Evolutionist, Peter Ward, from Washington University, and Intelligent Design theorist, Stephen Meyer, of the Discovery Institute squared off in debate at Town Hall in Seattle on the topic of intelligent design. You can listen to the audio here. It reveals just how much the theory of evolution relies on dogma rather than empirical evidence. It was Meyer, not Ward who was willing to talk about the empirical science of it all. Check it out.
May 3, 2006
Meyers and Ward Debate Intelligent Design and Evolution
Posted by Jason Dulle under Apologetics, Intelligent Design[9] Comments
Thinking to Believe 
May 11, 2006 at 3:18 pm
Listened to the debate and enjoyed it. Will probably have to listen to it a couple more times to really get a feel for it. Simply an observation, but I really don’t like how Ward comes off as a speaker (I’ve listened to him in other taped events) at times very sarcastic and slightly rude at times…particularily annoying were his attempts to appeal to experts in the audience, which Meyers in the end basically told him to knock it off…lol
Meyers has always struck me as exceedingly well spoken and well verse in all areas of science. My first impression is that he always seemed to have at least a somewhat plausible answer/response to every question broached to him… I’m thinking about going down to Biola Univ. tommorow for the “Intelligent Design Under-fire” event… If I do I’ll let you know how it goes…
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May 15, 2006 at 10:51 am
Upon listening to the debate/discussion for a 2nd and 3rd time a couple of things came to my mind… Meyers undoubtedly prevailed in a debate of ideas and snswers. I’m almost embarrassed to even say so but for those who question please listen to the debate yourself. Making appeals to experts in the audience, cutting off the other speaker and crushing potential points of dispute by simply saying “trust me” is not convincing at all to anyone who is seeking out answers objectively to this subject. Meyers fielded the majority of Q&A’s from the audience and made a convincing case for I.D.. However, what I feel is the biggest chink in the armor for I.D., is an adequate answer for when scientist’s should give up looking for answers to any issue/problem/research and simply say something is irreducibly complex. Should science say “uncle” whenever they bump their heads on a seemingly unanwerable question? I would like I.D. theorist to fully articulate the criteria for when to envoke the “intelligently designed” label on something…
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May 18, 2006 at 6:35 am
Yes, most seem to agree that Meyers was the better man, and the winner of this debate.
You asked “when scientists should give up looking for answers to any issue/problem/research and simply say something is irreducibly complex.” I think there is something amiss in your question. Affirming that some biological entity is irreducibly complex is not a label that a scientist haphazardly attaches to it to quell further research. It is through an empirical investigation of the entity that its irreducibly complex nature is determined (Dembski has written considerably on the criteria for determining design). Few scientists doubt that the systems Behe calls irreducibly complex are indeed irreducibly complex. Where they disagree with him is on the mechanism for producing such systems. Behe argues that such systems can only be made by a designing intelligence, while his detractors argue that evolution could do it (and yet they provide no plausible chemical pathway).
The fact of the matter is that there is no naturalistic, blind mechanism known to produce irreducibly complex things. The only thing known to produce such are intelligent minds. Scientists can continue to seek a naturalistic, blind mechanism for the production of irreducibly complex things if they want, but they should not fault ID theorists for concluding that the best explanation known to us is that such things were produced by a designing intelligence. It will not do to say that even though no other irreducibly complex things are produced by blind, natural forces that biological irreducibly complex things were. That’s not science, but a philosophical belief without supporting empirical evidence.
Your question touches on the Darwinists assertion that ID is a “science stopper.” I think there is more rhetoric than substance to this charge. ID is not a science stopper (“uncle”). ID is not based on what we don’t know, but on what we do know. It is not an argument from ignorance, but an argument from positive evidence in the natural world coupled with the scientific principle of inference to the best explanation.
Should we look for naturalistic causes to Mt. Rushmore? No. Why? Because we detect design and conclude that an intelligent agent caused it. Nobody gives the “science-stifler” response to someone who explains the origin of the pyramids or Stonehenge by appealing to an intelligent agent. So why is it different when it comes to the biological world, which is unbelievably more complex? If we have good reason to believe that an intelligent agent was involved, then it would be ludicrous to keep searching for its cause.
If anyone is crying “uncle” it’s the Darwinists, because they never give a plausible pathway for how something evolved. They just say “natural selection working on variation did it” and call it a day. In fact, acceptance of evolution stopped scientific discovery in the area of supposed junk DNA. Because people accepted the notion of evolution they thought the non-coding DNA in the cell must be leftover junk from the millions of years of evolution, and thus they did not explore whether or not it had any use. ID theorists, working on different assumptions, investigated junk DNA and lo and behold, it does have a function! It’s not junk after all. ID does not stifle scientific inquiry, but promotes it. And we must remember that the purpose of science is to get to the truth, not to just do studies. If we’ve found the truth out about some area of the natural world we move on to something else. That’s not a science stopper; that’s scientific progress.
Robert Laughlin, a Nobel laureate physicist concerned with the properties of matter that make life possible, noted himself how the theory of evolution itself is often a science stopper:
“Much of present-day biological knowledge is ideological. A key symptom of ideological thinking is the explanation that has no implications and cannot be tested. I call such logical dead ends antitheories because they have exactly the opposite effect of real theories: they stop thinking rather than stimulate it. Evolution by natural selection, for instance, which Charles Darwin originally conceived as a great theory, has lately come to function more as an antitheory, called upon to cover up embarrassing experimental shortcomings and legitimize findings that are at best questionable and at worst not even wrong. Your protein defies the laws of mass action? Evolution did it! Your complicated mess of chemical reactions turns into a chicken? Evolution! The human brain works on logical principles no computer can emulate? Evolution is the cause!”
I leave you with a quote from Frank Beckwith. He wrote:
“Many people claim that science is inexorably wedded to naturalism and that a non-naturalist account, such as ID, is a “science stopper” because there could always be a naturalistic answer that has yet to be discovered. But such a view of science is unfalsifiable, for it is saying that we should never accept that the non-naturalist account is better than the naturalist account even if the arguments for the former are far superior to the latter. So, in principle, no evidence can ever falsify the naturalist component in this definition of science. But if falsifiability is a necessary condition for science, then this view of science must be rejected because it is unfalsifiable.”
Well said!
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May 18, 2006 at 3:39 pm
You make alot of valid points, most of which I would agree with. Let me touch on what I don’t necessarily agree with… In my experience studying the matter most ID proponents use analogies similiar to the one you put forward, “Should we look for naturalistic causes to Mt. Rushmore? No. Why? Because we detect design and conclude that an intelligent agent caused it. Nobody gives the “science-stifler” response to someone who explains the origin of the pyramids or Stonehenge by appealing to an intelligent agent. So why is it different when it comes to the biological world, which is unbelievably more complex?” Now, I understand analogies are not bulletproof, but I think this is critical. Biology is the study of life and of living organisms. The problem is that these analogies regarding Mt. Rushmore, Rosetta Stone, pyramids, and etc…are NON-living objects. It’s simple to infer “intelligently designed” when looking at a building or monument. Which is precisely why I can sympathize with the scientist/biologist who doesn’t find this analogy compelling. Dealing with living organisms/entities you simply don’t do this. Scientists use a reductioning approach towards research/study because let’s face it, that’s what works both intuitively and practically speaking… Here is a quote by Richard Gallagher and Tim Appenzeller found in an abstract titled “Beyond Reductionalism” for the journal Science, “Questions in physical chemistry can be understood in terms of atomic physics, cell biology in terms of how biomolecules work, and organisms in terms of how their component cell systems interact. We have the best of reasons for taking this reductionist approach–it works. It has been the key to gaining useful information since the dawn of Western science and is deeply embedded in our culture as scientists and beyond.” The irony in this article is that the authors highlight some of the problems with reductionism. The quote however articulates the reasoning behind the usage of reduction in the scientific fields. Specifically, those involved with the study of living systems.
Understanding that God is the creator of the universe, a Christian can still look at something like a chicken and understand that it was once a chick, was once an egg, was once a embryo…etc The difference with say a pro-Darwinian scientist is that they throw “God” out of the equation. Behe’s argument is very compelling and I think it has legs to stand on. What I am trying to express is that I can again “sympathize” with the scientist who says, “…never mind this bump in the road…I believe there is a naturalistic answer out there for this conondrum…”
I am familiar with William Dembski, but I cannot say I’ve read any of his published books as of yet. I have promised myself I would, because I have found him to be very insightful on the subject.
On a side note…have you read Thomas Woodward’s – Doubts about Darwin: A History of Intelligent Design ? This book gives a rhetorical overview through the framework of Kant’s “paradigm shift” of the ID movement and it’s approach towards challenging neo-Darwinism. I highly recommend the book as it’s not your run of the mill ID vs. Darwin overview.
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May 18, 2006 at 4:16 pm
I just noticed that I put “Kant’s paradigm shift…” I meant to say Kuhn’s(as in Thomas Kuhn) thoughts on the process of scientific revolutions.
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May 19, 2006 at 1:19 pm
Phil,
I’m about to do a blog-comment no-no: dump lots of info on you. But I think you’ll enjoy it.
Yes, I do understand that in the analogies we are dealing with non-living things, and in biology we are dealing with living things, but that difference is irrelevant to the central issue: design detection. How do we detect design? You said it’s “simple to infer ‘intelligently designed’ when looking at a building or monument.” But why is that? How do we know the pyramids are designed rather than the result of millions of years of sand and wind storms? Did we see them being formed to know they were designed? No. But we infer it because there are certain characteristics about the pyramids that give evidence that a designing intelligence, rather than blind unguided processes is responsible. It’s those characteristics/principles that allow us to see the difference between a regular mountain and Mt. Rushmore as well, or between a chip of rock and an arrowhead.
Design detection is not limited to non-living things. It is an intuitive inference based on particular characteristics that can be delineated and even explained in mathematical terms. The way we detect design in non-living things is the same way we detect design in living things. When we look at living things, and break them down into their parts, and examine the way those parts relate to each other, coupled with the chances that such parts could be formed by slight, chance, successive changes over time, the most obvious conclusion is that an intelligent agent designed them. This is especially the case with irreducibly complex biological systems, because we know of no naturalistic workable way of creating them.
Your distinction between living vs. non-living things reminds me of Darwinists who say the design argument fails because it relies on knowledge of human designers vs. non-human designers. Colin Thomas of the Discovery Institute explains and counters:
Opponents of design often claim that…we are comfortable attributing the causation to people X because they are human and human intelligence is something we are familiar with. Intelligent design, they say, is a different story because it invokes supernatural intelligence, something that we are not empirically familiar with. I have several issues with this argument (not the least its mischaracterization of design), but here I will simply say that it misses the point. There may be a distinction between the familiarity of the causative agent in the thought experiment and that in the current debate (i.e. we are familiar with human intelligence, but we are not likely familiar with the intelligence of the designer), but there is not a distinction in the familiarity of the causation per se. An analogy to what I mean is this: whether a dog knocks a lamp off of a table, or a child knocks a lamp off of a table the causation is the same–enough momentum is transferred to the lamp from a moving object to overcome its inertia and cause it to fall. It does not matter if the momentum originally came from the child or the dog. In a similar way, intelligent causes are intelligent causes whether they arise from familiar or unfamiliar agents.
In a similar way it does not matter whether we are dealing with living or non-living entities. There are certain characteristics of intelligent causes and when we see them, we infer a designing intelligence whether it be in a non-living thing like a pyramid or a living thing like a human being.
Continued in next post…
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May 19, 2006 at 1:20 pm
…continued from above
Yes, methodological naturalism has given us access to a lot of truth about our world, but there are areas in which it seems powerless to explain it (particularly the origin of the cosmos and life, which have not submitted to naturalistic explanations). The issue is not the relative success of methodological naturalism, but its universal success. If it has not been universally successful (it hasn’t), and certain features of our world resist incorporation into that scheme (they do), then the approach is suspect. It’s only a working hypothesis that can be modified or disregarded when it is no longer useful as an explanation of reality. As Dembski wrote in “The Vise Strategy”, “But if methodological materialism’s authority as a rule for science derives from its success in guiding scientific inquiry, wouldn’t it be safe to say that it is merely a working hypothesis for science? And as a working hypothesis, aren’t scientists free to discard it when they find that it “no longer works”?
Even physicist, Mark Perakh, acknowledged that science should not exclude the possibility of supernatural causation in his book Unintelligent Design:
“[A] definition of science should not put any limits on legitimate subjects for the scientific exploration of the world. Indeed, although science has so far had no need to attribute any observed phenomena to a supernatural cause, and in doing so has achieved staggering successes, there still remain unanswered many fundamental questions about nature. … Until such answers are found, nothing should be prohibited as a legitimate subject of science, and excluding the supernatural out of hand serves no useful purpose.” (Perakh 2004, 358)
If the empirical evidence points to, and the best explanation seems to be an intelligent cause, then we should be allowed to accept that answer as the truth unless or until the empirical evidence points in another direction. Unfortunately, a particular philosophical view of the purpose and goal of science is restricting people’s ability to find the best answers. Scientists today seem to be more concerned about finding the right KIND of answers than they are the right answers; i.e. answers that comport with philosophical naturalism. As Nancy Pearcey wrote, “Should the definition of science restrict inquiry to natural causes alone? Or should inquiry be free to follow the evidence wherever it leads—whether it points to a natural or an intelligent cause?” Do we follow the scientific evidence to wherever it leads, or “only where materialism allows”? (Dembski)
Fred Skiff, professor of physics at the University of Iowa thinks scientists should be open to the possibility of an Intelligent Designer of the universe. He said, “It’s part of science to consider what blinders you might be wearing. Materialists put conditions on science that things can only exist if they satisfy materialism. I think that is a mistake.”
Materialists deny the possibility of God’s involvement “because it doesn’t fit into their conception of the world. That’s not science; that’s metaphysics. It’s not looking at the world around you. It’s closing your eyes and saying that ‘Nothing can exist except for things that can fit into my theory.’” He believes those who are pushing to exclude ID from science are doing so because they have declared philosophical materialism as the definition of science. “They are saying that anyone who doesn’t have our point of view isn’t a legitimate scientist. That’s coming on pretty strong.”
Jason
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May 20, 2006 at 12:12 pm
It took me hours to read through your last post…j/k lol… Thanks for the info…there were some things you mentioned though that I wanted to respond to. Which I will shortly…
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May 22, 2006 at 1:27 pm
You agreed in your last post that reductionism and methodological naturalism works. My understanding is that you would also agree that we have come to a lot of modern scientific understanding and truth through the use of reduction. So essentially you agree with the crux of my main contention with ID as it stands now.
I agree, issues of the cosmos are not easily explained via methodological naturalism. By it’s very nature, dealing with the origins of the cosmos your dealing in large part with things that are not tangible. Biology, on the other hand is much more testable and easier to study relatively speaking.
You wrote that design detection is an, “intuitive inference”. If true, I think it’s obviously subjective to each researcher/scientist, so that isn’t saying much(I’m not just being simply argumentitive either)It kind of reminds me of when I hear people say that that seeing the Oneness of God in the Bible is just so easy. No, actually it’s not. I think we both would agree to a certain extent, on how we could understand someone picking up the Bible could view the nature of God as a trinity.
Moving right along…My point again is simply, I can can understand the hesitance on Darwinian side of the ledger. You gave an analogy in your last post about the dog and the lamp. The main point(as I understand it) is that we can infer that somebody knocked the lamp down and that we don’t necessarily have to know WHO or WHAT knocked it down…I completely agree. In regards to what we are discussing, identifying the designer is not in any way essential.
Peter Ward or the moderator brought up a point in the debate that I thought was insteresting. They noted that by far the majority of those that espouse the ID theory identify the “Designer” as “God.” Well we both understand that regardless of who or what they believe in is completely irrelevant to the central issue of the debate…whether things in nature are “Intelligently Designed.” However, what it does display is how it could be possible that the presuppositions of pro-IDer or Darwinist could effect how they interpret the same problem…for example Ken Miller and Michael Behe with the cell.
ID is the new kid on the block…methodological naturalism has been proven to be pretty reliable in getting to solid scietific fact or theories. So I ask, can you at least sympathize (not agree) with how ID theory in some aspects is not accepted as the triumphant go to theory when naturalism doesn’t easily apply?
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