Ben Stein was good in "Ferris Bueller's Day" off", but......

[tophilactic]

...I think his upcoming movie "Expelled" will be nice to see through skeptical eyes. I would probably skip his “intelligent design” class to drive my friend's dad's Ferrari around the town.

Thank you Brian for your recent podcast on the various types of creationism, and for the continued updates on a broad spectrum of topics. I look forward to your wit and skepticism each week.
I can remember as a kid getting in mind-numbing arguments with a school mate who was a creationist (a modern young earth fundamentalist).

I realize that you excluded intelligent design from creationism, and there are , I’m sure, several reasons for this. I wanted to know if you or any fellow forum member(s) might help explain to me what intelligent design actually is. Please excuse me if I am jumping the gun, my reasons are that a) I am truly interested and b) the Discovery Institute held a conference at my school recently (see other post). I’ll try to keep this brief.

From what I gather: intelligent design is the premise that some phenomena in life are best explained as the result of an intelligent cause. I have seen/read two main arguments.

1) Some phenomena in life are too complex (irreducibly so) that natural selection and descent with modification fail to adequately explain them. I have seen counter arguments stating that this is simply an argument from ignorance

2) DNA is information, and thus could only be caused by an intelligent agent.

I still fail to understand what this means, and how (if) is is opposed to modern evolutionary theory. While the claim is that evolution would explain life is a result of chance...doesn't that ignore natural selection?

While intelligent design is claimed to not be creationism, having creationists in the ID “movement” has really seems to cloud things up. There is a disregard of the distinction between evolutionary theory and the theory of abiogenesis. There main avenues seem to be (as the creationists did) the courts, mass media outlets, and the rallying cry of “free speech.”

 

[tophilactic]

Perhaps I should rephrase the first argument. As was pointed out to me and is here duly noted, I have fallen into the trap of the excluded middle.

1) Some phenomena in life are too complex (irreducibly so) that they were caused by intelligent agency.

Furthermore, as was pointed out to me, for ID to be a legitimate theory, it must stand on it's own (rather than offering critiques on abiogenesis and evolution). Is ID not vague? It seems quite vague to me.

 

[tophilactic]

one final question......

...I re-listened to the different types of creationism podcast, and picked up a part I missed (selective hearing?). I did have one question:

If ID proposes that "the scientific method alone is not adequate to explain the natural world..." then why is it repeatedly called science (by ID supporters)?

 

[tracer]

I disagree.

I think his performance in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, while nailing the role to a T, was lackluster and bland.

 

[tophilactic]

Let's hope in Expelled he gives the same performance. They might consider giving a free pillow (or Red Bull) with each ticket.

 

[vita10gy]

Though I don't think it's what you meant I really hope the rebuttal to the irreducibly complex argument isn't really "that's ignorant"

The rebuttal to the "irreducibly complex" argument is that no one on the "Evolution side" ever said it had to always be the thing it is now. Eyes didn't have to just blink into existence from nothing they could have been a steady progression from rudimentary light sensors, or something.

Their favorite example is a mousetrap. A mousetrap is the block of wood, a spring loaded bar, and a triggering device. Take any of those parts away and it's not a mousetrap anymore.

This isn't logical on two fronts.

1) Again, no one said it would still be a mousetrap. A mousetrap without the triggering device makes a perfectly functional, albeit ugly, tie clip.
2) The process isn't as simple as everything being a sum of it's parts to be reverse engineered anyway. Evolution doesn't HAVE to work in a "start with a base model, then sup-it-up" fashion, like one creature gets the ability to detect light, the next gets the ability to see in black and white, the next gets lenses for focusing, the next gets the ability to see in color, and so on.

I was very surprised to hear Ben Stein's take on evolution.

 

[tophilactic]

Thank you, vita10gy, for the comments.

I should have clarified more, and you are right. It's not "that's ignorant." It's the "argument from ignorance" or the "God of the gaps" argument. The argument against ID (and the creation science) is that the supernatural is envoked to explain phenomena that science does not have a good grasp of presently explaining.

I would argue that any idea, such as ID, should explain not only the weaknesses of any natural scientific theory, but the strengths, too. It would help their cause if they could do a better job [than evolution does] in explaining these strengths, too.

The other common argument is descent with modification, which you used, which, I believe, is stronger.

 

[vita10gy]

I just enjoy watching the "new earth" people present scientific evidence for their case. One of the things they put forth is that the Grand Canyon wasn't formed over time, but rather by the great flood. Preposterous as that is anyway (as if it would just take a certain AMOUNT of water covering the planet to carve that one random spot that deep) it's not evidence at all. That's a hypothesis of how the Grand Canyon got there, not a hypothesis on something bigger. The bible said there was a flood > here's some crap that COULD have been formed by a flood > BIBLE == TRUE!

I said this over on my website when we got into this debate once:

With all the crazy stuff going on in the scientific world it strikes me as odd that evolution is the thing so often argued against. It's complex, but at the same time beautiful in its simplicity. ...

Though evolution explains the progression well it doesn't, however, yet explain how everything got started, which is why I find it so humorous that it's argued against. Evolution is an empirically gathered, scientifically sound, argument that all life began, and all life stems from this one creation.

The Church argued long and hard that the sun went around the earth, it was blasphemous to think otherwise. Through centuries of evidence gathering later scientists tracked the whole universe down to one point. The big bang, is the widely accepted theory of the beginning of the universe. It in no way, shape, or form explains where that infinitely dense spec of all matter came from, or what was there before it.

So, in other words our best two theories on the topics to date have shown that the universe itself inexplicably blinked itself into existence from nothingness and that life on earth is traceable back to one "event" we have yet to begin to understand. I find it hard to believe that these two thoeries are really so incompatible with religion and why, if anything, they aren't used as a scientific argument FOR a creator.

 

[LordoftheLeftHand]

I watched the trailer for the film.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4296238958211607055

In the trailer Stein said (I'm transcribing this so there might be errors):

Feel free to watch this film if you must, and I hope you do. But you've got to know that doing so could land you in a heap of trouble. Some of you are going to lose your friend from watching this film. Some of you may even lose your jobs. In fact if your a scientist with any hope of a future, I suggest you leave right now. College or high school students, especially teachers, legislators, journalists; anyone else with a stake in this debate should probably leave right now.

This reminds me of the claims a local minister made when I was a kid. That if you watched the film "The last temptation of Christ" you would go straight to hell, salvation was impossible for you.

LLH

 

[Wowbagger]

In the trailer Stein said (I'm transcribing this so there might be errors):

Feel free to watch this film if you must, and I hope you do. But you've got to know that doing so could land you in a heap of trouble. Some of you are going to lose your friend from watching this film. Some of you may even lose your jobs. In fact if your a scientist with any hope of a future, I suggest you leave right now. College or high school students, especially teachers, legislators, journalists; anyone else with a stake in this debate should probably leave right now.

I might be inclined to agree with that statement. Anyone who watches the film, without a decent understanding of the scientific method, might be more inclined to think ID is a form of science, and therefore, their career opportunities in science might be rightfully limited.

On the other hand, anyone watching it, who does have a good understanding of the scientific method, will probably see through it as a completely non-scientific set of arguments. But, still: It "looks bad" in front of your scientific friends, to be seen watching this movie.

 

[vita10gy]

ID needs to sound scientific because they want it in the classrooms at public school. If you don't want your kid to learn about evolution, pull them out of class. If you want them to learn creationism in school, send them to a private school.

Someday my dream is to be on a school board in an area demanding ID so I can concede to them that a designer is possible, then have the teachers teach that an Alien race are the most plausible creators. I want to see them wiggle through the "ID doesn't mean God, but we meant God, but we can't say God", argument.

Schools aren't about giving equal time to any idea someone comes up with. The truth is not a democratic process. If some movement started to take shape pushing schools to give equal time to the Holocaust Deniers in history classes, does that mean we should add it? Somehow we've let truth become democratic. ID isn't science, and the holocaust happened, but if enough people show up at the school board meeting, we start to change our minds?

Also, can we please stop having this debate like 95% of the high school curriculum is on evolution. It's one small section of the biology course that half the kids sleep though, just like every other section of every other course. Not to mention the kids are well aware of what it means to be a theory by that point.

 

[truethat]

In my opinion the reason ID was developed and has gotten support is basically what Stein is touching on in the movie. I doubt he's a religious fanatic and I think its funny how people who once loved him have now turned on him and are calling him an idiot. This has happened to me as well. I do not believe in Creationism in the biblical sense or the way it has been interpreted and I do not believe in ID. However I can understand that the reason ID started out was because criticism of evolution was banned from the classroom because of the prejudice that anyone who criticizes evolution automatically is doing so from a religious perspective.


My criticism of evolution is really in the area of phylogeny and the way it is presented to children and uninformed people as fact. Basically the way the past is being predicted and there's no way to confirm it but to bring that up causes a knee jerk reaction of anger. This anger concerns me because while we do have to everything necessary to keep a seperation of church and state and especially to keep religion out of the classroom, not all criticism is religious in nature.

My son for example is in 2nd grade and was sent home with a "research project" on current events. She chose an article from a Staten Island Newspaper about an alligator fossil that had excited people because it showed the alligator could have lived on land. I imagine that the teacher didn't really think too much about it, it seems like she just snipped an article out of the newspaper and stapled it to the sheet of paper.

But the article stated characteristics and behavior of the animal and had illustrations of the animal with little indications pointing out how the animal acted in the water and phrases along the lines of "This alligator sat with its head just below the surface following its prey and the after the attack pulled its meal into the brush to devour slowly" with illustrations. It was presented as fact and with the illustrations it really projected the idea to my son that this was a done deal and this was what we know the animal looked like and how it behaved. I just did the report with him without pointing this out but it bothered me. I didn't want to cause a problem for him in the classroom so I didn't say anything to him about it. In other words I just complied for fear of prejudicing the teacher against my son.

My criticism of this is not based at ALL on religion but just basically "Please don't present this to my child as a fact when its speculation. Perhaps the speculation is true, but we have no way of knowing this and as theories in this field are very very often revised, we should not present things in this way"

Its not that I don't accept evolution its that it does seem to me that in response to the Creationist fanatics evolutionary science has developed a knee jerk defense stanse and as such is allowing NON SCIENCE to influence the way the field presents itself to the public.

This bothers me a lot. I am very happy that its bothering other people as well. Sadly the people it should bother the most are the scientists themselves because its corrupting the science. But they are the ones who are doing it.

 

[Highly Selassie]

In my opinion the reason ID was developed and has gotten support is basically what Stein is touching on in the movie. I doubt he's a religious fanatic and I think its funny how people who once loved him have now turned on him and are calling him an idiot.

I don't know if he's a religious fanatic, but he has been a pretty outspoken neo-conservative and fervent supporter of the Bush administration. I haven't liked him since I was an apolitical kid and thought he was funny in the ClearEyes commercials.

 

[vita10gy]

Well now, to be fair, the Staten Island Newspaper isn't exactly a peer reviewed scientific journal.

The reason people get upset when you use the word speculation is because it's ANYTHING but speculation. It's as much a fact as the scientific process will allow us to call it a fact.

It's confirmed by many different branches of science and every breakthrough we have, like genetics, could make or break evolution, but it's confirmed every step of the way, in greater and greater detail as we advance.

I assure you by the time your child is taught evolution they know what it means to be a "theory" and that it hasn't been "proven." Theory doesn't mean "guess" or "speculation" at all, and evolution can't be proven because science doesn't work that way. The fact that the earth orbits the sun is still "just a theory", as far as I know.

Evolution has made predictions that have come true, just like any other science. If we believe that animal A turned into animal B over X time period then we should be able to go to rock of that age and find examples. Lo and behold we did. The notion that you had to be there to make any sort of claim as to what happened is a bit silly.

In other words, the very way you go about "contradicting" Evolution shows a very fundamental misunderstanding of the scientific process in the first place, so it's not surprising people aren't all ears by the time you get to your opinion.

 

[truethat]

The way you have responded to my post is a perfect example of what I like to call an EVO tactict. And its also what I think Ben Stein is referring to.


You didn't read my post or you would see that I didn't "contradict" Evolution. In fact I believe that evolution is a scientific fact. What I did say was that the article predicted the BEHAVIORS of an extinct animal but did so in a way that suggested it was a fact when clearly it is speculation.

The fact that your post insinuates that my child who is seven is going to be educated about scientific theory after the fact of being presented Evolutionary ART as if it is in some way scientific or uses scientific method when truly it is just ART and imagination of the artist and scientist, shows that you have the typical knee jerk reaction that anyone who criticizes the way this information is presented is automatically the enemy.

Or uneducated or a "fundy"

Re read what I posted and what you posted. The scientists very often in the media present their findings as PROOF of something which in reality it is not proof.

True scientists and those who wish to keep the fields that include evolutionary science true to scientific method, would criticize these kinds of statements as they are not scientific.

But for some reason any time it has something to do with evolution............its not allowed. And if one does the reply you posted is par for the course.

I suggest you reread my post and yours and realize you jumped the gun.