Books on Apologeticsmay be bought on-line
from
Books on Apologetics
may be bought on-line
from barnesandnoble.com
Christian Apologetics Related to Science
An ASA list discussion of
the following paper
Paragraphs numbered for reference.
Responses in italics.
See Also Bruce Gordon, "Intelligent Design Movement Struggles with Identity Crisis"
IS
INTELLIGENT DESIGN TESTABLE?
A RESPONSE TO EUGENIE SCOTT
William A. Dembski
<William_Dembski@baylor.edu>
Copyright
1999, 2000 by William Grassie. Copies of this internet posting may be made and
distributed in whole without further permission. Credit: "This information
was circulated on the Meta Lists on Science and Religion
<http://www.meta-list.org>."
1. Eugenie Scott is a physical anthropologist who as director of the
National Center for Science Education travels the United States warning
audiences about the threat of creationism and unmasking its various guises.
Intelligent design, according to her, is currently the most sinister of these
guises. Scott has developed a standard shtick, which includes not only some
well-worn arguments against creationism and some newer arguments against
intelligent design (which she refers to as "neocreationism") but also
some comedic elements, like the Monty Python wink-wink-nudge-nudge routine,
which
she uses when she wants to make clear to her audiences that the designer of
intelligent design is really none other than the "Big G" of the
Christian faith.
Dembski refers
disapprovingly to Scott's use of "some comedic elements, like the
Monty Python wink-wink-nudge-nudge routine, which she uses when she wants to
make clear to her audiences that the designer of intelligent design is really
none other than the "Big G" of the Christian faith." I
wonder where she could have gotten that idea? Could it be from the fact
that ID proponents regularly refer to the "big G"? Could it be
from that fact that they raise no voices in protest when significant parts of
the Christian community use their arguments as proof for the "big G"
of the Bible? Philip Johnson's undisguised belief
in "a God who acted openly and who left his fingerprints all
over the evidence" is admittedly in considerable tension with concept of a
God whose supreme revelation is the crucified Jesus. Still, he (and most
of his ID allies, including Dembski) clearly think that their
"Designer" is "the "Big G" of the Christian
faith." Pretending that this is not the case allows the ID movement
to play the "nobody here but us scientists and philsophers" game when
it suits them, and also to avoid serious theological discussion. But most
people aren't fooled.
She is right! An intelligent designer is either God, the only creator, or it is a human or a higher creature. Dembski's model examples for claiming that ID doesn't necessarily require God include archeology, forensics, etc., where the designer clearly is human, and SETI, where the designer - if there is any ETI at all - is a creature of the same creator, just as humans are. ID therefore cannot refer to anyone else but God, either directly or indirectly. And if we are dealing with biology, which is the only field we are interested in, in the context of ID, God is the only possible intelligent designer.
2. Recently (January 18, 2001) Scott presented a lecture at U.C. Berkeley
sponsored by the department of integrative biology and titled "Icons of
Creationism: The New Anti-Evolutionism and Science" (http://ib.berkeley.edu/seminars/index.html).
The title alludes to Jonathan Wells's recent book _Icons of Evolution_,
which critiques the various standard evidences used in textbooks to support
Darwinian evolution. Scott presumably means to turn the tables and show that
intelligent design is similarly open to criticism.
3. Scott's key criticism against intelligent design, both in her talk the
other day and since the early nineties, has been that intelligent design is
untestable. For instance, in an exchange with Stephen Meyer back in 1994 in Insight
magazine, Scott remarked that until design theorists develop a "theo-meter"
(this neologism is hers) to test for design, they are treading water in a sea of
retarded scientific aspirations. In her talk the other day at U.C. Berkeley she
claimed
that intelligent design does not propose any "testable model."
4. The testability objection to intelligent design can be interpreted in
two ways. One is to claim that intelligent design is in principle untestable.
This seems to have been Scott's line in the early nineties. Certainly it is a
hallmark of science that any of its claims be subject to revision or refutation
on the basis of new evidence or further theoretical insight. If this is what one
means by testability, then design is certainly testable. Indeed, it was in this
sense that Darwin tested William Paley's account of design and found it wanting.
It simply won't wash to say that design isn't testable and then in the same
breath say that Darwin tested design and refuted it.
I don't understand this paragraph. In what way did Darwin "test" Paley's ideas? What Darwin did do, as far as I can see, is show that Paley's claims of an "intelligent causation" could not be taken as the only possible explanation -- that purely naturalistic causation could explain the complexities of living organisms jst as well -- with the added value that such naturalistic explanations could be tested, at least in part, and could lead to other scientific research programmes, something Paley's claims could not do. But this is not a "test" as far as I can see. Paley's claims were neither "revised" or "refutted," but they were supplanted, and with good reason. To call all this a "test" is twisting the meaning of the word.
5 . The other way to interpret the testability objection is to claim that intelligent design may in principle be testable, but that no tests have been proposed to date. This seems to be Scott's line currently. Indeed, if the testability objection is to bear any weight, its force must reside in the absence of concrete proposals for testing intelligent design. Are such proposals indeed lacking? Rather than looking solely at the testability of intelligent design, I want also to consider the testability of Darwinism. By comparing the testability of the two theories, it will become evident that even the more charitable interpretation of Scott's testability objection does not hold up.
6. In relation to science testability is a very broad notion. It certainly
includes Karl Popper's notion of falsifiability, but it is hardly coextensive
with it and can apply even if falsifiability does not obtain. Testability as
well covers confirmation, predicability, and explanatory power. At the heart of
testability is the idea that our scientific theories must make contact with and
be sensitive to what's happening in nature. What's happening in nature must be
able to affect our scientific theories not only in form and content but also in
the degree of credence we attach to or withhold from them. For a theory to be
immune to evidence from nature is a sure sign that we're not dealing with a
scientific theory.
7a. What then are we to make of the testability of both intelligent design
and Darwinism taken not in a generic abstract sense but concretely? What are the
specific tests for intelligent design? What are the specific tests for
Darwinism? And how do the two theories compare in terms of testability? To
answer these questions, let's run through several aspects of testability,
beginning with falsifiability.
FALSIFIABILITY:
7b. Is intelligent design falsifiable? Is Darwinism falsifiable? Yes to the first question, no to the second. Intelligent design is eminently falsifiable. Specified complexity in general and irreducible complexity in biology are within the theory of intelligent design the key markers of intelligent agency. If it could be shown that biological systems like the bacterial flagellum that are wonderfully complex, elegant, and integrated could have been formed by a gradual Darwinian process (which by definition is non-telic), then intelligent design would be falsified on the general grounds that one doesn't invoke intelligent causes when purely natural causes will do. In that case Occam's razor finishes off intelligent design quite nicely.
For a specific example (e.g. flagellum), this is correct.
8. On the other hand, falsifying Darwinism seems effectively impossible.
To do so one must show that no conceivable Darwinian pathway could have led to a
given biological structure. What's more, Darwinists are apt to retreat into the
murk of historical contingency to shore up their theory. For instance, Allen Orr
in his critique of Behe's work shortly after Darwin's Black Box appeared
remarked, "We have no guarantee that we can reconstruct the history of a
biochemical
pathway." What he conceded with one hand, however, he was quick to retract
with the other. He added, "But even if we can't, its irreducible complexity
cannot count against its gradual evolution."
I, for one, find the argument that Darwinism is unfalsifiable a persuasive one.
That does not make it untrue, of course, but it does suggest that
"Darwinism is a fact" and "gravitation is a fact" seem to be
in two different categories, for we can conceive of observations that would
falsify the second but not any that would falsify the first.
both evolution in general and darwinian evolution are
falsifiable. Evolution in general (descent with modification) is
falsifiable by detailed study of fossil lineages and molecular biological
studies. Darwinian evolution (natural and sexual selection) is falsifiable
by field and laboratory studies. As I recall, neodarwinian evolution also
includes for geographic isolation
Correct!
9. The fact is that for complex systems like the bacterial flagellum no
biologist has or is anywhere close to reconstructing its history in Darwinian
terms. Is Darwinian theory therefore falsified? Hardly. I have yet to witness
one committed Darwinist concede that any feature of nature might even in
principle provide countervailing evidence to Darwinism. In place of such a
concession one is instead always treated to an admission of ignorance. Thus it's
not that Darwinism has been falsified or disconfirmed, but that we simply don't
know enough about the biological system in question and its historical context
to determine how the Darwinian mechanism might have produced it.
Correct! (However, Darwin gave a few examples which he said would falsify his theory). - The problem is that any theory claiming that a process whose mechanism is unknown occurred supernaturally is, in principle, always falsifyable (in the sense Dembski describes in 7b), namely by verifying that a natural mechanism is sufficient. But any theory claiming that a process whose mechanism is unknown occurred by a purely natural, reductionistic mechanism can, in principle, never be falsified: an unknown mechanism may always be awaiting detection and verification. Falsification of an ID origin requires knowing just ONE feasible Darwinian mechanism, but falsification of a Darwinian origin requires knowing ALL formulatable mechanisms to be impossible. This asymmetry shows that ID and Darwinism are not alternative scientific explanations on the same level. - A related problem with ID is its strict "either - or": either a process occurs naturally or it occurs supernaturally, implying that God has nothing to do in a naturally occurring process, which clearly contradicts biblical theology. He gifted creation at least with Van Till's functional integrity, if not with continuing, more concrete providential actions. How about the possibility of God causing a natural process to occur despite an infinitesimally small probability? - The basic problem with Darwinism, on the other hand, is that no test is feasible for its fundamental premise that the known evolutionary mechanisms were sufficient to produce the biosphere of the Earth within the past 4 billion years (macroevolution in the sense of producing fundamentally novel functions is required).
10 For instance, to neutralize the challenge that the irreducible
complexity of the bacterial flagellum raises against Darwinism, Ken Miller
employs the following argument from ignorance. Like the rest of the biological
community, Miller doesn't know how the bacterial flagellum originated. The
biological community's ignorance about the flagellum, however, doesn't end with
its origin but extends to its very functioning. For instance, according to David
DeRosier, "The mechanism of the flagellar motor remains a mystery."
Miller takes this admission of ignorance by DeRosier and uses it to advantage.
In
Finding Darwin's God he writes: "Before [Darwinian] evolution is
excoriated for failing to explain the evolution of the flagellum, I'd request
that the scientific community at least be allowed to figure out how its various
parts work." But in the article by DeRosier that Miller cites, Miller
conveniently omits the following quote: "More so than other motors, the
flagellum resembles a machine designed by a human."
Miller's request must be granted. And DeRosier didn't say that the
flagellum was intelligently designed, just that it appeared so.
11. So apparently we know enough about the bacterial flagellum to know that it is designed or at least design-like. Indeed, we know what most of its individual parts do. Moreover, we know that the flagellum is irreducibly complex. Far from being a weakness of irreducible complexity as Miller suggests, it is a strength of the concept that one can determine whether a system is irreducibly complex without knowing the precise role that each part in the system plays (one need only knock out individual parts and see if function is preserved; knowing what exactly the individual parts do is not necessary). Miller's appeal to ignorance obscures just how much we know about the flagellum, how compelling the case is for its design, and how unfalsifiable Darwinism is when Darwinists proclaim that the Darwinian selection mechanism can account for it despite the absence of any identifiable biochemical pathway.
The flagellum is certainly design-like; whether it is designed is
a different matter. - The knock-out test would be convincing if the
parts to be tested were atomic, indivisible. This is not the case.
Behe's mouse-trap model doesn't apply that easily. Knocking out a
component protein might destroy all activity, but a slightly simpler
derivative of the protein might be found which makes the whole system
work just a little less efficiently. This is just what Darwinism claims.
But this is what would have to be shown impossible to prove
irreducibility - a proposition every bit as immense as Darwinism's task
of verifying that an evolutionary path was possible. In virtually all
specific cases of complex systems, Darwinists are incapable of proving
that its origin by evolution works, and IDers appear to be incapable of
proving that it doesn't.
CONFIRMATION:
12.
What about positive evidence for intelligent design and Darwinism? From the
design theorist's perspective, the positive
evidence for Darwinism is confined to small-scale evolutionary changes like
insects developing insecticide resistance. This is not to deny large-scale
evolutionary changes, but it is to deny that the Darwinian mechanism can account
for them. Evidence like that for insecticide resistance confirms the Darwinian
selection mechanism for small-scale changes, but hardly warrants the grand
extrapolation that Darwinists want. It is a huge leap going from insects
developing
insecticide resistance via the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and
random variation to the very emergence of insects in the first place by that
same mechanism.
This strikes me as assuming that we now know _all_ about origins.
This is correct. Microevolution, in the sense of uninterrupted series of small random changes where each intermediate is selected (or at least neutral), is no problem. But as soon as a series of several specific, but non-selected random steps are required, the probability of their combined occurrence very rapidly drops to virtually zero. By the way, even for insecticide resistance, a Darwinian origin has not been shown to be possible when it requires new enzymes which cannot be imported from elsewhere.
13. Darwinists invariably try too minimize the extrapolation from
small-scale to large-scale evolution, arguing that it is a failure of
imagination on the part of critics to appreciate the wonder-working power of the
Darwinian mechanism. From the design theorist's perspective, however, this is
not a case of failed imagination but of the emperor's new clothes. Yes, there is
positive evidence for Darwinism, but the strength and relevance of that evidence
on behalf of large-scale evolution is very much under dispute, if not within the
Darwinian community then certainly outside of it.
Seems like rhetoric -- it does not add to the scientific argument
14. What about the positive evidence for intelligent design? It seems that here we may be getting to the heart of Eugenie Scott's concerns. I submit that there is indeed positive evidence for intelligent design. To see this, let's consider an example that I recycle endlessly in my writings (if only because its force seems continually lost on Darwinists). Consider the movie Contact that appeared summer of 1997, based on the novel by Carl Sagan. In the movie radio astronomers determine that they have established contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence after they receive a long sequence of prime numbers, represented as a sequence of bits.
Seems like rhetoric -- it does not add to the scientific argument
15. Although in the actual SETI program (Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence) radio astronomers look not for something as flamboyant as
prime numbers but something much more plebeian, namely, a narrow bandwidth of
transmissions (as occur with human radio transmissions), the point nonetheless
remains that SETI researchers would legitimately count a sequence of prime
numbers (and less flamboyantly though just as assuredly a narrow bandwidth
transmission) as positive evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. No such
conclusive signal has yet been observed, but I can assure you that if it were to
be observed, Eugenie Scott would not be complaining about SETI not having
proposed any "testable models." Instead she would rejoice that the
model had been tested and decisively confirmed.
SETI is irrelevant for ID in biology as, by definition, the
speculative ETIs are intelligent, but subhuman biological systems are
not. If ETIs were responsible for life on Earth, this would just push
the origin problem one step further back - to the origin of the ETIs.
This also applies to F. Crick's "directed panspermia" - the few orders
of magnitude of increased probability he gets are entirely
insignificant.
16. Now what's significant about a sequence of prime numbers from outer space is that they exhibit specified complexity -- there has to be a long sequence (hence complexity) and it needs to display an independently given pattern (hence specificity). But what if specified complexity is also exhibited in actual biological systems? In fact it is -- notably in the bacterial flagellum. Internet mavens have been pestering me for actual calculations of complexity involved in such systems. I address this in my forthcoming book (No Free Lunch), but such calculations are out there in the literature (cf. the work of Hubert Yockey, Robert Sauer, Peter Rüst, Paul Erbrich, Siegfried Scherer, and most recently Douglas Axe -- I'm not enlisting these individuals as design advocates but merely pointing out that methods for determining specified complexity are already part of biology).
What is assumed here is a purely random origin. But may there be
biochemical patterns? unexplored conditions? Do we know enough to do the
computations, or is this like the claim that bumblebees can't fly?
Is extremely low probability of occurrence of systems of specified
complexity equivalent to confirmation of ID? The problem is that no
amount of (scientific) improbability for an event or series of events
can prove (theological) ID. The best we can get from such calculations
(including my own) is convincing presumptive evidence that science is at
a loss for finding a plausible natural solution - and that belief in an
autonomous origin of life and autonomous macroevolution requires faith.
For theological reasons (faith out of a free personal decision), we can
never prove God, not even by ID.
17. Even so, it appears that Eugenie Scott would not be entirely happy
admitting that intelligent design is positively confirmed once some clear-cut
instances of specified complexity are discovered in biological systems. Why not?
As she put it in her U.C. Berkeley lecture, design theorists "never tell
you what happened." Well, neither do SETI researchers. If a SETI researcher
discovers a radio transmission of prime numbers from outer space, the inference
to an extraterrestrial intelligence is clear, but the researcher doesn't know
"what happened" in the sense of knowing any details about the
radio transmitter or for that matter the extraterrestrial that transmitted the
radio transmission.
18. Ah, but we have experience with radio transmitters. At least with
extraterrestrial intelligences we can guess what might have happened. But we
don't have any experience with unembodied designers, and that's clearly what
we're dealing with when it comes to design in biology. Actually, if an
unembodied designer is responsible for biological complexity, then we do have
quite a bit of experience with such a designer through the designed objects (not
least ourselves) that confront us all the time. On the other hand, it is true
that we possess very little insight at this time into how such a designer acted
to bring about the complex biological systems that have emerged over the course
of natural history.
Here Dembski discusses an "unembodied" designer. But this, to me, is the weakness of the ID movement. If one posits an unembodied designer, the intelligent agent (Newton used this word) is necessarily supernatural -- God, or at least a god or an agent working under a god. Positing the supernatural is just not necessary. What I see is that the ID movement does not have to abandon methodological naturalism (which I still firmly cling to). They do have to posit an intelligent agent, but that's all. The IA need not be supernatural. What characteristics do we think this IA might have. For 20 years or so (on other LISTSERVs) I have argued that we can safely deduce three characteristics: 1. The IA (which may be IAs) is technically advanced beyond present day humanity. 2. The IA is at least as intelligent as present day humanity. 3. The IA has a distinct sense of humor. Not that these characteristics are a lower bound. The IA is probably a lot more than that.
What is an "unembodied designer"? If it's God, the situation is
clear. If not, it may be an angel, or perhaps an ETI consisting of pure
energy or exotic particles or cosmic strings or whatever. But any of
these must be intelligent creatures made by God. ID cannot get rid of
God - which places the ID program outside of science. It is not just a
question of defining science, or a "demarkation problem", since any
step
of the ID program going beyond probability calculations is a step of
metaphysical faith. Science cannot go beyond the "don't know", apart
from looking for other natural explanations.
Why does Dembksi focus on unembodied design agents? I think it's
pretty simple.
1) He claims to have demonstrated that complex specificity (CSI)
is something that cannot be generated by natural mechanisms which involve chance or regularity (and it seems, any combination
thereof).
2) He maintains that humans (and possibly, some animals) do generate
CSI. He uses examples of human actions and intentions specifically
as demonstrations of CSI.
3) He denies that mechanisms such as genetic algorithms can generate true CSI (they only generate "apparent CSI"). An
alternative
view presented by others is that GAs demonstrate "intelligence
by proxy", which is a huge, nasty ball of tar, philosophically
speaking.
From this it follows that the CSI produced by humans cannot be
localized to the physical, human body or to the brain specifically,
because they are composed of "mundane" & natural processes (see
#1: chance and regularity cannot produce CSI).
So if humans really do generate CSI then they must have some
"extra-physical" or "unembodied" component which interacts
with
matter in some undefined way to effect CSI. It appears that
Dembski may be appealing to the "strange world of the quantum (tm)"
or something like that to bridge the mind/body duality problem and
achieve energy-free information transfer. In effect, we are
"unembodied designers", at least when we're operating in design
mode and not simply scratching our asses because they itch. Assuming
all this, perhaps one could say that Maxwell's demon lives in every
one of our brains. (Although I thought that even Maxwell's demon is
not exempt from thermodynamic limitations, either. There really is
no free lunch, even with energy-free information transfer).
If, on the other hand, Dembski were to accept that CSI can be
generated in blobs of matter such as the human brain, then he
would have to accept that mechanisms like genetic algorithms
might also produce CSI. Worse still, "genetic algorithms"
sound an awful lot like biology, a connection which he doesn't
want to allow. So I predict that won't happen.
Of course, if we're going to open the door to "unembodied"
mechanisms we can't exclude alternatives such as Rupert Sheldrake's
"morphic resonance" (which is not based on intelligent agents per
se). If there are "un-physical" mechanisms at work, then we
certainly don't understand them at all and one would be hard-pressed
to conclude that "intelligence" was involved -- i.e. is it
"intelligence" as we understand it or a basic property of the
"unembodied" world?
As others have noted, even the appeal to "un-physical" mechanisms
does not mean that methodological naturalism must be abandoned.
I think it's only P. Johnson et al's dogmatic conflation of methodogical naturalism with yellow dog atheism that stymies
thoughts in that direction. How would one know that un-physical
mechanisms could not be subject to scrutiny and testing? Why
jump the gun? For example, morphic resonance is potentially subject
to confirmation and testing.
19. Darwinists take this present lack of insight into the workings of an
unembodied designer not as remediable ignorance on our part and not as evidence
that the designer's capacities far outstrip ours, but as proof that there is no
unembodied designer (at least none relevant to biology). By the same token, if
an extraterrestrial intelligence communicated via radio signals with earth and
solved computational problems that exceeded anything an ordinary or quantum
computer could ever solve, we would have to conclude that we weren't really
dealing with an intelligence because we have no experience of
super-mathematicians that can solve such problems. My own view is that with
respect to biological design humans are in the same position as William James's
dog studying James while James was reading a book in his library. Our
incomprehension over biological design is the incomprehension of a dog trying to
understand its master's actions. Interestingly, the biological community
regularly sings the praises of natural selection and the wonders it has wrought
while admitting that it has no comprehension of how those wonders were wrought.
Natural selection, we are assured, is cleverer than we are or can ever hope to
be. Darwinists have merely swapped one form of awe for another. They've not
eliminated it.
Dembski refers to
the "present lack of insight into the workings of an unembodied
designer." One important reason for such a lack of insight is the
failure of those in the ID movement to give any attention to the question of how
God is actually supposed to carry out his designing work by acting in the world.
Glenn Morton pointed this out in his report on the "Nature of Nature"
conference in the July/August 2000 newsletter of the ASA and CSCA. Many
Christian theologians of past and present have discussed different approaches to
this question of divine action. In order to avail themselves of this work
the IDers would have to (a) drop the pretense that their "unembodied
designer" isn't "the "Big G" of the Christian faith"
and (b) recognize that most of those who are making useful proposals in this
area today are not sympathetic to ID claims. Alternatively,
they could (c) try to do some real theology them
20. It is no objection at all that we don't at this time know how an
unembodied designer produced a biological system that exhibits specified
complexity. We know that specified complexity is reliably correlated with the
effects of intelligence. The only reason to insist on looking for non-telic
explanations to explain the complex specified structures in biology is because
of prior commitment to naturalism that perforce excludes unembodied designers.
It is illegitimate, scientifically and rationally, to claim on a priori grounds
that such entities do not exist, or if they do exist that they can have no
conceivable relevance to what happens in the world. Do such entities exist? Can
they have empirical consequences? Are they relevant to what happens in the
world? Such questions cannot be prejudged except on metaphysical grounds. To
prejudge these questions the way Eugenie Scott does is therefore to make certain
metaphysical commitments about what there is and what has the capacity to
influence events in the world. Such commitments are utterly gratuitous to the
practice of science. Specified complexity confirms design regardless whether the
designer responsible for it is embodied or unembodied.
As before, the concept of "unembodied designers" is not necessary. To
continue with it hurts the ID cause.
I would claim that it is NOT illegitimate, scientifically, to ignore the
option that they [such entities] exist. This is not at all the same as a claim that they
do not exist.
I happen to think what Bill is doing is good philosophy -- whether or not
it is "true,"but bad science. It could be good science.
On a philosophical level, Dembski is right in calling an a-priori exclusion of an unembodied designer illegitimate. But science as such cannot deal with unembodied designers! Science is quite correct in looking for "non-telic explanations". I heartily sympathize with Bill's challenge to Eugenie Scott, but his attempt to keep ID within science is unsuccessful. By mixing up science and metaphysics, he is falling into the same trap as Scott. She doesn't seem to realize that atheism is just as religious and outside science as theism.
PREDICTABILITY:
21.
Another aspect of testability is predictability. A good scientific theory, we
are told, is one that predicts things. If it predicts things that don't happen,
then it is tested and found wanting. If it predicts things that do happen, then
it is tested and
regarded as successful. If it doesn't predict things, however, what then? Often
with theories that try to account for features of natural history, prediction
gets generalized to include retrodiction, in which a theory also specifies what
the past should look like. Darwinism is said to apply retrodictively to the
fossil record and predictively in experiments that place an organism under
selection pressures and attempt to induce some adaptive change. But in fact
Darwinism does not retrodict the fossil record. Natural selection and random
variation applied to single-celled organisms offers no insight at all into
whether we can expect multi-celled organisms, much less whether evolution will
produce the various body-plans of which natural history has left us a record. At
best one can say that there is consilience, i.e., that the broad sweep of
evolutionary history as displayed in the fossil record is consistent with
Darwinian evolution. Design theorists strongly dispute this as
well (pointing especially to the Cambrian explosion). But detailed retrodiction
and detailed prediction are not virtues of Darwin's heory. Organisms placed
under selection pressures either adapt or go extinct. Except in the simplest
cases where there is, say, some point mutation that reliably confers antibiotic
resistance on a bacterium, Darwin's theory has no way of predicting just what
sorts of adaptive changes will occur. "Adapt or go extinct" is not a
prediction of Darwin's theory but an axiom that can be reasoned out
independently.
But this is already well known. Assuming Darwinism is true, the known science of Darwinism actually predicts that one cannot predict. See John Casti's book, SEARCH FOR CERTAINTY. In this respect it is not unlike certain other sciences, ones which have little theological impacts. My point is that Bill uses this as an argument against Darwinism, when it is simply not a good argument at all. A science, Casti argues, ought to try to both EXPLAIN and PREDICT. It may do one fairly well, without doing the other well at all. If you can't check out his book, see by review of the book in PERSPECTIVES about 7 years ago.
The relevance of the Cambrian explosion is being challenged by
claims of Precambrian metazoan precursors (Fortey R.A., Briggs D.E.G.,
Wills M.A. "The Cambrian evolutionary 'explosion' recalibrated",
BioEssays 19 (1997), 429-434; Abouheif E., Zardoya R., Meyer A.
"Limitations of metazoan 18S rRNA sequence data: implications for
reconstructing the phylogeny of the animal kingdom and inferring the
reality of the Cambrian explosion", Journal of Molecular Evolution 47
(1998), 394-405; Conway Morris S. "The Cambrian 'explosion': slow-fuse
or megatonnage?" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 97
(2000), 4426-4429), although these claims still appear to be tentative.
22. Challenging me in American Outlook biologist Alex Duncan remarked:
"A scientific theory makes predictions about the world around us, and enables us to ask and answer meaningful questions. For example, we might pose the question 'why do polar bears have fur, while penguins have feathers, given the similar nature of their environments?' Evolution provides an answer to this question. The only answer creationism (or intelligent design) provides is 'because God made them that way.'"
23.
Actually, evolution, whether Darwinian or otherwise, makes no predictions about
there being bears or birds at all or for that matter bears having fur and birds
having feathers. Once bears or birds are on the scene, they need to adapt to
their environment or die. Intelligent design can accommodate plenty of
evolutionary change and allows for natural selection to act as a conservative
force to keep organisms adapted to their environments. Contrary to Duncan's
remark, intelligent design does not push off all explanation to the inscrutable
will of God. On the other hand, intelligent design utterly rejects natural
selection as a creative force capable of bringing about the specified complexity
we see in organisms.
24. It's evident, then, that Darwin's theory has virtually no predictive
power. Insofar as it offers predictions, they are either extremely general,
concerning the broad sweep of natural history and in that respect quite
questionable (Why else would Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge need to
introduce punctuated equilibria if the fossil record were such an overwhelming
vindication of Darwinism?); and when the predictions are not extremely general
they are extremely specific
and picayune, dealing with small-scale adaptive changes. Newton was able to
predict the path that a planet traces out. Darwin's disciples can neither
predict nor retrodict the pathways that organisms trace out in the course of
natural history.
Bill writes: "It's evident, then, that Darwin's theory has virtually no predictive power." Again, Bill, please read Casti's book. This is NOT a good argument.
The parenthetical sentence indicates the foolish assumption that science must be always right, not subject to change. What history of science has Dembski been reading?
Partly false. While I think it is true that you cannot use specifically Darwinian retrodictions for the ancestry of organisms, some can make some general evolutionary ones. One can predict what sort of ancestry and evolutionary pathway particular organism might have and then look for evidence in the fossil record and in molecular biology to test that hypothesis. If that does that work one can look for alternative evolutionary explanations. If none of them work, and there is good data of the fossil history and molecular biology of an organism then the time might have come to think of non-evolutionary explanations. With contemporary organisms, Darwinian theories postulate particular responses to changing environments. These can, and have, been tested in both the field and the laboratory. It is specious to deny either of these.
25. But what about the predictive power of intelligent design? To require
prediction fundamentally misconstrues design. To require prediction of design is
to put design in the same boat as natural laws, locating their explanatory power
in an extrapolation from past experience. This is to commit a category mistake.
To be sure, designers, like natural laws, can behave predictably (designers
often institute policies that end up being rigidly obeyed). Yet unlike natural
laws, which are universal and uniform, designers are also innovators.
Innovation, the emergence to true novelty, eschews predictability.
Designers are inventors. We cannot predict what an inventor would do short of
becoming that inventor. Intelligent design offers a radically different
problematic for science than a mechanistic science wedded solely to undirected
natural causes. Yes, intelligent design concedes predictability. But this
represents no concession to Darwinism, for which the minimal predictive power
that it has can readily be assimilated to a design-theoretic framework.
That solutions due to ID cannot be predicted is, in principle,
correct. But ID in biology takes us out of science, not just mechanistic
science. That science lacks metaphysics is not the problem, but that
scientists sometimes peddle metaphysics for science.
EXPLANATORY POWER:
26.
According to Darwin the great advantage of his theory over William Paley's
theory of design was that Darwin's theory
managed to account for a wide diversity of biological facts that Paley's theory
could not. Darwin's theory was thus thought to have greater explanatory power
than Paley's , and this relative advantage could be viewed as a test of the two
theories. Underlying explanatory power is a view of explanation known as
inference to the best explanation in which a "best explanation" always
presupposes at least two competing explanations and attempts to determine which
comes out
on top. Design theorists see advances in the biological and information sciences
as putting design back in the saddle and
enabling it to outperform Darwinism, thus making design currently the best
explanation biological complexity. Darwinists of course see the matter quite
differently.
27. What I want to focus on here, however, is not the testing of Darwinism
and design against the broad body of biological data, but the related question
of which theory can accommodate the greater range of biological possibilities.
Think of it this way: Are there things that might occur in biology for which a
design-theoretic framework could give a better, more accurate account than a
purely Darwinian and therefore non-teleological framework? The answer is yes.
Design can live with its
deliverances. Even if the Darwinian mechanism could be shown to do all the
design work for which design theorists want to invoke design (say for the
bacterial flagellum), a design-theoretic framework would not destroy any valid
findings of science. To be sure, design would then become superfluous, but it
would not become contradictory or self-refuting.
28. First off, let's be clear that design can accommodate all the results
of Darwinism. Intelligent design does not repudiate the Darwinian mechanism. It
merely assigns it a lower status than Darwinism does. The Darwinian mechanism
does operate in nature and insofar as it does design can live with its
deliverances. Even if the Darwinian mechanism could be shown to do all the
design work for which design theorists want to invoke design (say for the
bacterial flagellum), a
design-theoretic framework would not destroy any valid findings of science. To
be sure, design would then become superfluous, but it would not become
contradictory or self-refuting.
This is a curious admission. Design is superfluous, without empirical relevance, and therefore nonscientific unless science is redefined. Isn't this precisely what critics of ID have insisted all along? Of course, this is not what Philip Johnson has proclaimed.
Doesn't this claim make ID, as a whole (not for individual cases),
unfalsifyable?
29. The same cannot be said for Darwinism and the naturalism it embodies
as a framework for science. Suppose I were a super-genius molecular biologist,
and I invented some hitherto unknown molecular machine, far more complicated and
marvelous than the bacterial flagellum. Suppose further I inserted this machine
into a bacterium, set this genetically modified organism free, allowed it to
reproduce in the wild, and destroyed all evidence of my having created the
molecular
machine. Suppose, for instance, the machine is a stinger that injects other
bacteria and explodes them by rapidly pumping them up with some gas (I'm not
familiar with any such molecular machine in the wild), thereby allowing the
bacteria endowed with my invention to consume their unfortunate prey.
Natural selection at least caused it to prevail in the wild,
according to Dembski's story!
30. Now let's ask the question, If a Darwinist came upon this bacterium
with the novel molecular machine in the wild, would that machine be attributed
to design or to natural selection? When I presented this example to David Sloan
Wilson at a conference at MIT two years ago, he shrugged it off and remarked
that natural selection created us and so by extension also created my novel
molecular machine. But of course this argument won't wash since the issue is
whether natural selection could indeed create us. What's more, if Darwinists
came upon my invention of a novel molecular machine inserted into a bacterium
that allows it to feed on other bacteria, they wouldn't look to design but would
reflexively turn to natural selection. But, if we go with the story, I designed
the bacterial stinger and natural selection had nothing to do with it. Moreover,
intelligent design would confirm the stinger's design whereas Darwinism never
could. It follows that a design-theoretic framework could account for biological
facts that would forever remain invisible within a Darwinian framework. It seems
to me that this possibility constitutes a joint test of Darwinism and
intelligent design that strongly
supports intelligent design -- if not as the truth then certainly as a live
possible theoretical option that must not be precluded for a priori
philosophical reasons like naturalism.
CONCLUSION
31.
In conclusion, there is no merit to Eugenie Scott's claim that intelligent
design is untestable or hasn't put forward any "testable models."
Intelligent design's claims about specified and irreducible complexity are in
close contact with the data of biology and open to refutation as well as
confirmation. What's more, as a framework for doing science intelligent design
is more robust and sensitive to the possibilities that nature might actually
throw our way than Darwinism, which must view everything through the lens of
chance and necessity and take a reductive approach to all signs of teleology in
nature.
32. But isn't intelligent design just a stone's throw from fundamentalist
Christianity and rabid creationism? Even if a theory of intelligent design
should ultimately prove successful and supersede Darwinism, it would not follow
that the designer posited by this theory would have to be the Christian God or
for that matter be real in some ontological sense. One can be an anti-realist
about science and simply regard the designer as a regulative principle -- a
conceptually useful device for making sense out of certain facts of biology --
without assigning the designer any weight in reality. Wittgenstein, for
instance, regarded the theories of Copernicus and Darwin not as true but as
"fertile new points of view."
Who else but the Christian God could be the designer of living systems (if not of the earthly ones, then of the creative ETIs if they, in the extreme case, did the designing)? - Science is basically realist, although an occasional atheistic scientist may be clouded enough to fall for anti-realism. Dembski's attempt to keep ID within science is unsuccessful.
33. Ultimately, the main question that confronts scientists working on a
theory of intelligent design is whether design provides powerful new insights
and fruitful avenues of research. The metaphysics underlying such a theory, and
in particular the ontological status of the designer, can then be taken up by
philosophy and theology. Indeed, one's metaphysics ought to be a matter of
indifference to one's scientific theorizing about design. The fact that it is
not for design theorists, whose primary task is to explore the fruitfulness of
design for science. Yes, we've got our work cut out for us. But instead of
facilitating that work, Scott and her National Center for Science Education are
far more interested in exiling that work to oblivion. Fortunately, design
theorists have suffered exile for so long at the hands of Darwinists that we've
learned to operate effectively even in oblivion.
William Dembski
1-25-2001
Bill writes: "Ultimately, the main question that confronts scientists
working on a theory of intelligent design is whether design provides
powerful new insights and fruitful avenues of research." With this, I
suspect we will all agree. Is it reasonable to place some sort of a
schedule in place for some of this to happen? If 20 years go by and we
are still in the same place relative to ID I suspect most of us will have
relegated it to the dark room where the Phlogiston and N-Ray theories
More General Comments
When I read #7, I thought he was linking the whole concept of intelligent design to the validity of the irreducible complexity argument. Then in #28 he says that Darwinian explanations won't disprove intelligent design. This is more in accord with my view that there is no way to prove lack of design.
My comments here point up the fact that one (though certainly not the only one) of the problems with the ID movement is precisely their unwillingness to engage in serious theological discussion. It may be replied that in Dembski's article, which is a response to Eugenie Scott, theological arguments would have been out of place. But the fact that theological defects are so clear even in such a setting is itself significant
Thanks to all who participated
See Also Bruce Gordon, "Intelligent Design Movement Struggles with Identity Crisis"
The Big Tent and the Camelıs Nose
Eugenie C. Scott
<scott@ncseweb.org>
Copyright
1999, 2000 by William Grassie. Copies of this internet posting may be made and
distributed in whole without further permission. Credit: "This information
was circulated on the Meta Lists on Science and Religion
<http://www.meta-list.org>."
William Dembski has responded to my
January 18 Tom Jukes Memorial Lecture at UC Berkeley. Others are
responding on META and elsewhere to the focus of his essay, whether natural
selection is testable, and I shall not do so here. I should, however
comment on views attributed to me.
I wasn't really dealing with the testability of ID, though that is the
impression one might get from Dembski's essay. In this public lecture, I
discussed both traditional creation science as well as Neocreationism, and
compared them. I talked about Behe's irreducible complexity idea, and
Dembski's Design Inference, and illustrated religious motivation for fighting
evolution. I am not especially concerned with whether ID is testable. I
look at the testability of ID the same way I look at the testability of
traditional Young Earth Creationism (YEC): YEC can make empirically or logically
or statistically testable statements (the Earth was covered by a body of water,
all living things are descended from creatures that came off a boat) but its
foundational claim that everything came into being suddenly in its present form
through the efforts of a supernatural creator is not a scientifically testable
claim. Iıll let theologians argue over whether Special Creationism is
good theology, but evoking omnipotent supernatural causes puts one smack out of
the realm of science, protestations of the validity of ³theistic science²
notwithstanding. One cannot use natural processes to hold constant the actions
of supernatural forces; hence it is impossible to test (by naturalistic
methodology) supernatural explanations (Scott, 1998). Whether a
supernatural force does or does not act is thus outside of what science can tell
us.
Similarly, ID can make empirically or logically or statistically testable claims
(that certain structures are irreducibly complex; by using probability arguments
like the ³design filter² one can detect design) but the foundational claim
that a supernatural ³intelligence² is behind it all is not a scientifically
testable statement. (And please, let's be grownups here: we're not talking about
a disembodied, vague ³intelligence² that *might* be material, we're
talking about God, an intelligent agent that can do things that, according to
ID, mortals and natural processes like natural selection cannot. Not for
nothing does Dembski say that ID is the bridge between science and theology.)
In my talk, I wasnıt deploring the untestability of ID *per se* but the
fact that its proponents donıt present testable models. I was referring to the
fact that ID proponents donıt present a model *at all* in the sense of saying
what happened when. At least YEC presents a view of ³what happens²: the
universe appeared within thousands of years ago, at one time, in its present
form, living things are descended from specially created ³kinds² from which
they have not varied except in trivial ways, there was a universal flood that
produced the modern geological features, and humans are specially created apart
from all other forms. So what happened in the ID model?
I said (and have said repeatedly) that the message of ID is ³evolution
is bad science², without providing an alternative view of the history of the
universe. This is not trivial: in books by Philip Johnson as well as in
Jonathan Wells' new *Icons of Evolution* teachers are told that they
should be teaching students about how evolution is a weak, unsubstantiated ³theory
in crisis², to use former antievolutionist Michael Dentonıs phrase. The
theories of astronomical, geological and biological evolution attempt to explain
evidence demonstrating that the universe has been around for a long time, and
has gradually unfolded from a different form to its present form. There
are lots of details in there, about when and how things
happened: when our galaxy formed, when other galaxies formed, when Earth formed
and out of what matter, when warthogs or whortleberries or liverworts came to
resemble their present forms, and on. Something happened, and weıre trying to
figure out what, and trying to figure out the mechanisms that brought it about.
ID tells us that evolution didnıt happen (what else is one supposed to take
away from *Icons of Evolution*?) but it doesnıt tell us what *did*.
Unless ID proponents can come up with an actual model of ³what happened², all
they have is a sterile antievolutionism that adds little to YEC beyond the
specific ideas of irreducible complexity and the design filter.
The reason ID proponents are so vague about an actual picture of what happened
is that they strive to include YECs, progressive creationists (PCs), and
theistic evolutionists (TEs) among their theorists and supporters (though the TE
gang must feel rather uncomfortable, Dembski himself having proclaimed that ³ID
is no friend of theistic evolution² (Dembski, 1995). This is not just a
big tent; it is one bulging with people who must be eying one another warily.
Phil Johnson may want everyone to just be nice for the time being until
evolution is vanquished, and then they can work out their disagreements, but if
you think evolutionists squabble, wait until you see what happens when the ID
folks have to sort out their differences.
As Ronald Numbers and Kelly Smith independently urged at last summerıs ³Design
and Its Critics² conference, if ID is going to attain any level of scholarly
respectability, its proponents are going to have to distinguish their model from
the discredited, unscientific YEC model, even if that means losing the support
of biblical literalist Christians. For aspiring scholarly movements, the
enemy of my enemy is not my friend.
Given my odd line of work, Iım concerned with practical issues such as what
teachers are being told to do, and what effect this will have on American
education. As near as I can tell, teachers are being encouraged to teach
students that evolution didnıt happen, and that if it did, that natural
selection isnıt the cause of it, and that in any event we have to leave room
for the direct actions of a Creator, and all this is still called science.
But to keep all the ID factions quiet, an actual picture of what happened, which
is what evolution is trying to explain and what ID has to explain, is never
mentioned. What should teachers teach? Apparently, judging from *Icons
of Evolution*, they should teach the familiar old YEC saws about the
weaknesses of evolution. Evolution is bad science, they say. So to
my way of thinking, ID doesnıt rise above familiar
antievolutionism, though it may be served up in probability theory and
information theory with a side order of biochemistry, but there is no coherent
ID model of what happened for teachers to actually teach.
This invites the question of what, according to the proponents of ID, should
teachers teach about the following issues?
1) Is the universe a few thousand years old or billions? Most ID
proponents will if forced, uncomfortably confess that they accept an ancient age
of the earth, but they are quick to dismiss the question as unimportant,
presumably to keep the YECs in the antievolution tent. But should a
teacher teach that the earth is millions or thousands of years old? You
canıt have it both ways if you are proposing a K-12 curriculum. What is the ID
model? What happened?
2) Is the geological column which shows a succession of species through
time, ³real² or an artifact? At least the YECs present a model of what
happened: the arrangement of species in the geological column is a result of
sorting by Noahıs flood, rather than their appearance at different times.
Does ID accept the geological column as ³real²? This is a simple thing
to agree to: it is still possible to argue (as Jonathan Wells does) that the
arrangement of species through time doesnıt represent descent with
modification, but Dembski et al. are going to have to come clean as to what this
means. Minimally, it means the Special Creationists are wrong, but it also
requires the PCs and the TEs to fight it out as to whether the
succession of species through time represents separate creations or a
geneological pattern of related species.
3) Did living things descend with modification from common ancestors?
This is what biological evolution is all about, and where the ID big tent starts
showing the strain of trying to stretch over incompatible views. How is ID going
to accommodate both Theistic Evolutionist Michael Behe and Special Creationist
Paul Nelson? More important, what do proponents of ID expect teachers to teach?
What happened?
I think I know the answer. Teachers are supposed to teach that evolution
didnıt happen. Of course, if they did, they would be teaching a view that
is well outside the scientific mainstream, and be doing their students no
favors. I like to remind people that evolution is taught matter-of-factly
at every solid university in the nation, including Brigham Young, Notre Dame,
and Baylor. But more importantly for our purposes here, ID does not
present a coherent model of ³what happened², making it impossible for teachers
to present ID as an alternative to evolution, as proponents seek.
Now, maybe Dembski or other ID proponents will tell me that they are not trying
to influence the K-12 curriculum, that they are merely trying to build a
scholarly movement at the university or intellectual level, trusting that
eventually ID will be validated and like other intellectual movements, it will
trickle down to the K-12 level. If Dembski had attended my talk, he would have
heard me advocate exactly this strategy. I donıt think ID will enter the
academic mainstream, but if it does, then obviously it will eventually be taught
in high school. But I don't think ID proponents are willing to wait until
they get this validation: Jonathan Wells, whose book provides disclaimers to be
copied and placed in K-12 textbooks, is obviously concerned primarily with the
K-12 curriculum; Philip Johnson's *Defeating Darwinism* is explicitly
aimed at high school students; and CRSCıs Steven Meyer is an author of a
substantial ³Afterward² to teachers in the ID high school textbook,
*Of Pandas and People*. Bruce Gordon, presently interim director of
The Baylor Science and Religion Project, has correctly noted, : ID ³has been
prematurely drawn into discussions of public science education, where it has no
business making an appearance without broad recognition from the scientific
community that it is making a worthwhile contribution to our understanding of
the natural world² (Gordon, 2001).
So, what happened, Bill? Will you go beyond ³evolution is bad science² to give
us an actual model of what happened?
References
Dembski, William 1995 What every theologian should know about creation,
evolution, and design. Center for Interdisciplinary Studies Transactions 3(2):3.
Dembski, William. 2001. Is Intelligent Design Testable? A Reply to
Eugenie Scott. META 004. 2001.01.24.
Scott, Eugenie C. 1998 Two kinds of materialism. *Free Inquiry*, Spring,
1998, p. 20.
I thank Glenn Branch for useful comments.
Eugenie C. Scott, Ph.D.
Executive Director
National Center for Science Education, Inc.