Is This Why The Scientific Community Hates Intelligent Design?

On an internet forum recently, a young lady named Hope asked why the scientific community is so overwhelmingly against Intelligent Design (ID).  Specifically, she wondered why so many scientists not only reject ID but also seem to scorn those who propose it?

My friend Eric responded to her question.  Eric is a scientist and I’m republishing his reply to Hope because I believe it is quite revealing of what scientists expect from each other and why proponents of ID “just don’t fit the bill”:

Hope,

There is a very real phenomenon of prejudice within the scientific community towards ID. However, some prejudices are well founded. I think this prejudice comes from a number of traits prevalent in the ID movement:

1) Insistence on being taken seriously, despite a complete lack of quantitative predictions, proposals for how to test those predictions, or a single point of experimental data
2) A long history of distorting or misunderstanding the theory and supporting facts behind evolution
3) An admitted and documented political agenda

You specifically refer to scientists who simply say that the existence of an intelligent designer is possible. The problem is that most people who support ID are going far beyond that simple statement.

I agree with you that scientists who merely suggest the possibility of a designer should not be shunned, lose their jobs, etc. But if all you are saying is that an intelligent designer is possible, then as a scientist, I smile and say “That’s nice”. When a guy hands me a pamphlet about the “intrinsic gravity” of organisms which is full of newly-invented jargon and totally lacking in equations or experimental data, I smile and say “That’s nice”. The conversation is over. You don’t need a symposium or an article in the journal Nature to say that something is possible; that’s a waste of time. And you certainly don’t need to be paid $90K a year at a university to say it; that’s a waste of money, especially when your colleagues are using evolutionary “theory” to, for example, breed bacterial mutants that can be used to detect trace amounts of hazardous materials.

Science is tough. I was at a biophysics conference this weekend and there were many people there who worried that their research would not be taken seriously. These people had well-documented experiments, and mathematical models on their side. They explained in great detail what the outcome of an experiment should be if their hypothesis were true, and how this result compares to the predictions of alternative hypotheses. They drew conservative conclusions, usually making caveats like “it’s not yet conclusive…” or “we haven’t yet measured it this way…”

Yet, they were worried that their case (e.g., about the binding mechanism of some protein) just wasn’t convincing enough. Scientists are very, very critical. If you can’t make your ideas crystal clear, or if you don’t address all the possible objections to your research, people walk out of your lecture and they don’t even glance at your poster. After every single lecture, there was at least one question from the audience that called into question an assumption made, a method used, or a conclusion drawn. A great number of the people there were post-docs ultimately seeking a professorship with full funding and tenure. The vast majority of them will never get it.

If your work isn’t clear, rigorous, relevant, or supported by the data, you don’t get funded, you don’t get promoted, and you don’t get tenure. If you spend much of your time touting unsupported or unsupportable ideas, people ridicule those ideas, whether it’s ID or anything else.

My advice to ID proponents: quit whining just because you haven’t been able to produce anything scientifically rigorous. If what you’re doing is science, then show me an equation. Show me a schematic of a novel detector or experiment. Show me some data. You can believe and talk about whatever you want as a private individual, but as a scientist, you either put up or shut up.