I have not been able to participate in the ASA discussion lately, but Ted alerted me to Randy Isaac’s question, and the discussion following on it. Although I thought I had already said enough, in posts both numerous and long, to answer Randy’s question, apparently Randy and a number of others are still unsatisfied with, or puzzled by, my denial that ID amounts to “god of the gaps” thinking. Perhaps, therefore, it is worth spending more time on.
First, Steve Matheson’s reply to Randy, in which he adapts the argument of Del Ratzsch, using the example of a meteor storm which spells out a coherent English sentence, is exactly the kind of answer I would have given to Randy. A complete, seamless causal explanation, with no “gaps” whatsoever, does not rule out design, as the meteor example shows. Another way of putting it would be in terms invented by the late Donald MacKay, who wrote about religion/science matters way back in the 1950s. He suggested that an explanation might be “exhaustive” without being “exclusive”. Scientific explanation might be able to enumerate all the steps that led to Phenomenon A, without any break, and thus be “exhaustive” in physical terms, without denying the relevance of non-physical explanations for the same phenomenon, i.e., without being “exclusive”. In one of his essays he used the example of a lit-up neon sign above a restaurant, which said something like “Ea!
t at Joe’s”. Now in terms of the electrical set-up, the properties of the neon gas, the way the tubes are laid out on the sign, one can give an exhaustive materialistic/mechanistic account of why lights of exactly that shape are seen on the sign; no other explanation is necessary, on that level. Yet surely it is relevant to know that the words “Eat at Joe’s” have meaning as an English sentence, and that all the electrical work etc. was done in order to serve the purpose of the restaurant owner. Thus, the material/mechanical explanation is exhaustive within its sphere, but not exclusive of other modes of explanation. And, most importantly, in order to fully understand why the sign lights up with the words “Eat at Joe’s”, in the broadest sense of the word “why”, you need to combine the two explanations, one mechanical/material, and one involving purpose.
It’s the same with the meteor example. On one level, you can explain “why” the words “Hi, Mom” are spelled out on the planetary surface, without ever referring to purpose, design, intelligence, etc. You can say that the result was necessary given the laws of nature, going back to the Big Bang: those meteoroids had to strike exactly where they did, and unwittingly, unintentionally, they spelled out the words that they did. So you have an exhaustive, gap-free, naturalistic explanation. No need to try to squeeze in some deity subtly altering the paths of the meteoroids so that they spelled out those words. Yet, this explanation, though exhaustive in naturalistic terms, is not exclusive. We can also explain the words in terms of the intention of the person or deity who planned for their existence from the time of the Big Bang. In fact, if we DON’T add in this additional level of explanation, we haven’t fully “understood” the phenomenon at all, because, !
without the intention of the designer, those words would never have been carved out by the meteoroids. “Design” here is a genuine, bona fide cause of the event, equally necessary for explaining the event as the mechanical causes which science has tracked down.
Whether we say that the design inference here is “scientific” or not, the important point is that it is (a) legitimate and (b) necessary for a full understanding of the phenomenon. And further (c) the design inference involves no violation of “methodological naturalism” regarding the path of the meteoroids through space, etc.
Second, I think it’s important to point out what my answer implies for the “scientific” status of ID. ID is about design detection, not mechanistic/materialistic causal chains of events. If “science” requires that an explanation involve such causal chains, then ID is definitely not science. ID can discern that “Hi, Mom!” carved out by meteoroids implies an intelligent designer. ID cannot, however, just from looking at the design, tell you the history of the events. It cannot tell you what larger body (comet, satellite, or planet) the meteoroids were broken-off pieces of, or give you a full list of the other cosmic bodies the meteoroids interacted with gravitationally, over the 500 years or 500 million years before they began their final plunge. Similarly, it cannot tell you whether the sign that says “Eat at Joe’s” was manufactured in Scotland or Hong Kong. It also cannot tell you whether the sign was put up last night, or last year, or by unionize!
d or non-unionized labourers. Again, ID cannot tell you whether the Martian sculptures (from my earlier example) were carved by beings who were native to Mars, and later left or became extinct, or by visitors to Mars. Nor can ID tell you the dates or chronological order of the biological steps which brought the first bacterial flagellum into being. (Side note: neither can Darwinism.) If champions of Darwin are going to keep asking ID people to answer questions like: “Who was the designer? When did he do this? By what steps? Using what natural forces?”, the champions of Darwin are going to be forever disappointed. ID is not that kind of explanation.
Third, precisely because ID is not an efficient-cause explanation of the type that scientists usually demand, it is not a “god of the gaps” explanation. A God of the gaps explanation is an efficient cause explanation, because it places the activity of God within a series of actions in a causal chain. A GOTG explanation for evolution would work like this: The earth was formed naturalistically– the atmosphere and oceans were formed naturalistically – the first amino acids were formed naturalistically – and then God came down and miraculously made the first cell – and then the cell evolved naturalistically into simple multi-celled animals for a few hundred million years – and then God came down in the Cambrian Explosion and miraculously stitched together molluscs, echinoderms, arthropods, vertebrates, etc. God of the gaps explanations mix miraculous and natural causes, sticking in miraculous causes wherever natural causes are believed to be insufficient. But !
still, they are efficient-cause explanations. That is not what ID is about. ID is about detecting design. In Aristotelian terms, it’s akin somewhat to notions of formal cause and final cause, not to efficient cause. An ID analysis would typically conclude that the first cell, the Cambrian explosion, and many other things require design. But the way the design finds its way into nature, so to speak, may be entirely naturalistic. ID simply is powerless to say, due to lack of ability to historically reconstruct the events, how the design found its way into nature, just as archaeologists have often found themselves unable to reconstruct exactly how Stonehenge or the Easter Island statues were erected. But archaeologists are surely right to conclude that Stonehenge and Easter Island statues were designed, even though they cannot give a full historical, causal story.
Fourth, precisely because ID is incapable of affirming any particular causal story, it cannot rule out miraculous causal stories. In considering the Cambrian Explosion, the ID theorist may say, with Michael Denton, that absolutely no miraculous events were involved, and that the Cambrian Explosion was planned for in the very first DNA of the very first living creature, “front-loaded” into some bacterium billions of years before it was actualized. But the ID theorist cannot stop another ID supporter, perhaps from some fundamentalist church, from saying that the Cambrian Explosion represented the miraculous activity of God, swooping down into nature and temporarily suspending its laws in order to create new forms of marine life. The ID theorist has no basis in ID theory for saying that this could not have happened, that God could not or would not have done this. Even the most Bible-skeptical ID theorist would have to grant to the fundamentalist: “The design of the C!
ambrian fauna is compatible with such a miraculous explanation.” (But of course the ID theorist does not have to believe that explanation.) What this means is that creationists of various sorts, including some extremely narrow types, can identify themselves as ID believers or ID supporters. They can point to any design in nature not thus far explained in naturalistic terms, and say: “God did that by a special miracle”. They can argue for a “God of the gaps”. And there is nothing on the theoretical level that a Michael Denton or a Michael Behe can do to dissuade these people, even if they disagree with them. They can warn them that someday the gaps may be filled, so that gap-mongering is not the safest of strategies. Or they can indicate disagreement with their theology, but that takes the disagreement outside of ID theory, and outside of mathematics and science altogether. But a really stubborn god-of-the-gaps fundamentalist is not going to be budged by a!
nything a Behe or a Denton says.
This should shed light upon the exhortation (often voiced here and elsewhere) that ID, if it wants to be taken seriously as science, should “distance” itself from the large body of creationists who have used ID arguments as “God of the gaps” arguments. ID has no way of doing so, on the theoretical level. ID, by its nature, makes a “God of the gaps” approach possible. That doesn’t mean it endorses God of the gaps reasoning, or even is particularly inclined to it. It just means that it can’t rule it out.
When you think about it, how could ID rule out “God of the gaps” reasoning without making a metaphysical claim that miracles are not possible, or a theological claim that God never employs miracles in creation? ID wants to avoid making a theological decision between “naturalism” and “supernaturalism”. It wants to push the scientific exploration of origins as far as it possibly can without ruling on those options. Its way of doing this is to argue that “design”, in many cases at least, will look exactly the same whether it is naturally or supernaturally caused. Thus, we can detect design without settling the theological issue.
Now it is perfectly possible to be skeptical of ID on this point. Ted Davis has argued, reasonably I think (though he hasn’t yet convinced me), that all design inferences slip metaphysical assumptions in sooner or later. If that’s the case, if design detection is not possible without making metaphysical assumptions, then ID’s attempt to present design detection as a neutral scientific procedure is doomed. But it’s still unclear to me why metaphysical assumptions are always implicit in design inferences. I can see that they might often be slipped in. I don’t see why they are always necessarily slipped in. In my example of the Martian sculptures, I thought I showed that one could know them to be designed, without any metaphysical assumptions (about the nature of the designer, for example). Ted referred me to a general theoretical discussion by Elliot Sober, which I looked at, but did not find adequate as a response to my Martian sculpture example, or anything !
like it.
So, if the ID approach is right, ID must necessarily remain theologically neutral (regarding natural versus supernatural causation) in a way that seems to irritate TEs (who, with a few exceptions, appear to lean strongly towards purely naturalistic causation, at least regarding Creation). And that means that the ID bus, which is owned and operated by Anti-Chance Coach Lines, will always carry on it a mixture of agnostics, deists, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, mainline Protestants, and Christian fundamentalists (some of whom will make some “God of the gaps” arguments). But Anti-Chance Coach Lines can’t be blamed for the passengers who buy tickets and travel in its coaches. Nor can the other passengers. It’s not fair to blame me, or Michael Behe, or Michael Denton, for what some Biblical literalist says, any more that it would be to rail against a bus passenger who is Reformed for riding on a bus containing Lutherans. If you have a problem with God-of-the-gaps reasoni!
ng take it to those ID proponents, and only to those ID proponents, who employ it. Leave the other ID proponents out of it. I certainly haven’t endorsed God-of-the-gaps causal explanations, and I’d greatly appreciate it if people would respond to what I have argued, not to what some other ID proponent has argued.
So, in summary:
1. There is no inherent contradiction between saying that a thing is designed, and at the same time affirming that it was put together by means of the normal efficient causes recognized by modern science.
2. ID, therefore, can affirm design without affirming “God of the gaps”. It is not inherently committed to God of the gaps explanation.
3. ID cannot exclude the possibility of God of the Gaps reasoning, for the simple reason that ID refuses to pronounce metaphysically on the question whether God could have or would have violated natural laws on occasion during the evolutionary process. This is not a sly way of sneaking miracles into the discussion; it is an inherent limitation upon ID’s methods. ID bars itself from making metaphysical or theological decisions of this kind.
4. Therefore, ID will always attract the sort of “creationists” who are willing to admit a degree of evolution, but want to supplement it with some God-of-the-gaps assertions.
5. However, it will also always attract philosophical naturalists who would vigorously deny any “God of the gaps” conclusions, and would insist that the design finds its way into nature through wholly natural means.
6. The main argument of ID is not “God of the gaps”. The main concern of ID is not “miracles”. The main concern of ID is not Biblical literalism. The main concern of ID is to refute the alleged causal powers of “chance” in the biological realm, and to promote the alternative of “design”. Everything else you see in ID is subordinate to that end. And that means that ID must remain neutral on a number of theological questions that some TEs seem to have very strong opinions about, and it means that ID must tolerate, within its ranks, a number of theological opinions that not only many TEs, but many ID people themselves, find uncongenial. ID is willing to tolerate uncongenial theological opinions, because ID is not trying to establish any particular theology. ID is trying to dethrone Darwinism.
7. It follows that, if Darwinism could ever be decisively refuted, and if the whole world came to believe that the biological realm was carefully designed, the ID movement would simply dissolve, having accomplished its purpose. Individual supporters would go their own ways, some proclaiming that design was achieved by miraculous interventions, others that it was embodied through wholly naturalistic processes.
An interesting footnote to the last point is that, if Darwinism were ever to be decisively refuted, and design decisively established, TE would be in a quandary. Many of its characteristic arguments, which try so desperately to work in “chance”, would be completely outdated. Having hitched its star so closely to Darwin, it would have a tough decision to make: either make a major theological turnabout and abandon evolution altogether (in which case it would become traditional Christian creation doctrine rather than TE), or retain evolution but dump Darwin (in which case it would have to adopt a position similar in general outline to Behe’s and Denton’s). And this has been my point all along, i.e., that if you take away the (in my view irrational and religiously motivated) hostility to the idea of detectable design, there is no insurmountable barrier between some forms of ID and some forms of TE. It may be that, 100 years from now, Behe will be thought of, in hist!
orical perspective, as a TE, and people will wonder why there was ever a battle between the two camps.
To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Mon Nov 3 21:03:20 2008
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Mon Nov 03 2008 - 21:03:20 EST