Intelligible Design and Darwin's Black Box
By John Médaille / 20 September 2012 / 53 comments
The one thing that modern science should be able to do is to explain to us how
things happen. The one thing it cannot do is tell us that things happen by
chance. Things may well happen by chance, but then there is no chance of a
scientific explanation. "Chance" is the methodology of Darwinian account of
evolution, which can only mean that it doesn't actually account for anything. A
convinced Darwinist might respond, "It is not just chance, but chance mutations
measured against their survival value; it is the struggle for survival which
makes chance mutations work." But this merely introduces a factor which
Darwinists make no attempt to explain, namely, the will of the organism to live.
That organisms have such a will is self-evident, but can such a will really be
the result of chance mutations? After all, we never speak of the rock's struggle
for survival, but if rocks and plants are just different configurations of
matter, where does such a will come from? Here we see the biological form of
Heidegger's great question, "Why should things want to be rather than not be?"
This self-evident "will to live" introduces an insurmountable problem for the
Darwinist, for such a will must be present at the very beginning of life for the
theory to work at all. Without it, no species has any reason to adapt, or any
individual any reason to survive. But this "will" must precede evolution, and
hence cannot be explained by it. It might have been plausible, in the naïve days
of the 19th century, to speak of the ascent of higher forms of life from lower
forms, of a movement from the simple to the complex. But that is no longer
possible for the simple reason that we cannot find a "simple" form of life. The
smallest one-celled animal is irreducibly and unimaginably complex. The
single-cell already contains an information storage and retrieval system which
cannot, as yet, be duplicated by human means. And it also contains a
construction system of astounding complexity, able to translate information into
acids and complex structures, and the cell itself is a collection of complex and
cooperating structures. The scale of information is astounding; an amoeba dubia
has 670 billion base-pairs (bits) in its genetic material; the human, by
comparison, has 2.9 billion.
But this is just the beginning of the complexity, since not only is each cell
complex in itself, but lives in a complex set of relationships with other cells
and other species. There are simply no "simple" life forms with which we may
locate a simple "beginning." Indeed, the distance between "nothing" and amoeba
is far greater than the distance between amoeba and man. This is to say,
evolution is mostly complete by the time it starts. The heroic efforts to
explain all this within the "black-box" of chance mutations seems more like an
act of faith than a conclusion of science.
If the Darwinists cannot provide us with a scientific answer, should we turn to
the theory of "Intelligent Design"? For the one thing that everybody can agree
on is that the design is very intelligent indeed. But does it really do us any
good, for our understanding of God's universe, to replace the black box of
chance with one marked "miracles"? The whole point of having a rational God—a
god who is also logos—is that His universe is not only intelligent but
intelligible; man, made in the image and likeness of this logos-God, is always
able to understand more and more of God's work. Indeed, coming to an
understanding of this is man's work; our task is not merely to put the right
label on the black box, but to open the box and see what's inside. What is
needed is a theory not of intelligent design, but intelligible design. We
already know that, as final cause, God did it; the trick is to see how he does
it.
But if we cannot turn to Darwin to open the black box, and if Intelligent Design
merely re-labels the box, where are we to turn for a scientific explanation?
This is the question that Thomas Nagel explores in Mind and Cosmos: Why the
Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. It is
important to realize that Prof. Nagel is a philosopher with impeccably atheist
credentials. But while he has no belief in God, he has a belief in fairness:
Even if one is not drawn to the alternative of an explanation by the actions
of a designer, the problems that these iconoclasts pose for the orthodox
scientific consensus should be taken seriously. They do not deserve the scorn
with which they are commonly met. It is manifestly unfair.(p. 10)
The essential difficulty that Nagel poses to the Darwinist is the problem of
mind: consciousness, cognition, and values. If the Darwinist account of nature
is correct, these things must be reducible to physical matter. The problem with
such reductionism is that the more we know of mind, the less material it seems.
And if mind is more than matter, then biology must be more than materialism. But
we can go further. If the universe is intelligible, than matter itself must be
more than material. But what substance can we give to this "more than"?
Modern science, if it is to be scientific, must insist that the universe is
intelligible. But this intelligibility is hard to explain, and indeed it isn't
explained; it is accepted as a matter of faith. For Nagel, theism refers
intelligibility to something external, namely the will of God, but this prevents
any understanding of the world on its own terms. He judges the "interventionist"
accounts of evolutionary order to be a denial that there is a comprehensive
natural order.
The Darwinist account, on the other hand, can give us an explanation of the
intelligibility of the universe, but only at the cost of undermining our
confidence in that explanation. For example,
n evolutionary self-understanding would almost certainly require us to
give up moral realism— the natural conviction that our moral judgments are true
or false independent of our beliefs. Evolutionary naturalism implies that we
shouldn't take any of our convictions seriously, including the scientific world
picture on which evolutionary naturalism itself depends.(p. 28)
This is to say, if our thoughts are merely the result of a particular
electro-chemical state of the brain, what assurance do we have that these
contingent states actually reflect the actual world? No answer, from within a
purely material science, can satisfy the radical skeptic. Nagel takes us, in
great detail, through the problems of trying to explain consciousness,
cognition, and values in materialistic, evolutionary terms. At each level, the
problems for materialist explanations grow exponentially.
All explanations of the mental have to be either reductive or emergent. A
reductive account will explain the mental character of complex organisms
entirely in terms of the properties of their elementary constituents. An
emergent account will explain the mental in terms of the higher-level physical
functioning of the central nervous system, or structure like it. Both have
problems. The reductive account must posit some as yet unknown "proto-mental"
characteristics in the particles that make up the universe. But the emergent
account, aside from undermining our confidence in any mental constructs, places
an unbearable burden on evolutionary theory itself. At no stage in the emergence
of the purely mental can Darwinism give us an account that is in any way
probable; it can only assert the brute fact that consciousness does exist and
then by brute force exclude any but a materialist explanation.
As an alternative to either the materialist or the interventionist theories,
Nagel proposes a teleological property to the universe.
A teleological account will hold that in addition to the laws governing the
behavior of the elements in every circumstance, there are also principles of
self-organization or of the development of complexity over time that are not
explained by those elemental laws.(p. 59)
Nagel realizes that such an account will meet the same opposition as does
Intelligent Design.
I realize that such doubts will strike many people as outrageous, but that
is because almost everyone in our secular culture has been browbeaten into
regarding the reductive research program as sacrosanct, on the ground that
anything else would not be science.(p. 7)
For this teleological principle to work, the universe must contain, in addition
to the familiar physical laws, laws that are "biased towards the marvelous,(p.
92)" since the very appearance of any kind of life is marvelous. While Darwinian
evolution depends on a long series of accidents, Nagel's theory posits that each
successive stage of evolution must have a higher probability toward certain
outcomes, namely the production of beings that are capable of understanding
themselves and the universe.(p 93) Man is thus the product of the universe's
drive to self-understanding.
The Darwinists, I suspect, will have as much respect for Nagel's teleology as
they do for Intelligent Design's interventionism. I doubt if they will make a
serious attempt to respond to his critiques; their efforts will be the same as
with the Intelligent Design theory: to simply exclude it from the debate. But
leaving aside the Darwinists, there are two critiques of this theory that occur
to me. The first arises from the difficulty of positing an "atheistic"
teleology. Teleology is an Aristotelian idea that things have a natural purpose
and direction; an idea bound up with intentionality, and intentionality is a
quality of rational beings. To propose that things have a purpose without
intention, that is, without a being who intends this purpose, is rather a
stretch, and Nagel himself recognizes the problem.
The second problem is that Nagel seems to believe that there is some unified set
of beliefs called "theism." In fact nothing of the kind exists. The various
"theisms" are as different from each other as they are from atheism. Hence,
there is no "theism" that may be opposed to scientific rationality. On the
contrary, the very notion of an intelligible universe, the foundation of
science, is an artifact of science's
Christian roots in the Middle Ages; a rational God creates a rational universe,
one that rational creatures may understand.
Note that while this is the stance of Christianity, it is not the stance of
religions in general. For most religions, the world depends entirely on the will
of Heaven; it rains because God, or some god, wills it to rain; no further
explanation is required, and perhaps not possible. The Christian retains the
idea of God as the final cause of the rain, but insists that there are
intelligible formal, instrumental, and material causes as well, and that these
causes can, in principle, be known. This goes a long way towards explaining why
science developed in the West, even though the East had great engineers,
astronomers, and mathematicians while Europe was still a collection of mud huts.
For the medieval scientist, knowledge of the world was knowledge of the world's
God. But after the "Enlightenment" (so-called), knowledge of the natural world
would make god unnecessary. He would be confined to the gaps in our knowledge,
and as our knowledge expanded, God would be squeezed out.
This implies that science is, eventually, a theory of everything. Science is
constantly on the verge of this theory, but never quite gets there. Indeed, just
as they are about to grasp it all, it all slips away. For example, in the 1890's
Lord Kelvin, the most prominent physicist of his day, predicted that physics was
about to become a complete theory, with only a few minor problems to be solved,
those associated with heat and radiation. Of course, these "minor problems"
became quantum mechanics. We are on the verge of another "Theory of Everything,"
which I suspect will lead, as it always does, to a new starting point for new
realms of science.
The Christian is not surprised by this, since science is an exploration of the
infinite work of an infinite God. There is no final point, no complete theory.
Rather, the world will always reveal new wonders for those who gaze at it in
wonder. We have no method, at present, of detecting Nagel's teleological
principles in matter. But then, we had no way of detecting the quanta before we
looked for it. It is the right question that brings the right answer. If—as I
suspect—Nagel is proposing the right questions, we will find this teleological
bias in the laws of nature. And if the proponents of Intelligent Design are at
all intelligent, they will adopt this proposal as their own, and not be content
with a black box labeled "miracles," any more than they are content with
Darwin's black box.
http://distributistreview.com/mag/2012/09/intelligible-design-and-darwins-black-
box/ |