Dover is a wrap. The “New York Times reports on the closing arguments”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/05/science/sciencespecial2/05design.html?ex=1288846800&en=c428931f2daa6714&ei=5089&partner=rssyahoo&emc=rss,
and tries to paint the trial as one where two entities – the school board and the intelligent design movement – are on trial, one where there are scientists who believe ID is a new paradigm shift and others who believe its symbolizes the ultimate act of “giving up” on nature.
Closing statements for the defense yet again revived the many-times-over debunked “watchmaker” analogy. That is, when you see a watch you implicitly (translation: hypothetically) know it was designed (where is the experimentation? Where is the SCIENCE?!). My own observations of this argument – that the watch, without a designer, violates thermodynamics, etc. – make this the pinnacle of “giving up”.
If you saw something as complex as a watch, as a scientists you’d actually conduct experiments to determine how such a thing could have arisen. Intelligent design is only one explanatory hypothesis. Another is that a large injection of energy overcame entropy, and according to the orderly laws of nature managed to assemble the pieces in many failed arrangements until this successful arrangement, capable of telling time, appeared. It’s nuts, but only by experimentation can you determine the truth. And that’s what matters: science is a means by which you can establish the cause, and it is the process which matters. The conclusions (intelligent designer, etc.) only matter if they are vetted by experiment.
Unlike a watch, however, biology (which is the analogous system to the watch in this argument) is not teetered on the verge of not working. That is, if one (or even many) cogs are out of place in biological systems, they don’t collapse and stop working. Rather, as experiments have revealed, they *adapt* to the changes. Either the adaptation is successful, or not. But biology is not a watch whose sole function is predicated on the precise operation of every single part. Rather, biology is a system of adaptation, capable of making the adjustments needed to sustain, or to accept the inevitability of extinction. For instance, the eye (which is a favorite of many ID proponents as evidence for God), evolved from simple nerve patches capable of sensing light/no light. A flaw in their evolution is a blind spot, right in the dead center of your vision. This has to do with the optics in the eye, as they developed. It’s not a fatal flaw, unless there is a predator capable of exploiting it, but we often don’t even notice it because our brains have adapted to this error.
The other problem with the watchmaker argument is that it leads to an irreducible set of questions: “who designed the designer?” Once you posulate a “who”, you then are forced logically to postulate a “who made who”, etc. An additional problem is that if you refuse to accept the “who made who” series, you must force upon your reasoning an axiom: once I have established the existence of the designer, I will accept that nobody else could have designed the designer. That axiom has two problems: the first is supernaturality, or the conscious act of abandoning natural explanations in favor of an actor whose very existence is outside the bounds of scientific investigation; the second is that the axiomatic acceptance of an artifical wall to scientific investigations (no more questions are allowed to be asked) itself defeats science. In the end, intelligent design as science appears, by its own arguments, a snake eating its tail. If it is science, it undoes science.
In the end, it seems that the Dover schoolboard is likely very guilty of violating the establishment clause of the Constitution. They picked ID because it was the least “creationist” of the Protestant creation science movements. They picked the mention of “Of Pandas and People”, a book which only in its *last* revision changed the word “creationism” to “intelligent design”. Their private dealings explicitly pointed to injection of their faith into the public school system.
We’re going to have to wait until January, though, for the Judge’s ruling. This wait is gonna drive me nuts.
