Howell presents his own explanation of why he wrote the book here:
I havenât read the book as yet (which isnât surprising as it has just come out), though Iâm hoping to.
Based on the review, and the authorâs own description of it, three things did jump out at me however:
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The conspiratorial, more broadly anti-science, direction ID took after Dover. Weâve seen this from both the DIâs fulminations on the blog formerly known as ENV, and by the crank magnetism displayed by some of its adherents on this forum, questioning âthe prevailing scientific wisdom about vaccines, climate change, astrophysics, and AIDS.â
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IDâs âall offense, no defenseâ tactics of attacking evolution, and methodologically-natural science, without offering a well-fleshed-out alternative. Itâs all very well hoping for a Kuhnian paradigm shift to occur â but itâs never going to occur unless and until ID has a fully-fledged alternative paradigm to shift to. Einsteinian Relativity did not replace Newtonian Mechanics because Einstein simply pointed out flaws in the latter.
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The hope that the Walter Bradley Center for Natural & Artificial Intelligence will provide ID with some degree of redemption or respectability. I donât really see this happening. AI has become so big in recent years that, unless the WBC4N&AI comes up with something game-changing, itâs not going to receive any notice â itâll be just a drop in the ocean â nobodyâs going to notice.
I read the blog post and his observations largely match what Iâve seen over the ~30 years of ID.
What I didnât catch, but now I can see, was the movement to conspiracy-theorizing, at least with the DI. The âquestioning whether HIV causes AIDSâ schtick, I thought was mostly Phil Johnsonâs pet pony, and maybe to burnish his âas a lawyer, Iâm trained to see things that scientists missâ credentials. But it couldâve been just another step into crank magnetism. Still, I have no idea why so others associated with ID chose to follow him down that path on HIV denial. Again, I thought it was a case of showing tribal solidarity with one of IDâs founders, and not an attraction toward conspiracy theorizing. But in retrospect, it couldâve been the latter.
In know the DI, like many conservative organizations, seems to have reluctantly (well, at first), aligned themselves with the MAGA gestalt, praising the Brownstone Institute and the Barrington Declaration on Covid. So, yeah, I do see the turn from trying to make a positive case for ID to regurgitating dank memes.
A look thru the Walter Bradley Centerâs website âMind Mattersâ, their equivalent of EN&V, will quickly dispel any illusions that they will be producing any significant research.
(BTW, I did not know that any website using the â.aiâ suffix pays a royalty to the Caribbean island nation of Anguilla. This is apparently now a major source of revenue for them.)
At least someone on Anguilla was thinking intelligently.
When I studied A.I. back in 1981(??), we always spelled it as âA.I.â because âAIâ would have looked too much like the nickname of an Allen/Allan/Alan. And then there was the observation that âA.I.â standing for âAssociate Instructorâ after someoneâs name on the Dept of Computer Science staff office directory implied that they were cyborg.
I think one of the difficulties with intelligent design is that no one really knows what it means.
If tomorrow everyone united and said, âOkay, letâs teach the controversy, letâs teach ID,â what would even be taught? What would a science lesson look like?
Michael Behe, for example, is an intelligent design advocate, but he also believes in common descent and in people descending from archaic hominids.
But how is that meaningfully different from the theory of evolution in terms of human origins?
If everyone simply concluded that God used supernatural methods for people to descend from archaic hominids, would everyone then be satisfied, as long as it wasnât done by natural methods? Of course not.
Other ID advocates might believe in the instantaneous creation of species, as though out of thin air. But such a science class wouldnât go very well, because people donât appear out of thin air, they are born, just like every other species.
So even ID advocates do not really have a unified view of what they believe. And there isnât much substance behind the label.
Someone could be a theistic evolutionist and say that God used material evolution to create todayâs species. That could be exactly the same thing as the theory of evolution, yet they might still label it âintelligent design.â similar to how a baby is born and there are material mechanisms, yet people still affirm a divine hand in knitting the baby together in their motherâs womb.
For that reason, it canât really catch on, because nobody knows what it means, especially in terms of mechanisms.
What is intelligent design aside from a label?
Labels need to be attached to things that can be objectively measured, to tangible realities. Otherwise, theyâre just meaningless words.
And this is an issue in such a way that even people who are sympathetic to the intelligent design movement, and want to support it, arenât really left with something tangible to support.
A PR campaign to get creationism into public schools, and more broadly an arm of the decades-long campaign to impose Christian nationalism on the US. Donât need a coherent model to do that.
Yep. They only agree on what it isnât.
Whenever considering the actions of the DI, always keep the Wedge Document in mind. That manifesto spells out the ID agenda in no uncertain terms: To undermine scientific materialism to the point that it is no longer considered a reliable means of understanding the world, and replacing it with a philosophy based on fundamentalist theism (primarily Christian) that will undergird every aspect of society.
Achieving that goal does not require proposing an alternative to evolutionary explanations. It only requires convincing others that any worldview that does not explicitly include the supernatural is inadequate to account for human origins.
In this context, their broader embrace of all forms of crankery and crackpottery also makes sense.
Didnât Freud first spell out the ID agenda?
I think whatâs strange about this is that, there isnât any theological reason why God couldnât use natural biological processes to create life. What is the birth of a baby?
So what is the real gain?
Who can forget the spectacle of the current Secretary of Education consistently referring to it as âA-oneâ?
She at least knows her steak sauce.
Their goals are not really theological. They are political. They intend to establish a Christian theocracy, and undermining scientific authority is a means to that end.
Questioning scientific « wisdom » is quintessential to the scientific spirit. Science thrives by challenging assumptions. No idea is sacred; even established theories must withstand scrutiny. This attitude drives discovery and keeps science honest. Dogmatic acceptance of scientific âwisdomâ without question is the opposite of sane science.
There is a fundamental difference between questioning scientific conclusions in the interest of furthering scientific knowledge, versus sowing misinformation to foster distrust in science for the purpose of trying to create a theocracy.
The DI is doing the latter, not the former.
ID on the other hand âthrivesâ by misrepresenting sources, making unreasonable and/or unsubtantiated assumptions, and leaps of intuition without substantiating evidence. It therefore offers no valid challenges to scientific assumptions.
That ID is âkeep[ing] science honestâ would seem more akin to a statement of religious faith, closer to the belief that âthe god Thor causes thunder and lightningâ, than to any substantiatable claim.
In fact, it would seem that, like âThor-theoryâ, there is a mountain of evidence against this claim:
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the mountain of evidence for IDâs pervasive dishonesty (and you donât âkeep something honestâ by being dishonest yourself); and
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IDâs small-and-shrinking impact â most scientists would not have heard of ID, and would not give a ratâs arse about it (any more than they would care about Flat Earth or most other crank/conspiracy-theorist claim).
Funny how the âquestioningâ is always on the same few topics that upset religious conservatives, or the petroleum industry.
Itâs always the unholy trinity of unbelief, sexual freedom, and renewable energy.
Weird.