Group
Here is part 1 of a series of 4 posts by Bill Dembski, setting out his position in some
detail.
The original post can be found on Metaviews at
http://listserv.omni-list.com/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind00&L=metaviews&D=1&O=D&F=&S=&P=12939
Steve
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-----Original Message-----
From: meta views [mailto:metaviews@META-LIST.ORG]On Behalf Of William
Grassie
Sent: Friday, November 17, 2000 10:50 PM
To: metaviews@META-LIST.ORG
Subject: [METAVIEWS] 098: Intelligent Design Coming Clean, by William
Dembski
Metaviews 098. 2000.11.17. Approximately 15,505 words.
In the lengthy piece below, William Dembski responds to his many
critics. In particular, he addresses himself to Eugenie Scott, Howard
Van Till, Elliott Sober, Larry Arnhart, and Michael Shermer. The
essay is broken up into the following sections:
1. Cards on the Table
2. Situating Intelligent Design in the Contemporary Debate
3. Intelligent Design as a Positive Research Program
4. Nature's Formational Economy
5. Can Specified Complexity Even Have a Mechanism?
6. How Can an Unembodied Intelligence Interact with the Natural World?
7. Must All the Design in the Natural World Be Front-Loaded?
8. The Distinction Between Natural and Non-Natural Designers
9. The Question of Motives
At the outset, Dembski lays his theological cards on the table: "I do
not regard Genesis as a scientific text. I have no vested theological
interest in the age of the earth or the universe... That said, I
believe that nature points beyond itself to a transcendent reality,
and that that reality is simultaneously reflected in a different
idiom by the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments."
"So far I'm not saying anything different from standard
complementarianism, the view that science and Scripture point to the
same reality, albeit from different vantages. Where I part company
with complementarianism .., I argue that design in nature is
empirically detectable and that the claim that natural systems
exhibit design can have empirical content.... [E]ven though
intelligent design requires no contradiction of natural laws, it does
impose a limitation on natural laws, namely, it purports that they
are incomplete"
Of course, with over 15,000 words, there is more here than I could
adequately reference, but it is good to have Dembski's essays as a
stimulus to on-going dialogue.
-- Billy Grassie
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From: "William A. Dembski" <William_Dembski@baylor.edu>
Subject: INTELLIGENT DESIGN COMING CLEAN
Date: 11.17.00
1. Cards on the Table
In the movie _Dream Team_ starring Michael Keaton, Keaton plays a
psychiatric patient who must feign sanity to save his psychiatrist
from being murdered. In protesting his sanity, Keaton informs two New
York City policemen that he doesn't wear women's clothing, that he's
never danced around Times Square naked, and that he doesn't talk to
Elvis. The two police officers are much relieved. Likewise, I hope
with this essay to reassure our culture's guardians of scientific
correctness that they have nothing to fear from intelligent design. I
expect to be just as successful as Keaton.
First off, let me come clean about my own views on intelligent
design. Am I a creationist? As a Christian, I am a theist and believe
that God created the world. For hardcore atheists this is enough to
classify me as a creationist. Yet for most people, creationism is not
identical with the Christian doctrine of creation, or for that matter
with the doctrine of creation as understood by Judaism or Islam. By
creationism one typically understands what is also called "young
earth creationism," and what advocates of that position refer to
alternately as "creation science" or "scientific creationism."
According to this view the opening chapters of Genesis are to be read
literally as a scientifically accurate account of the world's origin
and subsequent formation. What's more, it is the creation scientist's
task to harmonize science with Scripture.
Given this account of creationism, am I a creationist? No. I do not
regard Genesis as a scientific text. I have no vested theological
interest in the age of the earth or the universe. I find the
arguments of geologists persuasive when they argue for an earth that
is 4.5 billion years old. What's more, I find the arguments of
astrophysicists persuasive when they argue for a universe that is
approximately 14 billion years old. I believe they got it right. Even
so, I refuse to be dogmatic here. I'm willing to listen to arguments
to the contrary. Yet to date I've found none of the arguments for a
young earth or a young universe convincing. Nature, as far as I'm
concerned, has an integrity that enables it to be understood without
recourse to revelatory texts. That said, I believe that nature points
beyond itself to a transcendent reality, and that that reality is
simultaneously reflected in a different idiom by the Scriptures of
the Old and New Testaments.
So far I'm not saying anything different from standard
complementarianism, the view that science and Scripture point to the
same reality, albeit from different vantages. Where I part company
with complementarianism is in arguing that when science points to a
transcendent reality, it can do so as science and not merely as
religion. In particular, I argue that design in nature is empirically
detectable and that the claim that natural systems exhibit design can
have empirical content.
I'll come back to what it means for design in nature to have
empirical content, but I want for the moment to stay with the worry
that intelligent design is but a disguised form of creationism. Ask
any leader in the design movement whether intelligent design is
stealth creationism, and they'll deny it. All of us agree that
intelligent design is a much broader scientific program and
intellectual project. Theists of all stripes are to be sure welcome.
But the boundaries of intelligent design are not limited to theism. I
personally have found an enthusiastic reception for my ideas not only
among traditional theists like Jews, Christians, and Muslims, but
also among pantheists, New-Agers, and agnostics who don't hold their
agnosticism dogmatically. Indeed, proponents of intelligent design
are willing to sit across the table from anyone willing to have us.
That willingness, however, means that some of the people at the table
with us will also be young earth creationists. Throughout my brief
tenure as director of Baylor's Michael Polanyi Center, adversaries as
well as supporters of my work constantly pointed to my unsavory
associates. I was treated like a political figure who is unwilling to
renounce ties to organized crime. It was often put to me: "Dembski,
you've done some respectable work, but look at the disreputable
company you keep." Repeatedly I've been asked to distance myself not
only from the obstreperous likes of Phillip Johnson but especially
from the even more scandalous young earth creationists.
I'm prepared to do neither. That said, let me stress that loyalty and
friendship are not principally what's keeping me from dumping my
unsavory associates. Actually, I rather like having unsavory
associates, regardless of friendship or loyalty. The advantage of
unsavory associates is that they tend to be cultural pariahs (Phillip
Johnson is a notable exception, who has managed to upset countless
people and still move freely among the culture's elite). Cultural
pariahs can keep you honest in ways that the respectable elements of
society never do (John Stuart Mill would no doubt have approved). Or
as it's been put, "You're never so free as when you have nothing to
lose." Cultural pariahs have nothing to lose.
Even so, there's a deeper issue underlying my unwillingness to
renounce unsavory associates, and that concerns how one chooses
conversation partners and rejects others as cranks. Throughout my
last ten years as a public advocate for intelligent design, I've
encountered a pervasive dogmatism in the academy. In my case, this
dogmatism has led fellow academicians (I hesitate to call them
"colleagues" since they've made it clear that I'm no colleague of
theirs) to trash my entire academic record and accomplishments simply
because I have doubts about Darwinism, because I don't think the
rules of science are inviolable, and because I think that there can
be good scientific reasons for thinking that certain natural systems
are designed. These are my academic sins, no more and no less. And
the academy has been merciless in punishing me for these sins.
Now, I resolutely refuse to engage in this same form of dogmatism (or
any other form of dogmatism, God willing). To be sure, I think I am
right about the weaknesses of Darwinism, the provisional nature of
the rules of science, and the detectability of design in nature. But
I'm also willing to acknowledge that I may be wrong. Yet precisely
because I'm willing to acknowledge that I might be wrong, I also want
to give other people who I think are wrong, and thus with whom I
disagree, a fair chance -- something I've too often been denied.
What's more, just because people are wrong about some things doesn't
mean they are wrong about other things. Granted, a valid argument
from true premises leads to a true conclusion. But a valid argument
from false premises can also lead to a true conclusion. Just because
people have false beliefs is no reason to dismiss their work.
One of the most insightful philosophers of science I know as well as
one of my best conversation partners over the last decade is Paul
Nelson, whose book _On Common Descent_ is now in press with the
University of Chicago's Evolutionary Monographs Series. Nelson's
young earth creationism has been a matter of public record since the
mid eighties. I disagree with Nelson about his views on a young
earth. But I refuse to let that disagreement cast a pall over his
scholarly work. A person's presuppositions are far less important
than what he or she does with them. Indeed, a person is not a crank
for holding crazy ideas (I suspect all of us hold crazy ideas), but
because his or her best scholarly efforts are themselves crazy.
If someone can prove the Goldbach conjecture (i.e., that every even
number greater than two is the sum of two primes), then it doesn't
matter how many crazy ideas and hair-brained schemes he or she
entertains -- that person will win a Fields Medal, the mathematical
equivalent of the Nobel Prize. On the other hand, if someone claims
to have proven that pi is a rational number (it's been known for over
a century that pi is not only an irrational number but also a
transcendental number, thus satisfying no polynomial equation with
integer coefficients), then that person is a crank regardless how
mainstream he or she is otherwise. Kepler had a lot of crazy ideas
about embedding the solar system within nested regular geometric
solids. A full half of Newton's writings were devoted to theology and
alchemy. Yesterday's geniuses in almost every instance become today's
cranks if we refuse to separate their best work from their
presuppositions.
I challenge anyone to read Paul Nelson's _On Common Descent_, which
critiques Darwin's idea of common descent from the vantage of
developmental biology, and show why it alone among all the volumes in
the University of Chicago's Evolutionary Monographs Series does not
belong there (of course I'm refusing here to countenance an ad
hominem argument, which rejects the book simply because of Nelson's
creationist views). I don't distance myself from creationists because
I've learned much from them. So too, I don't distance myself from
Darwinists because I've learned much from them as well. I commend
Darwinists like Michael Ruse, Will Provine, and Elliott Sober for
their willingness to engage the intelligent design community and
challenge us to make our arguments better.
Unlike Stephen Jay Gould's NOMA ("Non-Overlapping Magisteria")
principle, which separates science and religion into tight
compartments and which Todd Moody has rightly called a gag-order
masquerading as a principle of tolerance, intelligent design
theorists desire genuine tolerance. Now the problem with genuine
tolerance is that it requires being willing to engage the views of
people with whom we disagree and whom in some cases we find
repugnant. Unfortunately, the only alternative to the classical
liberalism of John Stuart Mills, which advocates genuine tolerance,
is the hypocritical liberalism of today's political correctness.
In place of Gould's NOMA, design theorists advocate a very different
principle of interdisciplinary dialogue, namely, COMA: Completely
Open Magisteria. It is not the business of magisteria to assert
authority by drawing disciplinary boundaries. Rather, it is their
business to open up inquiry so that knowledge may grow and life may
be enriched (which, by the way, is the motto of the University of
Chicago). Within the culture of rational discourse, authority derives
from one source and one source alone -- excellence. Within the
culture of rational discourse, authority never needs to be asserted,
much less legislated.
But is intelligent design properly part of the culture of rational
discourse? At every turn opponents of design want to deny its place
at the table. For instance, Eugenie Scott, director of the National
Center for Science Education, claims intelligent design is even less
reputable than young earth creationism because at least the
creationists are up front about who the designer is and what they are
trying to accomplish. Howard Van Till for the last several years has
been claiming that design theorists have not defined what they mean
by design with sufficient clarity so that their views can be properly
critiqued. And most recently Larry Arnhart, writing in the current
issue of _First Things_ (Nov. 2000, p. 31), complains: "Do they
[i.e., design theorists] believe that the 'intelligent designer' must
miraculously intervene to separately create every species of life and
every 'irreducibly complex' mechanism in the living world? If so,
exactly when and how does that happen? By what observable causal
mechanisms does the 'intelligent designer' execute these miraculous
acts? How would one formulate falsifiable tests for such a theory?
Proponents of 'intelligent design theory' refuse to answer such
questions, because it is rhetorically advantageous for them to take a
purely negative position in which they criticize Darwinian theory
without defending a positive theory of their own. That is why they
are not taken seriously in the scientific community."
2. Situating Intelligent Design in the Contemporary Debate
Let me now respond to these concerns. I'll start with Eugenie Scott.
Design theorists have hardly been reticent about their program. I've
certainly laid it out as I see it both in the introduction to _Mere
Creation_ and in chapter four of _Intelligent Design_. What Scott is
complaining about has less to do with the forthrightness of design
theorists about their intellectual program than with the increased
challenge that intelligent design presents to defenders of Darwinism
as compared with creationism. Creationism offers critics like Eugenie
Scott a huge fixed target. Creationism takes the Bible literally and
makes the debate over Darwinism into a Bible-science controversy. In
a culture where the Bible has been almost universally rejected by the
cultural elite, creationism is therefore a non-starter.
But isn't it true that design theorists are largely Bible-believers
and that their reason for not casting intelligent design as a
Bible-science controversy is pure expedience and not principle? In
other words, isn't it just the case that we realize creationism
hasn't been working, and so we decided to recast it and salvage as
much of it as we can? This criticism seems to me completely
backwards. For one thing, most of the leaders in the intelligent
design movement did not start out as creationists and then turn to
design. Rather, we started squarely in the Darwinian camp and then
had to work our way out of it. The intellectual journey of most
design theorists is therefore quite different from the intellectual
journey of many erstwhile creationists, who in getting educated
renounced their creationism (cf. Ron Number's _The Creationists_ in
which Numbers argues that the correlation between increased education
and loss of confidence in creationism is near perfect).
In my own case, I was raised in a home where my father had a D.Sc. in
biology (from the University of Erlangen in Germany), taught
evolutionary biology at the college level, and never questioned
Darwinian orthodoxy during my years growing up. My story is not
atypical. Biologists Michael Behe, Jonathan Wells, and Dean Kenyon
all started out adhering to Darwinism and felt no religious pull to
renounce it. In Behe's case, as a Roman Catholic, there was simply no
religious reason to question Darwin. In so many of our cases, what
led us out of Darwinism was its inadequacies as a scientific theory
as well as the prospect of making design scientifically tractable.
It's worth noting that the effort to make the design of natural
systems scientifically tractable has at best been a peripheral
concern of young earth creationists historically. There have been
exceptions, like A. E. Wilder-Smith, who sought to identify the
information in biological systems and connect it with a
designer/creator. But the principal texts of the Institute for
Creation Research, for instance, typically took a very different line
from trying to make design a program of scientific research. Instead
of admitting that Darwinian theory properly belonged to science and
then trying to formulate design as a replacement theory, young earth
creationists typically claimed that neither Darwinism nor design
could properly be regarded as scientific (after all, so the argument
went, no one was there to observe what either natural selection or a
designer did in natural history).
Intelligent design's historical roots do not ramify through young
earth creationism. Rather, our roots go back to the tradition of
British natural theology (which took design to have actual scientific
content), to the tradition of Scottish common sense realism (notably
the work of Thomas Reid), and to the informed critiques of Darwinism
that have consistently appeared ever since Darwin published his
_Origin_ (e.g., Louis Agassiz, St. George Mivart, Richard
Goldschmidt, Pierre Grass, Gerald Kerkut, Michael Polanyi, Marcel
Schtzenberger, and Michael Denton).
Why then are so many of us in the intelligent design movement
Christians? I don't think it is because intelligent design is
intrinsically Christian or even theistic. Rather, I think it has to
do with the Christian evangelical community for now providing the
safest haven for intelligent design -- which is not to say that the
haven is particularly safe by any absolute standard. Anyone who has
followed the recent events of Baylor's Michael Polanyi Center, the
first intelligent design think-tank at a research university, will
realize just how intense the opposition to intelligent design is even
among Christians. Baylor is a Baptist institution that prides itself
as being the flagship of evangelical colleges and universities (which
includes schools like Wheaton College and Valparaiso University).
Although an independent peer review committee validated intelligent
design as a legitimate form of academic inquiry, the committee
changed the center's name and took the center's focus off intelligent
design. What's more, after months of censorship by the Baylor
administration and vilification by Baylor faculty, I was finally
removed as director of the center.
Now my treatment at Baylor is hardly unique among my compatriots in
the design movement. Dean Kenyon, despite being a world leader in the
study of chemical evolution, was barred by the biology department at
San Francisco State University from critiquing the very ideas that
earlier he had formulated and that subsequently he found defective.
Refusing to have his academic freedom abridged, he was then removed
from teaching introductory biology courses, despite being a very
senior and well-published member of the department. Only after the
Wall Street Journal exposed San Francisco State University's blatant
violation of Kenyon's academic freedom was the biology department
forced to back down. I am frequently asked what is the latest
research that supports intelligent design, and I find myself having
to be reticent about who is doing what precisely because of enormous
pressure that opponents of design employ to discredit these
researchers, undermine their position, and cause them to lose their
funding (upon request, I'm willing to name names of people and groups
that engage in these tactics -- though not the names of researchers
likely to be on the receiving end of these tactics).
To sum up, intelligent design faces tremendous opposition from our
culture's elite, who in many instances are desperate to discredit it.
What's more, within the United States the Christian evangelical world
has thusfar been the most hospitable place for intelligent design
(and this despite opposition like at Baylor). Also relevant is that
Christianity remains the majority worldview for Americans. Thus on
purely statistical grounds one would expect most proponents of
intelligent design to be Christians. But not all of them. David
Berlinski is a notable counterexample. I could name other
counterexamples, but to spare them from harassment by opponents of
design, I won't. (By the way, if you think I'm being paranoid, please
pick up a copy of the November issue of the _American Spectator_,
which has an article about Baylor's Michael Polanyi Center and my
then imminent removal as its director; I think you'll find that my
suspicions are justified and that it's the dogmatic opponents of
design who are paranoid.)
Well, what then is this intelligent design research program that
Eugenie Scott regards as even more disreputable than that of the
young earth creationists? Because intelligent design is a fledgling
science, it is still growing and developing and thus cannot be
characterized in complete detail. Nonetheless, its broad outlines are
clear enough. I place the start of the intelligent design movement
with the publication in 1984 of _The Mystery of Life's Origin_ by
Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, and Roger Olsen. The volume is
significant in two ways. First, though written by three Christians
and critiquing origin-of-life scenarios, it focused purely on the
scientific case for and against abiogenesis. Thus it consciously
avoided casting its critique as part of a Bible-science controversy.
Second, though highly critical of non-telic naturalistic
origin-of-life scenarios and thus a ready target for
anti-creationists, the book managed to get published with a secular
publisher. It took well over 100 manuscript submissions to get it
published. MIT Press, for instance, had accepted it, subsequently
went through a shake-up of its editorial board, and then turned it
down. The book was finally published by Philosophical Library, which
had published books by eight Nobel laureates.
The next key texts in the design movement were Michael Denton's
_Evolution: A Theory in Crisis_, Dean Kenyon and Percival Davis's _Of
Pandas and People_, and Phillip Johnson's _Darwin on Trial_, which
appeared over the next seven years. Like _The Mystery of Life's
Origin_, these were principally critiques of naturalistic
evolutionary theories, though each of them also raised the
possibility of intelligent design. The critiques took two forms, one
a scientific critique focusing on weaknesses of naturalistic
theories, the other a philosophical critique examining the role of
naturalism as both a metaphysical and methodological principle in
propping up the naturalistic theories, and especially neo-Darwinism.
Except for _The Mystery of Life's Origin_, which in some ways was a
research monograph, the strength of these texts lay not in their
novelty. Many of the criticisms had been raised before. A. E.
Wilder-Smith had raised such criticisms within the creationist
context, though in a correspondence I had with him in the late 80s he
lamented that the Institute for Creation Research would no longer
publish his works. Michael Polanyi had raised questions about the
sufficiency of natural laws to account for biological complexity in
the late 60s, and I know from conversations with Charles Thaxton that
this work greatly influenced his thinking and made its way into _The
Mystery of Life's Origin_. Gerald Kerkut about a decade earlier had
asked one of his students in England for the evidence in favor of
Darwinian evolution and received a ready answer; but when he asked
for the evidence against Darwinian evolution, all he met was silence.
This exchange prompted his 1960 text _Implications of Evolution_,
whose criticisms also influenced the early design theorists.
Nonetheless, compared to previous critics of Darwinism, the early
design theorists had a significant advantage: Unlike previous
critics, who were either isolated (cf. Marcel Schtzenberger, who
although a world-class mathematician, was ostracized in the European
community for his anti-Darwinian views) or confined to a ghetto
subculture (cf. the young earth creationists with their in-house
publishing companies), the early design theorists were united,
organized, and fully cognizant of the necessary means for engaging
both mass and high culture. As a consequence, criticism of Darwinism
and scientific naturalism could at last reach a critical mass. In the
past, criticism had been too sporadic and isolated, and thus could
readily be ignored. Not any longer.
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"Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of
having been designed for a purpose." (Dawkins R., "The Blind
Watchmaker," [1986], Penguin: London, 1991, reprint, p.1)
Stephen E. Jones | Ph. +61 8 9448 7439 | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
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