Learned Hand
Posts: 214
Joined: Oct. 2009
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As I mentioned the other day, I had a chance to attend the Reasons conference (http://faithbibleonline.org/reasons2014) to hear Drs. Meyer and Dembski speak. (I may drop the “Dr.” title as I write this, but I don’t mean any disrespect by it—I’m simply in the habit of referring to people in my notes by last name alone.) Due to family commitments I could only attend the plenary sessions on the first day, so I missed the probably more substantial breakout and plenary sessions on the second day. That’s too bad, but I was happy to see what I did.
There’s no particular theme to this writeup, or “gotcha” moment I’m building to. I just wanted to put my impressions down on paper, as I’m writing a book that touches on Dr. Dembski and some related issues. Since I’m writing up my experience anyway I’ll share it with y’all. The tl;dr version: Meyer is a good and glib speaker who did not address any criticisms of his ideas that I recall and was unwilling to take a position on the age of the earth or common descent. Dembski was noticeably bitter about his treatment by the secular and Christian establishments.
The conference was held, naturally, at a church. I don’t have a feel for how many of the attendees were faithful and how many were skeptics. The cost wasn’t prohibitive so I wouldn’t be surprised if there were quite a few non-creationists there. My sense was that most of the attendees were creationists, though. As I’ll discuss later, it was hard to tell from the Q&A session.
The audience was notably diverse. I think most attendees were white males of at least middle age, but it wasn’t a large majority. A quick count (which may not be representative) showed a little over a third of the people in my section were women, quite a few were relatively young, and maybe ten percent were African-American.
The stage was set with quite a few props. I didn’t get any good pictures, but there was a big fake desk, chemistry set, blackboard, periodic table, and other stage furniture that didn’t seem to have any purpose other than to look sciencey.
MEYER
Meyer spoke first; I missed the first part of his talk due to travel time. (I had to drive from Austin to get there, and fighting SXSW traffic was a nightmare.) As a professional speaker and communicator, my first impressions were stylistic rather than substantive. He’s a fairly skilled presenter. He puts his hands in his pockets too often, but otherwise has good control of his voice and body language. He seems to have a personal taste for jackets that are cut too large for his frame, which you can see in photos of him. (Not that it matters, of course, just something that struck me.)
Meyer gave a broad overview of ID, touching on familiar themes. He was unhappy that it’s called and thought of as a “faith-based” idea. He pushed back on that by referencing Anthony Flew; how could ID be a faith-based idea, he asked, when it found fertile ground in an atheist?
He recited the Expelled narrative in broad strokes, referred a few times to “nanotechnology” in the cell, and defined ID narrowly as being consistent with common descent. He was careful to note that he personally is “profoundly skeptical” of common descent, which was typical of his lawyerly way of describing his own beliefs. I noted several times that he was seemingly intentionally reluctant to nail down his own beliefs. He preferred to refer to himself as a skeptic or to identify some other group’s beliefs. (In the Q&A session, for example, when asked how old he thought the Earth is, he instead answered by saying that the scientific consensus is “billions of years” and then moving on to discuss the origin of life.)
Meyer spent a good amount of time talking about ATP synthase, and forgive me if I’ve misspelled that as it’s not something I’m familiar with. He described it as a mechanism that uses simply machines, levers and such, to turn ADP to ATP.
He then described ID as simply an inference to the “best explanation.” He seemed to follow the uniformitarian path by saying he was only looking for causes that exist today that can create what we see in life, and that’s only intelligence. (I was a little taken aback by that, as I don’t believe any current intelligence, tool, or guided process can actually create ATP synthase from scratch, but he didn’t address the gap between known intelligent capabilities and the artifacts of life.)
He ended his talk by saying that ID critics fail to understand (or intentionally ignore) the difference between ID’s bases and implications. He denied that it has religious bases, but acknowledged its religious implications. Those implications explained why the conference was being held in a church, and why ID critics are “working so hard to suppress this idea.” He painted the dispute as one between dedicated materialists and an ID community following the evidence where it leads.
DEMBKSI
Dembski took the stage next. The man who introduced him called him a “giant” and flattered him shamelessly. Meyer might have received the same treatment, but I missed his intro. Stylistically, Dembski does not have Meyer’s skill as a communicator. He was, however, and despite the sweater jokes, better dressed. Again that’s neither here nor there, just my first impression. In general his talk included less technical detail than Meyer’s, and he spent more time on (intentionally) corny jokes.
Dembski didn’t seem quite prepared for this event. He had a stock presentation, including slides and animations. (The same people seem to have made his and Meyer’s. They were well done.) Since Meyer had covered a lot of the material in Dembski’s slide deck, he frequently passed over slides without discussing them. It was odd since he prefaced his remarks by saying that he’d worked with Meyer prior to the conference to make sure their presentations didn’t overlap.
He stressed at the beginning that ID is a theory of information and that as such it is “fully a part of science.” A big chunk of his presentation was describing how people are allegedly using ID’s tools today, especially SETI, forensic investigators, archaeologists, and anyone who looks at Mount Rushmore. Biology is no different from these examples, he claimed, in that we can know whether we’re looking at something that was designed. Similarly he said
He turned to his central thesis, which seemed to be that ID and the faithful are under assault from mainstream scientists. He seemed honestly and sincerely bitter about this. He complained that atheistic scientists put on airs as “Prometheans,” but that in fact “Darwinian explanations have failed.” (Those comments were from two different places in his talk.) He played up his own credibility, claiming that if he was wrong he’d be “laughed off of this stage.” Obviously I don’t buy that; the intended audience has no idea whether his ideas are right or wrong, and as I’ll discuss later even he himself showed little interest in finding out whether his ID tools work.
Dembski described his critics as following this logic: if materialism works, ID is unnecessary and evolution has explained everything. And, he said, the received wisdom is that the detection of design cannot be science at all. (This seems to conflict with comments I’ve read from Dr. Liddle and others.)
He then gave a short explanation of CSI, saying that he’s looking for (1) complex/improbable events that show (2) specificity/an independent pattern. Only intelligence explains (1) and (2), etc.
At this point he digressed from his prepared remarks. He blurted out, “I am not the unreasonable one here!” My impression was that this was a spontaneous, honest, and emotional outburst. He laughed it off, as did the audience.
He segued into a complaint that ID is underfunded due to materialists’ control of the educational system. He asked for donations of time, talent, and money, but especially money as they have plenty of talent already. He discussed some of his own work, and complained that The Design Inference “killed his career” as even many Christian colleges won’t hire him now. (He has made this complaint elsewhere too, in interviews available online.)
As I recall he ended his speech by summarizing his thesis: we have good intuitive reasons to suspect design, and his design detection tools confirm that intuitive result.
Q&A
Dembski and Meyer jointly took questions. I wasn’t watching the clock by I had the impression that this was abbreviated due to the speakers going over their time. The hosts and speakers made a good effort to take questions, though. The only questions I recall were, paraphrasing, “How old is the earth?” and “Since new scientific discoveries are accepted without any significant resistance, why aren’t your ideas being accepted?” From their tone and content, I couldn’t tell whether the questioners were skeptics or creationists.
As I noted, Meyer dodged the age of the earth question. He said the scientific consensus is 3.5 billion years, and then went on to discuss the age of life. He’s skeptical of the consensus on human descent, but didn’t give details. I don’t recall whether Dembski took a turn answering this question. Meyer also fielded the other question, saying (rightly, I think) that the premise was wrong and that new ideas are very often met with significant resistance whether or not they’re right. He went on to say that people are reluctant to give up their deeply-held beliefs, so scientists aren’t willing to give ID a fair chance.
There were other questions too, but I don’t recall them or the answers in detail.
Afterwards I approached Dembski and asked him one of a few questions I was hoping to pose: what empirical testing are you doing to show, under controlled circumstances, that your toolkit works? (My idea is that if he’s not willing to perform such tests, it suggests that he doesn’t believe his own tools actually work.) He responded that blind testing is probably impossible, since the investigator would have to know the function of the thing being tested. He asked for examples of a possible test, but I wasn’t able to give him any good ones. (I’d love to hear suggestions.) My impression was that he was totally uninterested in such testing, and that he assumed it wouldn’t be possible and/or wouldn’t work. He also said it would be virtually impossible to confirm the results of testing on real-world examples, saying for example that we can’t independently confirm that a meteor killed the dinosaurs. (I’m skeptical of that, as it seems there are many ways to independently confirm the plausibility of that theory even if we can’t perfectly prove it.) He focused on the theoretical applicability of the ID methodology, with no concern for practical applicability.
I’m still writing up some notes on this, but these were my rough impressions. Hope they’re of interest.
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