"science by consensus"

The title of an essay by Phillip Johnson in the March 2008 issue of Touchstone...

Johnson opens with two key issues in the Evolution/evolution debate-- and why a law professor might have something to add:

The controversy over evolution is at bottom not a dispute about evidence, but a dispute about whether words like “evolution” should be defined precisely and used consistently, and about whether a scientific conclusion is indisputably correct if it is endorsed by a consensus of contemporary scientific authorities. That is why I thought it appropriate for a law professor to take a professional interest in biological evolution, since lawyers are trained to insist that terms in a legal document be precisely defined, and are taught to check any consensus judgment of experts against the primary evidence.

Examples of vague or slippery definitions and appeals to the authority of consensus abound in writings about evolution, especially those writings that urge potentially skeptical people to trust the experts, rather than to examine the evidence for themselves.

The Christian geneticist Francis Collins, in his much-acclaimed book, The Language of God, describes the human genome in terms that seem at first to imply that its design is the product of intelligence. At the outset, Collins reverently talks of the partial sequencing of the human genome as providing “a glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God.” In our experience, instruction books are written only by intelligent agents.

Evolutionary biologists tell us, however, that this remarkably complex instruction book, written with a billion chemical letters in a fantastically ingenious code, is the product, not of God’s intelligence, but of the mindless accumulation of random mutations by natural selection (differential reproduction). Collins agrees with the evolutionary biologists, relegating God to the more distant role of fine-tuning the cosmos so that we could evolve, and thinks that the rest of us should agree with them also. Yet he never says what evidence convinces him that the Darwinian mechanism has the creative power not only to write the instruction book, but also to evolve molecular machines that can understand the instructions and act upon them.

Instead of providing the evidence, Collins invokes the authority of an expert consensus, writing that “no serious biologist today doubts the theory of evolution to explain the marvelous complexity and diversity of life.” He does not say what makes a biologist “serious,” although I sense that this is a matter of definition and hence, a tautology. No serious scientist publicly disputes a professional consensus, because those who dispute the consensus are not taken seriously.

The consensus in biology is that unintelligent material processes were capable of performing whatever feats of creativity needed to be performed in the history of life. Once the consensus is formed, it maintains itself. No reputable scientist ever disputes the consensus, because once-reputable scientists who dispute the consensus lose their reputations....