Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God

14: Intelligent Design

What stark Necessity or ordered Chance
Became alive to know the cosmic whole?
What magic of numbers, what mechanic chance
Developed consciousness, assumed a soul?

Sri Aurobindo

The simplicity that was once expected to be the foundation of life has proven to be a phantom; instead, systems of horrendous, irreducible complexity inhabit the cell. The resulting realization that life was designed by an intelligence is a shock to us in the twentieth century. But other centuries have had their shocks, and there is no reason to suppose that we should escape them.

Michael Behe

In the last decades of the 20th century two new ways of thinking have put scientific materialism into question from within. Its premise, to wit that all is matter because there is nothing but matter, is a dogma and the ground of a hardened paradigm. It is therefore by no means surprising that the present twofold viral infection in the innards of science itself has been countered by strong defence mechanisms. The controversies are still ongoing and may continue for a long time to come. One new idea is called ‘the anthropic principle’, the other ‘intelligent design theory’.

The Anthropic Principle

The anthropic principle has originated from the physicists’ wonderment about the improbability of the existence of conscious life – in other words: of ourselves – on Earth. Contemplating the glories of nature, and the human in nature, has caused delight everywhere and in all climes, and is at the heart of natural philosophy. The anthropic principle, however, is the result of modern, in fact quite recent macro- and microphysical findings. “The anthropic principle is essentially the idea that our very existence puts constraints on what physical laws are possible. These must be such that intelligent beings such as ourselves could somehow evolve.” (Peter Woit¹) It has become incontestable that “life can arise only in an extremely narrow range of all possible physical parameters and yet, oddly enough, here we are, as though the universe had been designed to accommodate us.” (Lee Smolin²)

In the history of the universe there is a range of mathematical constants which are absolutely basic for its evolution. There are for instance the fundamental physical constants which no theory can explain, but without which no theory can work: Planck’s constant, the speed of light, the electrical charge of the proton, Newton’s constant of gravity, the mass of the electron, and several others. The constants have been described as “the portions, balances, and strengths by which particles and forces worked together to create matter, elements, chemistry, and finally biological life. Thanks to the constants, it seems, the universe was not a cosmic soup of particles, as it might have been. … Where do the constants come from? They were simply there from the very beginning. They produced what would be called a ‘fine-tuned’ universe.”³

Without the fine-tuning of the universe in its eventful history since the Big Bang, it would not be as it is now, or it would have ceased to be in one of the critical phases of its evolution. For instance, the electro-magnetic force is 39 orders of magnitude stronger than the gravitational force. Why 39, neither more nor less? There is no answer. Yet “if the forces were more comparable in strength, stars would have collapsed long before life had a chance to evolve. … The neutron is heavier than the proton, but not so much heavier that neutrons cannot be bound in nuclei, where conservation of energy prevents the neutrons from decaying. Without neutrons we would not have the heavier elements needed for building complex systems such as life.”⁴ A physicist is of the opinion that the laws of nature seem specially tailored to our own existence; a biologist reflects that if the history of life had been even slightly different, the makeup of the world’s species today would be completely different.

There are actually two kinds of anthropic principle, differing in the value they confer on the human being and its place in the universe. The following formulations are by Brandon Carter, the astrophysicist who coined the term in 1973. The weak anthropic principle: “We must be prepared to take account of the fact that our location in the universe is necessarily privileged to the extent of being compatible with our existence as observers.” ‘Location’ here means our position on the Earth in space and time. The strong anthropic principle: “The universe, and hence the fundamental parameters on which it depends, must be such as to admit the creation of observers within it at some stage.”⁵ The observer is a living, conscious being. According to the weak principle this being may passively state the fact that the universe has created the (very improbable) circumstances of his being there; the strong principle asserts that all elements in the evolution of the universe must lead to the creation of the conscious observer.

It will cause no surprise that statements of this kind have led to vehement protests from scientific materialists, according to whom matter is not capable of intention and all events in the universe are chance events. Still, the improbability of the evolution of the universe leading up to the appearance of a being like the human is of such order of magnitude that even confirmed materialistic scientists, and among them some of the greatest, agree that something more than chance must have been in play. “The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming,” concedes Freeman Dyson. And even Steven Weinberg enunciates his amazement that the laws of nature and the initial conditions of the universe should allow for the existence of beings who could observe it. “Life as we know it would be impossible if any one of several physical quantities had slightly different values.”

“Until very recently, the anthropic principle was considered by almost all physicists to be unscientific, religious, and generally a goofy misguided idea. According to physicists it was a creation of inebriated cosmologists, drunk on their own mystical ideas,” writes Leonard Susskind.⁶ “Many scientists dislike the anthropic principle because it seems to be a throwback to a pre-Copernican, Aristotelian style of reasoning. It seems to imply an anthropocentric view of the cosmos.” (Freeman Dyson⁷) “It explicitly invokes life and is consequently anathema to many scientists. … The anthropic principle re-injects teleology into science.” (George Sudarshan⁸) These are the reasons why some sarcastic scientists launched, besides the weak and the strong anthropic principle, a third variety, “the completely ridiculous anthropic principle”!

Nonetheless, the data now at the disposal of the scientists of the micro- and the macroworlds, as those of biology, differ enormously from the data that were available to a Galileo, Descartes or Newton. The principle of studying the facts as perceived by the senses may remain the same, but – and this is only one different factor – instruments have extended the perception of the senses in a way scientists of the previous centuries could not so much as imagine. The use of the microscope and the telescope for scientific purposes caused a revolution in Galileo’s and Leeuwenhoek’s time. The modern instruments in the micro- and the macroworld are causing another revolution which is not less important.

Secondly, the fundamental significance of the levels of existence – matter, life, mind – will have to be recognized in the near or further-off future, because such is reality. New interpretations or a new paradigm will be needed to approach life, which is not reducible to measurement, calculation and mass only. ‘Vitalism’ has refused to go away in the history of science; at one time it will have to be accepted and studied, because it will become apparent that matter alone does not suffice to explain reality. And its study will be indispensable for the knowledge and mastery of consciousness in a following stage of humanity’s progress. Such will be the science of tomorrow which is already knocking at today’s door in issues like the anthropic principle and ‘intelligent design’, to which we now turn.

Intelligent Design and the Other Evolutionary Theories

The ‘Intelligent Design’ phenomenon is generally called ‘the Intelligent Design theory’, which is a misnomer. Intelligent Design puts scientific materialism into question without as yet being able to construct its own, rival theory. For it acknowledges life and intelligence, or consciousness, and, as we have just seen, a systematic explanation of this elementary categories is not yet possible. This is an observation of note because Intelligent Design (ID) is often attacked for its shortcomings as a theory, which it is not, and because adherents of ID themselves sometimes try to present it as such. The question formulated by ID is well-founded on scientific grounds; the answer remains to be found, and will require an entirely new approach of science.

Scientific materialism, inherently limited like all constructions of the mind, has been criticized since its beginnings in the 17th century. It gradually became the commonly accepted and academic interpretation of nature and reality in the 19th century. Curiously, while its foundations were again seriously questioned in the physics of the first half of the 20th century, it triumphed in the biological sciences with the discovery of the double helix in 1953 and the centenary of the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1959. Although biology relied on physics as its nethermost basis, the background mentality in the two fields was quite dissimilar, physics having its tradition of the great “mystics” (Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and the Einstein-Bohr generation), biology convinced of its metaphysical truths within a chitin shell of dogmatism, possibly secreted because of sheer vulnerability.

Because of the Second World War science’s centre of gravity shifted from Europe to the United States. The constitution of this country and its Bill of Rights are based on the principles of the Enlightenment transmitted via the humanitarian ideals of Freemasonry. On the other hand, there is still the widespread influence of the Christian sectarian refugees who were its first settlers, the emotional religiosity of Bible thumping preachers, and Christian religious fundamentalism in general. These two stances, rationalism and religious fundamentalism, are the great divide that runs through the nation and heavily determines its politics, culture and religious activities.

One finds this internal division also expressed in the trials about the teaching of either evolution or creationism, or both, in educational institutions. The most famous remains the “Monkey Trial” of 1925, but it has been followed by several others, like McLean v. Arkansas in 1982, and Edwards v. Aguillard in 1987. It was on this occasion that a group of scientists, including Nobel laureates, published in the newspapers a manifesto in support of scientific materialism. Other “court defeats for creationism” occurred in 1990, 1994 and 1997. At first a typical American phenomenon, such controversies have now spread to other countries, sometimes provoked not by Christian but by Islamic creationists. The contentious atmosphere resulting from these debates is directly responsible for the bitterness of the battles fought between creationists, positivists and intelligent-designers.

Michael Denton’s Evolution: a Theory in Crisis (1985) may be seen as the starting signal of the Intelligent Design movement. On its cover is printed: “New developments in science are challenging orthodox Darwinism.” Denton had no religious program; his criticism of Darwinism, which in most cases meant neo-Darwinism, rested on purely scientific grounds and is generally respected, although it came as a shock after the triumphalist Darwinian wave in the 1950s and 1960s, Desmond Morris’ Naked Ape and Jacques Monod’s Chance and Necessity. “I have tried to show why I believe that the problems [of ‘Darwinism’] are too serious and too intractable to offer any hope of resolution in terms of the orthodox Darwinian framework, and that consequently the conservative view is no longer tenable,” wrote Denton.⁹ His was a strong challenge indeed.

“Darwin’s model of evolution is still very much a theory and still very much in doubt when it comes to macro-evolutionary phenomena,” Denton asserted. “Furthermore, being basically a theory of historical reconstruction, it is impossible to verify by experiment or direct observation as is normal science. … Unique events are unrepeatable and cannot be subjected to any sort of experimental investigation. … Not only is the theory incapable of proof by normal scientific means, the evidence is far from compelling.”¹⁰ Denton, an Australian molecular biologist, then went on, in an unusually cultured book, to substantiate his contentions by examining the main problems such as the dogmatism of ‘Darwinism’, the proof of homology, the fossil record, the importance of the molecular biological revolution, and the enigma of life’s origin.

These solid arguments from a neutral source were grist to the mill of several Christian intellectuals who accepted some version of evolution but not the materialistic dogma buttressing Darwinism. Initially the most vocal one was Phillip Johnson, professor of law and Christian convert, who published Darwin on Trial in 1991. The reader may remember that, by then, the sociobiologists Edward Wilson and Richard Dawkins had published their supposedly ‘arch-Darwinian’ and aggressively anti-religious, not to say anti-theistic, books. Johnson saw sociobiology in particular and scientific materialism in general as a lethal menace to Western culture, by him identified with the Christian religion and morals. He was soon followed in this by like-minded but scientifically qualified persons who created organizations and published a literature to combat the institutionalized threat of official science.

“On the one hand, modernists say that science is impartial fact-finding, the objective and unprejudiced weighing of evidence,” writes Johnson. “Science in that sense relies on careful observations, calculations, and above all repeatable experiments. That kind of objective science is what makes technology possible, and where it can be employed it is indeed the most reliable way of determining the facts. On the other hand, modernists also identify science with naturalistic philosophy [Johnson’s term for scientific materialism]: In that case science is committed to finding and endorsing naturalistic explanations for every phenomenon – regardless of the facts. That kind of science is not free of prejudice. On the contrary, it is defined by prejudice. The prejudice is that all phenomena can ultimately be explained in terms of purely natural [i.e. material] causes, which is to say unintelligent causes.”¹¹

It was Johnson’s outspoken intention to go on the counteroffensive against scientific materialism, or as he put it “to split the foundations of naturalism” by “the wedge of truth” (title of one of his books) – Christian truth, that is. He became referred to as ‘Phillip “the Wedge” Johnson’. He and his like-minded crusaders saw themselves as defenders of Western civilization, “the normative legacy of Judeo-Christian ethics”. From a pamphlet, known as “the Wedge document” we quote the following: “The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. … Thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud portrayed humans not as moral and spiritual beings, but as animals or machines. … The materialist conception of reality infected virtually every area of our culture … The cultural consequences of this triumph of materialism were devastating … Discovery Institute’s Centre for the Renewal of Science and Culture [a powerhouse of Intelligent Design] seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies.”¹²

The battle was on – and is still on, in dust clouds of confusion. Original Darwinism and subsequent neo-Darwinism; creationism and Christian evolutionism; science as theory and science as metaphysical dogma; Christian theology and Intelligent Design; creationist ID and neutral ID – it is all mixed, together with the historical variations of each of these religions, doctrines, theories, hypotheses, ideas, guesses, or fantasies. The ignorance of the way in which the media present and mispresent this mixture is sometimes atrocious. To create some clarity in the confusion should be worth our while.

Creationism

Creationism is the belief that the world originated through an act of God as described in the Bible, a collection of books holy to the early Hebrew tribes. The Bible was, and still is, a sacred text of three major religions – in historical order: Judaism, Christianity and Islam – although in each religion it has been complemented with additional revelations, doctrines and traditions. The first words of its first book, Genesis, are: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” and it goes on describing how God created the universe and everything in it in six days, after which he rested on the seventh. A story in the biblical history of humanity, often referred to in the evolution controversies, narrates how God in his anger with a corrupt humanity causes a flood to destroy everything on Earth, except for the righteous Noah, his family, and a sample of all animal species in his ark. This flood, the Flood, is often used to explain the findings of geology and paleontology.

Religious scientists who accept creation as truth “no more think alike than do evolutionists.” There are the literalists, for whom everything happened exactly as written in the Bible. Their belief is called “the young Earth interpretation” because it holds that the creation of the Earth, and all things on it, happened not more than a few thousand years ago. The Anglican archbishop James Usher calculated that the year of creation had been -4004. Printed in the margins of the King James Bible, Usher’s chronology became quasi gospel for British and American Protestants during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is still the belief of millions of people who have been taught the biblical story of creation in their early youth.

Other religious scientists, unable to deny the geological and paleontological data but wanting to remain within their faith, have widened the Genesis story into a “day-age theory.” This means that they take the six “days” of creation as symbolical for six ‘ages’ of undetermined duration. Their main argument is that, indeed, the biblical story reflects in broad outlines the emergence of the universe, the creation of the Earth, and the appearance of plants, animals, and humans in the right evolutionary order. The “day-age theory” may be seen as a compromise between religious injunction and the scientific theories of evolution.

A third interpretation of Genesis admits “a vast gap of time between creation of the earth and creation of the Garden of Eden,” thus again finding accommodation for the modern discoveries of science. And a fourth religious view holds that “God uses evolution as his instrument; evolution is how God creates, his work cannot be detected.” This view is already quite distant from a literal acceptance of the biblical creation myth and close to natural theology which sees the hand of God in everything, in the heavens and on Earth. In fact, several Catholic scientists accept Genesis as a matter of respect for the doctrines of their Church, pro forma, while in the daily practice of their faith they see God as the sustainer of the evolution.

Yet the Christian Bible consists of two collections of books, the Hebrew Old Testament and the Christian New Testament. According to the latter, Christ, the incarnated Son of God, is the key to the redemption of all creation and especially of humankind. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and his consummation of the evolution in Christ is a well-known example of this vision. Another is e.g. Claude Tresmontant, former professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne, who writes: “Only the revelation and incarnation [of Christ] allow us to discover what is the ultimate aim of the creation.” The creation was not complete in the beginning, as one might infer from the Bible, for it cannot be completed without Christ. “In Christ is the meaning of the creation and he realizes in himself the final goal of it. … The aim of creation is the divinization of the human being. … The ultimate goal of creation was not the snail, nor the gorilla, nor the australopithecine, it is the True Human united with the True God, the new Human who is born again and has become like Christ.”¹³

Positivist Theories of Evolution

‘Positivism’ and ‘reductionism’, and in America ‘physical naturalism’, are terms nearly identical to ‘scientific materialism’ as used throughout our narrative. Present-day Darwinists routinely present Darwinism as the one and only scientific evolutionary theory, outlined by Charles Darwin in his Origin of Species. So does for instance David Attenborough in his BBC documentary on Charles Darwin, and so do most other popularizations of evolution. This is not only historically incorrect, it is also misleading as to the contents and significance of Darwinism, as it is of evolutionary theory in general. Of this, the reader has been informed in the chapters on Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck and Alfred Wallace.

All three of them, Lamarck, Wallace and Darwin, were exponents of their time, passionate students of their subject, and well-read in all texts available on it, among them the works of Linnaeus, Cuvier, Buffon, Erasmus Darwin and Chambers. Seen in this way, Darwin was much more a synthesizer and a symbol, leaning heavily on the theses of the geologist Lyell and the economist Mathus, than the inventor of scientific evolution. He was ignorant of the natural mechanism which he proposed as a substitute of supernatural creation, simply because in his time such knowledge was not yet available. The idea of evolution was in the air; the new sciences of geology, anatomy, anthropology and paleontology continuously discovered new data supporting it. But what is the scientific value of a theory of which the central mechanisms (variation and natural selection) can only be guessed at, not proved? In fact, the enormous mass of innovations and rearrangements by ‘Darwinism’ in the last century notwithstanding, the guesswork continues and definitive proof remains to be provided.

At present there are several positivist evolutionary theories, of which ‘Darwinism’ is the most widespread and by many supposed to be the only one. Lamarckism has been heavily attacked and ridiculed in the past, but it has never completely disappeared and is, as we saw when discussing the ongoing revolution in genetics, gaining strength again. ‘Darwinism’ is a cluster of theories, of which the original Darwinism is probably the least referred to. What is nowadays understood as Darwinism is generally some kind of neo-Darwinism, and depends on the inclinations of the proponent, whether geneticist, field biologist, anthropopaleontologist, or whatever. The sociobiology of Edward Wilson has radicalized neo-Darwinism into a moral, not to say fundamentalist theory. Dawkins and Gould both proclaim themselves arch-Darwinists, but Dawkins has launched his un-Darwinian theories of the extended phenotype and the meme, and Gould his anti-Darwinian theory of punctuated equilibrium, denying, in blatant heresy, Darwin’s principle of gradualism. As André Pichot remarks dryly: nowadays every biologist seems to have his personal theory of evolution.

Another problem is that evolution is a historic science and therefore very different from physics with its prime condition that experimental proof must be repeatable within identical conditions. We remember Michael Denton’s observation that “being basically a theory of historical reconstruction, [Darwin’s model of evolution] is impossible to verify by experiment or direct observation as is normal science. … Unique events are unrepeatable and cannot be subjected to any sort of experimental investigation.”

Given the limitations of the human mind, even of the greatest, controversy is part of the progress in science, or of the formation and clash of its paradigms. But it may be seen as a sign of its immaturity that it presents each of its new thought systems as absolute truth. The worlds opened to humanity by science are wonderful, its lifting of some corners of the veil of nature beyond expectation, and its guidance in the construction of our global world amazing though disturbing. All this, however, may not be more than a step towards the Truth and Reality of tomorrow.

Intelligent Design Theory

“The simplicity that was once expected to be the foundation of life has proven to be a phantom; instead, systems of horrendous, irreducible complexity inhabit the cell. The resulting realization that life was designed by an intelligence is a shock to us in the twentieth century,” writes Michael Behe.¹⁴ We know of the distortions caused by ‘mental simplification’, at the beginning of modern science in the representation of things, afterwards more and more misrepresenting reality as both the micro- and the macroworld became “horrendously” complicated. Actually, all domains of nature have become so complex, and are at the same time so astonishingly functional, that the question how such complexity may have come about can no longer be disregarded. What or who designed such astonishing, and astonishingly functional, complexity?

“Design is simply the purposeful arrangement of parts,”¹⁵ be they microscopic, small, big, or astronomical. ‘Design’ here is not a term from the world of fashion or sports shoes. It refers to drafting, planning, purpose, systematic ordering – not by chance, but by an intention which requires an intelligence. “‘Design’ means the operation of an intelligence that organizes the effects of law and chance, creating information. … The Intelligent Design theory started to take shape in the late 1970s, as an outcome of information theory. Faced with the enormous complexity of living things, ID theorists argue that it makes more sense to assume that the information is a language [i.e. a coherent system of significance]: In other words, it is the product of design. This is the complete opposite of Darwinism.”¹⁶

The argument for design, as composed by Michael Behe, goes as follows: “1. We infer design whenever parts appear arranged to accomplish a function. 2. The strength of the inference is quantitative and depends on the evidence; the more the parts, and the more intricate and sophisticated the function, the stronger is our conclusion of design.” Here, Behe rightly mentions William Paley’s old argument that if an artificial object, e.g. a pocket watch (nowadays we would say a chronometer), is found somewhere in nature, the conclusion must be that the watch has been designed by an intelligent being. “3. Aspects of life overpower us with the appearance of design. 4. Since we have no other convincing explanation for that strong appearance of design, Darwinian pretensions notwithstanding, we are rationally justified in concluding that parts of life were indeed purposely designed by an intelligent agent.”¹⁷

Creationist Intelligent Design

Most experts in the ID movement are qualified as experimental or theoretical scientists, or as university professors. Many of them are also religious. Behe, for instance, is a Catholic, and Johnson and Dembski belong to American Christian denominations. Dembski is quoted as having written: “My thesis is that all disciplines find their completion in Christ and cannot be properly understood apart from Christ. … Christology tells us that the conceptual soundness of a scientific theory cannot be maintained apart from Christ. Christ is the light and the life of the world and its destiny. It follows that a scientist in trying to understand some aspect of the world, is in the first instance concerned with that aspect as it relates to Christ – and this is true regardless of whether the scientist acknowledges Christ.”¹⁸

The militant ID movement has, among other activities, sponsored conferences, one in 1995 titled “Death of Materialism and the Renewal of Culture,” another the following year under the title “Mere Creation,” and a third one in 1999, “Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe.” In the published lectures of the latter, Bruce Chapman specifies the anti-materialistic objectives of the new movement: “Materialism is not limited in its implications to natural science. Materialism is a way of understanding day-to-day existence and responding to it. … It can be argued that materialism is a major source of the demoralization of the twentieth century. Materialism’s explicit denial not just of design but also of the possibility of scientific evidence for design has done untold damage to the normative legacy of Judeo-Christian ethics. A world without design is a world without meaning.”¹⁹ And Phillip “the Wedge” Johnson writes: “If reason is to be a reliable guide, it must be grounded in a foundation that is more fundamental than logic. Instrumental reason is not enough. That is why the fear of the Lord is not the beginning of superstition but the beginning of wisdom.”²⁰

No wonder that the not-Christian-minded accuse the ID movement of being a cover organization for Christian creationism. As an organization it certainly sees its reason to exist in the fight against gross materialism and for the traditional values of the Christian world. In fact, it is rather amazing that it took so long for such an accumulation of religiously inspired forces within science to rise up against the dominant materialism. The violently anti-religious language of authors like Richard Dawkins, which has more to do with his psychological personality than it has with science, certainly contributed to their organization.

Neutral or Open Intelligent Design

The religious ID’ers are of course aware of the arguments that can be directed against them. The biochemist Michael Behe is “a legitimate scientist with a good record of publication,” whose book Darwin’s Black Box (1996) marked a turning point for the new design movement. He writes: “Although some of my critics, noting that I am a Catholic, argue that design is a religious idea, I disagree. I think a conclusion of design is completely empirical, and can be justified solely by physical data, as well as by understanding of how we come to a conclusion of design.”²¹ He insists that Intelligent Design is a matter of science, and that secondary deductions belong to another domain, whether cultural, religious, or both.

“I am keenly aware,” writes Behe, “that in the past few years many people have come to regard the phrase ‘intelligent design’ as fighting words, because to them the word ‘design’ is synonymous with ‘creationism’, and thus opens the door to treating the Bible as some sort of scientific textbook, which would be silly. That is an unfortunate misinterpretation. The idea of intelligent design, although congenial to some religious views of the universe, is independent of them. For example, the possibility of intelligent design is quite compatible with common descent, which some religious people disdain. What’s more, although some religious thinkers envision active, continuing intervention in nature [by a higher being], intelligent design is quite compatible with the view that the universe operates by unbroken natural law, with the design of life perhaps packed into its initial set-up.”²²

The cause of the misunderstanding lies of course with a faction of the religious ID’ers themselves, those responsible for the opinions quoted in the previous section. All the same, it must be stressed that Intelligent Design as such, as a scientific statement, or as a questioning perception based on scientific grounds, is a-religious. ID advocates, unlike strict creationists, accept evolution, but they do not accept that it works in the ‘Darwinian’ way. And “their purpose is not to support Genesis, but to follow evidence wherever it leads.” In the words of a Phillip Johnson in a neutral mood: “The question for now is not whether the vast claims of Darwinian evolution conflict with Genesis, but whether they conflict with the evidence of biology.”²³

In the preface to the papers read at the 1999 “Science and Evidence” conference we find written: “Unlike neo-Darwinists and other evolutionary theorists, design theorists hold that intelligent causes rather than undirected natural [i.e. material] causes best explain many features of life and the universe. Unlike many creationists, design theorists do not necessarily believe that the earth is young, neither do they base their theories upon scriptural texts. Unlike many theistic evolutionists who think design can only be seen through ‘the eyes of faith’, design theorists believe that scientific evidence actually points to intelligent design – that intelligent design is, in their words, ‘empirically detectable’.”²⁴ As William Dembski, mathematician and philosopher, is quoted to have put it: “Intelligent Design is not creationism and it is not naturalism [i.e. materialism]: Nor is it a compromise or synthesis of these positions. It simply follows the empirical evidence of design wherever it leads. Intelligent Design is a third way.”²⁵

“The conclusion of intelligent design flows naturally from the data itself – not from sacred books or sectarian beliefs. Inferring that biochemical systems were designed by an intelligent agent is a humdrum process that requires no new principles of logic or science. It comes simply from the hard work that biochemistry has done over the past forty years, combined with consideration of the way in which we reach conclusions of design every day.” (Behe²⁶)

But then: who or what is the agent of that intelligent design? Is it a ‘designer’ with or without a capital letter? Behe’s answer is brief: “Inferences to design do not require that we have a candidate for the role of designer.”²⁷ He comments elsewhere: “The core claim of intelligent design is quite limited. It says nothing directly about how biological design was produced, who the designer was, whether there has been common descent, or other such questions. Those can be addressed separately. It says only that design can be empirically detected in observable features of physical systems.”²⁸

Let us have a look at these observable features.

Irreducible Complexity

Even Richard Dawkins is baffled by the “horrendous complexity” of life’s creatures, for he states laconically in The Blind Watchmaker: “The biologist’s problem is the problem of complexity.”²⁹ Mental simplification and familiarity with some of its outward aspects may have suggested an understanding of life where as yet there was no more than a rudimentary approximation. In the words of one scientist: “Familiarity dulls our sense of wonder at the craftsmanship of nature.” Still, mental simplification and familiarity have both been, and for a long time, the result not only of ignorance but still more of the limitation of our physical senses through which nature is perceived.

As noted before, the means at its disposal have allowed science to penetrate in physical realms previously unimaginable. The complexity of the atomic and sub-atomic worlds, of the cells and the microscopic processes of life, and of the cosmic phenomena has been found to be staggering, and led “from complexity to perplexity.” “It was once expected that the basis of life would be exceedingly simple,” writes Behe. “That expectation has been smashed. Vision, motion and other biological functions have proven to be no less sophisticated than television cameras and automobiles. Science has made enormous progress in understanding how the chemistry of life works, but the elegance and complexity of biological systems at the molecular level have paralyzed science’s attempt to explain their origins.”³⁰

“Each of the anatomical steps and structures that Darwin thought were so simple actually involves staggeringly complicated biochemical processes that cannot be papered over with rhetoric.”³¹ Marcel Schutzenberger, French mathematician and doctor of medicine, observed: “Whether gradualists or saltationists, Darwinians have too simple a conception of biology. … In biological reality, the space of even the simplest function has a complexity that defies understanding, and indeed defies any and all calculations.”³²

Behe’s comparison of biological functions with television cameras and automobiles is actually far too plain. A hundred years ago the cell was still seen as a minuscule blob of plasma; now “the most elementary type of cell constitutes a ‘mechanism’ unimaginably more complex than any machine yet thought up, let alone constructed by man.”³³ “A cell resembles a miniature industrial complex that is much more complicated than a General Motors or a Boeing plant,” writes Geoffrey Simmons in What Darwin Didn’t Know.³⁴ A human body, from its birth to its adulthood, contains from 10 to 75 trillion cells, all functioning, reacting to each other, and keeping the body alive. The brain is considered the most complex object in the universe. Our small bowel contains an astronomical number of 500 different kinds of bacteria. “How can the sight of a tennis ball’s shape, size, colour and speed be sent to dozens of spots in the brain at the same time, be recombined into a functional image, and then result in an action – all in less than a second?”

In stark contrast with the perplexity caused by complexity is the self-assuredness of some ‘Darwinist’ authors in the face of the processes of nature, Richard Dawkins being the prime example. A few quotes must do, but pages could be filled with explanations far from science and close to nonsense. About the origin of life, the great enigma of biology: “Actually a molecule that makes copies of itself is not as difficult to imagine as it seems at first, and it only had to happen once. Think of the replicator … Imagine it as … Now suppose …”³⁵ About natural selection: “If a group of atoms in the presence of energy falls into a stable pattern it will tend to stay that way. The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and a rejection of unstable ones. There is no mystery about this. It had to happen by definition.”³⁶ About gradualism: “Gradual evolution by small steps, each step being lucky but not too lucky, is the solution to the riddle.”³⁷ What is the science behind “lucky but not too lucky”? Luck is metaphysical speculation; scientific explanations need causes.

“In order to add new segments [to the body of the snake], all that has to be done is a simple process of duplication,” teaches Dawkins. “Since there already exists machinery for making one snake segment … new identical segments may easily be added by a single mutational step.”³⁸ To add any part to the body of any organism is never either easy or simple. For instance: “It is not sufficient to give a bird wings if it is to fly. In addition its bones must be made lighter while at the same time maintaining their strength, feathers must be aerodynamically adapted, the center of gravity must shift, the breastbone and musculature must develop, and changes in metabolism are required to provide sufficient energy for flight. If such changes do not all occur together and in a coordinated fashion, then they may well be disadvantageous to survival.”³⁹

On this sort of Dawkinsian aberration Stephen Gould comments: “Most so-called explanations amount to little more than what Lewontin and I, following Kipling, would later call “just-so stories” or plausible claims without tested evidence …”⁴⁰ Even Daniel Dennett seems to keep his distance from such kind of happy-go-lucky reasoning and writing: “One may be reasonably nervous about the size of the role of sheer, unfettered imagination in adaptationist thinking.” He is aware that “what particularly infuriates Gould and Lewontin is the blithe confidence with which adaptationists [like Dawkins] go about their reverse engineering,” which means imagining how organic structures have come about, “always sure that sooner or later they will find the reason why things are as they are, even if it so far eludes them.”⁴¹

Considering natures complex processes with an informed but open mind, the conclusion imposes itself that they cannot possibly have come about through Darwinian “gradual evolution by small steps.” The mechanisms, processes, organs and organisms cannot have come about by incremental chance processes – for it should not be forgotten that, according to scientific materialism, nature has no awareness, and therefore no plans, no intentions, no teleological vectors. What Darwin imagined as having come about gradually, and is still an article of faith of ‘Darwinism’, can no longer be accepted in the face of the astonishing complexity revealed by the latest scientific instruments.

The phenomenon of a complexity which can no longer be reduced to its parts and explained by them, has been called ‘irreducible complexity’. “By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.” This is Michael Behe’s oft-quoted definition in his book Darwin’s Black Box.⁴² The “systems” are the structures built by life, from the nano-mechanisms in the cell to the gigantic creatures that at one time roamed the Earth in their thousands, to our hyper-complex brain. The systems have one or more basic functions to which all the parts harmoniously contribute, and which cease functioning if one of their parts breaks down or is removed.

The classic example of an irreducibly complex system has become, since the publication of Behe’s book, the mousetrap. The basis of a mousetrap consists of a small wooden plank, the ‘platform’. On this platform are fixed a spring with a ‘hammer’, actually a bent metal wire strong enough to kill a mouse; a ‘catch’, which has to be moved by the mouse to activate the spring; and a holding bar, which holds the hammer down till released by the catch. Every one of these parts is indispensable for the mouse trap to function. Without one of these parts, the trap would be useless. Essential is that all parts have been put together, have been designed, with an intention: to kill mice. The coming together of the parts at the same time and in the right way cannot be explained as having taken place by chance, one independently after the other, and with time intervals.

Nature consists entirely of irreducibly complex systems, from the ones measuring microns, like the flagellum of a bacterium, to systems active over part or the whole of an organism, like the immune system. From one angle the systems of an organism are ordered from the whole down to its organs, cells, molecules, atoms and subatomic particles; from the opposite angle the order climbs from the elementary particles through the cells and the organs to the whole organism, be it plant or animal. “For instance, the emergence of a sensory organ like the eye, even the most elementary [in lower animals], requires the appearance in a coordinated manner of a whole sequence of transformations. It is difficult to understand how each single mutation might be selected before the eye is functional, as it is its function that is the necessary criterion of the selection.”⁴³ Richard Lewontin concludes: “It is not that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. It is that the properties of the parts cannot be understood except in their context in the whole.”⁴⁴

The appearance of having been designed is undeniable to anyone contemplating the intricacy and efficacy of nature, the ‘wonders’ of nature, even to Richard Dawkins, for he writes in the first page of The Blind Watchmaker: “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” Yet being the arch-Darwinian whom he declares himself to be, he has to deny any acceptance of design, for that was precisely what Darwin erected his theory against. Still, “Dawkins doesn’t just grudgingly acknowledge some faint impression of design in life; he insists that the appearance of design, which he ascribes to natural selection, is overpowering,” comments Behe. He goes on to quote Dawkins: “Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning.”⁴⁵

Intelligent Design, instead of systematically rejecting the logical conclusion of scientific findings for dogmatic reasons, accepts it. Irreducibly complex systems clash with Darwinian theory because they cannot be explained in the gradual, step-by-step manner envisioned by Darwin, who wrote: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”⁴⁶ Intelligent Design holds this to be demonstrated, therefore steps outside the Church of Darwinism and becomes anathema to it.

“It is important to understand that intelligent design is not a claim that miracles occur. Rather, (1) design is an actual feature of the universe, one that cannot be duplicated by the effects of natural law and chance, and (2) design is researchable, and therefore a valid part of science.” But: “The question is not whether the universe shows evidence of design. Of course it does. The question is how to interpret the evidence.” (O’Leary) In the words of William Dembski, who considers himself a neutral proponent of ID: “Intelligent design is not a form of anti-evolutionism. Intelligent design does not claim that living things came together suddenly in their present form through the efforts of a supernatural creator. Intelligent design is not and never will be a doctrine of creation.”⁴⁷

Problems of Intelligent Design

Neutral ID theory is struggling with problems of which it does not seem to be fully aware. The first one is that, while doing its utmost to comply with the rules of modern science, it does not even consider the gradations of reality traditionally called the ‘Chain of Being’. It cannot disregard them, for after all the ‘design’ is about the phenomena of life, and the ‘intelligence’ is about mind which is consciousness. One finds evidence of this anomaly for instance in Michael Behe’s recent reflections on his own view: “Such a view implies ultimately that life is an intrinsic property of matter, that the course of evolution is directed by natural law, and that our own existence was ordained in nature from the beginning. … Such a view is intellectually exciting because it holds out the prospect of a final union of biology and physics, and thus of a fully rational and lawful biology.”⁴⁸ Life an intrinsic property of matter? A final union of biology and physics?

A second point at issue is that Intelligent Design is not a theory, but a question, a problem for which ‘Darwinism’ and other materialistic evolutionary hypotheses have no solution. The facts which led to the question are indubitably scientific and the deductions logical. They are that the irreducible or specified complexity omnipresent in nature cannot be explained by step-by-step gradualism, because in any given natural ‘mechanism’ or structure each part must be functional simultaneously with all others to render the ‘mechanism’ or structure efficient. This requires an intention, a plan, a blueprint – a design, which means that in nature a designing intelligence is at work.

This reconsideration or reintroduction of consciousness by scientists in biological matters, together with the anthropic principle in physics, may be of decisive importance for the future of science. However, there is as yet no theoretical scaffold to support the scientific statement of ID and the question it asks from academic science. What is more, there cannot be a theory as long as ID, besides accepting an intelligent agent of the design, remains stuck in matter. The paradigm shift has to be considerable, but it is imperative.

A third problem is that the ID movement as a whole seems to be little aware of its limitations to its Western, Christian background. As such it is part of the far from extinct ‘Eurocentric’ attitude of a race which conquered the globe with its technology, commercialism, Christian religion, and true God. The spirituality of the inner explorations by its own great souls and mystics it has suppressed or ridiculed; the great spiritual movements, especially those in the East, it has covered with disdain. “In the Western world theology is wedded to a particular concept of God.” (O’Leary) “We can take the term ‘purposeful designer’ in a very broad sense to refer to any being, principle or mechanism external to our universe.” (Nick Bostrom) For the Judeo-Christian God thrones above his handicraft, and the idea that God might be the internal sustainer of life’s evolution on Earth is usually condemned as pantheism. Once again the words of the physicist David Bohm, who had the courage to explore beyond the invisible but still very real conceptual Western boundaries, deserve our attention: “Ultimately the origin of all this lies in the creative intelligence, which is beyond anything that can be discussed in the manifest physical side. This intelligence is universal and acts in every area of mental operation.”⁴⁹

Inevitably, Intelligent Design has been and is severely criticized. “Intelligent Design theory is pernicious nonsense which needs to be neutralized.” (Nial Shanks) “Intelligent design is a hopeless theory. … It makes no successful predictions, it fails to unify diverse classes of phenomena, and it has garnered no support for the alleged character and abilities of the designing agent or agents. It is on a par with the hypothesis of disco-dancing fairies.” (Tim Lewens) “Any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution. Creative intelligences, being evolved, necessarily arrive late in the universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it. God is a delusion, and a pernicious delusion,” writes the author of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins.⁵⁰

Nonetheless, Intelligent Design is gaining ground, despite the damage done to its genuine scientific position by interested religious forces. Creationist minds know how to gild their case with apparently neutral arguments. Poorly informed media contribute to the confusion about this potentially crucial event in the biological sciences.

The following is the conclusion of Jean Swyngedauw, a French physician: “It is not biochemistry which, in the course of time, has guided the meandering lines of the evolution. Biochemistry might have taken an unspecified number of directions or not realized anything at all. Constant information has been necessary, first for the multiplication of the cell to become possible, then for the genealogical tree of the species to spread out as reconstructed by the paleontologists. … There is no alternative: constant information must have borne the essential responsibility of the evolution. … Information has been indispensable, but what is its source? We are impelled to attribute life to a kind of infiltration of the spirit in the domain of matter-energy. … Present everywhere and not bound to time, its nature is perforce metaphysical.”⁵¹