Uncommon Condescent

Con`de*scent", n. [Cf. Condescend, Descent.] An act of condescension. [Obs.] --Dr. H. More.

The title of my post is a pun on a pun. I hope that you'll forgive me.

A few days ago I began to read William Dembski's Uncommon Descent. I'd like to take a moment to explain why I don't think I'll return.

First, let me say something about the tone of the posts. An anger suffuses them. Anger directed at whom? For what reason? The object of his anger, I assume, is that part of the scientific and academic community that refuses to take his work with any seriousness. He is quite thoroughly marginalized and will likely remain so. (I mean to make no judgment about the justice of this state of affairs. Rather I only mean to report what seems to me to be the case. Has he been treated unfairly? I have no idea.) Indeed the great majority of his peers will not even so much as take him on. Most, I suspect, don't think it worth their time. The few who might feel some temptation to take on the defenders of ID, moreover, fear that their peers would ostracize them if they did so. Thus Dembski and others of his sort labor mostly in scientific obscurity. (Of course they do possess some cultural notoriety. But this is due to the existence of a community of conservative Christians who find ID congenial.)

But even if I'm wrong in my speculations about the cause and object of his anger, I am quite certain of its existence. The anger most often takes the form of sarcasm. His posts are often deeply, darkly sarcastic. He lashes out at those who have denied him a place at the table, and sarcasm is his weapon of choice. This makes the whole of Uncommon Descent seem like one great fit. It's expressed not by cries but by the written word. It's a clever fit. It's a long fit. But a fit it is.

This is the first of my reasons to give up on Uncommon Descent. My second concerns not the tone of what is said there but the content. Dembski has a quite low opinion of those of his scientific peers who reject ID. Indeed he is quite often openly derisive of them. He accuses them of the most simple and obvious fallacies. He accuses them of bad faith; they quite deliberately, Dembski says, cover over the faults of their view. Now, it might well turn out that some form of ID will become the dominant paradigm within origins science. But no matter if this happens or not, I find it highly unlikely that the men and women upon whom Dembski heaps his derision are guilty of the sins, whether intellectual or moral, of which they're accused. They are not stupid and they are not wicked. Perhaps they are wrong, but their mistakes are for the most part honest.

Don't expect me to say anything about the virtues or vices, whether intellectual or moral, of either this or that foe or this or that ally of ID. Don't expect me to say anything of the vices or virtues, whether theoretical or empirical, of either ID or or the Darwinian account of origins. I simply do not know enough to make any judgments of this sort. In this, I am no doubt like the great majority. We are on the outside and will never know enough about the theories or the theoreticians to make any judgment about character of theoretician or content of theory. Rather we who are outside must look for certain marks of genuine scientific authority and make our judgments based upon that and that alone. What are these marks? Has a person been trained by experts in her field? Does she work at a place known to house experts in her field? Has she published in peer-reviewed journals in her field? Does she have the esteem of her peers? Do her opinions cohere with other experts in the field? Is she free of any entanglements that might compromise her objectivity? Most evolutionary biologists meet these criteria and thus we must trust them and what they say. (Trust them absolutely? Of course not. Error both small and great could still easily creep in. The mere fact that a generation of scientists agree on a certain matter is no guarantee that their opinion is true. But that they agree is good reason for those of us on the outside to believe what they say; for those of us on the outside, that the experts say a thing is good though not conclusive reason to believe it.)

Does Dembski meet these criteria to the same degree as they are met by his opponents? No. Thus we have less reason to trust him than we do his opponents. But even if we should have made a mistake in this, we still can say this with certainty: the charges of intellectual shabbiness and moral corruption that Dembski levels at his opponents are very nearly certainly false.
(Dembski does his cause no favor when he makes such charges. He alienates his peers in the scientific community, and he alienates those such as me who have insufficient knowledge of the content of the disputes to form any independent judgments.)