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 old fashioned 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 IndoEuropean 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 midthirties 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" (lifefriendly 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 originoflife
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 wouldbe
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 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