Robertson and his off-message message

Pat Robertson has once again reminded the world just what kind of Christian he is. To recap, the voters in the Dover, Pennsylvania school district voted out the flat-earther school board members who made their area an international joke by adopting a policy requiring public schools to present the faith-based, creationist scam known as "intelligent design" (ID) in science classes as science.

Robertson said of the voters' decision (CNN 11/10/25):

"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city," Robertson said on his daily television show broadcast from Virginia, "The 700 Club."

"And don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there," he said.

Steve Gilliard points out that Robertson went off-script with that comment (God's extortionist 11/11/05):

So when the [Cheney] did God appoint Pat Robertson his personal Tommy Udo.? What's next? Pushing a few scientists down stairs so they get the point?

Too bad Robertson's rant helps to undermine the ID case, by linking it to religion. See the game plan was to deny the religious connection. Robertson just made one in a partuclarly crude and vulgar way.

The current (Nov/Dec) issue of the Skeptical Inquirer has a series of articles on the topic "Evolution and the ID Wars".


Unfortunately, SI doesn't make most of its articles available online, although some selected ones from older issues are available, including some that address the (contrived) creationist controversy, such as the Mar/Apr issue.

In the Nov/Dec issue, Mark Perakh addresses the question, "Does Irreducible Complexity Imply Intelligent Design?" He takes a look at one of the key texts of the ID advocates, Darwin's Black Box (1996) by biochemist Michael Behe. Behe's contribution to ID is the idea that protein systems in cells have an "irreducible complexity" and could not have been evolved by chance.

The idea has been rejected by most of the numerous biologists who have taken the time to examine Behe's book. But it has two advantages for the creationists: it is obscure enough that the average news consumer won't immediately recognize it as problematic; and, it sounds very scientific, which satisfies the fundamentalist obsession to show that science actually supports their narrow interpretation of the Bible.

Perakh points out a basic flaw in one of the creationists' main scams, which Behe dresses up in a highbrow package. The argument is, how could something so incredibly complex be produced by chance? There must have been a designer.

The assumption is that "complex" must also be "highly improbable to have resulted from chance". However, Perakh uses a very accessible illustration to highlight the fact that such a general assumption is just wrong:

[C]omplexity is certainly not just disguised improbability. Examples to the contrary abound. Imagine a pile of stones. Each stone has some irregular shape that resulted from a series of chance events. Among these irregularly shaped stones, we find a perfectly rectangular brick. It has a simple shape that can be described by a simple equation containing only three numbers - width, length, and height. On the other hand, each of the irregularly shaped stones can be described only by a more complex program containing many numbers. However, the probability of a rectangular brick being produced as a result of chance is low; the brick can reasonably (with a high probability) be assumed to be a product of design. For irregularly shaped stones, the opposite is true - the probability of their having been created by chance is larger than the probability of their having been created by design. ...

In the case of the stones and the brick, simplicity rather than complexity is a marker of design.

He also explains an unfortunate (for the fundamentalists) implication of Behe's argument about irreducibility. Behe claims that because his protein builder (that virtually no one but biologists even know exists) stops functioning if even a single tiny piece is removed, it therefore could not have evolved from intermediate forms as the theory of natural selection would assume. In Behe's view, this means that it had to be consciously designed.

The unfortunate part, as Perakh explains, is that such an argument means that God - or whoever the supposedly unidentified Designer may be - is, well, not so competent a designer as one migh expect of an onmipotent Deity:

The simple fact is, though, that if an IC [irreducibly complex] system has been designed, it is a case of bad design. If the loss of a single part destroys the system's function, such a system is unrealiable, and therefore, if it is designed, the designer is inept. When engineers design machines, bridges, skyscrapers, TV sets, or artificial kidneys, they always try to envision what can go wrong with their design and how to ensure that small defects to not result in a failure of their products: they build in certain redudancies so that in case some part of the construction fails, its function will not be completely lost but rather taken over by certain self-compensatory features.

Perakh also mentions that there are empirical problems with Behe's assertions on complexity, as well.

His article gives the reader a good taste of the, uh, complex intellectual contortions through which the creationists put their pet theory to accomodate the currently binding court rulings on teaching creationism in public schools. And that's really what cooking up all these pseudoscientifc theories is all about.

As Pat Robertson helpfully reminded us in an unguarded moment.

(Perakh also discusses Behe's arguments in an article that is available online: Irreducible Contradiction (1999, updated 2002) Talk Reason.)