If ID Theorists Are Right, How Should We Study Nature?

One can at least point a direction by now. I began this series by asking, what has materialism (naturalism) done for science? It made a virtue of preferring theory to evidence, if the theory supports naturalism and the evidence doesn't. Well-supported evidence that undermines naturalism (the Big Bang and fine tuning of the universe, for example) attracted increasingly speculative attempts at disconfirmation. Discouraging results from the search for life on Mars cause us to put our faith in life on exoplanets -- lest Earth be seen as unusual (the Copernican Principle).

All this might be just the beginning of a great adventure. World-changing discoveries, after all, have originated in the oddest circumstances. Who would have expected the Americas to be discovered by people who mainly wanted peppercorns, cinnamon, sugar, and such? But disturbingly, unlike the early modern adventurers who encountered advanced civilizations, we merely imagine them. We tell ourselves they must exist; in the absence of evidence, we make faith in them a virtue. So while Bigfoot was never science, the space alien must always be so, even if he is forever a discipline without a subject.

But the evidence is still there, all along the road to reality. It is still saying what the new cosmologies do not want to hear. And the cost of ignoring it is the decline of real-world programs like NASA in favor of endlessly creative speculation. It turns out that, far from being the anchor of science, materialism has become its millstone.

But now, what if the ID theorists are right, that information rather than matter is the basic stuff of the universe? It is then reasonable to think that meaning underlies the universe. Meaning cannot then be explained away. It is the irreducible core. That is why reductive efforts to explain away evidence that supports meaning (Big Bang, fine-tuning, physical laws) have led to contradictory, unresearchable, and unintelligible outcomes.

The irreducible core of meaning is controversial principally because it provides support for theism. But the alternative has provided support for unintelligibility. Finally, one must choose. If we choose what intelligent design theorist Bill Dembski calls "information realism," the way we think about cosmology changes.

First, we live with what the evidence suggests. Not simply because it suits our beliefs but because research in a meaningful universe should gradually reveal a comprehensible reality, as scientists have traditionally assumed. If information, not matter, is the substrate of the universe, key stumbling blocks of current materialist science such as origin of life, of human beings, and of human consciousness can be approached in a different way. An information approach does not attempt to reduce these phenomena to a level of complexity below which they don't actually exist.

Materialist origin of life research, for example, has been an unmitigated failure principally because it seeks a high and replicable level of order that just somehow randomly happened at one point. The search for the origin of the human race has been similarly vitiated by the search for a not-quite-human subject, the small, shuffling fellow behind the man carrying the spear. In this case, it would have been well if researchers had simply never found their subject. Unfortunately, they have attempted at times to cast various human groups in the shuffler's role. Then gotten mired in controversy, and largely got the story wrong and missed its point.

One would have thought that materialists would know better than to even try addressing human consciousness. But materialism is a totalistic creed or else it is nothing. Current theories range from physicist Max Tegmark's claim that human consciousness is a material substance through to philosopher Daniel Dennett's notion that it is best treated somewhat like "figments of imagination" (don't ask whose) through philosopher Alex Rosenberg's idea that consciousness is a problem that will have to be dissolved by neuroscience. All these theories share two characteristics: They reduce consciousness to something that it isn't. And they get nowhere with understanding what it is. The only achievement that materialist thought can claim in the area of consciousness studies is to make them sound as fundamentally unserious as many current cosmologies. And that is no mean feat.

Suppose we look at the origin of life from an information perspective. Life forms show a much higher level of information, however that state of affairs came about, than non-living matter does. From our perspective, we break no rule if we assume, for the sake of investigation, that the reason we cannot find evidence for an accidental origin of life is that life did not originate in that way. For us, nothing depends one way or the other on demonstrating that life was an accident. We do not earn the right to study life's origin by declaring that "science" means assuming that such a proposition is true and proceeding from there irrespective of consequences. So, with this in mind, what are we to make of the current state of origin-of-life research?

Editor's note: Here is the "Science Fictions" series to date at your fingertips .

Intelligent design is not creationism, nor is it a religious position. It is the application of design theory to the natural and living world. Intelligent design theorists point to the existence of precise physical laws and the fine tuning of universal constants, the staggering complexity and nanotechnology of the living cell, and the digitally-coded information content of DNA as evidence for a designing intelligence.

You know that, dear Heartlander; I know that.

But try to explain that to a materialist who has already decided that all this "evidence of a designing intelligence" is something to ignore in principle. ID is ruled off the reservation, because in the minds of its critics, it can only mean (bottom line) an overt or covert search for "proof" of the existence of a creator god.

The creator god, of course, is in their minds merely a primitive superstition of ignorant mankind. To blast the ignorant out of their complacency, they love to point to the absurdity of "special creation," wherein the creator god is presumed to have made all things, as James S. Trefil puts it, "laboriously, piece by piece."

But it seems to me that "special creation" might rather be understood as referring to a particular, unrepeatable event that initiates, ex nihilo, an evolving Cosmos from a singular beginning of space and time, of "matter," of life and mind, of the basic organizational rules physical and moral that maintain the Order of this Creation over time. Thus to me, the Big Bang/Singularity/Inflationary Universe model does not seem inconsistent with the idea of the creative Word (Logos) of God in the Beginning.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
The same was in the beginning with God.
All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
In him was life; and the life was the light of men. — John 1:1–4

But design theory per se is really not involved in such disputes, which are philosophical and theological at bottom. It's just trying to explain the accumulating evidence that the universe really cannot be exhaustively explained on the premises of materialist reductionism and mechanism. Life and mind (consciousness) seem to resist explanation on these terms.

But hey, that's just me, just my view from where I stand. People see what they see from their own particular vantage point. But as Einstein reminds us, the physical laws are the same for all observers, regardless of where they stand.

I can see the other POV — the materialist one premised in reductionism. Here's James Trefil again [in The Moment of Creation: Big Bang Physics from before the First Millisecond to the Present Universe, 1983]:

We stand, in fact, on the verge of the ultimate triumph of the reductionist idea. Within a few years, we may very well realize that if we probe deeply enough, we will find a universe that is the ultimate in simplicity and beauty. All of the apparent complexity we see will be understood in terms of an underlying system in which particles of one type interact with each other through one kind of force. If this sort of theory is actually developed, it will be the culmination of a philosophical quest that began over two millennia ago in the Greek Ionian colonies....

Thus the noble aspiration. But does it hold water? Certainly Trefil takes "simplicity" and "beauty" very seriously. But on the other hand, what in materialist reductionism can account for this, his particular personal predilection for/attraction to simplicity and beauty? And by what criterion are they to be defined?

The "instinct" for simplicity and beauty would seem to me to be irreducible to materialist terms. Thus I "hit the wall" of the same problem that keeps the design theorists up at night. (So to speak.)

Notwithstanding, I highly recommend Trefil's valuable book. He strikes me as an intellectually honest man. Responding to the hypothetical question "What About God?" (not the best-formulated question I've ever seen), he writes:

When I talk to my friends about the fact that the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed relentlessly back toward the moment of creation, I am often asked about the religious implications of the new physics. That there are such implications is obvious, particularly in the speculations about how the universe came into existence in the first place. Physicists normally feel very uncomfortable with this sort of question, since it cannot be answered by the normal methods of our science [Trefil is professor of physics at U-VA]. For what it is worth, I will give my own personal views on the subject here, with the caveat that these views may not be shared by other scientists.

It seems to me that the unease people feel when they think about the sort of scientific advance implicit in the new physics arises from the notion that applying the techniques of science to the creation of the universe is somehow encroaching on terrain that has been staked out by religion....
...No matter how deeply we probe into any scientific subject, we will always find something unexplained and undefined....
...It now appears that our new discoveries of the laws that govern the nature of elementary particles may allow us to push the frontiers back to the very creation of the universe itself. This does not, however, alter the fact that there is a frontier. All it does is transfer our attention from the material form of the universe to the laws that govern its behavior. [Ed. note: Jeepers, that's what I thought design theory was doing....] I can hear a twenty-first century philosopher saying, "Very well, we agree that the universe exists because of the laws of physics. But who created those laws? [Ed. note: a bit of "question-begging" there IMHO; for we need not stipulate a "who" in advance; hypothetically, it could be a "what" {though ultimately, I personally doubt it}] And even if, as some physicists have suggested, the laws of physics we discover are the only laws that are logically consistent with each other (and therefore the only laws that could exist), our philosopher would ask, "Who made the laws of logic?"
My message, then, to those who feel that science is overstepping its bounds when it probes the early universe is simple: don't worry. No matter how far the boundaries are pushed back, there will always be room both for religious faith and a religious interpretation of the physical world.
For myself, I feel much more comfortable with the concept of a God who is clever enough to devise laws of physics that make the existence of our marvelous universe inevitable than I do with the old-fashioned God who had to make it all laboriously, piece by piece. [Ed. note: sorry to litter up the landscape with the "Ed. notes"; but I do have quibbles with some of Trefil's statements.... Itals added for emphasis]

Just some "grist for the mill!" Must leave it there for now.

Thank you so very much, dear Heartlander, for the ping — and for introducing me to Denyse O’Leary. Verrrrrry interesting! [Though I'm kinder to Max Tegmark than she is.]

LDS believe matter is eternal and in some distant past ‘eternity’ a god sired the present god of our universe being ruled from a planet orbiting Koleb”

Spirited: Actually, the way it works is that the LDS god (primal man) mechanically evolved out of matter in the same way that Ra mechanically evolved out of Nu-—primordial matter.

We are agreed on such idiocy.

With respect to ID, if you’ll recall, my initial response was to Heartlander’s —own-— definition of ID. To wit:

“Intelligent design is not creationism, nor is it a religious position. It is the application of design theory to the natural and living world.”

Heartlander’s definition immediately precludes creation by the living supernatural God then goes on to define it as the application of design theory “to the natural and living world.” By definition, this is one-dimensional pantheism.

Christian theism is not one-dimensional but two-dimensional. There are two interfacing, interactive dimensions. The personal God dwells in the third heaven-—outside of the space-time dimension. He created heaven and earth (space-time dimension) through His living Word in six instantaneous acts of creation, since in the beginning was the Word (Augustine). God made heaven and earth in the beginning, not in the beginning of time but in Christ (Chrysostom, Augustine). God created the matter of the heavens and the matter of the earth, which came to be from nothing (Basil, Nemesius of Emesa) The meaning of creation is known from Divine Revelation (Basil). To Moses, God’s revelation of the beginnings was made adequately known and his account is to be fully trusted (Chrysostom).

It is largely accepted by modern men that the reason—natural science, theories, systems, etc.— and mystical encounters of men (i.e., Teilhard de Chardin) are superior to the Revealed Revelation of God. Moderns do not trust His Revealed Word, hence they run from the word “creation” as though it will taint them.

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