Too smart for games

To finish up some old business:

***QUOTE***

DANIEL MORGAN SAID:

Well, without going through all 600, I found that the only 2 people from UF who signed the list were both Evangelical Christians, just from looking at their websites.

I am not implying that every single person on the list certainly is of one of the Abrahamic faiths, but if you want to take a wager, I'll post my wager right here on the web: when we move from sample 1 -- those who don't 'dissent from Darwinism' to sample 2 -- those who do, I will wager that the correlation of Abrahamic faiths (a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim) goes up by a minimum of 0.3 (30%), which is a significant statistic (p<0.05), given the prevalance of those faiths generally, and the relative lack of those faiths within scientists generally (about 40% believe in God, and Nature, 1997).

I'd wager on it. Would you? (hypothetical, not a real challenge to put up money)

Now, that doesn't mean that ID is false, but it certainly means something

Come on, Steve. You're too smart for games.

***END-QUOTE***

Well, I suppose I ought to be relieved to learn that I’m too smart for games. I guess that exempts me from Dawkins' classification system: “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that).”

Given Dawkins’ rather parsimonious alternatives, I’d opt for wicked over stupid every time. The wicked have all the fun, right?

Thankfully, though, Danny has given me another option: “smart.”

I must, say, though, that there’s an even better choice than any of the five. And that’s to be right.

Better to be stupid and right than smart and wrong.

He then says that while his wager doesn’t mean that ID is false, it certainly means something.

Speaking for myself, I don’t see that a fact-free wager means a thing. This is all raw conjecture on Danny’s part.

But, for the sake of argument, let’s play along with his assumptions.

Okay, then, what would such a correlation certainly mean?

Answer: the tautology that religious people believe religious things while irreligious people believe irreligious things.

And what’s the significance of that tautology?

This is the sort of argument that either proves too much or too little.

Danny is insinuating a causal connection: religious people believe religious things because they’re religious.

And he’s using that alleged connection to discredit their belief in ID on the grounds that their belief is driven by religious ideology rather than scientific evidence.

But there are two problems with this line of argument:

1.If valid, then it’s child’s play to construct a symmetrical argument for disbelievers in ID theory, to whit: their disbelief is driven by irreligious ideology rather than scientific evidence.

That follows directly from the structure of Danny’s own argument. Just use the same statistics in reverse.

2.The other thing it disregards is that intellectual conversion is a two-way street.

Someone could deny naturalistic evolution because he’s religious, or he could be religious because he denies naturalistic evolution.

That is to say, there are people who were originally atheistic in outlook, but as they began to scrutinize the intellectual difficulties with propping up naturalism in general, or naturalistic evolution in particular, they came to see that Christian theism was the only rational alternative.