Reasons to Believe group: The relevance to science of intelligent design - and the irrelevance of creation models

At Uncommon Descent, - as here - I commented on the hostility of Reasons to Believe (a group of Christians in science) to the Expelled film. One commenter, C_G_K, responded peacably,

My guess is that they just want to avoid controversy as that could take away from from what they are trying to accomplish.

But I felt that RtB's behaviour raised larger issues, so here is what I replied:

C_G_K - 2, I wish I could be as charitable in this matter as your comment offers to be, but unfortunately, the press release explicitly says "In Reasons To Believe's interaction with professional scientists, scientific institutions, universities, and publishers of scientific journals we have encountered no significant evidence of censorship, blackballing, or disrespect."

If so, that is because their "creation model" is completely irrelevant to science*, unlike fellow astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez's "galactic habitable zone" hypothesis, which is entirely testable and falsifiable - and THAT'S the problem with it. Win or lose, it's still science based on ID assumptions.

The conflict from which Hugh Ross and his team have chosen to be absent is primarily between people for whom science exists to defend materialism - no matter how ridiculous its theories, as Lewontin has so usefully pointed out - and people for whom evidence trumps theory In other words, Darwin fans vs. ID theorists.

The conflict is secondarily between people for whom science faculties are a tax-subsized private playground for materialist atheists and people who want to restore academic freedom of enquiry for all scholars whose research produces results - like Gonzalez, for example. Again, a conflict between Darwin fans and ID theorists.

*completely irrelevant to science? - If your answer to the question "How did life begin?" is that God zapped it into existence (RtB's view, I gather), then the origin of life is not researchable. That's because the key actions take place in a zone we cannot research.

If, however, you are an ID theorist, you might say "The origin of life shows evidence of design rather than chance." That doesn't mean it cannot be researched. It can be researched in depth. But the purpose of the research is to reconstruct a series of designed events, not to come up with a scenario about how it might all have happened by chance. The ID theorist sees such fantastically improbable scenarios as a waste of time compared to backward engineering the design.

In other words, studying the cell becomes more like studying ancient manuscripts to reconstruct the history of a civilization. We know that the manuscript (and the civilization) didn't all happen by chance, so we are not looking for some "rainwater dripping from a leaky roof" explanation for the marks on the paper. We are looking for what we can learn from the information they convey.

That's the future.

Reasons to Believe: Old Earth Creation ministry thumbs down on Expelled film

Politics makes strange bedfellows - and strange divorces too, to judge from Reasons to Believe's reaction to the Expelled film. Hugh Ross, a Canadian-born astronomer, founded Reasons to Believe, an old-earth creation ministry aimed at scientists, has gone out of his way to distance himself from the film and its implications: Refusing to endorse the film, the key Reasons guys say,

In Reasons To Believe's interaction with professional scientists, scientific institutions, universities, and publishers of scientific journals we have encountered no significant evidence of censorship, blackballing, or disrespect. As we have persisted in publicly presenting our testable creation model in the context of the scientific method, we have witnessed an increasing openness on the part of unbelieving scientists to offer their honest and respectful critique.
Our main concern about EXPELLED is that it paints a distorted picture. It certainly doesn't match our experience. Sadly, it may do more to alienate than to engage the scientific community, and that can only harm our mission.

- Hugh Ross, Fazale Rana, Jeff Zweerink, David Rogstad, and Kenneth Samples

As a matter of fact, RtB also supported the Dover anti-ID ruling and claimed that intelligent design theory is not science.

What might be going on here? A little background: I first ran into Ross a while back when I did a cover story on science and faith issues for Faith Today (Canada's evangelical glossy) (July/August 1999 - not on line yet). At the time, I was only beginning to investigate these controversies in any depth, and I did not then realize the significance of the fact that Ross was an "old earth creationist" rather than an intelligent design theorist.

Basically, old earth creationists believe that the universe and Earth are billions of years old, but they also hold that there were acts of divine creation, including the origin of life and of modern humans. (Young earth creationists interpret the first book of the Bible, Genesis, literally and believe that Earth was created in six days and is 6000 years old.)

Intelligent design theorists are not committed to any creation view as such. They say that the universe and life forms show clear evidence of design, as demonstrated by much higher levels of specified information than can be created either by the laws of physics and chemistry or by random changes since the Big Bang. Whether an aspect of the design of life required an act of direct creation is a separate question from whether it required design. Perhaps all the design was encoded at the Big Bang and thereafter it simply unfolded. But it is there and it is detectible.

Years ago, a historian of science told me that, so far as he could see, most old earth creationists were morphing into intelligent design theorists. That's easy enough to do because the ID theorists don't argue that direct creation cannot occur. It's just not the focus of their work.

Another factor is that Reasons to Believe and Answers in Genesis (the young earth creationists) have been duking it out for years, again drawing off resources in a messy sectarian struggle. All this leaves Reasons to Believe struggling to retain a reason to exist, except to oppose other groups - a common fate of groups caught in the middle.

All the same, I'm puzzled by the claim in the quotation above that they have encountered "no significant evidence of censorship, blackballing, or disrespect." I invited an RtB-trained speaker speaker to address my U of T course on why there is an intelligent design controversy last fall, and he talked quote openly about the persecution of ID theorists.

Not only that, but Guillermo Gonzalez is an astronomer, like Hugh Ross and, as several scientists have pointed out to me, Ross must surely know about the e-mail trail that showed that Gonzalez was refused tenure at Iowa State University on account of his sympathies for design, not his academic record. (Gonzalez has since found an assistant professorship at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, starting August 1, 2008.)

From what I know of highly politicized situations, Reasons to Believe has not encountered significant opposition largely because it is becoming irrelevant.

Update: April 28, 2008: See also my comment on the irrelevance to science of RtB's "creation model" versus the relevance of design theory.

Here's the view of ID theorist Bill Dembski on previous RtB efforts to distance itself from the ID theorist, and here's a more general comment on creationists vs. ID theorists.