Demea’s no dummy

.....As we’ve often noted, Trustee Tom Fuentes is among the directors of Eagle Publishing, of which Regnery Publishing is a subsidiary.
.....Regnery publishes books that are, shall we say, south of academe. They’re often south of honest, too. Consider the execrable Unfit for Command. You remember that one.
.....Occasionally, I check out Regnery’s “featured books.” Among them these days (see) is The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, by Jonathan Wells.
.....Regnery’s description of Wells’ book makes it sound like old news: the absence of transitional fossils, the Cambrian explosion. Evidently, Wells accuses some “Darwinists” of faking the evidence. Yeah, sure. It's all a plot. We'll meet at Disneyland later this summer and distribute the loot.
.....These days, no opponent of science leaves home without the “intelligent design” argument, which, in essence, judges that, since there exist complex natural phenomena the explanation of which we have not yet found, it follows that God (i.e., a grand intelligence) must be the explanation.

.....Imagine hanging with some ancient Babylonians. Suddenly, lightning hits a tree, sets it on fire. Everybody’s impressed. Babs (the Babylonian) says, “must’ve been God.” Lonnie (the Babylonian) replies, “Maybe it’s something else—something maybe we’ll figure out some day.”
.....Babs gets hostile. “Yeah, Mr. Wizard? Like what?”
.....Lonnie doesn’t come up with anything.
.....“OK, then,” says Babs. “It’s God.”

.....According to Regnery,

Wells … turns to the theory of intelligent design (ID), the idea that some features of the natural world, such as the internal machinery of cells, are too “irreducibly complex” to have resulted from unguided natural processes alone. [Yawn.] … As Wells explains, religion does play a role in the debate over Darwin—though not in the way evolutionists claim. Wells shows how Darwin reasoned that evolution is true because divine creation “must” be false—a theological assumption oddly out of place in a scientific debate….

.....I’m not sure what that last part's about. But it is often noted—by scientists and philosophers—that science is concerned with “the natural,” i.e., with nature. It is therefore not concerned with the “supernatural”—i.e., that which is beyond the natural. Bringing supernatural entities into the explanation of natural phenomena is, therefore, a mistake, like trying to open a bottle of beer with, say, a sentence fragment, or with a pain in one’s toe.
.....It’s just stupid.

.....The other day, I mentioned to one of my classes that there is, of course, a problem with the design argument, one noted 240 years ago by David Hume, among others. In his famous Dialogues, upon hearing a description of the design argument, the character Demea, a theist, immediately objects:

I shall be so free…, said DEMEA, as to tell you that from the beginning I could not approve of your conclusion concerning the similarity of the Deity to men; still less can I approve of the mediums by which you endeavour to establish it. What! No demonstration of the Being of a God! No abstract arguments! No proofs a priori! Are these, which have hitherto been so much insisted on by philosophers, all fallacy, all sophism? Can we reach no farther in this subject than experience and probability? I will not say that this is betraying the cause of a Deity. But surely, by this affected candor, you give advantage to atheists which they never could obtain by the mere dint of argument and reasoning.

.....Demea is saying that, if theists rely on this argument, they argue for a designer who operates at our level, the lowly level of human experience. That is, if we say that we must believe in God specifically because of what we see in the world, then we are talking about a God who makes worldly things, like cells and stars and cow pies. We are not talking about a God who makes things whose limits are only our wildest imaginings.
.....Demea may be a theist, but he’s no dummy. And he’s honest, too.
.....—Unlike the boorish yahoos of Regnery Publishing, including Jonathan Wells and Tom Fuentes—a man who helps to oversee South County's community colleges.
.....Good Lord!

March 2005: the community responds to Fuentes' nixing Spanish study-abroad: