Ignoring ID Won’t Work
There’s a growing school of thought among convinced Darwinists that says ID proponents should be ignored, because engaging them just gives them publicity, recognition, and apparent legitimacy as a possibly reasonable point of view, when we should be simply dismissing them as we would any absolutely insane position.
I consider myself an ID proponent (with some major caveats), so I take it upon myself here to explain why this “just ignore them” campaign cannot possibly succeed.
Let’s consider a proposition that probably everyone reading this article would agree is ridiculous: the existence of the Easter Bunny. Now let’s suppose that I’m walking a downtown street when I am suddenly solicited by a person who tells me that the Easter Bunny really exists, and says he can prove it. I’m 99.999% confident he’s wrong. What will I do? Of course I will, as politely as possible, keep walking and ignore him. I don’t have time to stop and listen to every zany street person’s beliefs, so I move on.
Now let’s change the scenario a bit. Suppose I hear that there is a small minority of intellectuals (their capacity for intelligence already demonstrated by other works) who are saying that the Easter Bunny does, in fact, exist, and are writing serious articles and even whole books to that effect. And, their claim is not that they saw the Easter Bunny in a holy vision, but rather that the Bunny can be scientifically demonstrated to exist. Now my reaction will be quite different. I will still have strong doubts that the Easter Bunny is real, but I will want to read some of their arguments, to find out why they think they’re on to something. In the unexpected event that those arguments are convincing, I may actually join their movement, but in the much more likely event that I find their arguments flawed, I will want to engage them in whatever forums I can, to demonstrate those flaws to the intellectual community, and hopefully curb this movement before it becomes larger.
In the past, has ignoring a serious intellectual movement ever made that movement go away? I’m not a historian, but I’m betting the answer is a definitive no. If you think a movement is dangerous or harmful, then ignoring it just gives it a free field day to do whatever it wants with impunity. Do the ignore-them Darwinists think that by ignoring IDists, they will somehow transform ID from an intellectual movement into a wacky street-person’s position? I submit that such a hope is utterly vain. Ignoring is a great strategy for keeping wacky street people from wasting your time, but it is not an effective tactic for turning anyone into a wacky street person. Nor is ignoring wacky street people necessary to keep the them in their place — if I stopped and tried to convince the Easter Bunny advocate that he is mistaken, it would not likely elevate his position or convince the world that he might be right. To prosper, his Bunny theory needs a strong case, based on evidence and logic.
Church of the Ignorant
Engaging and refuting flawed arguments, when they (somehow) take root as signficant intellectual movements, is a necessary part of science. So if Darwinists seriously believe the ID movement has no merit, they should engage and refute it to whatever degree they can. Ignoring it is a failure to practice a necessary part of science, and is in fact a descent into dogmatism — the insistence that something is so true that its detractors are mischievous by definition. Many Darwinists feel about ID the same way that devout Christians feel about someone who comes to their church and starts arguing that maybe Christ is not the savior of humanity. They might engage such a person for a bit, but would soon treat him as an intentional disruptor of their parish, and get him ejected any way they could. The idea that Jesus saves people from hell is their dogma; not a theory open to debate. With their “ignore ID” advocacy, Darwinists have taken a major step towards becoming, like the “Jesus saves” people, a scientifically, intellectually bereft community of dogmatists — people who so badly want Darwinism to be true that they would rather socialize only with others who share that desire, and shun as barbarian anyone who disagrees.
Ignoring Is Hard...
But even such a happy cult of unchallenged Darwinian belief cannot come to pass if the Darwinists themselves cannot learn to practice a truly dogmatic level of “ignoring.” I personally doubt they can do it. Witness Richard Dawkins, today’s most prominent living advocate of Darwinism, who publicly stated that he would not engage IDists, in order not to give them publicity, but then did a one-eighty when Michael Behe came out with the latest major ID work, The Edge of Evolution — Dawkins wrote a scathing review of the book in The New York Times. Having gotten that out of the way, I guess he can go back to “ignoring” ID — at least until the next new argument in its favor appears.
Some may hold Dawkins’s feet to the fire for going back on his promise to ignore, but I would rather praise him: Richard, if you truly believe Darwinism to be scientifically affirmed, and you honestly think you know of refutations of ID’s latest, best arguments, then you are practicing good science by engaging ID authors (however vitriolically), putting forth your refutations for all to see. Don’t worry about your promise to ignore — it was only a rash vow to ditch science in favor of dogmatism.
...Or Is Ignoring Even Possible?
Now here’s an even bigger problem with the campaign to ignore ID: Let’s suppose I’m a Darwinist and I really want to ignore ID; I’m determined to do it. How do I go about that? If Behe comes out with a book citing evidence about the evolution of malaria, I can (with a mighty effort of will) resist writing any reviews or comments about that book. But am I never again going to discuss malaria evolution? If I think the latest evidence on the malaria front somehow refutes Behe’s arguments in Edge, am I going to talk about those results, or leave that entire subject alone because Behe touched it? You see, there really isn’t any effective way to ignore ID without ceding whole evolution-related subjects to the ID people.
And there really isn’t any way the Darwinists are going to do that.
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