Judge Jones' god of the gaps fallacy

By: William Mulgrew

Posted: 3/2/07

Intelligent design opponents chalk it up to what's commonly called the god of the gaps fallacy. In the past, when humans observed natural phenomena they couldn't explain, they attributed it to a supernatural cause or an unseen force. For instance, we once didn't understand what thunder was or where it came from, so some attributed it to the deities Zeus or Thor and the like.

Besides the fact that science deals with unseen forces, like gravity, but nonetheless infers its existence through evidence, there's a huge problem for Darwinists. ID doesn't fall under the god of the gaps fallacy, but Darwinism does.

ID doesn't invoke a supernatural cause. It invokes an intelligent cause. What's the difference, you wonder? Everything. Science is the search for causes, and causes can be intelligent or natural.

Excluding intelligent causes from the realm of science throws out more than just ID. It gets rid of archaeology, cryptology, criminal and accident forensics, biotechnology and genetic engineering from the category of science - all are scientific disciplines that deal with intelligent causes or both intelligent and natural.

ID relies on observation and repetition. It is falsifiable - the discovery of a new natural law might prove a naturalistic life origin. That's more than what Darwinism can boast. By ruling out intelligent agency in advance, natural agency is the only game in town with nothing to falsify it.

Natural science devotes itself solely to natural causes, but is not the only form of science. It is empirical. Empirical sciences study present regularities in order to understand how they work. Forensic science studies singularities of the past for uniformity in order to understand whether agency is intelligent or natural.

When Darwinists rule out ID as science, they rule themselves out as well. Scientific theories rely on observation, replication and experimentation. Francisco Ayala said no one observed the origin of life or the evolution of species, "nor have these events been replicated in the laboratory or by experiment." No naturalistic life origin theory exists, only unproved conjectures. Life origins are forensic, not empirical. At worst, they shouldn't be exclusively empirical, but interdisciplinary, like environmental science.

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."

Mark Lamontia demonstrated irreducible complexity in molecular biology during his campus lectures. In a living cell, if one part is missing or malfunction, it breaks down. The cell has many complex parts that must be at the right place, time, and size or it cannot work. How does this observable evidence allow the Darwinian claim of slight modifications? It falsifies it.

Jones wrote, "ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community." The judge was too busy plagiarizing to notice that not a single scientific journal or publication shows how molecular evolution of complex biochemical systems might have occurred. As Michael Behe writes, "The idea of Darwinian molecular evolution is not based on science."

Jones claimed ID is not science because it "has failed to publish in peer-reviewed journals." In 2004, Richard Sternberg decided to publish a peer-reviewed article by Stephen Meyer on intelligent design in the Smithsonian-affiliated journal Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington.

Upon publication, he lost his managing editor position and office keys, and officials launched a campaign "to make Dr. Sternberg's life at the Museum as difficult as possible and encourage him to leave." This included Museum scientists probing his political and religious views.

A Congressional investigation concluded that Sternberg's civil and constitutional rights were violated, as well as his career and reputation smeared. For the record, Sternberg is not a proponent of ID, and the three scientists who reviewed the article were also no fans of ID.

So Jones' reasoning is circular: ID is not science because it hasn't generated any peer-reviewed articles, and it hasn't generated any peer-reviewed articles because it isn't science.

Without opening a dictionary, Jones copied the ACLU claim that "ID is grounded in theology, not science." The Merriam-Webster diction defines theology as "the study of religious faith, practice, and experience."

ID neither relies on a religious text, nor speculates on the identity of the intelligent agency. Therefore, it is not theology. It relies on a complex system of logic, such as William Dembski's Explanatory Filter. The Filter is to forensic science what the scientific method is to empirical. It provides logical proof for complex and specified information that only an intelligent agency could produce. Lamontia outlined it very well in his second lecture.

Science deals with intelligent and natural causes. Insisting on one at the expense of the other gives an incomplete view of science. Science is a creature of philosophy. Materialism neither proves the scientific method, nor is it the sole legitimate philosophy of science. Darwinists overstepped their bounds by confining life origins as an empirical study, when it surrounds the past as a forensic study. Without ID, Darwinism is not falsifiable and guilty of the problem it projects on ID - the god of the gaps fallacy.