09.29.05
Oh No! Methodological Naturalism
The York Daily Record has an article on Pennock’s testimony at the Dover ‘Scopes II’ trial.
Witness bashes intelligent design
A philosopher of science said the controversial idea rejects science.
By LAURI LEBO
Daily Record/Sunday News
Thursday, September 29, 2005
Pennock said the people behind intelligent design are attacking methodological naturalism, the accepted procedures of science that limit observations and hypotheses to the natural world.
It essentially says to scientists, Pennock said, “We can’t cheat.”
More ‘yuk’ on methodologicl naturalism.
First an important quibble. Pennock is styled a ‘philosopher of science’. Snce ‘philosophy’ is not considered science, and since it is considered that science has superceded philosophy, the testimony of a philosopher of science should be suspect, n’est-ce-pas? It would be of interest to review the credentials, education, general views of these ‘philosophers of science’ on the general issues Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Spinoza (Newton!! a design theorist) plus any others they wish to include from their camp with explicit statements in public as to whether science has superceded these and other philosophers. (This thought could be posed in any number of ways)
Check mate right there.
This is a trial about science, but is there a science of evolution that can decide the classic issues of philosophy under the rubric of the philosophy of science?
Let’s get down to the punch line: what view of the ‘free will’ question is implied by Darwin’s theory of natural selection and is the public required by scientific evidence to accept that view?
There is no way a theory of evolution can be science without legistlating these questions, but there is no way for science to do so.
More generally, one must protest the supine silence of the academic community that sits by and lets this double whammy fraud, ID vs. Science, get away with moonshine in the courts, no less.
My favorite is E. O. Wilson in Consilience where he takes an extreme view of the fact/value duality, in part because of the assumption natural selection is established:
If the empiricist world view is correct, ought is just shorthand for one kind of factual statement, a word that denotes what society first chose (or was coerced) to do, and then codified. The naturalistic fallacy is thereby reduced to the naturalistic problem. The solution of the problem is not difficult: ought is the product of a material process. The solution points the way to an objective grasp of the origin of ethics.
Are we required to accept such a view as ’science’, and what about the rest of the holdouts in the philosophy department?
Better watch how you answer, since Pennock claims scientists don’t cheat.
Intelligent design proponents’ ultimate goal is to create a revolution in science, taking it back to the days when epilepsy was believed to have been caused by divine possession and gravity was thought to be the result of “spooky action at a distance,” an expert testified in the third day of Dover school district’s trial over biology class.
A philosopher of science said Wednesday in U.S. Middle District Court that intelligent design is “a rejection of science.”
The long-term strategy of the concept’s proponents, said Robert Pennock, a Michigan State University professor of philosophy and science, is not just to get intelligent design into science class, but to change the very definition of science to include the supernatural.
Pennock said the people behind intelligent design are attacking methodological naturalism, the accepted procedures of science that limit observations and hypotheses to the natural world.
It essentially says to scientists, Pennock said, “We can’t cheat.”
As examples of the movement’s intentions, Pennock showed the court a number of articles written by the movement’s leaders, including two by William Dembski, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute.
Discovery has been part of efforts to change wording of Kansas state education standards to be more open to the supernatural in the definition of science.
“The scientific picture of the world championed since the Enlightenment is not wrong, but massively wrong,” Dembski wrote in an article titled “Building bridges between science and theology.”
In another article, titled “What every theologian should know about creation, evolution and design,” Dembski wrote, “In the words of Vladimir Lenin, What is to be done? Design theorists aren’t at all bashful about answering this question: The ground rules of science have to be changed.”
In the first test case on the concept, Judge John E. Jones III is being asked to rule whether intelligent design amounts to teaching students about God in science class. Plaintiffs’ attorneys say it’s merely revamped creation science. Dover Area School District attorneys say that it’s a legitimate scientific theory and that the four-paragraph statement read to students isn’t actually teaching them about it.
In the first three days of testimony, plaintiffs have brought two science experts into the courtroom to discredit the concept and outline what they have characterized as a misinformed attack on evolution.
After the school board voted to include intelligent design in the high school’s biology curriculum, 11 parents filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the district.
Dover attorneys also argue that because intelligent design doesn’t specifically identify the designer, it’s not religiously motivated.
But Pennock pointed to examples where its supporters have named the designer. And he is God.
He cited examples of articles written by Phillip Johnson, known as the father of the intelligent design movement.
In one, Johnson wrote of “theistic realism.”
“This means that we affirm that God is objectively real as Creator, and that this reality of God is tangibly recorded in evidence accessible to science, particularly in biology,” the article said.
Johnson is a law professor at the University of California-Berkeley and author of books including “Darwin on Trial” and “Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds.”
As a philosopher of science, Pennock said he has closely followed the intelligent design movement from its inception in the late ’80s following the U.S. Supreme Court’s rejection of the teaching of creation science in public school science classes.
In cross-examination by Dover’s attorney Patrick Gillen, Pennock also said in some ways, creation science — the idea that life’s literal blueprint is the Book of Genesis — is more scientific than intelligent design.
Even though its tenets have all been refuted by the scientific community, creation science puts forth ideas that are testable, such as the idea the Earth is less than 10,000 years old and that the geological record was formed by the Great Flood.
But, he said, intelligent design is no more testable than the “matrix hypothesis.”
“For all we know, the world may have been created five minutes ago and we’ve all been implanted with memory chips,” Pennock told Gillen.