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Scientists Confront Creationism: Intelligent Design and Beyond

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This review was written after reading the hardcover edition - pick up the paperback now that it is available!

Fervent fundamentalist religious groups (Jewish, Christian, or Islamic), have exhibited chronic allergies to science ever since Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species" convincingly presented his theory of evolution by natural selection. Unweaving rainbows could be tolerated - but dismantling cherished creation myths spawned an array of pseudoscientific hives and rashes ranging from 'creation science' to 'Intelligent Design.'

Faith-based resistance to evolution - a theory supported by an overwhelming and extraordinary consilience of scientific evidence - has deleteriously impacted everything from separation of church and state to economic competitiveness as science, and science education, became essential prerequisites for information age economies and political systems. "Scientists Confront Intelligent Design and Creationism" thoroughly and convincingly deconstructs the all dog, no pony, creationist and ID sideshow with sixteen essays by prominent scientists, historians, and educators.

PART ONE focuses on the origins of 'scientific creationism' and 'Intelligent Design.' Ronald L. Numbers unmasks the shell-game strategies employed by creationists attempting to substitute religious dogma for science in American classrooms. Shortly after the Supreme Court rejected 'scientific creationism' in the 1987 Edwards v. Aguillard ruling 'Intelligent Design,' chronicled by Eugenie C. Scott, whelped into view. Sired by an unremarkable claque of born again lawyers, underachieving academics, and a Moonie; 'Intelligent Design' was accompanied by a strident but content-free PR initiative from The Discovery Institute for the Renewal of Science and Culture. John R. Cole closes this section by documenting the conceit that led backers of 'Intelligent Design' to their own Golgotha in Kitzmiller v. Dover in 2005.

PART TWO includes essays by Victor J. Stegner, G. Brent Dalrymple, and Antonia Lazcano that roast creationist chestnuts ranging from 'The Second Law of Thermodynamics makes evolution or the natural origin of life impossible' (it doesn't, in fact non-equilibrium thermodynamics underlies a variety of physical and chemical processes that allowed life to develop and evolve on earth); to the age of the earth itself - an incontrovertible 4.54 billion years old. Despite all available scientific evidence, Young Earth Creationists (YECs) continue to insist that earth and the cosmos are only 6,000 to 10,000 years old - only off by factors of 750,000 for the earth and more than 2,000,000 for the universe!

Other PART TWO highlights pair Kevin Padian's and Kenneth D. Angielczyk's paper on how creationists duplicitously deny transitional forms with Robert Dorit's insights on biological complexity - flagellating Michael Behe's clumsy implementation of 'irreducible complexity.' Wesley R. Elsberry succinctly reveals the statistical slight-of-hand inherent in William Dembski's 'Design Inference.' The pretentious pseudomathematics genre was invented by Dembski and Elsberry's denouement is a fitting coup de grace. A summary of Human evolution by C. Loring Brace closes out this segment.

PART THREE pits Robert T. Pennock against an addled Dembski on philosophical and methodological grounds. His summarization is priceless:

"In other words, Dembski's argument works like this: If you cannot think of a way for natural regularities and/or chance to explain something, they say that a 'designer' did it. Dembski's 'design inference' is nothing more than a formalization of a simple god-of-the gaps argument. It is the standard argument from ignorance put in the form of a flow chart." Game, set, and match to Pennock.

J. Michael Plavcan explores how the concept of cognitive dissonance compels creationists to leap from the same conceptual cliffs over and over again with lemming-like disregard for the consequences. This model of how 'creation scientists' regurgitate fallacious arguments in the face of repeated and authoritative rebuttals is my favorite essay. If you want to know how Henry Morris, Duane Gish and Ken Ham (among others) manage to get everything exactly wrong read this chapter first and then enjoy the rest of the book.

Editors Andrew J. Petto and Laurie R. Godfrey worked with the essayists to weave numerous threads into a coherent and compelling tapestry that successfully champions sense over nonsense. If you cherish reason and prefer a reality-based worldview to faith-based voodoo, you will treasure this book.

Also try Tower of Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism by Robert T. Pennock, Unintelligent Design by Mark Perkah, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, Expanded Edition by Ronald L. Numbers, or Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design by Barbara Forrest.

"Scientists Confront Creationism: Intelligent Design and Beyond" is an important updated edition of an earlier volume focusing on the history and claims made by "scientific creationists" back in the 1980s. This recently expanded edition, edited by Andrew J. Petto, editor of the Reports of the National Center for Science Education, and Laurie R. Godfrey, the editor of the original edition, takes a long, hard look at the history, scientific claims and educational implications of creationism, especially in its latest, most virulent, flavor, Intelligent Design. This superb tome is subdivided into three parts; the first is a historical and philosophical survey of creationism. The second part explores its most important scientific claims in ample detail. The third section examines creationism from the perspective of trying to understand science, discussing how and why it fails to meet the rigorous self-imposed centuries-old standards of peer-reviewed scientific research. The sixteen contributors include a diverse group of scientists, philosophers, and other educators, including such luminaries as philosopher of science Robert Pennock, geochronologist G. Brent Dalrymple, vertebrate paleobiologist Kevin Padian and historian Ronald Numbers. This is truly an important, exceptional book which deserves a place on the bookshelves of anyone seeking to understand the history and aims of American creationist movements, especially that of Intelligent Design.

The opening section on the history and philosophy of creationism features superlative essays written by Ronald Numbers and National Center for Science Education executive director Eugenie Scott. Numbers' essay starts this section with a terse, but vivid, account of the history of American creationism. Scott follows with an in-depth examination of the Intelligent Design movement itself, emphasizing its recent legal debacle, the 2005 Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District trial. Anthropologist John Cole's concluding essay focuses on the significance of the Discovery Institute's notorious "Wedge Document" as a "blueprint" for inserting Intelligent Design creationism into almost every important facet of American educational and cultural life.

In the book's second section, there are several essays that I found especially useful. Physicist Victor J. Stenger explains creationism's fascination with cosmology, along with a lucid mathematical rebuttal of Discovery Institute Senior Fellow William Dembski's concept of Complex Specified Information. Geochronologist G. Brent Dalrymple's extensive essay on the ages of the universe and the Earth is the most succinct examination of this issue that I've come across, and one I recommend highly to all. Kevin Padian and Kenneth D. Angielczyk's "'Transitional Forms' versus Transitional Features" is an extensive overview of "missing links" in paleontology and their significance in constructing testable hypotheses about degrees of relationship between different species (or higher taxonomic units) as depicted in cladograms. Marine biologist Wesley Elsberry's extensive refutation of Dembski's Explanatory Filter/Design Inference demonstrates how and why this peculiar abuse of flow-chart diagrams and mathematical logic is quite nonsensical; here Elsberrry has demolished effectively the elaborate - if poorly "designed" - "mathematical" argument that Dembski has offered as "proof" of Intelligent Design.

Ending on a powerful note, the final section of "Scientists Confront Intelligent Design and Creationism" contains exceptional essays from philosopher Robert Pennock and evolutionary geneticist Norm Johnson. Pennock - whose superb "Tower of Babel" Tower of Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism ranks foremost on my required reading list of books on creationism - tears apart the creationist canard of arguing from ignorance - the so-called "God of the Gaps", by asserting that absence of evidence does not automatically imply support of creationism, especially its Intelligent Design variety. Johnson follows with an insightful overview from his perspective of Drosophila genetics research, demonstrating how pioneering work, early in the last century, showed that evolution was indeed a valid scientific theory. The book's editors offer an intriguing, persuasive, closing essay explaining why it is necessary to explain the "controversial" aspects of contemporary evolutionary theory as part of the standard curricula of biology science classrooms.

Scientists Confront Creationism is a series of academic essays addressing the misinformation posited and obfuscation used by the ID/Creationist/Christian Scientist crowd in its collective mission to overthrow naturalistic evolutionary biology in particular and naturalistic science in general. The essays provide a history, differences and methods of the anti-evolution/anti naturalistic science group. It is also loaded with details about the scientific method, genetics, anthropology and geology. This work is heavily cited and fact based, not an ideological rant.

Imagine the following locked room mystery. You watch a man and a woman walk into a room that is completed empty except for a baseball bat. The door closes and a few moments later, the woman walks out, the blood-spattered bat in her hand and the man bludgeoned to death within. Detective A looks at all the evidence: including your eyewitness testimony and all sorts of forensic evidence that links the blood on the bat to the victim, etc. He comes to the only reasonable conclusion: the woman killed the man. Detective B, however, has a firm belief (unsupported by any real facts) that women are not capable of killing men. Based on this belief, he either ignores the evidence of the crime or cherry-picks through it to support his view; forced to give an alternate explanation, he says an alien teleported in the room, committed the murder, hypnotized the woman and teleported out.

The discussion of evolution vs. creationism is like Detective A vs. Detective B. The former looks at the evidence and draws conclusions that fit; the latter has already determined his conclusion and makes the evidence fit it. This, of course, is not good detective work or good science, which is why creationism (or its slightly more sophisticated cousin, intelligent design) does not belong in a science curriculum. But don't just take my crude analogy as the only justification; read Scientists Confront Creationism to realize exactly how flawed the creationist arguments are.

Scientists Confront Creationism is a collection of essays by various scientists. It is divided into three sections. In the first section, the focus is on the history of the evolution vs. creationism debate and the general arguments creationists and IDers use to attempt to debunk evolution. Where they fail on the scientific level, they try on the political level, as if scientific ideas are decided by popular opinion, not facts. And despite the seeming high-mindedness of these creationists, they are not above a little deceit to achieve their ends. What comes out of this first section is that the Creationist/ID movement is primarily an American movement and primarily one of fundamentalist Christians, though it is not unique to either this nation or religious group.

The second section of the book focuses on the actual science; for the lay reader, this may be the most difficult section to read, as some of the writers do get rather technical. This section demonstrates the strength of evolutionary theory, the weakness of creationist "science" and the flaws in the creationist arguments against evolution.

The third section deals with the philosophies behind the two sides, demonstrating that evolution as a fact is arrived at through the scientific method, while creationist science, like Detective B, works in reverse: it assumes a conclusion and finds (or twists) evidence to support that conclusion. (That'd be like declaring a person was a vegetarian and proving it by only looking at the times he ate vegetables and ignoring any meals where meat was eaten.) One of the key attacks on evolution is that it's "only a theory", showing exactly how ignorant the creationist is about what the term "theory" means in the world of science. The fact is, evolution is a fact, and if controversies exist within the scientific communities, it merely is a fine tuning of the process, not a questioning of the mechanism of evolution itself.

Is Scientists Confront Creationism a perfect book? Not really: the format lends itself to a lot of redundancy between chapters, and as mentioned before, the second section may be a little too technical (in places) for some readers. And, of course, it is a book that preaches to the choir, but it does prepare the choir to better defend the teaching of evolution in the schools (and explain why creationism has no place in a science course). In this lengthy review, I've only scratched the surface of what this book covers; as a text that explains the dangers of letting ignorance (which is a condemnation of creationists, not religious faith) triumph over reason, this is an essential read.

This update of an earlier work delivers with great force a series of tightly-reasoned repudiations of aspects of "intelligent design" and other formulations of creationism. Each of the authors of its various sections is a professional in a related field of biology and/or a scholar in the philosophy and history of science. Indeed, one of the most striking things when comparing their writing to that of pro-ID authors is the level of erudition not merely in their technical field of proficiency but in that of their creationist detractors. These are serious contributors, and the style is always serious. Indeed, that is perhaps the only complaint I would make!

The reasoning is clear and incisive. I owe to this book at least one new piece of vocabulary, since one demolition of Dembski's pseudo-scientific "explanatory filter" carefully and cogently demonstrates that it circularly embodies only its own presumption that the options it sifts through are both "jointly exhaustive" and mutually exclusive. "Mutually exclusive" we all know, but "jointly exhaustive" for some reason was new to me and I shall be using it. As a demonstration of the clarity of reasoning in this excellent work I could probably do no better. Dembski's filter effectively defines "design" as being everything except low and intermediate probability - it embodies the very assumption it purports to demonstrate. The inference that specified complexity can be used to infer design is never actually supported, and indeed begs the very question of evolution which it purports to repudiate. The presumption of joint exhaustion of alternatives is presented pseudo-scientifically as a flow chart, but never shown to be true. The presumption of mutual exclusivity at branch points likewise.

The final chapter deals with science education and how it should now proceed. It makes a strong case that, ironically, the prevalence of ID demonstrates a need for more, and more thorough, science education and specifically more teaching of evolution. Some of the glaringly crude fallacies and misunderstandings promulgated by creationist propaganda outlets simply could not compete in a more scientifically sophisticated cultural milieu. At the moment, their nonsense is actually penetrating levels of society who could be expected to have a more thorough education in the scientific foundations of their own nation, so I tend to agree with the book's judgement that this needs to be corrected for by increased teaching effort.

The authors bring too much technical expertise to the discussion to risk embarrassing myself with a synopsis, but it can be said that they are erudite, careful and convincing. The style is a little straight-faced, but it is worth the effort of engaging with this excellent set of rebuttals.

Very easy to understand. An attractive layout which encourages the reader to complete the book. Suited to high school students and to those who need basic information about arguments for and against evolutionary theory.

This review pertains to the paperback "Scientists Confront Creationism, Intelligent Design and Beyond" (2007), and also to the hardcover "Scientists Confront Intelligent Design and Creationism" (2007). Though under different titles, be it known that they are exactly the same book... which is a complete redoing of a 1983 work that both authors accomplished now almost 30 years ago. And much has changed concerning the creationism/evolutionism controversy since then: beginning with Michael Denton's stunning 1985 monograph "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis"; the 1990's introduced Phillip Johnson and Michael Behe, along with William Dembski and "Intelligent Design", D. Berlinski's stunning article in Commentary (1996), and contributions from many others, in the latter 90's, and the next decade.

And this book does an excellent job recognizing, and answering the new output; a remarkable effort by the editors Andrew Petto and Laurie Godfrey. There are 16 essays covering different fields and approaches to Intelligent Design; and some of them are exceptionally well done, being grouped into three general categories. A Creationist myself, and though I am sympathetic to the viewpoint of my colleagues, nevertheless I would offer the following complaint: All the essays are from the Evolutionist's point of view; there are not even responses on the part of the Creationist/ID Theorists... Yet, however, some may view this as a positive feature of the book(!)
So then, an examination of the Evolutionist Response, we can say, therefore...
Additionally, and one more minor criticism, is that occasionally the essays can be a shade technical for the layman; but this should to some extent be expected ,and permitted, I think.
But please don't let either of these two criticisms hinder you from purchasing this superb book - especially if you are an Evolutionist. One further point, and of note, is the book, published now four years ago, is still quite up to date, as the ID movement is at a temporary standstill... There is much to think, and converse, about here; and all considered a very fine job by the editors indeed.

- John G. Lewis

Roughly half of adult Americans doubt evolution and another ~20% thinks that it's fair to "teach the controversy" as demanded by anti-evolution activists. Several of the book's authors use the term "creationists" for the doubters, and "creation scientists" for the activists, so I'll use that terminology here.

If you read this book and don't conclude that the authors genuinely want to help creationists, you're beyond hope. There are many excellent books about the U.S. anti-evolution movement, but of the ones I have read so far, this one seems particularly geared to a general audience - not too technical, but not simplified to the point of helping "creation scientists" caricaturize evolution. The book was written before the documentary "Expelled" and the so-called "academic freedom" legislation, but includes discussions of Kitzmiller v. Dover. Thus few readers should be surprised that "creation science" would continue its degradation from any potential "science of creation" and toward getting people to reject evolution by any means possible.

Part 1 is a brief history of the anti-evolution movement, Part 2 clearly and concisely demolishes several common "icons of creation science," and Part 3 further drives home why "creation science" will never be science and ought never to be taught as such. I would have preferred more emphasis on ID and the designer-free phony "critical analysis," and how those approaches pretend to be more scientific than earlier versions, yet keep abandoning the claims that can conceivably be tested on their own merits (young earth, independent origin of "kinds").

In this book and elsewhere I have seen estimates that at most 25% of adult Americans might not accept evolution under any circumstances. That leaves another ~50% who can benefit by reading this book, and the many helpful references within.