So I was reading a recent post by my friend Kenny over at one of his blogs about Intelligent Design. In it he takes the New York Times to task for writing a ‘balanced’ piece which makes it seem the scientific explanation of the grand canyon seem no better than an intelligent design type explanation. Since I’m a cheap bastard and not willing to pay the New York Times to see the old article I can’t such much about the article itself, and besides I like to keep my political commentary over at my other blog but I’m sure I would be equally appalled. However, it got me to thinking about whether there is any objective sense in which the scientific explanation is better. Not that I think the attacks on the geological explanation have any merit but even without these attacks in what sense can we say one of two theories which consistently explain a phenomenon is better.

Ultimately the question of which theory¹is better — that the grand canyon is the result of billions of years of geological change or that it is the work of god — is all about how we assign our prior probabilities. Clearly if we assign a very high prior probability to the existence of a god who would make the universe look like it had been created billions of years ago that would be the better theory. This seems exactly what the ID advocates are really doing, the attacks on the scientific explanation being just an after the fact justification.

Most philosophers I know seem to be convinced that ID advocates are not just wrong but somehow objectively wrong in a way which an impartial observer could determine. Yet this would seem to require some objectively correct assignment of prior probabilities like Carnap wished to find and most modern philosophers don’t believe such things exist. Now we could try and turn to some kind of demarcation between science and non-science like Popper offered but this would only tell us something about how we use the word science and not give as an objective reason to prefer one explanation to the other.

To be clear this doesn’t really affect the legal issues of teaching ID in schools. Regardless of it’s objective status we have a certain cultural agreement on what counts as religious belief. However, I thought the situation brought up some interesting philosophical issues and illustrated the reasons I have such a hard time dismissing Carnap’s program. In some sense I really want it to be true since it feels like I have objectively better reason to believe in geology than a divine trick but I don’t know if that is the sort of intuition that is evidentiary or not.