On The Integrity Of Science: A Response To Bill Dembski

Editor's Note : The following is the second piece in a four-part conversation between Dr. William Dembski and Dr. Karl Giberson, concerning Giberson and Francis Collins' new book, The Language of Science and Faith: Straight Answers to Genuine Questions. Read the first piece by Dembski here. Find more resources and discussion surrounding the book at the Patheos Book Club. Bill Dembski describes my recent book with Francis Collins as an exercise in "Selling the Product." I am not sure what this means. Certainly Francis and I had no conversations about "selling" and I don't think of science as being a "product." Our goal with this modest volume was simply to calm the fears of Christians who feel their faith is threatened by science in general and evolution in particular. If "selling the product" means doing our best job at our task, then we plead guilty to this oddball crime. I want to respond to Dembski—a personal friend whom I have known for many years—by addressing my most global concern about the anti-evolution movement of which he is a major player. This concern relates to the nature of the scientific enterprise, which I just don't recognize when anti-evolutionists, whether Bill or Ken Ham or Phillip Johnson, talk about it. I am deeply concerned that evangelical Christianity, as a vast and largely self-sufficient subculture in America, has become so disengaged from science that it is now intellectually impoverished. I am particularly alarmed at the widespread rejection of mainstream scientific ideas by Christians, particularly evangelicals. In some cases the rejection is, frankly, humiliating. The age of the earth, to take the most egregious example, has been established beyond all reasonable doubt to be billions of years, and yet most Christians think the earth is just a few thousand years old. And some of these Christians are very well-educated. In my book Saving Darwin , I used the following analogies to help readers understand just how far-fetched this is: Scientists know the moon to be two hundred and forty thousand miles away. How would you react if your neighbor, who was very interested in science, said it was a quarter mile away, closer than the convenience store you can see from your front step? Imagine attending a massive rock concert that broke all attendance records with ten million fans. Your neighbor, who was in attendance, claims there were just ten fans at the concert. Suppose you discussed the age of the earth with your neighbor. In agreement with scientists, you say the earth is five billion years old; your neighbor, however, says that number is a million times too large and the true age of the earth is just over five thousand years. Such extreme disagreements seem laughable and artificial. The last one, however, is a highly animated argument in America as young-earth creationists, a hundred million strong, spar with the scientific community over the age of the earth. Nobody thinks the moon is just above the rooftops, but most people in America have a neighbor who thinks the earth is ten thousand years old. Fortunately, Bill accepts the great age of the earth as determined by the scientific community, so he is not in this tragically uninformed group. But most of his fellow anti-evolutionists are. There are, perhaps, no serious practical implications of getting the age of the earth so incredibly wrong. People can hold all sorts of odd beliefs and still be able to tie their shoes and get to work, as Glenn Beck has shown so clearly. But, in order to prevent evangelicals from discovering the overwhelming evidence against their young earth position, the anti-evolutionists have had to assault the integrity of the scientific enterprise until most evangelicals just don't trust it. This is a widespread strategy employed in various ways by all the anti-evolutionists. Phillip Johnson—arguably the founder of the contemporary intelligent design movement—smeared science most articulately in his classic polemic Darwin on Trial. and follow-ups Reason in the Balance and The Wedge of Truth. In these volumes and his other writings he insists that science as practiced today—particularly evolution—rests on a shaky foundation of "metaphysical naturalism," rather than "empirical evidence." “Darwinism,” he wrote in Reason in the Balance (p.16) is not really based on empirical evidence. Its true basis is in philosophy, and specifically in the metaphysics of naturalism.” This is an amazing claim on so many levels. For starters, the label science —which includes physics, chemistry, and biological evolution (which critics prefer to call “Darwinism”)— is short for "natural science." The supposedly sinister "naturalism" of science that frightens good Christians is not a foundation at all, as if it can be separated from that science like a foundation that awaits the arrival of a house. Naturalism is central to the very definition of science. 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. When Newton's much vaunted theory of gravity was complete, it was celebrated as the best explanation for the motion of physical objects in the solar system, from rocks falling on the earth, to the motion of the moon, to the elliptical orbit of Mars about the sun. But the orbit of Saturn did not match the prediction of Newton's theory. It occasionally departed from the nice ellipse it was supposed to trace out, as it orbited the sun. This departure from the prediction of a reliable theory is a classic example of an anomaly. Saturn's anomalous path suggested that there was something wrong with Newton's theory, to be sure. And astronomers at the time worried about that. But the Saturnian anomaly suggested only that Newton's theory might not be a perfect explanation for everything ; it did not suggest in any way that Newton's theory was not the best explanation for most things. And the resolution of this famous anomaly was, of course, the discovery of the planet Uranus, which tugged on Saturn every time they passed each other, giving it the puzzling wobble they were worried about. When the influence of Uranus was considered, the anomaly plaguing Newton's theory disappeared. Anomalies typically work like this in every scientific theory; they are small puzzles inviting scrutiny, and almost never pointers to some wholesale replacement theory. And anomalies typically get resolved, as was the case with Saturn, within the larger framework of the very theory that they once appeared to contradict. I wonder if Bill may have absorbed a widespread misunderstanding about anomalies from the anti-evolutionary community of which he is a leader. This misunderstanding is rooted in two closely related fallacies: the "lawyer" fallacy, and the false dichotomy. Fallacies, as we study them in Logic, are not just mistakes in reasoning. They are particularly seductive mistakes in reasoning that are easy to miss. The false dichotomy emerges when we mistakenly assume that there are only two options on the table. If there really are just two options available to us then evidence against one actually serves as evidence for the other. This is why negative campaigning in the United States is so effective. A politician can get elected with an argument that amounts to nothing more than "The other guy is terrible!" The anti-evolutionary community has long framed the origins conversation as a false dichotomy: we have to choose between godless evolution or creation/intelligent design. If this really is the choice, then an anomaly that undermines evolution could be interpreted as pointing in the direction of intelligent design. But without the fallacious assumption of the dichotomy the anomaly says nothing in particular. It simply calls attention to itself, like Paris Hilton. The "lawyer" fallacy is a variation on the false dichotomy and has long been a part of the anti-evolutionary movement. Phillip Johnson's Darwin on Trial , published in 1991, was remarkably similar to Norman MacBeth's Darwin Retried , published two decades earlier. Lawyers, at least the ones we watch on TV, live in a world that is artificially black and white. They stand astride a dichotomy of "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt versus innocent." The task of the defense lawyer is to provide "anomalies" that will provide the jury with reasonable doubts about the prosecution's "theory." The defense lawyer is not required to provide a replacement theory. He can be entirely successful by simply destroying the best theory and leaving the prosecution with nothing to replace it. Science does not work like this. If anomalies in science worked like they do in jurisprudence, there would be no scientific theories of any sort. Virtually all scientific theories have anomalies and, when they are being born, they arise slowly from under a gigantic pile of anomalies, like a rescue worker climbing out of the rubble of a collapsed building. Bill and I have dramatically different perspectives on the significance of anomalies. I think anomalies in science are far too subtle to be lifted out of their context and evaluated as stand-alone bits of evidence. Bill writes, for example, "The issue is not who's doubting Darwinism, but what are the arguments for and against it and whether they have merit." I completely disagree with this statement. A scientific theory could have ten major evidences in its favor and two anomalies contradicting it. To adjudicate such an example is complicated. Not all evidence is equal and it requires deep experience and wisdom to make the appropriate evaluation. In the case of Newton's theory, the orbit of the moon provided solid evidence for the theory and the orbit of Saturn provided evidence against it. But, as the astronomers at the time saw clearly, the evidence from the moon deserved to be weighted more heavily—it deserved, in some sense, more votes. If 17th-century "antigravitationists"—the French astronomers desperately hoping René Descartes would win the international competition for most brilliant scientist—had demanded that people either explain the Saturnian anomaly or reject Newton's theory, they would be much like the anti-evolutionists of today. This is why I think history of science is so important in these discussions; we have seen all these arguments before and should be cautious when long dead arguments arise from their crypts and sneak back into the discussion. To evaluate the significance of anomalies requires subtle judgments by experts. Only someone who can actually perform gravitational calculations can adequately appreciate the significance of how Newton's theory predicts that the planets travel in elliptical orbits. It is breathtakingly beautiful to see how this works. It is equally easy to understand why people who appreciate this are unlikely to abandon such a theory because of small discrepancies in the orbit of Saturn. Their intuition tells them that there must be some other explanation for the anomaly, even though they have no idea what that might be. Scientists' unwillingness to be persuaded by anomalies may look like pigheadedness. A lawyer could make such apparently blind allegiance to a theory in the face of counterevidence seem irrational and suggestive of a conspiracy to protect a failing theory. But there is a collective wisdom in the scientific community that I don't think Bill appreciates. The experience of the scientific community when it comes to evolution is that countless anomalies from the time of Darwin down to the present have been happily resolved, just as the irregularity in the orbit of Saturn was resolved with the discovery of Uranus. I trust this collective judgment. Bill does not: "Giberson and Collins' constant drumming of mainstream and consensus science is beside the point—science progresses by diverging from the mainstream and by breaking with consensus." The collective wisdom of "mainstream and consensus science" is most certainly not "beside the point." It is precisely the point. I think Bill is just wrong when he says that science progresses by "breaking with consensus." This widespread misperception comes from conflating "revolutionary" science with "normal" science, to use Thomas Kuhn's terms. Revolutionary science is exciting and makes the history books; it is easy to remember. Famous scientists—Newton, Darwin, Einstein—are "revolutionaries" to be sure, but most scientific progress occurs by steadily expanding our knowledge, not blowing it all up and starting over. We need think only of the rapid progress in cosmology in the 20th century to see this clearly. Einstein inaugurated a revolution with his theory of General Relativity in the first couple of decades but, after the dust settled on that, there was steady progress for eighty years. Anti-evolutionists need to undermine the concept of "scientific orthodoxy." And they have succeeded in convincing many evangelicals that it represents nothing more than the unsupported collective opinion of scientists who are basically just "voting" on things. Going against this orthodoxy, as the anti-evolutionists have to do needs to appear courageous and revolutionary, not eccentric and uninformed. A year ago the renowned Old Testament scholar Bruce Waltke lost his job at a conservative seminary for suggesting that evangelicals needed to take seriously that the scientific community had reached a consensus on origins. He was chastised by a blogger at Uncommon Descent for his inappropriately "high regard for 'current scientific orthodoxy.'" The blogger asked the same question that Bill is asking in his review of The Language of Science and Faith : "Can we no longer confront the data on our own?" Bill and I have very different answers to this question. My response, which I provided at greater length a while ago on the BioLogos site, is "Of course we cannot confront the data 'on our own'." Dealing with scientific data requires training and experience in whatever narrow area we are considering. If you say, for example, that you can interpret fossil data on your own—as biochemist Duane Gish and legal scholar Phillip Johnson do—then you need to know about fossils. You should be able to answer detailed and sophisticated questions about fossils, before you presume to challenge the conclusions of people who study fossils for a living. But most non-specialists cannot answer even basic questions like: Where might you find a fossil? How much of a fossil skeleton is typically present? How do you determine the age of a fossil? What exactly is a fossil? What parts of a skeleton are most likely to be missing? How do you decide if fossils found together are from the same organism? If you cannot answer simple questions like these then you cannot confront fossil data "on your own." But, rather than engaging such a quixotic project, you can simply accept the conclusions of people who know way more than you do. And fossils are the simplest part of the evolutionary picture. Interpreting genomic data, with its complex biochemical, statistical, and historical underpinnings is not remotely possible without the relevant expertise. In my field of physics I cannot imagine what it would mean for a layperson to deal with the data and draw their own conclusions. If you don't understand differential equations, to take one example, then you cannot understand quantum mechanics. You can look at the colored lines in a spectrum and somehow imagine that they come from electrons jumping back and forth in the atom, but that is a far cry from understanding what is going on. The only time we hear calls of the sort that Bill is making to stand up and challenge "orthodoxy" is when we don't like that orthodoxy. But this is hardly the position of a reasonable man—to selectively cry "foul" on the process when you don't like the conclusion. That is nothing more than yelling at the umpire when his calls go against your team. If the scientific community has missed the boat on the science of evolution, then they have missed it on everything else. What basis is there to decide that the evolutionary biologists are completely incompetent but the medical researchers that discovered the drug you are taking for your heart condition is reliable? To understand science is to understand the process of science, to appreciate just how much effort is expended over the course of a century as thousands of scientists from different disciplines, different countries, and speaking different languages, gather data and work vigorously until they all get onto the same page—and reach a "consensus"—about what is going on. To suggest that this "data" can be handed over to non-specialists so they can make up their own minds is to profoundly misunderstand the nature of science.

On the Integrity of Science: A Response to Bill Dembski