Harvard Prof Says Intelligent Design Proponents Must Change Focus

Harvard Law Professor William Stuntz, who is an evangelical Christian, has written an interesting article in the Spring 2006 Harvard Law Bulletin explaining why proponents of intelligent design are destined to lose their debate with evolutionary scientists unless ID proponents radically change their mode of argument. He says:

[T]he proponents [of intelligent design] are too invested in the bottom line. You don't win scientific debates by arguing like lawyers; you win them by arguing like scientists. But my friends in the evangelical Christian community tend to argue like lawyers: They start with the bottom line and look for reasons to support it, just as a lawyer starts with the conclusion that most benefits her client and looks for arguments to support that conclusion. The only way to win a scientific debate is to play by the scientists' rules--start with premises and reason forward to conclusions. And the only way to do that credibly is to make clear at the outset that you're not committed to any conclusion, that you haven't already embraced a bottom line. Religious believers have already failed that test, which is why this debate will end up looking to most people like the debate over evolution in the 1920s. Nonbelievers think that believers are strategic, that we will embrace any argument that works to our benefit. To a large degree, they're right. Unless and until that changes, religious believers won't have any credibility with the secular academic world. We don't deserve to have credibility if we're not honestly engaged in truth-seeking.