On the Integrity of Science: A Response to Bill Dembski

May 11, 2011 by Karl W. Giberson

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And the charge that any scientific investigation is not based on "empirical evidence" seems incomprehensible to me. What can this mean? It would be a mistake to claim, of course, that science is based exclusively on such evidence and nothing else—mathematics comes immediately to mind—but claims that science is based on metaphysical naturalism rather than evidence are, quite simply, absurd. One need only enroll in an undergraduate science class to see the strangeness of this claim.

Johnson ups the ante even further when he talks about evolution. The scientific community promotes evolution, he says, to "persuade the public to believe that there is no purposeful intelligence that transcends the natural world." This claim, made by many in the anti-evolutionary community, comes from mistakenly assuming that certain popular science writers speak for the scientific community. Mariano Artigas and I analyzed this disturbing phenomenon in some detail in Oracles of Science: Celebrity Scientists versus God and Religion. In particular, we noted that the leading public faces of science over the past twenty-five years—Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Steven Weinberg, Stephen Jay Gould, Edward O. Wilson, Stephen Hawking—are significantly more anti-religious than the scientific community as a whole. Many of the anti-evolutionists today—and I include Bill in this group—seem to assume that these scientists speak authentically for the scientific community when, in fact, they do not.

The various strategies employed by anti-evolutionists to undermine faith in science have been wildly successful. Today you can take almost any scientific idea and discover, to my dismay and hopefully yours, that merely being evangelical makes one more likely to reject that idea. Global warming is a case in point. Fifty-eight percent of Americans "unaffiliated" with any religion accept that it is man-made, as the scientific community has definitively stated, but only 34 percent of white evangelical Protestants accept this. Unlike the age of the earth, or even evolution, global warming is a serious and immediate threat and it does matter what we think about it as it shapes many of our decisions. I am quite discouraged that the evangelical community has so distanced itself from science that we are making it harder for our society to address this problem.

There is more to be said here but I want to get back to my primary point: the scientific enterprise, as described by Bill and others in the anti-evolutionary movement, is unrecognizable to me. And I think this deep foundational difference is at the heart of most of our smaller differences on things like pseudogenes, common ancestry, and natural selection.

The Integrity of Science
Bill levels the following accusation at The Language of Science and Faith: "consumers have a right to expect truth in advertising. And here, in my view, this book signally fails." I don't like all the "marketing" and "advertising" metaphors here, which I think are just ad hominem rhetorical detours taking us off track, so I am not going to comment on Bill's extensive use of those concepts. What I want to look at is the profoundly different way that Bill and I view the scientific community and the appropriate way to evaluate scientific ideas.

Let me start with this passage from Bill's review: "Throughout their book, Giberson and Collins overconfidently proclaim that Darwinian evolution is a slam-dunk. Thus one reads, 'There has been no scientific discovery since Darwin—not one—which has suggested that evolution is not the best explanation for the origin of species' (21-22). No theory is that good. Every theory admits anomalies. Every theory faces disconfirming evidence."

The claim that evolution is a remarkably successful theory—what Bill calls a "slam dunk"—is nothing more than a description of how the scientific community—as a whole, with a tiny number of notable exceptions—views evolution. The scientific literature is not filled with growing concerns about the viability of the theory; scientific meetings do not have sessions devoted to alternative explanations for origins; and leading scientists are not on record objecting to the continuous and blinkered embrace of evolution by their colleagues. This is not to deny the presence of anomalies, as Bill rightly notes, which are observations that don't fit the prevailing paradigm. Most scientific theories have anomalies. But it requires a rather dramatic leap to argue, as I believe Bill does in the passage quoted above, that anomalies suggest that the prevailing explanation is no longer the best one available. Let me provide an example.

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5/11/2011 4:00:00 AM

Book Club

Bill Dembski

Creationism

Darwinism

evolution

Francis Collins

Mainline Protestantism

science

Christianity

Evangelicalism

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