This open-access 2017 paper by psychologist Raymond M. Bergner of Illinois State University popped into News’s inbox this morning. It seems to dip a toe into rationality while considering the question of design in nature:
Let me say from the outset that this is not an essay arguing for intelligent design. Rather, it is a protest against a certain attitude. Everywhere I turn today, I hear voices, with varying degrees of smugness and contempt, telling me that intelligent design — the position that there is some ordering intelligence behind the whole cosmic shooting match — is straightforwardly ridiculous. “No intelligent person believes such a thing.” “How unscientific!” “It’s always a cover for a religiously based, evolution-denying creationism, trying to sneak in the back door in the guise of science.” Highly visible, scientifically informed public intellectuals such as Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris pop up everywhere, telling us that, if any proposition about the origins or design of nature is unsupported (or unsupportable) by scientific evidence, that proposition is ipso facto without any merit or legitimacy whatsoever. Since intelligent design fails this requirement, they assert, it is unworthy of our entertaining it even as a possibility, much less a belief.
I do not wish to argue that intelligent design is true. I don’t know if it’s true. I also do not wish to argue that it is a scientific position. I believe that it is not, but is instead an empirically undecidable, metaphysical one. I wish only to argue, contrary to the current intellectual zeitgeist, that it is neither stupid nor ridiculous either to believe in it or to entertain it as a possibility. I am referring here, not to a version of intelligent design that claims that the world was created 6000 years ago just as we find it today, but to one stating simply that there is now, or may have been at some time in the past, an ordering intelligence behind the structure of the universe and its contents. I also want to argue that the position most commonly posed in opposition to it at the cosmic level (which is where I will focus), which I shall refer to as “accidentalism,” is not, as many would have it, itself a scientifically open and shut case.
Raymond M Bergner, Intelligent_Design_Maybe_True_Maybe_False_But_Not_Absurd” at ResearchGate
One wants to respond: ID is in good shape compared to psychology. There is massive evidence for design in nature whether the establishment can accept it or not. Not so much evidence for the psych concepts that have made the discipline a Sokal hoax laughing stock.
See also: Putting a respectable face on persecuting the social justice science hoaxers
Embattled “Social Sciences Hoax” Prof Is Not A Hero, He’s A Canary
Social Science Hoaxer’s Job At Risk For Revealing “Bias”
Sokal hoaxes strike social science again
Exposing gender studies as a Sokal hoax
Social Science Hoax Papers Is One Of RealClearScience’s Top Junk Science Stories Of 2018
and
Alan Sokal, Buy Yourself A Latte: “Star Wars” Biology Paper Accepted
“Motivated reasoning” defacing the social sciences?
At the New York Times: Defending the failures of social science to be science Okay. So if we think that — in principle — such a field is always too infested by politics to be seriously considered a science, we’re “anti-science”? There’s something wrong with preferring to support sciences that aren’t such a laughingstock? Fine. The rest of us will own that and be proud.
What’s wrong with social psychology , in a nutshell
How political bias affects social science research
Stanford Prison Experiment findings a “sham” – but how much of social psychology is legitimate anyway?
A BS detector for the social sciences
All sides agree: progressive politics is strangling social sciences
and
Back to school briefing: Seven myths of social psychology: Many lecture room icons from decades past are looking tarnished now. (That was 2014 and it has gotten worse since.)
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