Monday, July 20, 2009

Evolution's Anti Intellectualism Reaching Fever Pitch

Steven Pinker, Harvard professor of psychology, is the latest evolutionist to become unglued over Stephen Meyer's op-ed piece in the Boston Globe. Pinker writes:

SHAME ON you for publishing two creationist op-eds in two years from the Discovery Institute, a well-funded propaganda factory that aims to sow confusion about evolution. Virtually no scientist takes "intelligent design’’ seriously, and in the famous Dover, Pa., trial in 2005, a federal court ruled that it is religion in disguise.

Where do we begin? We could reassure Pinker that the Discovery Institute surely is not a "propaganda factory that aims to sow confusion about evolution." Or we could politely explain to the evolutionists that Meyer's op-ed is not "creationist" as Meyer's claims and the creationist's claims do not line up. And we could point out that federal courts, while very good at ruling on interstate trade and kidnapping cases, are not always equipped to deal with more nuanced cases involving the history and philosophy of thought, as was abundantly revealed in the Dover case.

Such responses would be intended to clear the air of the false notions evolutionists carry around. The responses would be made under the assumption that evolutionists are interested in facts and objective inquiry into such matters. Unfortunately, that is typically not the case. Evolutionists are certainly not interested in understanding intelligent design--then the evolutionists wouldn't be able to brand ID proponents as creationists.

Of course such explanations and reassurances would never be considered. They would never open the mind of an evolutionist like Pinker. But what is worse is they would mask the more serious problem. Trying to explain errors of logic or erroneous assumptions would miss the utter hypocrisy that fuels the evolutionist's vitriol.

Intelligent design is an inference from the data. Agree or disagree with it, there are no religious assumptions. It may be all wrong, but its arguments are based on the evidences of nature, logic, mathematics, and so forth. In other words, it is a scientific argument.

Evolutionists have always branded skeptics as guilty of being driven by religious motivations. Surely there must be religious convictions behind anything the skeptics say. If the skeptics don't admit to their sin, then they are liars as well.

But while evolutionists stand in self-righteous judgment of anyone who disagrees, it is in fact the evolutionists who have founded and promoted a religious theory. Their hypocrisy is plain for all to see. For they commit the very crime for which they castigate others. There is no scientific argument for their claim that evolution is a fact just like gravity--it is a religious argument based on deep metaphysics. Consider Pinker's very next paragraph.

The judge referred to the theory’s "breathtaking inanity,’’ which is a fine description of Stephen Meyer’s July 15 op-ed "Jefferson’s support for intelligent design.’’ Well, yes, Thomas Jefferson died 33 years before Darwin published "The Origin of Species.’’ And Meyer’s idea that the DNA code implies a code maker is just a rehash of the ancient "argument from design’’ - that an eye implies an eye maker, a heart implies a heart maker, and so on. Darwin demolished this argument 150 years ago.

And how did Darwin demolish the argument from design? How did Darwin show that the eye evolved rather than was designed? Did Darwin demonstrate a reasonable evolutionary pathway leading to the eye? Did he convince us that vision plausibly arises on its own? Of course not.

Darwin had no such evidence. But he did have something more powerful--religion. In Chapter 6 of Origin Darwin argued that the evolution of vision is the superior view because otherwise we must say that "the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of men." Have we any such right?

This anthropomorphic warning was straight out of the theological pronouncements of Enlightenment philosopher David Hume. And it was one of hundreds of religious arguments that mandated evolution, one way or another.

Religion drives science, and it matters.