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.

In my week long break, there were a bunch of things that I should have blogged about. Hardly having the time to cover any of them in depth, I’ll simply include a list with some links for your perusal.

• Perhaps the biggest story I missed in my week off was Kansas. The state board of education got an “anti-science” cleansing in the primary elections. Several republicans that were vehemently opposed to properly teaching science were replaced by moderate republicans, most notably Connie Morris. MSNBC covers the details and describes just how crazy life in Kansas is.
  

  Control of the school board has slipped into, out of and back into conservative Republicans’ hands since 1998, resulting in anti-evolution standards in 1999, evolution-friendly ones in 2001 and anti-evolution ones again last year.

  And for more on the political math in the election, see this post on Red State Rabble, a good source for Kansas politics as they relate to education.

• NASA has joined the search for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker by using air planes and “lasers” to map vegetation and identify potential habitat. While I lean on the side that the bird is extinct, it may be very interesting to see what they can learn about the habitat through techniques like this. I think every grad student studying ecology should get their own laser equipped NASA aircraft.
• In a new study, Sooty Shearwaters have been found to migrate over 40,000 miles in a single year. There are a couple of great write-ups on this story from the BBC and The Australian, as well as this site, which also included a nice picture gallery. At these distances, the birds would easily claim the title of longest migration in the world from Artic Tern. However, I might slightly quibble with how we define migration. Shearwaters and other tube-nosed birds (like Albatross) are ideally suited to cruise the open oceans. It is their habitat. It doesn’t mean this isn’t impressive. Just that perhaps it’s still impressive when a bird like the Arctic Tern makes the trip between poles to find favorable habitat.
• I had no idea that high polar latitudes and temperatures lower than -176°F could cause psychedelic clouds. Here’s the story, some really nice pictures, oh and leave it to the British to ruin the moment and kill the beauty.
• The latest edition of Carnival of the Spineless (all about invertebrates) was held over at Words and Pictures. There were a number of very interesting posts, including (I would like to think) two (here and here) from yours truly.

Not long ago, George Gilder — one of the founders of the Discovery Institute — wrote a piece called Evolution and Me for the print edition of National Review. (It’s online at the Discovery Institute though).

Yesterday in a shockingly violent manner, John Derbyshire (also at the National Review) was caught mercilessly pummeling Gilder’s piece beyond recognition. It’s nice to see that the National Review is keeping it in house.

Derbyshire’s piece, though long, is a poignant response to Gilder’s article, and includes some good insights.

I’ll also say that I write the following with some reluctance. It’s a wearying business, arguing with Creationists. Basically, it is a game of Whack-a-Mole. They make an argument, you whack it down. They make a second, you whack it down. They make a third, you whack it down. So they make the first argument again. This is why most biologists just can’t be bothered with Creationism at all, even for the fun of it. It isn’t actually any fun. Creationists just chase you round in circles. It’s boring.

While Gilder argues that throwing off the search for natural (that is material) means of explaining the world around us is the only way science will break new ground, Derbyshire points out that on the contrary, biology is just hitting it’s golden age and evolution is squarely at the center of it all.

Speciation via evolution underpins all of modern biology, both pure and applied. Note that in the latter category fall such things as new cures for diseases and genetic defects, new crops, new understandings of the brain, with consequences for pedagogy and psychology, and so on. To say to biologists: “Look, I want you to drop all this nonsense about evolution and listen to me,” is like walking into a room full of pilots and aeronautical engineers and telling them that classical aerodynamics is all hogwash.

Biologists are of all scientists least in need of a new metaphysic. Neurophysiology aside, it is in the “hard” sciences that our epistemological underwear is showing. When physicists have to resort to explanations involving teeny strings vibrating in scrunched-up eleven-dimensional spaces a trillion trillion trillion trillionth of an inch across, or cosmologists try to tell us that entire universes are proliferating every nanosecond like bacteria in a petri dish, there is a case to be made for a metaphysical overhaul. Not that work in these fields has come to a baffled dead stop, as George seems to imply. Far from it; the problem in fundamental physics and cosmology is not so much that we have run out of theories, as that we have too many theories. I’ll grant that there are epistemological issues, though.

Biology, by contrast, really has no outstanding epistemological problems. With the tools of modern genomics at its disposal, it is in fact going through a phase of great energy and excitement, so that biologists are much too busy to be bothered with epistemological issues. To modify the simile I offered above: Creationists are walking into that room full of pilots and aeronautical engineers right at the peak of the Golden Age of flight, around 1930. “Hey, those machines of yours don’t really fly, you know…”

He then hits the nail squarely on the head by pointing out the utter and total emptiness of intelligent design.

That brings us to the second problem that scientists have with George’s system: After being around for many years, it has not produced any science. George’s own Discovery Institute was established in 1990; the offshoot Center for Science and Culture (at first called the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture) in 1992. That is an aggregate 30 years. Where is the science? In all those years, not a single paper of scientific standing has come out of (nor even, to the best of my knowledge, been submitted by) the DI or the CSC. I am certainly willing to be corrected here. If the DI or CSC have any papers of scientific standing — published or not — I shall post links to them to NRO for qualified readers to scrutinize.

Scientists discover things. That’s what they do. In fast-growing fields like genomics, they discover new things almost daily — look into any issue of Science or Nature. What has the Discovery Institute discovered this past 16 years? To stretch my simile further: Creationists are walking into that room full of pilots and aeronautical engineers right at the peak of the Golden Age of flight, never having flown or designed any planes themselves. Are they really surprised that they get a brusque reception? [emphasis in original]

With so much of the objections to evolutionary theory coming from the political right, I’m always happy to see conservatives like Derbyshire (or George Will or Charles Krauthammer for that matter) trying to correct the record. I’d be just fine with de-politicizing science in our culture.