The Limits of Ignorance 6

Cont'd

There is a history of the teaching of ID/Creationism. According Eugene C Scott, ID arose in the last decades of the 20th century and although "claimed to be a qualitatively different set of ideas from creation science--the earlier and arguably, most important form of twentieth century anti-evolutionism--ID is a subset of creation science" and though It ignores many creation science contentions such as the age of the earth or the reality of Noah's Flood, ..it does not present any unique ideas not previously found in its ancestor. " (Creation Science Lite: "Intelligent Design" as the New Anti-Evolutionism" in SCC 59-109)

The movement was started by one Henry M Morris, a Baptist who wrote That You Might Believe (1946) and then The Bible and Modern Science (1951) and the movement crystallized in 1961 when he published The Genesis Flood which he co-wrote with theologian John C Whitcomb in which they proposed that there is scientific evidence that earth is less than 10,000 old and that therefore evolution is impossible and to promote such view, they founded the Creation Research Society (CRS) and started in 1964 to publish The Creation Research Society Quarterly. They propagated the view that God created everything in the universe, including the solar system, earth, plants and animals and humans in their present form, over 6 24-hour days and that God created the "kinds" of living things with limited genetic variability. (SCC 60) such that there can be variation or evolution "within kinds" but not "new kinds" . But ID creationism started with the publication of The Mystery of Life's Origins: Reassessing current theories (ed.C B Thaxton, W. L Bradley & R L Olsen with a preface written by D. H. Kenyon 1984) which claims that we cannot explain life without without reference to an outside, intelligent cause (SCC 60) but without relying directly on the Bible, with no reference to a universal flood, to special creation of Adam and Eve or any other creature or to a young earth. They started an organization called the Foundation for Thought and Ethics (FTE) in Dallas to promote the idea. The term "Intelligent Design" first appeared in the book Of Pandas and People: the Central Question of Biological Origins ( P W Davis and D H Kenyon 1989, published by the FTE as a supplement to high school biology texts written from the Darwinian point of view setting out 6 case studies comparing Darwinian and ID explanations to see which better fitted the data,  with the ID explanations always prevailing. This the book was proposed for adoption as an approved textbook (thus eligible for purchase using state funds) in at least two states viz. Idaho and Alabama and in several school districts.There "intelligent design" is defined as a frame of reference that "locates the origin of new organisms in an immaterial cause: in a blueprint, a plan, a pattern, devised by an intelligent agent".

Then in 1991, the ID movement received a boost with the publication of Darwin on Trial by Phillip E Johnson, a Presbyterian law professor at the University of California (Berkeley) in which he criticized Richard Dawkins The Blind Watchmaker (1986). In the Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins says: "Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeless form of all life. It has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker." ( pp5-6). In his book, Johnson complains against Dawkins for using the assumption of naturalism as the only legitimate way of doing science, an assumption which he claims unfairly limited the range of possible explanations and ruled out a priori any consideration of theistic factors. The book was dismissed by noted biologist Stephen J. Gould as "scarcely more than an acrid little puff." I do not think that Johnson's criticism against Dawkins is justified for the simple philosophic reason embodied by what has been called "the
Occam's razor", which states that for reasons of economy, where one hypotheses is good enough for a particular purpose, there is no need to add a further and new hypothesis i.e. we should not multiply hypotheses unnecessarily. If the hypothesis of naturalism is reasonably sufficient,why add a further "supernatural" hypothesis of God to explain "natural" phenomena? Whatever the truth may be, the ID movement received another boost when in March 1992, a conference at the Southern Baptist University was held under the title "Darwinism: Scientific Inference or Philosophical Preference" including presentations by Johnson and ID proponents like Michael Behe (author of Darwin's Black Box: the Biochemical Challenge to evolution 1996 published by the Discovery Institute), William Dembski ( author of The Design Inference: Eliminating chance through small probabilities (1998) No Free lunch: why specified complexity cannot be purchased without intelligence (2001) and Stephen C Meyer.

Public opinion polls show that in America, more than 85% of the population profess themselves as Christians and the majority of them believe the Book of Genesis to be inerrant ( G. H Gallup Jr. 1990 Religion in America , G Wills 1990 Under God: Religion and American Politics; and E J Larson and L Witham 1997  Scientists are still keeping the Faith in Nature 386 435-36)  and and only one in ten believe in naturalistic evolution. Therefore conservative politicians know that they can get a lot of milage out of supporting the anti-evolution electorate especially in the mid-American states, the so-called Bible belt states. This is what Ronald Reagan and Bush did in their election campaigns. Both of them wanted equal time for ID in the American high school biology class. But what is the reaction of the naturalist evolutionists to ID? According to Petto and Godfrey, their reactions to ID were, as expected, overwhelmingly negative ( See R. C Pennock ed. 2001 Intelligent Design creationism and its critics: Philosophical, theological, and scientific perspectives; B Forrest & P R Gross 2004 Creationism's Trojan Horse: The wedge of intelligent Design).(SCC 54) They think however, that "as long as the Bible remains the most trusted and widely read text in America and scientists maintain their considerable cultural authority, consensus seem unlikely even if desirable." (SCC 54).

(To be cont'd)