April 5, 2004

Piling On Intelligent Design

Everywhere I click in the last few weeks, folk are talking about Intelligent Design theories and working themselves into a mighty froth over the theories and the tactics of those who advance them.

Rather than joining the pile-on right away—though as you’ll see, I’ll get around to it eventually—I thought it might be worth taking a deep breath beforehand, partially because it doesn’t seem to me absolutely intrinsically impossible that one could find evidence of intelligent design in the universe. I suppose that’s what I now class myself as an agnostic rather than an atheist. I see no reason at all to think that such a designer exists, but I’m an open-minded guy.

So perhaps the first reaction one should have to intelligent design theories is to specify in advance what real, meaningful evidence could reasonably occasion a scientifically-sound hypothesis in favor of an intelligent designer. There are lots of personalized ways ID could be confirmed. Dying and finding oneself in an afterlife where a Supreme Being personally affirmed that he was in fact the designer of the universe would be one such source of evidence. A bit hard to repeat the experiment, though. Revelatory personal contact with God would be confirmation for a single person (though there would always be the possibility that you were suffering from mental illness) but that also can’t be shared or repeated.

What external, repeated evidence could there be? What would ID predict? God or his agents could appear physically in the world and cause events to happen for which there could be no other explanation save divine power, where we widely agreed that we had witnessed such events, or had repeatable confirmation via video or other recording devices that such events had happened. God could put a genetic watermark into the DNA of all living things that spelled out “Organism by God” in English. Equally unmistakeable signs—and we’re not talking a Rorsach-blot picture of a weeping Jesus on a tree stump here—would be enough. We could probably list them predictively with some reasonable precision.

What would not suffice, as many have noted, is a demonstration that our current theories cannot explain some aspect of observable reality. That proves nothing about an intelligent designer. And as many have also noted, even if one conceded most of the ID arguments of this kind, they would tell you nothing about the identity of the intelligent designer—it could just as easily be Yog-Sothoth or a mad scientist from Dimension X as it could be God.

The thing that is puzzling in a way is why most Christians would bother with intelligent design. Modern Christianity, even high rationalist Catholicism, acknowledges the special role of faith. Who is intelligent design intended for? A Christian who needs such an exotic, Rube-Goldberg crutch to achieve faith is very possibly a person whose belief in God is already on the verge of collapsing, unless they’re a strict ‘blind watchmaker’ deist. And yet, if this was the point of ID, I personally would have no real problem with it. Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins and various atheists who have made a point out of confronting and pursuing religious people have typically misunderstood three things: first, the social, cultural and psychological generativity and productivity of religious beliefs; second, the conditional rationality of many of them (e.g., they're reasonable readings or interpretations of certain events or phenomena but only in the absence of additional information); third, the degree to which it is completely rational (indeed, scientific) to be skeptical about the authority of science and scientists, especially when that authority is marshalled behind the making of public policy.

If any individual needs ID to bolster his personal faith, that’s fine with me. If believers want to share ID among themselves, then that too is fine, but considered purely as a matter of intellectual and social history, that says something interesting and perhaps even comforting about the ascension of scientific reason as the dominant spirit of our age, that Christian faithful would feel the need to translate their faith into the terms and norms of pseudo-science in order to legitimate it among themselves.

This is not what the struggle over intelligent design is about, however. Its proponents do not use it as a private foundation for their faith, or a shared liturgy. They want it to stand equally with evolution within the architecture of public reason. This is where the opponents of ID draw the line, and rightfully so, because what it reveals is that ID is a highly intentional mindfuck of the first order. It’s not intended for the faithful, and it’s not based on credible evidence. It’s intended for those who do not believe in God. It is a tool of subversion intended to produce conversion. It is a Trojan Horse attempt to speak in the language of the non-Christian Other while actively trying to obfuscate and sabotage that language. It is dishonest. This is why Brian Leiter and many others are perfectly right to react with such intensity to ID, because it is often a quite conscious attempt to pollute and despoil the utility and value of scientific thought and illicitly limit its domains within the social and intellectual life of the nation.

Christians have as much right as anyone to persuasively address their fellow citizens on behalf of their own cultural and social projects. However, participating in public reason in a democratic society obligates us all to honesty, to placing all our cards on the table. I will gladly hear a Christian try to persuade me to their faith, even if they talk in terms of arguments for intelligent design, as long as it is a two-way conversation, transparent to the public sphere. Trying to convert me by monkey-wrenching the general productivity of my everyday working epistemologies is a different matter, however. I react to that about as well I would react to someone slashing the tires on my car.