Dawkins on Intelligent Design

I have no beef with Intelligent Design one way or the other, although Edward Feser has gone a long way to convincing me it is more harmful than helpful. But Richard Dawkins sure doesn't make it easy to write off the ID folks.

In his book The God Delusion, Dawkins discusses creationism in his chapter "Why There Almost Certainly is No God." Arguing against the ID notion of "irreducible complexity", he casts it as a fallacy in the form of The Argument from Personal Incredulity: If I can't imagine how something came about, then it couldn't have come about naturally and must have been the creation of special design. Dawkins says there are many examples where this isn't true, and cites a reference in support of his argument:

In his book Seven Clues to the Origin of Life, the Scottish chemist A.G. Cairns-Smith makes an additional point, using the analogy of an arch. A free-standing arch of rough-hewn stones and no mortar can be a stable structure, but it is irreducibly complex: it collapses if any one stone is removed. How, then, was it built in the first place? One way is to pile a solid heap of stones, then carefully remove stones one by one. More generally, there are many structures that are irreducible in the sense that they cannot survive the subtraction of any part, but which were build with the aid of scaffolding that was subsequently subtracted and is no longer visible.  Once the structure is completed, the scaffolding can be removed safely and the structure remains standing. In evolution, too, the organ or structure you are looking at may have had scaffolding in an ancestor which has since been removed.

Does Dawkins realize he just gave a powerful argument for intelligent design? Yes, arches are typically built by piling stones supported by a structure, then removing the structure. This is how the Romans - intelligent agents - did it. Dawkins carefully abstracts from the agent ("one way is to pile a solid heap of stones...") as though describing an intelligent process without the agent somehow magically removes the agent. This isn't the first time I've seen this kind of thing happen (citing an example of intelligent design in support of an evolutionary process); I wonder if Dawkins knows what he is doing or is simply blind to it.

Complexity as Inevitable

I would love to leave the Intelligent Design/Evolution controversy alone and read John Derbyshire in peace... why must I be ambushed by comments such as these from his Straggler column?

There are great cosmic principles at work here. Simplicity yields to complexity. From ammonites and trilobites come seven hundred species of dinosaur; from the spare pronouncements of the Master come annotations, exegesis, and commentary upon commentary; from the convenience of a phone call we advance to email inbox folders, texting, MySpace, Facebook, and twittering. There were originally three federal crimes: there are now, according to one scholar's tally, at least 4,452. (Did you know that as of 2002 it has been a federal crime to move birds across state lines to engage in fights?)

Derbyshire is a highly intelligent man, certainly smarter than I am. Yet this quote is open to a Sesame Street-level analysis that seems beyond the reach of committed Darwinists like him: Which one of these things is not like the others? His examples of exegesis and commentary, email and twittering, and the increase in federal law are all examples of the effects of intelligent agency. The complexity in these cases doesn't just "happen" as though complexity is waiting in the wings for simplicity to "yield" to it. It only happens because intelligent men apply their minds to the world and add complexity to it. The one case where this is alleged not to have happened is in the simplicity of ammonites "yielding" to the complexity of dinosaurs. Can't you just hear those complex dinosaurs banging at the door to be let in?

It may very well be that dinosaurs developed from ammonites through the unintelligent, mechanical process that Darwinists suppose. I don't know. I do know that email and federal law certainly didn't. What is perplexing about Darwinism, and makes me wary of it, is the manner in which its allegedly hard-headed and skeptical advocates fail to see the obvious. If they can't see intelligent agency in email and federal law, why should I put any stock in their assurances that there is no intelligent agency in the development of life?

Evolution and the Myth of the Machine

Jerry Coyne starts chapter one of Why Evolution is True this way:

If anything is true about nature, it is that plants and animals seem intricately and almost perfectly designed for living their lives. Squids and flatfish change color and pattern to blend in with their surroundings, becoming invisible to predator and prey. Bats have radar to home in on insects at night. Hummingbirds, which can hover in place and change position in an instant, are far more agile than any human helicopters, and have long tongues to sip nectar lying deep within flowers. And the flowers they visit also appear designed - to use hummingbirds as sex aids. For while the hummingbird is busy sipping nectar, the flower attaches pollen to its bill, enabling it to fertilize the next flower that the bird visits. Nature resembles a well-oiled machine, with every species an intricate cog or gear.

Coyne then expresses the obvious, but (for the Darwinist) mistaken conclusion that all this implies a designer:

What does all this imply? A master mechanic, of course. This conclusion was most famously expressed by the eighteenth-century English philosopher William Paley. If we came across a watch lying on the ground, he said, we would certainly recognize it as the work of a watchmaker. Likewise, the existence of well-adapted organisms and their intricate features surely implied a conscious, celestial designer - God.

I will mention in passing that Coyne, like all Darwinists, admits that there is a reasonable, even strong, prima facie case for intelligent design, a case that has nothing to do with authoritative religious texts. In fact, their case for the genius of Darwin was that he showed that the common-sense conclusion of intelligent design was empirically false. Why, then, do folks like Coyne strenuously insist that intelligent design is a "discredited, religiously based theory", one only a fool or fraud could put any credence in compared to evolution, "a theory so obviously true", as Coyne does in his introduction? He compares the introduction of creationism in the classroom with introducing shamanism in medical schools or astrology in psychology classes. But there is no common-sense case for shamanism or astrology like there is for intelligent design - a case Coyne himself presents in his book! The intelligent design movement is simply an extension of the common sense arguments Darwinists admit are true; the appearance of design is true "if anything about nature is true." Of course, the common sense case may be wrong, but Coyne doesn't even want it presented in the classroom, under the penalty of law.

But that is beside the point I really wish to address, which is the manner in which our thinking about nature - including both Darwinists and their modern opponents like Paley - has become dominated by what Lewis Mumford called the "myth of the machine." We see it in Coyne's expression that "nature resembles a well-oiled machine, with every species an intricate cog or gear." This gets it backwards. Machines resemble nature, nature doesn't resemble a machine. There is much more to nature than is captured in the metaphor of a machine, and the insidious result of taking the machine prior to nature is to eliminate from view all those aspects of nature that cannot be fit into the ideology of the machine.

Machines are artifacts made by man to serve his purposes. Therefore the primary quality of a machine is efficiency: How powerfully and cheaply does the machine achieve the end for which it was made? Reading the myth of the machine into nature means turning efficiency into a metaphysical fundamental. But nature is an end in itself; the nature of nature is to be, not to be-for-something-else like a machine. Organisms are about more than efficiency; they are about being what they are.

The classical Christian view of God is that God is an artist, not that God is a mechanic. An artist creates things that are ends-in-themselves and for which efficiency is at most a secondary concern. When God is seen as a mechanic, as implied in Paley's argument from mechanical design, then power and efficiency are seen as the fundamental forces in nature and therefore constitute the measure of nature. Something like Darwinism will ultimately follow as a philosophical consequence (although mistaken for an empirical one), since Darwinism is simply the observation that some organisms are more efficient than others, which is undoubtedly true, allied to the philosophical principle that efficiency is the metaphysical fundamental of nature. As Darwin puts in in the Origin of Species:

In looking at Nature, it is most necessary to keep the foregoing considerations always in mind  - never to forget that every single organic being may be said to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers; that each lives by a struggle at some period in its life; that heavy destruction inevitably falls either on the young or the old, during each generation or at recurrent intervals. Lighten any check, mitigate the destruction ever so little, and the number of the species will almost simultaneously increase to any amount. (italics mine)

As the philosopher David Stove pointed out, the passage is manifestly false as a matter of empirics; the checks on the population of man, for example, have largely disappeared yet population growth is declining and, in some places like Europe and Russia, population is decreasing despite abundant food. So man is a counterexample to the assertion that every organism is striving to the utmost to increase in numbers. I would like to focus on Darwin's assertion that it is "most necessary" to keep the "struggle for existence" foremost in mind when thinking about nature. If reproductive efficiency were really the be-all and end-all of nature, then why is it necessary to keep reminding ourselves of the fact? The fact should become manifest as a matter of course. Of course, what Darwin is really insisting on is not to keep reminding ourselves of obvious empirical truths, but to read nature through the lens of the principle of efficiency in reproduction.

If we are not spellbound by the myth of the machine, then we may ask just what it means that, as Coyne says, "plants and animals seem intricately and almost perfectly designed for living their lives." In what way do plants and animals fail the test of perfection? A bear lives the life of a bear, and it seems to lead that life perfectly... bears do not sometimes fail to live like bears and instead live like birds. Now grizzly bears fish in streams, and no doubt they could do it more efficiently, and so we could say bears fail in that sense the test of perfection - if we take it for granted that the measure of a bear's life is efficiency. Does a bear become more "bearlike" the more efficiently it fishes? Maybe a perfect bear is a bear that fishes exactly as efficiently as actual bears do... the life of a bear is not about doing what it does with ever more power and violence, as though bears are waiting to discover dynamite so they can blow salmon out of streams. 

One of the standard Darwinist arguments against creation is that nature is "flawed" or contains examples of "bad design", and therefore no intelligent designer could be responsible for it. Although Darwinists typically deny any reality outside nature, the argument is in danger of presupposing it, for it supposes a standard beyond nature (a standard of "perfection") against which nature can be measured and found wanting. If we are not to repair to a standard outside nature, then the standard can only be that of efficiency, for efficiency only demands that nature do what it is already doing, only faster and with more power. Really it reads the ideology of the machine into nature, for machines can always be bigger, faster, and more efficient. Unlike a painting, an opera, a piece of furniture, or an organism, a machine always fails the standard of perfection of its own nature because it is always possible, in principle at least, for there to be a better machine that does what it does faster and more cheaply. There is no inherent limit to the speed of computers, some speed at which we say "the best computers run at one million millon gigahertz and no faster." But a symphony does not always become better by being played faster or more loudly, and why must a bear be viewed under the metaphor of a machine rather than a symphony? Why must the "increase in numbers" be taken as the first principle of nature?

Mickey Mouse and Evolution

We all know that Darwinists have managed to make criticism of evolution in public schools a crime. Darwinian evolution, it turns out, is so strong as a scientific theory that it must rely on the courts rather than evidence to get people to believe it.

But those rascally intelligent design advocates are far, far more clever than Darwinists can imagine. They find all kinds of ways to sneak intelligent design into the science classroom. Take this article from last Sunday's Boston Globe for example. Teacher David Campbell seems to be your typical Darwinian advocate. It is obvious, however, that he is a stealth intelligent design advocate; perhaps even a creationist.

Campbell uses the example of Mickey Mouse to help his students understand evolution:

Campbell smiled. "Mickey evolved," he said. "And Mickey gets cuter because Walt Disney makes more money that way. That is 'selection.' "

What more proof do we need that Campbell is actually a creationist, probably the head of a conspiracy to impose a fundamentalist Christian theocracy? Mickey Mouse is a pure example of intelligent design. The pen that drew him didn't move by itself; it moved in accord with a design of Mickey created by Walt Disney. Furthermore, any change Mickey underwent isn't any sort of random selection; it is change in light of the higher purpose for which Mickey exists: Making Walt Disney money. Aristotle himself could not have come up with a more teleological example.

Campbell goes on to give the substance of what Darwinists actually believe, but he provides no reason to believe it:

Later, he would get to the touchier part, about how the minute changes in organisms that drive biological change arise spontaneously, without direction. And how a struggle for existence among naturally varying individuals has helped to generate every species, living and extinct, on the planet.

So the substance of Darwinism is but a "touchy" afterthought to the only evidence he cites - an example of intelligent design. Perhaps Darwinism is so "touchy" because even high school sophomores might wonder why an allegedly purely naturalistic theory of origins must resort to examples of intelligent design to support it. The legal cases were supposed to have permanently closed off just this sort of unauthorized criticism; obviously they are not airtight enough if Campbell is still able to sneak intelligent design into the classroom.

But that's not the worst of it. Campbell goes on to bring the miraculous into the science classroom:

He looked around the room. "Bryce, what is it called when natural laws are suspended - what do you call it when water changes into wine?"

"Miracle?" Bryce supplied.

Campbell nodded. The ball hit the floor again.

So the example of "change" given by Campbell is Mickey Mouse, an example of creation and change effected by an intelligent designer for a purpose. Then Darwinism is explained as minute changes arising spontaneously, without direction. No example from the real world of this is given to counter the intelligent design example of Mickey Mouse. Clearly Campbell is subtly indicating to the sophomores that intelligent design and not Darwinism is reflective of how the world really works. And if a "miracle" is a suspension of natural law, like the drawing of Mickey Mouse is a suspension of the natural laws of pen and paper, then miracles are clearly a perfectly reasonable part of the world.

This has got to stop. Call the lawyers!

(By the way, water changing into wine is not an example of the suspension of natural law. As St. Augustine pointed out long ago, water changes into wine naturally all the time in the grape.)

Derb and Unnatural Thought

John Derbyshire has been going after Expelled with all guns blazing. Yet in this post, even in his attacks against the anti-Darwinists, he shows how hard it is to say anything at all about evolution without saying something problematic. I would like to focus on this passage:

"The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, and social. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the esteem of our peers. For most people, wanting to know the truth about the world is way, way down the list. Scientific objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought, restricted to small cliques whom the generality of citizens regard with dislike and mistrust."

If scientific objectivity is unnatural, how did it ever arise? Darwin's theory of evolution is universal and deep in scope; every aspect and fiber of our being has its origin in evolution and nothing escapes it. This includes our mind in thinking about evolution and conducting science in general. If evolution is true, then science is an evolutionary product as much as anything else. And it must be, in the end, as natural as anything else. The very act of distinguishing the natural from the unnatural, and pointing out certain acts as falling in the latter category, is an implicit rebuke to Darwinism, for Darwinism does not have the category of the unnatural.

Furthermore, if scientific objectivity is "freakish, unnatural, and unpopular" it is necessarily doomed anyway, isn't it? To be "freakish, unnatural, and unpopular" sounds a lot like being "unfit", and if there is one thing Darwinism assures us about the unfit, it is that it doesn't survive. Remember that Darwinism claims to bring all aspects of life under its purview, including all aspects of human life, and that means all its freakish, unnatural(?), and unpopular manifestations. Daniel Dennett has made a career out of insisting that people recognize the universal scope of Darwinian logic. Derbyshire goes on to say

"There is probably a sizable segment in any population that believes scientists should be rounded up and killed"

without thinking about it in the evolutionary terms he so champions. If a sizeable segment of the population desires such a thing, why don't they just do it? I'm not asking this question to make an ethical point about Darwinism but a scientific one. Isn't that what the competition for life, the struggle for survival is all about, the struggle that Darwin insists is going on all the time, all around us? If any population of organisms has the capability and desire to destroy its rivals, what in Darwinian logic would lead them to refrain from doing so? There is nothing, because the fundamental principle in Darwinism is that every organism acts to win the competition for survival. But it is just Derbyshire's point that a sizeable segment does see its interests in eliminating scientists. Again, I am not making a moral argument here, but an empirical one. The very fact that Derbyshire cites, that a lot of people desire to round up and kill scientists, and that they refrain from doing so, is a counterexample to the principle that organisms always act to win the competition for survival.