Intelligent Design and Creationism -- an explanation

For those of you [and I suspect it's most of you] who are not quite clear on how "Intelligent Design" which is now being debated in front of the Kansas Board of Education differs from "Creationism" [which was debated in the famous Scopes "Monkey" Trial] William Saletan, over at Slate has a nice "splainer" [though he gets a bit too cutsey in characterizing the development of the debate in evolutionary terms].

Read his explanation here.

In Saletan's view, and I think he's right, Intelligent Design is a capitulation to the methods and conclusions of science -- a last ditch effort to locate God's will in the ever shrinking gaps in our knowledge. It is bound ultimately to fail. He writes:

Essentially, ID proponents are gambling that they can concede evolutionist earth science without conceding evolutionist life science. But they can't. They already acknowledge microevolution—mutation and natural selection within a species. Once you accept conventional fossil dating and four billion years of life, the sequential kinship of species loses its implausibility. You can't fall back on the Bible; you've already admitted it can't always be taken literally. All you're left with is an assortment of gaps in evolutionary theory—how did DNA emerge, what happened between this and that fossil—and the vague default assumption that an "intelligence" might fill in those gaps....

But these concessions, and they are considerable, have not been accepted gracefully by secularists, particularly the more extreme evolutionary biologists.

They prefer to dismiss ID proponents as dead-end Neanderthals. They complain, legitimately, that [ID theorists] are trying to expand the definition of science beyond "natural explanations." But have you read the definition [the theorists] propose? It would define science as a continuous process of "observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena." Abstract creationism can't qualify for such scrutiny. Substantive creationism can't survive it. Or if it can, it should.

It's too bad liberals and scientists don't welcome this test. It's too bad they go around sneering, as censors of science often have, that the new theory is too radical, offensive, or embarrassing to be taken seriously. It's too bad they think good science consists of believing the right things. In the long view—the evolutionary view—good science consists of using evidence and experiment to find out whether what we thought was right is wrong. If they do that in Kansas, by whatever name, that's all that matters.

Very sensible, but in today's adversarial intellectual climate sneering and bashing are the default positions taken in every disagreement. Scientists do themselves no good when they thunder from the pulpit of scientism. Arguments from authority sound defensive and too much like mindless dogmatism. The ID advocates are not mindless opponents of science [for that matter, neither was William Jennings Bryan]. Quit treating them as such.

As I have argued time and again, if scientific authority is under attack it is to a great extent the fault of corrupt, irresponsible and arrogant scientists.