The universe and its form are remarkably wonderful. For centuries, people have observed its wonders and thought about some key questions—how did it come into existence and why is it here?
In coming to the topic of intelligent design, we are engaged in these questions. However, we must be certain that we do not talk past one another or set up straw men. Simply put, he who defines the terms dictates the debate. So, we begin with a definition of science.
Most folks hold an idealized image of science as impartial, unbiased empirical investigation that attends strictly to evidence.[i] However, science largely has been co-opted into the camp of naturalism. The reason we know this is that the only acceptable theories are naturalistic ones. Consider Richard Dawkins, “Even if there were no actual evidence in favor of Darwinian theory . . . we should still be justified in preferring it over all rival theories.”[ii] Or a KansasState researcher who wrote in a letter to Nature magazine, “Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.”[iii] Let that sink in a bit. Even if there is NO evidence in favor of Darwinism, and if ALL the evidence favors intelligent design, still we are not allowed to consider it in science.
It is really impossible by those definitions to have a reasonable discussion at all. Anything other than Darwinism is a priori not allowed. I would like to suggest that this kind of dogmatism is every bit a theological or religious statement as the most ardent creationist would posit. Indeed, I believe that it is impossible not to make theological statements in science classes, if science is going to include theoretical modeling, speculation, and prediction.[iv] Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin reasons in what I consider a theological circle when he states, “It’s not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation. On the contrary, 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.”[v] In other words, we assume material causes in order to investigate our world in a way that produces material explanations.
Instead, I offer that understanding or comprehension of truth or facts by the mind is a good definition of science.[vi] And into this understanding of facts comes the growing world of intelligent design.
What is intelligent design? It is the science that studies signs of intelligence.[vii] As such, it seems innocuous. Archaeologists look for signs of intelligence in the dirt. Crime scene investigators look for signs of the perpetrator at the crime scene. Even the search for extraterrestrial intelligence involves the study of radio transmissions in space to determine whether or not they signify meaningful communication. Such studies are not controversial because they focus on signs of intelligence that conceivably could have evolved from Darwinian means.
However, the fur starts to fly when the search for signs of intelligence that cannot reasonably have originated from Darwinian processes begins. Darwinism posits that all intelligence is a product of evolution. However, any intelligence that is responsible for biological systems, for example, could not have evolved but must have existed prior to the systems for which it is responsible. This is what makes intelligent design controversial. It claims to discover signs of intelligence where that intelligence cannot have evolved.[viii]
Let us also note what intelligent design is not. Intelligent design is not creationism, nor is it making any revelatory statements about the designer.[ix] Indeed, many now adopting intelligent design are not religious people at all. They simply have looked at the evidence and concluded that behind the design is a designer. Foremost among these is Antony Flew, perhaps the most famous atheist of our time who in 2004 became a theist. He states, “While reason, mainly in the form of arguments to design, assures us that there is a God, there is no room either for any supernatural revelation of that God or for any transactions between that God and individual human beings."[x] This is not the statement of a religious fellow!
Well, what are those arguments to design? Ah, my time is almost gone and I’ve not even come to this. Briefly, let’s list three of them.[xi] First, the world of the cell—the study of biochemistry. The cell is not mere protoplasm as Darwin assumed. Instead, it is a high tech molecular factory town far more complex than anything designed by us humans. Michael Behe, the Lehigh biochemist, has given us example after example in his book, Darwin’s Black Box. He coined the term irreducible complexity. One cannot come by time plus chance to evolve parts for which they will have no useful purpose until other parts get the chance to evolve into existence with them. His example of bacterial flagellum is an amazing story of irreducible complexity.[xii] Despite evolutionists protests of how the flagellum “could” have evolved, the operation of this tiny acid motor at tens of thousands of rpm, capacity to stop in a quarter of a turn, and the amazing variety of its constituent parts reflect a designer.
Second, there is the world of astrophysics. How have we come to a universe with such an amazing balance of forces? Cosmologists speak of “cosmic coincidences”. Yet “nothing in all of physics explains why its fundamental principles should conform themselves so precisely to life’s requirement,” says astronomer George Greenstein.[xiii] There is no physical cause. Astrophysicist Paul Davies writes in the New York Times, “Why is nature so ingeniously, one might even say suspiciously, friendly to life? It’s almost as if a Grand Designer had it all figured out.”[xiv] Nancy Pearcey notes—imagine you found a huge universe creating machine with thousands of dials representing gravitiational constant, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, electromagnetic force, ratio of mass of the proton and electron, and many more. Each dial has hundreds of settings and you can twirl them at will—nothing presets them to any particular value. It turns out that each of the thousands of dials just happens to be set to exactly the right value for life to exist.[xv]
Finally, there is the genetic code. Put rather crudely, DNA is made up of chemical letters, like a language. It is the sequence of those letters that make life possible in the same way that letters on a page make its message intelligible. Time plus chance do not give rise to specified, complex information. As Norman Geisler puts it, “If you came into the kitchen and saw the alphabet cereal spilled on the table and it spelled out your name and address, would you think the cat knocked the cereal box over?” [xvi] In fact, time plus chance tends to scramble rather than create information. When Dean Kenyon and Gary Steinman attempted to confirm their theory of Biochemical Predestination, that is, that something in matter itself predestined the DNA to line up in certain sequences to produce the building blocks of life, their experiments failed. “If we thought we were going to see a lot of spontaneous ordering, something must have been wrong with our theory,” Kenyon said.[xvii] One cell contains more information than the 30 volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica because there are no laws that cause the letters in DNA to link up in any particular pattern.[xviii] DNA, therefore, is the medium, not the message. Information theory tells us that the medium does not write the message. Information implies a communicator.
Richard Halvorson, writing for the Harvard Crimson, issues this challenge, “We must refuse to bow to our culture’s false idols. Science will not benefit from canonizing Darwin or making evolution an article of secular faith. We must reject intellectual excommunication as a valid form of dealing with criticism: the most important question for any society to ask is the one that is forbidden.”[xix]
[i] The bulk of the ideas in this paragraph come from Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2004), 168. Indeed, I am indebted to her for much of both the content and arrangement of this paper.
[ii] The Dawkins quote can be found in Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: Norton, 1986), 287, emphasis in original.
[iii] See S.C. Todd, “A View from Kansas on That Evolution Debate, “ Nature 401 (September 30, 1999): 423. His complete statement is as follows: “The lesson to be learned from the events in Kansas is that science educators everywhere must do a better job of teaching evolution. It must be made clear that the evidence supporting the mechanism of evolution is empirical and proven, but that speciation and natural history are derived from the admittedly weaker evidence of observation. The fact that one cannot reproduce the experiment does not diminish the validity of macro-evolution, but the observed phenomena supporting the theory must be presented more clearly. Additionally, one must question the interpretations of the observed phenomena and discuss the weaknesses of the model. Honest scientists are far more inspiring than defensive ones who scoff arrogantly at the masses and fear that discussing the problems of macro-evolutionary theory will weaken general acceptance of it. On the contrary, free debate is more likely to encourage the curious to seek solutions. Most important, it should be made clear in the classroom that science, including evolution, has not disproved God’s existence because it cannot be allowed to consider it (presumably). Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic. Of course the scientist, as an individual, is free to embrace a reality that transcends naturalism.” This is how most modern people handle these matters—in an upper story, lower story manner. See Pearcey’s book, pp. 97-121 for a good description of this problem which was also well articulated in Francis Schaeffer’s book, Escape from Reason. I intended to insert into my talk a brief explanation of these ideas but had no time to present them. Indeed, three of the presenters promoted this view, and I do not believe that any besides me would contradict it. The explanation appears here in outline form:
Some folks are opposed to religion of any kind and desire to use evolution as a club to beat believers. (Richard Dawkins accuses those who refuse to accept evolution with being “ignorant, stupid, or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that.” He recently added, “I don’t withdraw a word of my initial statement. But I do now think it may have been incomplete. There is perhaps a fifth category, which may belong under ‘insane’ but which can be more sympathetically characterized by a word like tormented, bullied, or brainwashed.”) Others don’t want to antagonize religious believers but desire to assure folks that they can be good followers of their faith as well as good Darwinists. Still others suggest that God acted in salvation history but divine activity in natural history is scientifically undetectable.
The twofloors for the mind constructed by modernman
1. The upper story--meaning/non-reason Lewis called it romanticism—beautiful, but imaginary
--emotions, subjective, spiritual, supernatural, the unseen world, optimism
(modern “religion” suggests that this is the only sense that the Bible is “true.”)
2. The lower story--reason/non-meaningLewis called it reason—repulsive but real
--facts, objective, material, natural, seen world, pessimism
(Modern science asserts that this is the only world that exists.)
3. The modern belief is firm that the two floors are separate and distinct.
One can move from one to the other, but one cannot be in bothplaces at the same time.
[iv] Dr. Frank Stootman in a lecture entitled “Is Intelligent Design Science or Religion?” at the L’Abri Conference in Rochester, Minnesota (February 18, 2006) suggests that there are three components to science: 1) data gathering through careful measurement; 2) data interpretation to fit in with standard paradigms; and 3) theoretical modeling, speculation, and prediction.
[v] Richard Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons, “ The New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997, 28. I found this initially in Pearcey, pp. 171.
[vi] This is the definition of science found in Noah Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary. In my brief survey, I discovered that the definition of science is subtly changing. Precisely why this is occurring would be well worth studying. Consider the following definitions of science (in all cases, only the first definition for the entry is given):
Noah Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary: “In a general sense, knowledge or certain knowledge. The comprehension of understanding of truth or facts by the mind. The science of God must be perfect.
Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, 1967: “Possession of knowledge as distinguished from ignorance or misunderstanding. b. Knowledge attained through study or practice.
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 2000: “The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation and theoretical explanation of phenomena. b. such activities restricted to a class of natural phenomena. c. such activities applied to an object of inquiry or study.
[vii] I am indebted to William Demski’s “Ten Questions to Ask Your Biology Teacher about Design” for this definition and for the bulk of this paragraph. This article is available at: 2004.01.Ten_Questions_ID.pdf
[viii] Again, Dembski’s “Ten Questions” article well describes this argument.
[ix] Although, I will concede, many intelligent design adherents have denied more than they should at the point. ID implies that we ought to know more about this designer!
[x] Flew further comments, “I think that the most impressive arguments for God’s existence are those that are supported by recent scientific discoveries. I’ve never been much impressed by the kalam cosmological argument, and I don’t think it has gotten any stronger recently. However, I think the argument to Intelligent Design is enormously stronger than it was when I first met it.” For the entire interview regarding Flew’s shift from atheism to theism, go to:
[xi] see Pearcey, pp. 184-201 for a good treatment of these three evidences for design.
[xii] Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box (New York: The Free Press, 1996) 69-72.
[xiii] Quoted in Pearcey, p. 188. The original source is George Greenstein, The Symbiotic Universe: Life and Mind in the Cosmos (New York: William Morrow, 1988) 85-90.
[xiv] Paul Davies, “A Brief History of the Multiverse,” The New York Times, April 12, 2003. Quoted in Pearcey, p. 189.
[xv] Pearcey, p. 189.
[xvi] Quoted in Pearcey, p. 193 from an interview that she had with Geisler.
[xvii] Quoted in Pearcey, p. 194, from an interview that she had with Kenyon.
[xviii] Pearcey, p. 196.
[xix] I found this in Dembski, “Five Questions Evolutionists Would Rather Dodge.” The article is available at: 2004.04.Five_Questions_Ev.pdf
Halvorson’s article appeared in the Harvard Crimson, April 7, 2003.