Why Darwin Matters_ The Case Against Intelligent Design - Michael Shermer [24]
But eschewing public debate has not kept the Intelligent Design movement at bay, nor has the public decided that evolution should not be debated. On a balmy spring Southern California evening in 2004, for example, I entered the four-hundred-seat Physical Sciences Lecture Hall on the campus of the University of California, Irvine, to find it chockablock with five hundred people. I was there to debate the incorrigibly insouciant Kent Hovind, Young Earth Creationist, Defender of the Fundamental Faith, and the fastest talker I have ever met. On the docket that evening was the defining question of this controversy, Creation vs. Evolution: Creation (supernatural action) or Evolution (natural processes)—which is the better explanation? So, in contrast to many other scientists, I believe there are legitimate and important reasons to engage in the debate between evolution and Intelligent Design:
1. Debates will occur anyway, so they might as well include someone with expertise and experience in science. Better still if they also have expertise and experience in debating, and can employ diplomacy, wit, and warmth along with scientific facts.
2. When a controversy receives as much media attention as evolution and creationism have garnered over the past century, refusing to engage in public dialogue or debate can be misconstrued as a weakness in one’s position. Intelligent Design advocates have made a cottage industry out of exactly this point.
3. Debate forces both sides to put their cards face up on the table for everyone to see. Intelligent Design creationists have no science to speak of, and debates provide opportunities to demonstrate that a pretty PowerPoint slide is not science. As John Stuart Mill argued in his classic 1859 treatise On Liberty: “But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”1
4. Debate is a chance to educate people about science and evolution. As we have discussed, muddled misunderstandings about the science of evolution—and the theology of Intelligent Design—far outnumber concrete understanding. In general, the world may be divided into three types of people: True Believers, Fence Sitters, and skeptics. Religious True Believers will never change their minds no matter what evidence is presented to them, and science-embracing skeptics already accept evolution. The battleground is for the Fence Sitters—those who have heard something about a claim or controversy and wonder what the explanation for it might be. Lacking a good explanation, the mind defaults to whatever explanation is on the table, regardless of how improbable it may be.
Point four is particularly relevant to the debate between evolution and Intelligent Design. Before the theory of evolutionary biology was developed in the nineteenth century, the default explanation for the distribution of species around the globe was independent creation by God and the Noachian flood. (Among the handful of more religiously skeptical scientists, the mode of distribution was Lamarckian evolution and long-gone land bridges between continents and islands.) But after Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace demonstrated how natural selection changes varieties into different species when they migrate into different regions, the default supernatural explanation could be abandoned in favor of a fact-based natural one. Debate