05.31.06
Overshoot/undershoot
Panda’s Thumb considers that Intelligent Design lacks fertility. It is certainly true that Darwinism has a thriving research program, but its emphasis on natural selection has produced a set of fallacies that has vitiated the overall interpretation of evolution, and concealed a most unfertile metaphysics behind its veneer of comprehensive explanation.
The result is an impoverished view of man, culture and history that is frozen in place and causing a derailment of the modernist project. Here ID has indeed been unhelpful: it proposes a new metaphyics of design which is distracting biologists from facing the reality of their subject. More generally the theism/atheism polarization has hijacked the debate and made clear thinking impossible, as the respective propaganda war plays itself out. Like overshoot and undershoot the complicated and subtle ‘narrow way’ between opposites has been abandoned by both parties.
To say that Darwinian biology is fertile forgets the total absence of any progress on major issues, such as the evolution of consciousness. And the attempt to ‘rationalize’ ethics a la sociobiology or theories of kin/group selection are simply barren.
In the meantime, we work with the premise that the Darwinian model is the best model for apprehending evolutionary biology. We believe the Darwinian model has proved itself the most fertile. It leads to new knowledge, which demonstrates its fertility. The difficulty with the Intelligent Design and Creationist models is that they lack fertility. They fail to produce progressive research programs. In a scientific sense, they cannot produce testable models. We believe that the dialogue with theology must take place with the best of science, not with a substitute that is a philosophical position and not science at all.