Zatera Ul

Through Swiftee, another instance of the tired “Intelligent Design is Creationism, and not Science” refrain, apparently in a science and engineering commencement speech at the University last spring:

I don’t mean in raising this issue to discredit, disparage, or in any way deny what each of us may believe about the higher or deeper or more wonderful realities of our existence–things that are beyond our ability to reason about or to understand, which therefore rightly belong in the realm of what we believe.

The old “you can believe whatever superstitions you want; it’s what we know through science that matters” brushoff. Of course he just did disparage those beliefs, by implying that they have little value because they didn’t come about through scientific observation and analysis. Anyway, these higher, deeper, and more wonderful realities are not totally beyond our capability for reason and understanding: think of philosophy, theology, and science fiction.

[continued…] What does concern me is that, in the interest of defending that higher belief which, in my view, needs no defense, those arguing for teaching creationism as a competing theory, distort and destroy the integrity of science, which is the discipline we depend on for, if you want, a human and practical understanding of nature.

Well, theology is the discipline we depend on for a human and practical understanding of God. A few of us “believe” that God has interacted significantly with nature at times. Intelligent Design focuses on the more general concept of a Designer, and asks the question, “If there were a Designer running around loose in the universe, how could we tell?” If this distorts and destroys the integrity of science, perhaps it is because science is too small. In evolution the Designer could well be an extraterrestrial, which is within the limits of scientific possibility (barely).

Scientists themselves don’t have a great track record of keeping science separate from their “beliefs”; at least not in their popular writings. A classic example is Carl Sagan’s introduction to A Brief History of Time (by Stephen Hawking, of course):

This is also a book about God…or perhaps about the absence of God. The word God fills these pages. Hawking embarks on a quest to answer Einstein’s famous question about whether God had any choice in creating the universe. Hawking is attempting, as he explicitly states, to understand the mind of God. And this makes all the more unexpected the conclusion of the effort, at least so far: a universe with no edge in space, no beginning or end in time, and nothing for a Creator to do.

See–they were looking for an Intelligent Designer! Sagan and Hawking endorse Intelligent Design! (Sagan perhaps even more now, since he’s dead.) Scientific respectability at last!