Alvin Plantinga, John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, has weighed in on Judge Jones opinion in Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District
I won't offer an opinion on whether the judge's decision is correct — although apparently he's never met an objection to intelligent design he doesn't like and some of his "findings" seem vastly more sweeping than is appropriate. First, a general question: What sorts of issues can a judge decide just by fiat? Jones rules, among other things, that:Read the whole article hereBut how can one hope to settle these matters just by a judicial declaration?
- ID is just warmed-over creation science
- ID tries to change the very definition of science
- The scientific community has refuted the criticisms of evolution brought by the IDers
- ID involves a kind of dualism and that this dualism is doomed.
I don't know if I will ever understand how it can be hard to see that the practice of science, de facto, just is that of methodological naturalism. Never mind most philosophers of science, I think almost any practicing scientist knows this, even if (s)he has never heard the term before.
Here's an angle on the problem with ID-as-science: What would it look like, and what would the significance be supposed to be, of a "design inference" or some such being falsified, as Plantinga explicitly says is inherently possible? Finding a naturalistic explanation for some structure? And would this in fact eliminate a design inference in any sense? And does this mean that for present mysteries, the burden of proof is constantly on the scientist to push God out of the picture? Is that what science essentially does, progressively establish atheism? The main problem I see with ID's no-explanations-as-explanations is that there's nothing we can do with such claims, except, apparently, falsify them by coming up with naturalistic explanations. ID's designer is circumscribed to a god-of-the-gaps, which contributes nothing to theology, and proposes no-explanations as explanations, which contributes nothing to science.
Thanks for the good article.
ID is not the theory that there are no explanations, but that for certain things for which there are no complete natural explanations. The practical impact of ID on science may be that it motivates one to continue to look for purposes and functions of systems where no evidence of such purposes is present. Given evolutionary naturalism, it seems difficult to justify an expectation that one will find a function for something (e.g. the appendix).
Of course, that assumes that ID must have some sort of practical impact on methodology. However, like every other intellectual endeavor, pure science, as contrasted with applied science, is ultimately just about seeking to know just for the sake of knowing. So, even if it has no practical import, resolving the question of whether or not anything in nature has been intelligently designed is certainly a scientific matter.