Intelligent Falling

Hat tip to a gentle reader for pointing SWNID to this gem in the Onion ("America's Finest News Source") on "Intelligent Falling Theory" versus the law of gravity:

http://www.theonion.com/news/index.php?issue=4133&n=2

Warning to SWNID's gentle readers who are unfamiliar with the Onion: although this article does not contain any offensive material, the Onion commonly contains vulgar and offensive language and themes. It nevertheless contains some of the cleverest satire on the web, at least from time to time.

Of course, SWNID readers don't need to be told that this piece is satire. They are, after all, SWNID readers.

The object of this satire is intelligent design theory (ID), of course. And to be honest, it's pretty telling at one level. Criticism of Darwinian evolution that is based on gaps or problems is, frankly, not all that significant. All theories have gaps and problems. Consider, for example, the logical response to the Christian theologian who claims to have laid out a comprehensive theory of life, the universe and everything, without gaps or problems. We reject such a claim as coming from a nut job, but we don't invalidate the core claims of Christian theology as a consequence.

So is ID baloney? Hardly. The significant contribution of ID to the discussion is raising the point of the unlikelihood of the origin of life at its present level of complexity apart from intelligent design and regardless of the pattern or visible method of development of the present complexity. ID's use of scientific data here is of a different order: marshaling the accumulated data about the complexity of the physical universe, the living cell, and of individual organs in complex organisms, for example, and asking the larger question as to whether it is reasonable to think that such things arose by chance.

Critics of ID insist that ID is not "science." Actually, they're right. It's not science in that it is not a hypothesis that is subject to testing. But then neither is Darwinian evolution if it is taken to imply the absence of a creator. ID confronts us with a scientifically informed philosophical question, what philosophers call a metaphysical question (i.e. the kind of question to which Aristotle turned after he wrote his Physics). Given the context, we might style it a metascientific question, what we ask after we've done the science.

The problem, then, is not that Darwinism is science and ID isn't. The problem is that many scientists and many in the public at large are lousy philosophers who don't address the epistemological questions of the scientific method's limits versus the broader limits of human knowledge. Many scientists who are hostile to ID and religion simply assume that the only real knowledge is scientific knowledge, and that that which cannot be proved scientifically is not simply unprovable scientifically but is untrue. The public, conditioned to interpret the white lab coat as the garment of authority (call it the high priestly garb of the modern era), accepts this illogic.

That simply makes it all the more important that thoughtful people of faith articulate their approach to the question of creation with precision. Otherwise, we'll be shouting at each other for another hundred years or so.