Scientific Prejudice

FWIW, one of the comments appears to be written by Michael Behe. (No one has responded to it yet, although I’m sure that will change.)

Oh, you didn’t say posted, you said written. Nemmine.

Good stuff, that.

But isn’t astrology-bashing a bit like hitting a barn door, or like taking the Mickey out of Christian doctrine? Two, four, six, eight — trying to trans-substantiate. Or arguing that homeopathy is a load of bullshit — so obvious to the typical Crooked Timber devotee as to be preaching to the converted. I subscribe to Shermer’s quarterly ‘The Skeptic’ and get a dose of this every few months. It’s fun. But does it move the ball down the field?

Well, that was my point. Astrology is ridiculous. Like Brian says, it can be dismissed without budging from one’s comfy chair. But giving some scientifically trained people an easily testable claim is like throwing chum to sharks — we can’t resist taking a bite.

Matt McIrvin writes:

“As a general rule, seemingly ridiculous fringe beliefs have more intellectual pull than the highly educated imagine them to have …”

They may have pull, but it’s hardly INTELLECTUAL pull.

And why ‘fringe’ beliefs? Islam is certainly a ridicuous belief system, but Moslems aren’t on any fringe in Arab countries — or in ‘Eurabia’ for that matter.

Perhaps I’m too much of a tragic realist — but I doubt whether the 50000 members of The Skeptics Society will ever catch up, number wise, with the 50 million churchgoers (I think Daniel Dennett made that point somewhere, so I msy be inadvertently plagiarising him).

Reommended reading on the evolutionary inevitability of religion, superstition, astrology, etc : ‘In Gods we Trust’, by Scott Atran
(http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/search-handle-form/ref=sr_sp_go_as/026-4258854-8727628)

This may be a dumb question, but what does an Intelligent Design scientist DO all day? What kinds of experiments or investigations do they do? What would an Intelligent Design research program look like?
“I can’t figure this out, therefore God” doesn’t take a lot of time or laboratory equipment.

C.J.Colucci: “What would an Intelligent Design research program look like?”

They’d be looking for evidence of design, and then testing hypotheses about the methods used by the designers, and the aims behind their designs. Of course we do this in the social sciences all the time, so I’d say ID would look a lot like, say, anthropology and archeology, with maybe some good historical digging, interpretive clarity, and clever survey research (“when you designed this planet, did you have a specific goal in mind? if not, please skip to question 6. If yes, was it (a) …”).

An uncomfortable fact for ID’ers is that, for all their griping about naturalistic bias in the sciences, we study design scientifically all the time. What the likes of Behe and Dembsky presumably don’t like is that, when you apply scientific scrutiny to the question of design in nature, you just don’t find very much to study outside of human societies, and maybe a few other terrestrial organisms at the outside. That may change, but I’m not holding my breath.

robin: “Still no direct response yet to Behe’s argument that ID is falsifiable. … another post claims that Behe’s absence of evidence for ID is tantamount to evidence of absence of ID – which is a bit like throwing stones in glass houses, since the same could be said about neo-Darwinism’s shaky foundations”

Design conjectures and hypotheses can be falsifiable: we use falsifiable design claims in the social sciences all the time (“that policy was intended to have that outcome.” “Doesn’t seem that way to me — give me evidence!”)

In spite of what you read from Behe and Dembski, the fruitfulness of ID does not turn on the vague question of whether or not there is evidence of design in nature. Hey, hypothesize away. Here, I’ll go: I hypothesize that really complex biological systems are designed, by which I mean they are artifacts. So what? The really hard work would then have me testing specific claims about who designed these systems, how they did it, and why.

ID theorists have proven time and again that they really aren’t interested in exploring these sorts of scientific questions about design. And that leads me to think that they really aren’t much interested in science.

Robin Green wrote:

“nat whilk – I think you are confused. Charles Copeland is a highly obnoxious reader of Crooked Timber and is certainly not a Crooked Timber author. So what’s your point?”

Again with the “what’s your point?” query, Robin? Either I need to work on my writing or you need to work on your reading comprehension. My point is that it would be nice to see some consistency–both by Crooked Timber authors and Crooked Timber readers–in their individual reactions to the claims of evolutionary psychology, or, failing that, a reason for the inconsistency. Are evolutionary psychologists’ explanations for religion somehow more legitimate than their explanations of those things that humanists hold dear?