Last month, while speaking at McLean Bible Church, a megachurch in McLean, Virginia, intelligent design superstar Dr. Stephen Meyer rolled out a magnetic white board adorned with block letters spelling out “DC ROCKS.” John Donahue, the head of McLean’s apologetics ministry and a domineering man whose closely trimmed beard makes him look more like Chuck Norris than Jeremiah, introduced Meyer. A self-described “celebrity-geek,” Donahue first warning the attendees that “our faith has come under attack” and that “no doctrine or ideology has had a more negative effect that the ‘so-called’ theory of evolution.” Evolution, Donahue continued with the passion of a true believer, was supported by “fraudulent research, cherry-picked data, fabricated drawings, and scientific fraud.” Meyer, Donahue insisted, was “one of the finest scientific authors of our time,” and was there to show how the “scientists” got it all wrong.

Meyer’s “DC ROCKS” demonstration served to show what all those evolutionary scientists were missing. The fact that the letters stuck down the board was the result of the laws of magnetism, Meyer said, but the letters arrangement, in a way that bore meaningful information, was the product of intelligence.

This is the core argument that Meyer makes in his new book about an old debate. The book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, is perhaps the longest, most detailed, and most “scientific” of any works produced by the Intelligent Design movement. And it’s not surprising that Meyer is the author of this doorstop work. He co-founded the Center for Science and Culture (CSC) at the Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based think tank that has been at the center of the ID debate for more than a decade. Despite Meyer’s self-presentation as someone who derives his belief in an intelligent designer purely from observable scientific evidence, Meyer’s connections to the religious community show he can’t abide the theory of evolution because of its purported ideological consequences.

If there were ever anyone that could put a respectable face on the Intelligent Design movement, it’s Meyer. He began his scientific carrer as a geophysicist, and he went on to Cambridge where he received a doctorate in the History and Philosophy of Science in 1991. Meyer wrote his dissertation on the different explanations of the origin of life. And while his background in the methodology and history of biology gives a certain heft to his arguments, it’s also important to note that he isn’t a biologist. His defense of intelligent design and his attack on Darwinian evolution is not entirely scientific, no matter what Meyer might purport.

The origins of the ID movement can be found in the so-called Wedge Document, a founding manifesto and fundraising document for the CSC, which lays out a broadly ideological agenda. It sets out a multi-decade plan for “the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies” and for the acceptance of “the proposition that human beings are created in the image of God.” Although the Wedge Document inveighs against secularism and materialism, Meyer still presents himself as a scientist who is just following the evidence.

Since Kitzmiller v. Dover, the 2005 court case in which Judge John Jones ruled that the city of Dover, Pennsylvania could not teach intelligent design in their classrooms because “the religious nature of ID would be readily apparent to an objective observer, adult, or child,” the question seemed to be put to rest. But Meyer—despite authoring a “Note to Teachers” in the discredited textbook—has kept on promoting the theory that evolution and natural selection are not sufficient explanations for the appearance of life on earth and, moreover, insisting that his work is purely scientific.

Meyer’s presentations come equipped with props for his demonstrations: a set of large plastic blocks, made “for students ages 2-4" that snap together to represent chains of amino acids that form proteins in DNA. Meyer exhaustively calculates how the 20 amino acids that form proteins and ten sites where the proteins can be linked combine into 10 trillion possible combinations. He confidently concludes that “no scientist believes blind chance can do this.”

After casting sufficient doubt into an audience over the question with his tricks of whether life could have come about without input from some greater intelligence, Meyer pulls his best rhetorical trick—he references Darwin. You see, Darwin, like Meyer, wasn’t around to witness evolution, he said, so he instead had to depend on “inference to the best explanation,” which is just a fancy way of saying that you look at a bunch of possible explanations for some phenomena and then pick the best one. Meyer cites the Victorian geologist Charles Lyell, to demonstrate that computer programmers producing code and we haven’t observed a similar natural process, then DNA could only be the product of a designer.

Meyer, while speaking at the conservative Heritage Foundation recently in Washington, D.C. said, almost as an aside, that the “denial of design is the foundation of this worldview in the west of physical materialism.” The only mention of God while at Heritage was in reference to the so-called New Atheists.

When I asked him to speculate on the nature of this designer, Meyer hedged and carefully said that his argument left open two possible agents for creation of life on earth, “aliens of God.” He just so happened to favor the God hypothesis. Sidestepping the tricky question of the origin of this great intelligence, Meyer assured me that God could very well be prior to the universe because of the apparent “fine tuning of the universe.” Meyer also argued that the big bang theory means there was a non-material cause; God had to be there.

But when asked at the McLean church if young earth creationists—i.e., those that follow a literal biblical timeline stretching back roughly 10,000—had “fueled New Atheism by giving it something to caricature,” Meyer said the Discovery Institute takes a “neutral position on this” and that the prevalence of young-earth creationist views didn’t matter because “we would have been treated exactly the same way.”

It’s no surprise that Meyer remained open, or at least didn’t condemn, such an anti-scientific belief. Creationists are the ID movement’s base. A 2006 Gallup poll showed that 46 percent of Americans believed that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so”—a position that is totally out of line with basic scientific knowledge of geology and archaeology. The Discovery Institute specifically targets these very people. Part of the long-term plan in the Wedge Document is to “build up a popular base of support among our natural constituency, namely, Christians. We will do this primarily through apologetics seminars.” McLean Bible Church, for example, hosted an apologetics event a month before Meyer’s to discuss how Noah’s Ark actually could have held all those animals. So it made sense that Meyer avoided offending his “natural constituency.”

Meyer more or less goes along with literal interpretations of Biblical texts; such an attitude is indicative of bait-and-switch behind ID. On one hand, ID-ers rise money and outline their goals by framing their research in terms befitting an ideological crusade. But Meyer maintains that his belief in God is based on scientific evidence of “fine-tuning” in the universe. But Meyer says that basic scientific tenants of “phyla, class, [and] order can not be explained” by evolution and natural selection. Meyer, in online debates, will go on to say that he thinks the Cambrian explosion or mammalian radiation “exceed evolutionary explanation.”

Meyer, despite his thin scientific coating, is trafficking the half-baked, over-motivated arguments that have always been peddled by creationists for as long since Darwin developed his theory of evolution. Meyer’s focus on the mystery of DNA is just a distraction. Stephen Meyer is not a scientist. He is an ideologue in the truest sense, someone who is willing to abide any distortion or untruth in order to maintain support for his crusade. His book may be new, his evident fascination with the inner workings of DNA maybe be appealing, but is just another in a long line of clever people who can’t stand the science of Darwin.

Matt Zeitlin is an editorial intern at Campus Progress and a sophomore at Northwestern University.

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Comments

1. The article was well written with facts and a fairly unbiased approach. I thoroughly enjoyed it until the last paragraph. Why undermine your article by fabricating a couple straw houses to destroy ( attacking creationists and his character) and airing out you opinion in sophomoric fashion? Stick to facts and reporting which you are good at and save your opinions for a blog or letter to the editor.

   — Matthew White - Jul 6, 06:11 PM - #
   
   

2. Matthew: opinion has nothing to do with the fact that Meyer’s ideas are half-baked and that YECs are either utterly deluded or lying through their teeth.

   Matt: great job!

   — Jorg - Jul 6, 10:09 PM - #
   
   

3. Matt wrote in his last paragraph, “Meyer is not a scientist.” And Meyer knows this, too. Meyer also knows that he has a better chance of selling more copies of “Signature” if it goes on the “Religion” aisle of the bookstores than the “Science” aisle.

   So Meyer chose to publish “Signature” at a religious publishing house, HarperOne. In the world of actual science, authors use science publishing houses; but in the world of religion, authors use religious publishing houses. Meyer may have just helped put yet another nail in the coffin of intelligent design creationism, by choosing to publish “Signature” as a religious book.

   “Signature” has been out a few weeks, and is ranked #720 at Amazon. Jerry Coyne’s book, “Why Evolution is True,” is ranked #237 – and that’s after six months of sales.

   But “Signature” is leading sales in its publishing category at Amazon: It’s #1 in the “Books > Religion & Spirituality > Christianity > Theology > Creationism” category – which is of course where it belongs.

   — Paul Burnett - Jul 7, 10:57 PM - #
   
   

4. Excellent article overall, but the photo of Michael Behe is irrelevant to the story and the caption uses the future tense to refer to a trial that ended nearly four years ago!

   — Dick Lessard - Jul 8, 06:08 AM - #
   
   

5. It does not appear that Mr. Zeitlin read Stephen Meyer’s book or he might have observed that the book is far more thoughtful and well reasoned than atheists expect from men like Mr. Meyers. I would prefer that the commentator take on the issues rather than attack the messenger. It does seem improbable that all that DNA organization just accidently fell into place for more than a million different life forms. And then all those unintelligent life forms knew enough to stop mutating when they had the design down right. Wow. Now that’s lucky.

   — Donald K. Struckmann - Jul 9, 07:51 PM - #
   
   

6. It’s sad, Matt, that you fail to see the real science. I am somewhat amused at your accusation towards Dr. Meyer of rehashing older and unproven theories, when you’re much more guilty of it. I also attended his lecture. The whole point of Dr. Meyer’s book and lecture, is that new developments in genomic research are giving us lots of reasons (based in real evidence) to doubt Darwin’s 160 year old theory. Recall that 40 years after Darwin wrote his opus, bloodletting was still in practice. Trust me, Darwin did not understand the interworkings of a cell or a DNA molecule. The underlying premises of Evolution does not factor-in the information content found inside every cell of your body. While at Northwestern U. perhaps you could do some real research into the complexity of the genome and better understand that from randomness, chaos & non-directed (purely materialistic) processes, nature cannot produce biological codes. There is no process to increase complexity at the genomic level (base pairs of the DNA) or at the information level (a word has more meaning than a string of letters.) If you believe otherwise, you are expressing a faith, not the results of an empirical analysis or scientific method. (If you’re curious about the empirical science, research “Haldane’s Dilemma” and follow the logic, the math and the genetics and you will see what I mean. Recall that Haldane himself was an evolutionist but was honest enough to admit the theory’s downfall. Dang! Even Darwin admitted the theory’s downfall and this very issue is still unaddressed. Refer to his famous quote “if it can be demonstrated…”) You simply can’t get there (i.e., true inter-species evolution) from here (i.e., the limitations of breeding as they apply to phenotypical mutations within a population).

   Yes, you read this correctly! Show me empirically, the data trail between two distinct species and I will listen. I am not talking about lines on a chart, Matt. And geeze, I’m not talking about beak length variations either. If you want to call millimeter size differentials (of beaks) within a bird population “evolution”, well, this is more misleading than it is instructional. I call this variation. Are humans different species because some are short, others are tall, some are white, others are black? Dude: these are variations within the same genomic phenotype. Did you take any science in high school?

   Francis Crick himself admitted that life had to have been planted on earth by a superior intelligence, because he could not conceive of a pathway to actually build the data and intelligence found in a single cell. And that was fifty years ago. ARE YOU LISTENING, MATT? The more evidence we gather, the more deeply we know that nature itself does not self assemble sub-atoms into atoms…atoms into molecules, molecules into cells, into tissues, organs and parts…etc. etc.

   Hopefully, you are a bit more scrutinizing than to believe everything you read. I am referring to (as just one example) the evolutionary pathway that turned the amphibian lung into an avian lung; this is a design overhaul from one lung to a VERY differently assembled organ to another. You may as well ask me, “how many hops would it take to hop to the moon?” The question assumes one can hop to the moon. If you say, “well with help, I could get there but not by hopping. I would agree. Evolution needs this very kind of help.

   Pretty lines and cool sketches in popular magazines don’t convince me. These are the opposite of empirical data, Matt. From what we now know about the DNA content of biological life (arguing from the extant evidence), the onus is now placed upon the evolutionary biologist to describe a natural, undirected process that created the amino acid-based couplings and syntax that rearranged the very structure of the encoded message inside the DNA in order to create the complexity of life as we see it on Earth. Even if you could hypothesize this, as soon as you understand Haldane’s Dilemma…your hypothesis would crumble (see Walter Remine’s work).

   Enough already. I admit that I’m tired of explaining these high school concepts to supposed intellectuals. I feel sorry for guys like you who reveal more ignorance than you even realize. Why you get religious fervor over such illogical unproven & theories is beyond me.
   Take care,
   Conservatatus

   — Conservatatus - Jul 10, 01:00 AM - #
   
   

7. “Recall that 40 years after Darwin wrote his opus, bloodletting was still in practice.”
   And that has to do with evolution, how?

   “Trust me, Darwin did not understand the interworkings of a cell or a DNA molecule.”
   Scientists, unlike the religiously-inclined, don’t deify their heroes, nor do they think them infallible. What matters is the hypotheses and evidence presented.

   “Francis Crick himself admitted that life had to have been planted on earth by a superior intelligence, because he could not conceive of a pathway to actually build the data and intelligence found in a single cell. And that was fifty years ago.”
   That would be compelling if we hadn’t learned anything in the past fifty years.

   “Hopefully, you are a bit more scrutinizing than to believe everything you read.”
   Don’t worry; I’m sure Matt is smart enough to not take unverified texts (like the Bible) seriously.

   The theory of evolution is the best offered explanation for the evidence at hand. There’s a very good reason why the scientific community, which thrives on disproving theories, overwhelmingly accepts it. What’s your theory, Conservatus? Aliens?

   — Steve - Jul 10, 10:24 AM - #
   
   

8. The issue, for me, is not so much about the scientific evidence for intelligent design. I have no problem with the ID theory in and of itself. The problem I have is that ID is used as a front for creationism and that it identifies the designer as God (presumably the Judeo-Christian God). If ID theorists were really only interested in the science behind evolution vs. ID, then why would they feel the need to identify their science with a particular creator and religion?

   — Julie H. - Jul 10, 04:40 PM - #
   
   

9. This discussion is missing the point. Whether or not a divine being had a hand in the creation of the universe is irrelevant to science. The absolute best thing you could say about ID is that it’s a different epistemology than the scientific one as it has evolved over the last few centuries (and bear in mind that the scientific epistemology also equipped us with the tools to have this discussion, i.e. a computer and the greatest communications network in history). Either way, ID isn’t science and shouldn’t be taught as science. The Discovery Institute is only serving to confuse the public on what we know and don’t know. Donald Struckman and Conservatatus are a case in point. Both demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution. Struckman, for instance, implies that evolution has stopped, but no real scientist will claim that. Evolution is all around us, from viruses and bacteria that grow resistant to our drugs, to the many breeds of dogs out there, to our own species, which has changed and adapted in the last 100,000 years (in reality a blink of an eye).

   Ultimately Intelligent Design is little more than a rehash of Christian Wolff and the ontological proof of God, which in reality Voltaire and Kant both put to rest.

   Whether ID is what “actually happened” or not is not something that we can know empircally, and therefore does not belong in a science textbook.

   — Alex - Jul 10, 05:42 PM - #
   
   

10. You can always tell the strength of a person’s position by the kind of arguments they try to make. Rather than addressing any of Dr. Meyer’s scientific arguments, Matt Zeitlin spends extensive time trying to attack Steve Meyer personally (“Stephen Meyer is not a scientist” ... “He is an ideologue in the truest sense, someone who is willing to abide any distortion or untruth in order to maintain support for his crusade,” etc.), attack Meyer’s religious beliefs (which he misrepresents) and Meyer’s alleged religious motives. These are all fallacious arguments, and this is not how people behave when they feel confident the evidence is on their side.

    First Mr. Zeitlin tries to dismiss ID completely by citing the Kitzmiller v. Dover ruling as if it demonstrates that “the religious nature of ID would be readily apparent to an objective observer, adult, or child.” Apparently Mr. Zeitlin takes the “Judge Jones Said It, I Believe It That Settles It as he says that when it comes to ID being religion, after the Kitzmiller ruling “the question seemed to be put to rest.” Unfortunately, Mr. Zeitlin forgets that judges can (and unfortunately often do) get things wrong (judges get overruled all the time), and prefers to trust a legal scholar on issues of philosophy of science rather than someone who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy of science from Cambredge (i.e. Steve Meyer). In particular, in this case, Judge Jones got a lot of things wrong, not the least of which were the fact that Judge Jones:

    • Incorrectly Defined ID by presuming that ID requires “supernatural creation” — a position refuted during the trial by ID proponents who testified in court;
    • Ignored the positive case for ID and falsely claimed that ID proponents make their case solely by arguing against evolution;
    • Overstepped the bounds of the judiciary and engaged in judicial activism by declaring that ID had been refuted when in fact the judge was presented with credible scientific witnesses and publications on both sides showing evidence of a scientific debate;
    • Used poor philosophy of science by presuming that being wrong precludes being scientific.
    • Blatantly ignored and denied the existence of pro-ID peer-reviewed scientific publications that were in fact testified about in his own courtroom;
    • Blatantly ignored and denied the existence of pro-ID scientific research and data that was in fact testified about in his own courtroom;
    • Adopted an unfair double-standard of legal analysis where religious implications, beliefs, and motives count against ID but never against Darwinism;
    • Violated a fundamental rule of constitutional law by declaring a religious belief to be “false” from the bench of a U.S. government court;
    • Uncritically reused material from a legal brief written by attorneys working with the ACLU. Indeed, “90.9% (or 5,458 words) of Judge Jones’s 6,004-word section on intelligent design as science was taken virtually verbatim from the ACLU’s proposed ‘Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law’ submitted to Judge Jones nearly a month before his ruling” ;
    • Engaged in textbook judicial activism by presuming that it is permissible for a federal judge to define science, settle controversial social questions, settle controversial scientific questions, and settle issues for parties outside of the case at hand so that his ruling would be “a primer” for people “someplace else”;
    • Wrongly—and dangerously—turned science into a voting contest by claiming that popularity is required for an idea to be scientific. Stephen Jay Gould, writing with other scientists, eloquently explained why science should never be a popularity contest: “Judgments based on scientific evidence, whether made in a laboratory or a courtroom, are undermined by a categorical refusal even to consider research or views that contradict someone’s notion of the prevailing “consensus” of scientific opinion. . . . Automatically rejecting dissenting views that challenge the conventional wisdom is a dangerous fallacy, for almost every generally accepted view was once deemed eccentric or heretical. Perpetuating the reign of a supposed scientific orthodoxy in this way, whether in a research laboratory or in a courtroom, is profoundly inimical to the search for truth. … The quality of a scientific approach or opinion depends on the strength of its factual premises and on the depth and consistency of its reasoning, not on its appearance in a particular journal or on its popularity among other scientists.

    Arnold H. Loewy, a self-described “liberal First Amendment theorist,” has critiqued Judge Jones’ judicial opinion by arguing that “it is not the Court’s job to distinguish good science from bad in the realm of education.” Similarly, anti-ID legal scholar Jay Wexler argues that “the part of Kitzmiller that finds ID not to be science is unnecessary, unconvincing, not particularly suited to the judicial role, and even perhaps dangerous both to science and to freedom of religion.” Judge Jones’ ruling represented an ACLU-scripted attempt to legislate from the bench—not an accurate or fair assessment of intelligent design. If Mr. Zeitlin further wants to cite Judge Jones, then he should address Steve Meyer’s demolishment of Judge Jones’ argument that ID is not science in chapters 18 and 19 of Signature in the Cell. Given that Meyer holds a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge, it isn’t much of a contest.

    Mr. Zeitlin’s next tactic is to psychoanalyze Dr. Meyer and use guilt-by-association arguments, stating “Meyer’s connections to the religious community show he can’t abide the theory of evolution because of its purported ideological consequences.”

    I don’t purport to get into Steve Meyer’s head and thereby speculate about his personal views, and I’m not going to attack Dr. Meyer on the basis that sometimes he associates with religious people. (Meyer also works with a lot of scientists, but why should Matt Zeitlin let little facts like that get in the way?) But if Mr. Zeitlin wants to play the motive-mongering game, then he might consider the fact that we don’t even have to SPECULATE that many evolutionists have expressed blatantly anti-religious motives, beliefs, and affiliations. If critics like Mr. Zeitlin want to harp upon the religious beliefs, motives, affiliations, and implications associated with ID, then they should realize that what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Leading proponents of neo-Darwinian evolution frequently discuss their views of the cultural and metaphysical implications of neo-Darwinian evolution. Moreover, many of them have expressed anti-religious beliefs and motives for advocating evolution, and have close ties to atheist and secular humanist organizations.

    Richard Dawkins for a long time was Oxford University’s Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and is probably the most famous evolutionist in the world. Yet Dawkins argues that belief in God is a “delusion” and that “Darwin made it possible to become an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” Dawkins has stated his goal is “to kill religion” and has asserted that “faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.”

    America’s great champion of evolution, the late Stephen Jay Gould, similarly announced that “[b]efore Darwin, we thought that a benevolent God had created us,” but because of Darwin’s ideas, “biology took away our status as paragons created in the image of God.” Gould repeatedly discussed the “radical philosophical content of Darwin’s message” and its denial of purpose in the universe: “First, Darwin argues that evolution has no purpose. . . . Second, Darwin maintained that evolution has no direction. . . . Third, Darwin applied a consistent philosophy of materialism to his interpretation of nature. Matter is the ground of all existence; mind, spirit, and God as well, are just words that express the wondrous results of neuronal complexity.

    ID-critics sometimes like to pretend that Gould and Dawkins are outliers in their views. If only that were so. A 2007 editorial by the editors of the world’s top scientific journal, Nature, stated that “the idea that human minds are the product of evolution” is an “unassailable fact,” and thus concluded, “the idea that man was created in the image of God can surely be put aside.” A very popular college evolutionary biology textbook (which I used for one of my upper division evolutionary biology courses during my undergraduate studies) declares that “[b]y coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous.”

    Similarly, in the prestigious scientific journal, Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences, leading evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala celebrates that “Darwin’s greatest accomplishment” was to show that the origin of life’s complexity “can be explained as the result of a natural process—natural selection—without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent.” Just to make sure that his readers don’t try to invoke some kind of “God-guided” evolution, Ayala writes that “[i]n evolution, there is no entity or person who is selecting adaptive combinations.”

    Cornell University evolutionary biologist William Provine has similarly stated that “belief in modern evolution makes atheists of people” and that “[o]ne can have a religious view that is compatible with evolution only if the religious view is indistinguishable from atheism.” Provine states that there are severe philosophical implications of Darwinian biology:

    “Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent.”

    Also noteworthy is the fact that key public defenders of Darwin have strong ties to secular humanist groups. For example, Eugenie Scott is a physical anthropologist who now serves as Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education and was called by the scientific journal Nature “perhaps the nation’s most high-profile Darwinist.” But Scott is also a public signer of the Third Humanist Manifesto, an aggressive statement of the humanist agenda to create a world with “without supernaturalism” based upon the view that “[h]umans are … the result of unguided evolutionary change” and the universe is “self-existing.” Another leading pro-evolution activist, Barbara Forrest, believes that “philosophical naturalism” is “the only reasonable metaphysical conclusion.” Dr. Forrest also sits on the Board of Directors of the New Orleans Secular Humanist Association, an associate member of the American Humanist Association, which publishes the Third Humanist Manifesto.

    Even the widely-touted theistic evolutionary biologist Kenneth Miller has claimed in five editions of his highly popular high school biology textbooks that the implication of evolution is that it works “without either plan or purpose” and is “random and undirected.” Two other versions of Miller’s high school biology textbooks contain a striking discussion of some of the potential philosophical implications of evolution:

    “Darwin knew that accepting his theory required believing in philosophical materialism, the conviction that matter is the stuff of all existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its byproducts. Darwinian evolution was not only purposeless but also heartless . . . . Suddenly, humanity was reduced to just one more species in a world that cared nothing for us. The great human mind was no more than a mass of evolving neurons. Worst of all, there was no divine plan to guide us.”

    Harvard paleontologist and author Richard Lewontin explains how materialism is a key assumption propping Darwinian thought:

    “[W]e have a prior commitment … to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to … produce material explanations … [T]hat materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”

    Finally, leading Darwinian philosopher of science Michael Ruse admits that “for many evolutionists, evolution has functioned … akin to being a secular religion” whose main doctrine is “a commitment to a kind of naturalism.”

    I do not list these anti-religious affiliations of leading Darwinists in order to contend that the anti-religious beliefs, motives, affiliations, and implications associated with neo-Darwinism make it unscientific. I accept and grant that neo-Darwinian evolution is a scientific theory. I list these examples to show that it is not possible to seriously dispute the fact that neo-Darwinian evolution is surrounded by a cloud of leading proponents with anti-religious motives, beliefs, and affiliations, who have plainly declared that the theory can have anti-religious implications. If such things count against ID, they should count against neo-Darwinism, but I don’t think that Mr. Zeitlin wants to go there. Thus I list the anti-religious affiliations associated with the theory to demonstrate that scientific theories must be tested independently of the beliefs, motives, and affiliations of their proponents, or the larger philosophical implications that some draw from the theory. In science, motives don’t matter, only the evidence does. And that’s why people who aren’t convident that the evidence is on their side (like Mr. Zeitlin) resort to demonizing people because of their alleged religious beliefs and motives.

    Pro-ID scientists should be able to stake out scientific positions on ID without being judged on the basis of their private religious beliefs, motives, or affiliations. Furthermore, pro-ID scientists should not have their views about ID disqualified from being scientific if people interpret ID’s scientific claims to have larger philosophical and metaphysical implications.

    There are other fallacious arguments left that Mr. Zeitlin plays in responding to Meyer. He resorts to trying to painting Meyer as a young earth creationist, which Meyer—a former geophyiscal researcher in the field of oil research—most definitely is not. It is here that Mr. Zeitlin stretches his bad arguments beyond even what leading ID-critics are willing to stomach. Even Eugenie Scott admits that “most ID proponents do not embrace a Young Earth, Flood Geology, and sudden creation tenets associated with YEC.”

    But what about Meyer himself? Meyer has stated numerous times (including in a radio interview this week) that he fully accepts the conventional geological column and the age of the earth. His new book Signature in the Cell shows that he fully accepts the geological column and doesn’t challenge it in any way:

    - Meyer notes that “Yockey notes that ‘the technology of informaiton theory and coding theory has been in place in biology for 3.85 billion years’” or from the time that life first originated on earth.” (pg. 17) So clearly Meyer accepts that life appeared on earth about 3.85 billion years ago.

    - Meyer adopts the conventional age of the universe stating “there has been a limited amount of time since the big bang” (pg. 216), and thus Meyer seems to accept big bang cosmology and thereby an extremely ancient age of the universe.

    - “Advocates of design who envision a designing intelligence acting discretely at intervals across the geological time scale tend to favor a polyphyletic rather than a monophyletic view of the history of life.” Here, Meyer seems to show that ID accept the geological timescale, which he obviously accepts.

    - In his expert report prepared (but not used) at the Dover trial, he wrote that “Fossil studies reveal a “biological big bang” near the beginning of the Cambrian period 530 million years ago.”

    - In his article in Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, he wrote that “The ‘Cambrian explosion’ refers to the geologically sudden appearance of many new animal body plans about 530 million years ago. At this time, at least nineteen, and perhaps as many as thirty-five phyla of forty total (Meyer et al. 2003), made their first appearance on earth within a narrow five- to ten-million-year window of geologic time (Bowring et al. 1993, 1998a:1, 1998b:40; Kerr 1993; Monastersky 1993; Aris-Brosou & Yang 2003). “

    - In the same article he further writes, “Then, beginning about 570-565 million years ago (mya), the first complex multicellular organisms appeared in the rock strata, including sponges, cnidarians, and the peculiar Ediacaran biota (Grotzinger et al. 1995). Forty million years later, the Cambrian explosion occurred (Bowring et al. 1993). The emergence of the Ediacaran biota (570 mya), and then to a much greater extent the Cambrian explosion (530 mya), represented steep climbs up the biological complexity gradient.”

    Many more examples could be given, but it seems pretty clear that Dr. Meyer accepts the geological timescale — no criticisms of it are found anywhere in his writings and he always adopts it at face value. Mr. Zeitlin’s claim that Meyer is a closet young earth creationist is completely false and baseless.

    Mr. Zeitlin claims that when asked about the identity of the designer, that “Meyer hedged” but Mr. Zeitlin’s own words admit that Meyer did not “hedge” because he admits that Meyer “favor[ed] the God hypothesis.” So it seems that Meyer was completely open about his view that the designer is God. What’s most interesting here is that Mr. Zeitlin admits that HE was pressing Meyer about this issue, so clearly Zeitlin is on a mission to distract from the scientific issues by pressing Meyer about his personal religious beliefs, which it turns out Meyer was more than willing to answer.

    Mr. Zeitlin wrote: “Meyer more or less goes along with literal interpretations of Biblical texts; such an attitude is indicative of bait-and-switch behind ID.” What Mr. Zeitlin’s basis is for this he doesn’t say. But it’s clear that even if Meyer does take Genesis literally, Mr. Zeitlin doesn’t seem to understand that many Christians — even those who take a literal interpretation of Genesis — accept the standard geological column, and that, as we’ve seen, Dr. Meyer is a Christian who fully accepts the mainstream geological column.

    What’s noteworthy about all of this is that despite his attacks on Meyer’s personal beliefs, and personal attacks on Dr. Meyer (he says “Meyer is not a scientist” ... “He is an ideologue in the truest sense, someone who is willing to abide any distortion or untruth in order to maintain support for his crusade,” etc.), Mr. Zeitlin offers no scientific rebuttal whatsoever to Dr. Meyer’s argument that there is no natural process to properly order the information in the first self-replicating life form

    Instead, Zeitlin merely csserts that Meyer is “trafficking the half-baked, over-motivated arguments that have always been peddled by creationists.”

    It’s clear what’s really happening here: Mr. Zeitlin is trying to deflect from his own position’s utter inability to account for the information in life by talking about irrelevant issues. What’s most ironic, thus, is that Zeitlin charges that “Meyer’s focus on the mystery of DNA is just a distraction.”

    Well, such profound problems probably are a “distraction,” to those who have no answers for them, like Matt Zeitlin. But for those who are serious about these questions, it’s one of the most important scientific questions ever asked. After all, in his book Information and the Origin of Life, origin of life theorist Bernd-Olaf Kuppers stated that, “The problem of the origin of life is clearly basically equivalent to the problem of the origin of biological information.”. If all this focus on the origin of information in DNA is just a “distraction” as Mr. Zeitlin’s conspiracy theory claims it is, then why did Dr. Meyer just publish a 600 page book — years in the making — trying to address this question?

    If there’s any distraction here, it’s Mr. Zeitlin’s attempt to distract from his position’s utter inability to account for the origin of information in life through a string of fallacious ad hominem and personal attacks on Dr. Meyer. That’s the real distraction here, and it’s too bad that Mr. Zeitlin wants to avoid a fascinating scientific investigation into this crucial question.

    (p.s. Seeing who is already involved with this discussion, unfortunately I expect that the response to me will be more personal attacks and namecalling, etc.)

    — Casey Luskin - Jul 14, 03:47 PM - #
    
    

11. “his position’s utter inability to account for the origin of information in life”

    Well, the research on abiogenesis continues. So “we don’t know yet” is true. But “we will never know” seems premature. At any rate, postulating an “intelligent cause” violates the definition of science, so Meyer needs to change that definition. Scientists say no – so this book will be ignored.

    — onein6billion - Aug 30, 10:54 PM - #