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Judge Jones' god of the gaps fallacy
By: William Mulgrew
Issue date: 3/2/07 Section: Ed-Op
Originally published: 3/2/07 at 10:25 AM EST
Last update: 3/2/07 at 10:25 AM EST
Originally published: 3/2/07 at 10:25 AM EST
Last update: 3/2/07 at 10:25 AM EST
Several students debated life origins a year ago in The Triangle forums. I cited an objection raised by Walter Bradley: Even if all the carbon in the universe were placed on the Earth's surface and allowed to react for billions of years, the probability or randomly assembling one functional protein molecule was one in ten to the sixtieth power. A Darwinist replied, "But it still happened, didn't it."
Not exactly. Such a dismally low figure is the same as saying it didn't happen at all. It's an irrational hypothesis.
If it couldn't happen once, it couldn't happen the billion trillion of times necessary to produce enough variation in life necessary for natural selection to occur.
So it's not ID, but Darwinism that commits the god of the gaps fallacy. It blindly asserts that time and chance account for the existence of complex biochemical systems that naturalistic processes cannot explain, or dismiss these gaps as "Darwin bashing."
If Darwinism has indeed endured 150 years of scrutiny, why fear the free exchange of scientific ideas that ID brings? Why instead run to a flawed court ruling by a judge who plagiarized his decision, and use that decision to propagate ad hominem about ID, like the god of the gaps fallacy?
If a student copied a single sentence from someone else or claimed someone else's idea as his own, we would rightly call that plagiarism. But when U.S. District Judge E. Jones copied 90.9 percent of his opinion in Kitzmiller vs. Dover, the decision that kicked ID out of the Dover Area School District of Pennsylvania, from an ACLU brief, it's praised as sound legal reasoning.
That Jones copied verbatim reveals that judges are not adequately equipped to make scientific judgments. Jones, like many Darwinists, dismisses irreducible complexity arguments without a second thought. But irreducible complexity is critical. In his On the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote, "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."
Not exactly. Such a dismally low figure is the same as saying it didn't happen at all. It's an irrational hypothesis.
If it couldn't happen once, it couldn't happen the billion trillion of times necessary to produce enough variation in life necessary for natural selection to occur.
So it's not ID, but Darwinism that commits the god of the gaps fallacy. It blindly asserts that time and chance account for the existence of complex biochemical systems that naturalistic processes cannot explain, or dismiss these gaps as "Darwin bashing."
If Darwinism has indeed endured 150 years of scrutiny, why fear the free exchange of scientific ideas that ID brings? Why instead run to a flawed court ruling by a judge who plagiarized his decision, and use that decision to propagate ad hominem about ID, like the god of the gaps fallacy?
If a student copied a single sentence from someone else or claimed someone else's idea as his own, we would rightly call that plagiarism. But when U.S. District Judge E. Jones copied 90.9 percent of his opinion in Kitzmiller vs. Dover, the decision that kicked ID out of the Dover Area School District of Pennsylvania, from an ACLU brief, it's praised as sound legal reasoning.
That Jones copied verbatim reveals that judges are not adequately equipped to make scientific judgments. Jones, like many Darwinists, dismisses irreducible complexity arguments without a second thought. But irreducible complexity is critical. In his On the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote, "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."
Mark Lamontia
posted 3/03/07 @ 7:54 AM EST
I am heartened by the weekly string of articles and commentary in The Triangle that followed my two lectures at Drexel. It appears there is enough interest for a debate to be set up. (Continued…)