Contra Anonymous DI Legal Intern: Common Misconceptions About Intelligent Design, Part 3

It stands as a basic precept of academic integrity that careful thought be met with careful thought; far be it for a footsoldier in the culture wars to attack a tenured professor’s lengthily reasoned treatise, save for at length, and thoroughly. Thus we begin the final installment in our three-part series, analyzing an anonymous Discovery Institute legal intern’s (ADILI’s) attempts to take on the legal academy. In our hero’s last rant, s/he spends a page addressing a matter to which Anne Marie Lofaso devotes nearly sixty – whether intelligent design is “science,” and whether changing the definition of “science” to accommodate ID is tolerable. She answers both in the negative.

If ADILI’s rebuttal of Mrs. Lofaso, in this “article,” does not repeat the gross mis-characterizations of legal authority that defined the last piece, it’s because the article at no point engages in discussion of the law… anywhere. Instead, Mrs. Lofaso’s legal article is only cited for its scientific propositions: that the “materialist requirement” of science is valid, and that ID is unfalsifiable. ((These aren’t legal arguments, and it boggles my mind why a legal intern would be paid to address them, unless the DI’s commitment to the law is as lackadaisical as its commitment to science.))

To rebut the latter, ADILI cites us to a (surprise!) Discovery Institute document, which argues that ID is falsifiable because it makes the following predictions which, if untrue, would render ID invalid:

(1) Natural structures will be found that contain many parts arranged in intricate patterns that perform a specific function (e.g. complex and specified information).
(2) Forms containing large amounts of novel information will appear in the fossil record suddenly and without similar precursors.
(3) Convergence will occur routinely. That is, genes and other functional parts will be re-used in different and unrelated organisms.
(4) Much so-called “junk DNA” will turn out to perform valuable functions.

Huh. If ID’s “falsifiable predictions” sound odd, it’s because they’re (for the most part) retrodictive predictions made by plain old natural selection, which hypothesizes inter alia (3) convergence and (4) the meaningfulness of junk DNA. The DI is trying to piggyback its pet theory on the falsifiability – ergo scientific validity – of “Darwinism,” without ever attempting to make the unique predictions which are the true hallmarks of a scientific theory. If ID is “falsifiable,” it is only falsifiable insofar as it co-opts uncontestable points of evolutionary theory: its addition of a designer, the true portion of the theory for which falsifiability would be needed, lacks any such indicia.

Mrs. Lofaso’s article presents a clear articulation of the reason that science must be primarily “materialist,” one which ADILI never discusses, save to argue that it is discriminatory, intolerant, and somehow “censorship.” While the persecution complex may be a fantastic rhetorical card to play, it is neither scientific nor legal, and most importantly fails to answer the argument that counting supernatural causation as “scientific” is a “science-stopper.”

[T]he answer – God did it – is both epistemologically unfulfilling and intellectually stifling…. Behe has given several examples of what he considers to be irreducibly complex systems…. [y]et, scientists have explained how both systems, although complex in much the way Behe describes, are not irreducibly complex…. If left to Behe, the inquiry would have ended with his statement that these systems were too complex to come about by the mechanism of natural selection and that better explanation for these systems is that God created them – end of story.

Just so. Few scientists could conjure a more pithy example. The only “legal analysis” in this article – a citation to a book review in the Harvard Law Review, which profanes the pages of that journal by making the tired “why not teach the controversy?” argument – fails to answer the damning allegation that ID, by invoking God, would dilute science down to meaninglessness. ADILI has proven, in this article possibly more than others, that having a LexisNexis account and reading law journal articles does not, in fact, mean that you’re doing legal analysis. And it sure as hell doesn’t make you a lawyer.