The ID debate - a summary - Barefoot in the wilderness

The ID debate - a summary

I’ve recently been posting a debate that I had with Peter Williams following an article I wrote about the theological implications of intelligent design theory. (The debate links are: part I, part II, part III, part IV, part V and part VI.) This current post is an attempt to summarise (for myself as much as anyone else!) what I’ve learned from this discussion.

First, I still believe that my original criticism of ID theory is valid. That is, for the Christian, it runs the permanent and serious danger of being dualist in its view of the relationship between Creator and Creation. This arises from the requirement for two kinds (or “modes” if you prefer) of divine creative activity. The theological justification for “design events” (those features that are suggested to be impossible to explain by the application of natural laws such as natural selection) always skirts the idea that all other biological change is somehow less “ordained” by God. It also seems to see these everyday events as too humdrum and ordinary to be really the work of God at all – for if God is active there, why do we posit this extra level of “design”? Yet, if the Incarnation tells us anything about God, it is that it is precisely in the ordinary and humdrum that we should expect to see God.

Second, although there is an interesting theoretical justification for searching for design in the Universe in Dembski’s idea of specified complexity, there has not yet been any sensible application of this idea. Irreducible complexity is the main child of specified complexity, but this is so ill-defined (there is no firm consensus on its theoretical definition from the ID camp) and flawed that it has little scientific credibility. Sadly, even when Dembski tries to produce a hypothetical example to show how specified complexity should work, he makes a total hash of it. To be fair, though, Richard Dawkins (the “hero” of the materialist evolution camp) makes an equal hash of things when he tries to work out an example! This is, unfortunately, an extremely complicated area, and any application of specified complexity will be very difficult (if possible at all) to work out.

Third, it’s become even more apparent that “intelligent design” is an extremely broad term. At one end, it includes out-and-out Creationists who believe that God created the world in seven days, approximately 6000 years ago. At the other, it can almost include me – a Christian who believes that evolution by natural selection is the way the world works, but that God is still the Creator and Sustainer of the world, and hence “behind” everything that occurs (without actually controlling them). Having a sensible discussion with a target that covers such a huge range of opinion is very difficult. Indeed, it started to become apparent to me as my discussion with Peter went on that we are not, in fact, so far apart. He simply finds the idea of specified complexity more attractive and more feasible than I do; part of me suspects that the reason for this is that he comes to it as a philosopher and I come to it as a biologist.

So, I am no more convinced that ID is correct than I was, although I am more open to concede the potential application of the metatheory behind ID should it ever be worked out properly; more open, but far from convinced that it can actually be done. I am reminded again that, merely because someone uses the label “intelligent design”, you know almost nothing about what they actually believe. And I still believe that ID as currently formulated fails in its central rationale for Christians – in attempting to place a Creator God in the context of science, it actually reduces that Creator and often crosses right over into dualism.

pax et bonum

Article posted at 7:41pm on 23 April 2006
Category: Faith, Features, Musing, Science

I remember as far back as Junior High people asking me, “Can you not see the intelligence of creation simply by looking at the trees?”, to which I would reply, “Oh, there is no doubt there is intelligence involved when you look at the trees. The only question is upon which side of one’s eyeballs the intelligence lies.”

Axinar () (URL)
8:50pm on 23 April 2006

I enjoyed this series of posts, and I found my self to agree with you on the whole. One problem for Christian IDers that I’ve yet to hear explained is how they make the connection between an Intelligent Designer and the Triune God, since science is incapable of establishing a connection between the two.

You can do it theologically of course, but to do it from scientific methods isn’t possible, and I get frustrated with IDers who try to trojan horse Christian theology into science in this manner.

Steven Harris () (URL)
8:55pm on 23 April 2006

This is a great post. Thanks.

I found it through the Christian Carnival.

Martin LaBar () (URL)
1:37pm on 26 April 2006

I don’t understand all the reasoning behind those “for” ID and/or “against” ID, but I can’t help but think allowing ID as an alternative to other theories, such as evolution, is a good thing.

You are right, there is no way to understand what a person actually believes when they allow for ID, but to me, it is better than totally discounting it.

Good post and I appreciate the effort to summarize your thoughts intelligently. I found it very interesting.

Susan L. Prince () (URL)
10:03pm on 26 April 2006

Interesting post! I’m not quite sure how you’ve been able to undercut Behe’s “irreducible complexity” relative to the mechanism of natural selection posited by the naturalist framework? Where is the flaw in his research?

I also don’t think your “dualist” critique follows . . . at least to me. You posit “two levels” — which seems to create a false dichotomy, between the molecular level — and the “visible” level; which is exactly what you’re saying ID actually engages in? Please clarify your point here, if you will.

bobby grow () (URL)
07:36am on 30 April 2006

Bobby,
If you want the details of the debate, the best place to look first is at the series of posts of which this is my summary (linked at the top of this post). Basically, “irreducible complexity” is ill-defined and has no actual examples that hold water.

The basis of the dualism I discuss isn’t operation at the molecular and visual levels – it’s two kinds of divine operation. Fundemantally, the division is between events that follow “natural law” and events that break it: “design events”. This is discussed in some detail in the original debate.

Thanks for the comment, and do please ask if there’s anything that’s still not clear.

pax et bonum

[John] () (URL)
08:32am on 30 April 2006

I think your objection completely misunderstands what the ID argument is saying. It’s not a distinction between two kinds of events whose natures are different — the divinely-caused ones and the naturally-caused ones. It’s a distinction between two ways of understanding an event, two different kinds of information that an event will convey. Some events, for all we know, are consistent with being merely naturally caused or with being divinely caused. Other events wear their divine causation on their sleeve. The design is observable. All an ID argument needs is that there are some events in the latter category. All it needs is that some events show design. It doesn’t require that those are the only designed events. So basically your argument confuses metaphysics and epistemology.

Now as to your response to Bobby, I think that makes a further mistake. It assumes that an ID argument needs violations of natural laws. It doesn’t. It just needs there to be some signs of intelligent origins to events in nature. Those origins may well have been in God’s choosing the natural laws that never get broken in the history of the world. In other words, you could have a completely deterministic system of natural laws that God set up at the beginning in order to achieve the results of the evidence ID arguments purport to find in the world as evidence of intelligence. If they then display signs of intelligence, then ID arguments would work, and it’s a completely deterministic naturalism except for God’s initiation of the laws and the original state. ID arguments are consistent with interventionist miracles, but they’re just as consistent with setting it all up via laws at the outset. What the argument needs is not a sign of interventionist miracles but a sign of intelligence, and that can be there on either view.

Jeremy Pierce () (URL)
5:59pm on 01 May 2006

Jeremy,
You’re actually saying the same thing Peter and I were debating. All events are God-caused. The question arises when we find two categories of God-caused events – those consistent with natural law and those that are not. (And, I should repeat, miracles in the Bible are always signs, not simply exercises of divine power. To justify claiming a miracle, I would want to see the sign involved, and no such sign can be claimed for ID.)

As for your second point, if there is no evidence of a violation of natural law, how can there be evidence of design? That is, if an event can be adequately explained on the basis of natural law, on what basis can we justify claiming it to be evidence for divine intervention? (I’m talking here about specific design events within Creation, not the design of Creation itself.)

ID requires extra-natural events to distinguish itself. However, it’s clear again that this shows the huge range of opinions that shelter under this label. I think that it is clearest if we reserve labels for their proper objects, and “Intelligent Design” refers properly to the theory put forward by Michael Behe et al., which is that certain features of organisms prove extra-natural causes (i.e. Design).

The view you’re talking about isn’t ID, but it sounds close to the position I’m going to be writing about in the third part of the current mini-series (Moving forward).

pax et bonum

[John] () (URL)
6:52pm on 01 May 2006

We’re not saying the same thing, because my view is that ID is compatible with this view. Yours seems to be that it’s not.

As for evidence of design, just look to what Dembski and company cite as evidence. They say there are items that they think (and I’m not endorsing the argument) would be extremely unlikely if there isn’t some intelligence behind it. They make it clear that they’re not assuming that the only possible explanation of the piece of data is a miraculous intervention. They say that natural causes could have led to it. It’s just unlikely that natural causes could have led to it without being guided by some higher power. So it shows intelligent causes as opposed to unguided causes. It says nothing about whether the intelligence guided it by setting up natural laws or if it was instead because of a breaking of laws at the moment. Either view is consistent with the ID argument, because either view could allow for things that seem extremely unlikely if there isn’t an intelligence behind why they occurred (which isn’t the same thing as how they occurred, something ID arguments are silent about).

The view I’m talking about is ID. What Behe is talking about as extra-natural is not that it requires breaking of laws, at least if he’s in-step with Dembski and Johnson on this matter. I suspect he is, and people are just misreading him in the same way they’re misreading Dembski and Johnson.

Jeremy Pierce () (URL)
7:29pm on 01 May 2006

Dembski et al. have no credible evidence. I’m a biologist by training and I’ve looked at it and it’s very weak indeed – I talk about some of this in the series of which this is a summary. (Saying that something is too unlikely to have happened by natural causes is effectively the same as saying that it couldn’t happen.)

If an event couldn’t happen by following natural laws in any reasonable timescale then we cannot solve this by appealing to an intelligent designer of those natural laws! If the laws won’t work then they won’t work. The intelligent designer who works through those laws must design them so that they would work. You seem to be suggesting that events that are too unlikely to have happened by natural process can be explained by “intelligently designed” natural processes, which is a contradiction.

ID requires natural law to be broken – it posits events that are (allegedly) far too unlikely to have happened “naturally”. Thus, they cannot be explained by natural laws, whether those laws are “designed” or not. The laws are alleged not to be sufficient – ID must invoke an extra-natural cause. This is the heart of ID, or it is simply orthodox science with a very strange way of expressing itself. (I covered this point in detail in the debate linked to from this post.)

pax et bonum

[John] () (URL)
7:53pm on 01 May 2006

I never said anyone had evidence. I’m just trying to get straight on what the argument is and why it’s consistent with the view I’ve been sketching. But what’s clear to me is that your parenthetical attempt to get around what I’m saying is just plain false. Saying that something is too unlikely to have happened by natural causes is not even close to saying that it couldn’t happen. One is saying that there are no possible worlds where it happens. The other is that we shouldn’t expect any. The first claim is demonstrably false, and any account of physics could show that. Natural causes could have formed Mt. Rushmore. You could explain exactly how if you knew enough about wind forces and how they chip away at rock over time. But it’s very unlikely that they would do so in a way that coincidentally looks just like four famous figures in American history. The distinction between being impossible and being unlikely is philosophically crucial, even if you can pretend that it’s irrelevant in biology most of the time. In philosophy (and that’s the domain you enter when you begin to discuss ID) you have to be aware of these important distinctions.

Who said anything about a reasonable timescale? There are some ID arguments that rely on such a notion, but many of them don’t, and I’m not talking about any particular ID arguments. I’m talking about ID in general. If the only arguments out there had to do with what was absolutely impossible for natural causes to produce even if designed at the outset by God, then you would be right, but many ID arguments aren’t of that sort.

You seem to be suggesting that events that are too unlikely to have happened by natural process can be explained by “intelligently designed” natural processes, which is a contradiction.

No, I’m suggesting that events that are too unlikely to have happened by unguided natural processes can be explained by intelligently designed natural processes. There’s no contradiction. As I said before, the issue is whether the causes are intelligently guided, not whether they’re natural. Something can indeed be both, and you seem to be saying that it can’t. You might as well give up theism altogether if that’s what you think. It’s no longer theistic evolution if evolution’s natural causes aren’t guided.

Jeremy Pierce () (URL)
8:40pm on 01 May 2006

Jeremy,
I suspect that part of our problem with understanding is that you have only “sketched” the ideas you’re trying to communicate. As far as I can understand, you seem to be describing something that would more neatly come under the label “theistic evolution” than “intelligent design”.

“Intelligent design” refers properly only to the theories of Michael Behe et al. (who coined the phrase, AIUI), which posit that evolution cannot adequately explain certain features of living things and that the only explanation is that they were designed; for example, an irreducibly complex system (should it exist) would have to come into being in one fell swoop and this is not feasible by natural selection. Using the term to cover a whole host of other theories that also deal with the relationship between the Creator and Creation is unhelpful, because it can lead only to confusion. “Guided evolution” or “theistic evolution” is not the same as Intelligent Design.

However, I should point out that I do not really fall into the guided or theistic evolution camp, either. I’m preparing a post on what I do think, to finish the “moving forward” mini-series on this blog. Perhaps that will help to clear things up :-)

pax et bonum

[John] () (URL)
10:36pm on 01 May 2006

I’m talking about the general perspective of Behe, Dembski, Johnson, and company. They explicitly allow for theistic evolution in the way I’m explaining it (with evidence of design), even though they explicitly deny that ID can make sense if theistic evolution is taken in the way it usually is (without evidence of design).

As I said above, they do not say that it’s impossible that natural causes should produce the irreducibly complex, just that it’s unlikely enough that we should seek another explanation.

The issue for those guys is not whether evolution occurred or whether it was guided. It’s not even about how it was guided (whether through breaking of laws at given instances or through the natural laws simply being designed to begin with for the purpose of the intended result). Their issue is whether there are signs of its being guided. That’s consistent with theistic evolution and no breaking of laws, and they make that point. ID opponents seem unwilling to acknowledge that, and that response seems to me to require a complete misreading of what Dembski et. al. actually say.

Jeremy Pierce () (URL)
7:22pm on 10 May 2006