Dembski on Naturalistic Materialism

Most of the time that I speak of intelligent design, Dembski, or his blog Uncommon Descent I’m highly critical. There’s lots not to like. But several days ago he posted a picture that was really quite nice — a “fire rainbow”.

fire rainbow over Idaho — click for larger picture

Once I stopped looking at the pretty picture and read the content, the feeling of appreciation quickly dissipated though. Dembski writes:

It’s the gratuitousness of such beaty that leads me to rebel against materialism.

Science, as a way of knowing, seeks materialistic explanations. That is, it seeks to explain the natural world solely by seeking natural explanations. This is what Dembski is referring to as materialism.

Now for what it’s worth, I (and probably all Christians) reject absolute materialism. That is to say that science is the only way of knowing something, that matter and nature are all there are, and that humans are simply an accidental byproduct.

But, is it a fair criticism to condemn science for seeking materialistic explanations? Should Christians (or for that matter others) be demanding that we seek more than just natural explanations for what we study? In one word — NO!

Let’s take the case of the fire rainbow. Snopes.com reports the precise conditions under which they form.

In general, a circumhorizontal arc (or “fire rainbow”) appears when the sun is high in the sky (i.e., higher than 58° above the horizon), and its light passes through diaphanous, high-altitude cirrus clouds made up of hexagonal plate crystals. Sunlight entering the crystals’ vertical side faces and leaving through their bottom faces is refracted (as through a prism) and separated into an array of visible colors. When the plate crystals in cirrus clouds are aligned optimally (i.e., with their faces parallel to the ground), the resulting display is a brilliant spectrum of colors reminiscent of a rainbow.

Far from being a mystery or a miracle, we know exactly how and under what conditions “fire rainbows” form. So, because this picture is beautiful, do I need to reject the naturalistic explanation that explains it? Better yet, for those of you with children, I’ll assume you find them beautiful too. Do you need to reject the theory of fertilization in order to be a good ChristianTM?

Clearly not. A Christian need not reject natural explanations for the natural world. Indeed it is the spectacular success of natural explanations that makes them so convincing. All a Christian must do is understand the place of natural explanations — that they explain the natural, observable world. Are there people who base their absolute materialism on naturalistic materialism? Yeah, sure. Are Christians free to disagree? Yeah, sure.

Dembski, like always, is creating a false conflict. It is the gravest of mistakes to lay the foundation of one’s faith on the belief that science can never explain something. I don’t care if it’s a fire rainbow, embryonic development, or even the origins of life. We can safely say that we live in a world governed by the laws of nature. Christians simply accept that God is the originator and sustainer of such laws.

A few days later though, it gets even more bizarre though in this post of predictions titled “If naturalistic materialism is true…“. I’m going to quote the first bit, and I’d like you to read it and carefully think about its implications.

If naturalistic materialism is true:

1. We are nothing but the sum of our parts. Our bodies are wholly explicable in terms of nature, and there is no aspect of our bodies that cannot be described in purely naturalistic terms, nor any means of describing ourselves other than naturalistic ones. Human beings are simply organic beings and nothing more, composed of organs which are composed of cells which are composed of molecules which are composed of atoms which are composed of sub-atomic particles (and, if string theory is valid, the particles are composed of various strings of energy), and that’s it. We are thus material beings and not spiritual ones. We have no souls. Consciousness is therefore nothing but a curious offshoot of biochemistry, a higher reasoning function of our brains that has arisen from the natural advantage afforded to us by both the size of the human brain and its level of complexity. It is NOT evidence that Man is a creature imago dei, but rather evidence of the power by which natural selection operating in tandem with random genetic mutation can operate.

THEREFORE, I PREDICT that scientists will one day construct a device capable of transporting a human body across vast regions of space–a device comparable to the “teleporter” as portrayed in the “Star Trek” TV series. It will disassemble a living human body at a molecular or sub-molecular level, transport those small bits of living organic material at high speed across great distance, and reassemble them to their original macroscopic configuration, with no ill effects to the body it has transported.

IF, HOWEVER, after several hundred years of scientific advance no such a device will have been formulated, this fact should be taken as an indication that naturalistic materialism is not true.

Consider what they’re really saying. The complexity involved in this “Star Trek” transportation device would be more than immense. It just might be impossible. For example, one source I came across suggested that a 150 pound person would contain ~7×1027 atoms. Simply put, that’s 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms. (Don’t ask me how to say that number). Furthermore, 99% of them are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. Thus, taking the number of electrons that each of those elements have and doing a little math, 99% of the body’s atoms contain ~2.3×1028 electrons.

Why did I bore you with the numbers? Simply put, if you know anything about quantum mechanics, then you’d know that every single one of these atoms and electrons would have to be “transported”, with all of their quantum properties intact. From what I understand of quantum mechanics (not much) — we can only deal with these properties statistically and in fact, if we’re right, we’ll never be able to predict exactly how an electron (or any of the other subatomic particles) behave.

Yet Dembski’s post would have us believe that this is a reasonable test of science’s validity. Now Intelligent design makes no predictions and has generated no research — despite vociferous claims to the contrary from prominent ID supporters. Thus the incredible irony in using the word predictions has not escaped the attention of this writer. Instead of falsifiable predictions highlighting the utility and explanatory power of intelligent design, we get bold “predictions” about what science will or will not be able to do several hundred years from now. If science does not live up to the expectations outlined in Dembski’s post, then it is found to be wanting, and presumably intelligent design wins by default.

Follow the logic? I didn’t think so.

The rest of the post is just as amusing: Claims such as

• We should find other life within the universe — The universe is something like 150 billion light years wide. That means that the vast majority of the universe may lie well outside our ability to detect life. That said, life may well exist. Who knows if or when we’ll find it. What we don’t know about other planets doesn’t change what we do know about our own.
• We should observe speciation — here the writer is simply ignorant, as we have every reason to believe we have.
• If Darwin was right, then morality is purely subjective — Crap! I’d better go cheat on my wife and have sex with animals. If I want to, why wouldn’t I? Here’s the most vile claim in the book and one that I will fight my whole life against. One can be a “Darwinian” and a Christian. I’m hardly the only one.

These two posts represent the age old battle. Pitting science and religion against each other and creating false dichotomies which insult a person’s intelligence, designed to steer them away from science by playing to their fears and prejudices. To borrow Dembski’s word, it’s the gratuitousness of such criticism that angers me.