Tuesday, August 23, 2005
"Intelligent design" oozes into Kitchener-Waterloo.
And a heads-up from Matt B., who blogs on an op-ed piece in today's Kitchener-Waterloo Record. Go read. Then give the Record the butt-kicking it deserves.
There's a reason I rarely read newspapers any more. That's one of them. It's also a lesson that philosophers shouldn't be allowed to talk about real science.
More detailed smackdown to follow.
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4 comments:
"It's also a lesson that philosophers shouldn't be allowed to talk about real science."
On the contrary, Philosophy of Science is a well-established discipline, which either Waterloo utterly failed to teach or "Doctor" van der Breggen utterly failed to attend.
I sincerely hope the good "Doctor" provided better material than that in his dissertation. He certainly doesn't merit the title based on the referenced letter. They would have been picking tiny pieces of him off the floor for weeks after his defense of such weak arguments.
In his reply to "Objection 1" he merely reports what "Intelligent Design theorists" say. This is a clever bit of rhetoric that avoids his having to actually defend the silly argument he cites, either premise of which is patently false. His "atheism of the gaps" aside is especially weak. First, it uses a loaded word, "atheism," to generate sympathy for his position in the minds of most readers who have an unreasonable bias against atheism. Second, it describes naturalism as a sort of trap, when science is by every intention a wholly naturalistic enterprise. Even if there were known to be a designer for the Universe, science would still exist and its purpose would be the same, to understand the design. Saying "God made it that way" would still be cheating.
"Objection 2" is a pure straw man. No one says that "intelligent causes are not a part of the scientific explanatory enterprise," for the very reasons he cites. Where would the global warming debate stand if scientists were bound by some odd stricture against admitting intentional action as a causal force? Scientists do not recognize supernatural causes, as which the "designer" desired by ID supporters certainly qualifies.
"Objection 3" and van der Breggen's reply to it are just muddled. I'm not sure what he's trying to claim or why. He's got an illegitimately overextended analogy with his "above the north pole" bit and a reference to simultaneous causality that seems to add nothing to any discussion of an "intelligent designer" of the Universe unless he wants to claim that God (er, pardon me, "the intelligent designer who may or may not have been the Fundamentalist Protestant Christian God" *wink*) was created simultaneously with the Universe, and I doubt he wants to do that. This section seems to be little more than a rhetorical exercise in confusing the issue so as to block rational response.
He follows up by a recommendation to read Dembski, who is notorious for his use of meaningless pseudomathematism to convince the ill-educated that he has evidence of the necessity of God. This reference does not help his case any more than a holocaust denier's arguments would benefit from referring his readers to Mein Kampf.
If that letter is any indication, the fact that van der Breggen has a Ph.D. in Philosophy should be nothing but an embarassment to U. Waterloo's philosophy program. Maybe they just didn't have a "petty sophistry" degree to award him.
I read into his little peice of clap-trap. What a complete load of crap. Intelligent Design only applies to Engineers working in the real world, hopefully ;-)
I wrote:
"It's also a lesson that philosophers shouldn't be allowed to talk about real science."
I was upbraided:
"On the contrary, Philosophy of Science is a well-established discipline, which either Waterloo utterly failed to teach or "Doctor" van der Breggen utterly failed to attend."
Yes, that was gratuitously cynical of me. I have a great deal of respect for the philosophy of science.
What absolutely baffles me is how someone that clueless could have received a doctorate in philosophy, when he spews absolute logical howlers.
I'd like to see his thesis and see how it relates to Intelligent Design. Perhaps someone at the U of W can arrange to get a copy?
Update: I heard from the Record tonight, and they're printing my letter in the next day or two. I know they might edit it, but I'm hoping they'll just strip out the gratuitous adjectives and leave the real content alone.
Anyhow, thanks for posting this, CC. I wasn't looking for the traffic on my blog (I think today's traffic doubles my all-time visits count) but I'm really happy to let people know what's going on out there.
And honestly, it's nice to have guys like you, Zorpheous, and Dursi reading my posts for a change. :)
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