2011 What's "Intelligent" About Intelligent Design?

Eugenie C. Scott, Ph. D., National Center for Science Education, Inc.

Sponsored by HUUmanists Association

Introduced by Dr. David Schafer of HUUmanists, Eugenie C. Scott, a physical anthropologist by education, began by recounting the founding of the National Center for Science Education. NCSE was created against a “background of a largely scientifically illiterate population” and the decline of science education. The organization was to work to get evolution into, and creationism out of, the curriculum. Scott noted wryly that when that work was done, she'd hoped to move on to other science education issues – but that time has not yet come.

She noted that there are basically two kinds of creationists: Bible-based creationists and design-based creationists. Bible-based creationism includes young earth creationism, “creation science,” and Genesis-based creationism, using literal interpretations of the Genesis creation story.

But not all creationists are Biblical literalists. Design-based creationism presents an explanation of creation that seems scientific. Scott explained this kind of creationism as teaching that the origin of “structural complexity” cannot be explained except by an intelligent being, “and the intelligent being just happens to spell its name with three letters.”

She spoke of the history of attempts to get “scientific creationism” into the public school curriculum, but in Edwards v. Aguillard the Supreme Court declared that the purpose of “scientific creationism” was really to teach a religious belief. But Justice Brennan's statement in the decision about the ability of teachers to “supplant the present science curriculum with the presentation of theories, besides evolution, about the origin of life” opened the door to another approach.

Some who had promoted “scientific creationism” began promoting the idea of teaching “scientific alternatives to evolution” – the “abrupt appearance theory didn't last long,” Scott said as an aside – and so young earth creationism proponents “morphed into” being “intelligent design” proponents.

The first explication of “intelligent design” was promoted in the book, The Mystery of Life's Origin: Reassessing Current Theories. The underlying idea is that life is too complicated to ever explain its origin by the operation of natural processes. This argument has much in common with the “argument from design” put forward by William Paley in 1802 in Natural Theology . In Paley's argument, if you find a watch (i.e. something “structurally complex”) you may infer a watchmaker. Paley used the vertebrate eye as another example of something that could not be explained without an intelligent designer. Thus, Darwin's writing on natural selection deliberately uses the structure of the eye to demonstrate how natural selection might explain the origin of natural structures.

Scott said that it's important to understand two levels of “intelligent design” (ID) – the scientific and philosophical claims, and the idea of cultural renewal.

The scientific/philosophical claims of intelligent design are:

1. The universe or parts of the universe have been specifically designed by an intelligence.
2. It is possible to detect evidence of design by “intelligence” either by using “irreducible complexity” or an “explanatory filter.”

Michael Behe, who teaches biochemistry at Lehigh University , is probably the leading proponent of ID (and one of the least doctrinaire about Biblical literalism). Behe looks at “irreducible complexity” at the biochemical and cellular level, and defines “irreducible complexity” as the condition in which all aspects of the structure must be present in order for the structure to function successfully.

Behe uses the analogy of a mousetrap, in which five parts must be present for the mechanism to work. Scott pointed out that if you Google “Behe mousetrap” you'll find that many people have indeed come up with “reduced mousetraps” of fewer parts, as a partial refutation of Behe's argument.

A standard biological example of “irreducible complexity” used by ID proponents is the bacteria flagellum, in which, Behe argues, 50 or more proteins need to be present in order for the organism to function. Thus, Behe argues, the bacteria flagellum could not have evolved, since there would be no selective advantage of a non-functional partial structure.

But this argument has been challenged, not least because parts may be argued to have had other functions. Like the mousetrap, parts of the flagellum exist elsewhere and are functional in those contexts, so one needs to look at whether a structure is really irreducibly complex – or if it is composed of parts with functional antecedents. Counter-examples which Scott cited include an antifreeze glycoprotein, which evolved from another protein, and the “Calvin system” involving catalyzing sugars and oxygen, which comes from functional subsystems.

Scott pointed out that the ID proponents pick out just the unsolved scientific questions like the bacteria flagellum. The bones of the middle ear, which can be seen as evolving from jaw bones in both embryonic change and the fossil record, could just as easily have been described as “irreducibly complex.” But it's hard to find a fossil record for micro-features like the flagellum, so refuting ID claims is difficult. “The goalposts will continue to move” as science finds explanations for one structure and then ID focuses on a different scientific unknown. Scott pointed out that such claims are theologically dangerous: when a “God of the gaps” is posited to explain what otherwise cannot be explained scientifically, that “diminishes God's majesty with each new scientific explanation.”

In short, Scott pointed out, the Behe argument is this:

a. Irreducible complexity exists;
b. Irreducible complexity cannot be explained through incremental natural selection; and
c.Therefore, irreducible complexity cannot have evolved.

Scott explained that this argument is flawed because part (a) is “true by definition,” (b) has not been demonstrated to be true, and (c) “is a false conclusion even if (a) and (b) are true.” What it really says, according to Scott, is that “the unknown is unknowable by definition.”

Part (d) of the ID argument is that irreducible complexity is evidence for design – and this, too, is a fallacious argument because it is a “conclusion from assertion.”

Still, “intelligent design” proponents continue to try to get their ideas taught in science classes. Scott asked, “What would they teach – that 'We can't explain this and we can't explain that'?”

“Intelligent design” is promoted through the Discover Institute in Seattle, founded in 1996. Scott showed how their logo and name have evolved (ironically) to remove images of Michaelangelo's depiction of the creation of Adam by God, replacing them by images of a galaxy called the Eye of God, and to change the name from the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture to simply Center for Science and Culture. The founders clearly remain, through these changes, concerned with secular cultural change. The trajectory of the attack, Scott said, is that by attacking evolution, they attack modern science, and by attacking science, they attack secularism.

The goals of the Institute include this: “To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies.” Scott pointed out that there are two ways that the word “materialism” is used. The first, methodological materialism, means to use natural causes to explain natural phenomena – that is, to avoid invoking supernatural causes. Science, Scott said, “has to hold variables constant…. How do you hold supernatural forces constant?” Such variables are set aside by science, because a scientist cannot order God to act in specific ways or “keep God out of the test tube. We don't have a ‘theometer.'”

The other kind of materialism is philosophical materialism, the idea that there is no reality beyond the material world. This is not the same as methodological materialism which only looks at what natural processes do and tries to find explanations. But often science is confused with atheism.

Cell division is equally as materialistic as is evolution, Scott said, but cell division doesn't have as much to do with meaning and purpose, so there is not the same emotional response.

Where are attempts to bring “intelligent design” into the science curriculum? Scott mentioned the Santorum amendment to the No Child Left Behind bill. In a section looking at critical thinking, this amendment singled out evolution among all scientific ideas for attention. The amendment didn't make it into the bill, “but unfortunately too many conservatives supported a rewritten version” where the language about evolution “stayed behind in supporting documents.” Though the language didn't make it into the bill itself, “the ‘intelligent design' people nevertheless claimed victory.”

Scott closed by recommending several books on the “intelligent design” controversy including Tower of Babel (Robert T. Pennock), Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design (Barbara Carroll Forrest and Paul R. Gross), and the forthcoming Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction, written by Eugenie C. Scott.

The National Center or Science Education, Inc., is a non-profit, tax-exempt membership organization working to defend the teaching of evolution against sectarian attack. For further information see their website .

Reported by Jone Johnson Lewis; edited by Joyce Holmen

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