A.2.8. The Intelligent Design Movement
A.2.8.1 Introductory Note
Note: The Intelligent Design (ID) movement is a
neo-creationist movement which I’ve characterized
elsewhere as “creationism tarted up for a more
upscale market.” It basically says that, for various reasons, there is physical
evidence in the universe which proves the existence of an “Intelligent
Designer.” In a rather ham-fisted attempt to avoid being labelled creationists,
they carefully avoid referring to the ID as “God” but this is in fact what they
mean. It’s an important development in the history of
religion and science – particularly regarding the issue of the origin of man –
which is why I’ve included it here. However, in
addition to this short introduction, at the end of Mr. Dembski’s
essay (which I obtained from www.talkorigins.org,
the “agora” or meeting place, of those who engage in discourse about
the origin of life), I have added a few comments of my own. I do not believe it
is good science, but more to the point, I do not think it is good religion
either – at least, not good “Restored Gospel” (“Mormonism”) – Marc S..
By William A. Dembski
Reprinted from Cosmic Pursuit, Spring 1998
According to Darwinism, undirected natural causes are solely
responsible for the origin and development of life. In particular, Darwinism
rules out the possibility of God or any guiding intelligence playing a role in
life's origin and development. Within western culture Darwinism's ascent has
been truly meteoric. And yet throughout its ascent there have always been
dissenters who regarded as inadequate the Darwinian vision that undirected
natural causes could produce the full diversity and complexity of life.
Until the mid 1980s this dissent was sporadic, focused
largely at the grass roots, and seeking mainly to influence public opinion
through the courts (and not very effectively at that). With the Intelligent
Design movement this dissent has now become focused, promising to overturn the
cultural dominance of Darwinism much as the freedom movements in eastern Europe
overturned the political dominance of Marxism at the end of the 1980s.
The Intelligent Design movement begins with the work of
Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, Michael Denton,
Dean Kenyon, and Phillip Johnson. Without employing the Bible as a scientific
text, these scholars critiqued Darwinism on scientific and philosophical
grounds. On scientific grounds they found Darwinism an inadequate framework for
biology. On philosophical grounds they found Darwinism hopelessly entangled
with naturalism, the view that nature is self-sufficient and thus without need
of God or any guiding intelligence. More recently, scholars like Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, Paul Nelson, Jonathan Wells, and
myself have taken the next step, proposing a positive research program wherein
intelligent causes become the key for understanding the diversity and
complexity of life.
Through this two-pronged approach of critiquing Darwinism on
the one hand and providing a positive alternative on the other, the Intelligent
Design movement has rapidly gained adherents among the best and brightest in
the academy. Already it is responsible for Darwinism losing its corner on the
intellectual market. If fully successful, Intelligent Design will unseat not
just Darwinism but also Darwinism's cultural legacy. And since no aspect of
western culture has escaped Darwinism's influence, so no aspect of western
culture will escape re-evaluation in the light of Intelligent Design.
What then is Intelligent Design? Intelligent Design begins
with the observation that intelligent causes can do things which undirected
natural causes cannot. Undirected natural causes can place scrabble pieces on a
board, but cannot arrange the pieces as meaningful words or sentences. To
obtain a meaningful arrangement requires an intelligent cause. This intuition,
that there is a fundamental distinction between undirected natural causes on
the one hand and intelligent causes on the other, has underlain the design
arguments of past centuries.
Throughout the centuries theologians have argued that nature
exhibits features which nature itself cannot explain, but which instead require
an intelligence over and above nature. From Church fathers like Minucius Felix and Basil the Great (3rd and 4th centuries)
to medieval scholastics like Moses Maimonides
and Thomas Aquinas (12th and 13th centuries) to reformed thinkers like Thomas
Reid and Charles Hodge (18th and 19th centuries), we find theologians making
design arguments, arguing from the data of nature to an intelligence operating
over and above nature.
Design arguments are old hat. Indeed, design arguments
continue to be a staple of philosophy and religion courses. The most famous of
the design arguments is William Paley's watchmaker argument (as in Paley's Natural
Theology, published 1802). According to Paley,
if we find a watch in a field, the watch's adaptation of means to ends (that
is, the adaptation of its parts to telling time) ensure that it is the product
of an intelligence, and not simply the output of undirected natural processes.
So too, the marvellous adaptations of means to ends in organisms, whether at
the level of whole organisms, or at the level of various subsystems (Paley focused especially on the mammalian eye), ensure that
organisms are the product of an intelligence.
Though intuitively appealing, Paley's argument had until
recently fallen into disuse. This is now changing. In the last five years
design has witnessed an explosive resurgence. Scientists are beginning to
realize that design can be rigorously formulated as a scientific theory. What
has kept design outside the scientific mainstream these last hundred and thirty
years is the absence of precise methods for distinguishing intelligently caused
objects from unintelligently caused ones. For design to be a fruitful
scientific concept, scientists have to be sure they can reliably determine
whether something is designed.
Johannes Kepler thought the
craters on the moon were intelligently designed by moon dwellers. We now know
that the craters were formed naturally. It's this fear of falsely attributing
something to design only to have it overturned later that has prevented design
from entering science proper. With precise methods for discriminating
intelligently from unintelligently caused objects, scientists are now able to
avoid Kepler's mistake.
What has emerged is a new program for scientific research
known as Intelligent Design. Within biology, Intelligent Design is a theory of
biological origins and development. Its fundamental claim is that intelligent
causes are necessary to explain the complex, information-rich structures of
biology, and that these causes are empirically detectable.
To say intelligent causes are empirically detectable is to
say there exist well-defined methods that, on the basis of observational
features of the world, are capable of reliably distinguishing intelligent
causes from undirected natural causes. Many special sciences have already
developed such methods for drawing this distinction-notably forensic science,
cryptography, archeology, and the search for
extraterrestrial intelligence (as in the movie Contact).
Whenever these methods detect intelligent causation, the
underlying entity they uncover is information. Intelligent Design properly
formulated is a theory of information. Within such a theory, information
becomes a reliable indicator of intelligent causation as well as a proper
object for scientific investigation. Intelligent Design thereby becomes a
theory for detecting and measuring information, explaining its origin, and
tracing its flow. Intelligent Design is therefore not the study of intelligent
causes per se, but of informational pathways induced by intelligent causes.
As a result, Intelligent Design presupposes neither a
creator nor miracles. Intelligent Design is theologically minimalist. It
detects intelligence without speculating about the nature of the intelligence.
Biochemist Michael Behe's "irreducible complexity," physicist
David Bohm's "active information,"
mathematician Marce lSchützenberger's
"functional complexity," and my own "complex specified
information" are alternate routes to the same reality.
It is the empirical detectability of intelligent causes that
renders Intelligent Design a fully scientific theory, and distinguishes it from
the design arguments of philosophers, or what has traditionally been called
"natural theology." The world contains events, objects, and
structures which exhaust the explanatory resources of undirected natural
causes, and which can be adequately explained only by recourse to intelligent
causes. Scientists are now in a position to demonstrate this rigorously. Thus
what has been a long-standing philosophical intuition is now being cashed out
as a scientific research program.
Intelligent Design entails that naturalism in all forms be
rejected. Metaphysical naturalism, the view that undirected natural causes
wholly govern the world, is to be rejected because it is false. Methodological
naturalism, the view that for the sake of science, scientific explanation ought
never exceed undirected natural causes, is to be rejected because it stifles
inquiry. Nothing is gained by pretending science can get along without
intelligent causes. Rather, because intelligent causes are empirically
detectable, science must ever remain open to evidence of their activity.
Where does this leave special creation and theistic
evolution? Logically speaking, Intelligent Design is compatible with everything
from the starkest creationism (i.e., God intervening at every point to create
new species) to the most subtle and far-ranging evolution (i.e., God seamlessly
melding all organisms together in a great tree of life). For Intelligent Design
the first question is not how organisms came to be (though this is a research
question that needs to be addressed), but whether they demonstrate clear,
empirically detectable marks of being intelligently caused. In principle, an
evolutionary process can exhibit such "marks of intelligence" as much
as any act of special creation.
If you're a Christian, what is the theological payoff of
Intelligent Design? It is important to realize that Intelligent Design is not
an apologetic ploy to cajole people into God's Kingdom. Intelligent Design is a
scientific research program.
That said, Intelligent Design does have implications for
theology. The most severe challenge to theology over the last two hundred years
has been naturalism. Within western culture, naturalism has become the default
position for all serious inquiry. From biblical studies to law to education to
art to science to the media, inquiry is expected to proceed only under the
supposition of naturalism.
C. S. Lewis put it this way:
Naturalistic assumptions ... meet you on every side.... It
comes partly from what we may call a "hangover." We all have
Naturalism in our bones and even conversion does not at once work the infection
out of our system. Its assumptions rush back upon the mind the moment vigilance
is relaxed. (quoted from Miracles)
By making the design in nature evident, Intelligent Design
promises to cure western culture of this unfortunate Enlightenment hangover.
Indeed, Intelligent Design provides the clearest refutation of naturalism to
date. Naturalism looks to science to justify its rejection of purpose in
nature. Intelligent Design shows that naturalism fails on its own terms. To be
sure, there are good philosophical reasons for rejecting naturalism-the very
existence of the world and the intelligibility of the world raise questions
which science cannot answer, and which point beyond the world. Intelligent
Design shows there are also good scientific reasons for rejecting naturalism.
For Further Study:
The Intelligent Design movement begins with the publication
of The Mystery of Life's Origin by Charles Thaxton,
Walter Bradley, and Roger Olson (Philosophical Library, 1984) and Evolution: A
Theory in Crisis by Michael Denton (Alder & Adler, 1986). These two books
presented a powerful scientific critique of evolutionary theory. Moreover, they
set the tone for subsequent publications by refusing to mix the scientific
evidence for design with theological views about creation.
The next key text in the movement was Phillip Johnson's
Dean Kenyon and Percival Davis's Of Pandas and People
(Haughton, 1993) and J. P. Moreland's Creation Hypothesis (InterVarsity,
1994) proved transitional texts. Whereas previous texts criticized evolutionary
theory without offering a positive alternative, these texts began examining
what a design-theoretic alternative to evolutionary theory would look like.
With the publication of Michael Behe's
My own The Design Inference (
A.2.8.4 My notes on ID as poor science and poor LDS theology
[Note: a modified version of this essay appears as a separate item on the website: “What is the difference between science and religion?]
A.2.8.4.1 The difference between science and religion
One of the biggest misunderstandings amongst people who fail
to reconcile or properly differentiate science from religion is confusion over
the questions they ask – an issue Stephen Jay Gould, the late Harvard
evolutionary biologist referred to when he coined the term
“Non-overlapping Magisteria” (NOMA). The confusion is complicated by the limitations of
language. People often use terms in different ways. For instance, most people
would think of a “theory” as something which isn’t
necessarily “true,” but is just a suggestion. But scientists use the words
differently. Science doesn’t deal in “truth” in any
abstract way, and when I’m trying to explain this, I
usually use the term “efficacy” for “truth” and “model” for “theory.” That is, something’s “true” in science if it “works,” which is to
say, if it is predictive and physically descriptive and can be reproduced, and it’s a theory if it successfully models a physical process
or event or object. (For more on this, see Steven Cushing, “Evolution: Just a
Theory?”, Verbatim: the Language Quarterly, XXV/2 Spring 00: 9-12, or
Laurence Moran, “Evolution is a Fact and a Theory,” 1993: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-fact.html).
I’ll leave most of the details of what constitutes a
successful model to another writer or at least another time, but for now let me
point out that the reproducibility of results is an important factor in what
goes into a successful model (for a send-up of this, see, e.g., The Journal
of Irreproducible Results, a satirical journal: http://www.jir.com/)
So what are the different “magisteria”?
As far as LDS religion is concern, we believe that ultimately, all knowledge is
“religion” but in terms of a philosophical difference, it concentrates on teleological
and transcendent questions. A teleological question is a purpose-related
question, such as “why are we here?” “what is our purpose in life?” “why was
life created?” and so on.
Transcendent questions are those which transcend the
physical world as we perceive and understand it. We experience the physical
world in our mind, ultimately, but we perceive it through our sensory organs.
Therefore, what we know of of the physical world is really the “footprint”
of the physical world, so to speak, not the “foot” itself – like drawing a
distinction between the mind and the brain. The difference rapidly becomes a
philosophical one – in an everyday sense we do not make this distinction and
tend to trust our senses. Those who choose to believe that there is more than
what is even conceivably perceptible within the physical universe have faith,
which, as Hebrews 11:1 famously defines, is “…the substance of things hoped
for, the evidence of things not seen.” I believe there is no physical proof of
transcendent phenomena within our physical universe, a point I’ll return to shortly; one chooses to believe, or
not, as one’s inclination leads. That is not to say a
position of faith is unreasonable, but it is not “reductionist,” or provable
within the universe of perception we have available to us. In the disciplines
of the physical sciences and mathematics it’s been
shown that even physical phenomena are not necessarily provable within their
systems (in mathematics this is known as the Incompleteness Theorems and
dashed Lord Bertrand Russell’s attempt to capture the
whole of mathematics in his book, Principia Mathematica[1]; in
physics it started out relatively narrowly as Heisenberg’s
Uncertainty Principle, which related to only one phenomena (the position
versus the momentum of an electron), and Niels
Bohr eventually broadened it to include all of quantum mechanics. Bohrand Einstein debated this all through the 20s and 30s
(a debate out of which came Einstein’s famous dictum,
“God does not play dice with the universe.”) and Einstein eventually conceded
defeat. God does, it appear, play dice with the universe, so to speak. Einstein’s view, classical realism or reductionism (the
belief that everything can be reduced to a physical explanation); Bohr’s explanation came to be known as the Copenhagen
Interpretation, and it implies that we can never really understand physical
phenomena until we observe them, which implies that they do not exist an
und fürsich (in and of themselves,
existentially), but are expressions of statistics. This was the only way to
reconcile the apparent philosophical quicksand and paradoxes of quantum
mechanics (now known as the Standard Theory when combined with cosmological
ideas such as the Big Bang). Don’t worry – Bohr said
that if anyone said they understood quantum mechanics they were either a fool
or a liar!
But religion doesn’t concern
itself with quantum mechanics, although many theologians see the Big Bang as
being the “singularity” (in mathematics, an indefinable point of a function) of
creation, by which they mean that the universe really was created ex nihilo
(out of nothing). LDS theologians tend to look at further developments in the
Standard Theory, such as the role of hyper-dimensional concepts which explain
how our universe can exist as a momentary (albeit a long moment of billions of
years!) manifestation from, say, a 4-dimensional realm, in 3 dimensions. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, as these are pure
speculations. The point is that religion concerns itself with matters which do
not necessarily exist in our universe, such as the question of the existence of
God, an afterlife, and the like. Protestantism and Catholicism believe in the
“supernatural” which means non-natural divine manifestations, such as miracles,
but LDS thought differs significantly here, in that we believe that everything
is, ultimately, physical, just not necessarily physical within our universe.
As Joseph Smith put it, “There is no such thing as
immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can
only be discerned by purer eyes. We cannot see it: but when our bodies are
purified we shall see that it is all matter.” (Doctrine & Covenants
131:7-8)
A final observation. I see a spectrum in the philosophy of
science and religion. Here’s what it looks like,
expressed in terms of whether one believes in matters of faith (religion) or
not.
Atheists / “scientismists” agnostic scientists / believers creationists / believers
The black defines those who accept that science is a
legitimate approach to learning about the universe. The white defines those who
accept that religion concerns itself with transcendent and teleological issues.
All black and all white are not, in my opinion, intellectually consistent
positions – only agnosticism and pro-science religion are intellectually
consistent. Atheism is not intellectually consistent because it is a positive
belief: a conviction that there is no transcendent reality whatsoever (even
though this cannot be proved); creationism is a conviction that religion takes
priority over science when the two appear to conflict (even though there is, in
principle, no conflict, only misunderstanding, in my opinion). Thus creationism
is bad science and scientism is bad religion. I’m
convinced of how I feel about atheism, ironically, by reading some of the works
that have taught me a lot about evolution – those by Richard Dawkins, an
A.2.8.4.2 Why do I feel ID is bad science?
The reason I feel ID is bad science is that at its heart it
consists of a transcendent argument, and implies a teleology, both of which are
ultra vires of science. The transcendent
argument is, of course, the existence of an Intelligent Designer (let’s call a god a God, shall we?), whom we cannot
perceive. That is pure transcendentism. It also
implies, since it was created by someone, that it was done for a
purpose, and that is teleological – also outside the realm of science. It’s that simple – it breaks two of the basic tenets of
science.
Dembski is a lawyer, not a
scientist, and his writings seem to imply that it is only necessary to raise in
the minds of people (mostly school boards in the US Bible Belt, I suspect), a
“reasonable doubt” regarding Darwinian evolution. But this isn’t
a legal argument, and it shows Dembski’s
fundamental lack of understanding of science. The law works on its assumptions,
and science works on its assumptions, and they are not the same. The work of
some of his colleagues, notably Michael Behe,
the biochemist who has resurrected an old argument and called it irreducible
complexity, is somewhat different. Irreducible complexity is the idea that
something (like life) could not have developed through natural means because
the results include subsystems which could not have developed from the elements
that make it up (like the keystone of an arch). This would be a good argument
except for the fact that many scientists (notably Richard Dawkins and Kenneth
Miller) have demolished all the examples Behe
and his colleagues have put forward. In fact, Dawkins turns Behe’s
example of blood coagulation on its head to show that evolution works with what
it has at hand, not with some pre-designed goal in mind.
Why is it bad (LDS) religion? There is a concept in
Mormonism which I sometimes refer to, tongue-in-cheek, as “the prime directive”
(borrowed from “Star Trek,” of course). Trekkies
and Trekkers will know the “prime directive” as the over-riding principle of
not interfering with lesser developed life forms the “
This does not deny all of the religious manifestations that
most religious people believe in. It simply says that there can, in principle,
be no evidence in the physical world of God’s
existence. No “signature” in the stars, although, pattern-recognizing species
that we are, we can perceive “spiritual” evidence in the physical world the
same way we perceive “physical” evidence, with the difference being that
spiritual evidence is not reproducible, at least not the same way as physical
evidence is (a subject for another essay)[1];
see also the quote from Joseph Smith above, for the LDS approach to what
“physical” means.
Thus something which posits physical (in the sense we
currently perceive) evidence rends the veil, corrupts the “ignorance” which
faith requires, and offends the preconditions of free agency we need to make
choices which are genuinely ours alone to make. ID does all this, and this is
why I believe it offends LDS religion, if not other Christian faiths (actually
a lot of other Christian-but-non-LDS scientists, such as Kenneth Miller, and
scholars like Ian Barbour, believe ID is bad theology as well).