Intelligent Design Coming C...

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Intelligent Design Coming CleanWilliam A http://www.designinference.com/documents/2000.11.ID_coming_clean.htm
Intelligent Design Coming Clean
William A. Dembski
Baylor University
November 17, 2000
1. Cards on the Table
In the movie Dream Team starring Michael Keaton, Keaton plays a psychiatric patient who must
feign sanity to save his psychiatrist from being murdered. In protesting his sanity, Keaton informs
two New York City policemen that he doesn’t wear women’s clothing, that he’s never danced
around Times Square naked, and that he doesn’t talk to Elvis. The two police officers are much
relieved. Likewise, I hope with this essay to reassure our culture’s guardians of scientific
correctness that they have nothing to fear from intelligent design. I expect to be just as successful
as Keaton.
First off, let me come clean about my own views on intelligent design. Am I a creationist? As a
Christian, I am a theist and believe that God created the world. For hardcore atheists this is enough
to classify me as a creationist. Yet for most people, creationism is not identical with the Christian
doctrine of creation, or for that matter with the doctrine of creation as understood by Judaism or
Islam. By creationism one typically understands what is also called “young earth creationism,” and
what advocates of that position refer to alternately as “creation science” or “scientific creationism.”
According to this view the opening chapters of Genesis are to be read literally as a scientifically
accurate account of the world’s origin and subsequent formation. What’s more, it is the creation
scientist’s task to harmonize science with Scripture.
Given this account of creationism, am I a creationist? No. I do not regard Genesis as a scientific
text. I have no vested theological interest in the age of the earth or the universe. I find the
arguments of geologists persuasive when they argue for an earth that is 4.5 billion years old.
What’s more, I find the arguments of astrophysicists persuasive when they argue for a universe
that is approximately 14 billion years old. I believe they got it right. Even so, I refuse to be
dogmatic here. I’m willing to listen to arguments to the contrary. Yet to date I’ve found none of the
arguments for a young earth or a young universe convincing. Nature, as far as I’m concerned, has
an integrity that enables it to be understood without recourse to revelatory texts. That said, I
believe that nature points beyond itself to a transcendent reality, and that that reality is
simultaneously reflected in a different idiom by the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.
So far I’m not saying anything different from standard complementarianism, the view that science
and Scripture point to the same reality, albeit from different vantages. Where I part company with
complementarianism is in arguing that when science points to a transcendent reality, it can do so
as science and not merely as religion. In particular, I argue that design in nature is empirically
detectable and that the claim that natural systems exhibit design can have empirical content.
I’ll come back to what it means for design in nature to have empirical content, but I want for the
moment to stay with the worry that intelligent design is but a disguised form of creationism. Ask
any leader in the design movement whether intelligent design is stealth creationism, and they’ll
deny it. All of us agree that intelligent design is a much broader scientific program and intellectual
project. Theists of all stripes are to be sure welcome. But the boundaries of intelligent design are
not limited to theism. I personally have found an enthusiastic reception for my ideas not only
among traditional theists like Jews, Christians, and Muslims, but also among pantheists,
New-Agers, and agnostics who don’t hold their agnosticism dogmatically. Indeed, proponents of
intelligent design are willing to sit across the table from anyone willing to have us.
That willingness, however, means that some of the people at the table with us will also be young
earth creationists. Throughout my brief tenure as director of Baylor’s Michael Polanyi Center,
adversaries as well as supporters of my work constantly pointed to my unsavory associates. I was
treated like a political figure who is unwilling to renounce ties to organized crime. It was often put
to me: “Dembski, you’ve done some respectable work, but look at the disreputable company you
keep.” Repeatedly I’ve been asked to distance myself not only from the obstreperous likes of Phillip
Johnson but especially from the even more scandalous young earth creationists.
I’m prepared to do neither. That said, let me stress that loyalty and friendship are not principally
what’s keeping me from dumping my unsavory associates. Actually, I rather like having unsavory
associates, regardless of friendship or loyalty. The advantage of unsavory associates is that they
tend to be cultural pariahs (Phillip Johnson is a notable exception, who has managed to upset
countless people and still move freely among the culture’s elite). Cultural pariahs can keep you
honest in ways that the respectable elements of society never do (John Stuart Mill would no doubt
have approved). Or as it’s been put, “You’re never so free as when you have nothing to lose.”
Cultural pariahs have nothing to lose.
Even so, there’s a deeper issue underlying my unwillingness to renounce unsavory associates, and
that concerns how one chooses conversation partners and rejects others as cranks. Throughout
my last ten years as a public advocate for intelligent design, I’ve encountered a pervasive
dogmatism in the academy. In my case, this dogmatism has led fellow academicians (I hesitate to
call them “colleagues” since they’ve made it clear that I’m no colleague of theirs) to trash my entire
academic record and accomplishments simply because I have doubts about Darwinism, because I
don’t think the rules of science are inviolable, and because I think that there can be good scientific
reasons for thinking that certain natural systems are designed. These are my academic sins, no
more and no less. And the academy has been merciless in punishing me for these sins.
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Now, I resolutely refuse to engage in this same form of dogmatism (or any other form of
dogmatism, God willing). To be sure, I think I am right about the weaknesses of Darwinism, the
provisional nature of the rules of science, and the detectability of design in nature. But I’m also
willing to acknowledge that I may be wrong. Yet precisely because I’m willing to acknowledge that I
might be wrong, I also want to give other people who I think are wrong, and thus with whom I
disagree, a fair chance--something I’ve too often been denied. What’s more, just because people
are wrong about some things doesn’t mean they are wrong about other things. Granted, a valid
argument from true premises leads to a true conclusion. But a valid argument from false premises
can also lead to a true conclusion. Just because people have false beliefs is no reason to dismiss
their work.
One of the most insightful philosophers of science I know as well as one of my best conversation
partners over the last decade is Paul Nelson, whose book On Common Descent is now in press with
the University of Chicago’s Evolutionary Monographs Series. Nelson’s young earth creationism has
been a matter of public record since the mid eighties. I disagree with Nelson about his views on a
young earth. But I refuse to let that disagreement cast a pall over his scholarly work. A person’s
presuppositions are far less important than what he or she does with them. Indeed, a person is not
a crank for holding crazy ideas (I suspect all of us hold crazy ideas), but because his or her best
scholarly efforts are themselves crazy.
If someone can prove the Goldbach conjecture (i.e., that every even number greater than two is
the sum of two primes), then it doesn’t matter how many crazy ideas and hair-brained schemes
he or she entertains--that person will win a Fields Medal, the mathematical equivalent of the Nobel
Prize. On the other hand, if someone claims to have proven that pi is a rational number (it’s been
known for over a century that pi is not only an irrational number but also a transcendental number,
thus satisfying no polynomial equation with integer coefficients), then that person is a crank
regardless how mainstream he or she is otherwise. Kepler had a lot of crazy ideas about
embedding the solar system within nested regular geometric solids. A full half of Newton’s writings
were devoted to theology and alchemy. Yesterday’s geniuses in almost every instance become
today’s cranks if we refuse to separate their best work from their presuppositions.
I challenge anyone to read Paul Nelson’s On Common Descent, which critiques Darwin’s idea of
common descent from the vantage of developmental biology, and show why it alone among all the
volumes in the University of Chicago’s Evolutionary Monographs Series does not belong there (of
course I’m refusing here to countenance an ad hominem argument, which rejects the book simply
because of Nelson’s creationist views). I don’t distance myself from creationists because I’ve
learned much from them. So too, I don’t distance myself from Darwinists because I’ve learned
much from them as well. I commend Darwinists like Michael Ruse, Will Provine, and Elliott Sober for
their willingness to engage the intelligent design community and challenge us to make our
arguments better.
Unlike Stephen Jay Gould’s NOMA (“Non-Overlapping Magisteria”) principle, which separates science
and religion into tight compartments and which Todd Moody has rightly called a gag-order
masquerading as a principle of tolerance, intelligent design theorists desire genuine tolerance. Now
the problem with genuine tolerance is that it requires being willing to engage the views of people
with whom we disagree and whom in some cases we find repugnant. Unfortunately, the only
alternative to the classical liberalism of John Stuart Mill, which advocates genuine tolerance, is the
hypocritical liberalism of today’s political correctness.
In place of Gould’s NOMA, design theorists advocate a very different principle of interdisciplinary
dialogue, namely, COMA: Completely Open Magisteria. It is not the business of magisteria to assert
authority by drawing disciplinary boundaries. Rather, it is their business to open up inquiry so that
knowledge may grow and life may be enriched (which, by the way, is the motto of the University
of Chicago). Within the culture of rational discourse, authority derives from one source and one
source alone--excellence. Within the culture of rational discourse, authority never needs to be
asserted, much less legislated.
But is intelligent design properly part of the culture of rational discourse? At every turn opponents
of design want to deny its place at the table. For instance, Eugenie Scott, director of the National
Center for Science Education, claims intelligent design is even less reputable than young earth
creationism because at least the creationists are up front about who the designer is and what they
are trying to accomplish. Howard Van Till for the last several years has been claiming that design
theorists have not defined what they mean by design with sufficient clarity so that their views can
be properly critiqued. And most recently Larry Arnhart, writing in the current issue of First Things
(Nov. 2000, p. 31), complains: “Do they [i.e., design theorists] believe that the ‘intelligent
designer’ must miraculously intervene to separately create every species of life and every
‘irreducibly complex’ mechanism in the living world? If so, exactly when and how does that happen?
By what observable causal mechanisms does the ‘intelligent designer’ execute these miraculous
acts? How would one formulate falsifiable tests for such a theory? Proponents of ‘intelligent design
theory’ refuse to answer such questions, because it is rhetorically advantageous for them to take a
purely negative position in which they criticize Darwinian theory without defending a positive theory
of their own. That is why they are not taken seriously in the scientific community.”
2. Situating Intelligent Design in the Contemporary Debate
Let me now respond to these concerns. I’ll start with Eugenie Scott. Design theorists have hardly
been reticent about their program. I’ve certainly laid it out as I see it both in the introduction to
Mere Creation and in chapter four of Intelligent Design. What Scott is complaining about has less to
do with the forthrightness of design theorists about their intellectual program than with the
increased challenge that intelligent design presents to defenders of Darwinism as compared with
creationism. Creationism offers critics like Eugenie Scott a huge fixed target. Creationism takes the
Bible literally and makes the debate over Darwinism into a Bible-science controversy. In a culture
where the Bible has been almost universally rejected by the cultural elite, creationism is therefore a
non-starter.
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But isn’t it true that design theorists are largely Bible-believers and that their reason for not casting
intelligent design as a Bible-science controversy is pure expedience and not principle? In other
words, isn’t it just the case that we realize creationism hasn’t been working, and so we decided to
recast it and salvage as much of it as we can? This criticism seems to me completely backwards.
For one thing, most of the leaders in the intelligent design movement did not start out as
creationists and then turn to design. Rather, we started squarely in the Darwinian camp and then
had to work our way out of it. The intellectual journey of most design theorists is therefore quite
different from the intellectual journey of many erstwhile creationists, who in getting educated
renounced their creationism (cf. Ron Number’s The Creationists in which Numbers argues that the
correlation between increased education and loss of confidence in creationism is near perfect).
In my own case, I was raised in a home where my father had a D.Sc. in biology (from the
University of Erlangen in Germany), taught evolutionary biology at the college level, and never
questioned Darwinian orthodoxy during my years growing up. My story is not atypical. Biologists
Michael Behe, Jonathan Wells, and Dean Kenyon all started out adhering to Darwinism and felt no
religious pull to renounce it. In Behe’s case, as a Roman Catholic, there was simply no religious
reason to question Darwin. In so many of our cases, what led us out of Darwinism was its
inadequacies as a scientific theory as well as the prospect of making design scientifically tractable.
It’s worth noting that the effort to make the design of natural systems scientifically tractable has at
best been a peripheral concern of young earth creationists historically. There have been exceptions,
like A. E. Wilder-Smith, who sought to identify the information in biological systems and connect it
with a designer/creator. But the principal texts of the Institute for Creation Research, for instance,
typically took a very different line from trying to make design a program of scientific research.
Instead of admitting that Darwinian theory properly belonged to science and then trying to
formulate design as a replacement theory, young earth creationists typically claimed that neither
Darwinism nor design could properly be regarded as scientific (after all, so the argument went, no
one was there to observe what either natural selection or a designer did in natural history).
Intelligent design’s historical roots do not ramify through young earth creationism. Rather, our
roots go back to the tradition of British natural theology (which took design to have actual scientific
content), to the tradition of Scottish common sense realism (notably the work of Thomas Reid),
and to the informed critiques of Darwinism that have consistently appeared ever since Darwin
published his Origin (e.g., Louis Agassiz, St. George Mivart, Richard Goldschmidt, Pierre Grassé,
Gerald Kerkut, Michael Polanyi, Marcel Schützenberger, and Michael Denton).
Why then are so many of us in the intelligent design movement Christians? I don’t think it is
because intelligent design is intrinsically Christian or even theistic. Rather, I think it has to do with
the Christian evangelical community for now providing the safest haven for intelligent design--which
is not to say that the haven is particularly safe by any absolute standard. Anyone who has followed
the recent events of Baylor’s Michael Polanyi Center, the first intelligent design think-tank at a
research university, will realize just how intense the opposition to intelligent design is even among
Christians. Baylor is a Baptist institution that prides itself as being the flagship of evangelical colleges
and universities (which includes schools like Wheaton College and Valparaiso University). Although
an independent peer review committee validated intelligent design as a legitimate form of academic
inquiry, the committee changed the center’s name and took the center’s focus off intelligent design.
What’s more, after months of censorship by the Baylor administration and vilification by Baylor
faculty, I was finally removed as director of the center.
Now my treatment at Baylor is hardly unique among my compatriots in the design movement.
Dean Kenyon, despite being a world leader in the study of chemical evolution, was barred by the
biology department at San Francisco State University from critiquing the very ideas that earlier he
had formulated and that subsequently he found defective. Refusing to have his academic freedom
abridged, he was then removed from teaching introductory biology courses, despite being a very
senior and well-published member of the department. Only after the Wall Street Journal exposed
San Francisco State University’s blatant violation of Kenyon’s academic freedom was the biology
department forced to back down. I am frequently asked what is the latest research that supports
intelligent design, and I find myself having to be reticent about who is doing what precisely because
of enormous pressure that opponents of design employ to discredit these researchers, undermine
their position, and cause them to lose their funding (upon request, I’m willing to name names of
people and groups that engage in these tactics--though not the names of researchers likely to be
on the receiving end of these tactics).
To sum up, intelligent design faces tremendous opposition from our culture’s elite, who in many
instances are desperate to discredit it. What’s more, within the United States the Christian
evangelical world has thusfar been the most hospitable place for intelligent design (and this despite
opposition like at Baylor). Also relevant is that Christianity remains the majority worldview for
Americans. Thus on purely statistical grounds one would expect most proponents of intelligent
design to be Christians. But not all of them. David Berlinski is a notable counterexample. I could
name other counterexamples, but to spare them from harassment by opponents of design, I
won’t. (By the way, if you think I’m being paranoid, please pick up a copy of the November issue of
the American Spectator, which has an article about Baylor’s Michael Polanyi Center and my then
imminent removal as its director; I think you’ll find that my suspicions are justified and that it’s the
dogmatic opponents of design who are paranoid.)
Well, what then is this intelligent design research program that Eugenie Scott regards as even more
disreputable than that of the young earth creationists? Because intelligent design is a fledgling
science, it is still growing and developing and thus cannot be characterized in complete detail.
Nonetheless, its broad outlines are clear enough. I place the start of the intelligent design
movement with the publication in 1984 of The Mystery of Life’s Origin by Charles Thaxton, Walter
Bradley, and Roger Olsen. The volume is significant in two ways. First, though written by three
Christians and critiquing origin-of-life scenarios, it focused purely on the scientific case for and
against abiogenesis. Thus it consciously avoided casting its critique as part of a Bible-science
controversy. Second, though highly critical of non-telic naturalistic origin-of-life scenarios and thus a
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ready target for anti-creationists, the book managed to get published with a secular publisher. It
took well over 100 manuscript submissions to get it published. MIT Press, for instance, had
accepted it, subsequently went through a shake-up of its editorial board, and then turned it down.
The book was finally published by Philosophical Library, which had published books by eight Nobel
laureates.
The next key texts in the design movement were Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis,
Dean Kenyon and Percival Davis’s Of Pandas and People, and Phillip Johnson’s Darwin on Trial,
which appeared over the next seven years. Like The Mystery of Life’s Origin, these were principally
critiques of naturalistic evolutionary theories, though each of them also raised the possibility of
intelligent design. The critiques took two forms, one a scientific critique focusing on weaknesses of
naturalistic theories, the other a philosophical critique examining the role of naturalism as both a
metaphysical and methodological principle in propping up the naturalistic theories, and especially
neo-Darwinism.
Except for The Mystery of Life’s Origin, which in some ways was a research monograph, the
strength of these texts lay not in their novelty. Many of the criticisms had been raised before. A. E.
Wilder-Smith had raised such criticisms within the creationist context, though in a correspondence I
had with him in the late 80s he lamented that the Institute for Creation Research would no longer
publish his works. Michael Polanyi had raised questions about the sufficiency of natural laws to
account for biological complexity in the late 60s, and I know from conversations with Charles
Thaxton that this work greatly influenced his thinking and made its way into The Mystery of Life’s
Origin. Gerald Kerkut about a decade earlier had asked one of his students in England for the
evidence in favor of Darwinian evolution and received a ready answer; but when he asked for the
evidence against Darwinian evolution, all he met was silence. This exchange prompted his 1960
text Implications of Evolution, whose criticisms also influenced the early design theorists.
Nonetheless, compared to previous critics of Darwinism, the early design theorists had a significant
advantage: Unlike previous critics, who were either isolated (cf. Marcel Schützenberger, who
although a world-class mathematician, was ostracized in the European community for his
anti-Darwinian views) or confined to a ghetto subculture (cf. the young earth creationists with their
in-house publishing companies), the early design theorists were united, organized, and fully
cognizant of the necessary means for engaging both mass and high culture. As a consequence,
criticism of Darwinism and scientific naturalism could at last reach a critical mass. In the past,
criticism had been too sporadic and isolated, and thus could readily be ignored. Not any longer.
3. Intelligent Design as a Positive Research Program
Criticism, however, is never enough. I’m fond of quoting the statement by Napoleon III that one
never destroys a thing until one has replaced it. Although it is not a requirement of logic that
scientific theories can only be rejected once a better alternative has been found, this does seem to
be a fact about the sociology of science--to wit, scientific theories give way not to criticism but to
new, improved theories. Concerted criticism of Darwinism within the growing community of design
theorists was therefore only the first step. To be sure, it was a necessary first step since
confidence in Darwinism and especially the power of natural selection needed first to be undermined
before people could take seriously the need for an alternative theory (this is entirely in line with
Thomas Kuhn’s stages in a scientific revolution). Once that confidence was undermined, the next
step was to develop a positive scientific research program as an alternative to Darwinism and more
generally to naturalistic approaches to the origin and subsequent development of life.
In broad strokes, the positive research program of the intelligent design movement looks as
follows (here I’m going to do a conceptual rather than a historical reconstruction):
(1) Much as Darwin began with the commonsense recognition that artificial selection in animal and
plant breeding experiments is capable of directing organismal variation (which he then bootstrapped
into a general mechanism to account for all organismal variation), so too the intelligent design
research program begins with the commonsense recognition that humans draw design inferences
routinely in ordinary life, explaining some things in terms of purely natural causes and other things in
terms of intelligence or design (cf. archeologists attributing rock formations in one case to erosion
and in another to design--as with the megaliths at Stonehenge).
(2) Just as Darwin formalized and extended our commonsense understanding of artificial selection
to natural selection, the intelligent design research program next attempts to formalize and extend
our commonsense understanding of design inferences so that they can be rigorously applied in
scientific investigation. At present, my codification of design inferences as an extension of Fisherian
hypothesis testing has attracted the most attention. It is now being vigorously debated whether
my approach is valid and sustainable (the only alternative on the table at this point is a likelihood
approach, which in forthcoming publications I have argued is utterly inadequate). Interestingly, my
most severe critics have been philosophers (e.g., Elliott Sober and Robin Collins). Mathematicians
and statisticians have been far more receptive to my codification of design inferences (cf. the
positive notice of my book The Design Inference in the May 1999 issue of the American
Mathematical Monthly as well as mathematician Keith Devlin’s appreciative remarks about my work
in the July/August 2000 issue of The Scientist: “Dembski’s theory has made an important
contribution to the understanding of randomness--if only by highlighting how hard it can be to
differentiate the fingerprints of design from the whorls of chance”). My most obnoxious critics have
been Internet stalkers (e.g., Wesley Elsberry and Richard Wein), who seem to monitor my every
move and as a service to the Internet community make sure that every aspect of my work
receives their bad housekeeping seal of disapproval. As a rule I don’t respond to them over the
Internet since it seems to me that the Internet is an unreliable forum for settling technical issues in
statistics and the philosophy of science. Consequently, I have now responded to critics in the
following three forums: Philosophy of Science (under submission), Christian Scholar’s Review
(accepted for publication), and Books & Culture (accepted for publication). I shall also be
responding to critics at length in my forthcoming book No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity
Cannot Be Purchased Without Intelligence (Rowman & Littlefield) as well as offering there a
simplification of my concept of specification. Yet regardless how things fall out with my codification
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of design inferences, the question whether design is discernible in nature is now squarely on the
table for discussion. This itself is significant progress.
(3) At the heart of my codification of design inferences is the notion of specified complexity, which
is a statistical and complexity-theoretic concept. Provided this concept is well-defined and can
effectively be applied in practice, the next question is whether specified complexity is exhibited in
actual physical systems where no evolved, reified, or embodied intelligence was involved. In other
words, the next step is to apply the codification of design inferences in (2) to natural systems and
see whether it properly leads us to infer design. The most exciting area of application is of course
biology, with Michael Behe’s irreducibly complex biochemical systems, like the bacterial flagellum,
having thus far attracted the most attention. In my view, however, the most promising research in
this area is now being done at the level of individual proteins (i.e., certain enzymes) to determine
just how sparsely populated island(s) of a given functional enzyme type are within the greater sea
of non-functional polypeptides. Preliminary indications are that they are very sparsely populated
indeed, making them an instance of specified complexity. I expect this work to be published in the
next two years. I am withholding name(s) of the researcher(s) for their own protection.
(4) Once it is settled that certain biological systems are designed, the door is open to a new set of
research problems. Here are some of the key problems:
*****Detectability Problem--Is an object designed?
An affirmative answer to this question is needed before we can answer the remaining questions.
The whole point of (2) and (3) was to make an affirmative answer possible.
*****Functionality Problem--What is the designed object’s function?
This problem is separate from the detectability problem. For instance, archeologists have
discovered many tools which they recognize as tools but don’t understand what their function is.
*****Transmission Problem--What is the causal history of a designed object?
Just as with Darwinism, intelligent design seeks historical narratives (though not the just-so stories
of Darwinists).
*****Construction Problem--How was the designed object constructed?
Given enough information about the causal history of an object, this question may admit an
answer.
*****Reverse-Engineering Problem--In the absence of a reasonably detailed causal history, how
could the object have come about?
*****Constraints Problem--What are the constraints within which the designed object functions
optimally?
*****Perturbation Problem--How has the original design been modified and what factors have
modified it?
This requires an account of both the natural and the intelligent causes that have modified the object
over its causal history.
*****Variability Problem--What degree of perturbation allows continued functioning? Alternatively,
what is the range of variability within which the designed object functions and outside of which it
breaks down?
*****Restoration Problem--Once perturbed, how can the original design be recovered?
Art restorers, textual critics, and archeologists know all about this.
*****Optimality Problem--In what sense is the designed object optimal?
*****Separation of Causes Problem--How does one tease apart the effects of intelligent causes
from natural causes, both of which could have affected the object in question?
For instance, a rusted old Cadillac exhibits the effects of both design and weathering?
*****Ethical Problem--Is the design morally right?
*****Aesthetics Problem--Is the design beautiful?
*****Intentionality Problem--What was the intention of the designer in producing a given designed
object?
*****Identity Problem--Who is the designer?
To be sure, the last four questions are not questions of science, but they arise very quickly once
design is back on the table for serious discussion. As for the other questions, they are strictly
scientific (indeed, many special sciences, like archeology or SETI, already raise them). Now it’s true
that some of these questions have analogues within a naturalistic framework (e.g., the functionality
problem). But others clearly do not. For instance, in the separation of causes problem, teasing
apart the effects of intelligent causes from natural causes has no analogue within a naturalistic
framework.
4. Nature’s Formational Economy
Now from the design theorist’s perspective, there is plenty here to work on, and certainly enough
to turn intelligent design into a fruitful and exciting scientific research program. Even so, many
disagree. I want next to address some of their worries. Let me begin with the concerns of Howard
Van Till. Van Till and I have known each other since the mid 90s, and have been corresponding
about the coherence of intelligent design as an intellectual project for about the last three years.
Van Till’s unchanging refrain has been to ask for clarification about what design theorists mean by
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the term “design.”
The point at issue for him is this: Design is unproblematic when it refers to something being
conceptualization by a mind to accomplish a purpose; but when one attempts to attribute design
to natural objects that could not have been formed by an embodied intelligence, design must imply
not just conceptualization but also extra-natural assembly. It’s the possibility that intelligent design
requires extra-natural assembly that Van Till regards as especially problematic (most recently he
has even turned the tables on design theorists, charging them with “punctuated naturalism”--the
idea being that for the most part natural processes rule the day, but then intermittently need to be
“punctuated” by interventions from a designing intelligence). Van Till likes to put his concern to the
intelligent design community this way: Design can have two senses, a “mind-like” sense (referring
merely to conceptualization) and a “hand-like” sense (referring also to the mode of assembly); is
intelligent design using design strictly in the mind-like sense or also in the hand-like sense? And if the
latter, are design theorists willing to come clean and openly admit that their position commits them
to extra-natural assembly?
Although Van Till purports to ask these questions simply as an aid to clarity, it is important to
understand how Van Till’s own theological and philosophical presuppositions condition the way he
poses these questions. Indeed, these presuppositions must themselves be clarified. For instance,
what is “extra-natural assembly” (the term is Van Till’s)? It is not what is customarily meant by
miracle or supernatural intervention. Miracles typically connote a violation or suspension or
overriding of natural laws. To attribute a miracle is to say that a natural cause was all set to make
X happen, but instead Y happened. As I’ve argued throughout my work, design doesn’t require this
sort of counterfactual substitution (cf. chapters 2 and 3 of my book Intelligent Design). When
humans, for instance, act as intelligent agents, there is no reason to think that any natural law is
broken. Likewise, should a designer, who for both Van Till and me is God, act to bring about a
bacterial flagellum, there is no reason prima facie to suppose that this designer did not act
consistently with natural laws. It is, for instance, a logical possibility that the design in the bacterial
flagellum was front-loaded into the universe at the Big Bang and subsequently expressed itself in
the course of natural history as a miniature outboard motor on the back of E. Coli. Whether this is
what actually happened is another question (more on this later), but it is certainly a live possibility
and one that gets around the usual charge of miracles.
Nonetheless, even though intelligent design requires no contradiction of natural laws, it does
impose a limitation on natural laws, namely, it purports that they are incomplete. Think of it this
way. There are lots and lots of things that happen in the world. For many of these things we can
find causal antecedents that account for them in terms of natural laws. Specifically, the account can
be given in the form of a set of natural laws (typically supplemented by some auxiliary hypotheses)
that relates causal antecedents to some consequent (i.e., the thing we’re trying to explain). Now
why should it be that everything that happens in the world should submit to this sort of causal
analysis? It’s certainly a logical possibility that we live in such a world. But it’s hardly self-evident
that we do. For instance, we have no evidence whatsoever that there is a set of natural laws,
auxiliary hypotheses, and antecedent conditions that account for the writing of this essay. If we did
have such an account, we would be well on the way to reducing mind to body. But no such
reduction is in the offing, and cognitive science is to this day treading water when it comes to the
really big question of how brain enables mind.
Intelligent design regards intelligence as an irreducible feature of reality. Consequently it regards any
attempt to subsume intelligent agency within natural causes as fundamentally misguided and
regards the natural laws that characterize natural causes as fundamentally incomplete. This is not
to deny derived intentionality, in which artifacts, though functioning according to natural laws and
operating by natural causes, nonetheless accomplish the aims of their designers and thus exhibit
design. Yet whenever anything exhibits design in this way, the chain of natural causes leading up to
it is incomplete and must presuppose the activity of a designing intelligence.
I’ll come back to what it means for a designing intelligence to act in the physical world, but for now
I want to focus on the claim by design theorists that natural causes and the natural laws that
characterize them are incomplete. It’s precisely here that Van Till objects most strenuously to
intelligent design and that his own theological and philosophical interests come to light. “Extra-
natural assembly” for Howard Van Till does not mean a miracle in the customary sense, but rather
that natural causes were insufficient to account for the assembly in question. Van Till holds to what
he calls a Robust Formational Economy Principle (RFEP--“formational economy” refers to the
capacities or causal powers in nature for bringing about the events that occur in nature). This is a
theological and metaphysical principle. According to this principle God endowed nature with all the
(natural) causal powers it ever needs to accomplish all the things that happen in nature. Thus in
Van Till’s manner of speaking, it is within nature’s formational economy for water to freeze when
its temperature is lowered sufficiently. Natural causal powers are completely sufficient to account
for liquid water turning to ice. What makes Van Till’s formational economy robust is that everything
that happens in nature is like this--even the origin and subsequent history of life. In other words,
the formational economy is complete.
But how does Van Till know that the formational economy is complete? Van Till was kind enough to
speak at a seminar I conducted this summer (2000) at Calvin College in which he made clear that
he holds this principle for theological reasons. According to him, for natural causes to lack the
power to effect some aspect of nature would mean that the creator had not fully gifted the
creation. Conversely, a creator or designer who must act in addition to natural causes to produce
certain effects has denied the creation benefits it might otherwise possess. Van Till portrays his God
as supremely generous whereas the God of the design theorists comes off looking like a miser.
Van Till even refers to intelligent design as a “celebration of gifts withheld.”
Though rhetorically shrewd, Van Till’s criticism is hardly the only way to spin intelligent design
theologically. Granted, if the universe is like a clockwork (cf. the design arguments of the British
natural theologians), then it would be inappropriate for God, who presumably is a consummate
designer, to intervene periodically to adjust the clock. Instead of periodically giving the universe the
gift of “clock-winding and clock-setting,” God should simply have created a universe that never
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needed winding or setting. But what if instead the universe is like a musical instrument (cf. the
design arguments of the Church Fathers, like Gregory of Nazianzus, who compared the universe to
a lute--in this respect I much prefer the design arguments of the early Church to the design
arguments of the British natural theologians)? Then it is entirely appropriate for God to interact with
the universe by introducing design (or in this analogy, by skillfully playing a musical instrument).
Change the metaphor from a clockwork to a musical instrument, and the charge of “withholding
gifts” dissolves. So long as there are consummate pianists and composers, player-pianos will
always remain inferior to real pianos. The incompleteness of the real piano taken by itself is
therefore irrelevant here. Musical instruments require a musician to complete them. Thus, if the
universe is more like a musical instrument than a clock, it is appropriate for a designer to interact
with it in ways that affect its physical state.
Leaving aside which metaphor best captures our universe (a clockwork mechanism or a musical
instrument), I want next to examine Van Till’s charge that intelligent design commits one to a
designer who withholds gifts. This charge is itself highly problematic. Consider, for instance, what it
would mean for me to withhold gifts from my baby daughter. Now it’s certainly true that I withhold
things from my baby daughter, but when I do it is for her benefit because at this stage in her life
she is unable to appreciate them and might actually come to harm if I gave them to her now. The
things I am withholding from her are not properly even called gifts at this time. They become gifts
when it is appropriate to give them. Nor is it the case that if I am a good father, I must have all the
gifts I might ever give my daughter potentially available or in some sense in reserve now (thus
making the economy of my gift giving robust in Van Till’s sense). It’s not yet clear what gifts are
going to be appropriate for my daughter--indeed, deciding what are the appropriate gifts to give
my daughter will be situation-specific. So too, Judeo-Christian theism has traditionally regarded
many of God’s actions in the world (though certainly not all--there’s also general providence) as
carefully adapted to specific situations at particular times and places.
Van Till’s Robust Formational Economy Principle is entirely consistent with the methodological
naturalism embraced by most scientists (the view that the natural sciences must limit themselves
to naturalistic explanations and must scrupulously avoid assigning any scientific meaning to
intelligence, teleology, or actual design). What is unclear is whether Van Till’s Robust Formational
Economy Principle is consistent with traditional Christian views of divine providence, especially in
regard to salvation history. Van Till claims to hold to the RFEP on theological grounds, thinking it
theologically preferable for God to endow creation with natural causal powers fully sufficient to
account for every occurrence in the natural world. Let’s therefore grant that it’s an open question
for generic theism whether for God to deliver gifts all at once is in some way preferable to God
delivering them over time. The question remains whether this is an open question for specifically
Christian theism. Van Till after all is not merely a generic theist but, at least until his recent
retirement from Calvin College, was required to belong to the Christian Reformed Church (or some
other denomination squarely in the Reformed tradition). Consequently, Van Till was required to
subscribe to confessional standards that reflect a traditional Christian view of divine providence.
Now it’s not at all clear how the RFEP can be squared with traditional Christian theology. Please
understand that I’m not saying it can’t. But it seems that Van Till needs to be more forthcoming
about how it can. In his older writings (those from the mid 80s where he attempted to defend the
integrity of science against attacks by young earth creationists--unfortunately, Van Till was himself
brutally attacked by creationists for his efforts), Van Till seemed content to distinguish between
natural history and salvation history. Within salvation history God could act miraculously to procure
humanity’s redemption. On the other, within natural history God acted only through natural causes.
I no longer see this distinction in Van Till’s writings and I would like to know why. Does Van Till still
subscribe to this distinction? If so, it severely undercuts his RFEP.
The RFEP casts God as the supreme gift giver who never withholds from nature any capacity it
might eventually need. According to Van Till, nature has all the causal powers it needs to account
for the events, objects, and structures scientists confront in their investigations. Why shouldn’t God
also endow nature with sufficient causal powers to accomplish humanity’s redemption? Human
beings after all belong to nature. Throughout the Scriptures we find God answering specific prayers
of individuals, performing miracles like the resurrection of Jesus, and speaking directly to individuals
about their specific situations. These are all instances of what theologians call particular providence.
The problem with the RFEP from the vantage of Christian theology is that it seems to allow no
room whatsoever for particular providence. Yes, it can account for God sending the rain on the just
and the unjust, or what is known as general providence. But the RFEP carried to its logical
conclusion ends in a thorough-going Pelagianism in which redemption is built directly into nature, in
which Jesus is but an exemplar, and in which humans have a natural capacity to procure their own
salvation. I’m not saying that Van Till has taken the RFEP to this conclusion, but if not, Van Till
needs to make clear why he stops short of assimilating the redemption in Jesus Christ to his robust
formational economy.
Van Till’s Robust Formational Economy Principle provides a theological justification for science to
stay committed to naturalism. Indeed, the RFEP encourages science to continue business as usual
by restricting itself solely to natural causes and the natural laws that describe them. But this
immediately raises the question why we should want science to continue business as usual. Indeed,
how do we know that the formational economy of the world is robust in Van Till’s sense? How do
we know that natural causes (whether instituted by God as Van Till holds or self-subsistent as the
atheist holds) can account for everything that happens in nature? Clearly the only way to answer
this question scientifically is to go to nature and see whether nature exhibits things that natural
causes could not have produced.
5. Can Specified Complexity Even Have a Mechanism?
What are the candidates here for something in nature that is nonetheless beyond nature? In my
view the most promising candidate is specified complexity. The term “specified complexity” has
been in use for about 30 years. The first reference to it with which I’m familiar is from Leslie Orgel’s
1973 book The Origins of Life, where specified complexity is treated as a feature of biological
systems distinct from inorganic systems. Richard Dawkins also employs the notion in The Blind
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Watchmaker, though he doesn’t use the actual term (he refers to complex systems that are
independently specified). In his most recent book, The Fifth Miracle, Paul Davies (p. 112) claims
that life isn’t mysterious because of its complexity per se but because of its “tightly specified
complexity.” Stuart Kauffman in his just published Investigations (October 2000) proposes a
“fourth law” of thermodynamics to account for specified complexity. Specified complexity is a form
of information, though one richer than Shannon information, which focuses exclusively on the
complexity of information without reference to its specification. A repetitive sequence of bits is
specified without being complex. A random sequence of bits is complex without being specified. A
sequence of bits representing, say, a progression of prime numbers will be both complex and
specified. In The Design Inference I show how inferring design is equivalent to identifying specified
complexity (significantly, this means that intelligent design can be conceived as a branch of
information theory).
Most scientists familiar with specified complexity think that the Darwinian mechanism is adequate to
account for it once one has differential reproduction and survival (in No Free Lunch I’ll show that the
Darwinian mechanism has no such power, though for now let’s let it ride). But outside a context
that includes replicators, no one has a clue how specified complexity occurs by naturalistic means.
This is not to say there hasn’t been plenty of speculation (e.g., clay templates, hydrothermic vents,
and hypercycles), but none of this speculation has come close to solving the problem.
Unfortunately for naturalistic origin-of-life researchers, this problem seems not to be eliminable
since the simplest replicators we know require specified complexity. Consequently Paul Davies
suggests that the explanation of specified complexity will require some fundamentally new kinds of
natural laws. But so far these laws are completely unknown. Kauffman’s reference to a “fourth
law,” for instance, merely cloaks the scientific community’s ignorance about the naturalistic
mechanisms supposedly responsible for the specified complexity in nature.
Van Till agrees that specified complexity is an open problem for science. At a recent symposium on
intelligent design at the University of New Brunswick sponsored by the Center for Theology and the
Natural Sciences (15-16 September 2000), Van Till and I took part in a panel discussion. When I
asked him how he accounts for specified complexity in nature, he called it a mystery that he hopes
further scientific inquiry will resolve. But resolve in what sense? On Van Till’s Robust Formation
Economy Principle, there must be some causal mechanism in nature that accounts for any instance
of specified complexity. We may not know it and we may never know it, but surely it is there. For
the design theorist to invoke a non-natural intelligence is therefore out of bounds. But what
happens once some causal mechanism is found that accounts for a given instance of specified
complexity? Something that’s specified and complex is by definition highly improbable with respect
to all causal mechanisms currently known. Consequently, for a causal mechanism to come along
and explain something that previously was regarded as specified and complex means that the item
in question is in fact no longer specified and complex with respect to the newly found causal
mechanism. The task of causal mechanisms is to render probable what otherwise seems highly
improbable. Consequently, the way naturalism explains specified complexity is by dissolving it.
Intelligent design makes specified complexity a starting point for inquiry. Naturalism regards it as a
problem to be eliminated. (That’s why, for instance, Richard Dawkins wrote Climbing Mount
Improbable. To climb Mount Improbable one needs to find a gradual route that breaks a
horrendous improbability into a sequence manageable probabilities each one of which is easily
bridged by a natural mechanism.)
Lord Kelvin once remarked, “If I can make a mechanical model, then I can understand; if I cannot
make one, I do not understand.” Repeatedly, critics of design have asked design theorists to
provide a causal mechanism whereby a non-natural designer inputs specified complexity into the
world. This question presupposes a self-defeating conception of design and tries to force design
onto a Procrustean bed sure to kill it. Intelligent design is not a mechanistic theory! Intelligent
design regards Lord Kelvin’s dictum about mechanical models not as a sound regulative principle for
science but as a straitjacket that artificially constricts science. SETI researchers are not invoking a
mechanism when they explain a radio transmission from outer space as the result of an
extraterrestrial intelligence. To ask for a mechanism to explain the effect of an intelligence (leaving
aside derived intentionality) is like Aristotelians asking Newton what it is that keeps bodies in
rectilinear motion at a constant velocity (for Aristotle the crucial distinction was between motion
and rest; for Newton it was between accelerated and unaccelerated motion). This is simply not a
question that arises within Newtonian mechanics. Newtonian mechanics proposes an entirely
different problematic from Aristotelian physics. Similarly, intelligent design proposes a far richer
problematic than science committed to naturalism. Intelligent design is fully capable of
accommodating mechanistic explanations. Intelligent design has no interest in dismissing
mechanistic explanations. Such explanations are wonderful as far as they go. But they only go so
far, and they are incapable of accounting for specified complexity.
In rejecting mechanical accounts of specified complexity, design theorists are not arguing from
ignorance. Arguments from ignorance have the form “Not X, therefore Y.” Design theorists are not
saying that for a given natural object exhibiting specified complexity, all the natural causal
mechanisms so far considered have failed to account for it and therefore it had to be designed.
Rather they are saying that the specified complexity exhibited by a natural object can be such that
there are compelling reasons to think that no natural causal mechanism is capable of producing it.
Usually these “compelling reasons” take the form of an argument from contingency in which the
object exhibiting specified complexity is compatible with but in no way determined by the natural
laws relevant to its occurrence. For instance, for polynucleotides and polypeptides there are no
physical laws that account for why one nucleotide base is next to another or one amino acid is next
to another. The laws of chemistry allow any possible sequence of nucleotide bases (joined along a
sugar-phosphate backbone) as well as any possible sequence of L-amino acids (joined by peptide
bonds).
Design theorists are attempting to make the same sort of argument against mechanistic accounts
of specified complexity that modern chemistry makes against alchemy. Alchemy sought to
transform base into precious metals using very limited means like furnaces and potions (though not
particle accelerators). Now we rightly do not regard the contemporary rejection of alchemy as an
argument from ignorance. For instance, we don’t charge the National Science Foundation with
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committing an argument from ignorance for refusing to fund alchemical research. Now it’s evident
that not every combination of furnaces and potions has been tried to transform lead into gold. But
that’s no reason to think that some combination of furnaces and potions might still constitute a
promising avenue for effecting the desired transformation. We now know enough about atomic
physics to preclude this transformation. So too, we are fast approaching the place where the
transformation of a biological system that doesn’t exhibit an instance of specified complexity (say a
bacterium without a flagellum) to one that does (say a bacterium with a flagellum) cannot be
accomplished by purely natural means but also requires intelligence.
There are a lot of details to be filled in, and design theorists are working overtime to fill them in.
What I’m offering here is not the details but an overview of the design research program as it tries
to justify the inability of natural mechanisms to account for specified complexity. This part of its
program is properly viewed as belonging to science. Science is in the business of establishing not
only the causal mechanisms capable of accounting for an object having certain characteristics but
also the inability of causal mechanisms to account for such an object, or what Stephen Meyer calls
“proscriptive generalizations.” There are no causal mechanisms that can account for perpetual
motion machines. This is a proscriptive generalization. Perpetual motion machines violate the
second law of thermodynamics and can thus on theoretical grounds be eliminated. Design theorists
are likewise offering in principle theoretical objections for why the specified complexity in biological
systems cannot be accounted for in terms of purely natural causal mechanisms. They are seeking
to establish proscriptive generalizations. Proscriptive generalizations are not arguments from
ignorance.
Assuming such an in-principle argument can be made (and for the sequel I will assume it can), the
design theorist’s inference to design can no longer be considered an argument from ignorance. With
such an in-principle argument in hand, not only has the design theorist excluded all natural causal
mechanisms that might account for the specified complexity of a natural object, but the design
theorist has also excluded all explanations that might in turn exclude design. The design inference is
therefore not purely an eliminative argument, as is so frequently charged. Specified complexity
presupposes that the entire set of relevant chance hypotheses has first been identified. This takes
considerable background knowledge. What’s more, it takes considerable background knowledge to
come up with the right pattern (i.e., specification) for eliminating all those chance hypotheses and
thus for inferring design. Design inferences that infer design by identifying specified complexity are
therefore not purely eliminative. They do not merely exclude, but they exclude from an exhaustive
set of hypotheses in which design is all that remains once the inference has done its work (this is
not to say that the set is logically exhaustive; rather it is exhaustive with respect to the inquiry in
question--that’s all we can ever do in science).
It follows that contrary to the frequently-leveled charge that design is untestable, design is in fact
eminently testable. Indeed, specified complexity tests for design. Specified complexity is a
well-defined statistical notion. The only question is whether an object in the real world exhibits
specified complexity. Does it correspond to an independently given pattern and is the event
delimited by that pattern highly improbable (i.e., complex)? These questions admit a rigorous
mathematical formulation and are readily applicable in practice. Not only is design eminently
testable, but to deny that design is testable commits the fallacy of petitio principii, that is, begging
the question or arguing in a circle (Robert Larmer developed this criticism effectively at the New
Brunswick symposium adverted to earlier). It may well be that the evidence to justify that a
designer acted to bring about a given natural structure may be insufficient. But to claim that there
could never be enough evidence to justify that a designer acted to bring about a given natural
structure is insupportable. The only way to justify the latter claim is by imposing on science a
methodological principle that deliberately excludes design from natural systems, to wit,
methodological naturalism. But to say that design is not testable because we’ve defined it out of
existence is hardly satisfying or legitimate. Darwin claimed to have tested for design in biology and
found it wanting. Design theorists are now testing for design in biology afresh and finding that
biology is chock-full of design.
Specified complexity is only a mystery so long as it must be explained mechanistically. But the fact
is that we attribute specified complexity to intelligences (and therefore to entities that are not
mechanisms) all the time. The reason that attributing specified complexity to intelligence for
biological systems is regarded as problematic is because such an intelligence would in all likelihood
have to be unembodied (though strictly speaking this is not required of intelligent design--the
designer could in principle be an embodied intelligence, as with the panspermia theories). But how
does an unembodied intelligence interact with natural objects and get them to exhibit specified
complexity. We are back to Van Till’s problem of extra-natural assembly.
6. How Can an Unembodied Intelligence Interact with the Natural World?
There is in fact no conceptual difficulty for an unembodied intelligence to interact coherently with
the natural world. We are not in the situation of Descartes seeking a point of contact between the
material and the spiritual at the pineal gland. For Descartes the physical world consisted of
extended bodies that interacted only via direct contact. Thus for a spiritual dimension to interact
with the physical world could only mean that the spiritual caused the physical to move. In arguing
for a substance dualism in which human beings consist of both spirit and matter, Descartes
therefore had to argue for a point of contact between spirit and matter. He settled on the pineal
gland because it was the one place in the brain where symmetry was broken and where everything
seemed to converge (most parts of the brain have right and left counterparts).
Although Descartes’s argument doesn’t work, the problem it tries to solve is still with us. When I
attended a Santa Fe symposium sponsored by the Templeton Foundation in October 1999, Paul
Davies expressed his doubts about intelligent design this way: “At some point God has to move the
particles.” The physical world consists of physical stuff, and for a designer to influence the
arrangement of physical stuff seems to require that the designer intervene in, meddle with, or in
some way coerce this physical stuff. What’s wrong with this picture of supernatural action by a
designer? The problem is not a flat contradiction with the results of modern science. Take for
instance the law of conservation of energy. Although the law is often stated in the form “energy
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can neither be created nor destroyed,” in fact all we have empirical evidence for is the much
weaker claim that “in an isolated system energy remains constant.” Thus a supernatural action that
moves particles or creates new ones is beyond the power of science to disprove because one can
always claim that the system under consideration was not isolated.
There is no logical contradiction here. Nor is there necessarily a god-of-the-gaps problem here. It’s
certainly conceivable that a supernatural agent could act in the world by moving particles so that
the resulting discontinuity in the chain of physical causality could never be removed by appealing to
purely physical forces. The “gaps” in the god-of-the-gaps objection are meant to denote gaps of
ignorance about underlying physical mechanisms. But there’s no reason to think that all gaps must
give way to ordinary physical explanations once we know enough about the underlying physical
mechanisms. The mechanisms may simply not exist. Some gaps might constitute ontic
discontinuities in the chain of physical causes and thus remain forever beyond the capacity of
physical mechanisms.
Although a non-physical designer who “moves particles” is not logically incoherent, such a designer
nonetheless remains problematic for science. The problem is that natural causes are fully capable of
moving particles. Thus for a designer also to move particles can only seem like an arbitrary
intrusion. The designer is merely doing something that nature is already doing, and even if the
designer is doing it better, why didn’t the designer make nature better in the first place so that it
can move the particles better? We are back to Van Till’s Robust Formational Economy Principle.
But what if the designer is not in the business of moving particles but of imparting information? In
that case nature moves its own particles, but an intelligence nonetheless guides the arrangement
which those particles take. A designer in the business of moving particles accords with the following
world picture: The world is a giant billiard table with balls in motion, and the designer arbitrarily
alters the motion of those balls, or even creates new balls and then interposes them among the
balls already present. On the other hand, a designer in the business of imparting information
accords with a very different world picture: In that case the world becomes an information
processing system that is responsive to novel information. Now the interesting thing about
information is that it can lead to massive effects even though the energy needed to represent and
impart the information can become infinitesimal (Frank Tipler and Freeman Dyson have made
precisely such arguments, namely, that arbitrarily small amounts of energy are capable of
information processing--in fact capable of sustaining information processing indefinitely). For
instance, the energy requirements to store and transmit a launch code are minuscule, though
getting the right code can make the difference between starting World War III and maintaining
peace.
When a system is responsive to information, the dynamics of that system will vary sharply with the
information imparted and will largely be immune to purely physical factors (e.g., mass, charge, or
kinetic energy). A medical doctor who utters the words “Your son is going to die” might trigger a
heart attack in a troubled father whereas uttering the words “Your son is going to live” might
prevent it. Moreover, it doesn’t much matter how loudly the doctor utters one sentence or the
other or what bodily gestures accompany the utterance. Such physical factors are largely
irrelevant. Consider another example. After killing the Minotaur on Crete and setting sail back for
Athens, Theseus forgot to substitute a white flag for a black flag. Theseus and his father Aegeus
had agreed that a black flag would signify that Theseus had been killed by the Minotaur whereas a
white flag would signify his success in destroying it. Seeing the black flag hoisted on the ship at a
distance, Aegeus committed suicide. Or consider yet another nautical example, in this case a
steersman who guides a ship by controlling its rudder. The energy imparted to the rudder is
minuscule compared to the energy inherent in the ship’s motion, and yet the rudder guides its
motion. It was this analogy that prompted Norbert Wiener to introduce the term “cybernetics,”
which is derived etymologically from the Greek and means steersman. It is no coincidence that in
his text on cybernetics, Wiener writes about information as follows (Cybernetics, 2nd ed., p. 132):
“Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can
survive at the present day.”
How much energy is required to impart information? We have sensors that can detect quantum
events and amplify them to the macroscopic level. What’s more, the energy in quantum events is
proportional to frequency or inversely proportional to wavelength. And since there is no upper limit
to the wavelength of, for instance, electromagnetic radiation, there is no lower limit to the energy
required to impart information. In the limit, a designer could therefore impart information into the
universe without inputting any energy at all. Whether the designer works through quantum
mechanical effects is not ultimately the issue here. Certainly quantum mechanics is much more
hospitable to an information processing view of the universe than the older mechanical models. All
that’s needed, however, is a universe whose constitution and dynamics are not reducible to
deterministic natural laws. Such a universe will produce random events and thus have the possibility
of producing events that exhibit specified complexity (i.e., events that stand out against the
backdrop of randomness). Now as I’ve already noted, specified complexity is a form of
information, albeit a richer form than Shannon information, which trades purely in complexity (cf.
chapter 6 of my book Intelligent Design as well as my forthcoming No Free Lunch). What’s more,
as I’ve argued in The Design Inference, specified complexity (or specified improbability as I call it
there--the concepts are the same) is a reliable empirical marker of actual design. Now the beauty is
that we live in a non-deterministic universe that is open to novel information, that exhibits specified
complexity, and that therefore gives clear evidence of a designer who has imparted it with
information.
It’s at this point that critics of design throw up their hands in disgust and charge that design
theorists are merely evading the issue of how a designer introduces design into the world. From
the design theorists perspective, however, there is no evasion here. Rather there is a failure of
imagination on the part of the critic (and this is not meant as a compliment). In asking for a
mechanistic account of how the designer imparts information and thereby introduces design, the
critic of design is like a physicist trained only in Newtonian mechanics and desperately looking for a
mechanical account of how a single particle like an electron can go through two slits simultaneously
to produce a diffraction pattern on a screen (cf. the famous double-slit experiment). On a classical
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