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April 14, 2002
'Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics': Supernatural Selection
By JIM HOLT
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INTELLIGENT DESIGN CREATIONISM AND ITS CRITICS
Philosophical, Theological, and Scientific Perspectives.
Edited by Robert T. Pennock.
Illustrated. 805 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: A Bradford Book/The MIT Press. Cloth, $110. Paper, $45.
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 n the last decade or so, creationism has grown sophisticated. Oh, the old-fashioned creationists are still around, especially in the Bible Belt. They're the ones who believe that the earth is only a few thousand years old, that God created it and all its inhabitants in six days and that fossils are a product of Noah's flood. In the early 1990's, however, a new breed of creationists appeared. These ''neo-creos,'' as they have been called, are no Dogpatch hayseeds. They have Ph.D.'s and occupy positions at some of the better universities. The case they make against Darwinism does not rest on the authority of Scripture; rather, it proceeds from premises that are scientific and philosophical, invoking esoteric ideas in molecular biology, information theory and the logic of hypothesis testing.
When the neo-creos go public -- as they did recently in a hearing before the Ohio Board of Education, which they were petitioning for equal time in the classroom with Darwinism -- they do not stake any obviously foolish claims. They concede that the earth is billions of years old, and that some evolution may have taken place once the basic biochemical structures were brought into being. What they deny is that the standard Darwinian theory, or any other ''naturalistic'' theory that confines itself to mindless, mechanical causes operating gradually over time, suffices to explain the whole of life. The biological world, they contend, is rife with evidence of intelligent design -- evidence that points with near certainty to the intervention of an Intelligent Designer. ''Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics'' is a great fat collection of essays, some three dozen in all, that examine this thesis from every imaginable angle. Its editor, the philosopher Robert T. Pennock, has himself written a book opposing the neo-creos (''Tower of Babel,'' 1999), and he admits that his selection here is stacked against them by about two to one. Yet most of the major proponents of intelligent design are represented: Phillip E. Johnson, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the father of the movement; the biochemist Michael J. Behe; the mathematician William A. Dembski; and the philosopher of logic Alvin Plantinga. They are given the chance not only to present their reasoning but also to defend it against their more prominent Darwinian critics, including the biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins and the philosophers of science Philip Kitcher and Michael Ruse. The debate ranges freely over genetics, theology, the history of science and the theory of knowledge. The rhetoric is spirited, if sometimes barely civil, and the to-and-fro of ideas can be impressive. Before we get to the scientific arguments of the neo-creos, a word should be said about their motivation. Just what do they have against Darwinism? Unlike the old-fashioned creationists, they are not especially worried about evolution conflicting with a literal reading of Genesis. Then why can't they join with the mainstream religions, which have made their peace with Darwinism? In 1996, for example, Pope John Paul II said that the theory of evolution had been ''proved true'' and asserted its consistency with Roman Catholic doctrine. Stephen Jay Gould, though agnostic himself, salutes the wisdom of this papal pronouncement, arguing that science and religion are ''nonoverlapping magisteria.'' But the neo-creos aren't buying this. They think that belief in Darwinism and belief in God are fundamentally incompatible. Here, ironically, they are in agreement with their more radical Darwinian opponents. Both extremes concur that evolution is, in the words of Phillip Johnson, ''a purposeless and undirected process that produced mankind accidentally'' and, as such, must be at odds with the idea of a purposeful Creator. The neo-creos are right to think that evolution is not religiously neutral. If nothing else, it undercuts what has traditionally been the most powerful argument for God's existence, the ''argument from design.'' No longer is the God hypothesis required to explain the intricate complexity of the living world. Christian intellectuals who accept Darwinism insist that evolution still leaves ample scope for a Creator-God, one who got the universe rolling in just the right way so that, by sheer chemistry and physics, beings like us would inevitably appear without further supernatural meddling. Ernan McMullin, a philosopher of science at Notre Dame who also happens to be a Catholic priest, argues that the resources of God's original creation ''were sufficient for the generation of the successive orders of complexity that make up our world.'' (Another contributor wonders whether the creationist idea of divine action hasn't been ''unduly affected by the 'special effects' industry.'') But this deistic notion of God holds little appeal for the neo-creos. They remain vexed that, as Richard Dawkins pointedly observes, ''Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.'' To regain the advantage for religion, the neo-creos have devised a two-part strategy. First, they try to establish their intelligent-design theory as the only alternative to Darwinism for explaining life. (The content of intelligent design is deliberately left vague: it can mean either creation by the designing agent or purposefully ''guided'' evolution.) Then they proceed negatively, deploying various arguments to show that Darwinian mechanisms could not possibly do the trick. The logic of this strategy is impeccable: Either Darwinism or intelligent design. Not Darwinism. Therefore, intelligent design. Armed with that conclusion, they hope to pry scientifically minded people away from a purely secular worldview. AT the moment, there is no serious scientific rival to Darwinism. Indeed, if the explanation for the origin and complexity of life must be sought in physical mechanisms, then an evolutionary theory of some sort would seem to be inevitable. But why, the neo-creos ask, should other sorts of explanations -- those positing intelligent causes, supernatural interventions -- be ruled out by fiat? To do so betrays a commitment to ''metaphysical naturalism,'' the doctrine that nature is a system of material causes and effects sealed off from outside influences; and that, they say, is a matter of faith, not proof. But the Darwinians have a devastating retort to the charge of metaphysical naturalism: nothing succeeds like success. As Michael Ruse points out, modern science's refusal to cry miracle when faced with explanatory difficulties has yielded ''fantastic dividends.'' Letting divine causes fill in wherever naturalistic ones are hard to find is not only bad theology -- it leaves you worshiping a ''God of the gaps'' -- but it is also a science-stopper. Besides, the evidence for Darwinism looks awfully strong. Yes, there are internal disagreements over the mechanisms and tempo of evolution. But the core thesis that all living things have a common ancestry, long supported by the pattern of structural similarities among them and by the fossil record, has received stunning new confirmation from molecular genetics. Johnson does his lawyerly best to cast doubt on the evidence for common ancestry. However, the more tough-minded of the neo-creos are willing to accept the historical claim that organisms evolved from one another. They even acknowledge a role for the standard Darwinian mechanism (natural selection operating on random variation) in the process. To make good on the second part of their strategy, the Not Darwinism part, they instead try to show that for deeper reasons Darwinism is bound to fall short of telling the whole story. They have three main arguments, all of which seem clever at first blush.
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