Intelligent Design: How Much Faith Should We Have in Science

The Biochemist, 2009

historian Ron Numbers has observed: "I suspect most people don't understand what Intelligent Design is. I've talked to enough people who didn't understand it to make me really suspicious, and there are even people who lecture about it and don't know what they're talking about. I don't define it; what I do is let the advocates of Intelligent Design speak for themselves. " 1 It is unfortunate that Kevin Padian and Nick Matzke didn't follow that good advice in their recent article in the Biochemical Journal [reprinted in The Biochemist, vol. 31 (1)], Darwin, Dover, 'Intelligent Design' and textbooks. Rather than letting ID advocates speak for themselves, they concocted their own notion: "... the whole point of ID is to establish that miraculous supernatural intervention was required in the history of life.... ID proponents attempt scientifically to demonstrate their proposal, i.e. repeated miraculous intervention in the history of life... " 2 They don't know what they're talking about. The basic claim of ID is simply that empirical evidence can lead one to a conclusion of design in Nature. It says nothing about "repeated miraculous intervention. " I made this quite clear in my most recent book, The Edge of Evolution, in a section entitled 'No Interference': "[T]he assumption that design unavoidably requires 'interference' rests mostly on a lack of imagination. There's no reason that the extended fine-tuning view I am presenting here necessarily requires active meddling with Nature any more than the fine-tuning of theistic evolution does. " 3 (Theistic evolution seems to be what Padian and Matzke meant by their phrase "your father's 'ID'" 2. Theistic evolution is also officially tolerated as a scientifically compatible viewpoint by no less than the National Academy of Sciences 4 .) It is true that many ID proponents do not think, as I do, that complete common ancestry is correct, and do think, as I don't, that miraculous interventions have taken place. Yet they understand, as Padian and Matzke apparently do not, that the basic argument for design does not reach that far-design focuses on the endpoint, not the process. Arguments about process require further evidence, beyond that for the bare conclusion of design. That should not be a difficult point to grasp. I sympathize with Padian and Matzke-if the judge at the Dover trial had ruled for my side, I probably would try to puff up his stature, too. But he didn't, so I looked more closely at his ruling. They call him an "independent thinker ... who hewed to no party line. " 2 Well, he must be the only independent thinker who copied his independent thoughts directly from someone else's party-line document. A month before the judge issued his opinion, the plaintiffs' attorneys submitted to him a 161-page brief, detailing exactly how they wished him to rule. Here's a brief excerpt from the lawyer's document: "Professor Behe testified that the strength of an analogy depends on the degree of similarity entailed in the two propositions. If this is the test, Intelligent Design completely fails. " 5 And here's the 'judge's' decision: "Professor Behe testified that the strength of the analogy de

College honors courses provide an opportunity to tackle controversial topics in an atmos- phere that encourages active learning, critical thinking, and open discussion. This venue is particularly appropriate for examining the debate about teaching intelligent design (ID) in public school science classes. A one-credit honors enrichment seminar taught at the University of North Carolina Wilmington provides a model, with associated successes and challenges, for addressing the controversy. This interdisciplinary course consisted primarily of discussions based on a set of weekly readings that presented contrasting viewpoints on evolution and naturalism, ID, theology, and educational issues. In prepara- tion for each class, students constructed charts contrasting the views of each writer on key points presented in the readings and summarizing their own responses. Discussion focused on a set of questions arising from the readings and designed to provoke debate. The Kitzmiller v. Dover deci...

South African Journal of Science, 2007

I NTELLIGENT DESIGN, THE NEW INCARNATION of creationism, is appearing in schools and universities across the world. The stock response by scientists seems to be: 'It is not science'. What proponents of intelligent design and irreducible complexity have managed to do, however, is introduce enough of the scientific method into their arguments to make this stock response untenable. We argue that, in South Africa, students of biology are conflicted and confused over this issue and the reconciliation of their religious and scientific beliefs, and therefore need to learn about it in such a way that they are fully cognisant of what science and the scientific method is. In this way they can fully understand the weaknesses of the intelligent design position from a scientific point of view.

This is a 270-page book criticizing both sides in the present 'scientific war' over Darwinism. On one side are the gurus of academic biology, defending Darwinism against the small Intelligent Design (ID) group, centered in the Discovery Institute in Seattle, who are mainly strong Christian intellectuals. The author's knowledge of the History of Science and the intellectual history of the Christian Church means that his sword blows are usually accurate and cutting. The subject of Evolution is a major divide in today's culture wars that are splitting the USA. This is not a replay of the 1925 Scopes Trial but ties directly into the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Board trial where the Pennsylvania school board wished to introduce ID into high-school biology. The judge ruled for Kitzmiller based on his own agreement with the Academic Establishment that "ID was not a science". Fuller, a founding member of the Science and Technology Studies (STS) project, takes an extremely skeptical view of most senior scientists and delivers some powerful intellectual punches, including a body blow when he shows that Darwin himself was a "failed ID theorist". Fuller shows that science has evolved from religion but many scientists today will not admit this. This is a provocative and exciting book that is hard to summarize because there is so much valuable information; however, it was such a fun read that I persisted and enjoyed the challenge of imposing some structure on the very many topics raised by the author. Readers of this review can expect to be brought up to date in this century's old battle for the minds of the educated public.

The theories of Darwinian evolution and Intelligent Design appear to be locked in an intractable debate, partly because they offer rival scientific explanations for the phenomenon of descent with modification in biology. This paper analyses the dispute in two ways: firstly, it seeks to clarify the exact nature of the logical flaw that has been alleged to lie at the heart of Intelligent Design theory. Secondly, it proposes that, in spite of this error, the Intelligent Design theory advocated by Michael Behe takes at least one significant step in the right direction. Although Behe’s suggestion is promising, it is shown to be not nearly radical enough.

Complexity, 2005

The Darwinian View of Evolution Is a Scientific Fact and Not an Ideology O n July 07, 2005 the New York Times published a letter submitted by the Roman Catholic Cardinal Christoph Schönborn. In this letter he raised the claim that nature provides evidence for intelligent design and criticizes evolutionary biologists for being unable to recognize the design. The letter reads: "Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science." and "Scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of 'chance and necessity' are not scientific at all, but … an abdication of human intelligence." Thereby, the Cardinal rejects the concept of evolution driven by random variation and selection, apostrophized as "chance and necessity" in the Neo-Darwinian spirit. The two quoted sentences are remarkable not only because the Cardinal aims at the recognition of intelligent design in nature but also because he accuses evolutionary biologists of adhering to an ideology. Almost all scientists who answered the letter reacted sharply because they felt that science has its own well-established rules for the dialog of the researcher with nature, and this dialog so far has not led to the necessity to assume a plan or a designer for understanding the evolution of the biosphere. The reaction of the nonscientific public, however, was ambiguous: Some answers were liberal and said: "Let the scientists do their job and define what science is about, and accordingly the Cardinal should care about belief and religion." An appreciable fraction of letters to newspapers in response to the letter in the New York Times, however, welcomed the Cardinal's position because they found that time has come to regulate scientific thought. Without digging into the deeper reasons of the somewhat burdened relation between science and laymen in the public, it seems in place to address some facts concerning the issues on which the most frequently invoked arguments for design are built. In the following six paragraphs an attempt is made to present these facts in the light of biology of today, which is more than 50 years after the formulation of the synthetic or Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. PROBABILITY ARGUMENTS IN FAVOR OF DESIGN ARE FUTILE An argument often raised against evolution by variation and selection is the low probability to obtain one particular biomolecule or one organism (see, e.g., Eugene Wigner [1]). We present it here in a simplifying caricature: In order to find one particular genome of chain length one million nucleotides, the number of trials required to hit the target in a random search with probability one is 4 1,000,000 Ϸ 10 600,000. Although the mean path length would be smaller than a path visiting all sequences, the number is so incredibly

2009

In her 1993 text Educating For Intelligent Belief and Unbelief, Nel Noddings advocated an ambitious plan to challenge our students; she wished to engage them in a dialogue on the religious issues that define those questions, which ―matter deeply to us.‖ 1 This was seen as a dialogue that can take place at all levels of education, but was initially aimed at helping teachers learn to explore links between traditional subject matter and profound existential and religious questions. More recently there has been a chorus of citizens who have called for just this: the linking of thoughts on intelligent design and the origin of humankind with traditional school subject matter: namely biology. Intelligent design theory is an attempt to address what a minority of theorists believe to be a weakness in evolutionary theory. According to this theory, many life processes are inexplicable without an appeal to the presence of an intelligence designing these processes. While the question of a ―desig...

Intelligent Design Theory and Darwinism are competing answers to the same question: how did living organisms, in all their diversity and splendour, come to exist on Earth? The theories stand opposed to each other both philosophically and scientifically, and on either side of the divide stand qualified proponents who defend their theory’s verity with a tenacious veracity. In 2005 Judge E. Jones ruled in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District that the teaching of Intelligent Design Theory (ID) in public schools was a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, and therefore unconstitutional. In this essay I shall argue against this decision and show, not only that the teaching of ID is not unconstitutional, but also that ruling out ID as teachable in public schools is itself a violation of the Establishment Clause. I shall argue that if we are to honour the value of a good liberal education as well as the Establishment Clause’s commitment to religious neutrality, that ID should not only be allowed to be taught, but should be encouraged to be taught in classrooms. The holding of the US District Court gave two reasons as to why ID would not be allowed into public education: firstly, because it is a form of creationism that cannot uncouple itself from its religious antecedents; and secondly, because it was not science. In my paper I show the first reason to be an erroneous conflation of two very different views, and argue furthermore that whatever religious connotations the ID view might have, they are not sufficient to render it’s teaching unconstitutional. Against the second claim I argue that both ID and Darwinian Evolution are scientific inferences to the best explanation, and that the strength of both inferences are influenced by prior metaphysical commitments. Therefore, I argue, that either both should be included, or both excluded. Finally, delving into the philosophy of education and the nature of the historical debate between Darwinian Evolution and Intelligent Design, I argue that the inclusion of both theories into the curriculum is more conducive to a liberal education, which values critical thinking, than the exclusion of both theories or the inclusion of only one theory would be.

Abstract. Creationists who object to evolution in the science curriculum of public schools often cite Jonathan Well’s book Icons of Evolution in their support (Wells 2000). In the third chapter of his book Wells claims that neither paleontological nor molecular evidence supports the thesis that the history of life is an evolutionary process of descent from preexisting ancestors. We argue that Wells inappropriately relies upon ambiguities inherent in the term ‘Darwinian’ and the phrase ‘Darwin’s theory’. Furthermore, he does not accurately distinguish between the overwhelming evidence that supports the thesis of common descent and controversies that pertain to causal mechanisms such as natural selection. We also argue that Wells’ attempts to undermine the evidence in support of common descent are flawed and his characterization of the relevant data is misleading. In particular, his assessment of the ‘Cambrian explosion’ does not do justice to the fossil record. Nor do his selective references to debate about molecular and paleontological phylogenies constitute a case against common descent. We conclude that the fossil and molecular evidence is more than sufficient to warrant science educators to present common descent as a well-established scientific fact. We also argue that diagrams depicting the ‘tree of life’ can be pedagogically useful as simplified representations of the history of life.