The main problem with our red state-blue state culture today is that good pizza is only available in the blue zones. As Harold Hubis, moderator of last night's evolution vs. ID debate had warned me, last night we were not merely in a blue zone, but a Navy Blue zone. And it showed--the pizza was great.
The debate venue was the San Jose Stage Company where, yes, Inherit the Wind is playing. Hubis was the perfect moderator for such a debate. His background includes both cardiology and history, all packed into an open mind. He kept the darkened blue audience at bay while Jonathan Karpf and I debated under the bright red-hot stage lights.
Karpf is a gentleman and scholar, but the debate took the usual turns. I talked about the bad science and metaphysics in evolution and Karpf hit the automatic-reply button. Out came the usual rebuttals and accusations. There is no evidence against evolution and all those falsified predictions are, explained Karpf, simply fallacious. I'm still amazed when I hear evolutionists make thngs so obvious.
Next, Karpf accused me of quote mining. Didn't I know that Darwin and later evolutionists like Francisco Ayala, Theodosius Dobzhansky and Ken Miller are not atheists, but rather theists? Didn't I know that the religion-vs-evolution dichotomy is a false one? And how disingenuous it was for me to quote Gould as not supporting evolution.
At this point it was becoming clear that Karpf was not responding to me. Perhaps he was not even listening to me. He had just sat through Inherit the Wind, and it sounded more like he was responding to Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee's script than to anything that I had said. His accusations were bizarre, but he was scoring powerful points against a third opponent. The audience chuckled in approval, unaware or not caring that Karpf's automatic replies were attacking a strawman.
When Karpf finally did come around things became comical (without the chuckles though). He challenged me to produce an example of comparative anatomy that could possibly be tainted with the hint of religion. Is not evolution pure, unadulterated empirical science? Like searching for the word "god" in a holy book, it took me all of about ten seconds to fish out an example from the few books I had brought along. Karpf's response was to question the source, but the hefty tome I was showing him was obviously a textbook and the gig was up. I'm shocked, shocked to find there is metaphysics going on here.
Karpf was now wet, so why not jump in? The audience was treated to the classic cytochrome c argument, in all its metaphysical splendor. The differences in the cytochrome c sequences, across the species, generally line up with what evolution predicts. Of course a fulfilled prediction is no big deal. Geocentrism has plenty of those. And there are many sequences that do not line up with evolution. Evolutionists cannot place too much emphasis on cooperative gene phylogenies, like cytochrome c's, on pain of falsification from the many that do not cooperate.
But that, of course, was not Karpf's point. As usual, metaphysics provided the ooomph. You see, the cytochrome c differences are not functionally required. Transplant a cytochrome c from one species to another and it works just fine. How foolish to think that God would do it this way. This drew approving chuckles from the all-knowing blue audience which had easily disregarded my earlier warnings of the smuggling of religion into science.
No sermon on evolution, however, would be complete without a douse of methodological naturalism to seal shut the doors. Science, the audience learned, must be restricted to methodological naturalism--complexity (and philosophy) be damned. So design theory is not only wrong, it is not even science.
But what about all those philosophical quandaries? What right do evolutionists have to make the rules for science when we can barely figure out what science is? Not a problem. Karpf assured the audience that, along with design theory, philosophy also is not science. Like Mr. Spock and the tribbles, Karpf is immune to any such effects. Define your opponents to be wrong (or irrelevant) and, conveniently, they become wrong (or irrelevant). Oh well, no matter. In blue zones even losers get to have pizza.
