Intelligent Design Is Creationism in a Cheap Tuxedo

My deliberately provocative title is borrowed from Leonard Krishtalka, who directs the Natural History Museum at the University of Kansas. Hired-gun "design theorists" in cheap tuxedos have met with some success in getting close to their target: public science education. I hope to convince you that this threat is worth paying attention to. As I write, intelligent design (ID) is a hot issue in the states of Washington and Ohio (see Physics Today, May 2002, page 31*). Evolutionary biology is ID's primary target, but geology and physics are within its blast zone.

Creationism evolves. As in biological evolution, old forms persist alongside new. After the Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925, creationists tried to get public schools to teach biblical accounts of the origin and diversity of life. Various courts ruled the strategy unconstitutional. Next came the invention of "creation science," which was intended to bypass constitutional protections. It, too, was recognized by the courts as religion. Despite adverse court rulings, creationists persist in reapplying these old strategies locally. In many places, the pressure keeps public school biology teachers intimidated and evolution quietly minimized.

However, a new strategy, based on so-called ID theory, is now at the cutting edge of creationism. ID is different from its forebears. It does a better job of disguising its sectarian intent. It is well funded and nationally coordinated. To appeal to a wider range of people, biblical literalism, Earth's age, and other awkward issues are swept under the rug. Indeed, ID obfuscates sufficiently well that some educated people with little background in the relevant science have been taken in by it. Among ID's diverse adherents are engineers, doctors--and even physicists.

ID advocates can't accept the inability of science to deal with supernatural hypotheses, and they see this limitation as a sacrilegious denial of God's work and presence. Desperately in need of affirmation, they invent "theistic science" in which the design of the Creator is manifest. Perhaps because their religious faith is rather weak, they need to bolster their beliefs every way they can--including hijacking science to save souls and prove the existence of God.

William Dembski, a mathematician and philosopher at Baylor University and one of ID's chief advocates, asserts that: " . . . any view of the sciences that leaves Christ out of the picture must be seen as fundamentally deficient."1 Whether or not they agree with Dembski on this point, most Americans hold some form of religious belief. Using what they call the Wedge Strategy,2 ID advocates seek to pry Americans away from "naturalistic science" by forcing them to choose between science and religion. ID advocates know that science will lose. They portray science as we know it as innately antireligious, thereby blurring the distinction between science and how science may be interpreted.

When presenting their views before the public, ID advocates generally disguise their religious intent. In academic venues, they avoid any direct reference to the Designer. They portray ID as merely an exercise in detecting design, citing examples from archaeology, the SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) project, and other enterprises. Cambridge University Press has published one ID book,3 which, the ID advocates repeatedly proclaim, constitutes evidence that their case has real scientific merit. ID creationist publications are nearly absent from refereed journals, and this state of affairs is presented as evidence of censorship.

This censorship, ID advocates argue, justifies the exploitation of public schools and the children in them to circumvent established scientific procedures. In tort law, expert scientific testimony must agree with the consensus of experts in a given field. No such limitation exists with respect to public education. ID advocates can snow the public and school boards with pseudoscientific presentations. As represented by ID advocates, biological evolution is a theory in crisis, fraught with numerous plausible-sounding failures, most of which are recycled from overt creationists. It is "only fair," the ID case continues, to present alternatives so that children can make up their own minds. Yesterday's alternative was "Flood geology." Today's is "design theory."

Fairness, open discussion, and democracy are core American values and often problematic. Unfortunately, journalists routinely present controversies where none exist, or they present political controversies as scientific controversies. Stories on conflicts gain readers, and advertising follows. This bias toward reporting conflicts, along with journalists' inability to evaluate scientific content and their unwillingness to do accuracy checks (with notable exceptions), are among the greatest challenges to the broad public understanding of science.

ID creationism is largely content-free rhetoric. Michael Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University and an ID proponent, argues that many biochemical and biophysical mechanisms are "irreducibly complex."4 He means that, if partially dismembered, they would not work, so they could not have evolved. This line of argument ignores the large number of biological functions that look irreducibly complex, but for which intermediates have been found. One response to Behe's claims consists of the tedious task of demonstrating functions in a possible evolutionary path to the claimed irreducibly complex state. When presented with these paths, Behe typically ignores them and moves on. I admire the people who are willing to spend the time to put together the detailed refutations.5

The position of an ID creationist can be summarized as: "I can't understand how this complex outcome could have arisen, so it must be a miracle." In an inversion of the usual procedure in science, the null hypothesis is taken to be the thing Dembski, Behe, and their cohorts want to prove, albeit with considerable window-dressing. Dembski classifies all phenomena as resulting from necessity, chance, or design. In ruling out necessity, he means approximately that one could not predict the detailed structures and information we see in biological systems from the laws of physics. His reference to chance is essentially equivalent to the creationist use of one of the red herrings introduced by Fred Hoyle:

A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there?6 Having dispensed with necessity and chance, Dembski concludes that design has been detected on the grounds that nothing else can explain the phenomenon--at least according to him.

Of course, design has no predictive power. ID is not a scientific theory. If we had previously attributed the unexplainable to design, we would still be using Thor's hammer to explain thunder. Nor does ID have any technological applications. It can be fun to ask ID advocates about the practical applications of their work. Evolution has numerous practical technological applications, including vaccine development. ID has none.

As organisms evolve, they become more complex, but evolution doesn't contravene the second law of thermodynamics. Dembski, like his creationist predecessors, misuses thermodynamics. To support the case for ID, he has presented arguments based on a supposed Law of Conservation of Information, an axiomatic law that applies only to closed systems with very restricted assumptions.7 Organisms, of course, are not closed systems.

ID's reach extends beyond biology to physics and cosmology. One interesting discussion concerns the fundamental constants. There is a well-known point of view that our existence depends on a number of constants lying within a narrow range. As one might expect, the religious community has generally viewed this coincidence as evidence in favor of--or at least as a plausibility argument for--their beliefs. The ID creationist community has adopted the fundamental constants as additional evidence for their Designer of Life--apparently not realizing that many fine-tuning arguments are based on physical constants allowing evolution to proceed. Physical cosmology is largely absent from school science standards. Where present, as in Kansas, it is likely to come under ID attack.

I have only scratched the surface here. Don't assume everything is fine in your school system even if it seems free of conflict. Peace may mean that evolution, the core concept of biology, is minimized. No region of the country is immune. Watch out for the guys in tuxedos--they don't have violins in those cases.

Adrian Melott is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. He is also a founding board member of Kansas Citizens for Science.

Letters are encouraged and should be sent to Letters, Physics Today, American Center for Physics, One Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740-3842 or by e-mail to ptletter@aip.org (using your surname as "Subject"). Please include your affiliation, mailing address, and daytime phone number. We reserve the right to edit.

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References 1. W. Dembski, Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology, InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, Ill. (1999), p. 206. 2. See http://rnaworld.bio.ukans.edu/id-intro/sect3.html. Another source is http://www.sunflower.com/~jkrebs/JCCC/05%20Wedge_edited.html 3. W. Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities, Cambridge U. Press, New York (1998). For a review by W. Elsberry, see http://inia.cls.org/~welsberr/zgists/wre/papers/dembski7.html. 4. M. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, Free Press, New York (1996). 5. See http://www.world-of-dawkins.com/catalano/box/behe.htm. See also http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~lindsay/creation/behe.html 6. F. Hoyle, The Intelligent Universe, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, New York (1983), p. 18. 7. W. Dembski, No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Md. (2002).

Because atoms exist within space-time. Everything that exists within space-time comes into being at some point along this continuum.

Then why should one believe that anything exists outside? What does "exist" mean? (Cleverly avoiding the synomym "is".)

"But he had the capacity to create "time and space." Therefore "time and space" co-existed with God in this pre-"time and space" non-time/non-space."

Non-Sequitur.

If there was no "time" before "time", then God had this whole "matter of the universe" ability the entire time (non-time) before time.

God spent his time (non-time) before time, thinking about what to create to take away his lonely time (non-time) before time time.

Acutally, if God had two thoughts in a row before time (non-time) that would fit any meaninful definition of the passage of time. So this whole God before time thing doesn't make a lick of sense -- since it implies stasis devoid of the slightest change -- including the sequence of thought of any God-like critter.

Clearly the universe came into being at an event called the "Big Bang". Things fell into place in just such a way that we concious entities came into being. We have a few options to account for this. A quantum vaccum fluctuation after which there was chaos and we are the result of a long series of amazing coincidences (this idea is replete with complications). The other option is that the universe and all that exists are the exquisite creation of an infinitely intelligent mind. A year or so ago, another option might have been a cyclical universe that expands and contracts over and over. Unfortunately science is now fairly certain that ours is a universe that will expand infinitely. It is truly unique. You might like Stephen Hawking's fanciful notion of imaginary time along which universes sprout like buds on a vine. I guess it comes down to what you choose to believe.

It means that God didn't come from anywhere. To come from a place implies both space, and time. Any theist will tell you God created both. It is hard for humans to comprehend of any entity which does not require a beginning. That is no reason to assume such an entity cannot "exist" for lack of a better word.

While there is no reason to assume such an entity cannot exist, what's the rationale for assuming one does? Should we take up the most preposterous possibility first?

So the point is to introduce Christ into science.

LOL

"Mr. Science, I'd like to to meet a friend of mine - Jesus Christ - the author and creator of all that you know."
"Uhhh... we've met."

How is "a specialized light bone structure" anitfunctional?

Light bones and long, fragile limbs, such as an arm 70% of the way to being a wing, would be a horrible disadvantage for a land animal. Out there in the jungle, an animal only gets one chance to have an arm broken.

we are the result of a long series of amazing coincidences

As complex as the material universe is, religionists assert a far more complex and powerful god/creator. If the material universe is too complex to be created by anything other than a creator, then the creator himself is VASTLY too complex to have been created by anthing other than a VASTLY more complex creator, ad infinitum.

Yes I can envision the next generation, home schooled, or schooled in ID junk science, directing America technology. The net result of such thinking leads to hiding in caves and praying to god for deliverance from your enemies’ smart bombs, as we have seen in Afghanistan.

I follow these threads as a pure lurker. I find it interesting that many comments from the evolution side tend to be immature personal attacks like the one above. Occasionally, I will read a good discussion between two intelligent scientists on this issue, but I do not expect one from this poster.

I have just one key comment here: if it is the case that America looses its technological edge because of poor schooling, it sure will not be because of home schooling or Christian schooling. It will be due to public schools. Many non-Christians put their kids into Christian schools for the better education. If you really care about teaching kids, why do you not focus on the problem. I dare you to get involved in a local public school. If you really are a scientist (atheist, Christian, whatever), you will probably be amazed and appalled. My background is in mathematics, and I am saddened by today’s graduates.

Fortunately, as we know, gravity was much less back then than it is now, so broken-bone injuries must have been commensurately less frequent, right?

I have just one key comment here: if it is the case that America looses its technological edge because of poor schooling, it sure will not be because of home schooling or Christian schooling.

Well, certainly not because of Catholic schooling -- they teach evolution. I know, I went to a Catholic school. I was taught evolution.

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