And this is a problem, how?

Bill Dembski just can't seem to manage his frustrations very well. Now, he's annoyed that the demon hordes are punishing all the positive reviews for his new book on Amazon. Here's how Dembski tries to sublimate his anger:

William Dembski:
While such behavior by Darwinists may seem unjust, there are two upsides:

(1) As the saying goes, there’s no negative publicity.

One word, Bill: Dover.

William Dembski:
(2) I’ve been talking with the producers of EXPELLED (www.expelledthemovie.com) about making this book a companion volume to Ben Stein’s film.* Thanks PZ Myers, Wesley Elsberry, Peter Irons, and others for strengthening my hand in these negotiations.

We'd have to ask them to be sure, but I'd say Myers, Elsberry et al would be happy to tie The Design of Life to Expelled. Does Dembski think the movie is going to add some gravitas to his book? Make it more scientific? It may add a little more "snide" factor, but how does that help? I'd say getting those together would be a good thing.

They deserve each other.

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Does UD Have ODD?

I'm reminded by today's post on global warming by DaveScot over at Uncommon Descent today by a child I know who my wife says has "Oppositional Defiant Disorder", or "ODD" for short. Now, I'm NOT saying here that DaveScot is being childish in this post, or that UD is childish in some general sense -- that is an idea that has some things to recommend it, but it's not my point here.

The point of the connection I've made is that a child with ODD is not just at odds with a particular policy or decision, but has a basic antagonism to authority itself -- an 'oppositional orientation' as a means of approaching the world.

What's that got to do with DaveScot's latest post?
My answer would be to ask what global warming has to do with ID? The folks at Uncommon Descent aren't chained to any particular topic or argument than I am on this blog, but look at these entries from the past few weeks:

• The New York Times - Et tu, Brute?

• Pope for sound stewardship

• Skeptical Scientists Urge World To ‘Have the Courage to Do Nothing’ At UN Conference

• Climate Change - Is CO2 the cause?

• Weather Channel Founder: “[Global Warming] is the greatest scam in history”

• Getting Hollywood to “Sell the Product” to Children

All of those were posted in the last six or seven weeks, and they all present arguments critical of the idea that anthropogenic contributions to the earth's climate are a problem. This is more than a note in passing from UD. What's the connection? It's hard to find a "design" connection, or even a religious connection, aside from the obvious affinities between right wing politics and evangelical Christians. What more cleanly explains the "anti-Global-Warmingism" is an oppositional orientation to mainstream science itself. Much of modern science so well attested in practice (you can go get lasik and be contact and glasses free in a couple days, for example) that there's not much to assail for much of the edifice. But global climatology is a big, complex domain -- not as big as the topic of biological origins, but large and intricate in its own right -- that affords the denialist a lot more "wiggle room" than other scientific subjects.

Let's assume that UD is right about global warming. Now what? How does that become interesting or useful to their agenda. How is that in their interest? Why, it's just a means of discrediting the scientific establishment, isn't it? I'd be surprised if this was a conscious rationale announced on the part of UD authors, either collectively or individually. But it's hard to avoid the sense that ID as a movement, and UD as a site, is much more about "anti-science" than it is "pro" anything.

That's not a complicated concept to arrive at, which is what makes me wonder. If global warming is just a stone that UD might heave at the scientific community for the purposes of bashing out a window or two, isn't that a kind of validation of their critics' objections? That ID is a "proxy" for discrediting and marginalizing that which provokes cognitive dissonance?

I'm no supporter of ID, but just separating for a moment for the matter, it seems to me that finding common cause with the global warming deniers would be a way to hand your critics a club to beat you with. UD's support may in some way help cast doubt on the scientific establishment, and that's a good thing from their point of view. But in the end, if ID wants to be taken seriously as a research program of some kind that can compete with and displace other more objectionable elements in the curricula used to teach science, this kind of reflexive opposition really helps substantiate the assertion that ID is an "oppositional defiant disorder" when it comes to science, doesn't it?

If so, isn't that a very poor return on their investment?

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Good ID Discussion at TelicThoughts

I hadn't checked back in a while, and found over the weekend that the comment stream for the post "The Other Movement" had registered more than 300 comments since I first read it a couple weeks ago. It's not got just a lot of comments, there are a lot of long comments.

Not only does this thread inform on several levels and provoke thought, it positively condemns the goings-on over at Uncommon Descent. Try reading a little of the TelicThoughts thread, then quick switch over to reading a post by Denyse O'Leary, and you'll see what I mean. And note the correlation: the points where the thread loses its positive momentum as thoughtful exchange are generally the points where the UD posters jump in (see 'angryoldfat''s comments here -- angryoldfatman at UD? Betcha!).

Too bad that TelicThoughts gets so little of the ID spotlight compared to Uncommon Descent. I don't think I agree with the basic claims of "Mike Gene" and the crew there any more than I do with the people running UD (although evolutionary basics like UCD seem much less controversial and offensive to the TelicThoughts team), but at least the debate there happens with some thought. Oh, and there is a debate there, which is a huge difference as well.

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Grumbling Under Dembski's Big Tent

Over on the "tracking thread" for Uncommon Descent at antievolution.org, "csadams" noticed this article, a recent interview with William Dembski geared at promoting Bill's new book. "csadams" highlighted a key statement in the interview:

Dembski:
I believe God created the world for a purpose. The Designer of intelligent design is, ultimately, the Christian God.

That comment was posted Thursday afternoon. By late evening, the folks at UncommonDescent had a post up, working the damage control buttons and levers over this quote. Clearly, someone at Uncommon Descent was monitoring the conversation at Antievolution.org, and realized this was something to get out in front of.

Dembski's PR blunders and self-defeating attempts at satire are now something of a low-level legend in this debate, but while Dembski comes across as decidedly tone-deaf in the wider battle for "hearts and minds", Dembski's been a master of playing both sides of ID movement, internally. On one hand, when speaking to Christian groups, he's the faithful creationist, taking up the sword and spear of his two PhDs and charging forth to battle the demon hordes of Darwinism. On the other hand, when speaking "out in the open", in scientific circles or public fora, he's a mathematician philosopher, whose scientific genius has led him to the discover of emergent properties in nature that objectively implicate an Intelligent Designer.

While that has long seemed somewhat duplicitous, and transparently so, Dembski has made it work, and work well. Dembski continues to enjoy wide and growing support from creationist Christianity, and at the same time, he's been able to construct a "big tent" theme, a loose coalition of sorts committed not so much even to ID specifically, but to the destruction of "Darwinism". Just from looking at the regulars at UD, you can see an array of non-Christians congregating under the safe, challenge-free tent of the blog.

If you read the interview, it's puzzling that Dembski offered this quote up where he did, and in the way he did. Here's the wider quote:

4. Does your research conclude that God is the Intelligent Designer?

I believe God created the world for a purpose. The Designer of intelligent design is, ultimately, the Christian God.

The focus of my writings is not to try to understand the Christian doctrine of creation; it’s to try to develop intelligent design as a scientific program.

There’s a big question within the intelligent design community: “How did the design get in there?” We’re very early in this game in terms of understanding the history of how the design got implemented. I think a lot of this is because evolutionary theory has so misled us that we have to rethink things from the ground up. That's where we are. There are lots and lots of questions that are now open to re-examination in light of this new paradigm.

I note here as an aside that Dembski doesn't answer the question. The interviewer is asking about current conclusions as a matter of research, but Dembski isn't listening; he has something else he wants to say.

As has been noted both at antievolution.org and in the comment stream for UD's damage control post, Dembski doesn't qualify the second sentence there with an "I believe". As I read it it, it's fairly implied, and anyone who's read Bill on this subject before knows he's accustomed to making these distinctions. ID is science the proves the existence of an Intelligent Designer, but nothing more about Designer than simply he/she/it is capable of designing organic life. Dembski's identification of that Designer as the Christian God as just his personal belief, beyond any implications of ID.

And insofar as the ID supporters have understood this, it hasn't been a problem. But the implication has always been that this is about the science as science first and foremost, and as for the "who is the Designer?" question, Dembski's got a right to speculate outside of the confines of the Design Inference as anyone. But this quote here seems to go a little farther, and gives the sense that Dembski starts with the conclusion that God is the Designer, and ID is just so much "working the numbers backwards".

This has been the heart of much criticism level at the Intelligent Design movement. Science is supposed to go wherever the evidence leads. In contrast, ID, like creationist arguments before it, is something more like lawyering; given a conclusion, arguments are built up underneath it to support it.

Here's an example of the kind of grumbling Dembski's statement is likely to generate from "big tent ID supporters":

PlatosPlaything:
“The Designer of intelligent design, is, ultimately, the Christian God.”

Umm, that bothers me. This founder of the movement is not saying, “ID proves design, and in my opinion the designer is Jesus,” but, as a fact, the designer is Jesus. As you know, I’m a pagan ID supporter. Where does this leave people like me — as well as the scores of Jews, Muslims and atheists who support ID?

Here's another complaint:

dave557:
Silly old me, I was always under the impression that ID was cold, hard science. ID had nothing to do with god. Time and time again Demski and others have denied religious motive. Oh well, guess I was wrong

That captures the basic objection. However, this particular complaint should be taken with a grain of salt here. I don't know this poster "dave557" to be a sockpuppet -- an ID critic posing as a (nominal, at least) ID supporter as a means of discrediting ID -- but my money's on the guess that he is. He continues by providing a long-ish quote from PZ Myers about Dembski's book. Not something you'd expect from anyone but the Banninated™.

Another poster sees a problem with this from a "textbook" angle:

Frost122585:
The problem here is this. If dembski goes down as saying that the designer is the “christian” god then i dont see how this is going to get tought in any public school.

Dembski weighs in with his own comments:

William Dembski:
In the context of the review, I was saying that I — personally — believe the Christian God is ultimately the designer behind the world. I’ve also written elsewhere that the Christian God might use teleological organizing principles to implement his designs (e.g., that God does not need to specifically toggle the bacterial flagellum). And I’ve stressed throughout my writings that there are alternative philosophical frameworks for making sense of ID. None of these considerations undercuts the scientific core of ID.

Come on folks, it’s no secret that I’m a Christian and that I have various motivations for pursuing ID (if you want to put me on the couch, please do the same with Dawkins).

The reader can be the judge as to Dawkins' sincerity in this, but I'd bet Dawkins would disavow the idea that he has "various motivations" for assuming his conclusion -- that no god exists -- on an a priori basis, external to the scientific investigation of the matter. Isn't that quite different than what Dembski is admitting here for himself? It sounds like he's projecting his own worldview on to Dawkins, and everyone else: believe whatever you believe, for whatever reason, then work backwards toward a supporting case for it.

Dembski here seems close to openly owning up to his "working backwards". If so, I'd say that will continue to not only produce more grumbling the Big Tent of ID, but will give ID opponents some strong philosophical grounds to reject ID as not just "non-science", but "anti-science". Working backwards from an a priori conclusion towards a constrained supporting argument is polemic, the antithesis of scientific inquiry.

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Dembski's "Symmetry Inference"

William Dembski asks today about the Chris Comer firing:

Dembski:
What if someone in the same position as Chris Comer forwarded an email about a forthcoming talk by Ken Ham at a “fundamentalist church” in which he would recommend teaching creationism in public schools?

First, the right answer is "nothing". As problematic as Ken Ham is, here, it's hard to come up with a reasonable basis for firing someone for forwarding a notification of an upcoming event. I will add the caveat that it's perfectly acceptable to fire an employee for violating a direct prohibition -- I've fired people for sending out perfectly acceptable messages to customers in terms of content; they got fired because they had no authority to speak for the company in said messages, and even though they said nothing wrong in those emails, the potential liability for us had they said the wrong thing was very large. They were repeatedly and clearly instructed not to engage in such communications, but did it anyway.

Insubordination, plain and simple.


To the extent that simple insubordination is at the heart of Comer's dismissal, I'm fantastically uninterested in this story. Too bad for her, if so. Lesson learned, hopefully. But Dembski isn't appealing to that idea here, and is instead apparently hoping to justify the ostensible injustice here by suggesting that if the tables were turned, the "Darwinists" would now be calling for Comer's dismissal.

But the apparent symmetry Dembski sees here, the "symmetry inference" he's making in imagining an email alert going out for a YEC event from someone in Comer's position, isn't a sound inference. These are not two sides of the same coin.

Say what you want about the Center for Inquiry in terms of their agenda. Dembski describes them as a "virulently atheistic organization", and from what little I know about them, there's not much to dispute in that, beyond Dembski's typically emotionally-loaded language ("virulently" has got to be bad, doncha know). In any case, I don't think any "virulence" matters, so long as they are willing to affirm the integrity and value of methodological naturalism -- the 'operating guidelines' for science as it is effectively practiced.

And that's the difference. Ken Ham doesn't have a different scientific view. He has an anti-scientific view. Dembski is hoping to impose a kind of "philosophical relativism" here, and the implication in his idea is that, ultimately, there is no method to science, and that it is all just so much politics and subjectivity. But I'd be willing to wager that for all of the Center for Inquiry's "virulence" in their metaphysical outlook (if they do indeed promote one), they would emphatically affirm the importance of methodological naturalism as essential to the succesful pursuit of scientific inquiry.

Ken Ham, on the other hand, sees methodological naturalism as the problem itself, rather than the solution, just as Dembski does. That's what fundamentally distinguishes the practical effects of an email alert about a Center for Inquiry event, and an email alert about an upcoming speech by Ken Ham. The former is broadly compatible with the existing practice of science itself, and the latter is not, not even nearly.

Remember, I wouldn't countenance the firing of a person in Comer's position even if they had forwarded an email alert concerning an upcoming Ken Ham speech, or a long series of YEC-friendly alerts and notes. Insubordination is good grounds for dismissal, but none of the email alerts we're considering here begin to rise to the level of a dismissal. But let's identify Dembski's equation of these two email alerts -- one about the Center for Inquiry, the other about Answers In Genesis for what it is: an attempt, again, and as always, to erode the practice of science itself.

Whatever "evangelizing" the Center for Inquiry might undertake, they can affirm and support the practice of science, as it occurs in the curriculum of the school textbooks for the district. The evangelizing of Ken Ham has a completely different agenda: to de-legitimize and marginalize science itself, and to assert their own authority (in the name of God, of course) over the scientific enterprise. Fortunately, things are so lopsided at this point in terms of evidence against Ken Ham that there is a diminishing threat, even in this. The only people who listen to Ken Ham aren't the least bit concerned about science qua science anyway. Anyone approaching this with their eyes open won't be buying any of it.

Ken Ham cannot affirm the science textbooks and curriculum of Comer's school district. And because of that, the "Ken Ham" alert from Comer would be more than "non-neutral", it would be actively subversive of the schools position on science and its practice. So, I know Dembski is asking his question rhetorically, but the real answer is: if it happened, Comer should not be dismissed, but we would reasonably wonder about her basic competency in the areas of science, were we to learn that she's promoting the ideas of Ken Ham. Not a firing offense, and maybe not an offense at all, but a signal that somewhere along the way, the system failed to locate a competent steward for its Director of Science position.

We'd be troubled to learn that the Attorney General didn't believe in civil rights for blacks or minorities. Or that a sitting judge on the bench neither knew the law or approved of the concept of American jurisprudence. A "Director of Science" promoting Ken Ham would signal the same kind of problem, a basic hostility to the enterprise they are trusted to promote and develop.

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YWAM/NewLife Killer In His Own Words

Given BarryA over at Uncommon Descent's "interest" in the question of atheism inciting murderous hatred in Matthew Murray, the man identified as the shooter in the YWAM/NewLife killings, there are some "interesting" stretches of commentary from Murray's online postings to review here. For what it's worth, the comments put together in that post seem much more problematic for the kind of Christianity Murray grew up in.

I'm a homeschooler. I've got six kids, four of school age, and their entire schooling has been homeschooling. My wife is quite active in the local homeschool co-op, and we are surrounded by evangelical homeschoolers; this is my demographic. We use Sonlight curriculum, and because of that, both my wife and I have been active in their online community for homeschooling families for years.

I'm intimately familiar with the culture of Matthew Murray's upbringing.

But you know what? For all the references and anger, all the possible "incitement to hate" that I could try and identify in Murray's words, all of that is secondary. This is a young man who went right off the deep end. He's responsible for his terrible actions, and no matter how vicious or hypocritical or humiliating he found his lot in life to be, growing up in a homeschooling fundamentalist Christian home, that's not sufficient to make it "interesting" to me to suggest fundamentalist Christianity is somehow to blame for the murders.

Unlike Barry, who simply popped off with an opportunistic bit of musing, the posts from Murray here shine at least a little bit of light on the mind and attitudes behind the killings. I wonder how "interesting" Barry thinks the situation is now, having read the posts of nghtmrchld26?

It doesn't matter, as far as blame is concerned for the killing, however. For all of that, Murray bears the guilt for his actions. It was his choice, his course of action, and his alone.

What remains is the lingering sense that BarryA, ostensibly concerned about the spread of hatred, about demonization, has engaged in the very practice he's concerned about. Barry's no more empowered to unilaterally instill hate in his readers than Ted Haggard or Richard Dawkins are in theirs (does Haggard have an audience anymore?); we must choose to adopt the hatred being offered. But posts like Barry's represent the offer, just as much as the angry words of those he's upset by (Dawkins, Hitchens, et al).

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Tonsillectomies as Proto-Eugenics?

The comments in the recent post over at Uncommon Descent titled "A Practical Medical Application For ID Theory" is a goldmine for the wild and wacky musings of the ID crowd. Here, in comment 23, we have "angryoldfatman" um, extending post author GilDodgen's attempt to turn the "science-stopper" accusation back on the evilutionists through the novel strategy of treating all infections with multiple biotics (don't ask how that works here!):

angryoldfatman:

Another example of a little known science-stopping incident brought about by Darwinism: unnecessary harmful surgery.

I remember a big push back in the 1970s for children to have their tonsils removed even if they weren’t sick because tonsils were considered vestigial organs.

They went so far as to push this propaganda on Saturday morning cartoons like Fat Albert, if I remember correctly.

“We don’t know what these body parts do, and according to Darwinian evolution there are going to be body parts that are useless, so let’s just carve these things out.”

To me that’s a lot more dangerous than the results of a “God did it” attitude.

That's pretty much how it went, right? "Let's just carve these things out, since we don't know what they do!" There has been ongoing debate for decades about just when a tonsillectomy becomes advantageous -- benefits outweighing the risks. But here's some creative demonization of the process -- and putting cartoon characters to work in the service of the Devil, no less. Whether or not that's more dangerous than the promiscuous "Goddidit" answer I don't know, but it hardly matters because it's a fictionalized bit of medical history in the first place.

This observation triggered this from "Dog_of_War":

Dog_of_War:
I think you are completely correct about the surgery line of thinking. It is very reminiscent of the something that Sal Cordova does a good job of reporting: a mild for of eugenics that is inherint in the darwinian model.

There you have it -- tonsillectomies, promoted by Fat Albert, as a starter kit for eugenics. It's inherent in the Darwinian model, doncha know? I guess the evilutionists can hardly blamed, since it is, after all, "inherint".

This kind of exchange just floats in the comment stream, and doesn't raise an eyebrow for any of the un-banninated. It's educational, I guess. This is the "background mindset" that many IDers bring to bear on this issue. Good to keep in mind in this debate.

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Moving the 'Edge of Evolution' Goalposts

Over at the latest UncommonDescent post here, discussing the ramifications of the evolution of antibiotic resistance, "getawitness" says:

getawitness:
By which I mean a falsification of Mike Behe’s putative “edge” of evolution. Gil’s point, I think, is that a bacteria could never develop such resistance because Behe is right. So that would be a unbeatable antibiotic.

"russ" replies:

russ:
Falsification of his “edge of evolution”, or simply adjusting where the edge lies? If bacteria successfully adapt to each and every antibiotic, there’s no evidence that that will lead to anything more than an altered bacterium.

In other words, "It will never be a dinosaur, nyah!"

I don't know what this means for Behe's 'edge of evolution' (OK I do know what that means for EoE, but that's another discussion), but what is being adjusted here are russ's goalposts in the discussion. Behe's argument is not that "at some point things get impossibly improbable" -- although it might as well be, come to think about it. Evidence that "each and every antibiotic" successfully adapt most certainly would be problematic for Behe's claims, but russ finds refuge, apparently, in that falsification of Behe, or evidence for evolution in the general case, it's still not the overwhelming earth-is-not-flat kind of proof that allows russ to "keep the faith", as it were. Sure, adapative bacteria. But that's no dinosaur, no whale, mind you!

"getawitness" later notes the moving of the goalposts:

getawitness:
Falsification of that edge, yes. He would be free to move the goalposts and draw another line in the sand.

"russ" begs off thusly:

russ:
But is “moving the goalposts” really a fair characterization? Edge of Evolution is an attempt to establish where the limits of evolution lie. NDE THEORY says that you can go from nothing to humans via natural processes with no intelligence. EoE says that the best available DATA indicate that the best you can do is decrease overall function in an attempt to survive. Showing somehow that NDE is even better than we thought at trench warfare does not constitute “moving the goalposts”, or “drawing another line in the sand”. You seem to be using those expressions merely to gain rhetorical points.

Yeah, nothing like making your case as a cheap ploy to gain "rhetorical points". Showing that NDE (he really means the underlying biology modeled by the theory) is "better than we thought a trench warfare" DOES necessitate moving the goalposts, as its this "better"-ness that Behe supposes is precluded by the constraints and probabilities involved.

I think that's as much as anyone like "getawitness" can expect to see by way of capitulation to the evidence from the ID fanboys. "getawitness" has clearly been trying to be on his/her best behavior, and has survived a while, but if DaveScot reads this, "getawitness" is banninated.

UPDATE: Yep, "getawitness" is banninated, but with his posts left intact (so far), and per After the Bar Closes, it was Hermagoras, all along.

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