Science v. Religion, cont'd

This is a lively discussion, so I'd like to keep it on the front page. Joe Kearns, in response to my initial post on this topic, writes in part:

To teach science as if it were Truth is a violation of the spirit of science, which is always aware of its unanswered questions. The teaching of the "time plus chance" paradigm of Darwinism as "received fact" leads the young non-scientist to believe what ain't so...that "scientists believe" this answers all the origin questions. They do not. There is a real problem with the paradigm, and that problem raises a real question whether we live in a "closed system" (the a-theistic view) or an "open system" (the someone/something else is out there messin with us view.) You might find it interesting to note that Francis Crick, along with several other atheistic scientists, believe in "panspermia", the idea that life evolved outside our planet and was planted here, precisely because of problems with the paradigm like those pointed out by Behe. To say with the authority of a teacher or a textbook, "science has found no need for a creator in its explanations of the world" is a religious statement, and simply untrue to boot.

Can we really interpret the 1st Amendment to disallow the discussion whether a creator exists? Especially when our scientists are haveing precisely that debate?

First, I want to reemphasize that while in the abstract, I am hard-pressed to mount a compelling argument for denying children in public school access to this debate, if not for purposes of hinting at some metaphysical truth than perhaps as an object lesson in the nature of scientific inquiry, I am still troubled by the evidence I see of what actually happens when such an endeavor comes to be. I also should acknowledge my limitations in this discussion, insofar as my knowledge of what various school systems have been doing is restricted to what I read in newspapers and the blogosphere. I wouldn't bet my whole stack of chips on either of their myriad recommendations. Furthermore, I have to object gently to Kearns' implicitly instrumentalist approach to the First Amendment. I have worked for a number of judges, at the state and federal level. I submit that most judges, notwithstanding their leanings, would express grave concern about couching the interpretation of the Bill of Rights strictly in terms of what result a given interpretation may or may not have, the Right's empirically incoherent alarums about an "activist judiciary" notwithstanding. None of which means there isn't a legitimate question there; it's merely an objection to loose terminology in a tight area of law: to frame it circularly and yet I think accurately, we will interpret the First Amendment precisely as we should, based not on whether the Framers' short-sightedness engendered an amendment ill-equipped to accommodate the teleological debates of future centuries, but on what the amendment says (about the discovery of which, debate will ever rage, but should never reduce to "because this interpretation would cause this, it simply must be the wrong interpretation," such normative judgments having only a modest role in American jurisprudence), mindful that if it proves problematic enough it can be changed through the democratic process (although I wouldn't hold my breath until that happens). Of course, this hardly means that the First Amendment's implications for public education are clear or settled; neither is true, as evidenced by the ongoing debate.

Kearns and I agree that problems with, or limitations of Darwinian theory ought to be openly acknowledged. Legitimate alternatives warrant exploration. I feel the same way about the teaching of history. That I may have arrived at certain conclusions about the reasons for this or that event, or the intrinsic worth of this or that decision and outcome, I wouldn't deny our children access to as much historical data as possible so that they might form their own opinions. This is the nature of critical inquiry, and it ought to be the essence of our children's education. Sadly, it is not; the ability to think critically is being sundered to various ideogically loaded sacred cows and market imperatives. This bodes poorly for all sides of the debate: neither will Darwin nor ID be viewed with the sort of jaundiced skepticism that I think all claims to Fundamental Truth ought to be.

It's misleading, however, to claim that scientists simply do not believe Darwin works as a theory -- though I will readily grant that an assertion that a given theoretical framework obviates the explanatory need for a designer qua deity is, in some limited sense, a religous claim and ought to be evaluated on the same terms as any other religious claims. Natural selection as a complete theory retains its accomplished, articulate bevy of advocates. The late Stephen Gould comes to mind. That Hawking continues to struggle against the idea of a theological explanation does not discredit him per se -- most would agree he is among the most brilliant scientists the world has known. It's unfair to ascribe to him a truculence, as though even were his explorations to lead him ineluctably to a deistic explanation he would reject it as part of some conspiracy-of-one to mislead the world. Furthermore, we find more than just ID or Frick's "panspermia" proffered up as theoretical constructs to help us get from there to here. Robert Wright's Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, while focusing on the past few tens of thousands of years of human development, posits various constructs for understanding a sort of directedness to evolution that requires no designer or creator. Granted, Wright does not attempt to account for the early leaps of complexity that Behe identifies as the biggest problems for NS, but it still might inform the debate. Kurzweil's work on machine intelligence and perhaps spirituality (his word) also might bear on the topic. And I'm confident that there are others.

The problem -- and the source of my reflexive concern vis-a-vis education -- is that it's wrongheaded to treat NS and ID (taking two dominant examples and letting them stand in for the larger spectrum of accounts) as mutually inconsistent. As I understand Behe's ID, it wouldn't supplant NS. Rather, it takes the fossil record and the evidence of widespread and sweeping natural adaptation as granted. The principle issue is that there is a gap in the NS account, and ID offers an explanation at least as credible as any other. As I began to note earlier, I don't thnk this is how the situation is seen among those teachers, administrators, and parents who are most outspoken in their determination to see ID in the classroom. For those NS-is-just-a-theory types, ID does or ought to supplant Darwin's account as the superior account -- not for its ability to address small problems in an exhaustively documented, verified, and predictive theory but for its suggestion of something wholly outside that theory. That's not Behe's ID, and it's not one that I think is defensible in public education.

The idea of truth is, of course, problematic in the sciences. But as far as theories go, NS has tremendous evidentiary support in its broad strokes -- indeed, I question whether many biological theories are more irrefutable at the general level. Whether some designer interceded early in the process, or whether the initial building blocks came from some extraterrestrial source (which to my mind is the same thing, because if this stuff was too complicated to occur here as posited by NS, it also would have been too complicated to occur spontaneously elsewhere, thus, no matter how long the consequent regress, even Frick's account ultimately requires some first step in establishing complexity somewhere -- in a word, a designer), is irrelevant to whether NS is just another theory when its explanatory power is so robust and its empirical underpinnings so widespread and well understood. If there's a gap somewhere along the way, students should know about it. But that's very different than saying students should be taught that NS theory is merely on a par with others that are less thoroughly validated by such voluminous evidence. That is why I previously said I believed NS is the Alpha and the Omega: should any of these alternative theories go so far as, or be presented as going so far as, to cast into doubt the basic principles of NS, I think they have left the realm of science and broken decisively toward religion (or metaphysics, if you prefer). And it's there that the First Amendment as it has been consistently interpreted comes into play.

Which leads me to qualify an overstatement I made earlier: perhaps it is not impossible to present ID as one possible solution to a fairly fine-grained problem with NS. Maybe that particular (Behe-ian) presentation of ID is entirely acceptable under the First Amendment. I still hold that we would have to be ever vigilant with regard to the individual treatments of the issue by the many educators who have indicated their willingness to use the chalkboard as a pulpit.

And now if you'll excuse me, my brain hurts.

"In the Case of Science vs. Nature . . . "

The title, perhaps, is a bit misleading, but it makes me giggle. In any event, this post at Dialogical Coffee House led me to this article at ReasonOnline, which in turn led me to the Times Op-Ed that engendered this latest round in the ongoing debate.

The Times piece, by Michael J. Behe, a professor of biological science at Lehigh University, aims to dispel what he argues are popular mis-associations of so-called "Intelligent Design" theory with those who would have public schools reject Darwin's natural selection as, at best, "just a theory," if not omitting to mention it entirely (sadly, something plenty of people in this country would prefer, as the most recent spate of attempts to do just that plainly illustrates). He speaks to the premises on which Intelligent Design is based, and emphasizes that these principles are not (or should not be) in themselves objectionable to scientists of an Enlightenment / scientific method bent.

In Reason, Ronald Bailey takes issue with Behe -- particularly, Behe's founding the notion of intelligent design on the premise that "there are no research studies indicating that Darwinian processes can make molecular machines of the complexity we find in the cell." Behe's claim is that these molecular machines, or in some cases the cellular machines in which they function are irreducibly complex, and that absent some sort of intelligent design -- which, to be fair, he at least concedes might not be a deity but rather something in nature (a claim the coherence of which exceeds my grasp just now, and one that Bailey explicitly rejects and DCH commenter, Joe Kearns, implicitly rejects, but let's grant it for argument's sake) -- they could not have arrived at their levels of complexity since to remove any one component of the cellular / molecular mechanism would bring the organism's life to a screeching halt. If these irreducible cellular machines were not made of whole cloth, all at once, then they would never have come into being, is the proposition that Bailey ascribes, I think correctly, to Behe. Bailey is, in some sense, quibbling with Behe's attempt to distinguish his ID theory from a purely dogmatic creationist account, and perhaps suggesting that it's a trojan horse.

As a good, the-first-amendment-can-never-be-strong-enough liberal, I'm wary of Behe's arguments for precisely this reason. After all, glazed with a patina of Enlightenment science, religion can become palatable, or rather it can become difficult to persuasively resist by those who recognize it for what it is. It is difficult rationally to object that Darwinism is the Alpha and Omega of life on earth, although that's what ID attempts to do. Darwinism is the best account offered yet, in my opinion and (more importantly) in the opinion of many people smarter than I. But so was Newton's account of mechanics until Einstein came along. And Einstein, for that matter, roundly rejected much of quantum theory that has now been verified or at least appears to be true.

Nevertheless, I fear that this aspect of Bailey's critique is unfair. I'll confess that the phrase Intelligent Design recalls to mind those religious network shows that attempt to mathematically square the prodigious evidence in support of Darwinism with the biblical math favored by their particular Christian denominations to pinpoint a date for the first day of Creation. And I feel like Behe's account clarified some things for me. Moreover, I'm not unfamiliar with Behe's (stated) orientation toward this issue. One of my physics teachers in college, a man who could carry a full tenure-track load in advanced physics and still attend law school at night (which, by the way, makes for an awful professor, since on more than one occasion he used his fastidiously tidy law school notebooks and study methods to illustrate why our note-taking and organizational skills as well as our study (non-)habits were abysmal, and largely to blame for our fate, one and all, as failures at grasping all things electromagnetic), and who was surely in virtue of his background of a devoutly logical inclination, was quite comfortable on one occasion opining -- with a hand-wave and in an astonishingly curt and cursory way -- "Natural selection doesn't get us here from there. Something's missing."

Brian at the Dialogical Coffee House, meanwhile, focuses on two paragraphs in Bailey's piece, in the first of which Bailey asks why ID shouldn't be acknowledged side by side with natural selection as a competing scientific account of life's terrestrial lineage. In virtue of this debate, my answer is less certain than it was, although the second Bailey point Brian highlights has something to do with my feeling that the scientific basis for ID is in some sense beside the point. Bailey observes, "Intelligent design theorists and their claims to scientific legitimacy aside, the only reason the vast majority of people who want intelligent design taught in high school want it is because they believe it will undercut the corrosive effects of evolutionary biology on the religious beliefs of their children." The obverse of this proposition, however, and one Bailey only implicitly acknowledges much earlier in his piece, is that the only reason the areligious or otherly religious would have it kept out of school is their fear that it is a trojan horse in the belly of which it bears scripture, as the Leviathan did Noah.

I should tip my hat on this point to Joe Kearns for his similar comment at DCH. And a propos, Kearns also writes that

[t]he "irreducible complexity" problem pointed out by Behe is philosophically and practically insurmountable, and would deep-six the whole [NS] edifice EXCEPT that there is no god-less alternative theory. Intelligent design is promising because, though it involves a Designer, it does not rely upon any revelation or authoritative knowledge about that Designer, but works outward from the world-as-found, from the material of the world. It therefore avoids the issues of "whose revelation?" In my opinion, this is why you actually find more believers in the science faculties than in the humanities faculties in the secular academy. The physicists are finding themselved forced, by the facts, to consider the existence of God as a compelling inference. ID is the same process, occurring in Biology.

The question, I suppose, is whether both sides are simply doing their respective jobs in pushing against each other from the extreme perimeters of the positions they defend, locked in battle over radically opposed ideas that do not represent the more moderate views of many of the people in whose name such battle is done to much fanfare and distraction (sound familiar)? Should both sides behave, as they have behaved, like lawyers, testing the extremes in hopes that the final result will incrementally favor their clients in direct proportion to the zealousness of their advocacy? When it comes to teaching our children, is an adversarial approach to curricula development appropriate?

I suppose that while my intention here has been more exegetical than critical, I am intrigued by Kearn's choice of words regarding "the existence of God as a compelling inference" (my emphasis). Is that all any scientific conclusion is, "a compelling inference"? I suppose there's a level of brute epistemological truth to this, but when, as Bailey notes, even the Pope grants a certain legitimacy to natural selection (I'm taking Bailey's word for this), I'm not sure that the ID argument for God is as compelling as the NS argument for Darwin's account of evolution, much as Kearns is unconvinced by Bailey's ascription to others the critique that if ID can be taught so should be astrology, phrenology, etc. (oddly, Bailey throws psychoanalysis in there with water-witching; while psychoanalysis may not lay claim to the sort of scientific validity that special relativity does, I don't think I'd file it with a list of debunked quackery that might as well include alchemy for all its validity). But then at the end of the day if it's only a matter of competing likelihoods -- to be reductive, say, Darwin's account is 65% likely to be true and ID's 22% likely to be true -- how do we decide which likelihood prevails, or at what level of likelihood we draw the line (after all, to the extent the teaching of ID is linked to religious creation, how do we draw the line as to which creation stories (and there are probably more of those in the world than there are discrete ethnicities, faiths, etc.) between what we should teach and what we shouldn't.

Which leads me to again don my lawyer hat, and speak to this from a (necessarily abstract) First-Amendment point of view (caveat: I'm woefully underqualified to do so, but hopefully more qualified than at least some of you): If we grant Kearns' point that ID favors no specific religion's creation story, but instead simply posits some designer based on the evidence of the "world-as-found," as he elegantly describes it, does that protect it from First-Amendment scrutiny? Should it? Perhaps. To the extent any one religion's account is barred by First Amendment jurisprudence (and, at least for now, it mostly is), one shouldn't be able to do an end-run by simply taking the specific references to a particular God or source of scripture out of the story. If no proponent of ID can escape the inference of some designer qua deity, than ID has no place in the schools. Why? Because the First Amendment doesn't bar reference to Christianity or Judaism or Islam, per se; rather, it precludes the presentation of scriptural material in public classrooms generally.

On the other hand, public-school history books certainly account for the role of religion in the formation of the modern world, and the religious framework for certain works of art also can be acknowledged and addressed for their contextual relevance. Which might be the saving grace for ID in the schools: the reason those other accounts are permissible, is because they're not scriptural in nature, in no material way construable as proselytizing, but are, as already dubbed, exegetical, contextual. Similarly, one might understand the likely religious overtones of any presentation of ID as incidental precisely because they don't favor any particular creation story's designer. And this is where Behe makes a convincing case: I have trouble seeing, either from a legal or a moral position, how in itself the teaching of ID would be problematic assuming it would be presented as a school of thought that challenges natural selection's most controversial assumptions and argues from the scientific material that undergirds the work of the Behes of the world, as opposed to the naked dogma of, say, a Falwell's account, or, for that matter, the Old Testament's account.

Which brings me back to where I started: Behe presents a fairly persuasive case that ID as understood by its more sophisticated advocates and researchers may well not be terribly religious (in the sense of denominational) in itself. Unfortunately, Bailey also is correct that this issue, rightly or wrongly, has become another battleground for the left and right (by and large), and thus in practice is heavily politicized. The problem is that not only do ID's avatars in many cases have ulterior motives; I think many of those administrators who line up in support of it are no different in their ends, are no more likely to read Behe's scientific defense of ID as a legitimate theory than their leftward opponents. And if battle necessarily pits those sides against each other (yet again) on the text of the Establishment Clause, and ejects from that field those people who make the scientific cases pro and con, well then the goal has to be to minimize the damage either by finding independently minded scientists to provide the ID account and ensure that individual teachers don't stray (an impossible task), or by omitting it altogether. It appears to me that the courts have reached a similar conclusion, though perhaps not by such a tortured path: faced with cases like this, of great moment to the social fabric and with profound First-Amendment implications, judges are hard-pressed to disregard entirely what will really happen in the schools in the event of one or another ruling. And I think that, more than anything else, is why the ID advocates are faring poorly in the courts. I probably agree with this outcome, but more as a pragmatist than as a dyed in the wool lefty.

UPDATE: I realize the title quote is wrongly stated. But I don't want to mess with the permalink. It should read, "In the Case of Science vs. Religion," or something like that. It's a Simpsons quote (of course). Anyone who wants to correct me feel free.

UPDATE 2: This discussion continues here.

String Theory

So at last, I believe it's time to introduce all four of you to one of my favorite blogs out there (again with the apologies for not yet stealing the code to put permanent links to these places somewhere on this site), Zulieka Unstrung. In this post, Zulieka takes on the Big Bang itself, highlighting what she finds to be a breakdown in the intuitive framework of the theory. Like hers, my physics, especially my astrophysics, is entirely too deficient to wrap itself around various conundra and dilemmas implied by the discovery at the heart of this not entirely current story. I should probably acknowledge that my physics, notwithstanding two years of it at a top college, appears to be far more deficient than hers, even though she's entirely too humble about her own ability, for it seems to me that she's made a compelling case for some pretty sophisticated problems with the new(ish) data. Anyway, since a few of you have your moments with such things, perhaps you can drop by and try to answer her questions. God knows I can't.

(Fair Warning for those of you who work for Big Brother or have delicate sensibilities (and if you do, please go away): Zulieka occasionally posts racy photos, often of herself (or so I presume, though how can one really know online?), so you probably don't want to call up her blog on your monitor when someone might be looking over your shoulder. That said, she's also quite beautiful, so those of you inclined toward women will probably find something to like on her site once in a while, even if you don't find the tremendous appeal I do in her elegant and eloquent musings about art, music, sex, and her incipient motherhood (in which, if she happens to encounter this post, she should know I wish her well).)