Group
Part 4 of Dembski's 4-part post.
Steve
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7. Must All the Design in the Natural World Be Front-Loaded?
But simply to allow that a designer has imparted information into the
natural world is not enough. There are many thinkers who are
sympathetic to design but who prefer that all the design in the world
be front-loaded. The advantage of putting all the design in the world
at, say, the initial moment of the Big Bang is that it minimizes the
conflict between design and science as currently practiced. A
designer who front-loads the design of the world imparts all the
world's information before natural causes become operational and
express that information in the course of natural history. In effect,
there's no need to think of the world as an informationally open
system. Rather, we can still think of it mechanistically -- like the
outworking of a complicated differential equation, albeit with the
initial and boundary conditions designed. The impulse to front-load
design is deistic, and I expect any theories about front-loaded
design to be just as successful as deism was historically, which
always served as an unsatisfactory halfway house between theism (with
its informationally open universe) and naturalism (which insists the
universe remain informationally closed).
There are no good reasons to require that the design of the universe
must be front-loaded. Certainly maintaining peace with an outdated
mechanistic view of science is not a good reason. Nor is the
theological preference for a hands-off designer, even if it is
couched as a Robust Formational Economy Principle. To be sure,
front-loaded design is a logical possibility. But so is interactive
design (i.e., the design that a designer introduces by imparting
information over the course of natural history). The only legitimate
reason to limit all design to front-loaded design is if there could
be no empirical grounds for preferring interactive design to
front-loaded design. Michael Murray in his recent paper "Natural
Providence" for the Wheaton Philosophy Conference (October 2000,
www.wheaton.edu/philosophy/conference.html) attempts to make such an
argument. Accordingly, he argues that for a non-natural designer
front-loaded design and interactive design will be empirically
equivalent. Murray's argument hinges on a toy example in which a deck
of cards has been stacked by the manufacturer before it gets wrapped
in cellophane and distributed to card-players. Should a card-player
now insist on using the deck as it left the manufacturer and
repeatedly win outstanding hands at poker, even if there were no
evidence whatsoever of cheating, then the arrangement of the deck by
the manufacturer would have to be attributed to design. Murray
implies that all non-natural design is like this, requiring no novel
design in the course of natural history but only at the very
beginning when the deck was stacked. But can all non-natural design
be dismissed in this way?
Take the Cambrian explosion in biology, for instance. David
Jablonsky, James Valentine, and even Stephen Jay Gould (when he's not
fending off the charge of aiding creationists) admit that the basic
metazoan body-plans arose in a remarkably short span of geological
time (5 to 10 million years) and for the most part without any
evident precursors (there are some annelid tracks as well as evidence
of sponges leading up to the Cambrian, but that's about it with
regard to metazoans; single-celled organisms abound in the
Precambrian). Assuming that the animals fossilized in the Cambrian
exhibit design, where did that design come from? To be committed to
front-loaded design means that all these body-plans that first
appeared in the Cambrian were in fact already built in at the Big
Bang (or whenever that information was front-loaded), that the
information for these body-plans was expressed in the subsequent
history of the universe, and that if we could but uncover enough
about the history of life, we would see how the information expressed
in the Cambrian fossils merely exploits information that was already
in the world prior to the Cambrian period. Now that may be, but there
is no evidence for it. All we know is that information needed to
build the animals of the Cambrian period was suddenly expressed at
that time and with no evident informational precursors.
To see what's at stake here, consider the transmission of a
manuscript by an anonymous author, say the New Testament book of
Hebrews. There's a manuscript tradition that allows us to trace this
book (and specifically the information in it) back to at least the
second century A.D. More conservative scholars think the book was
written sometime in the first century by a colleague of the Apostle
Paul. One way or another we cannot be certain of the author's
identity. What's more, the manuscript trail goes dead in the first
century A.D. Consequently, it makes no sense to talk about the
information in this book being in some sense front-loaded at any time
prior to the first century A.D. (much less at the Big Bang).
Now Murray would certainly agree (for instance, he cites the design
of the pyramids as not being front-loaded). In the case of the
transmission of biblical texts, we are dealing with human agents
whose actions in history are reasonably well understood. But the
distinction he would draw between this example, involving the
transmission of texts, and the previous biological example, involving
the origin of body-plans, cannot be sustained. Just because we don't
have direct experience of how non-natural designers impart
information into the world does not mean we can't say where that
information was initially imparted and where the information trail
goes dead. The key evidential question is not whether a certain type
of designer (mundane or transcendent) produced the information in
question, but how far that information can be traced back. With the
Cambrian explosion the information trail goes dead in the Cambrian.
So too with the book of Hebrews it goes dead in the first century
A.D. Now it might be that with the Cambrian explosion, science may
progress to the point where it can trace the information back even
further -- say to the Precambrian or possibly even to the Big Bang.
But there's no evidence for it and there's no reason -- other than a
commitment to methodological naturalism -- to think that all
naturally occurring information must be traceable back in this way.
What's more, as a general rule, information tends to appear
discretely at particular times and places. To require that the
information in natural systems (and throughout this discussion the
type of information I have in mind is specified complexity) must in
principle be traceable back to some repository of front-loaded
information is, in the absence of evidence, an entirely ad hoc
restriction.
It's also important to see that there's more to theory choice in
science than empirical equivalence. The ancient Greeks knew all about
the need for a scientific theory to "save the phenomena" (Pierre
Duhem even wrote a delightful book about it with that title). A
scientific theory must save or be faithful to the phenomena it is
trying to characterize. That is certainly a necessary condition for
an empirically adequate scientific theory. What's more, scientific
theories that save the phenomena equally well are by definition
empirically equivalent. But there are broader coherence issues that
always arise in theory choice so that merely saving phenomena is not
sufficient for choosing one theory over another. Empirically
equivalent to the theory that the universe is 14 billion years old is
the theory that it is only five minutes old and that it was created
with all the marks of being 14 billion years old. Nonetheless, no one
takes seriously a five minute old universe. Also empirically
equivalent to a 14 billion year old universe is a 6,000 year old
universe in which the speed of light has been slowing down and enough
ad hoc assumptions are introduced to account for the evidence from
geology and archeology that is normally interpreted as indicating a
much older earth. In fact, the scientific community takes young earth
creationists to task precisely for making too many ad hoc assumptions
that favor a young earth. Provided that there are good reasons to
think that novel design was introduced into the world subsequent to
its origin (as for instance with the Cambrian explosion, where all
information trails go dead in the Precambrian), it would be entirely
artificial to require that science nonetheless treat all design in
the world as front-loaded just because methodological naturalism
requires it or because it remains a bare possibility that the design
was front-loaded after all.
Please note that I'm not offering a theory about the frequency or
intermittency with which a non-natural designer imparts information
into the world. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the information
imparted by such a designer will elude us, not conforming to any
patterns that might enable us to detect it (just as we might right
now be living in a swirl of radio transmissions by extraterrestrial
intelligences, though for lack of being able to interpret these
transmissions we lack any evidence that embodied intelligences on
other planets exist at this time). The proper question for science is
not the schedule according to which a non-natural designer imparts
information into the world, but the evidence for that information in
the world, and the times and locations where that information first
becomes evident. That's all empirical investigation can reveal to us.
What's more, short of tracing the information back to the Big Bang
(or wherever else we may want to locate the origin of the universe),
we have no good reason to think that the information exhibited in
some physical system was in fact front-loaded.
8. The Distinction Between Natural and Non-Natural Designers
But isn't there an evidentially significant difference between
natural and non-natural designers? It seems that this worry is really
what's behind the desire to front-load all the design in nature. We
all have experience with designers that are embodied in physical
stuff, notably other human beings. But what experience do we have of
non-natural designers? With respect to intelligent design in biology,
for instance, Elliott Sober wants to know what sorts of biological
systems should be expected from a non-natural designer. What's more,
Sober claims that if the design theorist cannot answer this question
(i.e., cannot predict the sorts of biological systems that might be
expected on a design hypothesis), then intelligent design is
untestable and therefore unfruitful for science.
Yet to place this demand on design hypotheses is ill-conceived. We
infer design regularly and reliably without knowing characteristics
of the designer or being able to assess what the designer is likely
to do. In his 1999 presidential address for the American
Philosophical Association Sober himself admits as much in a footnote
that deserves to be part of his main text ("Testability,"
_Proceedings and Addresses of the APA_, 1999, p. 73, n. 20): "To
infer watchmaker from watch, you needn't know exactly what the
watchmaker had in mind; indeed, you don't even have to know that the
watch is a device for measuring time. Archaeologists sometimes
unearth tools of unknown function, but still reasonably draw the
inference that these things are, in fact, _tools_."
Sober is wedded to a Humean inductive tradition in which all our
knowledge of the world is an extrapolation from past experience. Thus
for design to be explanatory, it must fit our preconceptions, and if
it doesn't, it must lack epistemic value. For Sober, to predict what
a designer would do requires first looking to past experience and
determining what designers in the past have actually done. A little
thought, however, should convince us that any such requirement
fundamentally misconstrues design. Sober's inductive approach puts
designers in the same boat as natural laws, locating their
explanatory power in an extrapolation from past experience. To be
sure, designers, like natural laws, can behave predictably. Yet
unlike natural laws, which are universal and uniform, designers are
also innovators. Innovation, the emergence to true novelty, eschews
predictability. It follows that design cannot be subsumed under a
Humean inductive framework. Designers are inventors. We cannot
predict what an inventor would do short of becoming that inventor
But the problem goes deeper. Not only can't Humean induction tame the
unpredictability inherent in design; it can't account for how we
recognize design in the first place. Sober, for instance, regards the
intelligent design hypothesis as fruitless and untestable for biology
because it fails to confer sufficient probability on biologically
interesting propositions. But take a different example, say from
archeology, in which a design hypothesis about certain aborigines
confers a large probability on certain artifacts, say arrowheads.
Such a design hypothesis would on Sober's account be testable and
thus acceptable to science. But what sort of archeological background
knowledge had to go into that design hypothesis for Sober's inductive
analysis to be successful? At the very least, we would have had to
have past experience with arrowheads. But how did we recognize that
the arrowheads in our past experience were designed? Did we see
humans actually manufacture those arrowheads? If so, how did we
recognize that these humans were acting deliberately as designing
agents and not just randomly chipping away at random chunks of rock
(carpentry and sculpting entail design; but whittling and chipping,
though performed by intelligent agents, do not). As is evident from
this line of reasoning, the induction needed to recognize design can
never get started.
My argument then is this: Design is always inferred, never a direct
intuition. We don't get into the mind of designers and thereby
attribute design. Rather we look at effects in the physical world
that exhibit the features of design and from those features infer to
a designing intelligence. The philosopher Thomas Reid made this same
argument over 200 years ago (_Lectures on Natural Theology_, 1780):
"No man ever saw wisdom [read "design"], and if he does not [infer
wisdom] from the marks of it, he can form no conclusions respecting
anything of his fellow creatures.... But says Hume, unless you know
it by experience, you know nothing of it. If this is the case, I
never could know it at all. Hence it appears that whoever maintains
that there is no force in the [general rule that from marks of
intelligence and wisdom in effects a wise and intelligent cause may
be inferred], denies the existence of any intelligent being but
himself." The virtue of my work is to formalize and make precise
those features that reliably signal design, casting them in the idiom
of modern information theory.
Larry Arnhart remains unconvinced. In the most recent issue of _First
Things_ (November 2000) he claims that our knowledge of design arises
not from any inference but from introspection of our own human
intelligence; thus we have no empirical basis for inferring design
whose source is non-natural. Though at first blush plausible, this
argument collapses quickly when probed. Piaget, for instance, would
have rejected it on developmental grounds: Babies do not make sense
of intelligence by introspecting their own intelligence but by coming
to terms with the effects of intelligence in their external
environment. For example, they see the ball in front of them and then
taken away, and learn that Daddy is moving the ball -- thus reasoning
directly from effect to intelligence. Introspection (always a
questionable psychological category) plays at best a secondary role
in how initially we make sense of intelligence.
Even later in life, however, when we've attained full
self-consciousness and when introspection can be performed with
varying degrees of reliability, I would argue that even then
intelligence is inferred. Indeed, introspection must always remain
inadequate for assessing intelligence (by intelligence I mean the
power and facility to choose between options -- this coincides with
the Latin etymology of "intelligence," namely, "to choose between").
For instance, I cannot by introspection assess my intelligence at
proving theorems in differential geometry, choosing the right
sequence of steps, say, in the proof of the Nash embedding theorem.
It's been over a decade since I've proven any theorems in
differential geometry. I need to get out paper and pencil and
actually try to prove some theorems in that field. Depending on how I
do -- and not my memory of how well I did in the past -- will
determine whether and to what degree intelligence can be attributed
to my theorem proving.
I therefore continue to maintain that intelligence is always
inferred, that we infer it through well-established methods, and that
there is no principled way to distinguish natural and non-natural
design so that the one is empirically accessible but the other is
empirically inaccessible. This is the rub. And this is why
intelligent design is such an intriguing intellectual possibility --
it threatens to make the ultimate questions real. Convinced
Darwinists like Arnhart therefore need to block the design inference
whenever it threatens to implicate a non-natural designer. Once this
line of defense is breached, Darwinism quickly becomes indefensible.
9. The Question of Motives
Actually, there is still one remaining line of defense, and that is
to question the motives of design theorists. According to Larry
Arnhart (_First Things_, November 2000), "Most of the opposition to
Darwinian theory ... is motivated not by a purely intellectual
concern for the truth or falsity of the theory, but by a deep fear
that Darwinism denies the foundations of traditional morality by
denying any appeal to the transcendent norms of God's moral law." In
a forthcoming response to an article of mine in _American Outlook_
(November 2000), Michael Shermer takes an identical line: "It is no
coincidence that almost all of the evolution deniers are Christians
who believe that if God did not personally intervene in the
development of life on earth, then they have no basis for their
belief; indeed, that there can be no basis to any morality or meaning
of life."
For critics of intelligent design like Arnhart and Shermer, it is
inconceivable that someone once properly exposed to Darwin's theory
could doubt it. It is as though Darwin's theory were one of
Descartes's clear and distinct ideas that immediately impels assent.
Thus for design theorists to oppose Darwin's theory requires some
hidden motivation, like wanting to shore up traditional morality or
being a closet fundamentalist. For the record, therefore, let me
reassert that our opposition to Darwinism rests in the first instance
on scientific grounds. Yes, my colleagues and I are interested in and
frequently write about the cultural and theological implications of
intelligent design. But let's be clear that the only reason we take
seriously such implications is because we are convinced that
Darwinism is on its own terms an oversold and overreached scientific
theory and that even at this early stage in the game intelligent
design excels it.
Critics who think they can defeat intelligent design merely by
assigning disreputable motives to its proponents need to examine
their own motives. Consider Shermer's motives for taking such a hard
line against intelligent design. Shermer, trained in psychology and
the social sciences, endlessly psychologizes those who challenge his
naturalistic worldview. But is he willing to psychologize himself?
Look at his popular books (e.g., _Why People Believe Weird Things_
and _How We Believe_), and you'll notice on the inside dustjacket a
smiling Shermer with a bust of Darwin behind him as well as several
books by and about Darwin. Shermer's devotion to Darwin and
naturalism is no less fervent than mine is to Christianity. If there
is a difference in our devotion, it is this: Shermer is a dogmatist
and I am not. I am willing to admit that intelligent design might be
wrong (despite significant progress I believe design theorists still
have their work cut out for them). Also, I am eager to examine and
take seriously any arguments and evidence favorable to Darwinism. But
Shermer cannot make similar concessions. He can't admit that
Darwinism might be wrong. He is unwilling to take seriously any
positive evidence for intelligent design. But this is hardly
surprising. Shermer has a vested interest in taking a hard line
against intelligent design. Indeed, his base of support among fellow
skeptics (who rank among the most authoritarian and dogmatic people
in contemporary culture) would vanish the moment he allows
intelligent design as a live possibility.
The success of intelligent design neither stands nor falls with the
motives of its practitioners but with the quality of the research it
inspires. That said, design theorists do have an extra-scientific
motive for wanting to see intelligent design succeed. This motive
derives not from a religious agenda but from a very human impulse,
namely the desire to overcome artificial, tyrannical, or self-imposed
limitations and thereby to open oneself and others to new
possibilities -- in a word, freedom. This desire was beautifully
expressed in Bernard Malamud's novel _The Fixer_ (Penguin, 1966).
Yakov Bok, a handyman in pre-revolutionary Russia, leaves his small
town and heads off to the big city (Kiev). As it turns out,
misfortune upon misfortune awaits him there. Why does he go? He
senses the risks. But he asks himself, "What choice has a man who
doesn't know what his choices are?" (pp. 33-34) The desire to open
himself to new possibilities impels him to go to the big city. Later
in the novel, when he has been imprisoned and humiliated, so that
choice after choice has been removed and his one remaining choice is
to maintain his integrity, refuse to confess a crime he did not
commit, and thereby prevent a pogrom; after all this, he is reminded
that "the purpose of freedom is to create it for others." (p. 286)
Design theorists want to free science from arbitrary constraints that
stifle inquiry, undermine education, turn scientists into a secular
priesthood, and in the end prevent intelligent design from receiving
a fair hearing. The subtitle of Richard Dawkins's _The Blind
Watchmaker_ reads _Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe
Without Design_. Dawkins may be right that design is absent from the
universe. But design theorists insist that science address not only
the evidence that reveals the universe to be without design but also
the evidence that reveals the universe to be with design. Evidence is
a two-edged sword: Claims capable of being refuted by evidence are
also capable of being supported by evidence. Even if design ends up
being rejected as an unfruitful explanation in science, such a
negative outcome for design needs to result from the evidence for and
against design being fairly considered. On the other hand, the
rejection of design must not result from imposing regulative
principles like methodological naturalism that rule out design prior
to any consideration of evidence. Whether design is ultimately
rejected or accepted must be the conclusion of a scientific argument,
not a deduction from an arbitrary regulative principle.
What choice does science have if it doesn't know what its choices
are? It can choose to stop arbitrarily limiting its choices.
-- William Dembski
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"Contemporary religious thinkers often approach the Argument from
Design with a grim determination that their churches shall not again be
made to look foolish. Recalling what happened when churchmen opposed
first Galileo and then Darwin, they insist that religion must be based not on
science but on faith. Philosophy, they announce, has demonstrated that
Design Arguments lack all force. I hope to have shown that philosophy has
demonstrated no such thing. Our universe, which these religious thinkers
believe to be created by God, does look, greatly though this may dismay
them, very much as if created by God." (Leslie J., "Universes", [1989],
Routledge: London, 1996, reprint, p.22)
Stephen E. Jones | Ph. +61 8 9448 7439 | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
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