Here is a review by Mike Behe of Robert Pennock's recent book, "Tower
of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism" that was posted on
another list that I am on.
I like the paragraph:
"Methodological naturalism proves at last nothing more than an artificial
restriction on thought, and it will eventually pass. Despite would-be
gatekeepers like Pennock, the argument for design is gaining strength with
the advance of science and for a simple reason once described by the
physicist Percy Bridgman: `The scientific method, as far as it is a method,
is nothing more than doing one's damnedest with one's mind, no holds
barred.'"
Steve
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The Weekly Standard, June 7, 1999, BOOKS & ARTS; Pg. 35
HEADLINE: THE GOD OF SCIENCE;
The Case for Intelligent Design
BYLINE: By Michael J. Behe;
Michael J. Behe is professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University and
the author of Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to
Evolution.
In the 1940s, the British astronomer Fred Hoyle was puzzling over the
origins of the element carbon. According to the science of his day, virtually
no carbon should be made by stars, the nuclear furnaces that forge almost
all the other elements. Yet carbon, essential for life, indisputably exists.
So Hoyle guessed that there is a lucky arrangement of things "resonance
levels" for several kinds of atomic nuclei that allows stars to make carbon.
And when other physicists searched for such resonance levels, they found
them, exactly where Hoyle predicted.
In consternation Hoyle, an atheist, later wrote,
`A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect
has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that
there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one
calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this
conclusion almost beyond question.'
And that, in a nutshell, is what philosophers call "the argument for design."
When a number of separate, very unlikely events combine to produce
something as complex as life, we suspect that the conditions were
intentionally arranged for the purpose.
Design arguments remain controversial for a number of reasons the most
obvious being their theological overtones: Theists generally find them
persuasive; atheists don't. But sometimes, as the example of Hoyle
demonstrates, and atheist will find himself forced to accept such arguments.
And sometimes, it works the other way around. Robert Pennock, a
professor of the philosophy of science at the University of Texas, is a
theist, a Quaker, who doesn't like the design argument, and he's written his
new Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism to parry
it.
Unfortunately, whatever merits exist in Pennock's analysis, they are
obscured by based rhetoric. His term "creationism," for instance, is one that
readers will typically take to mean biblical literalism: a "young earth"
created as recently as 4004 B.C., Adam and Eve, Noah's Ark, and all the
rest. But Pennock applies "creationist" to writers who believe in none of
this. His actual opponents turn out to have doctorates in things like
embryology, biochemistry, the philosophy of science, and mathematics
from places like the University of Chicago, Cambridge, and Berkeley. And
they write books and articles that engage, rather than avoid, serious issues
in science and philosophy.
To be fair, Pennock does note the difference between modern
intelligent-design theorists and biblical literalists. But he never asks whether
the term "creationist" can be used for both, and he exploits the confusion
by using lines of argument against the modern intelligent-design theorists
that tell only against the oldfashioned literalists.
His title, Tower of Babel, for example, alludes to a device that he uses to
try to get young-earth creationists to admit the error of their ways: The
Bible says that all the plants and animals were created within a few days of
one another; the Bible also records that human languages were created
simultaneously by God, to foil plans for the tower of Babel; so Pennock
concludes that if he can convince creationists there is good evidence that
modern languages arose from a common ancestral language, he may be
able to get them to give up their insistence on the simultaneous creation of
all living things.
He announces proudly, "To my knowledge no one has drawn this
important parallel before" between linguistic and biological evolution. Well,
no wonder. People who believe that the Bible trumps fossils and Stephen
Jay Gould will also use it to trump Noam Chomsky and Indo-European
roots.
But Pennock is being disingenuous. His target is not biblical literalists; it's
intelligent-design theorists, who have no quarrel with linguistic changes.
His
whole etymological argument stands as an exercise in misdirection: The
point is simply to leave an association in the reader's mind between the
design argument and the inability to see that French is similar to Spanish.
Throughout the book Pennock milks "creationism" for all the negative
connotations he can. He calls it a "meme" (the term coined by the
Darwinist popularizer Richard Dawkins to mean an idea that spreads by
natural selection), even though many other Darwinists disavow the concept
of memes. So, Pennock says, a new variety of creationism (by which he
means intelligent-design theory) "evolved" from young-earth creationism as
a
"cluster of ideas that reproduces itself" and that these new intelligent-
design
"creationists" today "forget their own history," as though there were a
straight intellectual line to be drawn between the two types of opponents of
absolute Darwinism.
But Phillip Johnson, a professor of law at Berkeley and the chief target of
Pennock's criticisms, was an agnostic until his mid-thirties and came by his
skepticism of evolution after reading the atheist Richard Dawkins's The
Blind Watchmaker and the agnostic Michael Denton's Evolution: A Theory
in Crisis. I am a lifelong Roman Catholic who was taught Darwinian
evolution in parochial school and believed it until, as a professor of
biochemistry, I started noticing some biochemical difficulties for natural
selection. Pennock's supposed intellectual lineage is baseless.
It's true that the argument for design has a venerable history, going back at
least to Aristotle. It's had its low points over the last few hundred years,
but it has made a strong comeback at the end of the twentieth century. And
its rising fortunes have been boosted by discoveries principally in physics
and astronomy: The Big Bang theory and "anthropic coincidences"
(life-friendly features of the universe, such as the resonance levels Hoyle
pointed out) are summarized in a number of scholarly texts and popular
books. More recent design arguments have also been based on chemical
problems confronting the origin of life and on aspects of biology.
Pennock, however, is preternaturally uninterested in scientific objections to
evolutions. "Of course," he yawns, modern design theorists "are right to
suggest that the origin of life remains a mystery." But, he adds
lethargically, "Research into this topic has started only relatively recently"
which turns out to be seventy five years ago. Of the problems I pointed out
in my 1996 Darwin's Black Box, for example, he remarks, "Behe will no
doubt complain that I have not addressed the biochemical details of his real
examples, but as we have noted, the evidence is not yet in on those
question." But several of the biochemical systems I discussed have been
well understood for forty years. For Pennock, the evidence will never be in
if it points to intelligent design.
Tower of Babel puts two philosophical objections to intelligent-design
theory. First, Pennock faults it for using negative argumentation and false
dichotomies: To argue that Darwinism is wrong is not to prove that
Genesis literalism is right. Perhaps some evolutionary mechanism other
than natural selection is at work, or perhaps some other creation story, like
that of an American Indian tribe, is true instead of Genesis.
Pennock admits that Phillip Johnson, for example, does not defend biblical
literalism, but he says that Johnson commits the fallacy anyway, because as
a Christian he speaks of an active God who can intervene in nature. This,
Pennock sniffs, neglects such possibilities as deism, an impersonal God, and
a "universal life force."
Philosophers call this logic chopping. Johnson was writing not for
philosophers but for the general public. Suppose he had spelled out the
argument this way:
Darwinism is the most plausible unintelligent mechanism, yet it has
tremendous difficulties and the evidence garnered so far points to its
inability to do what its advocates claim for it. If unintelligent mechanisms
can't do the job, then that shifts the focus to intelligent agency. That's as far
as the argument against Darwinism takes us, but most people already have
other reasons for believing in a personal God who just might act in history,
and they will find the argument for intelligent design fits with what they
already hold.
With the argument arranged this way, evidence, against Darwinism does
count as evidence for an active God, just as valid negative advertising
against the Democratic candidate will help the Republican, even though
Vegetarian and One World candidates are on the ballot, too. Life is either
the result of exclusively unintelligent causes or it is not, and the evidence
against the unintelligent production of life is clearly evidence for intelligent
design.
The second Philosophical objection in Tower of Babel is that design
violates "methodological naturalism," which means roughly that science
must act as though the universe were a closed system of cause and effect,
whether it really is or not. "Without the constraint of lawful regularity,"
Pennock lectures, "inductive evidential inference cannot get off the
ground."
But wasn't it an "inductive evidential inference" that led the atheist Fred
Hoyle to conclude that nature doesn't follow merely blind forces? Isn't it
"the constraint of lawful regularity" that turns chemicals in origin-of-life
experiments into goo at the bottom of the test tube, rather than into
primitive cells? Pennock implies that our only choices are a cartoon world,
where genies and fairies swirl about endlessly dispensing magic, or a world
of relentless materialism where, say, the charitable work of a Mother
Teresa is explained only in terms of evolutionary selection coefficients.
Why should we think our explanatory possibilities are limited to these
choices? Observation and experiment demonstrate that lawlike regularities
explain much of nature. The same methods indicate that intelligence
accounts for other aspects. It is ludicrous to forbid Fred Hoyle to notice
what for all the world looks like design, or to say that if he does notice,
he's no longer a scientist.
Methodological naturalism proves at last nothing more than an artificial
restriction on thought, and it will eventually pass. Despite would-be
gatekeepers like Pennock, the argument for design is gaining strength with
the advance of science and for a simple reason once described by the
physicist Percy Bridgman: "The scientific method, as far as it is a method,
is nothing more than doing one's damnedest with one's mind, no holds
barred."
No holds barred even though that may force us to conclude that the
universe reveals, in its intelligent design, traces of its intelligent designer.
ROBERT PENNOCK Tower of Babel The Evidence Against the New
Creationism MIT Press, 440 pp., $ 35
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"His powers of imagination were already well developed, and in addition to
childish fibs, he invented a bogus story that he was able to produce
variations in crocuses, polyanthuses, and primroses at will, by watering
them with coloured liquids, which was of course, as he admitted, 'a
monstrous fable,' but also shows that the was not unaware of variation,
even at that age." (de Beer G., "Charles Darwin: Evolution by Natural
Selection," Nelson: London UK, 1963, p24)
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