Intelligent Design: Myers Reacts to Richard Land

Razib Khan reacts to Richard Land defending Intelligent Design (below:)

Khan writes:

One of the most interesting things to me is the nature of Creationism as an idea which evolves in a rather protean fashion in reaction to the broader cultural selection pressures...  Some of Land’s assertions are not really true. In relation to evolution Americans seem to be split down the middle. On the specific points many of the positions he outlines are total nonsense. But he’s very fluid and confident, as would benefit a man with a Princeton and Oxford education. His utilization of terms like irreducible complexity is about as substantive as chanting abracadabra, but probably just as effective in convincing fellow travelers already sympathetic to his position as shamans were in the days of yore.

A better and more thoughtful critique comes from P.Z. Myers, who as a fillip adds a cogent breakdown of the stages of evolution (!) of creationist thought.  He writes in response to Khan:

Where I disagree with Razib, though, is in his impression of eloquence in this clip of Richard Land defending creationism. Maybe it's because I'm so familiar with this stuff, but I was completely unimpressed: he may have spoken confidently, but the impression of fluidity is false, because that was a rote recital of done-to-death creationist talking points. It was Duane Gish spiced with a superficial seasoning of Michael Behe, a lot of 1961 mixed with a bit of glib 1990s, and rather than supporting the idea of a flexible creationism that evolves in response to cultural pressures, that was a beautiful example of stasis.

If Land leaves you impressed or feeling good about creationism, see Myers' critique.

Myers' most recent "stage" of the evolution of creationism is intelligent design.  That Land feels content to rely on it tells us that the Christian addiction to mendacity on scientific matters keeps on going.  There are several tines on Land's fork, here, but the sharpest one is the concept popularized by Michael Behe: irreducible complexity, a cornerstone of intelligent design.

Kenneth Miller describes intelligent design's laudatory confusion about natural processes in the development of the flagellum this way:

Why does the intelligent design movement regard the flagellum as unevolvable? Because it is said to possesses a quality known as "irreducible complexity." Irreducibly complex structures, we are told, could not have been produced by evolution, or, for that matter, by any natural process. They do exist, however, and therefore they must have been produced by something. That something could only be an outside intelligent agency operating beyond the laws of nature – an intelligent designer. That, simply stated, is the core of the new argument from design, and the intellectual basis of the intelligent design movement.

It's an old observation, but it can't be risked too many times while intelligent design still convinces anybody that Darwinism is structurally inferior to simple faith: Miller's description points out that intelligent design exists because of a lack of knowledge, a positive bewilderment.   There's no real "knowledge" there: the "proof" that the flagellum could not evolve through natural processes amounts to some complicated mathematics that we might call the mathematics of wonder, a numeric description of incredulity.

But of course science always ought to begin with wonder: it should never end there.