MetaCatholic

Kevin Wilson addresses what he sees as the problem of Intelligent Design on his always interesting blog Blue Cord. Like him, I think there are problems with it, but I’m not sure that the problems he addresses are actually the right ones. He sees their views as a re-working of the teleological argument, augmented in some cases by the cosmological argument. In the process, I think he misses the heart of it.

Firstly, the specific form of the teleological argument that seems to be characteristic of ID-ers is an argument from what they call “irreducible complexity.”  The eye and the bacterial flagellum are among the most frequently adduced examples. Wikipedia provides a useful summary of this view, which, briefly, states that since the whole mechanism is what works, its parts could not have been selected for through the processes of evolution, because there was no advantage. Equally the whole could not have evolved without the development of the separate parts.

Use of the teleological argument depends first on establishing an “irreducible complexity” whose existence cannot be explained by the mechanisms of evolutionary biology. Unfortunately, various lines of work are suggesting ways in which the complexity of the eye or the flagellum could have evolved, thus taking away the first base on which a teleological argument might stand. I have found Francis Collins (the Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute and a committed Christian) to be a useful guide to this in his book: The Language of God.

As he points out there, ID actually manifests itself as another example of a “God of the gaps” theory. God is put in as an explanation of the things that science cannot explain. Unfortunately science has a pretty good track record of explaining things it couldn’t previously, and so this kind of “mechanistic God” finds itself with fewer and fewer places in which to gain a foothold in the universe, before more-or-less vanishing altogether. It is this confusing of theologically explanation with mechanistic explanation that is the fundamental category mistake of ID.

By contrast, in his post Wilson refers (though not by name) to the anthropic principle, the idea that the the universe seems incredibly finely tuned to the emergence of life, as part of the ID package. I don’t think it is, and there are numbers of respectable scientists and believers who refer to it, such as John Polkinghorne, making effectively a form of teleological argument for it.

What’s different about this argument? Firstly, it’s based on scientific discovery, not scientific ignorance; on what we know of the universe rather than what we don’t know. Secondly it’s used to demonstrate a congruity between the observable universe and faith in God. Thirdly, its used to demonstrate that there is a rationality to theistic explanations of the universe which do not simply depend on private (revealed) knowledge. This is quite different from what ID sets out to do, and nothing in this kind of careful use of the anthropic principle can be contradicted by further scientific discovery, though it can be refined.

The competition for theistic narratives explaining the anthropic principle come from narratives of some kind of “multiverse”. Either there is an unending process of universe “creation” and collapse / dissipation, or there is an infinite number of universes constantly slitting off from each other. In either case, we just happen to find ourselves, of necessity, in one of the few capable of generating life. These explanations can be no more rooted in science than theistic ones, since such hypothetical universes are neither observable, nor testable, and may theoretically in any case not obey the laws of physics as we know them.

This moves the question into a quite different arena from ID, and while I entirely sympathize with Kevin Wilson’s unease with ID which is both bad theology and bad science, I think he’s been misled by the ID-ers into confusing  two very different arguments.