Francis J. Beckwith wrote:
Frank, applying this argument, do you think that Edwards v. Aguillard was wrongly decided? I think it can rather easily be established that what was called "creation science" in the Louisiana law (and the Arkansas law dealt with in McLean) was a set of claims about science and natural history that were demonstrably false (the evidence is overwhelming that the Earth is not 6000 years old and the geologic record was not deposited by a global flood) and that were advocated only because they were viewed as supporting a particular religious doctrine. Given those facts, is it unreasonable for the court to have said that requiring the teaching of this idea was an endorsement of a specific religious viewpoint? Well, I think it's incoherent on a couple of different levels. The first is one on which the DI seems to agree with me, that it is self-contradictory. In one part of the policy they say that they will not address the issue of origins at all, while in another they explicitly refer to ID as a theory of origins. But part of what makes it incoherent, in my view, is that the ID critique of evolution is itself incoherent. It's incoherent in the sense that it doesn't actually say anything that can be tested. With the traditional young earthers, you have a model purported to explain the natural history of the earth and from that model you can derive hypotheses that can be tested. If all fossil-bearing strata were deposited in a single global flood, this premise leads logically to certain conclusions that can then be tested against the data to ascertain whether it is true or not. With ID, on the other hand, there is no such model and thus no resulting statements or predictions that can be used to test its veracity. They do not tell us who or what the intelligent designer is, or what this intelligent designer did, at what points in the development of life the designer might have intervened or how they did so. They seem to accept common descent to some extent, but insist that at some unspecified time an unknown designer intervened to do *something*, without knowing what. Nor has any advocate of ID ever suggested any research that would help us define any of those undefined aspects of the idea. All of their time and what little actual research they do is done solely to establish that there are areas in which evolution does not have a well-defined and established explanation for a given phenomenon (the bacterial flagellum, in Behe's famous example, or the blood clotting cascade), with the implication being that if evolution hasn't yet explained how it happened, a supernatural intelligence must have done....well, something. It's a classic god of the gaps argument, it seems to me. If they ever actually come up with a positive way to test ID - as opposed to attempts to show evolution is an inadequate explanation - then perhaps this "theory" could be taken seriously as an alternative to evolution. But there is no such test, and no such model from which such a test might be derived. There simply isn't a coherent theory here to teach. Ed Brayton |
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