Positive Liberty

I generally agreed with Michael Shermer’s takedown of intelligent design in Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design. By contrast, I found Jonathan Wells’ The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design both smarmy and condescending (I gather that it’s to be expected in the Politically Incorrect series). A note on each below the fold. By your requests, I’ll keep them brief.

The Politically Incorrect Guide perplexed me: I wonder at all of the effort in the service of finding a designer — all while keeping his properties as vague as possible. The designer himself never seems to be the subject of any research inquiries: We argue and argue and argue that he exists… but we never inquire about his nature.

What is (or was) the designer like? If he exists, then he has properties, and science can presumably discover some of them. But ID doesn’t even try to. Even if I were to credit the ID research program as having found real evidence that the universe was designed, they have done nothing to answer the question by whom.

So, following William Dembski, let me suggest what a designer might look like.

The Guide reviews Dembski’s famous explanatory filter, which he proposes as a method of discovering evidence of design. Dembski describes the filter as follows:

Roughly speaking the filter asks three questions and in the following order: (1) Does a law explain it? (2) Does chance explain it? (3) Does design explain it?

And, to present it fairly, let’s consider three phenomena. First, we observe that water freezes at zero degrees Celsius. Second, we observe that about one time in six, a six-sided die will land on five. Third, we observe the text of this blog post.

For the water, we have a physical law, and thus we may stop at the first question; our work is done. For the die, we cannot formulate any coherent set of physical laws, so we find that “chance” the best explanation (even if we find that “chance” is merely a confluence of physical laws in configurations too difficult to calculate). And for this blog post, whatever its faults, neither law nor chance are enough to explain everything. There must have been a designer, and thus we infer the existence of one Dr. Jason T. Kuznicki. Simple enough.

(Now, it is possible to argue about the ontological status of law, chance and design, as I did in the parenthesis above, where I offer a reason why “chance” may not be a reason at all. And further: Although I certainly designed this blog post, it would not have been possible without the help of physical laws. The law of gravity, which steadfastly held me in my chair as I wrote, is much to be thanked. That same law helped the roll of the die, too, because without it, dice don’t roll. And so on and so forth. But I promised I’d be brief.)

So… Let’s apply the explanatory filter to the natural world. It seems clear that a set of simple physical laws cannot explain everything. Nor does it seem likely that chance alone could explain our observations. And so we are left with a designer.

I’m willing to accept all of this.

You read that right. Now let’s consider what a designer might look like. As I said above, ID advocates are loath to do this.

In mathematics, remarkably complex systems can arise from simple, uniform laws and a modicum of chance at the outset. The same is true in economics, in sociology, and in a wide array of observed phenomena: language, law, customs and manners, market economies, and many other systems show properties of spontaneous order. There seems no reason why life cannot have done likewise.

In other words, the designer may be an amalgam of law and chance. Neither one by itself is enough to explain what we have before us, but consider the two of them together: The result could be a naturalistic explanation that slips past questions one and two of Dembski’s filter, earning “no’s” on both. Yet while the design inference might seem reasonable here, clearly there is no designer, apart from the interactions of law and chance themselves. We already know that no one person designed the English language, or the common law, or the prices on the New York Stock Exchange. We know that Stephen Wolfram (atrocious writer though he is) has discovered simple mathematical rules that lead to remarkably complex — and apparently designed — geometric patterns. Why can’t something similar have been the designer of life? Over sufficient time, it seems inevitable that complex, repeating, self-organizing patters will emerge out of mere matter. They emerge out of everything else.

This, though, is not the designer that ID advocates want, and so the search will no doubt go on, always for the evidence of design, but never for the designer, whose properties will remain comfortably unspecified. Because true believers all know that God did it six thousand years ago, even if we can’t say that in the public schools.

Michael Shermer’s Why Darwin Matters was at least kind enough to address me as an adult. I did have one problem, though, with the following passage:

Belief in God depends on religious faith. Acceptance of evolution depends on empirical evidence. This is the fundamental difference between religion and science. If you attempt to reconcile and combine religion and science on questions about nature and the universe, and if you push the science to its logical conclusion, you will end up naturalizing the deity; for any question about nature, if your answer is “God did it,” a scientist will ask such questions as “How did God do it? What forces did God use?” …The end result of this inquiry can only be natural explanations for all natural phenomena. What place, then, for God? …

The problem with… attempts at blending science and religion may be found in a single principle: A is A. Or: Reality is real. To attempt to use nature to prove the supernatural is a violation of A is A. It is an attempt to make reality unreal. A cannot also be non-A. Nature cannot also be non-nature. Naturalism cannot also be supernaturalism…

Believers can have both religion and science as long as there is no attempt to make A non-A, to make reality unreal, to turn naturalism into supernaturalism. Thus, the most logically coherent argument for theists is that God is outside time and space; that is, God is beyond nature… and therefore cannot be explained by natural causes. [pp 123-5]

To my mind, this saves the belief in God by destroying the reality of God. Either God participates in the universe, or God does not exist.

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