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August 25, 2005

William Demdski in the Postmodern Age

Last night on Uncommon Descent William Dembski took issue with my post criticizing Kenneth Chang's piece in the New York Times. I did what might be called a form critical analysis of Chang's article and pointed out that it was written in such a way as to give pride of position to the ideas that collect around the title "Intelligent Design" that I didn't believe they deserved on their merits.

Near the end of my post, I said the following,

Now what is wrong with all this? Well, it turns the world exactly upside down. It is Intelligent Design creationism that has tried and failed to challenge mainstream science. The burden of proof is on Intelligent Design creationism and not mainstream science. If this article had been written in the mid-nineteenth century then perhaps the order of the "he said/she said" segments might have been appropriate in this kind of a journalistic piece.

The link is to an old post of mine about Herbert Spencer's famous remark,

Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all.

Dembski takes issue with my claim concerning the burden of proof.

Reality moment, everyone: In this postmodern age, there is no universally binding standard for who bears the burden of proof. Rather, who bears the burden of proof depends on who can most deftly shift the burden of proof or, alternatively, who is unable to deflect that burden. It now appears that the ID community has successfully shifted the burden of proof onto the evolutionists.

I must admit that I'm not at all sure what this paragraph means. But assuming that it means that the rules for assignment of burden of proof have changed and they now rely on deftness of debating points I imagine that he is correct. Most unfortunately, articles like Chang's and others that are even worse, have sometimes seemed to change the burden of proof in the larger public forum.

The problem is that science, while it goes on in public, does not make its, always tentative, scientific conclusions on the basis of opinion in that public forum but in the laboratory, the field and by the incorporation of published, peer reviewed papers into the ever growing body of evidence and theory.

Immediately following the paragraph quoted above Dembski writes this astonishing paragraph,

According to Richard Rorty, truth is what people let you get away with. Rorty also teaches that we must “keep faith with Darwin.” The American public is no longer letting the evolutionists get away with shifting the burden of proof from themselves, but is now forcing the evolutionists to bear it, despite their temper tantrums.

I'm far from a Rorty scholar to know if Rorty ever made such a claim, but since Dembski mentions it favorably, he must agree with it. Insofar as I can determine, the sentence, "truth is what people let you get away with" is important to his criticism of my position. I'll let the epistemologists debate what "truth" is but I'm darn sure it isn't "what you can get away with." If this is, indeed, what Dembski believes, then he believes the vilest form of anything goes relativism.

The problem that the Intelligent Design creationists face is that their ideas have so far failed in the scientific forum and, for this reason; the only hope their political agenda has is to rely on relativism and pray that no one notices. We should be grateful to Dembski for making that reliance so obvious.

One John Liljegren left a comment on Dembski's post that on the surface seems fair enough.

As to burden of proof, why isn’t the burden on any advocate of any theory? The burden of proof is on those who advocate the evolution theory, and likewise it’s on those who advocate ID. It is absurd for the Darwinists to suggest that their theory is correct [regardless of the state of supporting evidence] until the DI folks surmount some abstract burden of proving ID.

Here's the problem: Every day in laboratories and field studies the theory of evolution is being supported and sometimes modified. So every day scientists are accepting that burden of proof. More than that, they themselves often try to find alternatives to the theory.

The "state of the supporting evidence" is so overwhelmingly on the side of the scientific community. And it is growing every day. As far as I can see, the Intelligent Design creationists have not provided a shred of evidence in support of their intuitions that has withstood scrutiny.

Science tries to synthesize evidence into theories. The Intelligent Design creationists try to find support for their a priori naive intuitions. It appears that they are now looking to ideas such as "truth is what people let you get away with" for that support.

By the way, there is one thing that Dempski said that I completely agree with,

What a great day to be alive!

Posted by DuaneSmith at August 25, 2005 10:14 AM | Read more on Evolution |

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Posted by: afarensis at August 25, 2005 04:57 PM

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