Steve Fuller:
Intelligent design theory (ID), the latest version of scientific creationism to challenge the Darwinian orthodoxy in biology, is in the unenviable position of being damned as both bad science and bad theology. However, if those charges are true, then the basis of our belief in both science and God may be irrational. At the very least, ID suggests that belief in the two may be interdependent. I agree with ID on this point, which provides the main thesis of my latest book, a defence of science as an "art of living".
The most basic formulation of ID is that biology is divine technology. In other words, God is no less " and possibly no more " than an infinitely better version of the ideal Homo sapiens, whose distinctive species calling card is art, science and technology. Thus, when ID supporters claim that a cell is as intelligently designed as a mousetrap, they mean it literally. The difference between God and us is simply that God is the one being in whom all of our virtues are concentrated perfectly, whereas for our own part those virtues are distributed imperfectly amongst many individuals.
It is easy to imagine how this way of putting our relationship with God would result in many academic disputes " and it has. But the basic point that remains radical to this day is that, in important ways, the divine and the human are comparable. Notwithstanding Adam's fall, we are still created "in the image and likeness of God". From this biblical claim it follows that we might be capable of deploying the powers that distinguish us from the other animals to come closer to God. Such is the theological template on which the secular idea of progress was forged during the scientific revolution.
This point is of more than historical interest because the scientific projects that have most impressed humanity presuppose what the philosopher Thomas Nagel has called "the view from nowhere", aka "the mind of God". I mean to include here not only the achievements of Newton and Einstein, which allow us to comprehend a universe only a tiny fraction of which we will ever experience directly, but also Charles Darwin's conceptualisation of natural history long before humans first walked the earth. Yet, from a strictly evolutionary standpoint, it is by no means clear what adaptive advantage any of this knowledge has provided us as a species whose members still struggle on earth to survive roughly 75 years.
On the contrary, the second world war " if the first had not already " demonstrated the levels of global risk that we have been willing to tolerate in the pursuit of science and technology. And that faith remains unabated. Nowadays what passes for "anti-science", be it New Age movements or ID itself, mostly reflects distrust in established scientific authorities. It is no more anti-science than the original Protestant reformers were atheists. If anything, these developments " which I have dubbed "Protscience" " speak to the increasing desire of people to take science into their own hands in the 20th and 21st centuries, as they did religion in the 16th and 17th centuries. In this context, the internet today functions very much as the printing press did five centuries ago.
Insofar as we continue to put aside our misgivings that science might destroy us and the planet " that we pursue nuclear energy despite the atom bomb, that we pursue genetics despite the Holocaust, that we pursue social science despite brainwashing and surveillance " we are trading on a residual sense of our closeness to God. Indeed, the Christian doctrine of providence, which was designed to instil perseverance in the face of adversity, is the model for this curious, and some would say, blind faith in science. Certainly such a view makes more sense if God is thought to reveal his handiwork in nature, as ID supporters presume, than if the deity is inscrutable or non-existent, as ID opponents normally do.
In this context, Charles Darwin himself provides an instructive lesson. He began as an ID supporter but fell from the fold when he could not square the mass extinctions, monstrous events and design flaws so evident in nature with a super-smart, super-good, super-powerful deity that might serve as a beacon for human progress. As this awareness set in, Darwin gradually became more pessimistic about science's capacity to ameliorate the human condition. In every science-led policy initiative of his day " not only eugenics and vivisection but even publicity about contraception " Darwin always took a cautious line, doubting the policy's ultimate efficacy and warning about the dangers of "fixed ideas", whether based on science or religion (or both).
Of course, Darwin may be right about all this, but science would not have taken the shape or acquired the significance it has if we agreed with him.
Michael Ruse:
At the heart of Steve Fuller's defence of intelligent design theory (ID) is a false analogy. He compares the struggles of the ID supporters to the travails of the Protestant Reformers. Just as they stood against the established Catholic church, so the ID supporters stand against establishment science, specifically Darwinian evolutionary theory. Where this comparison breaks down is that the Protestants were no less Christians than the Catholics. It was rather that they differed over the right way to get to heaven. For the Protestants it was justification through faith, believing in the Lord, whereas for Catholics, it was good works. Given that Saint Augustine, some thousand years before, had labeled the Catholic position the heresy of Pelagianism, the reformers had a good point.
In the ID case, whatever its supporters may say publicly for political purposes " in the USA thanks to the First Amendment you cannot teach religion in state-funded schools " the intention is to bring God into the causal process. ID claims that there are some phenomena (like the bacterial flagellum and the blood-clotting cascade) are so "irreducibly complex," that to explain them we must invoke an "intelligent designer." As they admit among themselves " the philosopher-mathematician William Dembski is quite clear on this " the designer is none other than our old friend the God of Christianity. The logos of the early chapters of the Gospel of Saint John, as Dembski confidently states.
The trouble for the Fuller analogy is that science simply does not allow God as a causal factor. It is not a question of being an atheist or not. In the nineteenth century, even those who thought that there could be no natural explanation of organic origins realized that the appeal to divine intervention takes one out of science. In the words of the English historian and philosopher of science, William Whewell " an ordained Anglican who so disliked evolutionary speculations that, when he was master of Trinity College, Cambridge, he would not allow a copy of the Origin of Species in the college library " when it comes to science on origins: "The mystery of creation is not within the range of her legitimate territory; she says nothing, but she points upwards."
In the 20th century, two of the most important Darwinian biologists " Ronald Fisher in England and the Russian-born Theodosius Dobzhansky in America " were deeply committed Christians. But they would never, ever have introduced God into their work. Like all scientists, they were "methodological atheists." You don't have to be at one with Richard Dawkins on the God question to do evolutionary biology. ID is not science and, like its predecessor, Scientific Creationism, it only pretends to be science to do a political and legal end-run around the US Constitution.
Contrary to Fuller, although ID is not bad science " it is not science at all " its intent is deeply corrosive of real science. As Thomas Kuhn pointed out repeatedly, when scientists cannot find solutions, they don't blame the world. They blame themselves. You don't give up in the face of disappointments. You try again. Imagine if Watson and Crick had thrown in the towel when their first model of the DNA molecule proved fallacious. The very essence of ID is admitting defeat and invoking inexplicable miracles. The bacterial flagellum is complex. Turn to God! The blood clotting cascade is long and involved. Turn to God! That is simply not the way to do science. And as it happens, both the flagellum and the cascade have revealed their very natural, law-bound mysteries to regular scientists who keep plugging away and wouldn't take "no" for an answer.
ID is theology " very bad theology. As soon as you bring God into the world on a daily creative basis, then the theodicy problem " the problem of evil " rears its ugly head. If God works away miraculously to do the very complex, presumably in the name of goodness, then why on earth does God not occasionally get involved miraculously to prevent the very simple with horrendous consequences? Some very, very minor genetic changes have truly dreadful effects, causing people life-long pain and despair. If God thought it worth His time to make the blood clot, then why was it not worth His time to prevent Huntingdon's Chorea?
Keep God out of the day-to-day functioning of things. If, like the archbishop of Canterbury, you absolutely must have God do law-breaking miracles " apparently he would give up and become a Quaker if the tomb had not been empty on the third day " then at least restrict His activities to the cause of our salvation.
ID is the most recent manifestation of a particular form of 19th-century, American, Protestant, evangelical thinking. We don't want it in America and you don't want it in Britain either. Take it from Michael Ruse, a Brit living in America, that you shouldn't listen to Steve Fuller, an American living in Britain.
