Eddy and myself disagree on the validity of ID generally, but I would agree with him concerning the attribution of postmodernism to ID. It is hard to be definitive amid all the gobbledygook, but that one’s private little reality supersedes any imperialist objective reality, each to their own, seems to be one defining characteristic of postmodern thinking. ID strongly holds reality is the objective world everyone lives in, and the discussion then concerns what is the correct reality. Other than that, I do appreciate your comments.
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In the example you chose, I spoke of Gould and Denton, two people who had done technical research, so I was not exalting people who do only philosophizing about science above people who do technical work in science. But you are responding to a comment about Meyer, who did not previously do scientific research, so the comparison is not fitting. Further, Meyer does not accept macroevolution, whereas Denton and Gould both do. So you’re lifting my comment out of context.
ID creationists reject the objective data provided by doing science in the world we live in, in favor of pure rhetoric that frequently fudges that same actual, objective evidence.
The context was supporting my characterization of your obvious position:
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The Postmodern Sin of Intelligent Design Creationism | Science & Education
However, in the end, there is a lesson to be drawn from this history, though it is not about the details of creationism’s dalliance with postmodernism; this affair, in any case, is not the worst of IDC’s sins by any means. The real scandal is that of the academy in its dalliance with radical postmodernism. Intelligent Design Creationism is a particularly telling example of the postmodern sin.
IDC shows in a striking manner how radical postmodernism undermines itself and its own goals of liberation. If there is no difference between narratives – including no differ- ence between true and false stories and between fact and fiction – then what does liberation come to? Are scientific investigations of human sexuality really no more likely than the Genesis tale of Eve’s creation from Adam’s rib? Those original goals – the overthrow of entrenched ideologies that hid and justified oppression – that motivated the postmodern critique were laudable. But the right way to combat oppression is not with a philosophy that rejects objectivity and relativizes truth, for that guts oppression of its reality. In his article, Johnson began with some harsh words for the practitioners of Critical Legal Studies:
We expect adolescents to come up with grand criticisms of the existing order without proposing a realistic alternative, but by the time one graduates from law school, or at least by the time one achieves tenure on a law school faculty, we generally expect the former adolescent to have developed a willingness to come to terms with reality. (Johnson 1984, p. 248)
In an interview many years later Johnson remarked, “I’ve found that people often say things about their enemies that are true of themselves” (Johnson 1992a), without apparently appreciating the reflexive irony of his observation. His rhetorical question to those who might be tempted by Critical Legal Studies (which he must have forgotten when embarking on his own adolescent challenge of evolutionary science), applies equally to Intelligent Design Creationism and to extreme postmodernism – “Do You Sincerely Want to Be a Radical?” We do not need a God’s-eye view of truth-with-a-capital-T to recognize oppression, but we do need the grounding in reality that science helps provide. We need at least that mundane sort of truth if we are to be set free and it was the sin of radical postmodernism to think otherwise.
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I do not entirely disagree here. But postmodernists might say, “John and Eddy are both right, because that is the way they experience the world”, or oppositely, John and Eddy are both wrong, because they want to impose an objective reality on other people’s experience". Objective thinking says only one can be right concerning mutually exclusive positions, and here is the data which supports that position.
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I know what you mean. I’m certainly closer to Burke than I am to either modern libertarians or modern fundamentalists, both of whom are called “conservatives.” The term “conservative” is very slippery. But basically, by “conservative” in theology I don’t mean Ken Ham or Henry Morris, but Calvin, Aquinas, Jonathan Swift, Thomas More, etc.; and by “conservative” in philosophy I don’t mean American right-wing economists or the like; I mean Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and the like. Modern conservative thinkers include people like C. S. Lewis and Allan Bloom, who believe that truth has been discovered or at least is discoverable in principle – which post-modernism denies.
We haven’t “met” before, but since already Mercer is trying to give you wrong preconceptions about me, let me say that I have ID sympathies but am not a diehard defender of everything ID people write, that I accept macroevolution (like Behe and Denton) and have doubts only about some of the accounts about how it works, that I don’t read Genesis as a historical report, that I’m in no sense a fundamentalist or creationist, and that the very idea of growing up in a small US town surrounded by Bible-thumpers chills my blood. Give me throne and altar over village council and Bible any day. My interest in design arguments is no different from the interest that has been shown in them for over 2,000 years by the cream of the crop of Western thinkers, and I was interested in them long before I ever heard of ID. My graduate work was in a wholly secular religious studies department and I specialized in the doctrine of creation and its relationship to both philosophy and science. None of readings employed in my graduate work were by Gish, Morris, or any other fundamentalist. And oh yes, I don’t think ID should be taught in high school science class, but I do wish that science all the way up from early grades gave a little better sense of the history and philosophy of science, as opposed to just teaching students how to do certain experiments or solve certain mathematical problems.
Which is not my position. Empiricism and theory both are essential to science. My contrast is not between theory and empirical work; it’s between those scientists who tend to focus on small questions and those scientists who tend to engage in more big picture thinking, and in the course of that thinking interact with historians, philosophers, etc. I haven’t seen anyone here write as richly and deeply about evolutionary theory as Gould has, and that’s not because of any difference between empiricism and theory, but because of the vast capacity of Gould to integrate a wide range of areas of human thought.
Well, you know, I am interested in design arguments, too. I get pigeonholed as some sort of dogmatic anti-ID person, but the fact is that I have no basic problem with the idea. It’s the evidence that is the problem. And I have yet to see an ID advocate sincerely even attempt to make a positive case for it on the evidence – it always boils down to denial of evolution, and usually this is not even done honestly.
That tends to convince me that there is nothing there; that the Wedge Strategy document is as good a charter for the ID “movement” as could be written; and that the character of the material suggests an effort to separate people who are frightened of modernity and science from their money, rather than an attempt to explain unexplained features of the natural world. All of the railing that is done against materialism, and against naturalism, suggests that we have people who are making claims of supernatural activity but who do not accept the basic terms of the deal: that if you claim something really happens, you need evidence that it does.
Claims of miraculous doings cannot really be supported – not meaningfully – by historical evidence. If they could, we have too many of them to really believe – Huxley’s essay on the value of witness to the miraculous is a good one. And even when someone feels subjectively that he’s made a good historical argument, the problem is that there is no way to test it; the listener can simply withhold his assent. With data in hand, it’s easy to tell the denialist “it doesn’t matter whether you believe it or not.” When arguing that something miraculous seems likelier than not to you on the basis of historical accounts, “I just don’t buy it” is not a statement to which there can be any truly definitive, forceful response.
In other words, I would just say that ID needs to stop horsing around and get on with the business of demonstrating that the forces it proposes are real and that they actually do demonstrable things in the world. As long as the character of ID writing is what it has been to this point – mostly a negation of evolutionary theory – it seems to me that its proponents are not serious about it and are not really trying. They do have a revenue stream without being serious and without trying, and in economics, the test of fitness is not scientific rigor but cash flow and solvency; I think that’s all they’re really going for.
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We’ve distinguished in the past here between ID as a social movement and ID as a set of arguments for design in nature. I think that some of what you say is accurate about ID as a social movement, but I have always been more interested in the arguments for design in nature. That’s probably because I stumbled across ID not due to any concern about ninth-grade science class evolution instruction, but because I was on the lookout for any fresh ideas concerning teleology, design, etc. Having spent years studying Plato, Lucretius, Bergson, etc., where these things are discussed on the philosophical plane, I found it interesting that a group of people were discussing them on the plane of cell biology and biochemistry, and of information theory. So I started reading up on the stuff.
I’m actually more interested in those who try to make the case that design is there in nature than in those who try to attribute it to the Christian God. Did you ever read Michael Denton’s 1998 book, Nature’s Destiny? It wasn’t produced by Discovery. It makes the case for a naturally-executed designed evolution. No miracles are asserted. He’s really more interested in showing the remarkable overlaps in fitness that exist in the universe, making intelligent life possible, and in suggesting that this set of overlaps has a particular character that doesn’t sound like the result of a blind-search process but of a process that was planned. You may agree or disagree with his analysis or conclusions, but the book is utterly free of American culture-war considerations, having nothing to do with schools or curriculum or the interpretation of Genesis. And we know from Denton’s own biographical remarks that he has no interest in trying to work Christianity into American science classes. Whenever someone asks me a good ID book to start on, I always like to suggest that one.
This reflects a general problem you demonstrate discussions here: You seem unable to appreciate that it is possible for a person to exhibit behaviour that can be attributed to particular beliefs or premises, without the person actively and openly endorsing those beliefs. In fact, they might even overtly disavow these beliefs. We see this in your denial that ID proponents are creationists, and we see it here in the present discussion.
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A particularly egregious example of this was when William Lane Craig claimed that neuroscience had shown that animals other than humans (and maybe a few other primates) do not experience suffering when they are in physical pain. (This was supposed to be a response to the anti-theistic argument from suffering.) When a video was made in response in which a number of neuroscientists explained how he had misunderstood the evidence, Craig’s response in part was that a scientifically informed philosopher is better able to answer the question better than a neuroscientist. (He failed to specify where a scientifically uninformed philosopher like himself fell on the scale).
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One of the stocks in trade of ID thought, a staple (even a genre) is the line of “reasoning” that fits this pattern - we don’t know everything, therefore we know nothing, therefore God (or design or whatever the euphemism du jour is). This “logic” permeates ID tomes and scholarship - it is the entirety of Behe’s first book, it is the mainstay of Meyer’s works, it is the recurring theme in several contributions every week on the DI’s mouthpiece website. This approach is exactly what you assign to postmodernists, @Eddie. It is not " a laundry list of particular things certain people are dubious about", it is a “general stance about the very possibility of knowledge”.
Let’s update this:
The ID post-modernist thinks that science itself is yet another subjective enterprise, like philosophy, religion, art, etc. Science is the product of “atheistic liberals” of who hate Christians, …
Not at all. ID proponents choose to re-phrase basic assumptions, indeed to re-write reality. (Their response to my example of Turf13 is an excellent example of their approach. They airbrush one key facet of plant reproductive biology out of existence, they claim that 0+1=-1, and they recast two fundamentally different cellular processes as a single one. This is not about working with the same rules. ID proponents have totally different, essentially postmodernist views about truth, reality, and knowledge.)
See the above.
ID proponents are entirely postmodernist in this.
The facts are pretty plain - ID as a school of thought, as a movement, is permeated with postmodern tendencies and logic.
So, @Eddie, you don’t think ID proponents are necessarily conservative? I doubt that, but I would welcome evidence to the contrary.
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I think there may be an interesting overlap between post-modernism and reactionary theists who try to drive society back to pre-Enlightenment times. Where they diverge, however, is in the latter’s insistence on replacing reason with revelation.
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I think I was just saying that (1) I am more interested in the evidence (not the arguments; sheesh, there has been a lot of evidence-free argument in ID) for design in nature, and (2) the characteristics of ID suggest that it is only a social movement, not a bunch of people interested in nature.
The problem here so often is that ID advocates think arguments can do the work which only evidence can do. Evidence is the grist for argument’s mill. All we hear from ID proponents, most of the time, is the same sound of stone grinding on stone, getting no work done but exhausting the listener’s patience and nerves.
I might dig up Denton’s book – obviously, as you can tell, I have a weakness for such things and I do try to scope out the whole ID field. But it’s probably a fair guess that he did not, in 1998, come up with a load of good novel evidentiary material that ID advocates have somehow managed not to mention in the years since.
On the other hand, my goodness – there is a lot to read that is actually evidentiary and substantive. I recall the spectacular contrast between Erwin and Valentine’s book on the Cambrian explosion and Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt. A person who takes in both books can only conclude that one of them is about the Cambrian, and one of them is not. And while the Erwin and Valentine book is, for a layman like me, a book that has speed bumps in it that require me to slow down and really try very hard to be sure I understand, its various mysteries actually yield to scrutiny; one reads it, and one understands things after reading it that one did not understand previously. The same could never be said of Darwin’s Doubt.
And so I am always a bit torn, when it comes to reading time. I constantly say that a person cannot embark upon, or even understand, a critique of science without first understanding the views which are under critique. This is the mistake people make when they read ID works without suitable preparation in the underlying science: the critique will in most cases (where ID is concerned) misconstrue actual science, misrepresent its findings, misrepresent its implications, and present a sunny picture of the ID alternative. It looks very different if one reads actual biology first. What, I find myself often asking, should I take the time to read? If I hadn’t struggled through Jenny Clack’s Gaining Ground, I wouldn’t know anything about the sarcopterygian/tetrapod transition (one of those things IDers tend to deny without elaboration) or the fossils which illustrate it (which the IDers tend to just deny the existence of). I probably need to read it at least twice more because it works that way with things that are too technical for me. Kemp’s Origin and Evolution of Mammals only became fully comprehensible on about the third run (by which I mean that I felt that, rather than merely getting the general idea, I was actually able to participate in learning meaningful details).
So, in these situations I have to take my own advice. Reading ID literature is interesting from a cultural point of view but it is not helpful to my quest to understand biology – a quest which is not primarily about ID but is actually about learning things that are worth knowing for their own sake, rather than things which are worth knowing for the light they shed on American culture.
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Fellow peaceful science citizens, here is why I reject the characterization of ID as postmodern.
If anybody wishes to engage with postmodernism, do not waste time at Discovery Institute. Head to the nearest university and enroll in nursing or gender studies, and fill your boots. My daughter went through nursing and it is truly disturbing how much nursing theory openly extols pluralist “ways of knowing” at the expense of the scientific method. These disciplines make no bones about it, they self-define as postmodern and in your face with it.
This verbiage from a treatise on nursing theory, believe it or not, is an only typical example:
The postmodernist rejection of positivistic science, and its openness to marginalized discourses, also offers nurses and opportunity to practice according to alternative ways of knowing and according to theories that draw on prepositivist, postpositivist, and postmodernist insights. This might include, for example, the use of non-Western therapies such as shiatsu and acupuncture, or even unconventional non-scientific interpretive frameworks such as astrology and the paranormal.
https://cjnr.archive.mcgill.ca/article/viewFile/1578/1578
In the view of a sizable fraction of your local studies department, science is just an institutionalized reactionary tool of oppression created by old white guys to oppress women, and a smug imperialist condescension to the truths to be found in the third or indiginous world, so forget the telescope for instance.
Postmodernism has an intellectual pedigree, and names associated include Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault. ID stands in a tradition best defined by the evangelical theologian Francis Schaeffer. Fine if you never heard of him, but understand that he reacted strongly against the existentialism at the base of postmodernism, and was a huge proponent that reality was objective in time and space. Postmodernism and Schaeffer get along like matter and antimatter.
Postmodernism is not about practicing bad science. You can twist science, and not be a postmodernist. You can be an absolute crackpot, and not be a postmodernist. Flat earthers are not postmodern, as the true believers think that the earth is really, truly, and actually objectively flat, regardless of what your own lying eyes or your culture have to say about it. Let me be clear, I think ID is wrong in most of its claims, mishandles evidence, and is less than transparent concerning its theological underpinnings. But ID adamantly affirms a universal objective reality, and so whatever its other shortcomings, is not postmodern.
However, if your experience is that ID is postmodern, then for you, ID is postmodern. Who am I to negate the authenticity and validity of anybody else’s life experience?
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ID seems, to me, to be a classic example of modernism, though aimed at a certain type of secularism, and teetering on the edge of positivism. I don’t see it as postmodern.
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They would be incorrect in each case, because Eddie is all about subjectivity and rhetoric; he avoids the data. He’s a pomo when it comes to biology.
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That’s exactly what I am saying you do; you exalt theory (even when you don’t have one!) far above empiricism. Your lack of self-awareness is truly amazing.
You’re claiming that thinking is not involved in empirical work. You’re claiming that writing puts one in a higher caste than producing evidence.
I know many great empiricists who are great thinkers but who are lousy writers. Since you view them as lower-caste, you will never attempt to engage with the evidence they have to offer.
You won’t even engage with the evidence offered by empiricists who are superb writers, though…
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Yep. When someone wants to frame scientific questions as a matter of competing narratives instead of analysis of data, they’re taking a postmodern approach.
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