Why intelligent design is the best challenge to Darwinism

Feeling that I was too dismissive of intelligent design in an earlier blog entry and e-mail exchange, a correspondent wrote to me again to argue that ID is worth defending. While his long e-mail is very much worthwhile, if you’re not into reading it right now you can skip to my reply where I quote what I think is his key passage and summarize our points of agreement.

Dear Mr. Auster:

First, I don’t want to give the wrong impression: your view of Intelligent Design is the only one of your publicly stated positions with which I disagree…. Although I risk making myself a bit of a pest, I’m writing you again about Intelligent Design (ID for short) because in your responses to my previous e-mails, you don’t acknowledge what I tried to emphasize, which is the most important point of the whole creation-evolution debate. Darwinism and anti-Darwinism are vast, highly technical subjects, but I just want to emphasize the one, easily grasped point that is key to a proper understanding of the dispute.

I also write because there’s a chance you could become a formidable ally of ours!

A bit about myself: I’m a community-college math professor from Southern California and have degrees in physics and math. Like most of my friends and acquaintances, I was raised in (classical) liberalism, so I know it, because I was once one of their community. But God gifted me with a sense that something wasn’t right with the status quo, so I eventually became a conservative. And on the issue of Creation v. Evolution, my position is “old-earth” creationism. I regard the scientific evidence for the universe being billions of years old to be overwhelmingly strong, and the evidence for Darwinism to be very weak.

Darwinism, to be sure, is not at the front line of the culture war about which you write daily, so this may be to you a peripheral issue, or at least an issue about which you don’t believe yourself sufficiently knowledgeable to hold forth. Fair enough, but Darwinism is fundamental to the whole liberal project because without this Secular Creation Myth, liberalism loses its mass appeal. Without Darwinism, liberalism cannot give a plausible account of why one ought to believe in it, because without Darwinism, we have to take seriously the possibility that God really exists: He becomes the best explanation of why reality is the way it is. Therefore, a full-orbed defense of traditionalism requires opposition to Darwinism, and it must be a persuasive opposition that is based on clearly articulated first principles.

At the very least, a proper conservative ought to accept Darwinism only grudgingly, and refrain from attacking (as opposed to just disagreeing with) those who doubt it, as John Derbyshire has done recently (more on that later.) A properly conservative Darwinist ought to say “I wish it were not so, but I am reluctantly forced to go along with it, because of the evidence, and I admire those who oppose it, although I think they’re in a fight they can’t win.”

So here’s the key point: although some individual scientists doubt Darwinism, the official position of organized science is that Darwinism is definitely true, or at least as true as something can be, within the limits of the scientific way of knowing. But, as the more philosophically knowledgeable and honest scientists openly affirm, science does not know Darwinism to be true because of the evidence, but rather because of a presupposition of philosophical materialism, the doctrine that only matter and its properties exist. Their reasoning is: “We know that a God who performs miracles does not exist. Therefore, the only way life could have arisen out of non-life is through a Darwinian process. And since life did arise, something like Darwinism did occur.”

By “presupposition,” I don’t mean a self-evident truth that must be accepted in order to get started. That would be called an axiom. I mean by “presupposition” something regarded as already investigated and proved, so that it can be taken for granted. A presupposition is also something not explicitly acknowledged, as an axiom would be. It is instead something that “everybody knows,” and to doubt it is to identify yourself as disloyal to the group.

Most scientists are not consciously aware that the presuppositions determine the conclusion. Probably the majority of scientists are philosophically naive positivists who think that Darwinism follows from a straightforward examination of the evidence. And most of the rest are content to regard science as separate from religion by definition, so they don’t have to think about whether it is really true that God had nothing to do with the origin of life. After all, “that’s not my department.” They say things like “science is materialistic by definition” or “science and God have nothing to do with each other.” Holding these beliefs, they view the evidence against Darwinism as nothing more than the inevitable difficulties in working out the specific details of a theory that is known to be true overall.

Indeed, for most scientists, materialism is not clearly articulated and carefully proved. Instead, it is simply regarded as “the way of our people” that God is not to be considered. During their training, science students learn from senior members of the scientific tribe that “this is our way of life,” and like anyone with a strong sense of group loyalty, they resent any outsider who tells them they ought to do things differently by considering the possibility that God really did it. I’m being deliberately provocative in my choice of words, but I think you are aware of problem I’m referring to: most professionals seem to be primarily loyal to their group, rather than to truth.

Now, your position seems to be “we don’t need a new theory, we just need to present the evidence against Darwinism.” For an intelligent and well-educated person who does not closely follow the world of science, this position certainly makes sense, but it fails to recognize the current nature of official science. The official position of science is that such evidence does not exist: difficulties in the theory are just about the specific details; the overall ideas is known to be true.

Opponents of Darwinism have basically four ways to make their case:

one) Just give the evidence against Darwinism. This is the most common approach, but it only convinces some non-scientists and a few scientists. For the vast majority of scientists, and for all the official scientific organizations, it has no effect.

two) Stand on the authority of the Bible. I believe the Bible, but it has little authority for the main group we’re trying to convince, namely the intelligensia.

three) Dr. Hugh Ross, an astrophysicist and Christian apologist, and his organization “Reasons to Believe,” have created their “Testable Creation Model,” which attempts to use the official procedures of science to create a scientifically testable model of how God created. They aim to counter the most basic complaint leveled by scientists against anti-Darwinism, namely “it’s not scientific.” But regardless of its scientific merits, I believe that if the Testable Creation Model were to become as well known as ID, then the scientific establishment would be just as opposed to it as they are to ID, because it equally violates their presuppositions.

four) Intelligent Design, which by definition is the idea that we can create a scientific theory that can prove that natural forces do not have the capacity to create life out of non-life, nor to cause primitive single-celled life to develop into the complex organisms we see now. There already exist uncontroversial theories for distinguishing between intelligent and unintelligent causes, some of which are highly technical, such as cryptography. Therefore ID differs from established knowledge not in kind, but only in degree.

ID is thus in accordance with “presuppositional apologetics,” which is showing that the non-Christian’s basic philosophical presuppositions are incapable of accounting for reality. And since reality exists, at least one of the non-Christian’s presuppositions must be wrong. The scientific establishment is not convinced by the evidence for essentially the same reason that liberals cannot allow themselves to consider what would be the real cure for the immigration crisis. In both cases, the truth cannot be acknowledged because of presuppositions. More specifically, the liberal hates the idea that American ought to protect its identity, and the Darwinist hates the idea that God (especially the God of the Bible) exists. Therefore, long term, the approach of directly challenging these presuppositions probably has the best chance of succeeding. It certainly has the best chance of convincing those who are currently undecided, such as, for example, young people.

This is not to say that everything called ID is good or appropriate. ID undoubtedly has its share of charlatans, mainly because it is a new idea and movement, with no strong traditions or authorities. I have not followed the Dover case very closely, but I have heard some within the ID movement saying that it was not good strategy or tactics.

In any case, my main point is not about this case, but about ID generally. The fact is, ID has become “public enemy number one” for official science. John Derbyshire expressed the party line in a recent piece at NRO, where he said approximately: “I have no quarrel with traditional biblical creationism, because these people are just being true to their religion. But I hate ID, because they are trying to bastardize science.” And an article in “Physics Today” (a professional magazine for physics teachers) a few years ago was titled “Two Views of Intelligent Design”; the two views were “Hate it” and “Hate it a lot.” Given such irrational opposition, proponents of ID need to be tactically wise in how they further the cause.

And you should be wary of forming an opinion of ID based on reports in secular publications, such as you cited in your blog entry on the Dover case. All secular (and many religious) authorities agree that ID is bad; evaluating ID by relying on secular sources makes about as much sense as relying on liberal sources to evaluate American Renaissance. In both cases, the reporting media agree that the subjects about which they write are heretics, and the only question is whether they will attempt to fairly describe AR or ID before they inform the reader of how wrong and wicked it is.

ID is also controversial within the anti-Darwinism movement, for a variety of reasons. Young-earth creationists dislike it because it does not simply assert “Darwinism is wrong because the Bible says so,” but instead tries to rely on the enemy’s (science’s) way of thinking. Also, there are many atheistic or agnostic anti-Darwinists; such people cannot accept any suggestion that a Designer must have done it, so they oppose any theory that implies a Designer, whoever he may be. Finally, many Christians, and not just liberal Christians, believe that it is improper to disagree with what the scientists call a settled fact, either because they believe the scientists have the truth, or because they don’t want to pick what they believe to be an unnecessary fight with a heavyweight. Also, there is the snob factor; ID as well as six-24-hour-days creationism are believed by many to be the domain of rubes and yahoos, with whom the enlightened would not want to be associated.

In the Creation-Evolution debate, the bottom line is this: the question is not “does the definition of science necessarily include materialism?” (If materialism is false, it does not). The real question is: “According to all the evidence, which is more likely to have actually taken place: a Darwinian origin of life, or a theistic one?” This question cannot be answered simply by asserting a definition of science that automatically excludes competing theories, and ID directly attacks this prejudice.

Sincerely,
Alan R.

LA replies:

You write:

Intelligent Design, which by definition is the idea that we can create a scientific theory that can prove that natural forces do not have the capacity to create life out of non-life, nor to cause primitive single-celled life to develop into the complex organisms we see now. There already exist uncontroversial theories for distinguishing between intelligent and unintelligent causes, some of which are highly technical, such as cryptography. Therefore ID differs from established knowledge not in kind, but only in degree.

ID is thus in accordance with “presuppositional apologetics,” which is showing that the non-Christian’s basic philosophical presuppositions are incapable of accounting for reality. And since reality exists, at least one of the non-Christian’s presuppositions must be wrong. The scientific establishment is not convinced by the evidence for essentially the same reason that liberals cannot allow themselves to consider what would be the real cure for the immigration crisis. In both cases, the truth cannot be acknowledged because of presuppositions. More specifically, the liberal hates the idea that American ought to protect its identity, and the Darwinist hates the idea that God (especially the God of the Bible) exists. Therefore, long term, the approach of directly challenging these presuppositions probably has the best chance of succeeding. It certainly has the best chance of convincing those who are currently undecided, such as, for example, young people.

But this is what I AGREE WITH. This is ID in the mode of showing that natural forces cannot create life and new life forms. It’s not claiming a positive theory or explanation of how ID creates life and life forms (which is the way the not-very-intelligent and not-entirely-sincere people on the Dover school board were presenting it—they had their teachers call ID an alternative “explanation”), it’s just proving that natural forces cannot do it, which would then force the scientists to recognize that their materialist presuppositions (which up to this point have closed out even the consideration of a non-Darwinian approach) are flawed, which would then open up, as you say, a fair debate on whether Darwinism or a theistic explanation of life is more likely.

ID as you describe it (and as it’s described in a couple of ID books I’ve perused) starts from physical observations of life processes, and on that basis demonstrates that natural forces cannot do the trick. If that’s the way you define ID, then I support ID.

I am certainly not in line with John Derbyshire on his attacks on ID.

So your letter has succeeded. While there are in my view serious flaws in the way various ID’ers have presented it, if the ID’ers consistently laid out their approach the way you have done here, they would be in much better shape.

Thanks for writing.

Alan R. replies

Thanks for your careful attention to my e-mail. There are many sharp minds among the VFR community, and I anticipate some legitimate challenges to what I’ve (we’ve) said. I pray that the resulting exchange will be fruitful.

To give honor where due, I should have pointed out that although the wording of the e-mail is mine, the basic idea that Darwinism is supported because of presuppositions rather than evidence I learned from Phillip Johnson, professor emeritus of law at UC Berkeley and probably the world’s leading anti-Darwinist.

Sage McLaughlin writes:

I’m not sure you will have noted it but this statement by your Southern Californian correspondent regarding ID,

“But God gifted me with a sense that something wasn’t right with the status quo, so I eventually became a conservative,”

strikes me as deliciously ironic, and confirmation of Chesterton’s paradoxical dictum that there was never anything so dangerous and exciting as orthodoxy.

This reminds me of something I said half-jokingly a few months ago (though I can’t find it at the moment), that Christianity, because of the sheer complexity of it and the difficulty of maintaining a society based on it, is really the fulfillment of Nietzsche’s dictate to “live dangerously.”

Ben writes:

Re: the significance of ID. The fallen idols.

Two gods of the 19th century have fallen - Marx and Freud. The third one of that unholy trinity - Darwin - is now crumbling. The 19th century - RIP. The times they are a changin…

Ron E. writes:

I agree with your correspondent Alan R. that the significance of the conflict between ID and Darwinism has social and cultural consequences. The biological basis for political liberalism is the theory of evolution. Darwinism roots the origins of man in pure materialism (without any higher teleology) through the mechanism of random selection. An absolutely materialistic view of man grounds the human race solely in itself and thus makes man himself the only social arbiter available—this is the core of liberalism.

The mechanism of random selection espoused by Darwin removes any teleology from man and thus renders all concepts of transcendence meaningless. ID attacks not only the materialist conception of origins in Darwin but also questions the lack or negation of a telos in scientific inquiry. If the origins of life are based on intelligent design—and intelligence is purpose driven—then a goal-less biology is false.

If ID presents a true assessment of human origins, then liberalism loses its concept that man is the measure of all things and determines his own telos through social, historical and biological “progressivisms”.

Alan R. is quite right that the conflict between ID and Darwinism has profound social implications and can spell the demise of liberalism once the scientific basis for liberalism is removed.

LA writes:

This may be true, but the issue as I see it is, is Darwinism true?, not, is Darwinism good for us?

A reader writes:

In my considered opinion, knowing what I do about natural selection, ID is not true. I refer to Alan, and now Ron suggesting we ditch Darwinism because it leads to liberalism. Your last comment about truth is well appreciated- here I again refer to your website.

Scientists continue to find evidence for recent selection for genes in humans, check out Sailer’s and Pontikos’ archives for that. [LA note: That’s micro evolution, changes within a species, not macro evolution, the evolution of new life forms.] There is antibiotic resistance in bacteria, selection for virulence for viruses under pressure not to make their hosts die too quickly before the viruses can spread. [LA: Ditto.] There is fossil evidence of prehistoric forms of modern animals. [LA: This bare statement is supposed to be dispositive? There are vast and innumerable gaps in the fossil record, 150 years after Darwin, who said in Origin that the persistence such gaps would disprove his theory; he was more honest than his followers.]

People should leave religion in church and stop bringing it into the lab. I’m no fan or Derbyshire, but he’s right in this case. [LA: The religious believers here are those who have made a religion out of material science.]

The reader writes again:

If macroevolution takes tens-thousands-millions of years, how are we going to see it?

I’d like to see the ID enthusiasts provide evidence for their own ideas. Real easy to find “holes” in the fossil evidence. More difficult to show that a great spirit in the sky created life.

LA replies:

You are completely missing the point.

Darwinism (more precisely neo-Darwinism but for convenience we use the shorter word) says that purely natural processes of random mutation and natural selection produced complex living organisms such as the lion and the whale, and complex organs such as the eye, the bacterium flagellum, and the human brain. The critics of Darwinism say that random mutations naturally selected cannot possibly lead to irreducibly complex structures such as the eye, in which all the parts must be present and working together, since each individual part by itself would have no selective advantage, only the functioning whole would have selective advantage. Irreducibly complex structures can only be produced by a purposive intelligence, not by random mutations.

Darwinism is presented today as the orthodox truth to the whole world, therefore the burden of proof is on the Darwinists to show that Darwinism is true. The burden of proof is not on the critics of Darwinism to offer their own theory of how evolution actually works.

The truth is that we DO NOT KNOW how evolution occurred. THAT is the truly scientific position. But the Darwinists have made a religion out of Darwinism, and absurdly demand that if the critics of Darwinism are to be believed, they must offer a complete theory to replace Darwinism. As I see it, such a replacement theory for Darwinism is not possible, for the same reason that Darwinism itself cannot be true: Since life with its complex structures cannot have been created by random material processes, but could only have been created by a purposive intelligence that is not material and is beyond our grasp, no experimental theories demonstrating how this happened are possible. If the ID’ers can come up with such a theory, I’d love to see it. But they do not need to have such a theory in order to demonstrate the falseness of the Darwinian theory.

Bob W. writes:

The best web site for reviewing ID is: http://www.arn.org/

It has a very lively forum for exchange. The site itself has tons of ID material and references. It exposes the fraud that Darwinism in all of its permutations and guises is the only valid origins game in town.

John M. writes:

I believe Alan R. is exactly right. The debate about Darwinism is at the epicenter of the culture wars. ID’s proponents should be viewed as valuable allies. Whatever one says or thinks of Intelligent Design, it ought to be based on the limits of what its main proponents have argued, not on what the Dover School Board did, or how ID’s critics or naïve enthusiasts tend to misrepresent it.

… Scientists claim to have discovered the mechanism––random mutation combined with natural selection––that is capable of explaining all life within a naturalistic, as opposed to a creative, framework. ID’s proponents claim they are wrong. They are defining workable mechanisms for demonstrating that the probabilities are running overwhelmingly against the Darwinists. In other words, information, or design, is primary.

If they are right, does this tell us anything “positive”? Well, if life cannot be attributed to random processes, to what is it attributable? I was sitting next to Michael Behe at dinner a few months ago and asked him this question directly. Behe is one of the major ID theorists. He said in effect, we don’t know. Neither does ID contend with the facts of a very old earth or very old life.

… My point is that it is counterproductive to claim to support the negative arguments of ID if you turn away from the positive conclusions to which the arguments are leading. Many conservatives, especially since the Dover debacle, are at pains to discredit ID and distance themselves from it. While they no doubt understand that any system (Darwinism) that makes the conclusive case for official atheism is not a good thing, they seem to have no confidence in the emergence of an intellectually credible alternative. That alternative is an explanation of how primary intelligence brought life about within a developing, real world framework, as opposed to the “miraculous” scenario of special creation. [LA note: John should have said, “that alternative would be,” not “that alternative is,” since as he points out, the alternative explanation he’s hoping for doesn’t exist yet.]

As it stands, Darwin’s Natural Selection is a theoretical framework for explaining the material origins of all life. It is a theory that is highly consistent with the observable patterns of the development of life as seen in the fossil record, together with the overwhelming imputation of common descent, again as seen in the fossil record and confirmed by genetic science. ID is not an opposing theory of origins. It lacks a theoretical structure, and makes no coherent claims about how life got to be what it is today, other than to argue against the coherence of randomness, and in favor of the primacy of information. [LA: yes, that’s been my whole point: ID ads up to saying that the Darwinist explanation cannot be true, since there must be intelligence in the evolution of life, but ID doesn’t go beyond that general statement.]

Those of us who reject philosophical naturalism, and who believe there are fatal flaws in the structure of Natural Selection, should be focusing our intellectual energies on defining a theory of creation that is consistent with the observable facts. These facts are:

Highly complex and specified information cannot arise by natural, randomly based, processes.

The earth is billions of years old.

Life on earth is hundreds of millions of years old.

All extant life is descendent from ancestor species that were vastly different.

The gradualism required by a coherent evolutionary theory is not observable in nature. To the contrary, the genome is capable of throwing off highly integrated macro mutations.

The processes of life, especially sexual reproduction in the higher species, are directed towards the literal conservation of the entirety of the information in the genome.

A contrary mandate (survival) requires that the genome be highly adaptable.

Some structures persist despite being far less than optimum adaptations to the environment.

Any ideas as to where all this is leading?

LA replies:

Given John M’s list of facts (with one exception, see below), given that the Darwinian explanation is unsustainable, and given that life and the ever more complex forms of life must have come out of a purposive intelligence, it seems to me that there are only two possible scenarios:

1. From time to time, parents propagated offspring that were, as weird as this sounds, of a different species from the parents. There was in effect a special creation (or, if you like, the unfolding of the potentials of life that were there from the beginning) involving a leap to a new life form. For example, a bacterium species lacking a flagellum motor with its many parts propagated a new bacterium species that had the flagellum.

2. There were from time to time special creations out of nothing, new life forms without parents. This involves rejecting John’s statement that “All extant life is descendent from ancestor species that were vastly different.” The reason for the genetic similarities between these new beings and earlier or different ones (such as the genetic similarity between humans and apes, or between humans and fruit flies) is that the Creator keeps working from the same basic “templates,” reusing them in different ways.

These two scenarios are really the same, as they both involve the creation of new life forms without an immediate natural predecessor.

Further, these two scenarios can never be anything more than that; we can never know the exact “how” of life and evolution. Thus I don’t see the possibility of a non-Darwinian explanation. I only see the possibility of establishing that the materialist presuppositions of Darwinism are not true, and therefore that Darwinism is not true, and therefore that higher intelligence had to be involved in the creation and evolution of life. But “how” this higher intelligence accomplished this can never be known, as I see it.

RB writes:

Intelligent design vs. natural selection might be one more example of a false dichotomy. For a long time it has seemed to me that a strict Darwinian natural selection model cannot account for the complexity of many genes working together. I’ve had the following speculation. When you look at the molecular basis of heredity you find immensely complicated structures: nucleic acids and proteins etc. Through these structures electrical energy may be passing in very complicated pathways. Perhaps a highly complicated net of pathways through which energy flows as in the brain gives rise to or “attracts” intelligence, consciousness etc. If so could there be some kind of “mind” at work at the molecular level? This mind learns and experiments and alters its own configuration in the way that a human brain alters its synaptic pathways when it decides to learn a new subject, e.g. a student undertakes the study of mathematics.

This view is compatible with and may even require the existence of a higher intelligence; an absolute universal source of mind. It does, however, rule out simple minded creationism while allowing science and religion to coexist without conflict within their respective spheres. A few “outcast” biologists such as Rupert Sheldrake and Brian Goodwin are currently groping to produce a coherent scientific theory somewhat along these lines.

LA replies:

What RB is saying would seem to be consistent with the idea of genetic “meta-programs,” which would determine whether genes are active or not and in what configuration and how they interact with each other. This would suggest why it’s incorrect to speak reductively of organisms in terms of their “genes,” as though we were nothing but a bunch of individual genes and each gene did something by itself. Also, evolution could be a matter of a “meta-program” activating and releasing new potentials in the genome that were not seen before.

I purchased Sheldrake’s book A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation, back in the ’80s, it’s an anti-mechanistic, more holistic and vitalistic approach to life. Unfortunately, judging by the absence of much underlining in my copy, I don’t seem to have gotten much out of it. But I remember something intriguing about the idea of form, that once a species takes on a form or a way of being (leaving aside the question of how it acquired it in the first place), it will persist in it.

Here is Sheldrake’s webpage. But instead of dealing with the large questions of biological form and evolution, his emphasis seems to be such issues as telepathy. Here are some of the topics that are highlighted at the page:

Testing for Telepathy

How Telepathic are you?

Online Staring Experiment
Can YOU tell
if you are
being stared at?

Can you wake
a sleeping
animal by
staring at it?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 05, 2006 03:08 PM | Send