Rebuttal to Reports by Opposing
Expert Witnesses
By William A. Dembski
May 14, 2005
1 Introduction ……………………………………………….………...………………..
1
2 Barbara
Forrest ………..…………………………………….……………………… 2
2.1 The Myth
of Religious Neutrality ………………..………..………………… 2
2.2 ID and
Creationism …………………………………………………………… 7
2.3 Methodological
Materialism ……………………………….………………… 9
2.4 ID’s
Contribution to Science ……………………………..………………… 13
3 Robert
Pennock ………………...…..………………………….……..…………….. 17
4 John
Haught ………………………………………………….……..…..………….. 23
5 Kevin
Padian …………………………………………………..…….…..………….. 27
6 Kenneth
Miller …………...……………………………………………..………….. 34
Signature
Page …………………………………………………………………………40
Appendix 1: Barbara
Forrest’s Letter to Simon Blackburn …………....………… 41
Appendix 2: Press
Releases in Response to Robert Pennock ……..………………. 45
Appendix 3: Berlinski
Op-ed — Why Evolution Calls for Special Attention ……. 49
Appendix 4: “Still
Spinning Just Fine: A Response to Ken Miller” ………………. 50
Appendix 5: “Irreducible
Complexity Revisited,” Section 5 …………...…….……. 64
Endnotes ……………………………………………………….…..………………….
75
1 Introduction
I have carefully read the reports by the six opposing expert witnesses. In this rebuttal, I will respond to five of the reports, omitting the one by Brian Alters. Alters’s report focuses on philosophy of education, the pedagogical value of teaching intelligent design in the high school biology curriculum, and the reception of intelligent design among educators (especially among the professional educational associations concerned with science instruction). Alters’s main concern is that through the teaching of intelligent design, science teachers will “engender needless misconceptions” in their students’ understanding of evolutionary biology (Alters, p. 3). Other experts in these matters take exactly the opposite view. For instance, according to Larry Arnhart evolutionary theory cannot be properly understood and taught without considering ID as its foil and counterpart.[1] Note that Arnhart himself is not a proponent of ID.[2]
Although the pedagogical value of teaching ID is an interesting question, the key question is whether intelligent design constitutes a scientific program and whether the textbook in question, Of Pandas and People (2nd ed.), adequately represents the theory of intelligent design. Because the other reports address this key question, this rebuttal will focus on these other reports. I therefore defer to the expert witnesses on my side who are more qualified to rebut Alters’s concerns about the educational value of ID (especially Warren Nord, Dick Carpenter, and John Angus Campbell).
I am a philosopher of science and have published on the relation between science and religion. I therefore feel qualified to respond to the expert witness reports of Barbara Forrest, Robert Pennock, and John Haught in their entirety. As for the reports by Kenneth Miller and Kevin Padian, I am qualified to assess the logic of their arguments. In particular, as a professional mathematician, I am qualified to critique their assessments of my own mathematical work on design detection.
Except for Barbara Forrest and Brian Alters, I have interacted professionally with the opposing expert witnesses regarding intelligent design: Kevin Padian and I were together on Jack Ford’s PBS program Inside the Law back in 1996. Kenneth Miller and I have squared off at a number of conferences and debates (e.g., the Design and Its Critics conference at Concordia University in Mequon Wisconsin in 2000 and at the World Skeptics Conference in Burbank in 2002). Robert Pennock and I met for a formal debate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 2002. Finally, John Haught and I were together for a week at Oxford University (Wycliffe Hall) in the summer of 2001 to discuss intelligent design.
2 Barbara Forrest
2.1 The Myth of Religious Neutrality
Does intelligent design have at its core a scientific theory and research program? This is the key question that needs to be addressed in deciding Kitzmiller v. Dover. Forrest touches on this question at a few points in her expert witness report, and I will return to her treatment of this question. But the inordinate amount of space she devotes in her report to charting ID’s religious associations requires some comment first.
No party to this debate is religiously neutral. Indeed, for every citation she gives in which ID proponents obtain religious mileage from intelligent design, it is possible to cite evolutionists who obtain equally religious (or anti-religious) mileage from evolution. Forrest’s expert witness report never makes clear the distinction between the religious motivations of some ID proponents, the religious implications of ID, and ID as such (i.e., as a scientific program).
Forrest, for instance, accurately quotes one of my theological publications as stating that intelligent design is the Logos of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory (Forrest, p. 27). But consider Barry Lynn, who heads Americans United for Separation of Church and State. In a 1997 PBS Firing Line debate on intelligent design, he too invoked the opening chapter of John’s Gospel, but this time to support evolution: “‘In the beginning was the word....’ Indeed that word just might turn out literally to have been a command: ‘Evolve!’”[3] Given the history of New Testament scholarship on John’s Gospel,[4] Lynn’s use of this passage to support evolution is even more radical than my use of it to support intelligent design.
Lynn and I are both bringing our knowledge of contemporary science to bear on our religious understanding of the world. For Lynn, it is evolution that brings religious insight. For me it is intelligent design. In fact, I write entire books on the theological implications of intelligent design.[5] But I also write academic monographs and research articles on intelligent design as such, notably, my 1998 monograph The Design Inference (published with Cambridge University Press in the monograph series Cambridge Studies in Probability, Induction, and Decision Theory). Forrest in her expert witness report obscures this distinction.
Most philosophy programs at the college level offer a course in critical thinking. Although Barbara Forrest is a professional philosopher, much of her expert witness report consists in committing what such courses refer to as the genetic fallacy. According to one standard text on critical thinking,
[The genetic fallacy is] a type of argument in which an attempt is made to prove a conclusion false by condemning its source or genesis. Such arguments are fallacious because how an idea originated is irrelevant to its viability.[6]
Every variant of the genetic fallacy that Forrest employs against intelligent design can be employed against evolution. To discredit the Discovery Institute and its support for intelligent design, she notes that Howard Ahmanson, one of the chief funders of the Discovery Institute, has in the past supported the Chalcedon Foundation, a Christian reconstructionist organization (Forrest, p. 29). Ahmanson has since repudiated his involvement with the Chalcedon Foundation. But even if he had not, why should his support of certain initiatives play any role in assessing the intrinsic worth of those initiatives? In the case of the Discovery Institute, why should the fact that he has given money toward its work on intelligent design undercut the institute’s work on intelligent design? That work must stand or fall on its own merits.
Forrest is engaging in guilt by association, which is a variant of the genetic fallacy. One could make a parallel argument against National Center for Science Education (the premier watchdog group for debunking intelligent design — www.ncseweb.org). For many Americans, Hugh Hefner does not exemplify moral probity. Yet Hugh Hefner has lent his name to support the NCSE: for her work with the NCSE, Eugenie Scott received the Playboy Foundation’s 1999 Hugh H. Hefner First Amendment Award.[7] Should those opposed to Hugh Hefner’s moral views for that reason reject the work of the NCSE? Of course not. The work of the center must be judged on its own merits.
Forrest decries the religious and moral implications drawn from ID. But what about those drawn by evolutionists from evolutionary theory? Consider the following:
RACISM AND GENOCIDE:
“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.... The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”[8] [Just so there is no doubt, the author in particular is claiming that whites will exterminate blacks.]
—Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871, ch. 6.
BESTIALITY:
Evolution teaches that “we are animals” so that “sex across the species barrier ceases to be an offence to our status and dignity as human beings.”[9] [Just so there is no doubt, “sex across the species barrier” is a euphemism for bestiality.]
—Peter Singer, “Heavy Petting,” 2001
RAPE:
Rape is “a natural, biological phenomenon that is a product of the human evolutionary heritage,” akin to “the leopard’s spots and the giraffe’s elongated neck.”[10]
—Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer, “Why Men Rape,” 2000
BASIS FOR MORALITY:
“As evolutionists, we see that no [ethical]
justification of the traditional kind is possible. Morality, or more strictly
our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our
reproductive ends. Hence the basis of ethics does not lie in God’s will.... In
an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us
by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding.”[11]
—E. O. Wilson and Michael Ruse, “The Evolution of Ethics,” 1991
ORIGIN OF RELIGION:
According to Darwin, religious belief arises from ignorance of natural causes: “The tendency in savages to imagine that natural objects and agencies are animated by spiritual or living essences, is perhaps illustrated by a little fact which I once noticed: my dog, a full-grown and very sensible animal, was lying on the lawn during a hot and still day; but at a little distance a slight breeze occasionally moved an open parasol, which would have been wholly disregarded by the dog, had any one stood near it. As it was, every time that the parasol slightly moved, the dog growled fiercely and barked. He must, I think, have reasoned to himself in a rapid and unconscious manner, that movement without any apparent cause indicated the presence of some strange living agent, and that no stranger had a right to be on his territory. The belief in spiritual agencies would easily pass into the belief in the existence of one or more gods.”[12]
—Darwin, Descent of Man, 1871, ch. 3
JUSTIFICATION FOR ATHEISM:
According to Richard Dawkins “the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design.” Moreover, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”[13]
—Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, 1986
GOAL OF SCIENCE:
“I personally feel that the teaching of modern science is corrosive of religious belief, and I’m all for that! One of the things that in fact has driven me in my life, is the feeling that this is one of the great social functions of science — to free people from superstition.” Lest there be any doubt about what Steven Weinberg here means by “superstition,” he adds, “this progression of priests and ministers and rabbis and ulamas and imams and bonzes and bodhisattvas will come to an end, that we’ll see no more of them. I hope that this is something to which science can contribute and if it is, then I think it may be the most important contribution that we can make.”[14] [Weinberg, a Nobel laureate physicist, is well-known as an ardent evolutionist. He has debated Phillip Johnson on a number of occasions on this topic.[15] Note that the demise of religion is for Weinberg the most important contribution of science.]
—Steven Weinberg, “Free People from Superstition,” 2000
NON-NEGOTIABILITY OF MATERIALISM:
“We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.... To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, than miracles may happen.”[16]
—Richard Lewontin, New York Review of Books, 1997
This last quote is particularly revealing. It, and others like it, prompted Phillip Johnson to introduce the “wedge metaphor,” the very metaphor about which Barbara Forrest is so exercised in her expert witness report. Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin, a well known proponent of evolutionary theory and collaborator with the late Stephen Jay Gould, is here counseling that science’s commitment to materialism is not merely a working hypothesis that helps science succeed. Rather, it must be held as an absolute, a priori principle, and thus regardless of scientific evidence. Question: what happens when this commitment to materialism conflicts with scientific evidence, as intelligent design indicates? It’s this dilemma that Johnson’s wedge metaphor highlights, forcing scientists to choose between two conceptions of science: science conceived as following the evidence wherever it leads and science conceived as following the evidence only where materialism allows.
Note that there has never been any hidden or conspiratorial agenda behind the wedge as Barbara Forrest suggests throughout her expert witness report. Johnson introduced the wedge metaphor in his 1997 book Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds (and thus a full year before the “wedge document” that Forrest cites appeared) and further reinforced it in his 2000 book The Wedge of Truth. Johnson and the Discovery Institute have always been entirely above board in their use of the term. To suggest, as Forrest does in the title of her book (Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design), that the wedge advertises itself as one thing but is really another is unfounded. The wedge is exactly what it has been advertised to be right along.
Over the last five years, I personally have become the special target of Barbara Forrest’s criticisms. Her book Creationism’s Trojan Horse cites me 130 times in the index (more than any other entry in the book). In April 2000, I organized a conference at Baylor University titled The Nature of Nature, which featured Nobel laureates Steven Weinberg and Christian de Duve as well as members of the National Academy of Sciences. Scholars on both sides of the ID question were invited to discuss their differences freely. Rather than allow this event to take place unimpeded, Forrest wrote a letter to derail the conference, using the same guilt-by-association approach that appears in her expert witness report (for her letter, see Appendix 1).
Where does that leave Barbara Forrest? Is she an unbiased, neutral commentator on this debate. She herself is on the board of directors of the New Orleans Secular Humanist Association.[17] Although secular humanists deny that secular humanism is a religion,[18] secular humanism is anything but religiously neutral. Indeed, secular humanism rejects “traditional views of God and divinity” and discounts “the illusions of immortality or reincarnation.”[19] Moreover, evolution is a necessary feature of secular humanism.[20] Given her secular humanist presuppositions, her opposition to intelligent design follows as a matter of course.
Nor does it lessen her bias to note that people can hold to evolution and be Christians or religious believers of other faiths. The question is not whether some religious believers have made their peace with evolution, or whether the rational course is for religious believers to make their peace with evolution, but whether some religious believers see evolution in its conventional, materialistic form as fundamentally incompatible with their religious beliefs. So long as there are people like this (and Gallup polls consistently indicate that about half the U.S. population falls in this category[21]), the teaching of evolution in high school biology curricula will not be religiously neutral. The only way, then, to effect religious neutrality is either to remove evolution from the biology curriculum (which clearly is not an option) or to offset it by also teaching intelligent design (which is an option).
Cornell’s Will Provine, a well-known evolutionist, in a synopsis for his 1998 Darwin Day address, acknowledges this dilemma and offers the following advice:
Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent.... Evolution is of interest to all. 50% of Americans believe humans were created by God.... Most other Americans who do believe in evolution think that God guided it. But a small group of powerful naturalist evolutionists have taken control of our schools. They want to stifle discussion of evolution in the classroom by everyone according to his or her beliefs. Discussion may then change minds. Evolutionists are their own worst enemies by preventing free discussion of all views in the biology classroom.[22]
Although Provine is right as far as he goes, the issue here goes beyond simply freeing up discussion in the high school biology classroom or counterbalancing the teaching of evolution. To be sure, no one on reflection takes seriously the claim that evolution is religiously neutral. At the same time, the teaching of intelligent design in the high school biology curriculum must not be viewed as deference to the religious preferences of certain special interests. This is not a matter of charity but of honesty and fairness. Intelligent design is a scientific theory and research program. It deserves a place at the table in the high school biology curriculum.
2.2 ID and Creationism
Barbara Forrest is meticulous at ferreting out older quotes by ID proponents in an effort to show that intelligent design is a repackaging of old-style creationism. Nonetheless, her use of these quotes is misleading. In particular, it does not do justice to ID as a developing discipline whose aim and ideas are, for lack of a better word, evolving. Here are three of her most damning quotes:
“Our first project is a rigorous scientific critique of the theory of prebiotic evolution. Next, we will develop a two-model high school biology textbook that will fairly and impartially give scientific evidences for creation side by side with evolution. (In this case, Scripture or even religious doctrine would violate the separation of church and state.) A credentialed author team and a consulting editorial board of scholars are being assembled for the project. The manuscript will be placed with a secular publisher for publication.” (quoted by Forrest on pp. 23-24)
—Foundation for Thought and Ethics planning document, ca. 1980 [FTE publishes Of Pandas and People]
“Although students generally hear only one side on the origins question, increasing numbers of scientists are now abandoning evolution for a new scientific version of creationism. Creationist scientists now number in the hundreds, possibly in the thousands, in the States and other countries.” (quoted by Forrest on p. 20)
—Affidavit by Dean Kenyon, co-author of Pandas, 1986
“This isn’t really, and never has been, a debate about science… It’s about religion and philosophy.” And “My colleagues and I speak of ‘theistic realism’ — or sometimes, ‘mere creation’ — as the defining concept of our movement. This means that we affirm that God is objectively real as Creator, and that the reality of God is tangibly recorded in evidence accessible to science, particularly in biology.” (quoted by Forrest on p. 31)
—Phillip Johnson, from two sources, 1996
The most recent of these quotes is about a decade old now. The oldest dates back twenty-five years. What do these quotes say about the state of intelligent design today? Has the field developed since then so that these quotes no longer adequately represent ID? Or has ID stood still and merely changed its terminology? This is an important question. Nor is the answer immediately evident inasmuch as the two seminal book that have defined the ID movement, namely, Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box (1996) and my own The Design Inference (1998), had not yet appeared and made an impact on the intellectual world when these statements were first written or uttered.
The most troubling aspect of these quotes for Barbara Forrest is their explicit reference to “creation.” What Forrest seems not to appreciate is that just like “evolution,” the term “creation” has several senses. For instance, the evolutionary literature will use the term evolution to mean everything from changes in gene frequencies to universal common ancestry to a purely materialistic process of organismal change driven by natural selection to an encompassing philosophy of life and the world.[23] Likewise, creation has several senses. Thus, it can mean everything from innovative design to a religious doctrine about God bringing the world into being to a particular interpretation of Genesis about how and when God brought the world into being.
Creation in the first, religiously neutral, sense can be found in both the engineering sciences and the biological sciences. Consider, for instance, the title for the following engineering text on technological evolution: Engineering of Creativity: Introduction to TRIZ Methodology of Inventive Problem Solving.[24] From the biological sciences, consider the following remark by Wallace Arthur, a geneticist at the University of Chicago and not an ID-proponent:
How can a theory of evolution that purports to explain how creatures with trillions of cells arose from unicellular beginnings lost in the mists of pre-Cambrian time be taken seriously if all it tells us is that differential rates of destruction can alter the genetic composition of populations? How are the new variants that natural selection spreads through populations created in the first place? Although the phrase “creation science” carries disreputable connotations because of its frequent use by some religious fundamentalists, we truly need some “creation science” (in the other sense of that phrase) as a major component of evolutionary theory.[25]
The references to “creation” and “creation science” in the first two passages quoted above by Barbara Forrest (i.e., the FTE planning document and the affidavit by Dean Kenyon) are not referring to a religious doctrine of creation in which God brings the world into being but rather to a generic intelligence capable of bringing about biological complexity. Precisely because these senses of the term creation are so distinct, “intelligent design” rather than “creationism” is now the preferred way to speak about a science of biology in which intelligence plays a key role. Forrest, to be sure, insists on referring to intelligent design as a form of creationism, but this is simply to discredit intelligent design, not to clarify the underlying issues.
Forrest’s quotes of Johnson fall in a different category. I
know Johnson personally, and he really does aspire to see our culture imbued
with a broadly theistic understanding of the world as a divine creation. The
question remains, however, what his aspirations have to do with ID as a
scientific theory and research program. Take his claim, “This isn’t really, and never has been, a debate about science… It’s
about religion and philosophy.” Johnson never claimed that there is no
scientific debate over evolution and intelligent design (see, for instance,
chapter 6 of his book The Wedge of Truth,
in which he summarizes what he takes to be the scientific case for ID and the
failure of evolutionists to mount an adequate scientific refutation). It’s just
that for him the scientific debate is a matter of details, and what’s really
driving this debate are political, religious, philosophical, and cultural
forces. The obsessive quality of Barbara Forrest’s writings on intelligent
design (evident in her expert witness report) suggests that Johnson is right on
this matter. Yet regardless of whether he is, nothing he has said or written contradicts
the claim that ID is science.
Forrest also faults Johnson for
associating ID with “theistic realism” or “mere creation” or the view that a
creator God has left tangible marks in the natural world. What Forrest fails to
note is that ID proponents are free to reject Johnson’s theistic realism and
still call themselves ID proponents. Moreover, Johnson has since embraced such
proponents of ID. Take David Berlinski. He is an ID proponent warmly embraced
by Johnson, and yet when charged with being a creationist, Berlinski has
remarked: “I have no creationist agenda whatsoever
and, beyond respecting the injunction to have a good time all the time, no
religious principles, either.”[26]
In her expert witness
report, Forrest gives the impression that what is now known as intelligent
design was set in stone decades ago and that the only thing to have changed
since is the vocabulary to describe it. But that is not the case. As with most
intellectual movements, intelligent design has gone through a continual process
of development and refinement, clarifying its scientific critique of
conventional evolutionary theory, building a positive scientific alternative,
and separating off interpretations of ID’s cultural and religious significance.
Johnson made his remarks in 1996. Berlinski, who provides a counterexample to
Johnson’s “theistic realism,” did not enter the ID movement until November of
1996, when he spoke at the Mere Creation
conference at Biola University.[27] Since then, Johnson has placed less and less
emphasis on “theistic realism” (it does not even get an index entry in his 2000
book The Wedge of Truth). Also since
then, ID has become a discipline in its own right whose price of admission is
not the acceptance of any religious doctrine but the rejection of
methodological materialism.
2.3 Methodological Materialism
At the start of her expert
witness report, Barbara Forrest identifies a normative principle for science
known as methodological naturalism or methodological materialism. According to
her, this is a “scientific procedural protocol of seeking only natural
explanations of natural phenomena.” She then adds, “ID’s rejection of
naturalism in any form [and thus as a methodological principle for science]
entails its appeal to the only alternative, supernaturalism, as a putatively
scientific explanation for natural phenomena. This makes ID a religious belief”
(Forrest, p. 1) Forrest also quotes an article of mine from 1992 in which I
refer to “supernatural design.” (Forrest, p. 35)
The impression Forrest leaves
is that whereas conventional evolutionary theory is engaged in the hard work of
real science, intelligent design appeals to the supernatural and thus gives up
on science, substituting magic for as she puts it “natural explanations.” But
what are “natural explanations”? Forrest doesn’t say. Indeed, what constitutes
nature remains very much an open question. If one reviews the ID literature,
one finds that early on there were quite a few references to “the supernatural,”
but that by 2000 (especially with Baylor’s Nature of Nature conference, which I
helped organize), references to the supernatural largely disappear. The reason
for this is that the very term “supernatural” concedes to materialists like
Barbara Forrest precisely the point at issue, namely, what is nature like and
what are the causal powers by which nature operates.
Forrest wants to say that
nature operates only by natural causes and is explained scientifically only
through natural explanations. But what does Forrest mean by nature? In my
expert witness report, I briefly criticized methodological materialism. There I
cited Eugenie Scott as follows:
Most scientists today require that science be carried out according to the rule of methodological materialism: to explain the natural world scientifically, scientists must restrict themselves only to material causes (to matter, energy, and their interaction). There is a practical reason for this restriction: it works. By continuing to seek natural explanations for how the world works, we have been able to find them. If supernatural explanations are allowed, they will discourage—or at least delay—the discovery of natural explanations, and we will understand less about the universe.[28]
In response, I noted in my
expert witness report the following:
There are two problems with this [Eugenie Scott’s] statement. First, if methodological materialism is merely a working hypothesis that scientists employ because “it works,” then scientists are free to discard it when it no longer works. Design theorists contend that for adequately explaining biological complexity, methodological materialism fails and rightly needs to be discarded. Second, and more significantly, in defining science as the search for natural explanations, Scott presupposes precisely what must be demonstrated. If, by natural explanations, Scott simply means explanations that explain what is happening in nature, there would be no problem, and intelligent design would constitute a perfectly good natural explanation of biological complexity. But that is not what she means.
By natural explanations, Scott means explanations that resort only to material causes—as she puts it, to “matter, energy, and their interaction.” But that is precisely the point at issue, namely, whether nature operates exclusively by such causes. If nature contains a richer set of causes than purely material causes, then intelligent design is a live possibility and methodological materialism will misread physical reality. Note, also, that to contrast natural explanations with supernatural explanations further obscures this crucial point. Supernatural explanations typically denote explanations that invoke miracles and cannot be understood scientifically. But explanations that call upon intelligent causes require no miracles and give no evidence of being reducible to Scott’s trio of “matter, energy, and their interaction.” Indeed, design theorists argue that intelligent causation is perfectly natural provided that nature is understood aright.
Because so much of this
debate over intelligent design hinges on the nature of nature, I need to expand
on these remarks. Nature, as conceived by Scott, Forrest, and the other expert
witnesses opposed to ID, consists of material entities ruled by fixed laws of
interaction, often referred to as “natural laws.” These laws can be
deterministic or nondeterministic, which is why some scientists refer to nature
as being governed by “chance and necessity.”[29] Obviously, these laws of interaction rule out any
form of intelligent agency acting real-time within nature. They operate autonomously
and automatically: given certain material entities with certain energetic
properties in certain spatio-temporal relationships, these entities will behave
in certain prescribed ways.
An inescapable question now
arises: How do we know that nature is in fact a set of material entities ruled
by fixed laws of interaction? In particular, how do we know that everything
that happens in nature can be accounted for in terms of antecedent material
conditions and the processes that act on them characterized by these laws of
interaction? Once the question is posed this way, it becomes an open question
whether nature comprises a set of material entities ruled by fixed laws of
interaction. In fact, it becomes a live possibility that nature, so conceived,
is radically incomplete. In my book No
Free Lunch I summarize what’s at issue here as follows:
In arguing that naturalistic
explanations are incomplete or, equivalently, that natural causes cannot
account for all the features of the natural world, I am placing natural causes
in contradistinction to intelligent causes. The scientific community has itself
drawn this distinction in its use of these twin categories of causation. Thus,
in the quote earlier by Francisco Ayala, “Darwin’s greatest accomplishment
[was] to show that the directive organization of living beings can be explained
as the result of a natural process, natural selection, without any need to
resort to a Creator or other external agent.” Natural causes, as the scientific
community understands them, are causes that operate according to deterministic
and nondeterministic laws and that can be characterized in terms of chance,
necessity, or their combination (cf. Jacques Monod’s Chance and Necessity). To be sure, if one is more liberal about
what one means by natural causes and includes among natural causes telic
processes that are not reducible to chance and necessity (as the ancient Stoics
did by endowing nature with immanent teleology), then my claim that natural
causes are incomplete dissolves. But that is not how the scientific community
by and large understands natural causes.[30]
The point to appreciate here
is that Forrest and her fellow expert witnesses, in assuming methodological
materialism, have assumed precisely the point at issue. Specifically, to say,
as Forrest does, that science is the search for natural explanations of natural
phenomena is to presuppose that such explanations exist for all natural phenomena. But how is this
claim to be justified? Rather than justify it, Forrest begs the question. To
see that Forrest has indeed made a question-begging assumption here, consider
the following analogy drawn from the game of chess. In chess, there are
initially thirty-two pieces arranged on an eight-by-eight chessboard as
follows:
Moreover, chess operates by
certain fixed rules. For instance, bishops move diagonally, pawns only move
forward and only take one square diagonally, etc. In this analogy, the chess
pieces in their initial configuration correspond to the material entities that
for Forrest constitute nature and the rules of chess correspond to the laws of
interaction that for Forrest govern nature.
Given the initial position
of chess pieces and the rules of the game, we can ask whether the following
position is possible:
It turns out that it is not.
There is no way to get from the first position to the second by the rules of
chess.
So too, intelligent design purports
to show that there exist configurations of material entities (e.g., bacterial
flagella, protein synthesis mechanisms, and complex organ systems) that cannot
be adequately explained in terms of antecedent material conditions together
with processes characterized by fixed laws that act on them. Granted, chess constitutes
a toy example whereas the biological examples ID theorists investigate are far
more complicated. Moreover, whereas chess operates according to precise
mathematical rules, the laws of interaction associated with material entities
are probabilistic, so the obstacles to producing complex biological
configurations of material entities are not logical impossibilities but
empirical improbabilities. But the point of the analogy still holds. Whenever
you have a theory about process — how one state is supposed to progress into
another — it is perfectly legitimate to ask whether the process in question is
capable of accounting for the final state in terms of the initial state.
It follows that the charge
of supernaturalism against intelligent design cannot be sustained. Indeed, to
say that rejecting naturalism entails accepting supernaturalism holds only if
nature is defined as a closed system of material entities ruled by unbroken
laws of material interaction. But, as we have just seen, this begs the
question. In his expert witness report, Robert Pennock asks: “If you call a
tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?” Pennock rightly answers, “Four; calling a tail a let doesn’t make
it one.” (Pennock, p. 24) Likewise, defining nature as a closed system of
material entities operating by fixed laws of interaction doesn’t make it so.
Nature is what nature is, and prescribing methodological materialism as a
normative principle for science (as Forrest and the other expert witnesses do)
does nothing to change that. ID theorists argue that methodological materialism
fundamentally distorts our understanding of nature. For the purposes of this
case, the crucial thing is not whether they are right but whether they might be
right. Given that they might be right, methodological materialism cannot be taken
as a defining feature of science, much less should it be held dogmatically. To
make methodological materialism a defining feature of science commits the
premodern sin of forcing nature into a priori categories rather than allowing
nature to speak for itself.
To sum up, Forrest and her fellow expert witnesses present us with a false dilemma: either science must be limited to “natural explanations” (taken in a highly tendentious sense) or it must embrace “supernatural explanations,” by which she means magic. But there is a third possibility: neither materialism nor magic but mind. ID theorists are not willing to concede the materialist claim that a designing intelligence (mind) interacting with matter is “supernatural.” Indeed, investigations by ID theorists are beginning to demonstrate that this interaction is perfectly natural — that nature cannot be properly understood apart from the activity of a designing intelligence.
2.4 ID’s Contribution to Science
Critics of intelligent design like Barbara Forrest have adopted a zero-concession policy toward intelligent design. According to this policy, absolutely nothing is to be conceded to intelligent design on the scientific front. Indeed, to do otherwise is to allow that intelligent design might have something going for it scientifically, in which case its legitimacy in the public school biology curriculum would be immediate. To block this possibility, Forrest must assert that intelligent design has contributed zero to science. As she puts it (and she makes identical claims throughout her report): “[intelligent design’s] effect on science is nil” (Forrest, p. 30).
Let’s examine this charge and how Forrest attempts to substantiate it. One way is by quoting design theorists and attributing to them the admission that ID has contributed nothing to science. Thus, for instance, on page 26 of her report, she quotes my article “Becoming a Disciplined Science: Prospects, Pitfalls, and Reality Check for ID.” In that article I wrote: “Because of ID’s outstanding success at gaining a cultural hearing, the scientific research part of ID is now lagging behind.”[31] Forrest quotes this statement and then interprets it as follows: “Dembski has admitted that the ID movement has produced no science on its own” (Forrest, p. 26). This is wishful thinking on her part. I’ve never made any such admission. In the passage Forrest quotes, I was simply stating that as both a cultural and a scientific movement, intelligent design was progressing faster on the cultural than on the scientific front. But this is a far cry from denying that ID is progressing scientifically, much less conceding ID has made no contribution to science. ID was making scientific progress back in 2002 when I wrote these words, and its scientific progress has accelerated since then.
In this same vein, Forrest quotes Paul Nelson as saying “Easily the biggest challenge facing the ID community is to develop a full-fledged theory of biological design. We don’t have such a theory right now, and that’s a problem” (Forrest, p. 48). Forrest takes this as a grand admission that ID is scientifically deficient. But, in fact, Nelson’s statement reflects a profound malaise within the scientific community about the absence of a general theory of biological form. Scientific theories vary in their scope and power. As a theory of design detection and technological evolution, intelligent design is now well in hand. But as a general theory of biological form, ID has a long way to go. Intelligent design, however, is hardly alone in this regard. Consider the following admissions about the lack of a general theory of biological form by mainstream biologists and scientists:
“The strange thing about the theory of evolution is that everyone thinks he understands it. But we do not.”[32] —Stuart Kauffman, 2003
“Biology still lacks a theory of organization.... The need for a conceptual framework for the study of organization lies at the heart of unsolved problems in both ontogeny and phylogeny.”[33] —Mary West-Eberhard, 2003
“We do not claim that the fundamental laws of physics (and thus of chemistry) do not hold in biology; they, of course, do. But we do claim that their conceptual frame is too narrow. Rather we have to find new concepts that transcend the purely microscopic descriptions of systems.”[34] —Kelso & Haken, 1995
“We do not even know what biology is about, in the same sense that we know what mechanics is about, or what optics is about, or what thermodynamics is about. We thus do not know the scope of the domain of biology, for it has as yet no objectively definable bounds. In place of these, we have only a tacit consensus.”[35] —Robert Rosen, 1991
“S’il est vrai que le darwinisme est le seul lieu théorique de la biologie, c’est qu’en effect il est le seul à introduire un virtuel, l’ensemble des évolutions possibles d’une espèce en un temps et en lieu donnés. Mais ce virtuel est incontrôlé, on ne peut rien en dire.”[36]
[“If it’s true that Darwinism alone constitutes the theoretical portion of biology, that’s is because it alone introduces a virtual reality, namely, the collection of all the possible evolutions of a species in a given time and place. But this virtual reality is uncontrolled; one can say nothing about it.”] — René Thom, 1990
“The delusion of the finished [evolutionary]
synthesis places restrictions on freedom of thought of which its believers are
unaware. Selectionists [i.e., those who
think that natural selection is the principal mechanism in evolution] point to
the internal debates as evidence of free discussion, but the freedom is bounded
by the dead hand of Darwin.”[37]
—Robert Reid, 1985
Another way Forrest attempts to substantiate the charge that ID has contributed nothing to science is by doing database searches of scientific journals: “In order to document the absence of articles using ID as a biological theory in peer-reviewed, scientific journals, I searched scientific databases such as Medline, Zoological Record, etc.” (Forrest, p. 11). “There are no peer-reviewed ID articles in which ID is used as a biological theory in mainstream scientific databases such as Medline” (Forrest, p. 45).
An obvious question now arises: How did Forrest conduct her search? What key words and key phrases did she punch into her search engines? She doesn’t say. Suppose she was punching in “intelligent design.” In that case, it is unlikely she would turn up very much in the scientific literature. The reason for this, however, would not be because intelligent design is not represented the scientific literature. New scientific theories tend to face considerable opposition when they are first proposed (Forrest’s own opposition is a case in point). As Thomas Kuhn, a well-known historian of science, noted in the case of Nobel laureate Max Planck:
Max Planck, surveying his own career in his Scientific Autobiography, sadly remarked that “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.[38]
There’s a good sociological reason for this. Machiavelli put it this way:
It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly for fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favor; and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it.
— Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1519), The Prince, ch. 6
As is evident from the expert witness reports, Barbara Forrest and her fellow witnesses are defending an old order and reluctant to concede anything to the new order.
Despite Forrest’s failure to find intelligent design fruitfully employed in the scientific literature, a more careful search of that literature reveals that intelligent design is making a scientific impact. The way to see this is to focus not on whether scientists attach the label “intelligent design” to their work, but on what they are actually saying and what ideas they are engaging. At the Design and Its Critics conference at Concordia University in Mequon Wisconsin (June 2000), Kenneth Miller took much the same line as Barbara Forrest in her expert witness report by claiming that database searches of the scientific literature revealed that no one was engaging Michael Behe’s concept of irreducible complexity. But Miller was mistaken: several months earlier Randy Thornhill and David Ussery had published an article in the Journal of Theoretical Biology devoted entirely to analyzing the concept of irreducible complexity.[39]
Interest in and discussion of intelligent design in the scientific literature is growing. Part of the reason Forrest doesn’t see this is that she is looking in the wrong places. For instance, there is now growing interest in the bioengineering community regarding intelligent design, especially in the subdisciplines of bioinformatics, biocomputing, and biom