John MacDonald Smith looks at ongoing attempts to defend ‘creationism’ in the USA under the name of ‘intelligent design’.
I’m writing this during the quincentenary of my old college, Christ’s Cambridge. More importantly, it is also Charles Darwin’s old college and I am asked to offer comment on the ideas of some people whose intention is to undermine his most penetrating insight into the nature of reality. They think Darwinism threatens their beliefs.
You could sum up the underlying idea of what Daniel Dennet has called Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by saying that there is nothing in the universe which has not emerged by a lawful process out of something else in the universe. As Charles Lyell wrote in 1830: ‘All former changes of the organic and inorganic creation are referable to one uninterrupted course of physical events governed by the laws now in operation ...’ What is Science Doing?
We can begin with the traditional belief in the JudeoChristian God as rational, free and omnipotent. This leads to the consequence that the cosmos is ordered, rational and radically contingent. It could be the way it is, or not; and it might never have existed at all. It is therefore comprehensible only by experiment: you have to dismantle it in order to see what it is like before you can understand it. Then, as Whitehead has remarked, ‘every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles.’ Faith in the rationality, repeatability and lawfulness of events is born out of faith in the reality of a metaphysical First Cause.
Keith Ward thinks this is all there is to be said: ‘The existence of the laws of physics ... strongly implies that there is a God who formulates such laws and ensures that the physical world conforms to them.’ Actually, it does nothing of the sort. While this prescriptive view of natural law might, more or less, have fitted in with the anonymous, undefined ‘particles’ of Newtonian mechanics, it’s a different story now that we know more about the natures of the things which make up the universe, and the ways they relate to each other. Nowadays we understand natural law rather more as a reformable, falsifiable description of the ways in which things relate to each other. Nowadays it is difficult to imagine how one could have a universe in which there was only one object, for relatedness is fundamental. Things interact in those ways because they are those things with those characteristics, creating situations which we can understand as arising from their properties.
We have moved on from first-order ‘classical’ Newtonian ideas to a fuller acceptance of the rationality and comprehensibility of the cosmos on its own terms, and we summarise our understanding in what are still referred to as ‘Laws of Nature.’ But they are description, not instructions.
Disagreement Some people find it difficult to integrate this universally agreed understanding with the way they see their beliefs. The influential American theologian Alvin Plantinga thinks that natural laws are ‘perhaps best thought of as regularities in the ways in which (God) treats the stuff he has made.’ He wants to replace current methodologically naturalistic science with what he calls ‘Augustinian Science’ which allows for miracles as well as laws. But this is simply not how we do science and is not the right way to do science; you will never understand the universe on its own terms if you introduce a metaphysical element into it.
William Dembski is a professor at the Southern Baptist theological seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
Lecturing on ‘What Every Theologian Should Know About Creation, Evolution and Design’ he, too, wants to invoke a metaphysical component in science. His sleight of hand is to identify methodological naturalism with the pointless, meaningless purposelessness with which, for instance, Richard Dawkins sees natural phenomena and to claim that this is the only alternative. To it he opposes what he calls the Intelligent Design Thesis and we shall examine this shortly.
Designed? Or Evolved? Or Both?
Movements like Intelligent Design are a feature of an American religious scene which feels itself threatened, confused and uncertain.
In his Royal Society Lecture 11.04.06. Prof. Steve Jones (UCL) compared the belief that a god created the world to the theory that ‘babies are brought by storks’.
How Evolution Works Ongoing attempts to revive creationism in the US and introduce it into schools in the UK, prompts clarification of Darwin’s ideas of a century and a half ago. He began, as it were, in the middle of a billennia-long process and arrived at an explanation for what he, and anybody else who cared to look, could see in the here and now. Selection, and change through historical accident has become central to thinking in biological science. Darwin did not ask, and could not have answered the question if he had, how it started – how life emerged from non-life.
Theologians may think, with Keith Ward, that ‘while one cannot absolutely rule out chance ... the existence of an intelligible, integrated, elegant process tending to produce states of value is far more likely on the hypothesis that there is a Cosmic Mind which wills it to be thus.’ God of the Gaps? Metaphysical Science? God as a scientific concept? Others will differ from Ward and there are not lacking some rather interesting ideas which could explain, not only how life began but how the universe itself came into being as a result of an evolutionary process. But this need not imply atheism, for God is not a thing among things.
The basis of Darwinism has four parts. Firstly, every organism produces more offspring than will eventually survive to maturity. Secondly, random variations will occur among the offspring. On the other hand, traits do tend to be passed on. Finally, traits which make the individual fitter will tend to increase in the population. In addition, evolution by natural selection acts on the individual, one life at a time.
Every individual is trying to earn a living by successful adaptation to an environment consisting of other individuals as well as the inanimate world. This involves a complex process of co-evolution between species, symbiosis in which they assist each other’s survival, and shaping the environment over periods of time long enough to create fitness-enhancing change and speciation.
Paley, Darwin (and Dembski and Behe) William Paley was an undergraduate and Fellow of Christ’s from 1759 to 1775, at the height of the eighteenth century dialogue on science and religion.
Newton’s Mechanics had, it was thought, disturbed contemporary believing, so Ralph Cudworth (also Christ’ s) and the Cambridge Platonists set themselves the task of proving the reality of spirit through scientific enquiry. Paley’s work typified this holy alliance between Georgian Anglicanism and natural philosophy and his Evidences was required reading in the University until 1921. Paley was not a Platonist; what he did was to suggest that a ‘clockwork’ universe shows evidence of design. If, walking across a field you kick your foot against a rock, you think nothing of it. But if you find a watch instead you immediately conclude that such a complex mechanism must have a designer.
That this need not be the case was demonstrated by the work of Charles Darwin who entered Christ’s in 1828 and in fact occupied Paley’s rooms in the College. We have outlined the elements of his understanding of how things work out. Thus, one might be tempted to think that the eye is so complex, like Paley’s watch, it must have been designed and therefore requires a Designer. But suppose in some very primitive creature, due to the presence of some chemical in a group of cells, which is necessary for the proper functioning of the cells, or even by accident, they become light-sensitive. This is not improbable. An ad hoc development of this nature would give selective advantage to those members of the species, which possessed it, over those that do not. Eventually all members will possess it because those that do not will be bred out. Then, very gradually over millions of years this new development will be refined – into an eye. The members of the species in which refinements do not occur will be bred out, unable to compete in the race for survival.
Actually, the eye has evolved several times over the past in several different designs which presumably suit the needs of the animals they evolved in. This is the Darwinian way of thinking to which William Dembski, Michael Behe and others take exception. They want to return to a Paley-esque, pre-Darwinian way of explaining the animal kingdom because, like Plantinga, they think that methodological naturalism is necessarily and inevitably atheist.
Michael Behe denies the adequacy of selection in evolution to develop, unaided; certain necessary systems which he claims are ‘irreducibly complex.’ That is, you need every part of the system to be in place simultaneously for it to work properly and it is therefore so improbable that it should evolve that creative mind is needed for it to exist. His analogy for Well-organised movements which see science as an enemy Owl’s eye this ‘Irreducible Complexity’ is a five-part mousetrap, which will not work unless all the bits are present (actually it can be made to do so with four of them.) It is clear from the evolution of the eye, that this complexity is not irreducible, so why, unless one has an axe to grind about naturalism, should it be thought that occurrences in nature cannot be a natural development? That really is the question: what is Behe frightened of? What is wrong with the idea of small-step, long-term, self-creation of the most complex mechanisms for enhancing the animal’s fitness and creating new species?
We have also noted William Dembski’s resentment at a way of doing science which asks how far one can explain the behaviour of one part of nature in terms of other, related parts. He wants to adopt the approach of Plantinga and claims that what he calls ‘intelligent design’ is at work in the world in the form of creative mind – though he is careful to maintain that this is not God. He proposes an ‘explanatory filter’ based on the Occamist notion that explanations should be economical. Start with regular, unbroken law and if that fails to answer the question, try chance. If chance fails then for Dembski the only option left is design. One of his examples is very humble: a bacterium swimming upstream in a glucose gradient with its flagellar motor rotating – a sort of propeller sticking out of one end. Dembski thinks this appendage cannot develop without external help, and, indeed, in his written work there is a lot of complicated mathematics to show just how improbable this kind of thing might be.
Dembski has been criticised by Michael Ruse for separating chance, law and apparent design overmuch: usually all appear at once, mixed up together. In addition, his Intelligent Designer is not absolved of responsibility for malmutation, which is no less due to chance than is fitness-to-survive.
Movements like Intelligent Design are a feature of an American religious scene which feels itself threatened, confused and uncertain. World events, it thinks, have pushed it into a corner where its perceived responsibilities require a supporting narrative which most people will understand as myth. The Bible is read literally: there will be Armageddon in the Holy Land; Jesus will return and initiate the Rapture and so on. Hence in 2004, a survey found that 37% of Americans wanted creationism taught in schools – not just alongside evolution but in place of it.
This is all of a piece with ideas going back decades – to the Scopes Trial of the1920’s but nowadays more sophisticated. Intelligent Design and Irreducible Complexity are the thin end of a wedge leading to Creationism, and are well-organised movements which see science as an enemy. The Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture is only one of a network of organisations, funding foundations and lobby groups dedicated to overthrowing what they think of a ‘scientific materialism.’ At the heart of the campaign is what it refers to in its manifesto as ‘The Wedge Strategy’: a wedge is to be driven into the ‘tree’ of ‘materialistic science’ at its weakest point, which is Darwinian evolution. A new, faith-based science is being called for, with the worrying consequence that this leads to a dismissal of what is called the ‘chimeras of popular science’: global warming, pollution problems and ozone depletion along with the pursuit of ruthless free-market economics. It begins to look both suspiciously like pseudo-science with a political agenda, and we know where we last saw that kind of thing.
In addition, it is also lousy theology and perhaps, exemplifies that religion really is a human creation.
Further Reading The list could be enormous, so here are a few starting points. Of course, Richard Dawkins masterly explanations of biological evolution come high on the list, and all his books are worth reading. Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea is also a classic. Meanwhile Lee Smolin’s The Life of the Cosmos describes how the universe itself may have originated in an evolutionary process; while Stuart Kauffman’s At Home in the Universe describes how selforganisation plays a significant part in driving the evolutionary process. Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box explains, if that is the word, Irreducible Complexity; while William Dembski wrote a rather forbiddingly mathematical book called No Free Lunch to help us to understand what Intelligent Design is about. Michael Ruse’s Can a Darwinian be a Christian? and The Evolution-Creation Struggle present his answer to Behe, Dembski and Creationism. Finally, New Scientist for October 2005 offers an entire section on Fundamentalism, which is worth reading.
John MacDonald Smith was formerly a Parish Priest,Hon.
Secretary of ClergyAgainst NuclearArms and is a freelance theologian.