It has been two months (an eternity in blogging years) since Paul Newall and Michael Pearl insisted that the issue of teaching intelligent design in schools should not be resolved via demarcation. While Paul is on solid ground when he deconstructs the sloppy philosophical arguments used by the anti-ID crowd, I take issue with his analysis of the implications (emphasis added):
The implication is thus that if arguments for demarcation criteria continue to fail, if these failures are seized upon by intelligent design advocates and if there are better reasons to dispense with this approach altogether, it is likely that objections to intelligent design on some other basis will be more successful at least in part because they are more philosophically rigorous. Criticising an insistence on demarcation, far from demonstrating a lack of political understanding, actually returns the issue to one of science instead of philosophy and provides a service to the debate rather than acting as an irrelevance or hindrance.
I’m not sure I follow. Scientists are already pretty successful in applying demarcation to intelligent design, however erroneously they do so. They do, after all, win the important cases. And so it’s not clear what they would gain by trying to make their arguments more philosophically rigorous. Their primary goal is to prevent ID from being taught in science class, not to get an A+ on a philosophy paper.
Along those lines, what does it mean to provide a “service to the debate?” Most scientists would say that nothing undermines “the debate” more than confusing ID for science, and thus we must employ any and all arguments–even philosophically suspect ones–to ensure said confusion does not persist. Paul, Michael and I are surely among the minority who so desperately believe that the current form of the debate serves as a hindrance. Mainstream scientists are happy to keep it in these terms,especially because they seem to be successful at it.
There’s an irreconcilable mismatch of goals here. Philosophers–and the former space physicists who have defected to their camp–think truth, sound arguments and civil discourse should hold greater sway. Scientists disagree. More than anything else, they care (not too unreasonably) about preventing ID from entering science classes. Even if most scientists understood the demarcation problem (I’m pretty most have never even heard of it), and even if they agreed with Paul that methodological naturalism cannot be used to demarcate ID (most passionately and honestly believe that alone suffices), I bet their approach wouldn’t change much. For better or worse, this issue has always been fought in terms of demarcation. Unless something drastically changes, that’s the way scientists will continue to fight.
