Robert B. Stewart, ed. Intelligent Design: William A. Dembski & Michael Ruse in Dialogue. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007. 257pp $22. (paper), ISBN 9780800662189.
[1] For decades we have witnessed a protracted debate over the controversial notion of intelligent design (ID). To describe the debate as contentious and overflowing with hyperbole is an understatement. Key ID spokespersons claim to be ushering in a major scientific revolution that not only will replace Darwinism as a thriving scientific research program, but also will alter fundamentally the entire scientific enterprise. Not to be outdone, prominent ID critics warn of a sinister alliance of design activists with the Religious Right to engineer a theocratic state. For every wild statement by someone like Benjamin Wiker who considers ID “the most important intellectual movement to occur in the last 200 years, if not the last half-millennium,” there is someone like John Brockman likening the ID camp to Visigoths about to destroy the scientific and technological foundations of America’s economy.
[2] Obviously, both sides believe the stakes in this debate are very high. ID advocates view Darwinism as the cutting edge of a naturalistic worldview that threatens to reduce the universe to “purposeless, meaningless matter in motion.” On the other side, ID critics believe they are defending with tooth and claw the integrity of the science against a challenge that masquerades as empirical but is essentially philosophical, theological, and increasingly political in nature. It is next to impossible to carry on a constructive dialogue in such a rhetorical hothouse. Consequently, I have grown weary of the debate and have become increasingly skeptical that anything productive will emerge from attempts to bring the two sides together in conversation. And in that state of mind with low expectations, I approached Robert Stewart’s edited volume, Intelligent Design: William A. Dembski & Michael Ruse in Dialogue. I was pleasantly surprised. While there are things to criticize, on balance this is a welcome addition to the literature on the design debate and models nicely how to explore these controversial notions with rigor and civility.
[3] The book has two main components: comments and papers given at the Greer-Heard Point-Counterpoint Forum in Faith and Culture (originally scheduled at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, but forced by Hurricane Katrina to be moved to a Baptist church in the suburbs of Atlanta) supplemented by papers from an impressive array of invited scholars, including Alister McGrath, Nancey Murphy, John Polkinghorne, and Wolfhart Pannenberg.
[4] The subtitle is a bit misleading. The dialogue between design theorist William Dembski and ID critic Michael Ruse occupies a relatively modest portion of the book. Moreover, while the tone is quite civil, there is nothing new or particularly noteworthy here, save perhaps for Dembski’s claim that he thought it premature to mandate the teaching of ID in Dover, Pennsylvania. What might have been an entertaining public event comes across in print as a rather predictable rehashing of stock arguments. Along with Robert Stewart’s solid introduction, the Dembski-Ruse exchange, however, functions as a serviceable springboard for the more substantial and formal essays that follow. Like any anthology, there is unevenness in the twelve contributions. Some, frankly, are too technical and tedious for a volume of this nature. So rather than summarizing all of them, I will highlight a few themes in the volume and supply a sampling of the many provocative arguments offered.
[5] A claim often made by dogmatic evolutionists—people Catholic theologian John Haught calls “Deep Darwinians”—is that the science of Darwin necessarily leads to atheism. Biologist Martinez Hewlett and biologist-cum-theologian Alister McGrath effectively refute this suspect notion, noting that there is nothing scientific about such claims. McGrath observes that Richard Dawkins’s celebrated move to atheism is as much a leap of faith as that made by theists in the opposite direction. There is nothing new here; nevertheless, it is heartening to hear such strong voices in the public square countering the aggressive claims of the “new atheists.”
[6] Mirroring the differences many thoughtful Christians have about the subject, Hewlett and philosopher William Lane Craig disagree about the overall ID project. Hewlett concludes that proponents of design are attempting “to force science into an improper role to accomplish an impossible task.” It is a “well-meaning but ill-conceived attempt to counter the ideological overlays” that have plagued Darwinism. Craig, on the other hand, resists the notion that only naturalistic hypotheses can be counted as “live explanatory options.” Echoing Dembski, he sees this as a dogmatic stance of a philosophical not scientific nature—so much of the ID debate, by the way, hinges on the philosophy of science. Although I am less sympathetic to ID than Craig, he makes a very good ends/means point when he argues that discovering the truth should trump methodological constraint. Moreover, he raises an excellent question: “Why can’t the scientist postulate a Godlike being as a theoretical entity in order to explain certain observable data, just as high-level physicists postulate strings, hyperspaces, parallel universes, and sundry unobservable theoretical entities…?” (67-68) He links his critique of the assumption of antiteleological naturalism with a spirited call to let the best explanation carry the day.
[7] I agree with Hewlett, but I also salute Craig for raising such important points. I am, however, more persuaded by McGrath’s project (not discussed in this volume) of a revived and reconceptualized natural theology built on a specifically Christian set of assumptions than I am of the ID program wanting to change the very rules of science to accommodate notions of design. The concept of stratification undergirds McGrath’s theological method. His thinking on this, in turn, has been greatly influenced by the stridently anti-reductionistic critical realism of philosopher of science Roy Bhaskar. McGrath appropriates two major notions from Bhaskar that speak to some of Craig’s concerns: (1) ontology determines epistemology and (2) reality is stratified. Bhaskar asserts that the nature of some aspect of reality determines the manner and extent to which it is known. The world is not limited by what can be observed; epistemology and methodology do not determine reality. Reality, moreover, is stratified. Because of this each intellectual discipline must adopt a methodology appropriate to its object/stratum. Science by definition is naturalistic, but science has limits. Far better for both theists and naturalists alike to respect those limits but also admit that many questions humans want to ask simply cannot be answered by science.
[8] Wesley Elsberry and Nicolas Matzke, both of whom have ties with the National Center for Science Education, pronounce the collapse of ID based especially on their analysis of the important 2005 court case, Kitzmiller v. Dover, stemming from the Dover, Pennsylvania school board’s decision to make ID part of the biology curriculum. Their essay ranks as one of the more polemical pieces in the volume, but Elsberry and Matzke raise concerns that must be addressed in any serious assessment of ID, most importantly the dearth of “original empirical research published in peer review articles.” The ID camp, they assert, has resorted to blustering in op-ed pieces, law-review articles, and ID-oriented conferences rather than doing the hard empirical work and then making their case in science journals. It should be an embarrassment, they argue, that one can find more published in the scientific literature on “cold fusion, homeopathy, and Bigfoot” than ID. I have to trust that this claim is accurate, but even Dembski has acknowledged elsewhere that ID needs to produce a good scientific case in order to be taken seriously.
[9] In a starkly contrasting essay, Baylor University philosopher Francis Beckwith criticizes Judge John E. Jones’s decision in the Kitzmiller case, arguing that it is unconstitutional to prohibit ID from the public-school classroom. Beckwith admits that the decision to use Dover as a legal test case for ID was unwise and that the Dover policy was ineptly defended; nevertheless, he argues that Jones’s heavy reliance on religious motive analysis (a policy or law is unconstitutional if its proponents have “exclusively religious motives”) is itself unconstitutional. Inspecting the religious motives of the Dover school board members violates their religious liberty.
[10] One strength of the essays collected in Intelligent Design is that they range from the nitty-gritty world of constitutional law and public policy to more speculative meta-questions about the nature of reality and divine action in the universe. Those attracted to the big questions lurking behind ID, theistic evolution, and naturalism will not be disappointed. Editor Robert Stewart wisely solicited contributions from two of the leading spokespersons in the contemporary science-and-religion conversation who have explored at length how to understand divine action in theologically and scientifically appropriate matters: Nancey Murphy and John Polkinghorne. Their arguments are familiar to anyone who has read the literature grappling with how to understand God’s relation to nature, but their succinct assessments provided here are welcome and thought-provoking.
[11] Murphy, a philosopher and theologian by training, offers a brief historical summary of the problem of divine action and surveys the options currently in play. Eschewing interventionism (God as sovereign creator violates the laws of nature to effect God’s will) and immanentism (God acts exclusively through processes of nature and history), she notes that contemporary science allows for a third way: “noninterventionist special divine action.” Put crudely and eliminating nuance, this means that God could act at the quantum level or at the level of chaotic systems without violating the laws of nature. Murphy finds quantum divine action to be the most appealing approach. At that level laws are statistical generalizations. It is entirely compatible with our understanding of science and theology, then, to conclude that God performs “special, intentional, but noninterventionist acts at the indeterminist quantum level.”
[12] John Polkinghorne, the senior statesman of the field of science and religion, favors an understanding of divine action at the level of chaotic systems. His essay does not dwell on this, and neither will I. Suffice it to say that incorporating chaos theory, like quantum theory, enables one to view divine action built into the very fabric of the universe, rather than as a function of a tinkering God resorting to “episodic acts of direct interventionism.” There is so much more that could and probably should be said about Polkinghorne’s rich essay. It is in some ways a distillation of much of his recent thinking, and it serves as a wonderful introduction to the important body of work of this remarkable scholar. On intelligent design, in particular, Polkinghorne concedes that the ID people are asking important scientific questions. Indeed, if they could establish the validity of one of the main components of design theory, irreducible complexity, he believes it would be a major scientific achievement, perhaps of Nobel caliber. But ID sympathizers are far from making that case. In fact ID functions essentially as a covert theological program, one that overly emphasizes a distinction between the processes of nature and direct divine interventionism.
[13] Agreeing with Polkinghorne, Stewart suggests in his introduction that ID has failed to offer a convincing scientific alternative to evolutionary biology. But the question remains: should ID be given a chance to make its best case and let the chips fall where they may? Although I have no scientific credentials whatsoever, based on many conversations with those who do, I am increasingly skeptical that ID can deliver. That said, I tend to agree with Stewart’s middle road approach of acknowledging the evolutionary picture overwhelming advanced by science while holding open the possibility of revision if ID can ever one day produce a scientifically convincing case.
[14] ID may be an ill-conceived research program, but it has done a valuable service in exposing the extra-scientific assumptions some prominent science writers have smuggled into their supposedly scientific arguments. And as this volume demonstrates, ID has raised some important questions that merit sober and sustained dialogue. Some, however, seem to think it necessary and sufficient to fight the evolution wars with hyperbolic zeal. I don’t. Neither does Stewart, who makes a good case for toning down the rhetoric and increasing the understanding. As I have argued elsewhere, if truth is the goal, spokespersons for both sides might consider being less intent on winning the evolution wars and more interested in engaging each other and in making a goodwill effort to understanding the best notions that the other has put forth.