intelligent design as op-ed

While I was otherwise occupied last week the subject of Intelligent Design made yet another ripple across the blogosphere, inspired in part by this article from WSJ's Opinion Journal. I really ought to post a few belated comments on that piece, but today I will instead respond to something a bit fresher: Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe's op-ed contribution in Monday's New York Times (link via Eric Seymour).

Behe's aim is to summarize the foundational axioms of the ID program; and as one of the movement's most visible proponents, he might seem a good choice for such a task. But he seems to regard this statement of postulates as an argument, which clearly it is not. Perhaps the kindest conclusion to be drawn is that he should stick with the biochemistry.

First, what it isn't: the theory of intelligent design is not a religiously based idea, even though devout people opposed to the teaching of evolution cite it in their arguments. For example, a critic recently caricatured intelligent design as the belief that if evolution occurred at all it could never be explained by Darwinian natural selection and could only have been directed at every stage by an omniscient creator. That's misleading. Intelligent design proponents do question whether random mutation and natural selection completely explain the deep structure of life. But they do not doubt that evolution occurred. And intelligent design itself says nothing about the religious concept of a creator.

Behe is here employing the standard ID tactic of separating the products of design from the identity of designer. This is perhaps the most striking departure of the present movement from its direct antecedent in 19th century British natural theology. Even as an ID skeptic, I am not convinced that this move is wholly illegitimate: the question of proper inference to design can, in principle, be a good scientific one (as I've recently said elsewhere), perhaps even if the designer's identity and nature are unknown. Yet an overwhelming majority of Intelligent Design supporters are theists; and if a few arrived at their theism via design arguments, it remains the case that most ID advocates by far were religious theists first, and support the program because of those commitments. Critics understandably perceive the not religious! honest! claim as a dodge, and a dishonest one at that, even if it can be given a more charitable reading.

Our good professor also glosses over the big-tent nature of the ID movement. Behe himself has no quarrel with descent with modification (or so he has said elsewhere), including the more expansive claims of mammalian descent from reptiles or even human descent from earlier hominids. His primary objection is not to the process of evolution itself, but rather to the claimed efficacy of Darwinian natural selection on the molecular level. Yet when he says that intelligent design advocates “do not doubt that evolution occurred”, he neglects to mention that most of his fellow travellers hold that evolution only occurs within constrained limits. And that those limits are almost invariably presumed, rather than justified in anything resembling a scientific fashion.

Next Behe describes “four linked claims” at the heart of the ID program.

[T]he contemporary argument for intelligent design is based on physical evidence and a straightforward application of logic. The argument for it consists of four linked claims. The first claim is uncontroversial: we can often recognize the effects of design in nature. For example, unintelligent physical forces like plate tectonics and erosion seem quite sufficient to account for the origin of the Rocky Mountains. Yet they are not enough to explain Mount Rushmore.

Of course, we know who is responsible for Mount Rushmore, but even someone who had never heard of the monument could recognize it as designed. Which leads to the second claim of the intelligent design argument: the physical marks of design are visible in aspects of biology. This is uncontroversial, too. The 18th-century clergyman William Paley likened living things to a watch, arguing that the workings of both point to intelligent design. Modern Darwinists disagree with Paley that the perceived design is real, but they do agree that life overwhelms us with the appearance of design.

At this juncture, we are only halfway through Behe's “argument”. But already it is a wondrous strange piece of reasoning. If the monument on Rushmore is an effect of design perceived in nature, then so is the Borough of Manhattan, which is, after all, built on an island. Behe's first claim appears to be contentless.

The second claim—that “the physical marks of design are visible in aspects of biology”—is by contrast the defining postulate of Intelligent Design. As such, Behe should spend a bit more time unpacking its implications, rather than just labelling the assertion “uncontroversial”. Here, for instance, is how I summarized the axiom in my dissertation proposal.

ID theorists postulate that explicit divine action has been integral to the history of life. This commitment is in itself nothing new; what distinguishes ID from its forebears is the additional claim that the signature of design is both detectable and quantifiable, and hence is a legitimate subject for scientific inquiry in spite of its extra-natural origin. But one striking aspect of this doctrine is an imposed limit on allowed divine action: the possibility that God might have front-loaded all necessary design into the laws of nature, thus rendering redundant further action beyond the purview of those laws, is excluded.

Note that I did go the extra step in identifying the designer as God. But were I to rewrite that passage, leaving the designer anonymous, the central feature would remain: for ID theorists natural law alone is insufficient to explain the complexity of life. This sets up an interesting tension between design arguments in cosmology and those in biology, for in the former the front-loading of design is often precisely the point.

But why this ID objection to designer as lawgiver? Why is the possibility of design without signature—design in accordance with natural law—explicitly excluded? Certainly the concept of designer-lawgiver poses no logical difficulty for theism. But it is just as consistent with deism: and from deism it is but a small step to regarding the laws, rather than the lawgiver, as ontologically ultimate. For ID advocates, then, the detectable fingerprint of design becomes of utmost importance.

This is a very poor strategic position. Edward Oakes (in First Things; see also here) argues that this as an unavoidable weakness of any natural theology based on design: for evidence of the sufficiency of natural law is a strike against design, and can in effect become an argument for atheism. What is more, Oakes points out that this objection is hardly original, as it was expounded in detail by John Henry Cardinal Newman, perhaps the nineteenth century's most prominent convert from the Anglican Church to the Roman Catholic.

But let's return to Behe. Had he written that “the the physical marks of apparent design are visible…” then arguably there would be grounds for calling the assertion “uncontroversial”. There is, after all, something amusing about watching biologists tie themselves in knots over the use of design-laden language. But as it is written, Behe's assertion is just oh so very contentious.

Continuing:

The next claim in the argument for design is that we have no good explanation for the foundation of life that doesn't involve intelligence. Here is where thoughtful people part company. Darwinists assert that their theory can explain the appearance of design in life as the result of random mutation and natural selection acting over immense stretches of time. Some scientists, however, think the Darwinists' confidence is unjustified. They note that although natural selection can explain some aspects of biology, there are no research studies indicating that Darwinian processes can make molecular machines of the complexity we find in the cell.

Scientists skeptical of Darwinian claims include many who have no truck with ideas of intelligent design, like those who advocate an idea called complexity theory, which envisions life self-organizing in roughly the same way that a hurricane does, and ones who think organisms in some sense can design themselves.

To his credit (and unlike certain other ID advocates), Behe uses “Darwinian” in a well-defined sense, referring to evolution occurring strictly under the operation of natural selection. Behe maintains that Darwinian mechanisms are insufficient to explain certain microstructures within cells. Most of his fellow biochemists disagree: but this question, at least, is a proper scientific one.

Opponents of ID tend to go overboard in their zeal to dismiss the design program as pseudoscientific rubbish, so allow me to restate my last assertion, with emphasis. Asking whether natural selection—operating on naturally occurring variation—is by itself sufficient to explain the evolution of molecular machines is an example of perfectly proper scientific inquiry. Many of Behe's colleagues maintain that the question has already been answered affirmatively: natural selection is sufficient in these instances. But his fair-minded critics also admit that the scientific literature thus far contains mostly superficial treatments of the evolution of complex small-scale systems.

For the sake of argument, I will here concede that what Behe elsewhere calls “irreducible complexity” actually exists: that, in other words, natural selection cannot account for the development of certain molecular machines. Is design therefore implicated? No—indeed the only conclusion that might be drawn is that something besides natural selection is at work. As Behe himself points out in the passage above, other proposals, such as self-organizing systems, have been floated. At this juncture such competing schemas remain relatively undeveloped. But it is however clear that the design program is not the sole option.

The fourth claim in the design argument is also controversial: in the absence of any convincing non-design explanation, we are justified in thinking that real intelligent design was involved in life. To evaluate this claim, it's important to keep in mind that it is the profound appearance of design in life that everyone is laboring to explain, not the appearance of natural selection or the appearance of self-organization.

The strong appearance of design allows a disarmingly simple argument: if it looks, walks and quacks like a duck, then, absent compelling evidence to the contrary, we have warrant to conclude it's a duck. Design should not be overlooked simply because it's so obvious.

Still, some critics claim that science by definition can't accept design, while others argue that science should keep looking for another explanation in case one is out there. But we can't settle questions about reality with definitions, nor does it seem useful to search relentlessly for a non-design explanation of Mount Rushmore.

As discussed above, Behe assents to Darwinian explanations outside the molecular domain. But surely organisms exhibit a “profound appearance of design” on these larger scales. Why then should we reject this appearance of design on a macroscopic level, but continue to regard design as the default explanation for microstructures? Here again, ID advocates have chosen very poor ground on which to make their stand: for each “convincing non-design explanation” effectively shrinks the region of explanatory space left for design.

This gives ID arguments—or at least Behe's version of such arguments—the “profound appearance” of a God of the gaps strategy. And as someone said: If it looks, walks and quacks like a duck, then, absent compelling evidence to the contrary, we have warrant to conclude it's a duck.

Yes.