Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

Op advies van Johan Braeckman tijdens het Skeptisch Wereldcongres 2012 in Berlijn: de docu ‘Expelled’ zou goed om als skeptici eens te bekijken:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obqWnzAcWWA

Er is gelukkig ook een website (http://www.expelledexposed.com/) die laat zien dat Expelled de zaken onjuist weergeeft. Hieronder een voorbeeld:

Intelligent Design

Summary

Expelled’s main theme is that intelligent design is under systematic attack by “Big Science” – the scientific establishment – which refuses to recognize its scientific validity because of a previous commitment to atheism and materialism. In truth, the arguments of intelligent design have been examined by the scientific community and found to be lacking in both utility and accuracy. If mainstream science declines to accept intelligent design, it is the fault of the intelligent design advocates, who have not performed the research and theory-building demanded of everyone in the scientific enterprise.

The Claim

“Intelligent design was being suppressed in a systematic and ruthless fashion” (Ben Stein, Expelled).

The Facts

Intelligent design has not produced any research to suppress. When prominent ID proponent Michael Behe was asked about his research, and why “you don’t do those tests?” he responded, “I myself would prefer to spend time in what I would consider to be more fruitful endeavors.” If even proponents of ID do not think it is a fruitful enterprise, why should the scientific community take any interest in it?

As shown elsewhere on this site, the supposed cases of suppression offered in Expelled are dishonest attempts to make mountains out of molehills and to create martyrs where martyrdom does not exist.

Intelligent design is scientifically unproductive, and this perhaps explains why scientists like Guillermo Gonzalez and Michael Behe publish far fewer papers after they become attracted to intelligent design. Ultimately, intelligent design’s lack of success in science departments is the fault of the flawed and unscientific nature of intelligent design itself, not the result of bias in the scientific community.

The issue is not the suppression of ID, but the lack of warrant for its scientific claims. And ultimately, ID has an uphill struggle to demonstrate that it is, indeed, science. The fundamental problem with intelligent design as science is that intelligent design claims cannot be tested. Scientific testing requires that there be some set of phenomena which are incompatible with your idea. No observation could possibly be incompatible with a claim that an “intelligent agent” (whom everyone recognizes as God) acted to, say, introduce information into a system. Untestable claims are not scientific claims. Regardless of their attractiveness as religious ideas (although many people of faith strongly reject intelligent design) intelligent design has not passed muster as science.