Over the years, many who follow the debate over intelligent design (ID) have become accustomed to certain arguments from ID's leading critics. As I have discussed in my other rebuttals to the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), some of their common methods include:
- (1) Appealing to Authority
- (2) Blatantly Twisting and Misrepresenting ID
- (3) Puffing about the Glory of Evolution
- (4) Rewriting History
- (5) Promoting False Conspiracy Theories about ID
- (6) Hypocritically Harping on the Religious Associations of ID while Ignoring Their Own Side’s Use (and Abuse) of Religion
- (7) Evading the Real Issues
The NCSE’s fourth opening statement is an exercise in fallacies #2 and #4, where they claim that “the history and content of the [
Of Pandas and People] textbook, and of ID in general, are not legally distinct from ‘creation science’ or other forms of special creationism.” I anticipated and refuted this argument in my fourth opening statement.
The NCSE's argument relies on a blatant twisting of the law. To put it succinctly, when the U.S. Supreme Court found that creationism was unconstitutional, it ruled as such because creationism referred to a "supernatural creator."(1) Yet as I have discussed extensively (see, for example, my fourth opening statement), the theory of intelligent design does not require appeals to the supernatural because it does not try to address questions about whether the designer is natural or supernatural. Indeed, as I discussed in my fourth opening statement, this has been true of ID since its early days--including the pre-publication drafts of
Of Pandas and People ("
Pandas")--to the present day.
Thus, the NCSE's argument that ID is not "legally distinct" from "creation science" could not be more wrong. After all, the NCSE's executive director Eugenie Scott all but directly contradicted the NCSE's opening statement that ID is "not legally distinct from 'creation science'" when she wrote that, “most ID proponents do not embrace a Young Earth, Flood Geology, and sudden creation tenets associated with YEC.”(2)
In order to address charges that ID is creationism, we require a working definition of “creationism.” There are more general definitions of “creationism” than the widely-known YEC view. Leading scholars on both sides of this debate agree that creationism defined generally holds that “supernatural” powers created life.(3) Indeed, as noted, in its 1987
Edwards v. Aguillard ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court basically adopted this definition, finding that creationism was religion because it referred to a “supernatural creator.”(4)
Under this broad definition of creationism, ID is still legally distinct from creationism. This is because, as we have seen, ID does not try to address questions about whether the designer is natural or supernatural, and in fact within biology explicitly allows that the designer could have been natural. For this reason, intelligent design lacks the key defining characteristic that caused creationism to be both unscientific and unconstitutional.
Creationists base their claims upon faith or divine revelation. But as I argued in my first opening statement, ID makes its arguments using the scientific data, and not faith or divine revelation. ID should not be considered the same as creationism.
From its early days, the ID-project has made empirically-based arguments that stayed entirely within the empirical domain and avoided religious questions about the supernatural. Thus, in a desperate effort to tie ID to creationism, Darwinists resort to weak semantic or “guilt by association” arguments, rather than substantive arguments, to claim that ID is creationism.
Because ID's current formulation is so obviously legally-distinct from creationism, Darwinists have often cited language in early pre-publication drafts of the
Pandas textbook that used the term “creation” and later pre-publication drafts as well as published editions that used the term “intelligent design.” They alleged the terminology was switched merely in an effort to evade the
Edwards ruling, which found “creation science” unconstitutional.
The NCSE makes a semantic argument, not a substantive one: Conceptually, early drafts of
Pandas, although they used the word “creation,” did not advocate “creationism” as that term has been defined by the Supreme Court and most scholars in this debate.
Before the
Edwards ruling, pre-publication drafts of
Pandas specifically rejected the view that science could determine whether an intelligent cause identified through the scientific method was supernatural. A pre-
Edwards draft argued that “observable instances of information cannot tell us if the intellect behind them is natural or supernatural. This is not a question that science can answer.”(5) The same draft explicitly rejected William Paley’s eighteenth century design arguments because they unscientifically “extrapolate to the supernatural” from the empirical data. The draft stated that Paley was wrong because “there was no basis in uniform experience for going from nature to the supernatural, for inferring an unobserved supernatural cause from an observed effect.”(6) Another pre-publication draft made similar arguments:
“[W]e cannot learn [about the supernatural] through uniform sensory experience . . . and so to teach it in science classes would be out of place . . . [S]cience can identify an intellect, but is powerless to tell us if that intellect is within the universe or beyond it.”(7)
By unequivocally affirming that the empirical evidence of science “cannot tell us if the intellect behind [the information in life] is natural or supernatural,”(8) it is evident that these pre-publication drafts of
Pandas meant something very different by “creation” than did the Supreme Court in
Edwards v. Aguillard, in which the Court defined creationism as religion because it postulated a “supernatural creator.”
Unfortunately, in his
Kitzmiller v. Dover ruling, Judge Jones bought into the revisionist history of ID that claims ID is just repackaged creationism, and the Judge presented a sharply truncated and inaccurate view of the intellectual history of design. A correct history will make it clear that the term “intelligent design” was not invented to evade the
Edwards ruling, but that the intelligent design project that has always been distinct from the core claims of creationism about the supernatural.
Judge Jones traced the origins of ID back to the natural theology of William Paley and the arguments of the thirteenth century Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas. Even some critics of ID admit that “design arguments are not new,"(9) for the debate over design in nature began at least as early as the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers.(10) The Greek philosophers Heraclitus, Empedocles, Democritus, and Anaximander believed that life could originate without any intelligent guidance.(11) Plato and Aristotle both advocated that a mind was required to explain life's existence. (12) In more modern times, Isaac Newton asked in his treatise
Opticks, “Was the Eye contrived without Skill in Opticks, and the Ear without Knowledge of Sounds? [...] And these things being rightly dispatch’d, does it not appear from Phænomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent…”(13)
The debate over design continued vigorously among scientists and philosophers—not just theologians—at the time of Darwin in the 19th century. Zoologist and geologist Louis Agassiz, a critic of Darwin, invoked an “intellectual power”(14) to explain the diversity of living organisms in his “Essay on Classification,” published in the late 1850s, near the time that Darwin published Origin of Species. The term “intelligent design” was invoked as a plausible alternative to blind Darwinian evolution in 1897 by Oxford scholar F.C.S. Schiller, who wrote that “it will not be possible to rule out the supposition that the process of Evolution may be guided by an intelligent design.”(15) Even the independent co-discoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, concluded that it was possible—and appropriate—to detect design in nature.(16)
The research and ideas that ultimately inspired ID proponents were conceived in the decades and years prior to the
Edwards ruling.(17) Highly influential upon ID arguments was the discovery that life depended upon information, whose structure was not only independent of its physical or chemical form, but whose ordering was not amenable to explanation by physical or chemical laws. As the chemist Michael Polanyi wrote in an article titled, “Life’s Irreducible Structure,” published in the journal
Science in 1968:
“Suppose that the actual structure of a DNA molecule were due to the fact that the bindings of its bases were much stronger than the bindings would be for any other distribution of bases, then such a DNA molecule would have no information content. Its code-like character would be effaced by an overwhelming redundancy. […] Whatever may be the origin of a DNA configuration, it can function as a code only if its order is not due to the forces of potential energy. It must be as physically indeterminate as the sequence of words is on a printed page.”(18)
The term “intelligent design” appears to have been coined in its contemporary scientific usage by the atheist cosmologist Dr. Fred Hoyle, who in 1982 argued that “if one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure of order must be the outcome of intelligent design.”(19) The term “intelligent design” was also used by non-scientist James E. Horigan in his 1979 book
Chance or Design? where Horigan used the term “intelligent design” and framed his argument as an empirical one, “without resort to biblical or other religious references,” and without investigating questions about “ultimate purpose.”(20)
Horigan and Hoyle, however, did not become part of the later ID movement. But in 1984—three years
before the
Edwards ruling—three scientists who did help found the ID movement published a book titled
The Mystery of Life’s Origin that made arguments for an “intelligent cause” in the origin of the information in DNA:
“We have observational evidence in the present that intelligent investigators can (and do) build contrivances to channel energy down nonrandom chemical pathways to bring about some complex chemical synthesis, even gene building. May not the principle of uniformity then be used in a broader frame of consideration to suggest that DNA had an intelligent cause at the beginning?”(21)
Those three scientists were Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, and Roger Olsen. Soon thereafter, Thaxton, a chemist and academic editor for the
Pandas textbook, adopted the term “intelligent design” after hearing it mentioned by a NASA engineer.(22) Thaxton’s adoption of the term “intelligent design” took place pre-
Edwards was not an attempt to evade a court decision, but rather to distinguish ID from creationism, because, in contrast to creationism, ID sought to stay solely within the empirical domain. As Thaxton testified during his deposition in the
Kitzmiller case:
“I wasn’t comfortable with the typical vocabulary that for the most part creationists were using because it didn’t express what I was trying to do. They were wanting to bring God into the discussion, and I was wanting to stay within the empirical domain and do what you can do legitimately there.”(23)
Thaxton, who is a scientist and not a lawyer, adopted “intelligent design” terminology out of a desire to respect the limits of scientific inquiry, not as some conspiracy to avoid a Supreme Court ruling. When recounting the history of why he adopted “intelligent design” terminology, Thaxton explains that his goal was not to avoid any court decisions but to help people understand that their argument was “trying to operate entirely within the empirical domain”:
“Unfortunately for Westerners … anytime you use the word creation it automatically conjures up any of a number of religious discussions. We knew from the beginning of our project, that turned out to be the making of Of Pandas and People, that we wanted to avoid this automatically concluding that what you’re talking about was religion because in fact we were dealing with a biological discussion. So we were trying to operate entirely within the empirical domain. And my thought was, how to arrive at a set of terms that would allow us to traffic the literature and the discussion and build an argument without having to use terminology that would automatically bring one into the religious realm?”(24)
Thaxton continues, saying “we did what we could do to stay within the empirical domain and make legitimate inferences.”(25) He then explains the terminology that was originally in the early pre-publication drafts of
Pandas:
“I realize that the charge was that we were trying to just use a substitute word for creation, but that isn’t the case at all. In the early days of writing the
Pandas book for example, although we understood what we were doing, most other people who we were talking to didn’t know our objectives really. And if you have a whole culture that knows about creation as a term … So we used that word early on, not for deception so we could later switch on them but because we wanted the materials to be understood that we were focused on. It was always clearly within the empirical domain, even the things that we wrote early on.”(26)
Thaxton completes his account by recounting that after speaking widely on the subject of origins that “gradually it became clear that there was a real good way that there was a case we wanted – completely within the empirical domain – and we looked for a term that would do this and reading the literature and ah, ‘intelligent design,’ is the most appropriate term. And that’s why we did it.”(27)
In conclusion, the term “intelligent design” not only long pre-dates the
Edwards ruling, but the basic arguments for design pre-date Christianity. Moreover, modern members of the ID movement started using the term “intelligent design” not to evade a court ruling, but because they sought terminology that would accurately communicate their project’s original intent to remain “entirely within the empirical domain” and avoid investigating religious questions about the supernatural. Since the U.S. Supreme Court declared creationism to be a religious viewpoint because it postulated a “supernatural creator,” it seems that regardless of what wording was used early on, the ID project has always been substantively distinct from creationism.
Any arguments that ID is creationism because early pre-publication drafts of the
Pandas textbook used “creation” terminology are false conspiracy theories based not upon substance but semantics and revisionist history. The very fact the NCSE resorts to such arguments shows just how weak their case is that ID is creationism. In fact a fair analysis shows that if anything, intelligent design
is "legally distinct" from creationism.
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