Positive Liberty

…Or Perhaps Just Taking It Apart

Summary: In his contribution to the volume Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?, intelligent design advocate William Dembski suggests that skeptics will find it virtually impossible to defeat the idea that life was designed by something more than mere chance. To do so, he makes a number of troubling claims about the scientific and skeptical establishment–but he also makes at least one very important point that is liable to be missed: Skeptics need to be more sensitive about the troubling consequences of evolution–and to present a more inspiring worldview of their own.

Skepticism and Nihilism. First, let’s examine Dembski’s epistemological account of skepticism. It’s deeply flawed but worth considering for just this reason. Dembski writes,

…on two occasions I offered to join the editorial advisory board of Michael Shermer’s Skeptic Magazine to be its resident skeptic regarding evolution… he never took me up on my offer. Indeed, he can’t afford to…

Skepticism faces a curious tension. On the one hand, to maintain credibility it must be willing to shine the light of scrutiny everywhere, and thus in principle even on evolution. On the other hand, to be the scourge with which to destroy superstition and whip a gullible public into line, it must commit itself to a materialistic conception of science and thus cannot afford to question evolution.

But this is to confuse skepticism with nihilism. Skepticism properly speaking does not uniformly disbelieve everything. On the contrary, it disbelieves theories only so long as positive, testable evidence for them is insufficient. When such evidence appears, however, the skeptic must change his course. He may even–contra Dembski–accept a given idea as true, provided that no significant evidence emerges against the idea.

There is absolutely nothing in the rules of skepticism that forbids sincere belief. Only belief without foundation is forbidden. This, and a not unified dogma, is how skepticism maintains its “scourge.”

I should pause to note that it’s quite different from religion in this respect–and that creationists have often taken mainstream science to task for precisely its supple, adaptive character. Surely, they reason, real truth would never change. Dembski, by contrast, asks why a good skeptic shouldn’t doubt everything in his path, including evolution.

One wonders what positive benefit might accrue to intelligent design if such skeptics were to replace their actual foes, for surely these nihilist-skeptics would doubt Intelligent Design as well. But I digress, and it’s time to move on.

And Science? Dembski’s scientific claims in the article are few, limited to a vague discussion of “specified complexity” and the impossibility of the bacterial flagellum. It’s an argument recapitulated here, running in essence as follows:

the E. coli bacterial flagellum simply could not have evolved gradually over time. The bacterial flagellum is an “irreducibly complex” system. An irreducibly complex system is one composed of multiple parts, all of which are necessary for the system to function. If you remove any one part, the entire system will fail to function. Every individual part is integral. There is absolutely no naturalistic, gradual, evolutionary explanation for the bacterial flagellum. (Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, 1996.)

It puzzles me why ID theorists find this argument so compelling. While a look at present-day biological systems seems to reveal a certain bootstrapping effect–the mousetrap only works if the latch, the spring, the bar, the lever, and so forth all work just so–our present-day perspective neglects the natural history of the mousetrap, or organism, in question, wherein those parts may have been used for locomotion, reproduction, camouflage, or purposes we cannot even imagine. Only later, by slow, intermittently useful degrees, did they fuse into something that looks irreducibly complex. There’s no mystery at all to this, unless one starts out eager to find a mystery in the first place.

Moreover, I would feel more comfortable with “specified complexity” if such complexity actually were specified, with, say, a number that might be compared to other numbers. Making definitive claims based on a qualitative judgment like this strikes me as utterly unscientific. Even guessing the probability of a hand of poker is a feat of considerable skill; how are we ever to trust our judgment on the likelihood of genetic mutations? To claim that something is insufficiently probable requires numbers, not just fancy terms with a… specified… mathematical ring.

I would also feel more comfortable with specified complexity if it did not seem to take the following form:

1. If a designer created life on Earth, then that life would exhibit a specified complexity.
2. Life exhibits a specified complexity.
3. A designer must have created life on Earth.

This is no more than affirming the consequent, for it neglects the possibility that complexity, however specified, might have come about through other means.

Politics: Whatever Dembski’s scientific claims may be, he saved his trump cards for last. Disturbingly, they are political. The scientific establishment, Dembski writes, may well support evolution. But the masses do not, and the masses control the purse strings of the academy. “This disconnect can be exploited,” he writes. It’s chilling, to say the least.

In essence, Dembski is arguing that the consensus opinion of those who study biology does not matter–and that truth, as understood by those in a position to know, does not matter either. All that matters are the purse strings. (Is there anything either scientific or Christian about this opinion? I have trouble seeing either.)

Dembski’s advice to skeptics: At the end of the article, Dembski offers some advice for those who would see evolution more widely accepted. The most interesting of these suggestions is to “paint a more appealing world picture” of evolution. I hate to say it, but here he is entirely correct. I doubt Dembski would even have offered the advice, except that he figures we have so little chance of carrying it out.

Humans want desperately to believe that they are more than mere chance arrangements of molecules that just happen to survive and replicate. They want not only order, but Order. Dembski knows quite well that the story of God and the soul and the afterlife is quite often considered inspiring, and that the biological account of human life is cold–lifeless, even. Intelligent Design may or may not be religious–Dembski has said both at times–but it certainly has a power and a mystery to it, its the emotional appeal that keeps the votes and the purse strings set firmly against evolution, no matter how much the scientific establishment embraces it.

Never mind that it’s actually quite easy to reconcile the immortal soul, the Judgment, and the Divine with evolution. How? Simply define the soul as that perfect memory of our lives that is stored in the mind of God, combined with the God’s knowledge of how that life might continue under the conditions that He sets for it. In this scenario, seeking evidence for or against the soul here on earth is like looking for ‘a good conversation’ in your spice rack. But this is not to say that good conversation is impossible or nonexistent.

The idea of the soul as a divine memory or impression of an otherwise physical life could easily reconcile theism with Darwinian evolution, as even a few minutes’ thought makes clear. But Dembski isn’t interested in reconciling anything. It seems he only wants to destroy the theory evolution–at whatever the cost. And he’s willing to co-opt, even to imperil, the religious sense of grandeur to do it, by tying that grandeur irrevocably to a set of scientific claims that may not even succeed. A word comes to mind; it is “prostitution.”

So… Many of us can and do find grandeur and meaning in the worldview of unguided, unobserved evolution (here is a great example of what I mean, and more writings like it would certainly be helpful in answering the challenge at hand). But to those who still need a supernatural crutch, I think I may have supplied one. And may the god of the atheists have mercy on my soul.

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