At the height of the media frenzy surrounding the Dover trial in the fall of 2005, I was asked to appear on an MSNBC program called The Abrams Report. As is customary on “talking heads” shows, the host, Dan Abrams, played a short prerecorded “backgrounder” before the interview portion of the program. The report about the trial had been filed by Robert Bazell, a science correspondent for NBC News. After playing the piece and before asking his guests any questions, Abrams took the somewhat unusual step of offering his own opinion about the theory of intelligent design.
What he had to say wasn’t too favorable. Abrams explained as how he thought that intelligent design was “dishonest.” In his opinion, it was a stealth form of creationism that refused to mention God in order to conceal a religious agenda. He also alleged that the theory wasn’t scientific. Not only had advocates of the theory “provided no new evidence”; there were no “peer-reviewed studies” in support of it, or so he claimed. After getting the other guest on the program, my old nemesis Eugenie Scott (see Chapter 6), to confirm this (falsely, as it happens), Abrams initiated a line of questioning to establish that intelligent design was “religion.” To do this, he tried to get me to say that I thought the designing intelligence responsible for life was God.
But Abrams was setting a trap, one that, by this time, I knew all too well. If I answered truthfully (which I did) and told him that neither the evidence from biology nor the theory of intelligent design could prove the identity of the designer, he would accuse me of dishonesty and “refusing to come clean” about the religious nature of the theory (which he also did). If, on the other hand, I told him—again truthfully—that I personally thought that God had designed the universe and life, he would seize upon my words as proof that the theory of intelligent design was “religion,” thus establishing in his mind that it must lack any scientific basis. “Just admit it, it’s religion,” he kept demanding.
As a Christian, I’ve never made any secret about my belief in God or even why I think theism makes more sense of the totality of human experience than any other worldview. But I was on Mr. Abrams’s show to discuss the theory of intelligent design, and the theory does not make claims about a deity, nor can it. It makes a more modest claim based upon our uniform experience about the kind of cause—namely, an intelligent cause—that was responsible for the origin of biological form and information.
Of course, that modest claim raises a separate question, indeed, an important religious or philosophical question, namely, the very question about identity of the designing intelligence that Abrams was pressing me to answer. Clearly, his question was legitimate. But I wanted to answer it after I had explained what the theory of intelligent design is and after I had established that there is scientific evidence for it. Otherwise, I knew the minute I said that I personally thought that God was the designer, he would dismiss the case for intelligent design as “religion” because he, and perhaps many of his viewers, assume that if an idea is religious it has no basis in fact or evidence.
And so a little tug-of-war ensued. To get me to either “admit it” or look evasive, Abrams asked two different questions in rapid succession: “What is intelligent design?” and “Who is the intelligent designer?” As I tried to answer his first question by defining intelligent design and describing some of the evidence that supports it, he kept demanding that I admit the designer is God. He was playing the journalist on the scent of a scandal, and the scandal he wanted to reveal was my belief in God. If I “admitted” that I thought God had designed the universe, then that would invalidate my position by showing intelligent design to be “religion.” And so he peppered me with a series of questions: “Is it religion or not?” “You just can’t…It’s religion.” “Is it religion or not?” “Just admit it. It’s religion.”
Religion, Science, or What?
Perhaps more than any other objection, the accusation that intelligent design is religion or “religion masquerading as science” has closed minds to considering the evidence for the design hypothesis. This has occurred partly because the media have successfully portrayed those who advocate intelligent design as having a hidden religious agenda. But there is another, more fundamental reason that this criticism has had the effect of closing minds. Many people assume that science and religion do not interact in any significant way. They assume that scientific theories have nothing to say about religious or philosophical questions and that if they do, then they must not really be scientific.
Abrams was clearly making this assumption as he pursued his “either or” line of questioning. Judge Jones’s ruling in the Dover case also betrayed this same way of thinking. Either intelligent design is science or it is religion. Since, as both men noted, “major scientific organizations” say it isn’t science, it must be religion. Similarly, since some advocates of “intelligent design” think that life was designed by God, intelligent design must be a religious belief rather than an evidence-based scientific theory.
But does this follow? Is intelligent design religion? And, if so, does that mean that the theory of intelligent design lacks a scientific basis? And what about the beliefs and motives of advocates of intelligent design: Do they invalidate the case for intelligent design, including the case I have developed in this book? There are several reasons to think not.
Not Religion
First, by any reasonable definition of the term, intelligent design is not “religion.” When most people think of religion, they think of an institutionalized form of worship or meditation based upon a comprehensive system of beliefs about ultimate reality. Religions also typically involve various formal structures, practices, and ritualistic observances, including “formal services, ceremonial functions, the existence of clergy” and “the observance of holidays.”1
Though intelligent design, like its materialistic evolutionary counterparts, does address questions about the origin of living things and may, therefore, have implications for metaphysical questions about ultimate reality (see Chapter 2), it does not proffer a comprehensive system of belief about that reality. Intelligent design does not answer questions about the nature of God or even make claims about God’s existence. The theory of intelligent design does not promulgate a system of morality or affirm a body of doctrines about the afterlife. It doesn’t require belief in divine revelation or tell adherents how to achieve higher consciousness or how to get right with God. It simply argues that an intelligent cause of some kind played a role in the origin of life. It is a theory about the origin of biological information and other appearances of design in living systems.
Moreover, the theory of intelligent design does not involve any of the practices or have any of the institutional structures or features typically associated with religions. It does not involve worship or meditation or recommend a system of spiritual disciplines. It does not have sacred texts, ordained ministers, rabbis, or priests; there are no intelligent-design liturgies, prayer meetings, or intelligent-design holidays. Advocates of intelligent design have formed organizations and research institutes,2 but these resemble other scientific or professional associations rather than churches or religious institutions.
Despite this, some critics, such as Robert Pennock and Gerald Skoog, have gone so far as to characterize the theory of intelligent design as narrowly “sectarian.”3 Yet upon examination, this claim evaporates into nothing more than the observation that the theory of intelligent design is popular with some Christians and not others. In any case, the theory of intelligent design does not affirm sectarian doctrines. It has nothing to say about, for example, the virgin birth, the immaculate conception, predestination, infant baptism, the validity of Islamic law, salvation, original sin, or the reality of reincarnation. Moreover, the belief that a designing intelligence played a role in the origin of the living world is hardly unique to Christians or to religious persons in general. Historically, advocates of design have included not only religious theists, but nonreligious ones, pantheists, polytheistic Greeks, Roman Stoics, and deistic Enlightenment philosophers and now include modern scientists and philosophers who describe themselves as religiously agnostic.4
Theistic Implications
To deny that intelligent design is a religion is not to say, however, that the evidence for intelligent design in biology has no religious or metaphysical implications. Indeed, there is another option that Mr. Abrams and Judge Jones did not consider in their attempts to classify the theory rather than assess its merits. Theories, especially origins theories, needn’t be either scientific or religious. They might be both. Or more precisely, some scientific theories—although not themselves religions—might have philosophical or religious implications.
There are good reasons to think that intelligent design is a scientific theory of this kind. First, as I’ve already shown (see Chapters 18 and 19) there are good reasons for thinking that intelligent design is a scientific theory. Second, the theory of intelligent design addresses a major philosophical question that most religious and metaphysical systems of thought also address, namely, “What caused life and/or the universe to come into existence?” Thus, like its materialistic counterparts, the theory of intelligent design inevitably raises questions about the ultimate or prime reality, “the thing from which everything else comes” (see Chapter 2).5
Moreover, intelligent design, arguably, has specifically theistic implications because intelligent design confirms a major tenet of a theistic worldview, namely, that life was designed by a conscious and intelligent being, a purposive agent with a mind. If intelligent design is true, it follows that a designing intelligence with some of the attributes typically associated with God acted to bring the first living cells into existence. The evidence of intelligent design in biology does not prove that God exists (or that a being with all of the attributes of a transcendent God exists), since it is at least logically possible that an immanent (within the universe) intelligence rather than a transcendent intelligence might have designed life. Nevertheless, insofar as a transcendent God (as conceived by theists) does possess conscious awareness and intelligence, it possesses the causal powers necessary to produce (and explain the origin of) specified biological information. Thus, the activity of a theistic God could provide an adequate explanation of the evidence of intelligent design in biology, though other entities could conceivably do so as well. Further, insofar as the evidence for intelligent design in biology increases the explanatory power of theism (as a kind of metaphysical hypothesis), it makes theism more plausible or more likely to be true than it would have been otherwise in the absence of such evidence.
Those who believe in a transcendent God may, therefore, find support for their belief from the biological evidence that supports the theory of intelligent design. They may cite this and other evidence as a reason to identify the designing intelligence responsible for life’s origin with the God of their religious belief. Thus, it’s fair to say that intelligent design has theistic implications, or implications that are friendly to theistic belief, even though the theory is not itself a religion (or a proof of God’s existence).
Metaphysical or Religious Implications?
But if intelligent design makes belief in God more plausible or likely, doesn’t that still mean intelligent design is essentially a religious, rather than a scientific, concept of biological origins? And shouldn’t that induce some skepticism about its scientific merit?
No. On the contrary, the religious implications of intelligent design are not grounds for dismissing it. To say otherwise confuses the evidence for a theory and its possible implications. It also fails to recognize that intelligent design is not the only theory that has metaphysical or religious implications. Contrary to the popular “just the facts” stereotype of science, many scientific theories have larger ideological, metaphysical, or religious implications. Origins theories in particular have such implications since they make claims about the causes that brought life or humankind or the universe into existence.6
For example, many scientists believe that the big-bang theory, with its affirmation that the universe had a temporal beginning,7 has affirmative implications for a theistic worldview. In fact, many scientists with materialistic philosophical leanings initially rejected the big-bang theory, because they thought it challenged the idea of an eternally self-existent universe and because they thought it pointed to the need for a transcendent cause of matter, space, and time.8 Nevertheless, scientists eventually accepted the theory despite its (to some) unsavory philosophical implications. They did so because they thought the evidence strongly supported it.
Scientific theories must be evaluated on the basis of the evidence, not on the basis of philosophical preferences or concerns about implications. Antony Flew, the longtime atheistic philosopher who has come to accept the case for intelligent design, insists correctly that we must “follow the evidence wherever it leads,” regardless of its implications. Were that not the case, the metaphysical implications of other scientific theories would invalidate them—and yet they do not.
Or consider another example. Some scientists think that Darwinism and other materialistic origins theories have significant metaphysical and religious (or antireligious) implications. Because both classical Darwinism and modern neo-Darwinism deny that the appearance of design in living organisms is real, they affirm that the process that gave rise to that appearance is blind and undirected. Chemical evolutionary theorists likewise insist that the first life arose, without direction, from brute chemistry.9 Richard Dawkins has dubbed the idea that life arose as the result of an undirected process the “blind watchmaker” thesis.10 He and other leading evolutionary theorists claim that biological evidence overwhelmingly supports this purposeless and fully materialistic account of creation.11 As George Gaylord Simpson, the leading neo-Darwinist a generation ago, stated: “Man is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned.”12
In light of this, Simpson and a host of prominent Darwinian scientists—from Douglas Futuyma13 to William Provine14 to Stephen Jay Gould15 to Richard Dawkins16—have insisted that Darwinism (and the broader blind-watchmaker thesis) has made a materialistic worldview more plausible. They also argue that materialistic evolutionary theories have made traditional religious beliefs about God either untenable or less plausible. As Dawkins stated, “Darwin made it possible to become an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”17 Or as the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen J. Gould argued, Darwin formulated “an evolutionary theory based on chance variation and natural selection…a rigidly materialistic (and basically atheistic) version of evolution.” Or as Gould explained elsewhere, “Before Darwin, we thought that a benevolent God had created us,” but after Darwin, “biology took away our status as paragons created in the image of God.”18
Similarly, many major biology texts present evolution as a process in which a purposeful intelligence (such as God) plays no detectable role. As Kenneth Miller and Joseph Levine explained in the fourth edition of their popular textbook, Biology, the evolutionary process is “random and undirected” and occurs “without plan or purpose.”19 Or as W. H. Purvis, G. H. Orians, and H. C. Heller tell students in Life: The Science of Biology, “The living world is constantly evolving without any goals. Evolutionary change is not directed.”20 Other texts openly state that Darwin’s theory has profoundly negative implications for theism. As Douglas Futuyma’s biology text puts it, “By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous.”21 For this reason, many people may find support for materialistic metaphysical beliefs in Darwinian and chemical evolutionary theory. Conversely, some scientists, such as Kenneth Miller, believe that evolutionary theory reinforces their religious beliefs.22 Thus, if he is correct, the study of evolutionary theory may lead a student to “find Darwin’s God.”
Either way, chemical evolutionary theory and neo-Darwinism raise unavoidable metaphysical and religious questions. Arguably, these theories also have incorrigibly metaphysical and religious (or antireligious) implications. At the very least, many scientists think that evolutionary theory has larger metaphysical, religious (or antireligious), or worldview implications. Yet this fact has not prevented Darwinism from being regarded as a scientific theory. Nor does anyone think that the possible implications of the theory should determine its scientific merit or invalidate the evidence in its favor. Yet if the religious (or antireligious) implications of materialistic evolutionary theories do not make these theories religion or invalidate the evidence in support of them, then neither should the religious implications of the theory of intelligent design negate the evidence in its favor or make it a “religion”—with all that implies to the modern mind.
Instead, the content of a scientific theory, not its implications, should determine its merit. Scientific theories must be evaluated by the quality of the evidence and the arguments marshaled in their favor. But if that principle applies generally, and specifically, in the case of materialistic theories of evolution, then it should apply to the assessment of intelligent design as well. If it does, then the metaphysical or religious implications of intelligent design do not invalidate the evidential case in its favor.
Religious Motivations?
Just as the implications of particular theories do not determine their merit or truth, the motivations of the theorists who advance these theories do not invalidate them either. Indeed, there is an obvious distinction between what advocates of the theory of intelligent design think about the identity of the designing intelligence responsible for life and what the theory of intelligent design itself affirms. Just because some advocates of intelligent design think that God exists and acted as the designer does not mean that the theory of intelligent design affirms that belief.
Notwithstanding, there is no question that many advocates of the theory of intelligent design do have religious interests and beliefs and that some are motivated by their beliefs. I personally think that the evidence of design in biology, considered in the context of other evidence, strengthens the case for theism and, thus, my personal belief in God. Subjectively, as a Christian theist, I find this implication of intelligent design “intellectually satisfying.”
Does that negate the case for intelligent design that I have presented? Some have argued as much. For example, in the Dover trial, Barbara Forrest and Robert Pennock argued that the religious beliefs of advocates of intelligent design delegitimized the theory. But this doesn’t follow.
First, it’s not what motivates a scientist’s theory that determines its merit, status, or standing; it’s the quality of the arguments and the relevance of the evidence marshaled in support of a theory. Even if all the scientists who have advocated the theory of intelligent design were motivated by religious belief (and they are not), motives don’t matter to science. Evidence does. To say otherwise commits an elementary logical fallacy known as the genetic fallacy, in which an alleged defect in the source or origin of a claim is taken to be evidence that discredits the claim.
Here’s an example. Suppose someone argues that because Richard was raised by evil atheists, his arguments against the existence of God are wrong. The reasoning is obviously fallacious. The facts of Richard’s upbringing are irrelevant to the soundness of the arguments he makes. The arguments must be considered separately and on their own merits. Similarly, that many ID advocates have religious beliefs that may increase their openness to considering intelligent design says nothing about the truth or falsity of the theory. Instead, the theory must be assessed by its ability to explain the evidence.
In any case, scientists on both sides of the origins controversy have ideological or metaphysical or religious (or antireligious) motivations. Barbara Forrest, a leading critic of intelligent design, is a board member of the New Orleans Secular Humanist Association. Other prominent critics of intelligent design such as Eugenie Scott and Michael Shermer have signed the American Humanist Manifesto III. Richard Dawkins’s sympathies are well-known.23 Aleksandr Oparin was a committed Marxist. Kenneth Miller takes a different, though no less disinterested tack. He claims that Darwinism illuminates his religious beliefs as a Catholic.24
Do the religious or antireligious motives of leading advocates of evolutionary theory disqualify Darwinian evolution or chemical evolutionary theory from consideration as scientific theories or diminish the merit of the theories? Obviously they do not. The motivations of the proponents of a theory don’t negate the scientific status, merit, or validity of that theory. But if that general principle applies to the evaluation of materialistic evolutionary theories, then it should apply when considering the merits of intelligent design. In short, the motives of the advocates of intelligent design do not negate the claims of the theory.
It Gets Personal: Why it Matters
In public debates, I’ve often encountered critics of intelligent design who quote design advocates acknowledging their religious beliefs as a way to discredit the case for the design hypothesis. Though this happens frequently, I’m always a bit surprised that scientists and especially professional philosophers (who have presumably taught logic) would resort to such fallacious motive-mongering. Nevertheless, I suppose it’s not surprising that religious motives and worldview implications do surface in the heat of discussion. The issue of biological origins raises deeply personal and philosophical issues. As I have reflected on these issues, I’ve become convinced that my former philosophy professor, Norman Krebbs, was right. The scientific case for intelligent design is fraught with philosophical significance and poses a serious challenge to the materialistic worldview that has long dominated Western science and much of Western culture.
With the rise of materialistic evolutionary theories in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science purported to explain the origin of everything from the solar system to the cell to the longings of the human soul, all by reference to undirected physical processes. Collectively, Laplace, Darwin, Oparin, and others portrayed the universe as an eternal, self-existent, self-creating system. Skinner, Freud, and Marx applied this perspective to understanding human beings by asserting that the same impersonal forces that shaped the material cosmos also determined human behavior, thought, and history. This view of reality, derived as it was from the natural and social sciences, understandably seemed to support the comprehensive philosophy or worldview of scientific materialism.
According to scientific materialism, reality is ultimately impersonal: matter and energy determine all things and, in the end, only matter matters. “In the beginning were the particles. And the particles became complex stuff. And the complex stuff reacted with other stuff and became alive. As the living stuff evolved, it eventually became conscious and self-aware…but only for a time.” According to the materialist credo, matter and energy are the fundamental realities from which all else comes, but also the entities into which all that exists, including our minds and conscious awareness, ultimately dissolves. Mind and person-hood are merely temporary “epiphenomena,” a restless foam effervescing for a time atop a deep ocean of impersonality.
Though this view of existence proved initially liberating in that it released humans from any sense of obligation to an externally imposed system of morality, it has also proven profoundly and literally dispiriting. If the conscious realities that comprise our personhood have no lasting existence, if life and mind are nothing more than unintended ephemera of the material cosmos, then, as the existential philosophers have recognized, our lives can have no lasting meaning or ultimate purpose. Without a purpose-driven universe, there can be no “purpose-driven life.”
The British analytical philosopher Bertrand Russell understood the connection between the denial of design (or what he called “prevision”) and humankind’s existential predicament. As he explained in 1918:
That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.25
As a teenager in the mid-1970s, I sensed this absence of meaning in modern life. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was that I had been acutely aware of the distress of the generation coming of age just ahead of me. Perhaps it was that my family had left the church. Perhaps it was because the questions that I kept asking did not seem to have any obvious answers. “What’s it going to matter in a hundred years?” And by “it,” I meant anything. What heroism, thought or feeling, labor, inspiration, genius, or achievement will last, if impersonal particles are all that ultimately endure?
Though the theory of intelligent design does not identify the agent responsible for the information—the signature—in the cell, it does affirm that the ultimate cause of life is personal. By personal I mean a self-conscious, deliberative mind in possession of thoughts, will, and intentions. Only persons have such minds and only minds of this kind can create complex specified information. If we know anything we certainly know this. Thus, while the theory of intelligent design does not prove the existence of God or answer all of our existential questions, it does reestablish the conditions of a meaningful “search for meaning.” The case for intelligent design challenges the premise of the materialist credo and holds out the possibility of reversing the philosophy of despair that flows from it. Life is the product of mind; it was intended, purposed, “previsioned.” Hence, there may be a reality behind matter that is worth investigating.
These implications of the theory are not, logically speaking, reasons to affirm or reject it. But they are reasons—very personal and human reasons—for considering its claims carefully and for resisting attempts to define the possibility of agency out of bounds. Is intelligent design science? Is it religion? Perhaps these are not the right questions. How about, “Is there evidence for intelligent design?” “Is the theory of intelligent design true?” And, if so, “What does it imply?”
Indeed, for me, far from wanting to avoid the philosophical or theological questions that naturally arise from a consideration of the evidence for intelligent design, these questions have done much to sustain my long interest in the scientific controversy surrounding the origin of life. And why not? If there is evidence of design or purpose behind life, then surely that does raise deeper philosophical questions. Who is the designer, indeed? Can the mind that evidently lies behind life’s digital code be known? Can we as persons know something of the agent responsible for the intricacies of life? Is there a meaning to existence after all? I have asked these questions for many years. What excites me about the theory of intelligent design and the compelling evidence now on display in its favor is not that the theory answers these questions, but instead that it provides a reason for thinking that they are once again worth asking.
Conclusion
For one hundred and fifty years many scientists have insisted that “chance and necessity”—happenstance and law—jointly suffice to explain the origin of life on earth. We now find, however, that orthodox evolutionary thinking—with its reliance upon these twin pillars of materialistic thought—has failed to explain the origin of the central feature of living things: information.
Even so, many scientists insist that to consider another possibility would constitute a departure from science, from reason itself. Yet ordinary reason and much scientific reasoning that passes under the scrutiny of materialist sanction not only recognize, but require us to recognize the causal activity of intelligent agents. The sculptures of Michelangelo, the software of the Microsoft Corporation, the inscribed steles of Assyrian kings—each bespeaks prior mental activity rather than merely impersonal processes. Indeed, everywhere in our high-tech environment we observe complex events, artifacts, and systems that impel our minds to recognize the activity of other minds: minds that communicate, plan, and design. But to detect the presence of mind, to detect the activity of intelligence in the echo of its effects, requires a mode of reasoning—indeed, a form of knowledge—that science, or at least official biology, has long excluded. If living things—things that we manifestly did not design ourselves—bear the hallmarks of design, if they exhibit a signature that would lead us to recognize intelligent activity in any other realm of experience, then perhaps it is time to rehabilitate this lost way of knowing and to rekindle our wonder in the intelligibility and design of nature that first inspired the scientific revolution.