“EVOLUTION AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN”

A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear

Sunday, October 9, 2005

All Souls Unitarian Church

Indianapolis, Indiana

It is hard to know where to begin on this topic. The issue is a religious issue, but it is also a political issue. It is an issue about science, but it is also an issue about education. It has a philosophical dimension to it, and it has a moral, legal, and even constitutional dimension to it.

Since I’m not sure where to begin, I suppose I could begin – if you’ll overlook the figure of speech – “In the beginning.” “In the beginning was. . . the “Flying Spaghetti Monster.” “Flying what?” you ask. Flying Spaghetti Monster. Well, I fear I’m getting ahead of myself. There’s a lot more groundwork to be laid before I get to this topic. But don’t lose it in your mind. I’ll return to it before I close.

We have been reading in recent weeks about the emergence of a movement known as “intelligent design.” It is the subject of legal debate in places where school districts want to promote this in science classes. Put in neutral words, there is controversy over whether public schools should be required to offer this idea as an alternative to evolutionary theory. Put in not-so-neutral words, it is the latest in a long series of attempts to persuade politicians and the public to legitimize sectarian religious objections to Darwin’s theory of evolution, and it undermines true science. This has been happening since Darwin first published his discovery in 1859, and it has been an on-going struggle to keep scientific integrity safe from the political reach of religious dogma. It is the 21^st century version of the Scopes Trial. And it is our turn, I believe, to come to the defense of reason and science.

I’ll offer a simple description of the intelligent design movement, and then elaborate as I continue. The promoters of intelligent design begin with a simple and, as far as it goes, true premise. They point out that there are gaps in what the theory of evolution has been able to explain about how nature works. Fair enough, I suppose. There are in fact gaps in what evolution can explain so far.

The next steps they take, however, are more than steps; they are astounding leaps in logic. For example, they suggest that if evolution isn’t able to explain everything, then it is inadequate, and we need to search for an alternative theory of explanation. And sure enough, they have one right in their back pocket. They call it the scientific theory of intelligent design.

In a nutshell, intelligent design says that there are many examples in nature of systems that are so complex and intricate that surely they must have been designed by an intelligent creator. Most of them allow for the fact that evolution might explain some of the minor changes that occur within various species, but evolution cannot, from their view, adequately account for all of it, and in fact the best explanation for the complex systems in nature is the idea that they were designed by an intelligent agent of some kind.

The promoters of Intelligent Design present this as if it were some new scientific discovery that challenges evolution and deserves an equal hearing. But there is nothing new about the theory of Intelligent Design. It is, as they say, “old as the hills.” I studied it thirty years ago in my college philosophy class. It is called the “teleological argument for the existence of God.” It was first presented systematically in 1802 by William Paley, a cleric and philosopher, who offered what is now popularly known as the “watch” theory. If you find a “watch” on beach, and you pick it up and examine the intricacies of its components, it is reasonable to assume that there has existed somewhere a “watch-maker.” Similarly, by looking at the intricacies and complexities of nature, we can assume it didn’t happen simply by chance, but that there must be a Creator. The word “telos” means “end,” as in “outcome,” and the teleological argument for the existence of God means we can presume the nature of the cause by examining the nature of the effects.

It is a very old argument, not something just stumbled upon recently by a few maverick scientists. In fact, my college textbook, published in 1965, gave the alternative label for teleology. It is called “argument from design.” In its formal style, it’s been around over 200 years, though it appeared as far back as Thomas Aquinas more than a thousand years ago. It is a philosophical and theological argument, but until now it was never a scientific argument. The simple reason for that is because it is not a scientific statement, and never was.

In preparing for this morning, I wrestled with the question of how detailed I should be about the scientific arguments used for the intelligent design theory. There are specific arguments they make, such as something called “irreducible complexity,” that warrant careful examination. But I decided for several reasons, some doing with limited time, not to get very detailed. There are plenty of sources from scientific literature that adequately rebut their views. If you are interested I would recommend the April 2002 issue of Natural History magazine, and the August issue of the New Republic. I also decided not to get very detailed with their scientifically-based arguments simply because they are almost universally rejected by the scientific community. Intelligent design is really argued to persuade the minds of the public and politicians, rather than the scientists, for the political power resides there.

But there is one part of their argument I will mention. Intelligent design proposes that the beauty and complexity and perfection found in nature imply an all-powerful all-intelligent designer. In response, some might wonder, why then do some aspects of nature seem to offer evidence of some kind of faulty intelligence? Why did the designer give eyes that don’t work to blind cave animals? Why have 99% of all species designed by this creator over time become extinct and died out? What is the reason for designing congenital birth defects, or genetic predispositions for diabetes and heart disease, or for that matter a neurological predisposition for schizophrenia? And why create a basically useless appendix in the human body, something that until the invention of surgery had accounted for countless human deaths? It is reasonable to raise the question, “Just how intelligent is that ?”

Let me say emphasize one point here. I have no problem with the teleological argument from design as a philosophical or theological statement. As philosophy or theology it is a fairly sound argument and fairly persuasive. What I have a problem with is when it is presented as a scientific statement, and then political pressure is used to require schools to teach it as if it were science. It is not.

The whole movement displays an extraordinary misunderstanding of the scientific method. What determines whether a statement is scientific or not is really very simple. If there is some way of testing a statement by observation to demonstrate whether it is true or false, then it is a scientific claim. If there is no way to test it, it is not science.

If I say that water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, I can test that theory in the laboratory by combining these elements in those proportions. The claim can be tested. But if I further claim that water in the baptismal font is holy water, that God has given it a special blessing -- that is not a scientific claim. Such a statement may very well be true, but it can’t be tested by the scientific method. Science cannot form an opinion about that claim.

The hypothesis of nature being deigned by an invisible agent that cannot be detected or measured through any method of science is not a scientific hypothesis. I grant that the claim might in fact be true, but its truth is not subject to testing. It has nothing to do with science.

This point was explicitly made by the National Academy of Sciences in 1999 when it issued this assessment of the so-called theory of “intelligent design.”

“Intelligent design . . . and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life or of species are not science because they are not testable by the methods of science.”

There is another characteristic of science that the intelligent design movement gets wrong. In the creationist writings leading up to intelligent design, and from those who lobby school boards today to include intelligent design as an alternative to evolution, it is frequently claimed that evolution is “only a theory, and not a fact.” When Cobb County, Georgia wanted to present intelligent design as an alternative to evolution, it put stickers on the student’s biology textbooks warning the readers that evolution is “only a theory, and not a fact.”

The statement that evolution is a theory is absolutely right. What is misleading about that statement is that all scientific claims are theories. Science deals only with theories. There is no scientific claim that isn't a theory, subject to further testing and revision.

In many minds, to say something is “only a theory” is to imply that it is a “guess” or a “hunch.” But in science, theories are offered to explain certain phenomena, and the more it explains, the better theory it is. And some theories are better than others. Some theories are very highly accepted because they are able to explain so much with so much reliability. Gravity, for example, is “only a theory,” but it is an extremely reliable one. So are photosynthesis and the orbital path of planets. These too are “only” theories. Other theories are somewhat less reliable, but still credible, such as the theory of continental drift or the Big Bang. And then there are theories have a very low probability of being true, such as the theory that the earth is flat, or phrenology (the belief that the shape of a person’s skull determines their personality). All science is theory – a hypothesis that is proposed and tested and continuously challenged and revised, but it always remains a theory. There are no absolute facts.

Intelligent design, however, is not a scientific theory because it is not testable. Even the theories of the flat earth and phrenology, however unlikely, are testable theories, and therefore inside the scope of science. They are as much theories as is gravity – they are just not very useful ones because they are unreliable. Evolution is theory because it is science. And as scientific theories go, it has consistently shown to be very highly reliable in its ability to explain what we see in nature.

In 2002, another distinguished scientific organization, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, put it as plainly as possible when it passed a resolution that says:

“To date, the intelligent design movement has failed to offer credible scientific evidence to support their claim that intelligent design undermines the current scientifically accepted theory of evolution.”

If the movement to impose intelligent design theories in science classes is not based in science, then where does it come from? It is an important question with a revealing answer. Almost all of the published works in support of intelligent design are produced from one source – a think tank in Seattle called The Discovery Institute, and a subdivision of that organization called the Center for Science and Culture (CSC). The papers produced by this organization use scientific language to argue their cases, and they never talk about “God” or “Christianity,” or religion. Their public face is to present an objective scientific study, but the motivation for their views is fairly transparent for those who care to dig a little deeper. An early mission statement of the Center for Science and Culture stated its purpose was “to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies” and “to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.”

The religious motivation for intelligent design was revealed in a private internal memo of the Discovery Institute that somehow became published on the web in 1999. The paper accuses modern science of promoting materialism, then says that the intelligent design movement “promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.” The memo went on to describe their strategy as providing a “wedge” that will “split the trunk [of modern science and its naturalism.]”

Most of the funding of the Discovery Institute comes from conservative and fundamentalist religious sources. The leading “fellows” of the Institute, who do most of the writing and promotion of intelligent design, speak differently in front of creationist and religious audiences than they do in their writing to the scientific community.

There is little question that the writers have impressive credentials. William Dembski, for example, is a fellow at the Discovery Institute with doctorates in both mathematics and philosophy. But speaking before a non-scientific audience he said:

“But (I have) deeper motivations. I think at a fundamental level, in terms of what drives me in this is that I think God’s glory is being robbed by these naturalistic approaches to biological evolution. . . When you are attributing the wonders of nature to these mindless material mechanisms, God’s glory is getting robbed.”

Another fellow at the Institute, Jonathan Wells, also has two doctorates, one in molecular biology and another in religion. He is a devout follower of Korean Rev. Sung Yung Moon, founder of the Unification Church, whom followers call “Father.” He had this to say at a Unification Church gathering:

“Father’s (Rev. Moon’s) words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism. . . When Father chose me to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle.”

Notice that his opposition to Darwinism is not tied to science – it is a religious position. There is a certain irony to the fact that those who are promoting intelligent design feel the need to hide their deeply held religious motivation for doing so. In fact, one critical article on movement in its title calls intelligent design “The Faith That Dare Not Speak Its Name.” (Jerry Coyne, The New Republic, August 2005).

It is no coincidence that all the leading promoters of this movement have direct ties to conservative religious organizations.

It is also significant that, in spite of impressive credentials, their work does not rise to the quality of being eligible for publication in scholarly journals. The academic standard for almost every discipline is the ability to be published in what is called “peer review” journals – where colleagues in the same area of studies can critique your research and findings. Only once has a Discovery Institute fellow been able to have their writing accepted by such a scholarly journal, The Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. After the article appeared, the journal disowned the paper because “it did not meet the scientific standards of the Proceedings.” This fact is consistent with the overwhelming determination of professional scientific societies that what the “intelligent design” movement is advocating has nothing to do with science.

It is fairly clear that the audience of the Discovery Institute is not the scientific community, since the work they do isn’t science, and they are unable to get attention from science. Instead, theirs is an appeal to the broad public, to school boards, and to the media. It is important to understand the strategy they use for promoting their ideas.

Their strategy now seems to be persuading school boards to require that science classes point out the shortcomings and failures of evolution – the view that evolution is “simply a theory, and not fact” – then allow alternatives to evolution to be considered, most importantly “intelligent design.”

The rallying cry for this strategy is “teach the controversy.” If schools become aware that evolution and intelligent design are competing theories of biological origins, then it is only responsible for the schools to let the students know of this debate, and allow them to weigh the arguments from both sides. This strategy can be found in an article from USA Today about the issue. A leading Intelligent Design advocate said it this way:

“Rather than teaching evolution as an incontrovertible ‘truth,’ teachers should present the arguments for modern neo-Darwinism and encourage students to evaluate these arguments critically. In short, students should learn the scientific arguments for, and against, contemporary evolutionary theory.”

That’s an example of the “teach the controversy” strategy. It certainly sounds reasonable. Of course students should be educated about all sides of a controversial theory. The problem is that from the view of science: THERE IS NO CONTROVERSY! At least not in scientific circles. There may be controversy and different views among scientists about how evolution works, but there is none about whether evolution works. There may be controversy about evolution on a religious level, and certainly on a political level, but within the scope of science, there is no controversy. The scientific community has accepted the theory of evolution about as solidly as it accepts the theory of gravity. Evolution cannot account for every observation of nature. Nor is it immune from being revised and adjusted based on new findings. But as a scientific theory, the concept of evolution is not controversial.

It is an ingenious strategy, though, I must say. Invent a controversy. Create a controversy. Allege a controversy. Then lobby the political bodies, in this case school boards, to approach the topic in the only possible way that is fair, which is to “teach both sides” of the controversy.

And I also must say it is proving to be a very effective strategy. It is so effective, even President Bush seems to have signed on to the cause. In an interview last August, he was asked about whether intelligent design ought to be taught along with evolution in the public schools. Here is how he answered:

“I (feel) like both sides ought to be properly taught . . . so people can understand what the debate is about. [If] you’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes.”

Who can deny the reasonableness of presenting both sides of a controversy? Yet after this comment, the New York Times interviewed John Marburger, who is Science Advisor to President Bush and Director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. Marburger, a scientist, replied to the interviewer that “evolution is the cornerstone of modern biology,” and “intelligent design is not a scientific concept.”

The comment by the President sent some chills through the scientific community. The American Institute of Biological Sciences issued a press release saying, “Intelligent design is not a scientific theory and must not be taught in science classes.” The American Physical Society issued a statement saying, “Only scientifically valid theories, such as evolution, should be taught in the nation’s science classes.” And the president of the American Astronomical Society sent a letter to President Bush saying, “Intelligent design has neither scientific evidence to support it nor an educational basis for teaching it as science.”

While we’re on the subject of education, it should be mentioned that politicians, even in the form of elected school board members, are not the best judge of determining the content of what should be taught. What is history should be determined by historians; what is psychology should be determined by psychologists.

For example, the Book of Mormon teaches, and devout Mormons believe, that after the resurrection of Jesus, and before Europeans came to America, Jesus himself visited American Native Indians. It’s right there in black and white in the Book of Mormon. Does this historical “theory” belong in history classes of our public schools, even though historians give it absolutely no credence? Should we include it in order to “give the students both sides,” as the politicians say, so that kids can make up their own minds? There is about as much historical evidence for the claim that Jesus visited American Indians as there is scientific evidence for Intelligent Design.

Or how about teaching phrenology (skull shapes and bumps determine personality) in psychology classes? Sure, the discipline of psychology thoroughly rejects the notion, but since some people still believe in phrenology, shouldn’t we “teach the controversy” and let the students decide?

Evolution is under attack again, and the reason for the attack is the same as it has been since it was first proposed. Religious conservatives fear that evolution promotes atheism, or at least a kind of naturalism that excludes the possibility that there is a God. This fear is unwarranted. It represents yet another misunderstanding of the nature of scientific inquiry.

It is obvious that many scientists, maybe even the majority, have absolutely no trouble believing in both evolution and God at the same time. Science doesn’t exclude the possibility of God existing – it just doesn’t address it. Science proceeds with what might be called a “methodological naturalism” – the presumption that only topics which can be observed and measured and tested are scientific topics. God does not fall into that category.

There is nothing incompatible with a belief in God and a belief in evolution. Natural History magazine recently published an interesting exchange where three of the leading intelligent design writers gave their arguments, and three leading scientists offered rebuttal. Kenneth Miller, a biology professor at Brown University, responded to the argument of intelligent design writer Michael Behe by saying this:

“If Behe wishes to suggest that the intricacies of nature, life, and the universe reveal a world of meaning and purpose consistent with a divine intelligence, his point is philosophical, not scientific. It is a philosophical point of view, incidentally, that I share. However, to support that view, one should not find it necessary to pretend that we know less than we really do about the evolution of living systems.

By now there is only one more question you may be asking. What about that “Flying Spaghetti Monster”? In case you haven’t heard, it’s a new religion. An inventive internet writer has identified a new religion that believes the world was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster and he has launched a powerful movement to persuade school districts across the nation to include this theory, along with evolution and intelligent design, when students are studying the origin of life. You know, “teach the controversy.” Thousands of people have signed on and are flooding the internet with pleas to school boards on the behalf of the religion of Flying Spaghetti Monsters, especially those school boards who have shown sympathy to intelligent design and are dedicated to being fair in presenting all sides of the debate. A movement is growing, and eventually there may be, in number, more advocates of Flying Spaghetti Monsters than there are of intelligent design. It’s an amazing phenomenon – you are invited to look it up and join in. There have now been articles about the Flying Spaghetti Monster theories in The New York Times and Germany’s Der Speigal. The author’s plea to the school boards ends with these words:

“I think we can all look forward to the time when these three theories are given equal time in our science classrooms across the country, and eventually the world: One third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.”

A READING (of sorts) by Bruce Clear

“THE EVOLUTION OF THE ‘CREATIONUS SCIENTIFICUS’”

If someone is looking for an example of how evolution works, he or she need look no farther than a human species\type known as “creationus scientificus,” often referred to simply as “creationists.” The creationist is identifiable because it carries an extraordinary gene that fosters biblical literalism which seems to confuse religious doctrine with scientific theory. Observations of this phenomenal group over time demonstrate they are highly adaptive to their changing environment, and they can survive within some of the most adverse conditions.

Creationus scientificus have existed in the wild for quite some time, but were first observed in a controlled environment in 1925, at the Tennessee trial of John Scopes – also known as the “Monkey Trial,” – which became the subject of the award-winning play “Inherit the Wind.” The creationists held there that the Bible should be read as a scientific textbook and the theory of evolution was not only dangerous, it was false, so therefore it should be banned. They won the trial, and for some decades after they flourished and their gene for biblical literalism multiplied across the land.

But a threat to the survival of the “creationus” species came from an unlikely source: the Cold War. When the United States found itself in competition with the Soviet Union for the mastery of science – such as medical advances and engineering and the race into space – the country decided our educational institutions should be more serious about science. In so doing, science was handed back to the scientists, rather than the creationists, and evolution again became the foundation for scientific education. During this time, the creationist species discovered how maladaptive their gene for biblical literalism can be in the context of true science. The U.S. was winning the science wars, and the creationus species began a slow descent, and started to die out.

But an amazing thing happened – some might even call it a miracle. By chance mutation, it seems, some of the creationists began attaching the word “science” to their ideas, and discovered by doing this they had a greater chance of survival. The gene for biblical literalism morphed into something called “creation science,” and at this stage (the 1970s and 1980s) they acquired the new identity: creationus scientificus.

This was practically a new species. More complex and sophisticated than its predecessor, instead of simply excluding evolution from the classrooms, they insisted that an alternative scientific theory – “scientific creationism” – be taught as well. The gist of this view is simply the literal biblical story of creation, only this time with the word “science” attached.

It was an astounding example of adaptation. By simply co-opting the word “science,” the gene for biblical literalism would survive in this new environment. By the early 1980s, the gene appeared to be absolutely indestructible!

But again, there appeared almost out of nowhere a new threat to the survival of the creationus scientificus. This time it wasn’t from diabolical science, the Darwinian evolutionists. And it wasn’t from an outside enemy like the godless communists. It was a far more insidious threat than that to the survival of their genes. It came from the U.S. Constitution.

The creationists had succeeded in passing laws in various states, most notably Arkansas and Louisiana, decreeing that science classes in public schools must devote equal time to both competing theories of origins: evolution and scientific creationism. The laws were challenged, and tested in court, and in case after case, including a case before the Supreme Court in 1987, the laws were struck down as unconstitutional. It was easy to show to any impartial judge that “creation science” was in no conceivable way a science, and that it was in fact a sectarian religious doctrine. It violates the First Amendment, the courts all concluded, to teach religious doctrine in science classes.

This was a serious blow to the creationus scientificus. For most observers, it seemed to be a fatal blow, and some even predicted the virtual extinction of the species, and the gradual disappearance of the gene for biblical literalism.

But if evolution teaches us anything, it teaches us that species are single-minded in pursuit of the survival of their genes, and the best assurance for survival in a threatening environment is the appearance of a new mutation that allows for better adaptation to that environment. And that is precisely what happened to creationus scientificus.

Sometime in the 1990s, observers identified a new mutation in this genetic strain. That mutation has a name. It is called “Intelligent Design.” This mutation was selected because of its ability to protect the biblical literalism gene in a most creative and resourceful way. This mutation was absolutely inspired. The idea is to shed the doctrine of all – and they mean all – obviously religious content, and by doing so present biblical literalism again as a non-sectarian “science” which offers an alternative to evolution. Biblical literalism would enter the classroom under camouflage.

So if the Bible says, “God created the heavens and the earth,” they can say, “nature shows evidence of design, and therefore it must have a ‘designer.’” They don’t even have to call that designer “God.” People will be able to figure it out. To promote intelligent design, they don’t even have to do science, or carry out actual experiments in actual laboratories – because they offer no hypothesis that can be tested in laboratories – but they can wear white lab coats like other scientists if they want (as long as they use real scientific jargon when they speak, and never quote scripture in public). They don’t have to convince the scientific community of their ideas; they only have to persuade through public relations a critical mass of the population and the politicians that what they are promoting is, indeed, science. It won’t matter what the scientists think. And as for those pesky judges who worship the constitution, as long as these new creationists avoid blatant religious language, they just might be able to pull it off.

And that is precisely what observers see happening. More than twenty states are now considering laws that either challenge the teaching of evolution or promote intelligent design as a legitimate alternative. Even the Hamilton Southeastern School District has been threatened with a lawsuit to impose these nonscientific ideas in their science classes. And from school board officials to Senators to the President, people and politicians outside the scientific community are lining up across the land to endorse the “new science” of “intelligent design.”

The creationus scientificus turns out to be one of the most adaptive and therefore persistent species we have, and the biblical literalist gene they carry seems to be one of the strongest ever observed. For me, there is probably no better illustration of the process of evolution, as described by science, than to look at the astounding survival by mutation and adaptation, amid threatening environments, of the species “creationus scientificus.”

© Bruce Clear 2005

READING from

“The Faith That Dare Not Speak Its Name”

An article appearing in The New Republic, August 2005

By Jerry Coyne, Professor of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago

[Recent headlines cover an ongoing court case in Dover, Pennsylvania, where a school district has mandated that science classes present a statement critical of the theory of evolution and supportive of another view called “intelligent design.” In this excerpt Coyne gives some background that most of us don’t know about the case.]

In the spring of 2004, the district’s textbook review committee recommended a new. . . . biology textbook. At a school board meeting, William Buckingham, the chair of the board’s curriculum committee, complained that the proposed replace book was “laced with Darwinism.” After challenging the audience to trace its roots back to a monkey, he suggested that a more suitable textbook would include biblical theories of creation. When asked whether this might offend those of other faiths, Buckingham replied, “This country wasn’t founded on Muslim beliefs or evolution. This country was founded on Christianity and our students should be taught as such.” Defending his views a week later, Buckingham reportedly pleaded: “Two thousand years ago, someone died on a cross. Can’t someone take a stand for him?” And then he added, “Nowhere in the Constitution does it call for a separation of church and state.”

[The school board then adopted a requirement that before teaching evolution, biology teachers were to read the following statement:]

‘Because Darwin’s Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence. . . . Intelligent design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view.’

[Then the statement refers students to a specific reference book about “intelligent design”].

“The results were dramatic but predictable. Two school board members resigned. All eight science teachers at Dover High School sent a letter to the school superintendent point out that ‘intelligent design is not science. It is not biology. It is not an accepted scientific theory.’ The biology teachers asked to be excused from reading the statement. . . . So in January of this year, all ninth-grade classes were visited by the assistant superintendent himself, who read the mandated disclaimer while the teachers and a few students left the room.”