Why I Won't Debate Creationists
The following is reprinted without express permission of the author.
Author: Dawkins, Richard Source: Free Inquiry 23, no. 1 (Winter
2002/2003): p. 12-14 ISSN: 0272-0701 Number: 276915851 Copyright: Copyright
Council for Secular Humanism Winter 2002/2003
RICHARD DAWKINS
For good or ill, the late Stephen Jay Gould had a huge influence on
American scientific culture, and on balance the good came out on top. His
powerful voice will echo on for a long time. Although he and I disagreed about
much, we shared much, too, including a spellbound delight in the wonders of the
natural world and a passionate conviction that such wonders deserve nothing
less than a purely natural explanation.
Another thing about which we agreed was our refusal to engage in public
debates with creationists. Steve had even more reason that me to be irritated
by them. They distorted the theory of punctuated equilibrium so that it
appeared to support their preposterous (but astonishingly common) belief that
there are no intermediates in the fossil record. Gould's reply deserves to be
widely known:
Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is
infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists-whether through design
or stupidity, I do not know-as admitting that the fossil record includes no
transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species
level, but they are abundant between larger groups.1
Sometime in the 1980s when I was on a visit to the United States, a
television station wanted to stage a debate between me and a prominent
creationist called, I think, Duane P Gish. I telephoned Stephen Gould for
advice. He was friendly and decisive: "Don't do it." The point is not, he said,
whether or not you would "win" the debate. Winning is not what the creationists
realistically aspire to. For them, it is sufficient that the debate happens at
all. They need the publicity. We don't. To the gullible public that is their
natural constituency, it is enough that their man is seen sharing a platform
with a real scientist. "There must be something in creationism, or Dr.
So-and-So would not have agreed to debate it on equal terms." Inevitably, when
you turn down the invitation, you will be accused of cowardice or of inability
to defend your own beliefs. But that is better than supplying the creationists
with what they crave: the oxygen of respectability in the world of real
science.
I have followed his advice ever since, and I was reminded of it again in
2001 when I was invited by a third party to take part in a debate with, among
other evolutionists and creationists, the lawyer Phillip Johnson, high priest
of the "Intelligent Design" sect of creationists. I refused, as usual. Johnson
then refused too, and his letter (which he copied to me) brought back with a
vengeance Steve Gould's words about creationists' real motives.
Here is what Johnson said:
It isn't worth my while to debate every ambitious Darwinist who wants to
try his hand at ridiculing the opposition, so my general policy is that
Darwinists have to put a significant figure at risk before I will agree to a
debate. That means specifically Dawkins or Gould, or someone of like stature
and public visibility.
This moved me to write to Gould, reminding him of his advice to me all
those years ago. I proposed a joint letter, perhaps to the New York Review of
Books, explaining why we don't do debates with creationists, and encouraging
other scientists to refuse for the same reason. He enthusiastically agreed, and
suggested that I draft a letter and send it to him as a starting point. I did
so, but our correspondence was sadly cut short by his last illness. My draft,
deprived, alas, of the improvements that he would undoubtedly have wrought,
will be published in my forthcoming book of collected essays.2
Johnson's motives are similarly betrayed in two further documents. In his
"Wedge of Truth" Web site, he reports a debate between the creationist Jonathan
Wells (incidentally a long-- standing Moonie3) and the Harvard biologist
Stephen Palumbi. Johnson's triumphalist tone is captured in his headline,
"Wells Hits a Home Run at Harvard." But the "Home Run" turns out to be not a
resounding success by Wells in convincing the audience, nor any kind of besting
of Professor Palumbi (who told me he agreed to take part, with great
reluctance, only because somebody at Harvard had already invited Wells and it
was too late to do anything about it4). There is no suggestion that Wells won
the debate, nor even any obvious interest in whether he did. No, Wells scored
his home run the moment the invitation from Harvard dropped into his mailbox.5
The second revealing document is a recently published interview given by
Johnson to a religious magazine.6
In October I had a wonderful debate with Nobel laureate physicist Steven
Weinberg at the University of Texas. Weinberg, one of the most famous
scientists in the world, debates me before an academic audience whenever I come
to Austin.
(Look at me, I'm having a debate with one of the big boys. Doesn't that
just prove that creationism is being taken seriously in the universities?)
Again, it is sufficient that a scientist of Weinberg's stature agrees to take
part in a debate with Johnson. The existence of the debate itself is the
propaganda victory, not the arguments deployed nor the outcome of the debate.
My own most bizarre invitation, and the most transparently
publicity-hungry, is dated August 2002.
Dear Dr. Dawkins:
.. Do you really believe in evolutionism? If so, on behalf of Dr. Joseph
Mastropaolo I present you with the following challenge.
This is the announcement of the Life Science Prize. The rules are like
those for a prize sporting event: the winner takes all.
The evolutionist contestant puts $10,000 in escrow. This will be matched
by a creation scientist for a total of $20,000.
If the evolutionist proves evolution is science and creation is religion
he wins the $20,000. If the creation scientist proves that creation is science
and evolution is religion, then he collects the $20,000.
The standards of evidence will be those of science: objectivity,
validity, reliability and calibration. The preponderance of the evidence
prevails.
Please contact me as soon as possible and we shall begin working out the
details for the debate.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Karl Priest
Who, I wondered, was "Dr. Joseph Mastropaolo"? Evidently a personage so
grand that somebody else writes his letters for him. Or was Priest/Mastropaolo
a Jekyll and Hyde figure, named Mastropaolo but with a fantasy of becoming a
priest? For reasons I have already explained, I had not the slightest intention
of accepting his (their?) ridiculous challenge, but I thought I might have some
fun before ending the correspondence. With hindsight, that might have been a
time-wasting mistake.
Although I wondered in passing about "calibration," I noted that the
standards of evidence would be those of science. I therefore made the innocent
suggestion that the judging panel should consist of distinguished scientists,
to be nominated by the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society, and
Nobel Prize winners. Needless to say, I would never have dreamed of troubling
these august bodies with such a silly request. If Priest/Mastropaolo had
possessed even a grain of intelligence, he could easily have called my bluff.
But of course he did not. Instead (this time beginning his letter as plain
Mastropaolo but still signing off as Priest) he accused me of trying to rig the
judging process, and ended with ringing defiance:
If your objective is to stack the jury with evolutionists that will vote
you the winner no matter what evidence is presented, then count yourself in
default on this challenge. Which is it?
Priest/Mastropaolo won't let it drop, and he goes on challenging me, with
increasing belligerence, to accept or "default." At one point I told him I
might publish the correspondence for amusement, and received the following
truculent permission to do so:
Be sure you publish the following (and you may sign my name): You, Dr.
Dawkins are an intellectual coward. You are scared to defend your faith in
evolutionism on a level playing field. You have defaulted out of fear.
I promised that I would indeed publish his words (I just have). I
reminded him that it was he who refused to submit a scientific question to the
judgment of the world's leading scientists, and I added a further constructive
suggestion:
... science keeps its playing field level by the rather admirable system
of anonymous peer-review. If you have evidence that evolution is false, you are
entirely at liberty to submit a paper to the editor of Nature, or Science, or
the Journal of Theoretical Biology, or the American Naturalist, or Biological
Reviews, or the Quarterly Review of Biology, or any of hundreds of other
reputable journals in which ordinary working scientists publish their research.
Do not fear that editors will reject it simply because it opposes evolution. On
the contrary, the journal that published a paper which really did discover a
fallacy in evolution, or convincing evidence against it, would have the scoop
of the century, in scientific terms. Editors would kill to get their hands on
it.
This challenge by me has-of course-- gone unanswered. On my side the
correspondence is terminated, although Priest/Mastropaolo went on bombarding me
weekly with i23, no. 1 (Winter 2002/2003): p. 12-14ncreasingly raucous
accusations of cowardice. He reminds me of the Black Knight in Monty Python and
the Holy Grail who continued, as a stump-waving, blood-spouting torso, to shout
"Running away, eh? ... Come back here and take what's coming to you. I'll bite
your legs off!" at the indifferent back of the opponent who had successively
deprived him of all four limbs.
I hope that my recollection of Stephen Gould's wise words will encourage
others to refuse all debating invitations from pseudoscientists avid for
publicity. Quite a good plan, which I follow myself from time to time, is to
recommend that the case for evolution could easily be entrusted to a local
undergraduate majoring in biology. Alternatively, I plead a prior engagement:
an important forthcoming debate against the Flat Earth Society.
Creationists don't need to win debates with evolutionists. It is
sufficient for them that the debate happens at all. They need the publicity. We
don't.
Notes
1. S.J. Gould, "Evolution." Chapter 19 of Hen's Teeth and Horses Toes
(New York: WW Norton, 1983).
2. Richard Dawkins, A Devil's Chaplain (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson;
Boston and New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 2003).
3. In his "scientific" writings, Wells is coy about his ordination in the
Unification Church of Reverend Moon (known as "Father"), but he comes clean in
"Why I Went for a Second Ph.D.," his personal testimony to fellow Moonies:
"Father's words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote
my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had
already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me (along
with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978,
I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle."
http://www.tparents.org/Library/Unification/Talks/Wells/Darw in.htm.
4. The invitation did not come from biologists nor from any scientific
department, but from the Institute of Politics.
5. While this essay was in press, the same Jonathan Wells sent me his
paper called "Critics Rave Over Icons of Evolution," his book that illustrates
the same point: these people want recognition, recognition of any kind, even if
it is highly unfavorable. He happily admits that "rave" in this case does not
have its normal meaning of extravagant praise. Instead, the "rave" reviews of
his book amounted to "a firestorm of vilification." This doesn't bother him at
all. He exults in the attention. Quoting Oscar Wilde, he writes, "the only
thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. And talked about
I am. The Internet is buzzing with reviews of my book." Perhaps, by analogy
with Gould's advice about debates, the best thing to do with attention-seekers
like Wells is not to pan their books but simply to ignore them. Deny them the
recognition they crave, even if this means keeping silent about their numerous
errors.
6. http/www.arn.org/docs/johnson/citmag 99.htm.
Richard Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of Public Understanding
of Science at Oxford University. An evolutionary biologist and prolific author
and lecturer, his most recent book is Unweaving the Rainbow.
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