Mark Vernon at the <em>Guardian</em>: What’s wrong with intelligent design?

You’re probably familiar with this contretemps, recently described last Friday in the New York Times.  The philosophy journal Synthese published an issue on “Evolution and its rivals,” which, among other pieces, contained an article by philosopher Barbara Forrest criticizing the work of another philosopher, Francis Beckwith.  Forrest rightly called out Beckwith for his sympathies with intelligent design (ID) and his lack of qualifications to pronounce on legal issues.

When the journal came out in print, its editors published a disclaimer, aimed implicitly at Forrest, saying that “some of the papers in this issue employ a tone that may make it hard to distinguish between dispassionate intellectual discussion of other views and disqualification of a targeted author or group.” That, of course, represents the journal caving into to ID sympathizers.

Who were they?  The Times reports that they include Notre Dame theologian Alvin Plantinga, Calvin College philosophy professor Kelly James Clark, and Beckwith himself.  Forrest also suspects prominent IDer William Dembski, who denies (using weasel words) any knowledge of a “campaign.” In the meantime, Glenn Branch of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), a co-editor of the special issue, has complained bitterly about the journal’s disclaimer.

Well, people have a right to complain, but academic journals, when publishing pieces, shouldn’t then publish disclaimers criticizing the “tone” of those pieces.  It’s undermining their own mission and their own authors.

Over at the “Comment is free” section of the Guardian, ex-Anglican priest Mark “Holy Rabbit” Vernon, inspired by the Synthese controversy, does his own tone-trolling in a piece called “Too much heat, not enough light in the creationism war.”

But American ID battles are powerful catalysts of this near hysterical tone too. Do academics – not least analytical philosophers, who stand or fall on their cool – want to be so readily swept up by it too? Is it not the case that those who stand to gain the most from such rows are not philosophers and scientists, but polemicists who seek to politicise evolution?

Arguably, not just the tone but the content of discussion risks distortion too. Staying with the Synthese row, one element in it concerned whether or not the laws of nature preclude the possibility of miracles. It’s a reasonable question, raising interesting issues about the nature of laws of nature and miracles alike. But against the backdrop of ID, philosophers start citing David Hume as if his treatises were infallible scripture, and start accusing their peers of virtual heresy for allowing even the possibility of a defence of miracles.

I have no desire to defend either Hume or miracles. But is this not tantamount to declaring certain subjects off-limits? Again, it’s the biblicists who stand to win the most. “A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies,” observed Oscar Wilde. You will come to resemble them. For evidence of that, observe the culture wars of the present day.

First of all, Hume did not declare miracles “off-limits”.  As most of us know, Hume said that, to establish a miracle, the evidence in its favor would have to be stronger than the likelihood that those attesting to the miracle were either wrong or duplicitous:

‘That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish….’ When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.

Clearly, Vernon doesn’t understand why the subject of ID brings so much “heat”, nor why those recalcitrant scientists declare miracles “off limits.”

First, not all of us declare miracles “off limits”.  Although some people, including NCSE director Eugenie Scott and Dr.³ Massimo Pigliucci, say that science simply cannot investigate miracles or the supernatural, others—including myself—disagree.  If theism predicts that God interacts with the world in certain ways, then those ways can be tested.  I once argued with Scott that if, say, native Americans perform certain rituals intended to bring rain, one could in principle do a scientific test of whether those rituals actually have the desired effect.  Ditto with the efficacy of prayer.  Now maybe those “miracles” could eventually be shown to have non-goddy causes, but if we rule out duplicity or error along the lines of Hume, I think we could provisionally accept some results as evidence for the supernatural.

But the main reason why scientists like myself reject intelligent design is not because we’re a priori determined to reject the supernatural. It’s because the idea of the supernatural has never been necessary to explain anything in science.  We have not yet found any phenomenon in which the likelihood of God’s intervention is a more reasonable interpretation than our simple ignorance of a naturalistic cause.  Michael Behe, for instance, famously declared that because he could not see any way that the blood-clotting system could have evolved by gradual, stepwise evolution, the existence of that system testified to an Intelligent Designer.  But subsequent analysis showed that Behe was wrong: there were possible evolutionary precursors to this system, and clotting systems missing some parts were nevertheless still functional (see Kenneth Miller’s argument here).

The problem with ID, then, is that it is, as someone once called it, a “science stopper.”  It’s based solely on a failure of imagination—and scientific understanding—that is then written off as evidence for God.  It’s a biochemical god-of-the-gaps gambit.  And this tactic precludes any further scientific work, the kind of work that eventually showed that blood clotting could indeed have evolved in a Darwinian way.  Since there has been no previous evidence for supernatural intervention in either science or the rest of the world, it is more reasonable for scientists to consider a puzzling phenomenon as reflecting our lack of understanding than as evidence for God.

In a critique of intelligent design I wrote for The New Republic, I said this about Behe’s resort to the supernatural:

In view of our progress in understanding biochemical evolution, it is simply irrational to say that because we do not completely understand how biochemical pathways evolved, we should give up trying and invoke the intelligent designer. If the history of science shows us anything, it is that we get nowhere by labeling our ignorance “God.”

Until Mark Vernon understands how biology works, he should stick to his mushbrained apophatic theology.  Need I add that Vernon was a Templeton-Cambridge Journalism fellow (in 2008)?

h/t: Sigmund