Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [104]
In any case, is a set of natural laws and forces the sort of God whom IDers wish to worship? No. IDers want a supernatural God who uses unknown forces to create life. But what will IDers do when science discovers those natural forces, and the unknown becomes the known? If they join in the research on these mysteries then they will be doing science. If they continue to eschew all attempts to provide a naturalistic explanation for the phenomena under question, IDers will have abandoned science altogether. What a remarkably unscientific attitude. What an astounding lack of curiosity about the world. The British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins poignantly spelled this out in a clever fictional dialogue between two scientists. “Imagine a fictional conversation between two scientists working on a hard problem, say A. L. Hodgkin and A. F. Huxley who, in real life, won the Nobel Prize for their brilliant model of the nerve impulse,” Dawkins begins.
“I say, Huxley, this is a terribly difficult problem. I can’t see how the nerve impulse works, can you?”
“No, Hodgkin, I can’t, and these differential equations are fiendishly hard to solve. Why don’t we just give up and say that the nerve impulse propagates by Nervous Energy?”
“Excellent idea, Huxley, let’s write the Letter to Nature now, it’ll only take one line, then we can turn to something easier.”
2. Methodological Supernaturalism. Knowingly or unknowingly, scientists adhere to an underlying bias of methodological naturalism (sometimes called materialism or scientism), the belief that life is the result of a natural and purposeless process in a system of material causes and effects that does not allow, or need, the introduction of supernatural forces. University of California, Berkeley, law professor Phillip Johnson, a self-proclaimed “philosophical theist and a Christian” who believes in “a Creator who plays an active role in worldly affairs,” claimed in his 1991 book Darwin on Trial that scientists unfairly define God out of the picture by saying, essentially, “we are only going to examine natural causes and shall ignore any supernatural ones.” This is limiting and restrictive. Theorists who postulate nonnatural or supernatural forces or interventions at work in the natural world are being pushed out of the scientific arena on the basis of nothing more than a fundamental rule of the game. Let’s change the rides of the game to allow IDers to play
Okay, let’s change the rules. Lets allow methodological supernaturalism into science. What would that look like? How would that work? What would we do with supernaturalism? According to ID theorists, they do not and will not comment on the nature of ID. They only wish to say, “ID did it.” This reminds me of the Sidney Harris cartoon featuring the scientists at the chalkboard filled with equations, with an arrow pointing to a blank spot in the series denoting “Here a miracle happens.” Although they eschew any such “god of the gaps’-style arguments, that is, in fact, precisely what they are doing. They have simply changed the name from GOD to ID.
For the sake of argument, however, let’s assume that ID theorists have suddenly become curious about how ID operates. And lets say that we have determined that certain biological systems are irreducibly complex and intelligently designed. As ID scientists who are now given entree into the scientific stadium with the new set of rules that allows supernaturalism, they call a time-out during the game to announce, “Here ID caused a miracle.” What do we do now? Do we halt all future