Specified Complexity: Darwin's Panic?

In Wiker’s reply to Jeff Shallit, he writes,

As for ID making no predictions about the age of the Earth, I think that is quite sane. The second-to-last I heard, scientists thought it to be 15 billion years old. Then, after I’d sent in my article, they informed us that it was only 13.7 billion years old.

Actually, estimates of the age of Earth range from 4.5 to 4.55 billion years, and are as well established as anything in science. The age of the Universe is more uncertain (for rather fundamental reasons we have no rocks to date from that time!). This was probably just a slip-up on Wiker’s part, but Wiker’s avoidance of Shallit’s point – which was that ID advocates are in general downright evasive about the age of the earth and the blatant wrongness of Young-Earth Creationists – conforms to the usual pattern of ID slipperiness. Why doesn’t Wiker just say, “The evidence clearly points to an ancient Earth, and waffling on this issue is unacceptable if ID is to be taken seriously by the scientific community”? It’s clear why he doesn’t: creationists are core ID supporters.

Wiker makes various other mistakes in his reply. To wit:

1. Parsimony is a strength, not a weakness, in a scientific theory. In Wiker’s version of ID, one attributes “apparent design” to intelligent design (parenthetically, this means a truly incredible number – billions – of individual design events, which makes it rather surprising that we have yet to detect one of these design events in biology). “Apparent design” only ends up in the “chance” category when the evidence for natural processes gets piled so high that disagreement is embarassing. (By the way, “chance” is a highly misleading creationist depiction of mutation and natural selection.) Wiker’s hybrid approach is not reasonably testable. No matter how many examples of apparent design and biological complexity are explained by natural processes, ID advocates will simply retreat to systems slightly more complex and declare those the systems that evolution cannot produce. As far as I know, Paul Nelson is the only ID advocate who has, to his credit, acknowledged this problem.
2. Wiker defends Behe with a number of references to Behe’s works, but Behe’s original examination of the literature was weak, and his responses to critics are similarly weak. I know because I’ve looked up much of the relevant literature. Many of the references (or links to webpages with the references) are posted at a page I’ve been working on at EvoWiki, “Irreducible complexity and the scientific literature.”
3. As for Dembski, his arguments now rely entirely on Behe’s “Irreducible Complexity” at their key point, and if IC collapses, then so do Dembski’s substantive arguments.
4. Wiker concludes,

   Is ID a desperately disguised god-of-the-gaps? Indeed not. The criticisms coming from ID proponents arise from knowledge, not ignorance. For example, it is our knowledge of the prebiological conditions of the Earth that allows us to reject the possibility that amino acids could spontaneously form the first proteins; it is our knowledge of chemistry and the actual complexity of cells that allows us to reject the silly notion that the first proteins could have been formed on the surfaces of silicate clays; it is our knowledge of the general deleterious effect of mutations that allows us to reject the continual recourse to mutation miracles by Darwinists.

   Wiker’s three claims are refuted here, here, and here, respectively.

Despite the scientific errors that permeate his work, Wiker is a leading proponent of ID. He seems to think that he can rely on the science of Behe and Dembski, and then build a legal case that their “scientific” view has a legal “right” to be taught in public school classrooms. He will have quite a shock when the expert witnesses are called.

Wiker has an odd way of looking at things. For example, on the Discovery website you may find several articles in which he states that Darwin, along with Galton, advocated eugenics. This is just wrong on so many levels it’s not even funny. The connection he wants to make is to eugenics as practiced in the US and Germany in the early 20th century - sterilizations, et. al. However Galton, who advocated eugenics in the sense of the “best” people seeking one another out, never went this far. And Darwin stated that mate choice should be unconstrained in (I think) Descent of Man. It is just a smear, calculated to support his argument that “Darwinism” leads to immorality. The guy has problems beyond the age of the earth, problems that amount to some degree to simple reading comprehension problems

Wiker, BTW, coauthored with Wm Dembski _Moral Darwinism: How We All Became Hedonists_.

Hi, Karl! Long time, no see.

I’ll also be interested in any reply you receive.