Monday, September 26, 2005
Using Religion to Explain Science is Like Using Music to Explain Food
Dover PA has once again taken over headlines with news of this trial on whether or not to offer an Intelligent Design disclaimer in high school biology class. This would essentially be a brief statement that evolution is a theory, one of many that seek to explain the origin of life, and should not be treated as dispositive because even scientists have disagreements about it. Evolutionary theorists, in turn, describe ID as a theological philosophy akin to deism, and dispute its role in any classroom focusing on the “hard sciences.”
It’s an important debate. As the national floodtides of suffering and indignation begin to recede, the stagnant puddles left behind grow ever more fetid and rank. With the supreme court in double flux and our foreign entanglement ever more entangled, with nature raging and our leadership faltering, the time seems right to me to dump my load of spleen on proponents of the teaching of intelligent design.
Why would I dabble thus when so many other more real problems confront us? Because it’s easy, duh. After so many high-caliber minds have taken aim at this subject, I need only score a glancing blow to be able to claim victory over the ID boosters.
As I’ve seen so much crumbling and collapsing in the world lately, too often I find myself hearing the ID viewpoint and finding myself shouting, inside of my own head, a series of questions to which I cannot imagine a response. (And, as ID teaches us, if a response cannot be imagined, it must not exist.) Since I’m tired of hearing these questions echoing in the emptyness of my own cranium, I figured I’d blast them out your way and see what good it does me.
* Where does the theory end? I appreciate that ID is an attempt to fill in the holes in evolutionary theory. But evolution as a scientific inquiry was an outgrowth of geology, the first modern science - the science that first led us to question the biblical story of creation. Does ID extend to the mountains of limestone, that, if subjected to close enough scrutiny, are composed substantially of fossilized remains of now-non-existent creatures, and on which now live highly-specialized new organisms? To the creation of habitats that seem perfectly designed for the survival of a given species, like the mountains for a ram or seasonal mudholes for the lungfish? What about the forest fires that are needed to germinate certain pinecone seeds? Or the boiling sulphurous pools of Yellowstone, where unique microorganisms live that could survive nowhere else? If we claim an intelligence behind the design of living things, what basis is there not to extend this theory to geologic and climactic phenomona to which the survival of these things is so inextricably linked? And if ID covers these realms as well, what basis is there to deny that it is a theory of the creation of everything in the universe? This question is important to me, because it would require the Dover “disclaimer” before every class being taught in every school, with the possible exception of shop classes. However, math, history, civics, even literature can be traced back to intelligent, and therefore designed, responses to specific circumstances by intelligently-designed entities that responded in a manner that the original designer, being sufficiently intelligent, must have intended. You can’t design the animals without designing the zoo.
* There’s been some buzz lately about critters that change. These critters tend to be ones that are regularly confronted by dangerous enemies that seek to extirpate them, but instead, they form new configurations and adopt new strategies that help them evade destruction. And we’re not talking about baathist militias or heartland neoCaananites here, people - we’re talking about the flu. TB. HIV. Any number of illnesses and contagions that become resistant to our weapons against them, and mutate into new, more powerful forms. An ID theory would have to accept that the intelligent creator has intentionally created dangerous mutating diseases that could cause pandemics and wipe out significant portions of our population. Some might say that’s just intelligent population control - if we overcrowd the planet, the diseases will thin our ranks, as it is with lemmings, who experience periodic outbreaks of a fever that causes overly successful colonies to kill themselves off. But since we humans have learned to beat our diseases, the diseases now change as we confront them. My question, then, is: if the design is so intelligent, why have we been designed to overpopulate the planet in the first place? It strikes me as rather shortsighted to create organisms (us) that overrun their habitat and render it uninhabitable. Natural processes ebb and flow and self-adjust, but intelligently designed processes move from a starting point to an ending point with linear efficiency. There is no efficiency in a population control system that relies on mutating pathogens. If there is no efficiency, I am hard-pressed to posit that there is intelligence behind it.
* When we design something, like a wristwatch or an automobile or a building, all the parts of our creation work together for a single purpose. Why, then, have we been designed to kill? To hurt each other? To abuse each other? To destroy the natural world from which we draw sustinence? To detest each other according to every form of difference that can be identified - geographic, spiritual, political? Why was the world designed to be ruled by people who are breaking it apart? Would it not have been more intelligent to design members of the most powerful species to work together coherently for self-preservation, than for them to to lock each other into concentration camps or to hack each other to death with machetes while we cower in our churches? If we have been intelligently designed, why do we act so stupid? And if the designer’s design reaches our biology (as well as all the other conditions of the natural world) but not our behavior, does the theory really make sense anymore - as, for example, when it’s used to support the “wrongness” of homosexuality but not the “wrongness” of nazism? If we can find a biological basis for any behavior, such as homosexuality or, in the alternative, sociopathology, does that mean that it’s tacitly “endorsed” by the designer and should be celebrated as a part of the natural order of the world? Did the creator create homosexuality? If so, why is it considered “wrong”? If not, why is the design considered so intelligent, when it has such greivously unintended consequences?
* The argument has often been made by ID proponents that biology is chock-full of “irreducably complex” phenomena - things so complicated and so perfectly suited to their function and purpose that no intermediate “evolutionary” stages could have been successful. There’s also talk about how you never saw a wristwatch, or a camera, or a car or a building, that hadn’t been designed in some way. (In fact, in terms of architecture, the phenomenon of vernacular architecture disproves that theory - the world is full of buildings that people just built, without design, created out of necessity and circumstances, not with a coherent design firmly in mind.) Let us consider the eye, they tell us - irreducably complex; no “half-eye” would have been an evolutionary advantage so none would have been created by natural processes. Therefore, we must accept that fully-formed eyes were designed for the purpose of seeing, just as we use them today. A parallel analogy would be the fuel injector in your car. No car is built without a fuel injector, and no car can operate without one. It must have been created out of whole cloth as an inherent component of auto manufacturing, or the underlying principle of the automobile would never have been successful. Except that there didn’t use to be fuel injectors. Instead we had a carburator and a suction-driven fuel pump that was adjusted with a manual choke. The irreducable complexity of the fuel injector is the end product of synthesizing other less complex mechanisms. The computer we built to make atom bombs and to make space travel possible has been retasked to control the flow of gasoline to internal combustion engines - a function previously performed by cruder components. Irreducable complexity theory is, in fact, a theory based explicitally on the limits of human knowledge. So my question, here, is this: Why should we assume that the snapshot we hold before us of the world as it exists today, accurately reflects conditions and responses that have been true since beginning of terrestrial life so that we can make any kind of assumption about how irreducably complex anything is?
And in the end that’s my main concern about ID: it enshrines our own ignorance as the basis of a theory of creation. When this sort of celebration of our own limitations masquerades as science, we lose any claim to being intelligent beings. We go where we aim, and science is the cross-hairs of that aim. If we aim for the stars, we get there. If we aim for the secrets of life, we get there. And if we aim for a theory of the universe that’s based on never being able to understand how it all happened, you can bet we’ll get there too. I just never thought that was where we were going.
