I wasn't able to attend last night.
But here's some thoughtful comments from Michael Metzler with some follow-up observations:
I attended the presentation by Eugenie Scott last night at the U of I regarding the scientific qualification of Creation Science and Intelligent Design. I enjoyed the talk very much. Scott is a fabulous public speaker and has put together a high quality PowerPoint presentation. She also appears to be highly qualified to speak to the subject. Many aspects of the talk were also somewhat informative for me. Overall, I think we are fortunate for her visit to us. However, I was very disappointed with the overall argumentative thrust of her presentation. There was plenty of ‘rhetoric’ of the questionable sort and much of it was clearly directed towards the settled evolutionary scientist in the audience. Laughing was not uncommon as she pointed out the ‘stupid’ work of Creation Scientists, displaying a few random examples from a few old books such as Of Pandas & People and the work of Jonathon Wells. She was also very concerned about the bias of the media on this subject; the media is currently making it look like there are a lot of Intelligent Design Scientists out there; but according to Scott, we probably could not even fill up the U of I auditorium if we were to gather all the Intelligent Design Scientists from the four corners of the earth. Along this same thought, she spent a good amount of time (which included even a spreadsheet with the documented statistics) demonstrating that the work of Creation Scientists and Intelligent Design is not found within Scientific Journals. For example, Michael Behe’s work is discussed in only a few scientific journals, and all of those are merely criticizing his work (I ran into one of these journal articles a few years ago, and remember it as a highly respectful criticism of Behe). Yet, given the nature of the broader cultural debate on this subject and the fully granted dominion of evolutionary biology within the scientific establishment, it is not clear what the argument is really supposed to be here. And the same goes for the other implied arguments; certainly, this is not a debate that can be won by pointing out some bad science found in a few Creation Science publications, some of which were not even posing as ‘scientific publications.’ To say she was offering insufficient evidence for a strong thesis would be an understatement.
I wish I could say more to all this; in fact, I wish I could write a full criticism of the entire presentation. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to do this. However, I don’t think I really need to do this given my analysis of what appears to be an Achilles heel of her overall argument. And here it is:
Running throughout her presentation were claims regarding the “incoherence,” “logical fallacies,” and “false alternatives” of the Creation Science and Intelligent Design movements (from here ‘ID’). These were various, but they all had a common theme. Roughly, ID proposes Darwinsim or Tradition, Evolution or Creation, Atheism or Scientific Explanation of origins, etc. All this was just asserted. In fact, the closest Scott came to providing good evidence here was her explanation of Phil Johnson’s Wedge method, which explicitly claims that we are conceptually left with only two real options: atheism or evolution. With the little bit of exposure I’ve had to Johnson’s work (he visited the U of I last year) it was clear to me that Johnson labors by arguing for just this point. He provides arguments for the fact that atheism or evolution are the only two options. In waiving aside Johnson’s success in this as merely a logical fallacy or a ‘false alternative’ Scott has missed the real debate on this point all together. This sort of false alternative is precisely what Johnson is not guilty of. But in any case, Scott goes on and concludes with an analysis explaining why ID gets the categories confused: what ID and associates fail to recognize is the distinction between Methodological Materialism and Philosophical Materialism. Science is all about Methodological Materialism and not about Philosophical Materialism at all. Methodological Materialism is simply the practice of searching for nothing but material explanations: matter, energy, etc. Methodological Materialism does not say anything at all about what else there is in the world, and therefore theists have no reason to associate atheism with evolutionary biology or pit theism against evolutionary science. Philosophical Materialism, on the other hand, makes the larger claims that theists must deal with. But Philosophical Materialism is not what you find in the science room and so the case is closed. Scott washes her hands clean.
All this seemed a bit suspicious to me; I suspected that the lines are really a bit more blurry than Scott would like us to think. I suspected that even if the lines are not more blurry, Scott would enjoy something of a Philosophical Materialism to bolster her Methodological Materialism anyway. After all, it is a bit strange to refer to basic scientific method as any sort of “materialism” at all. But then Scott went on and took all the mystery out of my ponderings. In criticizing Demski’s Design Inference proposal, which asserts there are algorithmic ways to observationally discern whether a natural phenomenon has originated by intelligent design or chance, Scott made the argument that even human intelligent design must be considered part of the natural system in which science studies. In other words, people are “material agents” and hence entirely “natural.” Demski is therefore making a category mistake which is lethal to the success of his algorithm.
And hello, we have a problem here. This mere assertion of Scott just is the thesis of Philosophical Materialism. And if there are any doubts in your mind about this, let me tell you what happened after. In the brief question and answer period that followed, one gentleman posed a question regarding the mystery of how human psychology and the physical body inter-relate—no doubt a question generated by the Philosophical Materialist thesis asserted by Scott. Scott’s response was quick, resolved, and emphatic: There is nothing mystical or mysterious about the mind. Period. Scott admitted that some people like to say that the mind is mysterious, but this is not true. The Mind can be studied entirely within the methodology of science. This of course means that everything there is to know about the mind has a scientific explanation. Previous in the talk, Scott criticized the point of view that if we don’t know something, it is likely that we can’t know something. Scott disagreed: we simply just don’t know it yet. Science simply hasn’t gotten there yet. And so now dear reader, you now have a wonderful introduction to what Philosophical Materialism is. Scott has defined it, exhibited, and illustrated it for us perfectly. In fact, she has thrown in a couple more ‘isms’ for free: scientism and reductionism of the most imperial sort. Not only do we see the primary distinction that makes the rest of her arguments throughout the talk fall to the ground, we also come to realize that ID has been ‘refuted’ by merely asserting a materialist position of one of the most extreme kinds. And Scott wants a theist walking away assured that atheism, reductionism, and philosophical materialism have nothing to do with her position? Nothing to do with the battle against ID in the science classroom? Wow. So where does the debate go from here?