1] Let me do something rather unorthodox and admit at the front that I am both a practicing Christian and an evolutionist who believes that Intelligent Design theory (hereafter ID) is false and unpromising, both theologically and scientifically. After reading this volume, I am even more solidified in that conviction. This result, it is important to note, is not because the book is biased in any way. On the contrary, the authors are allowed to speak for themselves, as Stewart notes in his introductory chapter, and the reader is allowed to see first hand the diversity of opinion on ID.
[2] The book originated from the second Greer-Heard Point-Counterpoint Forum in Faith and Culture, hosted by New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, which took place February 3-4, 2006. The topic at hand was ID, and several of the volume’s contributors were in attendance, both supporters and detractors, including Dembski and Ruse.
[3] Overall the book is a very helpful introduction to ID, but especially to the various issues surrounding it. The essays focus on the scientific, theological, philosophical, legal, and educational aspects of ID, and in each of these areas there are both affirmative and critical positions presented. Historical background also plays a minor role, but if one is primarily interested in that, a detailed history of the movement has yet to be published to my knowledge. Since I do not claim proficiency in all of these fields, I will limit my comments to those essays which address areas with which I am more familiar, specifically theology, philosophy, and, to a lesser extent, biology.
[4] Stewart’s introduction is an informative and brief survey of ID and its major players (Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, and Dembski), including their particular arguments. It is also the closest the book comes to a neutral position, although Stewart admits that he would like to see ID proved true. He also makes an important and, I believe, accurate claim: “At the end of the day, the crucial issue seems to be one of philosophy of science. Is methodological naturalism always the appropriate stance for a scientist to take? ID proponents say no while their critics say yes [11].” Based on the other readings in the volume and my own research I agree that this really is the fundamental question, and that the options are clear.
[5] Before we proceed some definitions are in order. According to Dembski, intelligent design is “the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as the result of intelligence [20].” Methodological naturalism, then, is the philosophical position that science must proceed by appealing only to natural processes. To be simple, it means doing science as if God does not intervene. William Lane Craig is correct, then, to point out in his essay that this methodology precludes intelligence as a causal explanation of biological diversity because it would be considered non-natural or supernatural. He is also correct that evolution does not mandate methodological naturalism. He and his colleagues fail to see, however, that this methodology is actually quite helpful to both scientists and theologians, and that it should actually be embraced instead of abandoned.
[6] Without methodological naturalism in science, I do not think we can avoid the infamous “god-of-the-gaps” philosophy. Simply put, this is defined as the view which inserts God as an explanatory hypothesis wherever there are gaps in our scientific knowledge, and, ironically, it has actually nurtured the rise of secularism in Western culture, not opposed it. The problem is that if we posit God whenever we are unsure about science, we get rid of God as soon as our scientific knowledge advances enough to fill in what we did not know before. This has proven to be disastrous in the history of theology because we are learning more and more about the world all the time through scientific means. If we support an ideology, such as ID, which opposes God and nature, eventually we will have no need or room for God, save perhaps on a psychological level.
[7] It is also bad science because God is not something empirically observable. If we continue this kind of thinking, not only are we left with the task of trying to discern which parts of creation owe to God’s agency and which to nature’s agency—something which John Polkinghorne in his essay contends is impossible anyway—but we must also ask about which God we have in mind. Ruse is quite correct to put this at the forefront of his critique of ID because he recognizes that if one posits a designer there is then the need “to say something about the nature of that designer [35],” a question which ID backers avoid because they want to preserve the notion that what they are doing is science and not theology.
[8] This is a necessary issue to discuss because there is no such thing as a generic god, however much traditional theists want to claim there is. The god presented in contemporary Christian analytic philosophy and ID is a particular deity, not a neutral one to which we can later attach “Christian” or “Muslim” or “Jewish” or anything else as identifiers. In the history of world religions this is a rather unique view, and in contemporary social sciences it is quickly falling out of favor in exchange for an approach which acknowledges the particularity of social location, including with regard to theological construction.
[9] It is also important to note that most Christian theologians worldwide do not hold to the view of God which ID promotes. Although there is some diversity of belief within the ID community, they share the dominant theology of Evangelical Protestantism, which J. P. Moreland helpfully summarizes (and assumes) in his chapter. I do not have the space to evaluate that view here, but I highly recommend F. LeRon Shults’ Reforming the Doctrine of God on this topic. Several Lutheran theologians as well have criticized early modern theism and presented more Biblical and Trinitarian alternatives (Wolfhart Pannenberg, Robert W. Jenson, Ted Peters, to name a few).
[10] For our immediate purposes here we can attend to the issue of God and biological nature, which is part of the larger question of how God relates to the created world. It is a consistent theme throughout the ID literature, including the pro-ID essays in this volume, that God’s agency is opposed to creation’s agency. Hence we are left with a choice between “some form of external supernatural engagement or…some internal chance process operative from within [Hal Ostrander, 142];” between “intelligent agency [or] unguided matter [Francis Beckwith, 93].”
[11] But why such a dualistic alternative? It is due primarily to the substance ontology which undergirds ID proponents’ theological ideas, including ideas of divine action. If God is an immaterial substance and the world is a material substance, they must find some way of relating which preserves the integrity of each of the individual substances involved. The notion of an immaterial substance interacting with a material substance was found to be problematic already by Descartes, whose only way of explaining the interaction of mind (immaterial substance) and body (material substance) was by way of the tiny pineal gland. Philosophically, however, the problem is not solved simply by recourse to a really small thing, because it is still a material substance, within that ontological system.
[12] Hence ID, in an attempt to retain the sovereignty of God in the God-world relationship, is left with a view of divine action which is interventionist, as Nancey Murphy describes in her chapter. This is commonly recognized by critics of ID, but it is in no way an unfair assessment. Craig himself asserts that it is an open question in ID “exactly when or how the designer injected design into the cosmos [63].” Yet we are still left with the question of how or by what mechanism God intervenes or inserts his immaterial will into nature. This is precisely why Dembski and his allies cannot explain how design was implemented (see page 19). Unbeknownst to him, this is not a scientific question awaiting further discovery, but a logical impossibility when substance metaphysics is presupposed.
[13] Murphy’s alternative is “non-interventionist special divine action [162],” or a position known as QDA (quantum divine action) in which God acts in the world at the indeterminate quantum level in such a way “that does not override the intrinsic behavior of the various creatures he has made [163].” This is a popular view among theistic evolutionists, including Robert John Russell and Phil Clayton. The distinction from ID is that by referring divine action to the quantum level it preserves the integrity of the created order as discernible by science, including evolution.
[14] The problem with QDA, however, is that it still presupposes that God and the world are two different substances which must interact in some way. It could potentially lead to a god-of-the-gaps situation as well if the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle—a theory according to which nature at the subatomic level is inherently unpredictable and upon which QDA is largely based—is shown to be false. While I really do think it is true, we must be careful not to hitch our theological wagons to it in the way that Murphy posits because of the constantly developing nature of science.
[15] It may have been for this reason that Paul Tillich wisely warned against basing theological views on scientific theories. This, however, goes both ways. Several of the contributors correctly point out that science has no authority to make religious claims of any kind. It simply is not a question approachable by their methodology. Hence Alister McGrath in his essay rightly calls Richard Dawkins to task for the latter’s notorious claim that the “God hypothesis” is a scientific question. Unfortunately, many ID supporters play Dawkins’ game by agreeing with him and thus scrambling to find evidence which points to God in nature. This is, realistically, the entire enterprise of ID, but Dawkins is no slouch of a scientist, which is why if we assume that God is who Dawkins says God has to be, we are in trouble.
[16] If, however, we let science be science and hence entirely neutral on the matter of faith, we can be open to a much more illuminative and beneficial understanding of God’s loving embrace of the world. Contrary to the dualistic alternative that ID and Dawkins present, truly preserving the integrity of both God and creature means viewing the world and everything in it as the work of God precisely as scientifically described. Hence Polkinghorne is closer to the mark when he says that “to see the universe as creation is to discern intelligent design built into its physical fabric [172],” not as something periodically imposed on the world from without, as ID proposes. John C. Lennox and Pannenberg share similar views in their essays.
[17] Yet what I find even more troubling than the problematic theological and philosophical assumptions, and even all of the pro-ID books being published which are geared only for those who already agree with it, is the endeavor to get ID a place in public science education alongside or even superior to evolution. (That it be discussed in a philosophy or religion class I have no issue with, as Ruse himself affirms (42).) I am not qualified to comment on the legality or constitutionality of the recent court decisions to keep ID out of science classes. The anti-ID chapter by Wesley Elsberry and Nicholas Matzke and the pro-ID chapter by Beckwith discuss those issues quite informatively.
[18] Elsberry and Matzke also point out, though, that ID proponents are attempting to thrust it into public education without the proper peer review and acceptance by the scientific community that is a standard requirement for every other scientific theory. This strategy is part of “The Wedge” controversy which sprouted up in 1999, which refers to a document written by the Discovery Institute (the main organization promoting ID) as part of a fundraising strategy. Although Discovery has since claimed that they authored the document in question, it is debatable whether it was originally intended for publication, or whether it was leaked to the public without permission. It has garnered controversy because it outlines long term goals of Discovery which go well beyond their scientific agenda; specifically the plan to replace naturalism and materialism in all areas of Western culture with design theory, not just in science.
[19] A major ethical problem, as I see it, is that if ID theorists were genuinely serious about the science, they would wait until their claims had strong support from a large number of scientists and institutions who do not share their political and theological views. Certainly there are a handful of non-theists who are sympathetic to design theory because of the gaps in evolution, but it needs to be understood that this is a very small minority relative to the scientific consensus. Instead, ID proponents are driven primarily by their ideological views instead of love of science, which is evidenced in their haste to get ID into the public curriculum, where it has strong rhetorical value for those who do not know any better about biology. The reality is, however, that ID simply does not stand up to scientific scrutiny, and this is reflected in the fact that ID theorists have consistently failed to publish in peer-reviewed scientific research journals. Moreover, even if they ever do get some articles published, this would in no way indicate acceptance, much less consensus, and certainly would not merit equal time in public schools, as Elsberry and Matzke discuss. My sense is that the Discovery Institute and other proponents are aware of this, so they stick to publishing for those who already agree that evolution is false, or who do not know any better to think otherwise. Any other attention they get owes more to public concern and media frenzy than scientific explanatory value.