[Vision2020] Intelligent Design Revisited

[Nicholas Gier]

Greetings:

I've had the first version of his piece on my website for some time, but a recent op ed in the New York Times by a biology professor defending intelligent design inspired me to revise my essay.

GOD IS NOT A SCIENTIFIC HYPOTHESIS
By Nick Gier
Professor Emeritus of Philosophy
University of Idaho	
	
	In 2001 the Discovery Institute, affiliated with evangelical Seattle Pacific University, ran full-page advertisements containing the names of dozens of scientists and philosophers objecting to a PBS series defending evolutionary theory. On the Institute’s website one finds that one of the scientists admitted that he had not seen the program, but that he had still signed the statement because he was a Bible-believing Christian. 
	The Institute was invited by the producer to offer scientifically tested and peer reviewed experiments supporting Intelligent Design.  They were not able to meet this requirement, so they were offered, but declined, a spot on the last segment that covered religious responses to evolution. 
	In a recent column in The New York Times Michael J. Behe, a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute and professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University, argues that Intelligent Design has been misunderstood and that it should be accepted as a legitimate scientific alternative to Darwinian theory, which he claims fails to explain the existence of “molecular machines of the complexity we find in the cell” (Feb. 7, 2005).
	The appeal to intelligent design is an argument by analogy.  The 18th Century Anglican priest William Paley referred to the making of a watch, and Professor Behe offers us the sculpting of the rock of Mount Rushmore.  The Scottish skeptic David Hume granted that there is an analogy, but he claimed that it was actually quite weak.  In most cases we can discover the specific reasons and mechanisms by which humans have created things, but we have no direct access, other than mostly figurative references in religious literature, to the reasons and specific mechanisms for a divine creation.  
	Using God as a hypothesis for the order and structure of the universe fails as a scientific explanation.  Christians claim, and their theologians have confirmed the proposition, that with God “all things are possible.”  Therefore, whatever order and structure the world might have, then God could have created it.  
	The evolutionary hypothesis has been spectacularly successful in demonstrating specific reasons for specific developments in thousands of the earth’s creatures. For example, we know that sickle cell anemia developed for a specific reason in malaria infested Africa, but creationists are left with a profound moral dilemma with this and many other similar examples.  Natural selection has no moral scruples, but creationists must defend a deity who creates a myriad of things that can have both good and evil effects.
	Intelligent Designers cannot give the specific reasons that evolutionary theory can. They can only say “God made it that way, and we honestly do not have any good answers about the evil effects of divine creation.”  The standard appeals to divine mysteries are obviously not explanations.
	I once witnessed creationist Duane Gish in a debate with Grover Krantz, an anthropologist at Washington State University.  Gish finished his presentation with a series of slides about the development of the Monarch butterfly.  He challenged Krantz to explain how of this intricate and complex process came about by natural selection.  Krantz said that this was not his field, but he assumed that biologists had not yet found an explanation.  Compare Krantz’s humble answer with Gish’s implied but triumphant answer that “God did it.” 
	The creationist answer is not only arrogant but ignorant about how science operates, and how it must remain agnostic when there are no plausible hypotheses. Claiming that God created the Monarch such that it would go through these stages explains nothing at all about how butterflies actually came about.
	A hypothesis that explains all possible order and structure explains nothing about the specific operations of our incredible cosmos.  Evolution has proved itself to be a very successful scientific hypothesis in this regard, but it has nothing to say about ultimate origins.  At this point people should turn to philosophy and theology and  choose their own answers to nonscientific, but critically important, questions such as “Why is there something rather than nothing at all?”  The scientific method cannot answer this question, but the world religions have lots of interesting and worthy answers.	
	Therefore, Professor Behe is wrong to assume that “in the absence of any convincing non-design explanation, we are justified in thinking that real intelligent design was involved in life.” I have argued that Intelligent Design is a philosophical and theological hypothesis, not a scientific one.  As long as people continue to ignore this essential distinction, this controversy will continue with negative consequences for our cultural stability and the integrity of science education in this country.