[00:00:05] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and Intelligent Design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Today, as per usual on Fridays, we're sharing an episode from our extensive archive. Let me give you a little context on our choice of episode this time around.
My colleagues and I were saddened to learn of the recent loss of Tom Gilson. His name might ring a bell, since he has hosted occasional episodes of ID the Future in recent years. But even if you haven't heard him host, if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you've been listening to his work regularly for several years. Tom sound engineered this podcast. He took raw audio files and applied his wide knowledge of audio engineering and experience as an editor to create a polished finished product. In 2023, I became discovery Institute's Director of Podcasting, and in that role I've had the privilege of working with Tom regularly. His reliable professional work week in and week out, coupled with his extensive knowledge of the arguments for intelligent Design, made him an ideal colleague to work with. I'm grateful to have joined forces with him. In addition to editing the podcast, Tom was a senior editor of the Stream, where he wrote and published over a thousand articles. He was also author of six books and co founder of the Apologetics Fellowship in the Cincinnati and Dayton area of Ohio. Today, in honor of Tom's important contribution to ID the Future, I selected out of the archive an episode that really highlights his ability to communicate important ideas in a creative and memorable way. Here, Tom offers advice to opponents of Intelligent Design on how to improve their persuasive strategy. Getting ID theory right instead of criticizing a made up straw man would be a good start, he says. He then offers several additional suggestions, all of which have the incidental effect of highlighting the many suspect rhetorical strategies that have been commonly employed by prominent opponents of the theory of Intelligent Design.
[00:02:14] Speaker C: Hello, I'm Tom Gilson. I'm the editor and sometime host of these ID the Future podcasts. I'm also an author, a columnist, a blogger with a long history of serious discussions on science and faith, and I hold a master's degree in organizational psychology, a field closely related to social psychology. And I'm speaking to you today from that perspective. And in a rather unexpected switch, I suppose. Today I'm offering advice to people who oppose Intelligent Design. That's right, I am here to speak to IDs opponents. Now, I know unsolicited advice is rarely welcome, especially from someone with different views than one holds, but I'm going to offer it anyway. This isn't sarcastic, it's not tongue in cheek. This is genuine advice.
So now my words of advice to ID opponents. Let's start with some background. This is the lay of the land. Every strategist in military terms knows you have to understand the terrain, you need to understand the lay of the land. Here's just a mere set of facts that you have to take into account in your persuasive strategy. You have to realize that most of the people you're trying to persuade are laymen. People who know next to nothing of biology, including evolution. This is to some degree true even for those laymen such as myself who have read widely studying authors both and against your position. There are only so many ways a person can learn science. You have your lab work, your field work, your conferences, your technical journals. I'm not doing that. No layman does. If we're going to learn your position, we have to rely on books and articles, on video and audio. But we only know what others tell us. We're hearing from multiple perspectives. It's our job as responsible human beings to assess what we should believe of what we hear.
Now, you would undoubtedly prefer that we never read anything that favors Intelligent Design, but guess what? That's out of your control. If you think that that would be a good strategy, just realize it's out of reach. You can't keep laypeople from reading Intelligent Design.
So what's your next best strategy? You have to convince us that your side is right and Intelligent Design is wrong. How are you going to do that? Some time ago, in response to reviews I wrote of Stephen Meyer's book Darwin's Doubt, some folks tried a strategy of urging me to read the works that Meyer cited in his footnotes. They said I should check for myself whether he got things right. Now that's a great idea. I could do that. But I have a problem. Like virtually every other person who's not a biologist, I'm not in any position to assess what's written in the journals. It would be irresponsible for me to assume that I'm competent for that. That strategy could theoretically work, but its success depends on us becoming full blown experts in whole new disciplines. Realistically, you shouldn't expect that. You'd be wise not to put too much hope in your readers coming up to speed on all these technical journals, on all the technical issues. You, on the other hand, you're the experts. And as I read your responses to Intelligent Design, I see you calling on laymen like me to accept your word as credible. Authorities on the subject. Well, that would be nice. If we did that, we wouldn't even have to read the journal articles. You're the ones who know what you're talking about. You've got the facts. You're right. But I got to remind you again, you can say that, but it hasn't worked rhetorically. Your strategy hasn't succeeded. But I'm not here just to tell you what isn't working. I've got some advice on what might.
It goes all the way back to Aristotle. You want to persuade people on the basis of your competence, your credibility, your expertise. You must understand that in order for that to work, we have to agree that you are credible as experts. And credibility comes out of a composite of factors. It isn't just the time that you spend in the labs and in the field. It isn't just your degrees. It's your perceived competence. Yes, that's a big part of it, but it's also your perceived trustworthiness. We do recognize your competence as biologists, paleontologists, geneticists, biochemist, geologists. Whatever related field you may work in, your perceived competence there is. Fine. Do you realize, though, that that's not all it takes, beyond your competence in the physical sciences, in order for us to trust you as credible authorities, we want to know that you are competent in the relevant philosophical questions that are attached to this issue. And, you know, we actually need to know that you are worthy of our trust on other grounds as well. So let's take these one at a time. First, your perceived philosophical competence. Your objections to Intelligent design are typically based on your knowledge of the evidence within a certain naturalistic framework. That's a philosophical framework. When ID presents its position from within a different philosophical framework, it's not unusual to see you just laughing it away. This is not what competence looks like. Laughter is not argumentation. Laughter provides us no reason to believe you're qualified to speak from a properly considered philosophical framework. Further, from the logical side of philosophical discussions, you engage in multiple fallacies, mostly in the category of the straw man. Over and over and over again, you misrepresent the Intelligent Design position that you oppose. You tell us it's an argument from ignorance. It isn't. You call it a scheme to sneak religion into schools. No, it isn't. You say it's just a weak argument in the form of, hey, we don't know how this all happens. Who must be God did it? No, that's not Intelligent Design either. None of this is what he actually proposes. I have to say, sometimes I Wonder where the payoff is for you in arguing against positions that none of us actually holds? I'd be bored. What's the fun in it? Worse for you, though, it erodes our perceptions of your competence. You look like you don't know what you're talking about. I suggest you pay attention and not brush us off when we point out logical fallacies in your arguments and when we try to get you to understand the difference between your basic philosophical position and ours. Even if you think we're wrong for strategic, rhetorical, persuasive purposes, you would do well to listen. Presumably you want to try to persuade us. And as you complain about our position being wrong, the first thing we want to know is whether you actually know what our position is. Misrepresenting it won't persuade us at all. And then there's the perceived trustworthiness part of the competence trustworthiness credibility equation. Yes, again, you have all the competence we could ask for in your disciplines. If you were to develop credibility in the philosophical debate, that would advance your position tremendously. But remember, credibility is both about expertise and perceived trustworthiness. Trustworthiness and demonstrated character go together, obviously. So you ought to be able to see how your trustworthiness is diminished when you engage in silly dismissive games toward us using terms like calling the Discovery Institute the Dishonesty Institute. Or when you say God did it and you spell it all as one word when you talk about the Flying Spaghetti Monster or I'm thinking of Jerry Coyne, who has gone on and on with inane comments about sophisticated theologians with a trademark sign after it. This doesn't come across as credible character. It comes across as silliness. By the way, I don't know if Coyne is still saying that. I decided a good while ago not to bother reading him any longer. It wasn't getting me anywhere. I didn't have any good reason to trust him with that kind of language. So we have to wonder when we see you misrepresenting our position that way, is it because you couldn't get it right that you're careless or even incompetent philosophically? Or is it because you intended to distort our position, which would be old fashioned dishonesty? Is there another option besides those two? I can't think of one.
This kind of thing does you no good. You're not going to persuade anyone who sees you lacking the crucial character of being someone that they can trust. You need to understand the difference between being right and being persuasive. Very frequently. I see you insisting that we must believe you because you know what you're talking about and because you're right. Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't. I'm not here today to give my opinion on that. But what I'm about to say here is no opinion. This is fact. If you think you're being persuasive, you're wrong. That's easy enough to prove empirically. And don't blame it on the American public, not when your strategies are so obviously weak. You need to shore yourself up in your philosophical competence and in your trustworthiness.
So that's my unsolicited advice for you. Who would like to persuade the world that your view of evolution is right and any other view is wrong? Just ask yourself, besides being right, which I'm sure you think you are, what else does it take to be persuasive? Social psychologists can tell you all about their research on this from recent decades. But other than some manipulative techniques that I hope you wouldn't stoop to, there's not much there that Aristotle didn't say thousands of years ago. You need more than expertise in your field. You need expertise in whatever else is involved. In this case, irrelevant philosophical issues and the kind of character that evokes trust. Then maybe you'll stand a chance of being more persuasive.
I actually look forward to seeing what you come up with. Go ahead. Try to persuade me. I'm open to it. But I mean, really try. Try to do it better than you have been. And that's my advice to you. For ID the Future, I'm Tom Gilson. Thank you all for listening.
[00:13:24] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
