Does Intelligent Design Have Merit?

Do you tend to believe politicians who engage in name-calling but don't offer much substance? Like such politicians, The Ayn Rand Institute doesn’t want you to listen to what ID proponents are saying: it uses harsh rhetoric to oppose intelligent design (ID) saying things like:

• ID “is nothing more than a crusade to peddle religion”
• ID is “metaphysical marijuana”
• ID is promoted “fervently” by “its salesmen.”

In other words, plug your ears because ID isn't cool and its proponents have nothing good to say.  As one of ID’s apparent “salesmen,” I ask you to carefully analyze the claims and assertions behind The Ayn Rand Institute’s rhetoric. After all, Ayn Rand herself rightly said, “The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it.” If only The Ayn Rand Institute would seek truth without all of the unnecessary harsh rhetoric. 

Seeking the Truth on Harsh Rhetoric, Case #1:
The Ayn Rand Institute’s assertion that ID is a “crusade to peddle religion” does not make it so. In my first opening statement, I explained the empirical basis for the argument for design, concluding that:

“One can disagree with the conclusions of ID, but one cannot reasonably claim that it is an argument based upon religion, faith, or divine revelation. Nothing critics can say—whether appealing to politically motivated condemnations of ID issued by pro-Darwin scientific authorities, or harping upon the religious beliefs of ID proponents—will change the fact that intelligent design is not a ‘faith-based’ argument.”

Unless the Ayn Rand Institute actually shows how I am wrong and ID really is just a faith-based argument, it is simply making assertions with no grounding in real facts. Readers who read my first opening statement will not be convinced by The Ayn Rand Institute’s bluffs.

Seeking the Truth on Harsh Rhetoric, Case #2:
The Ayn Rand Institute asserts that ID’s appeal to a “designer” is “nothing more than a gateway god--metaphysical marijuana intended to draw students away from natural, scientific explanations and get them hooked on the supernatural.“

The Ayn Rand Institute seems quite scared of the possibility of a supernatural designer. Might this stem from the fact that Ayn Rand herself was an avowed atheist? The truth about ID is that it gives principled reasons why ID does not identify the designer. I addressed this claim in my fourth opening statement, where I explained how ID actually interfaces with the designer

The refusal of ID proponents to use ID to draw scientific conclusions about the nature or identity of the designer is principled rather than merely rhetorical. ID's non-identification of the designer stems from a desire to take a scientific approach and respect the limits of scientific inquiry, and not inject religious discussions about theological questions into science. In short, ID does not identify the designer because under present knowledge and technology, there is no known scientific method for identifying the intelligent source responsible for design in nature. Thus for the scientific theory of ID to try to identify the designer would be to inappropriately conflate science with religion.

Thomas Woodward explains the principled reasons why the current biological evidence for ID is insufficient to allow us to identify the designer:

“There is no ‘Made by Yahweh’ engraved on the side of the bacterial rotary motor--the flagellum. In order to find out what or who its designer is, one must go outside the narrow discipline of biology. Cross-disciplinary dialogue must begin with the fields of philosophy, sociology, history, anthropology, and theology. Design itself, however, is a direct scientific inference; it does not depend on a single religious premise for its conclusions.”(1)

In other words, the empirical data, such as the information-rich, integrated complexity of the flagellar machine, may indicate that the flagellum arose by intelligent design. But that same empirical data does not inform us whether the intelligence that designed the flagellum is Yahweh, Allah, Buddha, Yoda, or some other type of intelligent agency. There is no known way to use such empirical data to determine the nature or identity of the designer, and since ID is based solely upon empirical data, the scientific theory of ID must remain silent on such questions.

Some critics allege that ID proponents are “coy” about the identity of the designer, which they really believe is God. Yet ID proponents are also very open about their views about the identity of the designer—they have just made it clear that these are their own personal beliefs and not conclusions of intelligent design theory proper. For example, Michael Behe explains:

“most people (including myself) will attribute the design to God--based in part on other, non-scientific judgments they have made--I did not claim that the biochemical evidence leads ineluctably to a conclusion about who the designer is. In fact, I directly said that, from a scientific point of view, the question remains open. ... The biochemical evidence strongly indicates design, but does not show who the designer was”(2)

Thus, when ID proponents state that ID does not identify the designer, they are, in Behe's words, "not being coy, but only limiting ... claims to what ... the evidence will support."(3) During the Kitzmiller trial, Behe gave a clear, direct, and unambiguous testimony explaining that his personal beliefs the identity of the designer is God are not derived from the scientific theory of intelligent design:

"Q. So is it accurate for people to claim or to represent that intelligent design holds that the designer was God?
Behe: No, that is completely inaccurate.
Q. Well, people have asked you your opinion as to who you believe the designer is, is that correct?
Behe: That is right.
Q. Has science answered that question?
Behe: No, science has not done so.
Q. And I believe you have answered on occasion that you believe the designer is God, is that correct?
Behe: Yes, that's correct.
Q. Are you making a scientific claim with that answer?
Behe: No, I conclude that based on theological and philosophical and historical factors."(4)

Similarly, Phillip Johnson writes that “my personal view is that I identify the designer of life with the God of the Bible, although intelligent design theory as such does not entail that."(5) In fact, I too believe the designer is the God of the Bible, but this is not a conclusion of ID; it is my personal religious view that stems from factors outside of intelligent design. Any fair analysis must come to the following conclusions about ID and questions about the identity or nature of the designer:

• ID does not address religious questions about the identity or nature of the designer, and in fact ID proponents have diverse views about the identity of the designer;
• ID proponents give principled reasons why ID does not identify the designer, stemming from ID’s intent to respect the limits of science and not attempt to address religious questions that go beyond what can be scientifically inferred from the empirical data;
• Whether traditional theists or not, ID proponents are entirely open about their views on the identity of the designer;
• ID proponents make it clear that their views about the identity of the designer are their personal religious views, and not conclusions of ID.

Seeking the Truth on Harsh Rhetoric, Case #3:
The Ayn Rand Institute also claims that ID “should be rejected” because it is promoted "fervently" by "its salesmen," but is a "religiously motivated attack on science."

Pro-ID scholars have published more than a decade of scholarship in reputable academic books and journals about the empirical evidence supporting design. The Ayn Rand Institute chooses not to engage any of this scholarship and explain why they think ID is wrong. Rather, they find it easier to harp upon the alleged religious beliefs and motives of ID proponents, claiming that due to their religious beliefs, ID “should be rejected.” I anticipated this tactic in my third opening statement where I wrote, “Critics may trot out quotes from ID proponents discussing their own personal religious beliefs, motives, and affiliations, or discussing the larger philosophical implications they draw from ID, to allege that ID is not science, but religion.

These common attacks against ID are both logically fallacious and highly hypocritical for at least three reasons:

First, The Ayn Rand Institute’s arguments offend the First Amendment’s protections on religious freedom: scientists have freedom of religion and their scientific views should not be disqualified due to their alleged religious motives or beliefs. Moreover, as I explain in my third opening statement, the religious beliefs and motives of a scientist are irrelevant to whether they are scientifically correct:

Second, the motives or personal religious beliefs of scientists don't matter; only the evidence matters. For example, the great scientists Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton were inspired to their scientific work by their religious convictions that God would create an orderly, rational universe with comprehensible physical laws that governed the motion of the planets. They turned out to be right—not because of their religious beliefs—but because the scientific evidence validated their hypotheses. (At least, Newton was thought to be right until Einstein came along.) Their personal religious beliefs, motives, or affiliations did nothing to change the fact that their scientific theories had inestimable scientific merit that helped form the foundation for modern science.

Third, if ID “should be rejected” due to the alleged religious motives of its proponents, then what would The Ayn Rand Institute say in response to all of the anti-religious motives of leading Darwinists?

For example, Eugenie Scott is a physical anthropologist who now serves as Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education and was called by the scientific journal Nature “perhaps the nation’s most high-profile Darwinist.”(6) But Scott is also a public signer of the Third Humanist Manifesto, an aggressive statement of the humanist agenda to create a world with “without supernaturalism” based upon the view that “[h]umans are … the result of unguided evolutionary change” and the universe is “self-existing.”(7)

Another leading pro-evolution activist, Barbara Forrest, believes that “philosophical naturalism” is “the only reasonable metaphysical conclusion.”(8) Dr. Forrest also sits on the Board of Directors of the New Orleans Secular Humanist Association,(9) an associate member of the American Humanist Association, which publishes the Humanist Manifesto III.(10)

Richard Dawkins is Oxford University’s Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and is probably the most famous evolutionist in the world. Yet Dawkins argues that belief in God is a “delusion”(11) and that "Darwin made it possible to become an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”(12) Dawkins has stated his goal is “to kill religion,”(13) and when he received an award from the American Humanist Association, he declared that “faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.”(14)

Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg, who has been a public advocate of teaching evolution in a one-sided pro-Darwin-only dogmatic fashion in public schools,(15) says that his scientific career is motivated by a desire to disprove religion:

“I personally feel that the teaching of modern science is corrosive of religious belief, and I’m all for that! One of the things that in fact has driven me in my life, is the feeling that this is one of the great social functions of science—to free people from superstition.”(16)

Weinberg elaborates on what he means by “superstition,” as he hopes that “this progression of priests and ministers and rabbis and ulamas and imams and bonzes and bodhisattvas will come to an end, that we’ll see no more of them. I hope that this is something to which science can contribute and if it is, then I think it may be the most important contribution that we can make.”(17)

In November, 2006 the New York Times covered a conference held at the scientific research hub The Salk Institute. The story reported a striking agenda on the part of leading scientists present at the conference to stifle religious belief in order to promote Darwinism to the public: “one speaker after another called on their colleagues to be less timid in challenging teachings about nature based only on scripture and belief.” The scientists were worried that scientific theories like evolution by natural selection and other views are “losing out in the intellectual marketplace,” and one scientist sarcastically said the anti-religious viewpoints expressed at the conference “have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”(18)

I do not list these examples to claim that one cannot accept both religion and evolution or to argue that evolution is not science. In science, personal religious (or anti-religious) motives of scientists don’t matter; only the evidence matters. Neither ID nor neo-Darwinian evolution should be disqualified from being scientific simply because of the religious (or anti-religious) motives of their proponents.

I list these examples to show that If The Ayn Rand Institute were to apply its misplaced argument fairly, it would have to argue that neo-Darwinian evolution is unscientific. Somehow, I don’t think it wants to do that.