Barr Part 2

2010.11.05   prev     next

I don’t think I said quite enough about Stephen Barr in my previous post, so here’s some more. Enjoy:

For centuries, religions made various claims to know the age of the earth. Science had nothing to say about it, and it must have seemed to many that science would never be able to explore the subject of Earth’s age.

But then technology reached a point where it became possible for science to explore this subject, and it turned out that Earth was a lot older than those religions thought.

This is an example of how science and religion can easily overlap. What do we do when that happens? Simple: Science teachers and textbooks should teach what we know about the scientific evidence in that area. So in this case, our science textbooks should teach that the evidence indicates that our planet formed about 3.5 to 4 billion years ago. And they should teach this even if it directly contradicts the teachings of some religions. And I’m sure Barr would have no problem with that.

But it can also go the other way. Suppose a religious scripture says that an ancient city existed in a certain part of the world. There’s no city there now, and no obvious indication there ever was. But one day, scientific tools develop to the point that scientists can scan that area with satellites and determine if there might have been a city there. And presto — there it is: the underground remnants of a very old city. Just about where the scriptures said it was. Of course, the scriptures may say a great deal more about the city (things that happened there and such) that science cannot currently verify or refute. But the mere existence of the city is scientifically verified.

What would Barr say about that? Should science teachers and texts (if they happened to be on the subject of ancient cities in the Middle East) mention that this long-claimed city of scripture does actually exist, and that we know this scientifically? I’m guessing that Barr would be OK with that.

So why is he not OK with a similarly scientific discovery that mutation-selection evolution isn’t responsible for biological complexity? Probably because, as he somewhat denigratively described in the debate, if evolution didn’t do it, then something else did, and that something else most likely doesn’t fit into a scheme of pure naturalism (or post-Big-Bang pure naturalism, anyway). So the bottom line with Barr is simply the same old question that Phillip Johnson elucidated in the ID-founding book Darwin On Trial — is science the quest to find any and all empirically supported truths, or is science the quest to find the most plausible purely naturalistic story, no matter how empirically implausible it may be, and then proceed under the premise that that story did in fact occur? And to shun as practically barbarian those who would draw attention to this glaring exception to the general pattern of evidence-following that is on exhibit in virtually all other fields of science?

One way to justify the latter approach is to appeal to the problem of the “infinite regress.” Barr goes to great lengths in his debate with Behe to point out that the infinite regress is a problem for ID. But he doesn’t say anything about what that means for the issue of biological complexity. And he says nothing about the fact that the infinite regress is a problem for all scientific theories. And he leaves an implication hanging in the air that ID fails due to the infinite regress, and that mutation-selection evolution thus wins, without directly saying so. How well would it have flown if he had stated it directly, say as follows:

“If the evidence indicates that mutation-selection evolution couldn’t have generated the flagellum, then designers are inferred, and the question of where the designers came from is unanswered and may never be answerable by our science — therefore mutation-selection evolution must have generated the flagellum!”