If you've ever read anything about intelligent design (ID) online, you're sure to have noticed that it is dismissed by many elites as "pseudoscience." Wikipedia has a terrible track record of shoehorning this term into every article that mentions ID.
Why? A big part of it, as far as I can tell, is that ID does not adhere to methodological naturalism (MN). Philosopher of science Stephen C. Meyer, one of ID's architects, defines MN in this way: "a principle that specifies that scientists must explain all events by reference to materialistic (non-intelligent) causes whatever the evidence."
ID breaks the rules of MN by inferring an intelligent source from things like the irreducible complexity (i.e., you take one piece out of the system, and it won't function anymore) of bacterial flagellum or the biological information contained in DNA. The main idea that drives ID is that complex systems and information have an intelligent cause.
Now perhaps I can see the appeal of MN. It's parsimonious in its ontological commitments, as it only makes room for material things.
Suppose we accept MN. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to classify ID has a scientific-philosophical research program, instead of as a purely scientific one.
But the criticism that ID is a "pseudoscience" could just as well be levelled against neo-Darwinists like Richard Dawkins, who writes in his book The Blind Watchmaker that "Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view."
Dawkins steps outside the boundaries of MN here. While ID theorists infer a designer from information encountered in the natural world, Dawkins infers that no such designer exists, all while providing an anti-metanarrative for natural selection. This is not just methodological, but also ontological, naturalism.
Well, given the complexity of the "system" of life, there would have to be some kind of intelligence behind it, whether it's God, a god, or if matter has a sentience about it that tends towards the creation of life in some circumstances. Natural selection implies something is directing everything.
ReplyDeleteYour title is correct, though, and I would maintain there needs to be different language to distinguish pure scientody (the practice of science) and areas of knowledge that overlaps science but includes other things. Evolution, intelligent design, palentology, and much of cosmology isn't science because it's not readily observable nor reproducible; scientists (not a reified "science") fill in those pesky gaps. We could call all of that "pseudo-science" but that carries a negative slant. We need another word that objectively describes science-adjacent knowledge mixed with, say, philosophy, that can't satisfy the reproducibility aspect of the scientific method. Science has too much purity attached to it: science plus something else is seen as diluted and incorrect. A change in this attitude would help greatly.
"Evolution ... isn't science because it's not readily observable nor reproducible"
DeleteThings you're not allowed to say! lol