http://apologeticspress.org/APContent.aspx?category=12&article=209
The Intelligent Design Movement [Part II]
| by |
Trevor Major, M.Sc., M.A. |
[
EDITOR’S NOTE: Part I of this two-part series appeared in the
October issue. Part II follows below and continues, without introductory comments, where the first article ended.]
“Intelligent Design”
William A. Dembski, one of the leading figures in the intelligent
design movement, uses the term “design” to denote (1999, p. 127):
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the scientific theory that distinguishes intelligent agency from natural causes;
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what it is about intelligently produced objects that enables us to
tell that they are intelligently produced and not simply the result of
natural causes; and
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intelligent agency itself.
All these uses, you will notice, make some reference to intelligence.
Why should intelligence provide the logical foil to nature? Recall our
earlier discussion on the definition of “natural.” One way to define
this term is to say that it denotes something that is not artificial. A
natural thing is the product of nature, whereas an artifact is the
product of design. An artifact is a contrivance; it results from a
decision to use skills or learned knowledge. Nature cannot learn, or
make decisions. Moreover, only agents can have the intention to act upon
something else. Nature is acted upon; it cannot have intentions. Only
agents can have a purpose—a reason for acting. To be able to reason is a
mark of intelligence. Recall also that the natural excludes minds and
intelligences. Dembski emphasizes this point by talking repeatedly of
intelligent agency and
intelligent design.
Where we see evidence of design, we look for an agent. The blob of clay
that little Johnny fashioned in art class is an artifact, but so is a
jet airplane or a beaver’s dam. Each of these objects reflects different
levels of skill, but that is not the issue. Each of these objects was
made from natural things, but that is not the issue either. Even
something like, say, polyester—that wonder of manmade
materials—ultimately must come from something in this world. The real
question is this: Is there anything about Johnny’s masterpiece that
would distinguish it from any other object that has not received the
purposeful attentions of an intelligent agent?
What if we cannot detect signs of intelligent design, even when we know
that Johnny made his piece of art in school today? This false negative
is not as much of a concern as a false positive (see Dembski, 1999, pp.
139-144). In Johnny’s case, we have background knowledge of his artistic
endeavors. We might find a similar blob of clay on another occasion and
wonder if Johnny has been busy again, but we might not know one way or
the other. When we are actually on the lookout for design, and dump an
artifact in the box marked “naturally caused,” we then have reached a
false, negative conclusion about that object. In fact, for all we know
Johnny is at the vanguard of a new movement in ceramics that seeks, on
purpose, to create objects indistinguishable from nature. An
intelligent, designing mind can do that, if it wants to.
However, if we find an object that appears to show signs of
intelligence and we put it in the box marked “designed,” then we might
have reached a false positive. The concern on the part of epistemic
naturalists is that theists are partial to such false positives—viz.,
they have an almost uncontrollable urge to credit God with the design of
undesigned things. As I noted earlier, this view is based on bad
theology. And besides, God is not the automatic conclusion. All we have
to do is determine whether the cause is intelligent. Nonetheless,
epistemic naturalists have raised the avoidance of false positives to a
virtue. This is why Richard Dawkins can admit that living things have
the
appearance of being designed, while expressing confidence—given his decision to eliminate intelligent causes
a priori—that none of these things will end up in the wrong box.
Inferring Design
Dembski’s contribution is to address this fear of false positives by
proposing a three-stage explanatory filter. He provides a rigorous proof
in his technical monograph,
The Design Inference (1998). A more accessible treatment of the subject can be found in his book,
Intelligent Design (1999), to which I have referred previously.
Basically (and I emphasize that word so as not to underestimate
the very precise formulation that Dembski has offered in his writings),
there are three questions to ask of anything before we can say it is the
product of necessity, chance, or design (Dembski, 1999, pp. 127-133).
First, is it
contingent? In other words, is it the case that the event
had to happen, or that the object
had
to appear? If so, then it is necessary, not contingent. For example,
when sodium and chloride ions are dissolved in water, and the water
evaporates, salt crystals remain behind. This process follows a regular,
law-like behavior. No matter how many times we repeat this experiment,
the ingredients assemble themselves into tiny, cubic structures. An
understanding of the underlying physics establishes the fact that they
must form these crystals, which means they meet the criteria for
necessity, not design. Something that is designed—that is the result of
an agent making a decision—is contingent.
Second, is the object or event
complex? The idea here is to trap
any object that appears to be contingent, but, in fact, could be
produced by chance. Basically (there’s that word again), a simple object
or a short series of events has a high probability of producing
something that might appear to be the product of design. For instance,
if we were to paint the letters of the alphabet on the backs of house
flies, we might observe that sometimes, when they alighted on the wall
next to each other, the sequence of letters formed recognizable English
words. On one occasion, for instance, we might observe the sequence “
NO.”
However, there is a high probability that two letters, when set next to
each other, will form a word. So while there is nothing necessary about
this arrangement, it is not sufficiently complex to pass any further
through the explanatory filter.
Which brings us to the third and final question: Is the object or event
specified?
For instance, the guides who lead cave tours frequently draw visitors’
attention to stalagmites, stalactites, and other natural formations that
appear to represent faces, coastlines, animals, or other recognizable
objects. True, this often involves a healthy imagination, and we
entertain few doubts that these shapes are the product of purely natural
causes—namely, the random accumulation of calcite deposits. But we
cannot afford to be too hasty. What if we were to wander into a cave and
find consecutive shapes showing a reasonable likeness of the first
forty American presidents arranged in chronological order? It is
difficult indeed to imagine what law-like behavior could result in such a
phenomenon. Additionally, forty shapes might seem sufficiently complex
because there are many different ways to arrange a sequence of this
length. But is it “specified”? By this, Dembski means that the sequence
exhibits a suitable pattern, which, in this particular example, would be
the presidents arranged in chronological order. If the images were
somewhat vague, and the Washington-looking rock came after the
Reagan-looking rock, we might have reason to believe that our
enthusiastic tour guide could have made this sequence of shapes fit
practically
any pattern. If so, we would have a case of
ad hoc fabrication, not a pattern showing proper specification.
In addition, the fact that no one predicted that this pattern was going
to appear before the sequence was discovered does not matter. What does
matter is that the historical order of presidents is independent of, or
detachable from, the pattern we can see on the cave wall. For instance,
we might discover (in regard to the cave wall pattern) that the
seemingly random dripping of mineral-rich waters actually is being
controlled by something above ground, which just happens to be the city
of Washington,
D.C. If so, then there might be no detachability, and thus no inference to design.
A couple of comments are in order. Note that the nature of the designer
is not a concern. Whether the presidential display is the work of a
high-school art class, or some reclusive, strange history buff with a
penchant for sculpting limestone caves, does not matter. The explanatory
filter works only to determine whether a designer is the
most likely cause.
Further, if design is suspected in nature, there is no appeal to
miracles, but only to what the evidence may or may not suggest about an
intelligent agency.
Note, also, that the explanatory filter can produce false negatives by
failing to recognize objects, such as Johnny’s clay figurine, that were
the product of intelligent agency. At the same time, it is unlikely,
although not impossible, to arrive at a false positive—i.e., to allow
something through the sieve that was, in fact, produced by wholly
natural causes. Even so, there is nothing to stop the test being run
again when new evidence comes to light. Something that once was thought
to be designed might, on further examination, turn out to be the product
of natural causes.
Intuitively, we know that design cannot be a concept that is foreign to
science because there are disciplines of a scientific nature that seek
to tease apart natural causes from intelligent agency. Dembski is not
proposing a change in the way that these scientists work. All he has
done is to formalize the process that they (and many of us) already use,
and to show that the process can detect design in a reliable fashion.
One such discipline is forensic science. A typical task of forensic
investigators is to determine the cause of death: Was it natural or
suspicious? Should they be looking for a person—an agent—who caused this
death? Another science is archaeology, which on a regular basis must
distinguish genuine artifacts from stones, sticks, and other items that
so often clutter excavation sites. One of the best-known examples of
design detection is
SETI (the Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence). The late Carl Sagan promoted this
ongoing research program and featured it in his novel,
Contact.
This fictional work, which became a major motion picture starring
actress Jodie Foster, provides a great angle on Dembski’s explanatory
filter. The goal of the
SETI program is to detect
the activity of intelligent beings among the avalanche of radio noise
arriving from outer space. The very existence of
SETI
proves that even self-confessed materialists (like Sagan) have
well-honed intuitions when it comes to the detection of intelligent
agency. All of these disciplines—forensic science, archaeology, and
SETI—dispel the notion that science, by definition, cannot look for intelligent causes.
Updating Paley
Still, the objection is going to be this: We know there are people, but
the existence of God is controversial. As Ernest Nagel has argued, “We
have never run across a watch which has not been deliberately made by
someone” (1992, p. 213). In other words, we know that there is a
watchmaker; we do not know that there is a World Maker. But this begs
the question, “Is there a World Maker?” There is no obvious way to get
from “We don’t know” to “It cannot be.”
The skeptics likely will respond, “Yes, but there are plenty of reasons
to deny that nature is the product of an intelligent cause.” Their
favorite approach, at least going as far back as David Hume (and
progressing forward to Charles Darwin, Stephen Jay Gould, et al.), is to
point out the imperfections of nature. But this objection misses the
mark entirely. If a watch does not keep time, then is it any less the
product of an intelligent designer? The only way around this response is
to say that, if there were a Creator-God, He must be pretty inept. Of
course, this concedes that a Creator is at least a possibility. As for
His being inept, that is another matter. How can we know that the
less-than-perfect or “suboptimal” organ, system, or structure has not
become so through time? My watch may be losing time now, but it might
have run perfectly well before I dunked it in the ocean. And second,
suboptimality is in the eye of the beholder. For instance, Gould is
famous for talking about what he perceives to be the panda’s “clumsy”
pseudothumb but, in fact, this particular appendage is an efficient tool
for holding bamboo shoots and stripping off leaves (see Thompson,
1991).
How does talk about intelligent design differ from William Paley’s
famous watchmaker argument? In its essential features, very little. As
you may remember, Paley told the story of a man who found a stone and
concluded rightly that it was a product of nature. Then this man found a
watch and concluded (also rightly) that it was the product of a
designer—a watchmaker. To hear the skeptics tell it, Paley’s arguments
were crushed historically between Hume’s refutation
in principle and Darwin’s refutation
in fact.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. Ironically, Paley’s argument
relied on Hume’s principle of “uniform experience” to argue that
wherever we see the “marks of contrivance, we are led for its cause to
an
intelligent author” (1802, p. 232, emp. in orig.). As for both
Hume and Darwin, Paley argued that we do not need perfection, nor a
clear understanding of function, to see evidence of design.
If we are going to de-emphasize Paley, it is on three grounds (Behe,
1996, pp. 211-216). The first is a matter of strategy. People have heard
Paley put down so much that it is hard to get past centuries of
prejudice. Second, although Paley used the best science available, some
of his examples have not withstood the test of time (and on occasion he
did tend toward overstatement of his case). Paley’s arguments need to be
recast in the light of contemporary science and more judicious
examples.
Third, when Paley used a watch as an analogy, he would describe a
system of interacting components. Take away one wheel, one cog, or one
gear, and the whole system would cease to function. Yet the best
biological
examples used by Paley, and the popular examples we tend to use today,
are at the level of gross anatomy. In a way, these arguments can sound
very compelling. The vertebrate eye, for example, has a number of
discrete components: the lens, retina, muscles, pupil, and optic nerve.
If any one of these parts is missing or damaged, vision is not possible.
The standard response since Darwin is to suppose that the eye could
have been built component by component. It is easier for nature to take
small steps, creating each part individually, than to take a giant leap
creating an integrated whole. Richard Dawkins argued along these lines
in his book,
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996). All we need,
according to this argument, is for the right components to come together
at the right place and at the right time. The evolutionist presses his
point with an analogy that goes something like this: begin with an
English word, replace some of the letters and, just by chance, another
English word can be reached after a number of steps. The following is a
simple example:
BELIEVE
ELIEVE
EVLIEVE
EVLIVE
EVOLIVE
EVOLVE
By analogy, the argument goes, biology can produce something new and functional via the step-wise rearrangement of
DNA
bases, amino acids, or the components of an anatomical system. Dawkins
suspects that nature “seems” designed because all we are seeing is the
end product.
There are several problems with this analogy. First, there is a kind of
“cheating” going on. The Dawkins fan who created the word puzzle above
had a target, or goal, in mind. But, as Dawkins himself insists,
evolution is blind; it is completely nonpurposive and undesigned. Nature
has no “mind” in which it can visualize and formulate goals.
Evolution’s equivalent to the Dawkins-like game would have Nature
peeking through a tear in its blindfold. This is the same mistake Darwin
made in his analogy from artificial selection. By definition, the
farmer or agricultural researcher has a goal in mind, whether it be
drought-resistant wheat or higher milk fat production.
Incidentally, evolutionists draw attention to the use of this technique
in fields such as chemical engineering, software programs, and
origin-of-life experiments. In each case, the idea is to generate a huge
number of variations and then, along the way, test to see which one
best meets the goals laid out at the beginning of the experiment. Often,
such techniques are called “Darwinian” or “evolutionary.” That they
work in the “real world” of business and technology is supposed to
legitimize evolution as a useful endeavor and a pervasive feature of our
world. But in all of these examples, there is a clear goal in mind. As
long as there is a goal, we are not dealing with long-term, large-scale
evolution as Darwin envisioned it. This is merely another version of the
shell game that I mentioned in Part I of this series.
Second, and more significantly, you will notice that none of the
intermediate words in this game has any meaning. The words “believe” and
“evolve” are known to play a role in our language. But the intervening
words are nonsense; they serve no purpose whatsoever in our language.
Imagine, then, that the word “believe” corresponds to a biological
system of some kind, and that the life of an organism depends on
possessing one of these
BELIEVEs. If it lost the
B part, and was left with an
ELIEVE, the system would break down, and the organism would die. Death, to put it bluntly, is not a good survival mechanism.
Behe’s counter-response to the evolutionists is to apply Paley’s watch
analogy to more suitable biological examples. The components should not
be discrete, nor self-contained, but should be essential to the
functioning of the system. In this way, there are no “steps” to the
functionality we see here and now; the system must appear—suddenly—in
its entirety.
Black Boxes
To make the analogy stronger, Behe urges that creationists no longer
employ arguments using gross anatomy. Although he believes it is
unlikely that nature assembled the components of vertebrate vision, for
instance, he thinks that evolutionist still could make a plausible,
step-wise argument. Or, consider the panda’s pseudothumb. Ideally, we
want to suggest that this appendage certainly is well designed. But,
Behe argues, we cannot make a case for design unless we show that the
parts could not have come together by, say, fortuitous mutations.
At first glance, such an argument might seem to concede too much.
However, Behe is not suggesting that the panda’s pseudothumb came about
accidentally; rather, he is arguing only that it remains to be shown
that it did, or did not, come together accidentally. So Darwinists and
design theorists are in the same boat until all the evidence is in. In
Behe-speak, the various parts that compose the panda’s “thumb” might
turn out to be a collection of discrete systems—what he refers to as
“black boxes” (a term borrowed from engineers). For instance, I can
install a hard drive in my computer without having to coat any disks,
solder any wires, or write any programs. As far as I am concerned, my
hard drive is just one black box that can be hooked up to a number of
other black boxes that make up my computer.
What we are looking for instead, Behe argues, is not just complex arrangement of parts, but
irreducible
complexity. We want to dig down deep enough until we find no more black
boxes. With sufficient knowledge, for instance, I could analyze my hard
drive and see, perhaps, that there were no further subsystems. I might
learn that it could not work without the platters, the heads, or the
on-board controller. It does not matter whether the case is made of
aluminum or gold, or whether there are six platters or only one. Just
like with Paley’s watch, all of the interacting parts must be present
for the system to function properly.
When you stop to think about it, creationists need that “out.” We need
to be able to say that, on the gross anatomical level, certain modified
or novel structures can be the result of random mutations, and that
natural selection could preserve those mutations that are not harmful to
the organism. For instance, the Bactrian camel has two humps, while the
Arabian camel has only one. Clearly, a structure (a second hump)
appears on the one camel that does not appear on the other. But why?
Perhaps God created each species separately, or perhaps nature has
produced a variation on a theme. To deny the second option outright is
to say, in effect, that species are fixed (a concept that is difficult,
if not impossible, to defend; see Major, 1993). What we want to allow is
that variation
is possible, and that new species
can arise, but that the
amount
of variation (i.e., microevolution) is limited unless we can add new
information. Perhaps the second hump of the Bactrian camel, considered
structurally, is no different from its first hump, and thus adds no more
information. So, yes, God could have created these two camel species,
but it also is possible that the second hump is nothing more than a
cobbling together of existing structures by mutation (or, conversely, is
the end result of a mutation that reduced the original number of
humps).
However, to suggest that camels’ humps and pandas’ “thumbs” have
resulted from the cobbling together of black boxes does not prove
macroevolution. To suggest that it does is to make the same mistake as
Darwin, Dawkins, and others who would “explain” the eye by putting
together a number of discrete components. But this sidesteps the
question of how the components came together to make all those black
boxes in the first place.
For Behe, the crucial arguments about irreducible complexity will take
place at the level of biochemistry—an area of science that was not
available to either Paley or Darwin. In the opening pages of his book,
Dr. Behe talks about the biochemistry of vision within the retina. We
now know, he says, that the retina is at the level of a black box, which
means the biochemistry of vision is irreducibly complex. Take out one
step at the biochemical level, and vision is not possible. You cannot
cobble these parts together; all the components have to be present and
interacting at once in order for the system to work. That is something
that neo-Darwinian evolution is ill-equipped to explain.
Behe’s search for irreducible complexity is the equivalent of Dembski’s
specification-complexity criterion described earlier. His efforts to
rule out random mutations, for instance, parallel Dembski’s discussion
of chance and complexity. This work is an example of putting intelligent
design into practice as a research program (Dembski, 1999, p. 228).
Similar efforts within the
ID movement seek to move beyond the conceptual issues addressed by Johnson, Dembski, and others (see Johnson, 2000, pp. 14-15).
CONCLUSION
The purpose of this review has been to highlight the positive aspects
of the intelligent design movement. Admittedly, there are some
off-putting aspects as well. All I can do at this point is encourage
readers to exercise due regard, as they should with any human author.
Allow me to relate a personal experience with the
ID
movement. When I first heard Phillip Johnson make his pitch for
intelligent design at the International Conference on Creationism in
1994, I came away with severe misgivings. At different times during his
speech (e.g., when he was attacking naturalism), I found myself in
hearty agreement. At other times, I wondered what on Earth he was doing
there. Here he was, at the premier meeting of young-Earth creationists,
telling his listeners that they were wasting their time on the
age-of-the-Earth issue. It led to splintering and factionalism within
the religious community, he said, and is not relevant to the dominant
culture. He explained his personal decision to remove the debate from
the Bible-science context or, more specifically, any defense of the
Genesis account. Here is my own transcript of this point from the speech
he gave that night:
And so I thought it was tremendously important to focus on the
scientific and philosophical issues, and so I declared at the beginning
that I would not discuss the biblical account at all, or have anything
to say about it, and to completely put behind any question about matters
such as the age of the earth....my approach will be just simply to take
for granted as an assumption of whatever the authorities wanted to say
on that point.
Johnson altered his view slightly when a young-Earth creationist friend
reminded him that those same authorities were the ones who dogmatically
asserted that materialistic evolution is a “fact.” Since then, he has
softened his stance toward young-Earth creationists to the point that he
resists attempts to marginalize this group within the
ID
camp. Anyone who has challenged the suggestion of the alleged
factuality of evolution has been shunned by the gatekeepers of
scientific orthodoxy. It would be ironic, to say the least, if the same
kind of treatment then were extended by some within the
ID
movement to those (i.e., young-Earth creationists) who definitely are
allies of that movement. Indeed, Johnson now envisions a Big Tent
approach in which all the opponents of epistemic naturalism can gather,
regardless of whether they are young-Earth or old-Earth creationists.
And as strange as it may sound at first, Johnson even would welcome
nontheists, as long as they admitted to being skeptical of epistemic
naturalism.
Our task is to separate the wheat from the chaff—to use the best that the
ID
movement has to offer, while at the same time retaining an innate
respect for the Bible’s specific teachings regarding the age of the
Earth and related matters. There is much to be gained by tapping into
arguments that are able to refine the concept of inherent design—a
concept that, after all, is a core belief of young-Earth creationism.
There also is a place for framing the debate in terms of Intelligent
Design vs. Naturalism. It represents a way to deal with evolution in
various contexts, such as public schools, where any mention of God or
the Bible closes the door to any further discussion. Most important,
perhaps, it is a way to diagnose and teach our brethren who have adopted
epistemic naturalism, and yet do not comprehend or understand the
tensions they have created within their own faith.
REFERENCES
Behe, Michael J. (1996),
Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: The Free Press).
Dawkins, Richard (1996),
Climbing Mount Improbable (New York: W.W. Norton).
Dembski, William A. (1998),
The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities (New York: Cambridge University Press).
Dembski, William A. (1999),
Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press).
Johnson, Phillip E. (2000),
The Wedge of Truth (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press).
Major, Trevor (1993), “Variation Within Limits,”
Reason & Revelation, 13:25-30, March.
Nagel, Ernest (1992), “Philosophical Concepts of Atheism,”
To Believe or Not to Believe, ed. E.D. Klemke (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, reprinted from
Basic Beliefs, 1959), pp. 209-222.
Paley, William (1802),
Natural Theology (Boston, MA: Gould, Kendall & Lincoln, 1850 edition).
Thompson, Bert (1991), “
Evolution’s ‘New’ Argument—Suboptimality,”
Reason & Revelation, 11:41-44, November.
