User:Andrew Lancaster/ID FAQ

I have set up this page 3 Sept 2013 to assist discussion concerning intelligent design and several other related articles such as teleological argument and intelligent design (disambiguation). The problem on those talk pages is that detailed explanations are demanded and then forgotten by the same people, meaning now we have hit the point where the same people are using the "wall of words" itself as an excuse.

Many of the posts one has to write are repetitive. I will therefore place standard answers here for standard questions, and then I can simply refer to them:

1. What is my involvement?

I started looking at this page 20th August 2013. Here is my first post.
I came to the article because I was checking which philosophy articles have FA status. I am a longtime member of WP:PHILO.
It interested me a lot to see User:North8000 and User:Dave souza, who I have had good impressions of, were in debate and that this "FA" article shows a lot of trouble signs and controversy.
I have worked on evolution and philosophy articles, and felt I could help. See my first post above. I started asking questions and I spent a lot of time tracking down relevant literature. (Amazon has done well out of this.)

2. What is really my concern?

Effectively the concern is that the particular way of splitting WP coverage of "intellectual design" amounts to WP:censorship and a failure to be WP:neutral.
Certain sentences in our text, such as the current first sentence of intelligent design, actually put this position into words.
I and other editors have noted that actually there is no good sourcing to justify this, but all good sources seem to make it clear WP is doing the wrong thing.
Furthermore the way this splitting is being put into effect is clearly not normal. For example if dogs and wolves are in different articles because of problems with article length, or a decision based on WP:COMMONNAME we would not see editors patrolling these articles deleting all mention of dogs as a type of wolf, or wolves as a type of dog. Anyone watching the article will also immediately be struck by how these patrolling editors use words like "we have got to be careful about this". Attempts to discuss the best reliable sources are attacked and swamped and then "forgotten".
It is pretty clear that politics and emotions triggered by the intelligent design movement are the real motivation for trying to keep a firewall between articles about them, and articles about other people or movements who also propose intelligent design arguments.
The battle with creationists is also being used to try to block discussion now. Editors who have nothing to do with creationism have the article special "discretionary" status pointed out to them as a warning.
There is also a secondary concern about WP:circular. WP itself is now promoting an idea that I think is spreading around the internet.

3. Am I sure that my concern is the same as the concerns of other that have frequented this article?

It certainly seems so. In fact there seems to be remarkable consistency in the concerns serious editors have expressed about the situation. In this respect the case is quite straightforward compared to what can sometimes be found in Wikipedia.
I do notice different ideas about practical paths to better future articles, but I think no-one is married to any particular solution.

4. What do I suggest right now (3 Sept 2013) in practical terms

Right now, the opening sentence of the intelligent design article is "Intelligent design (ID) is a form of creationism based on the argument from design and promulgated by the Discovery Institute, a politically conservative think tank based in the United States." This should be changed or removed in order to remove the unsourced implication that there is no other type of "intelligent design".
All similar unsourced claims should be removed wherever we find them.
Defenders of the current situation have made it clear that the intelligent design article is currently intended to be about "intelligent design theory" and not the "intelligent design movement" which has its own article. All materials which do not fit that description should therefore be moved out and found a new home. (They dominate the current article!)
Clear and properly sourced references admitting that intelligent design just basically means the same thing as the "design" in "argument from design" should be allowed in this and any other relevant articles.
We need to decide how we can seriously differentiate between teleological argument and intelligent design. If we continue having editor efforts split between two articles which must inevitably be merged we are wasting people's time and giving ourselves lower quality articles.

5. Why do I dispute the relevance of WP:COMMONNAME?

Most obviously, the above policy is intended for use when two different types of thing happen to share the same thing. Here we are talking about one type of thing (which has several names). "Intelligent design" is clearly one of the most common names today of what is also referred to as an "argument from design" or "teleological argument".
I actually do not mind which title we use out of these three. My concern is the artificial creation of POV forks that say that intelligent design theory is a different thing from the teleological argument.

6. But if we merge teleological argument with intelligent design the article will be too big?

Not if we remove all the irrelevant material. I really think this is nonsensical. The article is supposed to not be about the movement and yet it is full of information about schools policies and films and so on.
We also should consider that the article is currently a disaster in terms of repetitive wording, massive footnotes, etc. All this is coming from the controversy which is created by the problem I am explaining here.

7. What is my understanding of the sourcing case for the status quo.

So far I can only identify two which say anything close to relevant. (I do not count sources which only say that the intelligent design movement is different from past proponents of arguments from design. I discuss why below.)

7a. Matzke's blog

A biologist named Nicholas Matzke has claimed, most clearly on a blog, that "everyone now knows, even though the ID guys will never admit it, "intelligent design" as such originated in the 1989 ID textbook Of Pandas and People".

My comments on the Matzke quote:

Relevance. This is the biggest issue. Does it matter when the term first started to be used? No. What matters is how it is used now. Aquinas is for example someone WP reports as having had an "argument from design" but the term had not even been invented yet.
POV. Matzke is an involved party in the legal debates concerning the intelligent design movement and shows no specialist knowledge concerning the history of arguments from design. Googling for him finds associated websites constantly mentioning smashing, hammering etc.
Quality of publication. This is a blog, and he was clearly not doing much fact checking (see below). See WP:RS. Furthermore Matzke shows no sign of being well qualified in the area he is being cited for here, which is not biology but more relevant to theology.
Interpretation. We also need to look beyond the quote in isolation, because actually he admits himself this is not true in any simple way. He remarks "Pandas was the first place the term “intelligent design” was used systematically", by which he goes on to define as "defined in a glossary, claimed to be something other than creationism, etc". He also admits that in "a desperate attempt to obfuscate this basic historical point, ID guys have dug up various random instances of the words “intelligent” and “design” placed together". Furthermore, you have to see that Matzke's blog post is part of an online debate with creationists which in a sense did not go well for him. Later episodes proved that there were lots more references to "intelligent design" before 1989.
Summary: The main problem is relevance. I am in fact willing to agree for now that 1989 was a turning point which made the term more "standardized" and commonly used.
The question is whether it is used to mean "argument from design" or only the argument from design of one movement.

7b. The Thaxton NASA story

There are several sources for the report that Charles Thaxton was inspired to use the term when he heard a NASA engineer use it.

My comment on the Thaxton story:

As far as I know this report does not say that Thaxton had never heard the term before and it does not say that, for example, the NASA engineer was not discussing William Paley at the time! In summary this is entirely irrelevant.

8. What is my understanding of other arguments (not source based) for the status quo?

8a. The lieing argument.

There is an argument (or a group of similar ones) that what makes the movement's "intelligent design" new is that the movement pretends that the argument does not imply religion, does not imply creationism, does not imply miracles, and is scientific. In summary: what distinguishes this "new" argument from design is that the people who promote it, are a bit dishonest about it.

My response to this concern:

It needs to be pointed out that this is original research, and not source based. Of course we have sources which discuss differences between various different movements and individuals who have proposed arguments from design, but we have no source saying that the above dishonesty is something which caused a fundamentally new type of argument from design to come into being.
So our editors are arguing that it is self-evident that this type of political dishonesty (is that new?), somehow caused the argument from design to get a new definition, even though our sources say that the argument is the same as in the past. It is all self-evidently very unconvincing! (And shows very poor historical consciousness concerning the notability of dishonesty in the times before our present puritanism.)

9. What sources exist to prove that the status quo is misrepresenting the best sources

It is really easy to find sources for this, so I will try to divide citations into ones proving particular points, and I'll try to stick to good sources.

Caused by "intelligent design" used to implying benevolent nature (not in the context of the intelligent design movement)

Ayala (2004):

Organisms exhibit design, but it is not “intelligent design,” imposed by God as a Supreme Engineer, but the result of natural selection promoting the adaptation of organisms to their environments.
natural selection, rather than intelligent design

"intelligent design" used a term for William Paley's argument from design

Ayala (2004) (quoting Ernst Mayr):

I never read Paley in the original and this opened my eyes! And it shows how well aware Darwin was that Paley could be answered. In the Origin (and perhaps even better in the orchid book) Darwin. Darwin shows again and again how wrong it is to consider the world a product of Intelligent Design.

References

Ayala, Francisco (2004), "IN WILLIAM PALEY'S SHADOW: DARWIN'S EXPLANATION OF DESIGN" (PDF), LUDUS VITALIS, 12 (21)