Thanks to Steve Rauschenberger

I have a very good thing to say about Joe Birkett

The trio aired their differences at a debate Wednesday sponsored by the City Club of Chicago. The issue exploded onto the national forefront last year when a federal judge barred a Pennsylvania high school from teaching the creationism theory in biology class as an alternative to evolution.

Birkett, of Wheaton, and Rauschenberger, of Elgin, agree each school district should be allowed to decide whether to teach intelligent design. Their running mates ? Riverside?s Judy Baar Topinka and Chicago?s Ron Gidwitz, respectively ? share that view.

The lieutenant governor hopefuls differ, however, on where to teach the concept, which holds that living organisms are so complex, a higher power must have created them.

If school systems opt to include intelligent design, Rauschenberger, a state senator, says it should be taught in science class as a viable explanation for how the universe began. He describes past scientific errors ? such as the now-disproved belief that dinosaurs were cold-blooded lizards ? as a reason for offering different views.

?I don?t think there?s anything wrong with science curriculum discussing alternatives to evolution,? he said. ?Evolution is not an immutable force, nor is it fully understood.?

Birkett, the DuPage County state?s attorney, said he supports Topinka?s stance that intelligent design should be taught only in religion or philosophy classes.

?This is an area where we are in agreement, although I am a conservative on many, many issues,? Birkett said. ?I do not believe the teaching of intelligent design should be available to science classes.?

Following the debate, Birkett, a practicing Catholic, observed the first day of Lent by having a priest in the audience mark his forehead with ashes. Though Birkett supports limitations on where the theory is taught, he says he does believe in intelligent design.

?I believe in God,? he said. ?I have faith and I?ve never doubted that we have a supreme being.?

And in a sense, Birkett is talking about lower case ID which essentially is faith that God created the universe and how he did it is a question to investigate. The difference with his position and Rauschenberger’s is that Birkett is not trying to introduce an element of faith into scientific investigation. This shouldn’t be surprising as the Catholic Church just released a strongly worded statements on the issue.

Benedict, previously as Ratzinger, had this to say:

“We cannot say: creation or evolution, inasmuch as these two things respond to two different realities. The story of the dust of the earth and the breath of God, which we just heard, does not in fact explain how human persons come to be but rather what they are. It explains their inmost origin and casts light on the project that they are. And, vice versa, the theory of evolution seeks to understand and describe biological developments. But in so doing it cannot explain where the ‘project’ of human persons comes from, nor their inner origin, nor their particular nature. To that extent we are faced here with two complementary — rather than mutually exclusive — realities.” (Cardinal Ratzinger, In the Beginning: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall [Eerdmans, 1986, 1995], see especially pages 41-58)

Creationists attempt to make faith and science mutually exclusive when there is no reason to do so and even a very conservative Pope understands that well. That Birkett makes a similar argument isn’t because he is some atheist activist, it is because he doesn’t dismiss Christianity with a strong intellectual tradition of accepting scientific findings.

Rauschenberger instead tries to play amateur scientist and fails miserably. Not understanding specific details of the history of life doesn’t mean dismiss the overwhelming evidence of multiple nested hierarchies that demonstrate common descent. Those hierarchies exist within the fossil record, genetic trees, morphology, and phylogeny to name just a few.

Rauschenberger doesn’t attack the primary lines of evidence, instead he tries to deal with specific details that were wrong—but none of what he is talking about are falsification points for common descent through natural selection, genetic drift and other mechanisms scientists identify in the Modern Synthesis.

The major tenets of the evolutionary synthesis, then, were that populations contain genetic variation that arises by random (ie. not adaptively directed) mutation and recombination; that populations evolve by changes in gene frequency brought about by random genetic drift, gene flow, and especially natural selection; that most adaptive genetic variants have individually slight phenotypic effects so that phenotypic changes are gradual (although some alleles with discrete effects may be advantageous, as in certain color polymorphisms); that diversification comes about by speciation, which normally entails the gradual evolution of reproductive isolation among populations; and that these processes, continued for sufficiently long, give rise to changes of such great magnitude as to warrant the designation of higher taxonomic levels (genera, families, and so forth).”
– Futuyma, D.J. in Evolutionary Biology, Sinauer Associates, 1986; p.12

Saying that science was wrong about a detail in the history of life, doesn’t address the basic evidence of evolution–it is a non sequitur that doesn’t address that whether dinosaurs were cold or warm blooded has little to do with our understanding of evolution as a whole. It’s sort of like saying that we had the wrong ancestor species for a modern species–so what? Unless it demonstrates something that violates the Modern Synthesis, the point is irrelevant to the current state of the science other than a detail to fix.

Worse, Rauschenberger seems to be confusing evolution with multiple theories of science. Biological evolution is deals with changes amongst living organisms and the history of life. It has nothing to do with the Big Bang and the origins of the universe, the creation of the Earth and Solar System, nor with the origin of life itself–evolution is after life is established. He wants to discuss intelligent design as some sort of grand theory that explains everything–which isn’t analagous to biological evolution. He isn’t just talking about changing biology curriculum, he is changing curriculum in biology, physics, chemistry, earth science, and on and on and on.

Beyond that, if one wants to introduce an alternative to any one of these theories one has to introduce a theory that fits the current evidence, is falsifiable and has not been falsifiable, and is more explanatory than biological evolution. If Rauschenberger would care to identify such a theory, he should feel free, but given the creationists at the Discovery Institute can, Steve’s got a hell of task in front of him.