The Future of Intelligent Design
Every time Intelligent Design makes it to the news, my big question always goes unanswered:
What long-term impact should ID have on how science gets done? Suppose us radical Darwinists realize that we misundestood the true nature of science and rational inquiry, and the United States becomes the world leader in ID research. We teach it to our kids, and universities start programs in Designed Biology (as well as Astrology, Phrenology, Potions and Defense Against the Dark Arts). What do folks in that program study? How do ID-ologists advance their knowledge of Intelligent Design? And how does that knowledge advance the grander progress of human endeavors?
In physical science, “how?” and “why?” are the same question. When children ask “Why does the moon go around the Earth?”, they are really asking, “How does the moon go around the Earth?” The word “why” is a question that assumes agency: what’s the motivation for a conscious agent to perform a certain action? Agency is not a part of the physical science frame, so the two words point to the same meaning.
In social science, “how?” and “why?” are very different questions. If an anthropologist sees someone make a totem pole, they want to know how the totem pole was made, but that’s an easy question to answer. More importantly, they want to explore the ‘why’ behind this creation. What’s their motivation? What goes on in their head to make them think that this totem pole is more than what we think it is? Why did they choose these totems and not others? Etc. The sort of questions that can only be asked when you’re dealing with sentient beings.
If ID were to succeed, it would change biology from a physical science to a social science. In ID, all us terrestrial lifeforms are just totems designed by God, the agent. The question “how was the eye formed?” becomes easy. God did it. We’ve answered that. But science must go on. Knowing the “how” of the formation of the eye tells us nothing about why God made it. God’s intentions, his thought processes, his psychological makeup — those become the interesting research questions. So that’s the new field of inquiry, isn’t it? That’s the next logical place to look, the subject of innumerable theses in the Departments of Intelligent Design across the country. Cognitive theology. Ecclesiastical anthropology.
Right? Don’t we want to know why God made eyes useful but left us with dangly appendices and vestigial tails that get in the way? Don’t we want to know why he (it’s safe to assume that, in ID-land, God is male) made bacteria adaptable to antibiotics? According to a Discovery Institute article,
ID doesn’t explain everything in terms of design. There is still room for chance and necessity. Furthermore, ID does not claim that design must be optimal; something may be designed even if it is flawed. Nor does ID purport to explain everything in the history of life; extinction, among other things, may be undesigned.
Wow! We certainly wouldn’t be scientists if we left those things unexplained. So why did the designer design some things and not others? What was his decision-making strategy? That’s the next question in the scientific process. Plus there are the classic questions, which ID would thrust into the realm of legitimate research topics: “what is the precise mechanism by which the designer turns his designs into reality?” and “can he design a stone so big that he can’t lift it?” and “who designed the designer?”, etc. And if the designer didn’t want me asking questions about his temperament, why did he design me to be so fucking curious? No more of this “the Lord works in mysterious ways” crap — that’s fine in Sunday School, but you waive your right to that line when you stuff God into a petri dish. You wanna be an Designologist, those must be the questions that comprise your research.
We’ll see this in Kansas classrooms immediately. Kids are great at asking questions. School isn’t the passing of information from teacher to student. There is a dialogue. Kids query, they explore, they need to know why things happen. If little Janet asks how the eye evolved in a secular biology class, a teacher can say, “well Janet, there are competing theories, but if you’re really curious, you can study that in college, and maybe you’ll be the one to settle the debate.” How are teachers supposed to nudge their kids toward even the most rudimentary answers about the nature of an Intelligent Designer?
So I don’t think the religious Right thought this through very well. They think religious belief is under attack from the secular world. But there is no attack. The traditional separation between faith and science represents the détente of that old war, and if the fundies want to pick that fight again, they’d better be prepared to accept some casualties.
December 1st, 2005 at 12:43 am
I’m not sure I agree with you about the interesting research questions. If we really do sever the questions of “how” and “why” (and I’m not sure that would be so bad - I don’t think they’re obviously the same thing, at any rate), then that’s all we’ve done. We haven’t overwritten the question of “how” with the question of “why.”
So suppose we decide that the molecular mechanism behind photosensitivity is irreducibly complex, and consequently we think it’s more likely than not that it was designed. That raises some obvious questions about who designed it, some of which are the ones you pointed out and some of which are rather more basic than that (e.g., “is the designer of this mechanism a deity?” or “is the designer of this designed mechanism the same as the designer of that designed mechanism?”). But it doesn’t alter the traditional scientific questions at all. We still want to know about the “how” of that mechanism in all the traditional ways. In fact, the “how” in some ways takes on greater significance. What else might have been designed? The eye? Presumably not; it’s not that hard to imagine a scenario where the eye evolves according to normal selection principles so long as you have the basic building block of a photoreceptor. But the question of “given what we know about this mechanism, do we think it was designed?” will likely become terribly en vogue. And to ask that question we need to know an awful lot about “how.”
On an unrelated note, I’m not sure the problem you pose about the nature of an Intelligent Designer is really much of a problem. Of course kids will be curious about that question, but we really don’t know what sort of things we’ll be able to tell them. It might be nothing, but I doubt it. For instance, suppose it turns out that we can only find evidence of design in biomolecular mechanisms of a certain kind. That’s interesting. It might not be the question the child is asking, but we don’t always have good answers to the questions our students ask (if a classics student asked me, “What did Miltiades eat for breakfast the morning of Marathon?” I wouldn’t have a very good answer. It’s a good question - an important question - but you can only answer questions from the evidence you have). There’s nothing wrong with that. Nor is there a problem with kicking the question out to another discipline. There’s nothing inherently horrible about a world where science doesn’t pretend to have ultimate answers, after all. And nobody seriously contends that all of the important questions children ask in a science class can be answered without recourse to other disciplines. If I teach a child the scientific method (or rather, the scientific method kids are taught in middle and high school) and he asks, “Why do we do it that way?” there is no good scientific answer. I’d have to outsource that question to philosophy, or maybe history. Nothing wrong with that. If little Janet asks, “Did Jesus design Designed Mechanism X?” and I can’t provide a scientific answer, nothing wrong with that either.
December 3rd, 2005 at 8:56 pm
I’m going to try and ignore the obvious cynicism in your article and answer your questions:
1. “What long-term impact should ID have on how science gets done?†For starters, stop requiring that only solutions powered by blind-chance be considered. Isn’t it obvious that this is an arbitrary philosophical precondition like the creationism that some people try to equate ID to? One way to start will be to take an honest approach in studying what appear to be irreducibly-complex structures in microbiology. Also, admit that we know far too little about the nature of reality to disqualify intelligent causes out of hand.
2. Turning this into a discussion about “why?†takes us outside of the realm of science and into the philosophical realm. I’m willing to go there, but ID doesn’t identify the designer and I don’t want to lose focus.
A scientific recognition of the possibility of intelligent causes and a methodology for detecting such causes, however is not a religious study — it is a search for the truth. ID cannot identify the “why†or “who†as it related to an intelligent cause. But when science excludes even the possibility of intelligent causes, then it is no longer a search for the truth — it has degenerated into dogma.
Clear? Please refer to my category on ID for more context: http://upontruth.com/blog/?cat=2
December 4th, 2005 at 2:48 pm
Stephen, you miss a few things. Better writers than I have pointed out that evolution is not “blind chance”. The term “natural selection” should make that quite clear. The environment a species lives in determines what traits will survive. Why don’t monkeys have gills? Why don’t seagulls have tunnelling claws? If evolution is so random, how come animals are so well-suited to their habitats?
It seems that ID, as it’s presented now, is based on blind chance. You say “ID doesn’t identify the designer”. My whole point is that eventually it will have to, because this idea that some things were designed and not others — well, what determines what gets the designer’s attention? Looks like random chance to me. Eventually, ID will have to answer the question of how the designer(s) make decisions, because otherwise the whole thing is an even bigger scientific travesty.
Erik, thanks for your thoughtful response. I’m not sure you’d like to live in a world where it’s assumed that we can, and should, look for Godly answers via empirical means. We as a society have tried very hard to get away from the idea that there’s one right way to believe in god(s) and everything else is wrong, and that the purpose of religious discourse is to get everyone to believe the same right thing. That has nothing to do with the merit of ID as a theory — that’s been debunked elsewhere ( http://pandasthumb.org/ , http://talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-qa.html) , repeatedly. But aside from that, ID would do bad things to a kid’s spiritual development if ID were taught in school before it got some fundamental questions straightened out.
Your analogy puzzles me, perhaps because I’m not a Classics guy. Is the question of what that guy had for breakfast really as important, as crucial to the understanding of the story of Marathon, as the questions about the nature of the designer are to ID?
Science has never pretended to have the ultimate answers. It has only claimed to have answers about the empirical world, not about morality, the afterlife, or the meaning of existence. The theory of evolution is spiritually neutral — like every other proper theory, you can believe in it if you’re an atheist, even if (as with the case of evolution and gravity), the originators of the theory were devout Christians.
The scientific method isn’t good? Um…I understand why it’s less than perfect, but 1) it’s done us pretty good so far and 2) even if it is less than perfect, it’s not so bad that we need to bring god in to patch it up.
December 4th, 2005 at 6:04 pm
I think the scientific method is perfectly good, I just don’t think it is itself scientifically verifiable as the proper way to conduct science. We conduct science according to the scientific method for reasons that are ultimately philosophical, not scientific. My point was not that the scientific method is bad, or that we shouldn’t teach it in science classes - it’s good, and we should teach it. My point was that there are some questions that any study of science will naturally raise that cannot be answered by scientific means. I think discussing the scientific method is the most important example of that, but in principle I would have no objection if the nature of the intelligent designer became another important extra-scientific topic that students first encountered primarily in science class.
The story of Marathon is probably not as important as the nature of an intelligent designer (assuming there is such an entity), but relatively speaking I think the analogy works. Assuming for the moment (as your original post did) that intelligent design has scientific merit, there are some things you could answer about the intelligent designer without knowing anything about him (let’s call it a him for now) directly. You could start to conclude what processes had and had not been designed (or perhaps what processes had been designed to what extent) and perhaps you could make some inferences based on that data set. It would probably take a lot more work to uncover how they were designed, though (if indeed you could ever uncover that information through the practice of ID-informed science). I think you’re quite right in saying that it isn’t enough, at least for our scientific curiosity, just to know what is designed. We want to pull back the veil more than that. Similarly, we know what happened at Marathon, on a gross level - the Greeks won, the Persians lost, there seems to have been running involved. But how did it happen; what were the mechanics? That we do not know, and probably never will. But if we were to know, we’d need certain data such as the physical capabilities of the men involved. How did they run, how fast, and how far? What kind of energy would they have had when they finally made contact with the foe? How much energy would they have needed to expend once they got there? You can’t answer any of those questions if you don’t even know what they ate. And of course that’s frustrating - to a classicist, or to someone who believes that the Greeks heavily influenced western culture, Marathon is one of the formative moments. We want to know how it happened, not just that it did. But we probably never will know as much about the mechanics as we want to, and that does not point to a flaw in our methodology. My analogy was intended to make the point that if ID-informed science failed to pierce the veil of intelligence design very far (or as far as we want it to) that would be frustrating, but not necessarily an indication of a flawed methodology.
I’m not sure I’d like living in a world where it’s ordinarily assumed you can look for answers about God by empirical means either, Dan (although I should point out that I know I don’t like living in a world where it’s ordinarily assumed that there are many right ways to believe in god(s) and that the purpose of religious discourse must never be to get everyone to believe the same right thing). But that is not a very good reason for rejecting the teaching of intelligent design in our schools. I think you’re right, that there are good reasons for rejecting teaching ID (especially depending on how we teach it - for instance, why should we assume that our intelligent designer is a deity? That’s too conclusory for my tastes). But I think it would be a mistake to reject ID because it’s spiritually biased or spiritually biasing, for two reasons. First, I don’t think ID (properly presented) is any less spiritually neutral than gravity. Second, to the extent that ID clashes with some peoples’ spiritual ideas, I don’t think we should care. When evolution clashes with somebody’s spiritual ideas, we shrug our shoulders and say that’s their problem to resolve. If ID were to be accepted as scientifically meritorious and were also to clash with somebody’s spiritual ideas, I think the proper response would be the same.
December 4th, 2005 at 7:52 pm
Dan, you miss my point.
Most people understand that Darwin, in “Natural Selectionâ€, believed that he found an impersonal designer. But lets move closer to origins for a moment; Darwinism cannot account for MANY necessary conditions for life to begin in the first place. For example:
a. How does (Darwinian) Naturalism account for the mechanism used for passing on inherited traits in simple life — before DNA even existed? Without a mechanism for passing on new characteristics that contribute to the survival of the life form, then Darwinism has nothing on which to operate. And yet even the simplest cell, and its genetic code that guides its self-replication, is complex beyond the creative ability of humankind.
b. How does Naturalism account for the inanimate universe and its incredible fine-tuning for the existence of life? The inanimate universe is not subject to Darwinian evolution for there is nothing upon which it can operate without the genetic code.
c. Your argument that some things are designed well and others not-so-well implies that you, being an intelligent agent, can tell the difference. Are you quite confident here? I would make the point that, when humans design an artifact, they always design with real-world constraints in mind. Take the design of a PDA for example. It will be a compromise of manufacturing cost, power consumption, assembly cost, and many other factors balanced against its end-purpose. PDA’s can be designed with longer battery life or more memory, but this will increase the cost. Can you identify all of these factors in a life form that you believe to be inadequately designed?
d. You are also falling into the trap of using what you perceive to be negative evidence for God as a substitute for positive evidence for evolution. In this you are in good company — Darwin did much the same. Is this also why many cling so strongly to Darwinian Naturalism (evolution) — because the only perceived alternative is a creator God?
e. “Why do I find it interesting that there are atheists who believe in Intelligent Design?†Because design implies a designer! I’m suggesting that when one sees the hand of the designer, she probably doesn’t remain an atheist for long. Witness the famous atheist Anthony Flew’s departure from atheism last year (abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=315976). That being said, ID doesn’t require its adherents to believe in God, but it does provide substantial evidence for such belief.
As I have said before, my primary complaint is the presumption of “random chance†/ purposelessness which is used as a prerequiste nowadays before a theory can be considered legitimate scientific inquiry. How can science know enough about the universe to determine that no purpose lies behind it?
This much should be CRYSTAL CLEAR. IF there is a design behind our existence, then prematurely disqualifying anything that looks like design as being “out-of-bounds†will guarantee that we will NEVER be unable to discover it! Again, I submit to you that this approach is not a search for truth!
Why require purposelessness to be science? Why not keep an open mind and follow the evidence where it leads?
http://upontruth.com/blog/?p=14
June 19th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Soma….
Ashes of soma. Soma-fitness. Soma to florida….