:

"I'd like to address one narrow point you brought up, and it came up again moments ago in your answer to a previous question, this issue of how creationists can present themselves in ways more likely to be received by the scientific community. I think, to be a little blunt about it, I don't think the issue is philosophy. I don't think it's that scientists are operating within a Kuhnian paradigm or something like that. I think it's simply that from the scientific perspective creationists are just making bad arguments. That's how they see it. When they look, and I should stop saying they because I include myself in this, when I look at a lot of the books out there and browse through them you can go pages at a time without seeing anything that resembles the way scientists talk about evolution. And I would also add that a lot of these arguments, have been addressed by scientists. It's not that they've been ignored and have not been able to get a hearing. Especially more recently with people like William Dembski and Michael Behe, you have book-length arguments about it. So I think that philosophy is not really the answer. I think it's that there are a lot of bad arguments. And worse than that, when I hear, when I attend conferences like this and I hear creationists say, “Oh, they're so disrespectful and they're so rude,” well, I haven't seen much respect coming the other way. When I attend these conferences I hear caricatures of science, I see misquotations of scientists' work, and very simplistic versions of evolution. I would suggest instead of finding comfort in philosophy, sharpen your arguments and be a little more respectful the other way. Then they might be more inclined to reciprocate."

Kennard's talk was not well attended, so only about fifteen people were there for that little piece of oratory. Here's the first part of Kennard's reply:

"Well, I agree and think those are issues that need to be worked on. Having gone to the Mendel computer model [talk], I wonder if that's not a good example of what I'm urging here in the Lakatos approach. That is, to set up a computer model that might help the broader scientific community to increased nuanced, precise modelling and excel at that, so that whether they know you're a creationist or not they recognize this is nice work. That's one side of this approach that I think might say that, it's not just that we haven't answered, or that we don't have good scientific presentations. I think that a lot of the literature out here is purely at a popular level, and probably some of it is not good science."

Well steal my thunder why don't you! Here I was hoping to have a good martyr story to tell, and he had to go and be gracious about it. Kennard went on a while longer regarding the virtues of philosophy, and criticizing the ID folks (!!). When he had finished his answer, the moderator approached the microphone and said to me: "Thank you for coming. We need the challenge and we need the sharpening, the honing."

The moderator, a retired air force pilot, caught up with me after the talk. He thanked me again, and told me that the point of the ICC's was to provide a forum for serious work in creation science, unlike a lot of the popular level stuff that gives creationism a bad name. He told me about all of the garbage papers they received for inclusion in the conference, and how difficult it was to single out the few good papers from the piles of nonsense.

It was a useful reminder of something I have written about before. There's a distinction to be made between leaders and followers in creationism. The people writing the books and leading the revivals are precisely the ignorant charlatans scientists portray them to be. But the people sitting in the audience absorbing this stuff are frequently a different story. As I have said before, it is a lot easier to caricature people you have never met.

End of sermon. And, just so you don't think I am going soft, let me add that I have precisely zero confidence in the ability of the friendly moderator to distinguish between scientific sense and nonsense. Browsing through the conference proceedings, I find a lot of very technical papers in geology and physics. I know a resectable amount of science, but I recognize that I am not really in a position to judge many of them. Somehow I am not optimistic that my colleagues in the geology and physics departments would find anything of value in these submissions.

This was a hard-core philosophy talk, so naturally I lost interest about ten minutes in.

One should never take sides in anything. Taking sides is the beginning of sincerity and earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the human being becomes a bore.

Butteville school board exploring intelligent design
(By Jeff Knebel, Mount Shasta News, August 20, 2008)

Butteville Union Elementary School District trustees, as well as school administrators, are considering adding “intelligent design” to the school’s seventh-grade science curriculum.

In a discussion on an information/action agenda item, “Evolution versus Intelligent Design Taught in the Classroom,” during the district’s board meeting last Wednesday, trustees agreed to seek legal counsel regarding the issue.

“I think this will be a big issue in the Supreme Court before long,” said board president Stephen Darger, a practicing attorney and former police officer. “Maybe it will be with this school.”

Intelligent design is a theory which posits that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by an “unspecified higher power.”

Court cases in recent years involving the teaching of intelligent design in public schools, including two highly publicized California cases, have resulted in lawsuits against the schools and loss of government funding.

In a 2006 landmark lawsuit, a Dover, Penn., school was successfully blocked by Americans United from teaching intelligent design alongside evolution in high school biology classes. The court ruled that intelligent design was religion shrouded as science and that it cannot be taught as an alternative to evolution in public school science classes.

The following month, two rural California public high schools contended that the Pennsylvania ruling by Judge John E. Jones, an appointee of President Bush, opened the door to the possibility of teaching intelligent design in philosophy or religion classes.

But the new strategy was immediately struck down when a high school in Lebec, Calif., a rural town north of Los Angeles, terminated one such course as part of a court settlement involving 11 law suits. As a result, a hearing scheduled before a federal judge in upcoming days was cancelled.

In a similar case just days later Frazier Mountain High, a rural school district outside of Fresno, with pressure from lawsuits and Americans United, settled the issue with the agreement to halt its intelligent design course and to never again offer a class that promotes creationism.

Darger said that in order to legally teach intelligent design in a public school the subject would have to remain entirely secular and only offer possible explanations for what evolution cannot explain.

He cited a decision nearly 20 years ago in the case of Edwards v. Aguillar, where the Supreme Court concluded that “teaching a variety of scientific theories about the origins of humankind to school children might be validly done with the clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science instruction.”

In recent years many scientists have developed issues surrounding Darwinism and are uncovering evidence that is contradicting certain aspects of the widely accepted theory, Darger said.

“The key problem is that [intelligent design] isn’t viewed as an accepted scientific theory,” he said. “This isn’t an issue of creation versus evolution, and it’s not pointed toward religion. Intelligent design can help explain the problems with Darwinism and introduce ideas about life’s origins beyond evolution.”

College of the Siskiyous biology instructor Dave Clarke said he views intelligent design as a veiled attempt to impose creationism, a biblical-based view that credits God for the origin of life, on public schoolchildren. Public schools are required to teach evolution as the theory of how life originated " life forms have developed over millions of years on Earth, which is billions of years old.

Clarke said he respects creationism and intelligent design and that he doesn’t disregard their possibilities, but that it is not a viable science and has no place being taught along side of evolutionary biology.

“It’s a belief system, not a science,” he said. “Science is a process of inquiry " you have a question and you test it. Science doesn’t prove truth it disproves claims; a scientist starts with a hypothesis, tries to disprove it, and then either accepts or rejects it. Intelligent design offers no falsifying facts, nothing can be disproved.”

Clarke explained that many of the claims intelligent design supporters hold simply cannot be tested because of science’s inability to do so.

“Intelligent design is used to defend fallacies,” said Clarke. “Supporters say there is a lack of evidence for evolution, but a lack of evidence for one thing is not evidence for another.”

One major aspect that separates intelligent design from science, according to Clarke, is that science starts with a question that needs supporting answers, whereas intelligent design starts with an answer that needs supporting questions.

“Intelligent design states that because of the complexity of the universe it must have been created by an ‘unspecified’ higher power,” Clarke said. “This leaves the possibilities wide open for what the intelligent designer could be " aliens, multiple Gods....anything.”

BUESD trustee Steve Hart reported during the meeting that the subject would only be applied to the seventh-grade curriculum because it is the grade level at which Darwinian evolution is introduced.

“What we would like to do is include [in the curriculum] a way for students to look at evolution with critical minds and become aware of things (in evolution) that are no longer accepted,” said Hart, who proposed the idea. “Science has always excluded supernatural phenomenon. Although there are risks, this is something that would benefit the entire school.”

Hart also reported that he has been in contact with an attorney from Redding and suggested that board members seek advise as to legal ramifications. It was also reported that school funds could not fund either legal counsel or the proposed program.

School principal and superintendent Cynthia McConnell reported that teachers would not be legally required to teach intelligent design, or anything other than state education requirements.

Methodist advocates evolution
(Rosa Salter Rodriguez, Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, August 23, 2008)

A Fort Wayne man says he has finally nudged the United Methodist Church “into the 21st century” on the subject of evolution.

Al Kuelling, 67, a retired engineer trained in physics, wrote two of three proposals on evolution adopted as church policy at the denomination’s 2008 quadrennial national conference this summer in Fort Worth, Texas.

The votes capped a yearslong quest by Kuelling to have the church explicitly recognize evolution as a legitimate foundation of science and acknowledge that it is not at odds with theology.

But the endeavor at times has put Kuelling at odds with his pastor and his bishop.

“Methodism has been sidestepping the issue of evolution for quite a while now,” Kuelling says, adding he believes it had to be confronted to keep young people from leaving the church.

“I walked from my commitment to be a minister, and I walked away from the church for over a decade over this,” he says.

“Now Methodism is joining many other denominations around the world that find no conflict between religion and science.”

One of Kuelling’s proposals amends the Science and Technology section of the church’s Book of Discipline. It was approved by 80 percent of voting delegates.

It now states, in part: “We find that science’s descriptions of cosmological, geological and biological evolution are not in conflict with theology.”

The second proposal, which passed with 96 percent of the vote, was added to the church’s Book of Resolutions. It endorses The Clergy Letter Project led by David Zimmerman, an ecologist and dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Butler University in Indianapolis.

The proposal encourages Methodist pastors to sign an open letter on evolution that affirms that “the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist” and supports the teaching of evolution alone in schools instead of as “one theory among others.”

A third evolution resolution, advanced by a church regional body in Kansas, puts the church on record as opposing the teaching of “faith-based theories such as Creationism and Intelligent Design” in public-school science classes.

Kuelling says his resolutions were “a big rarity” because they were advanced and approved despite not coming from an official church body.

Although he is a member of First Wayne Street United Methodist Church, he developed the resolutions and attended the conference on his own, he says.

Dan Gangler, director of communication for the Indiana Area United Methodist Church, says only a small fraction of the 1,200 resolutions are introduced by individuals and even fewer pass at the committee level to be sent to the floor. Conference-goers typically trust the judgment of committees when they vote, he says.

According to his pastor, the Rev. Greg Enstrom, Kuelling was not an elected delegate and was not representing First Wayne Street church at the conference.

Enstrom, who acknowledges he and Keulling have had “some disagreements” on the issue, declines to say whether he agreed with the proposals because he had not read them as passed. He was not a conference delegate so he had no opportunity to vote on them.

But Enstrom says he is “not a creationist literalist” and adds: “I do believe that faith and science are not at odds.”

Bishop Michael Coyner of the Indiana Area United Methodist Church was reported to be on vacation by his secretary, Ed Metzler.

Coyner and Kuelling sparred over the issue in 2006, when Kuelling took out a half-page advertisement in The Journal Gazette challenging the church to provide guidance on creationism and intelligent design.

Metzler says a letter to the editor Coyner wrote then still reflects his views.

“In our church, creation and evolution are open for discussion,” the bishop wrote. “For us, creation is an issue of stewardship rather than a debate over creation vs. evolution.”

Coyner added that the church believes science and theology are “complementary rather than mutually incompatible.”

Metzler says he does not know whether the bishop signed a letter Kuelling says he sent to United Methodist bishops asking them to go on record as supporting the approved resolutions.

“I know that the bishop many times has refused to sign letters that don’t go through proper channels irregardless of how he feels about the subject,” Metzler says.

Kuelling says 47 active and retired United Methodist bishops, about 50 percent of their number, have signed the letter, but not Coyne.

He defended his Journal Gazette ad as a way of prodding church officials after a previous attempt to introduce a resolution through church channels failed. He says the proposal was not introduced for reasons that remain unclear to him.

“There are other bishops who are eager for what I’m doing, and they are saying it should have been done a long ago,” he says, adding he doesn’t think members will leave the church over the new position. He cites a survery of 3,000 United Methodists that found only about 7 percent are creationists.

Kuelling, who has worked with youth and whose wife, Judith, was a United Methodist Christian education director, says he felt he needed to press the issue because he had missed opportunities to pass along to young people his understanding of the biblical creation stories as “a metaphor.”

When a Methodist pastor cast the Bible in that light and told him many other Christians do as well, he says, he immediately felt comfortable again with the church.

If the church doesn’t acknowledge the legitimacy of evolution in science, religion comes off as “out of touch with reality” and loses credibility when it makes moral statements on areas involving science and technology,” he says.

“What we’re saying is the Bible … tells us who created the world and what we should do to care for it,” he says. “Genesis teaches about relationships and responsibility. But it does not teach science.”

Kuelling says, adding he believes it had to be confronted to keep young people from leaving the church.

Methodist advocates evolution
(Rosa Salter Rodriguez, Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, August 23, 2008)

It now states, in part: “We find that science’s descriptions of cosmological, geological and biological evolution are not in conflict with theology.”