Selected Minor Works: The Heresy of Intelligent Design

Justin E. H. Smith

I would like to explain why, in the matter of the origins of species, there can be no compromise position, no accommodation by one side of the principle tenets of the other.  There can be no way of conceding the basic mechanisms through which evolution works while holding onto an anthropocentric view of the cosmos or a conception of human beings as unique among creatures in their likeness to the creator.  It is time, in short, for evolutionists to be clear: you are either with us, or you are against us.

Last year, Christoph Schönborn, an Austrian cardinal with close ties to “Benedict," brought the Catholic church a step backwards by calling into question the earlier moderate view on evolution put forth by John Paul II.  In an op-ed piece in The New York Times, Schönborn downplayed a 1996 letter in which the former Pope described evolution as “more than a hypothesis.”  The cardinal held forth with the view that “[e]volution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense --an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection-- is not.”

The cardinal is not, evidently, denying that random variation and natural selection are the basic mechanisms of evolution.  He is only denying that these proceed without guidance and planning.  For the cardinal, every transformation in animal species prior to the emergence of homo sapiens must have been rigged in such a way as to guarantee this eventual outcome, since human beings, in traditional Christian theology, are the very reason God bothered creating all that cosmic dust and hydrogen and mud, all those supernovae and humble worms, in the first place.  It is all for us.  Things could not have unfolded in any other way.

This account of evolution has become quite common over the past years among conservatives trying to take a moderate stance in the debate.  They argue that there is nothing impious about the view that God may have worked through evolution in order to arrive at his crowning achievement, homo sapiens.  Thus George Will, in a recent article on the woes of the House Republicans, begins with a telling comparison: “Before evolution produced creatures of our perfection,” he writes, “there was a 3-ton dinosaur, the stegosaurus, so neurologically sluggish that when its tail was injured, significant time elapsed before news of the trauma meandered up its long spine to its walnut-size brain" (“How to Evict the ‘Rent-Seekers’," January 11, 2006).  The implication is that God worked through such earlier rough drafts until he arrived at his final goal, namely, us (overlooking the obvious fact that there still are plenty of neurologically sluggish species lumbering around, and that in the Jurassic there were plenty of species that did not suffer from this shortcoming).  The Christians can hold onto their anthropocentric cosmology, while nonetheless taking good scientific evidence about shared ancestry into account.  It's the best of both worlds!

But is such a compromise tenable?  Let us review some of the basics of the Darwinian account of how exactly “higher forms” (this is Darwin’s own misleading language) are thought to arise from lower ones.

The supreme virtue of an organism, in an evolutionary sense, is fitness to its environment, and fitness does not admit of non-relative degrees.  Thus, when it comes to getting one’s oxygen supply underwater, a fish is fitter than I, and thus, I suppose, better.  To the extent that we can talk about “better” and “worse”, we must make clear what sort of environmental circumstances we have in mind before we can say whether an organism is better or worse able to live in them.  Beyond this, it makes no sense to speak of an organism’s place in some non-relative, hierarchical chain of being.  The image of the chain is a vestige of a world-view that is hopelessly at odds with the theory of evolution.  (One thing its latter-day supporters frequently leave out is that, traditionally, human beings were not the highest placed on the catena rerum.  This spot was reserved for the angels--purely spiritual beings with nothing of the animal in them.)

But even with this circumscribed conception of betterness as fitness, could we not still go along with Schönborn and say that human beings are still God’s best work, moving from the comparative to the superlative on the grounds that, say, human beings are well-adapted not just to some tiny ecosystem, but to the entire globe, and eventually, perhaps, to outer space as well; or on the grounds that they cannot just live in any ecosystem, but can also dominate all of them, and all their inhabitants, by use of reason?  And is it not in virtue of the possession of reason that we are justified in speaking of human beings as the image of God?

The problem here is that, as Schönborn worries, the mechanism of adaptation that ensures the greater fitness of some organisms in some particular environment --whether this fitness involves the evolution of gills, bipedalism, or language-- is one that can be better understood in terms of randomness than in terms of intelligent guidance.  In any population, there are variable traits.  Some organisms have them, some don't, and the reasons for this variation are random mutations at the genetic level.  If Schönborn wants to deny this, he will also have to deny a whole host of elementary facts about genetics that he probably never even noticed were offensive-- facts that have nothing to do directly with evolution, and facts the knowledge of which he probably benefits from on a regular basis in his reliance on modern medicine.

Some of the traits will prove more useful in response to certain environmental features, and the subset of individuals in a population that have these traits will be more likely to survive to  reproductive age and pass them on.  If God is working through evolution, then, as Schönborn and Will believe, he will have to be actively rigging not just all genetic mutations, but also all of the environmental changes to which the organisms, in which these genetic mutations occur, prove to be well or poorly equipped to respond.

Let us consider an example, one that is very close to home for us human beings.  Paleoanthropologists suggest that a significant moment in our becoming human arrived when our ancestors transitioned from arboreal swinging as their primary form of locomotion to bipedalism  This new and handsome way of getting about is thought to have brought in its wake a number of other adaptive consequences, including, some speculate, the evolution of a vastly larger cranium than those of our ancestors.  This, in turn, is what ultimately facilitated the performance of complicated mental feats, including those we today think of as “rational”.

But why did our ancestors go peripatetic in the first place?  Unfortunately, this change cannot be accounted for in terms of any innate desire for self-improvement among hominids, nor can it plausibly be explained in terms of God’s plan for their kind.  The full story of the evolution of bipedalism will also have to take into account the way in which meteorological and geological events changed parts of the landscape of Africa from rain forest into savannah, and forced the hominids in those parts, at pain of extinction, to start moving about in new ways.  If you wish to assert that evolution is a guided process, you must not think only of God pushing his creatures to go down one path rather than another, you must also take into account God's micromanagement of every single event in the physical world so as to ensure particular outcomes in the biological world.  The passing of meteors, landslides, volcanic eruptions in the Mid-Atlantic range, the dissolution of a cumulonimbus here and the emergence of a cumulus there, the decay of this atom as opposed to that one, all of this must be meticulously set up for the sake of desired results among one tiny subset of natural phenomena.

Indeed, what we end up with is a sort of neo-occasionalism, the view that the only true cause of any event in the universe is God, that there can be no talk of causality except in reference to the ultimate cause of everything.  In the 17th century, Gottfried Leibniz derided this view, held by his contemporary Nicolas Malebranche, as recourse to “perpetual miracle."  Leibniz, like many fellow Christian thinkers of his era, understood that implicating God in the nuts-and-bolts of the universe's daily maintenance is to assign to God a task that is beneath his dignity, and thus to lapse into impiety.  If miracles like the incarnation or the resurrection are going to count for anything, Leibniz saw, then they are going to have to be set apart from the ordinary flow of nature.  This is what occasionalism would preclude.  How much more Christian it would be to account for natural phenomena not by perpetual miracle or by divine micromanagement, but by appeal to a few simple and regular laws.

One can easily see why intelligent design cannot work as a compromise position.  Prima facie, it is much more plausible to suppose that, had God made the universe with human beings in mind as his ultimate goal, he would not have bothered coming up with such a meandering mechanism, and one that would require so much upkeep.  He would have seen rather to the simultaneous, instantaneous, once-and-for-all creation of all species in their present form, and would have shaved several billion years of build-up off the history of the universe, setting things into motion around, say, 5,000 BC, rather than circa 15,000,000,000 BC.  In other words, God would probably have done things more or less as Genesis would have us believe.  The creationist's attempt to compromise with science, whether for honest or disingenuous reasons, by taking the middle road of “guided” or “managed” descent from lower forms, cannot fail to lapse into nonsense.  I would certainly prefer to debate a scriptural literalist who sticks to his guns, who only recognizes one source of truth, and is clear about what this is.

What Schönborn is worried about is not so much the proposition that human beings are the kin of “lesser” animals (elsewhere I have argued that it is precisely this worry that guides many creationists).  In line with traditional Christian theology --as opposed to the aberrant theology of many fundamentalist protestant sects-- the cardinal recognizes that the proper understanding of a human being is as a creature that shares part of its nature, though not all, with the animal kingdom.  Rather, Schönborn is concerned that the best scientific theory of how we got here disconnects us from any divine purpose, leaves us to fend for ourselves metaphysically.  This is a worry that is not limited to the debate about human origins.  Indeed it is one that many were expressing long before the descent of man from lower forms became an issue.

While many early modern thinkers agreed with Leibniz that excusing God from the task of micromanaging the affairs of nature is the best way to exalt him, there were just as many who feared that, with diminished responsibilities, God runs the risk of becoming irrelevant.  Some early modern vitalists, such as Ralph Cudworth, the author of a 1686 treatise not-so-humbly entitled The True Intellectual System of the Universe, thought he had the perfect compromise solution: God dispatches a certain “plastick nature” that intelligently guides the unfolding of natural processes in the material world while allowing him to retreat and, I suppose, contemplate his own divine excellence, while this subordinate force “doth drudgingly execute” those tasks that are beneath God's station.  What terrified Cudworth was the thought that the things of this world might be accounted for, to use Cicero’s compelling phrase, simply as “a fortunate clash of atoms,” yet he understood that the answer is not to make God himself take care of all the “operose, sollicitous, and distractious” affairs of this lowly world.  But this position prompted others to accuse Cudworth of reintroducing the pagan doctrine of the world soul. 

One might easily get the sense that, when it comes to characterizing God’s involvement with the world, you just can’t win.  There will always be reasons for denouncing any position as impious.  If I can hope to contribute anything to the unfortunate debate about intelligent design that has developed over the past few years, it is that ID theory is just as suitable a candidate for denunciation on the grounds of heresy as any other account of what God is up to.  The standard criticism of ID is that it is bad science.  I would like to propose that it is bad theology as well. 

But fortunately none of this has anything to do with the prospects of evolutionary biology.  Today we have at our disposal biochemistry, genetics, and numerous other promising fields of inquiry that are in a position to explain how atoms, in accord with a few simple laws, really can produce human beings.  And at just this promising moment, creationists want to throw in the towel in view of the “irreducible complexity” of it all.  This phrase had some resonance 300 years ago-- vitalists had good reason to think that billiard-ball-style mechanical physics was inadequate to account for all the phenomena of nature.  Now, however, it is nothing more than the proclamation of a preference for ignorance.

Unlike Richard Dawkins and his bright friends, I find people who put too much faith in science obtuse, and I do not think my own life would be easily bearable if I were to abandon all hope for a perfect, eternal order beyond this shoddy, decaying one.  But let us keep our activities straight.  Let us not do interpretive dance in our trigonometry classes, and for God’s sake let us not complicate the teaching of a perfectly autonomous and rigorous science with the problem of finding meaning and purpose in the universe.

Comments

[Virge]

Justin,
I was with you right up to the first sentence of the last paragraph where you mentioned a "hope for a perfect eternal order beyond" etc.

I wonder if you'd share your thoughts on how you think of yourself, your consciousness, or whatever you think may go on beyond your physical death. Do you postulate that some subset of your memories are non-physically stored? Would a "consciousness" stripped of your life's memories have any context within which to appreciate some perfect spiritual existence? Would you still be you, or some newly rebooted mind, tabula rasa, devoid of the human culture in which you were nurtured? What is it, apart from traditional religious teaching, that gives you hope of any continuing consciousness?

(If there is any possibility of an afterlife, I want to upload my memories from wetware to spiritware before old age takes its toll on the physical interconnections in my brain.)

[Abbas Raza]

Absolutely brilliant, Justin. This is your most substantive piece for 3QD yet, and they keep getting better! Thanks. (And we are still waiting for the diatribe about Canada!) You have some gems of phrases in here, like, "interpretive dance in our trigonometry classes". Great stuff!

[Justin]

Personal to Virge: You will note that I said I hope for an eternal, perfect order beyond this shabby, decaying one. I did not say I hope to move into this order promptly upon death and hang around there for a temporal duration of infinite length. The prospect seems unlikely, probably incoherent, and certainly boring. Thoughtful Christians, unlike superstitious ones, believe not in a white, glowing place where time continues to elapse as before, with the difference that we are now relieved of our earthly bodies (and thus, on the materialist view, of the very thing that ensured the continuity of our identities) and instead float about like mist forever and ever. What thoughtful Christians believe in is the promise of eternal life. If you look up "eternal" in a reliable dictionary, you will find that this has nothing to do with infinite duration; in fact, it means something very nearly the opposite of this. To be eternal is not to be subject to the succession of moments at all. You may want to deny that talk of eternity makes any sense, but this is a very different problem than whether the soul can continue existing after death in the absence of a material host.

[Virge]

Thanks Justin.
The reliable dictionaries that I've used (Merriam-Webster and Oxford English) use "having infinite duration", "lasting or existing forever" as their main definitions, and each of these implicitly assumes the existence and perception of the passing of time. Merriam-Webster includes "characterized by abiding fellowship with God" as another definition, but the word "abiding" implies a temporal experience in all of its definitions. Looking further I see that American Heritage prefers a definition that may be stretched to seem more in line with what you were meaning, i.e. "Being without beginning or end; existing outside of time."

Since you seem to identify yourself as a thoughtful Christian, I looked again to the uses of "eternal" in the Bible, and I note that the biblical uses of "eternal" have everything to do with infinite duration. "Eternal" and "everlasting" are treated as synonyms. (e.g. Mat 25:46 - aionios. The OT Hebrew words translated to "eternal" also depend on the passage of time.)

With the benefit of your clarification, I now see that you've redefined the hoped-for "eternal, perfect order" in terms so alien to ordinary existence that it does indeed become impossible to contemplate, much less contradict. We lack a common language for you to convey your meaning.

You speak clearly and rationally on evolution, but then pin your hopes on dualism. When the Intelligent Design PR battle subsides and the religious community wakes up and finds itself in direct conflict with the science of mind, where will you stand? (e.g. see Neuroscience gears up for duel on the issue of brain versus deity.)

[Justin]

I used a suggestive "we" where I should have said "they", and this gave you the mistaken impression that I think of myself as a "thoughtful Christian". But that's not important, what I was hoping to do was to come to the defense of believers in an eternal order against obtuse scientistic types who want to show why there could not possibly be one.  It turns out my point about the meaning of "eternal" in reliable dictionaries fell flat, since, as you have demonstrated, there are simply no reliable dictionaries around.  But just look at the composition of the word: "e-" is a contraction of "ex-", that is, "out of", while "ternal" is a synonym of "temporal", thus giving us: "outside of time".  It may be we would have to leave our Random Houses and go back to early modern philosophical lexica in order to see this sense preserved, but I would be willing to do that.  Geometry is eternal, in the early modern sense, since, e.g., in order for the internal angles of a triangle to equal two right angles, you do not need first to throw some triangle together that will then bring about a new relationship with pairs of right angles.  This relation of equality exists outside of time.  Of course if you are a thoroughgoing empiricist you will think that geometrical knowledge develops through abstraction from repeated perceptions of physical objects in the real world, and that knowledge of what triangles are like is only in your head, rather than from some perfect geometrical realm.  And if you are a materialist empiricist you will say that what it is to be "in your head" is to be supported by neurons.  Fine.  The reason why scientistic types are obtuse is that they fail to see that quite often the explanation of a phenomenon by appeal to the underlying mechanics of it is not really the most interesting one, nor, I will risk saying, the truest.  I have no doubt that if you look for the neurophysiogical structure that would explain religious or poetic sentiments, you will find it.  That's not what interests me when I speak of a hope for an eternal, perfect order.  I would simply like to reserve a spot for Rilke, who speaks of God going through "the pages of the dark book of the Beginning," next to all the tiresome Stephen Hawkings and Brian Greenes of our world among those authorized to hold forth on what the world is and how it got here. I suspect that a few thousand years from now, Rilke's account will still have some punch to it, while Hawking's and Greene's will be quite superseded. By insisting on thinking of religious sentiment as belief in the factual truth of the proposition that personal identity persists in spiritual form forever and ever after the death of the physical body thanks to the fact that the soul and the body are two distinct things and the self is to be identified with the former, you are setting up a straw-man.  And he looks ridiculous indeed, but he's not me.

Next time, readers, I'll have some more Canada-bashing for you.

[Julia]

If you got some of these obtuse scientists to talk on the subject in a private setting, you might find far more common ground. Following on the heels of all too often under-trained teachers who have studied nothing but education and have been given first crack at educating fresh minds, they are tasked with teaching the theory of evolution, not the debate surrounding it, or at least we should hope that that is the task they are attempting to complete. As long as intelligent design continues to maraud science education, those scientists cannot show faith in anything other than the facts that they teach lest the door be pried open a bit wider and another day of science education be lost to the nonsense of ID. If you ask them about an eternal, perfect order while the topic of evolution, the big bang, etc. is also on the table, they may dismiss the question and say that they wish to only discuss that which has empirical proof. That does not mean that all are like Richard Dawkins nor that they are not hopeful in the same way that you are, just that they can no longer tolerate mixing their fact-based work with that which must continue to be speculative.

Now, if you will excuse me, I must go down the hall and teach plate tectonics in a room that has not been remodeled since the days that it held debates on whether or not continents have moved. Luckily, that is one debate that we have been able to put behind us.

[Abbas Raza]

Very good point, Julia.

[Virge]

We'll have to disagree on a number of items here, Justin

I do not agree that the available dictionaries are unreliable. They represent a common understanding of the words that we use in the ways that we use them. Meanings change with time, and if you try to communicate with your peers using your own interpretation of words (based on your own artificial etymological anayses--see eternal), then you should expect to generate misunderstandings. In the use of language, there are no timeless absolutes. Culture is a majority decision.

Your suspicions concerning a thousand years from now seem to be based on the idea that scientific understandings, ever being replaced by better models, are somehow of lesser value because they've been "superseded". Your choice of words obscures the fact that the ideas generated by pioneers of science are, in most cases, built upon, not superseded. Even those who fill in a small piece of a puzzle have produced a thing of lasting value. You'll concede the value of Darwin's work, but your crystal ball won't allow you to see what will be built upon the work of today's scientists. Since you regard them as obtuse and tiresome, and since your apparent Platonism looks down on people who work by physical observation and experiment, I don't expect our crystal balls will ever show compatible images.

[Justin]

To Virge: You are 100% right that my off-the-cuff etymology of "eternal" is false. A moment's reflection should have told me as much. Since the Latin is "aeternalis", the "e-" cannot be a contraction of "ex-". I stand by my contention however that the more deeply rooted meaning of "eternal" in the history of Western thought is the one given as primary in my Petit Robert: "Qui est hors du temps." I suspect that this meaning naturally lapses into the idea of infinite duration, since this is, as Spinoza would say, more pleasing to the imagination.

To Julia: I am all for keeping cosmogonical and metaphysical speculation out of science education. Hence my insistence on "keeping our activities straight". ID is a cross-culturally recurrent expression of the folk-belief in supernatural reification of species (Scott Atran's masterful phrase), and this recurrence is of tremendous interest to anthropology. Atran even suggests that reified species taxonomies are part of the innate framework of all human cognition, that there is "universal taxonomy" subsequently filled in by the available species in the folk environment in the same way that there is a universal grammar subsequently filled in by some natural language or other. This would mean that the very reason why creationism is so hard to stamp out is that the brain has evolved in such a way that it can't but perceive animal species as reified!

I explicitly complained about the obtuseness of "scientistic" as opposed to "scientific" types, the latter being competent investigators of the workings of nature, who may or may not believe in a divine plan, etc., the former being those who see empirical science as the absolute and exclusive source of truth.

I did not expect so much reaction to the concluding paragraph of the essay, in any case. The paragraphs leading up to it will, I hope, make it clear to anyone willing to re-read them whose side, exactly, I am on.

[Abbas Raza]

Wow. Congratulations, Virge! You have made Justin, one of the smartest people I know, give in. Good on ya', mate!

[Luke]

I don’t know the worth of picking off Science against God. It is a futile argument.

The question that having God, as the ultimate answer to everything, is that God gives the Universe meaning. God answers our question, that we have all ask one another or ourselves at one stage. Why are we here?

Evolution, or any science, only tells us how we came to be here, or how things work. Or how anything works for that matter. It doesn’t quench our thrust for meaning, or living. Science is incapable of answering that question, and will never be a substitute for God.

Your argument misses the point.