Intelligent Design as Apologetic Argument:
Advancing the Discussion Beyond Darwin’s Black Box
By Frank Chan, Ph.D., and Denny Lee, Ph.D.
Evangelicals who have been following the creation-evolution debate know that in 1987 the Supreme Court effectively put to death scientific creationism by declaring it a religious doctrine and not a scientific theory (Edwards vs. Aguillard). Yet, at the time of this writing, public school administrators in Dover, PA, Cobb County, GA, and Topeka, KS have received national attention for considering revisions to their science curricula enabling students to consider criticisms of and alternatives to Darwin’s theory of evolution.[1] What, then, is feeding this doubt about the power of natural selection?[2] Clearly it is the growing influence of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, a loose network of organizations devoted to the belief that neo-Darwinism can and should be questioned on scientific, rather than religious, grounds.[3]
This is done in part by establishing rigorous criteria by which intelligent design can be detected. No one has contributed more to this task than William A. Dembski.[4] As a popular illustration of these criteria, Dembski is fond of using the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) in the fictional movie Contact.[5] In the film, he asks, How did the radio astronomers know that when they heard a series beats and pauses that depicted all prime numbers from 2 to 101, they were in contact with a source of intelligence? Dembski says they recognized a property that he calls “specified complexity.” The sequence was contingent (i.e. nothing in the laws of physics required this formation); it was complex (i.e. not a simple sequence that could easily happen by chance); and it was specified (i.e. not just any sequence but a mathematically significant one—the prime numbers). In short, design theorists contend that specified complexity, provides compelling circumstantial evidence for intelligence.
Although we can trace the beginnings of the ID movement to the publication of Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis in 1986,[6] or perhaps to Philip Johnson’s Darwin on Trial in 1991,[7] it was not until 1996 that ID was, so to speak, put on the map. The publication of Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box[8] did three things: (1) it argued popularly and eloquently for ID and gave the movement national exposure; (2) it moved ID argument to a place where it could excel: at the micro-level of the cell; and (3) it framed many of the terms of the current debate. Behe argued that the human cell contains “machines” that are so “irreducibly complex” (unable to function in an incomplete state), that no gradual, step-by-step Darwinian route could have led to their creation.[9] Though he drew from many examples, the one that has become the “poster child” of the ID movement is the bacterial flagellum.[10] Behe compares this swimming device on the backs of certain bacteria to an outboard motor, with all the same components: a motor, a rotor, O-rings, bushings, a drive shaft and a propeller. The flagellum is a marvel of nano-engineering, requiring the interaction of approximately forty different proteins. Behe asks, How could a blind, non-teleological process like natural selection have brought all these interrelated parts together in incremental fashion, if the absence of even one part would negate the very functional advantage (navigation) needed to drive the entire process? The most probable explanation of the flagellum’s origin, Behe says, is that the components of this irreducibly complex system were brought together at once as part of an intelligent design.
What is striking is that nothing in the ID argument presented thus far has presupposed any religious commitment. One need not be a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim to affirm any of these scientific observations. “That is because the design inference as developed by Behe and Dembski depend entirely on the empirical character of the effect—its irreducible or specified complexity—and not on the presumed character of the agent who caused it.”[11] In other words, ID is not about the Creator of all material substances; it is only about the arrangement of certain material substances.
As a result, non-theists can, and have, advocated ID. Plato spoke of an “ordering Mind” behind the order in the world (Phaedo 97b-c) and Aristotle spoke of how living things appeared designed toward desired ends (Parts of the Animal, 641a 7-17), yet neither were believers in the God of revealed religion.[12] Long time critic of evolution Michael Denton is an agnostic.[13] Dembski mentions in a Christianity Today interview that he was recently invited to speak on ID by the Oxford Center for Hindu Studies.[14] Thus, although many Christians find great apologetic promise in the ID movement, its ideas are not exclusively or even essentially Christian.
Is it fair game, then, to inquire as to ID’s apologetic value for Christianity? We should note that ID theorists themselves, while insisting that their argument need not presuppose religious commitment, feel quite free to give a place to the discussion of the religious implications of their work.[15] With their blessing, this paper seeks to size up from a Christian perspective the apologetic benefits of the ID movement. How, if at all, does it make the tenets of Christianity more plausible and the message of the gospel more persuasive? We will address this question with three considerations. First, we will distinguish ID from two previous forms of Christian argument from the natural world: (a) the classical design argument for the existence of God (notably expressed by William Paley in 1802) and (b) the scientific creationism movement (1961 to the present). We will then clarify ID’s apologetic value relative to these two. Second, we will discuss the genetic code as a product of intelligent design, a line of ID argument that, we believe, represents an advancement beyond Behe’s and a field that holds great potential for advancing ID as a scientific research program. Third, we will discuss ID’s timely role in the history of apologetics, how it partakes of both modern concerns and postmodern concerns.
- Intelligent Design’s Apologetic Value Relative to Two Previous Forms of Christian Argument from the Natural World
An evaluation of the apologetic value of the ID movement must begin with the question of whether it represents an advancement over two similar types of Christian argument from the natural world. We will discuss the design argument and the scientific creationist argument and illustrate both wherever possible with Behe’s example of the bacterial flagellum.
First, ID is understandably compared to the classical design argument for the existence of God, since both begin with the observation of order in the cosmos. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century reasoned that since some intelligent being must be directing unintelligent things, like a bacterial flagellum, toward desirable ends, like swimming, this being had to be God. David Hume effectively responded to the design argument by exposing two weaknesses.[16] First, he said, it was an argument from analogy. Bacterial flagella obviously share some features with machines, but not other features. How do we known design is one of the shared features? Second, Hume noted, it was an argument from induction. We can comfortably reason about causal processes for machines because we have had past experiences with machines, but can we really reason about causal processes for flagella, if we’ve had no experience in watching them originate before?
William Dembski’s assessment is that Hume’s counter-arguments are answerable, but worth listening to.[17] When stacked up against the exaggerated claims of 18th and 19th century British natural theology epitomized by William Paley (that we can infer God’s character from nature), they rightfully keep the claims of the design argument modest. Design in the flagellum doesn’t put us in any position to infer anything about the nature or purposes of the Designer. Further, Hume’s counter-arguments ensure that we recognize that our observation of the flagellum does not prove a Designer (a design proof with certainty), but only suggests a Designer (a design inference based on comparative probabilities). On the other hand, Dembski says, Hume should not be overrated and be given credit, as he often is, for destroying the design argument (and ID by association) so that it has no value at all. With the caveats mentioned above, the design argument still works just fine.
It is for this reason that William Paley’s famous watchmaker argument (you infer a watchmaker when you stumble upon a watch in the woods) still works,[18] since Paley also reasoned probabilistically from design to “an inference to the best explanation.”[19] Contrary to popular belief, what discredited Paley was not Hume’s counter-arguments, but the emergence of “another viable hypothesis” for apparent design that would claim greater probability later—Darwinism.[20] The ID movement has an advantage over Paley in that it has benefited in large part to the demise of Darwinism in the late 20th century.
But is ID theory itself an advancement over Paley’s watchmaker argument as it was formulated over two hundred years ago? We believe it is, in two respects. First, ID offers greater precision in its language about design. Because of the developments in information theory (the science of message transmission) in the 1940’s, ID theorists are able to distinguish order exhibiting little information (like the formation of crystals) from order exhibiting much information (like Mount Rushmore). Paley was not able to do this.[21] Second, ID has been able to move the design discussion from the realm of theology to the realm of science. Paley would typically say something like, “Clearly the designer of this ecosystem prized variety over neatness!” whereas a ID theorist would say, “Although that’s an intriguing theological possibility, as a design theorist I need to keep focused on the information pathways capable of producing that variety.”[22]
The second Christian argument to which ID must be compared is the scientific creationist movement, which argues that the earth is no more than ten thousand years old, that all fossilization is the product of a catastrophic worldwide flood at the time of Noah and that species have not evolved, but are each the direct product of God’s creative acts.[23] Clearly critics of the ID movement view it as “stealth creationism,” and often will pejoratively call ID “Intelligent Design Creationism” to encourage an attitude of dismissive rejection and to avoid engaging ID’s proposals.[24]
The ID movement does share with the scientific creationist movement an opposition to the approach of methodological naturalism among scientist as they conduct their science (the belief that for an explanation to be scientific, it must be naturalistic only). But it differs from scientific creationism in two important respects. First, ID does not start with prior religious commitments. Unlike scientific creationism, it does not start with the idea of an inerrant biblical text and does not try to find evidence that backs up specific historical claims derived from a literal reading of Genesis. Second, ID never tries to identify the cause of the intelligent design it detects as the Creator God. Unlike scientific creationism, it does not speculate on the origin of material world, only the arrangement of materials already in the world. Because ID chooses to remain within certain boundaries, to follow only empirical data to where it leads and no further, it ensures its legitimacy as a scientific theory.[25]
In one very important sense, then, we believe these features make ID an apologetic advancement over scientific creationism. Because it is free from religious entanglements and does not represent church doctrine, it does not fall under the 1987 Supreme Court decision barring the teaching of scientific creationism as science in public schools. One can therefore make the case that ID has a legitimate place in public school science curricula (and many ID supporters have). As such, it has a better shot than scientific creationism at overturning methodological naturalism in the sciences and ultimately materialism as a general worldview, which quite possibly may be “the greatest stumbling block to faith in the contemporary world.”[26] We conclude with a statement from J. Gresham Machen, which may enable us to size up the potential apologetic impact of the ID movement:
False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the relentless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.[27]
- The Genetic Code as a Product of Intelligent Design: Its Unique Persuasiveness and Potential for Research
Any analysis of the apologetic value of the ID movement must raise the question of the cogency of its argument. How convincing has ID theory been? How successful has it been in winning adherents in the scientific community? Opponents of the ID movement have been relentless in pointing out the paucity of significant peer-reviewed journal articles by ID scientists.[28] Even though the ID movement is still quite young (only a decade old since Darwin’s Black Box), critics are fond of saying its future offers little hope for improvement.[29] But with this last point we are inclined to disagree.
It is apparent to us that a specific form of the ID argument holds enormous promise and perhaps has within it the potential to bring down, to use Dembski’s phrase, Darwin’s “Berlin Wall”: the information embodied in genetic code. Indeed, the stated reason the leading atheistic philosopher in the world, Anthony Flew, now 81, underwent a highly publicized conversion from atheism to theism last year was because of ID work in the area of DNA studies.[30] Why?
Imagine for a moment, that you are walking through a jungle and you come across a metal container that looks like a desktop computer. Who is responsible for this item? If you were to examine the hardware components (power source, circuit board, wiring), you might tentatively conclude it was the work of human beings, but you would still hold out the possibility that monkeys had gotten a hold of some old machine parts from a junkyard and fashioned them together. Now suppose you plug the machine in and discover there is software running that gives you a map of the jungle and tells you the exact location of the machine where you found it. Isn’t the monkey hypothesis now much less probable? That is because the presence of programming instructions or information communicated in encoded language points distinctively to human intelligence. As far as detecting a human presence is concerned, the argument from software has a higher persuasive value than the argument from hardware. In the same way, as ID has focused its attention to biochemistry in recent years, we believe arguments from the “software” of cellular life (the information in the genetic code) will come to command greater plausibility than arguments from the “hardware” of cellular life (the irreducible complexity of molecular “machines”).
Though Michael Behe’s argument in Darwin’s Black Box for intelligent design from the bacterial flagellum was groundbreaking, it was still a “hardware” argument, an observation about the bacteria’s mechanical engineering, which gave his opponents some maneuvering room. Behe’s critics point to a subsystem (of perhaps ten genes or so) in the flagellum’s basal region that may have acted as a pump (known as the type III secretory system) and claim that this is a possible path through which the flagellum may have evolved. Natural selection, they say, co-opted this pre-existing pump as the bacterium gradually developed its swimming ability.[31] Though Behe and Dembski have critiqued this theory of co-optation as not much more than wishful speculation,[32] one does not get the impression that their response has been heeded.[33] Their argument from the “hardware” of the flagellum, at least for the present, has seemingly been unable to advance beyond this impasse. Both adherents and opponents of ID seem to have their own interpretation of how this system of interdependent parts came about and that is that.
But “software” arguments for ID rest on a different plane altogether. Biologists have long realized that living things are governed not merely by physical laws (gravitational, electromagnetic, thermodynamic, etc.) but also by genetic information. For example, the carbohydrate C6H12O6, which is found in plants, will not emerge if one simply brings together water, carbon dioxide and light. The photosynthesis is a complex process requiring many proteins,[34] which themselves are built according to a set of instructions found in the nucleus of each of the plant’s cells. These instructions are in the universal codes common to every living thing: the sequence of four nucleotide bases (symbolized by the letters C, T, G, A) in the spine of the DNA molecule’s double helix strands.[35] ID theorists have claimed these letter-sequences within DNA are the ultimate examples of irreducible and specified complexity.[36]
What, then, is the origin of this genetic information encoded in DNA? Is there any chance that it arose gradually over time? Did laws of attraction between the C, T, G and A bases help bring about their present arrangement? ID theorists Stephen Meyer and Walter Bradley have shown that there is as little reason to believe the nucleotides have self-organizing properties as there is to believe the letters on this page were drawn together by the chemistry of the ink.[37] Unlike the “hardware” components of the bacterial flagellum, the “software” in DNA is essentially a language.[38] As in the case of English letters and words, the sequence of nucleotide bases is a closed system of symbols, whose meaning is confined to the internal coding system. In the English language, the combination of the letters CAT represents an animal with four legs that catches mice. In DNA, the nucleotide combination CAT represents the amino acid Histidine. There is no intrinsic linkage of CAT to either the four-legged animal or to Histidine—they are merely system-specific symbols.