biologos’ karl giberson pulls a mooney

When you’re in the mood for post-modernist and pseudo-spiritualist blather, there’s no place on the web quite like the Huffington Post to get your fix. From angry, anti-science screeds by New Age gurus and exercises in intellectual laziness from self-appointed philosophers, to inane rants equating teaching science in science classes to pedophilia and exorable alt med woo, it seems that pretty much anyone with a pulse and disdain for the real world is welcome to a column at HuffPo. This time, a member of the Templeton funded project for the watered down apologetics of Francis Collins, BioLogos, decided to take a page from Chris Mooney and blame scientists for being unable to dispel creationism, and then offers the very same kind of pseudoscientific obfuscation that brought it into the public sphere and allows it to endure in a feat of scientific dishonesty.

I’m really not surprised that Karl Giberson would dive into Discovery Institute style fallacies since I generally expect far lower scientific standards when Templeton’s projects are involved and this time is no different. We start right off the bat with arguments that seem to be cribbed from Bill Dembski’s rants at Uncommon Descent and offered with absolutely no real meaning or definition behind them.

… ID’s coffin is far from being nailed shut. Several things are propping it open: 1) The complex designs of many natural structures that have not yet been explained by science. As long as there are ingenious devices and intricate phenomena in nature (origin of life, anyone?) that we cannot understand, there will be ID arguments.

Saying that something is complex without offering a real definition of complexity is not a scientific argument. If you remember my explanation why terms like “design” and “specified complexity” which are hurled around by the talking heads at the Discovery Institute are just meaningless technobabble, you’ll probably note that what Giberson is doing here is no different. He’s saying that as long as there’s something we don’t understand, we will always have people who want to throw in a completely unfounded, religious explanation to affirm their faith and he’s right in that regard. But he couldn’t possibly be more wrong in saying that opportunistic cranks lend a serious, scientific legitimacy to creationism. That’s like saying that a shaman in the Amazon lends credence to faith healing in the absence of modern, scientific medicine.

2) The remarkable, finely-tuned structure of the cosmos in which the laws of physics collaborate to make life possible. Many agnostics have had their faith in unguided materialism shaken by this, most recently Anthony Flew.

Oh of course, because an old agnostic who flip-flopped on his faith throughout his life was swayed, surely we all must bow down and covert too, just as soon as we get our own creationist mentor like Flew did. The notion of a finely tuned cosmos is not supported by physics or biology, and it’s actually a product of a self-absorbed attitude which holds humans as the pinnacle of creation while deeming this somehow noble in a backward look at pretty much of all history, chemistry, physics and zoology.

3) The widespread belief that God — an intelligent agent — created the universe. The claim that an intelligent God created an unintelligent universe seems peculiar, to say the least.

And this is the only point on which he’s actually correct. People want to believe that they’re special, that there’s an omnipotent deity which created them, which watches over them, and if they pray hard enough and are just pious enough and properly adhere to certain books, they’ll be rewarded by paradise. This is the one and only reason why creationism persists and every other argument ever summoned for it comes from the deep need to keep one’s faith going.

4) The enthusiastic insistence by New Atheists that evolution is incompatible with belief in God. Most people think more highly of their religion than their science. Imagine trying to get 100 million Americans to dress up for a science lecture every Sunday morning — and then voluntarily pay for the privilege.

I could imagine it. Just give me about five generations, the ability to set up my own culture and overcome all of the objections from scientists who’ll insist that selling their work as the one, sole absolute truth is not ethically responsible. People go to church because that’s what they did for as long as anyone can remember. And yes, if you’re going to accept evolution as a real science, you can’t just pick and choose what parts of the theory you will re-attribute to a deity on your personal whim. That kind of attitude may pass in church, but not in a lab.

If the scientific community wants to dislodge ID, they need to start by admitting that their efforts have been an abysmal failure so far. And then they need to turn their considerable analytical skills on the problem of explaining that failure.

Funny how this advice comes from an apologist on a payroll of Evangelical billionaires trying to buy their way into the scientific community who just laid out vague, pseudoscientific, pro-creationism fallacies. I hope he’s not serious about the scientific community taking his advice seriously because it would be like listening to an arsonist how to build houses and how to fight fires. Skeptics and scientists know why they can’t just dislodge creationism. It’s because of people like Collins, Gilberson, their bosses, and Christian fundamentalists.

If they do this, they might discover that enthusiastic pronouncements like “ID is dead” or “science has proven God does not exist” or “religion is stupid” or “creationists are insane” are not effective. They might discover that affirming that the universe is wonderful, despite our bad backs and the nonsense in our genomes, makes it easier for people to accept the bad design in nature.

And now we’ve reached the final part of the performance, the piece in which the apologist projects his inability to appreciate nature’s flaws on scientists who say that these flaws are proof that nature is far more elaborate, complex and nuanced than any myth of an old man in a white robe and sandals waiving it into existence. He’s desperate to see his religious beliefs justified and lacking any sort of proof for them, he resorts to absolutely meaningless affirmations about beauty and complexity. You see, Giberson really wants to be special, living in a universe designed for him and when those mean old scientists say they have no proof for his fantasies, his response is to craft an elaborate bandwagon fallacy and tell scientists to obey the crowd. Maybe, one day, he and his bosses will get over themselves and when they do, creationism will finally start to die.