The situation is quite different, however, when we attempt to infer the existence of a designer by considering alleged examples of his handiwork. Living organisms are highly complex and consequently require a special sort of explanation. Most scientists explain them as the end result of a lengthy evolutionary process. Proponents of intelligent design (ID) dissent from this view. It is their belief that living organisms exhibit a certain kind of complexity, which they refer to as “complex specified information (CSI),” that is most plausibly explained as the result of intelligent design.

In drawing this conclusion they are hypothesizing the existence of an entity with the ability of creating, via an act of will, life in all its complexity. This is far beyond the abilities of any intelligent agents with which we have direct experience. The complexity of nature is used as the evidence that a certain sort of designer exists. This designer, in turn, is used as the explanation for nature.

This leads to a problem. The existence of complex entities was precisely the phenomenon in need of explanation. Hypothesizing the existence of something more complex than the thing to be explained only replaces one problem with a far greater one. If the universe can only be explained as the product of design, then any designer capable of crafting the universe must also be so explained. The result is an infinite regress of designers, each invoked to explain the existence of the one before.

Since this simple bit of logic poses a grave challenge to their theory, it is unsurprising that ID proponents have offered a number of gambits to get around it.

We could try denying the problem. Just as no one asks where humans come from when they are invoked to explain complex machines, perhaps it is unreasonable to demand an explanation for the designer in ID. Design proponent William Dembski, in his book The Design Revolution, writes:

Design-theoretic explanations are proximal or local explanations rather than ultimate explanations. Design-theoretic explanations are concerned with determining whether some particular event, object or structure exhibits clear marks of intelligence and can thus be legitimately ascribed to design. Consequently, design-theoretic reasoning does not require the who-designed-the-designer question to be answered for a design inference to be valid. There is explanatory value in attributing the Jupiter Symphony to the artistry (design) of Mozart, and that explanation suffers nothing by not knowing who designed Mozart. (p. 199)

This, alas, is not an adequate reply. The issue here is not how we explain the existence of the designer in ID. It is that the design proponent’s own logic tells us that such a designer can only be explained via the action of some other designer. It is their argument that the presence of a particular kind of complexity in living organisms can only be explained by design. Any designer capable of producing such complexity would have to be at least as complex as his production. If the design inference is legitimate when applied to living organisms, then it applies with even greater force to the designer himself.

Can we reject the premise that the designer in ID is as complex as his creation? No, we cannot. We are hypothesizing a designer capable of first conceptualizing the design of Earth’s biosphere, and then implementing that design by manipulating matter to bring it about. The greatest intelligences of which we are aware require highly complex bodies to function, but they can do nothing remotely like what the designer of ID is said to do. It seems implausible that an agent with vastly greater powers than our own is nonetheless simpler than us in any relevant sense.

Perhaps we can concede that the designer’s origin is mysterious, but argue that scientists routinely hypothesize the existence of entities that are themselves unexplained. Dembski again:

The regress implicit in the who-designed-the-designer question is no worse here than elsewhere in science. Such regresses arise whenever scientists introduce novel theoretical entities. For instance, when Ludwig Boltzmann introduced his kinetic theory of heat back in the late 1800’s and invoked the motion of unobservable particles (what we now call atoms and molecules) to explain heat, one might just as well have argued that such unobservable particles do not explain anything because they themselves need to be explained. (p. 198)

This, at least, is an instructive error. Dembski is wrong to analogize the explanation of heat via the motions of unobservable particles to the explanation of living organisms via the action of an unknown intelligent agent.

To see why, you need to consider the nature of scientific explanation. As I described in a previous essay in this series (See “What is Science?”), what scientists value is not so much truth as it is predictability and control. When scientists assert that a particular theory is true, they mean that it has successfully predicted the results of so many experiments that it would be unreasonable to withhold tentative assent.

That is why no one challenged Boltzmann when he invoked unobservable particles in his explanation of heat. He was able to show clearly that his hypothesis allowed him not only to explain the phenomena of heat, but also to predict the results of experiments not yet performed. It was undeniably useful to think in terms of atoms and molecules, and that was what Boltzmann, like all scientists, cared about.

Perhaps the most famous example of invoking an unobservable entity in scientific explanation is the neutrino. Atomic experiments in the early nineteen hundreds produced results in seeming contradiction to the principle of energy conservation. In other words, experiments were conducted in which it appeared there was less energy at the end of the experiment than there was at the beginning. This led some scientists to hypothesize that the kinetic energy of a tiny, unobservable particle, the neutrino, accounted for the missing energy. At the time, some scientists objected to this move, but later experiments established that the neutrino actually existed.

In both of these cases, hypothesizing certain unseen particles brought clarity to previously mysterious phenomena. And if the design proponents could show that their hypothesis does likewise scientists would embrace it for that reason. That is, if design proponents could point to some facts of biology and say, “The design hypothesis makes sense out of these facts, and suggests a likely fruitful line of investigation,” scientists would not object on the grounds that the designer itself needs to be explained. That would be treated as a mystery for another day. But the design proponents do not do this. They merely assert the reality of design and leave the matter there. Though they frequently assert otherwise, they have yet to produce anything of scientific interest from their chosen starting point.

There is a second difference to be noted. The scientists of Boltzmann’s day already had ample reason to suspect the existence of atoms and molecules. Neutrinos were themselves a novelty when first proposed, but many subatomic particles were already known and it was not too farfetched to hypothesize another one. Furthermore, the properties these particles were said to possess were in line with those possessed by other physical entities. Though unobserved, they were not totally mysterious. They were not imbued with remarkable powers invoked solely to explain puzzling data. Rather, scientists were able to infer precisely what properties they ought to have to explain the data in question, and these inferences formed the basis for subsequent experiments.

As a further example of this logic, consider the discovery of the planet Neptune in 1846. Its existence was originally inferred from anomalies in the orbit of Uranus. Astronomers hypothesized that these anomalies could be explained via the gravitational pull of a then unknown planet. But they did not leave the matter there. Instead they deduced the approximate size and location of the mystery planet and used those deductions as the basis for their astronomical investigations. They were later repaid with success, of course.

Such is not the case with the design hypothesis. We have already seen that the entity being hypothesized is utterly unlike anything with which we have experience. It certainly is not a simple extrapolation from known intelligent agents, since the designer of ID is capable of feats orders of magnitude beyond anything known intelligences are capable of. And while you might think we could draw inferences about the nature of the designer by examining its alleged productions, thereby offering hope that it could be a useful hypothesis, the design proponents are quite adamant that this is not the case. They routinely assert that we can infer nothing beyond the trivial about the motivations or abilities of the designer on the basis of the design.

What, then, are we left with? Well, we might argue that the logic by which design proponents infer design in living organisms applies only to objects within the universe as we know it. If the designer resided outside of the universe - and how could it be otherwise if he is the entity that created the universe in the first place - then we cannot apply our Earth-bound logic to him.

Writing in the November 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine, author Marilynne Robinson tried this line of attack. She was responding to a version of the who-designed-the-designer argument offered by British biologist Richard Dawkins:

That God exists outside time as its creator is an ancient given of theology. The faithful are accustomed to expressions like “from everlasting to everlasting” in reference to God, language that the positivists would surely have considered nonsense but that does indeed express the intuition that time is an aspect of the created order. Again, I do not wish to abuse either theology or scientific theory by implying that either can be used as evidence in support of the other; I mean only that the big bang in fact provides a metaphor that might help Dawkins understand why his grand assault on the “God Hypothesis” has failed to impress the theists.

Of course, by going this route we are giving up all hope of making design into a scientific hypothesis. Saying that the designer is not himself subject to the principles of inference and logic applicable to everything else is equivalent to saying that he resides outside of all scientific investigation. Many religious people will have no problem with this assertion, but it is fatal to ID proponents.

More to the point, however, is that you do not need to be a logical positivist to regard Robinson’s suggestion as nonsense.

In explaining the origin of the universe, it seems inescapable that there must be something that has always existed. The Big Bang theory puts paid to the notion that our universe in its present form could be the something in question. Nonetheless, we can imagine that the cosmos has always had the capacity for quantum fluctuations and the like, and that certain basic principles of physics are eternal. Curious people will now ask where these principles and quantum phenomena came from, but we must stop somewhere and this at least provides the simplest stopping point we can imagine consistent with what is known about the universe. The great mystery of the universe’s existence is then reduced to the lesser mystery of the origin of something vastly simpler than the universe itself. This represents progress.

It is hardly reasonable, by contrast, to hypothesize a realm of reality even more bizarre and incomprehensible than our own, populated by at least one entity of unfathomable power, and argue that is the thing that has always existed. Placing the designer outside the normal logical and physical constraints of our universe solves nothing. If the designer exists and can influence our universe, then it is reasonable to ask where he came from. And if the designer is declared by fiat to have no need of an explanation, then it is likewise unreasonable to demand an explanation for the universe in the first place.

This is the problem with using the action of an awesomely powerful designer as an explanatory principle in science. Nothing that was formerly mysterious becomes clarified by such a move. No aspect of nature becomes controllable or predictable. The who-designed-the-designer question is not so much an attack on the logical possibility of an intelligent designer of the universe (though it does raise some troubling issues for ID proponents). Rather, it points to the utter vacuity of the idea. It explains nothing, and it leads to no fruitful lines of investigation. It solves one problem, the existence of the universe, only by creating a vastly greater problem, the existence of something more complex than the universe.

Still, we might imagine certain observations of nature that would drive us to such a conclusion anyway. That is, we could hypothesize observations that, were they to be made, would so strongly suggest the existence of something beyond our familiar reality that we would accept that conclusion despite our bafflement over where that something beyond came from. But prior to making this leap we had better be quite certain the phenomenon is genuinely inexplicable by more mundane approaches. Invoking design is not a solution. It is a concession that a problem is insoluble.

One wonders why this is not obvious to the design proponents. After all, scientific explanation typically moves from complex to simple. This is so for the most practical of reasons: simple explanations are more likely to be useful than complex ones. Complex phenomena do not become predictable or controllable by explaining them as the result of something more complex still. Yet design proponents urge scientists to proceed in precisely that manner.

The reason for this is not hard to spot. Despite their protestations to the contrary, ID is not really a scientific enterprise at all. Really its goal is simply to claim the backing of science for the conclusion that God exists. They understand perfectly well that hypothesizing the action of an unfathomable designer represents the end, not the beginning, of our investigation into nature’s mysteries. This is acceptable to them because their goals have more to do with cultural power and authority than they do with the more quotidian concerns of practicing scientists.

The difficulty posed to ID by the who-designed-the-designer question is real. If your argument is that aspects of nature are so complex they could only have arisen by design, then you are forced either to an infinite regress of designers or to the conclusion that the designer has some very bizarre characteristics indeed. If you place the designer outside of all investigation based on the principles of the known universe, then you are conceding that design cannot be part of science, and you are asserting nothing of explanatory value.

Perhaps someday we will be driven nonetheless to this conclusion, and we will just have to accept certain mysteries even more baffling than the ones nature already presents. ID assertions notwithstanding, that day has not yet arrived.

Sadly, there is no substitute for knowing the subject matter under discussion. If your goal is to understand precisely why creationist arguments are incorrect, you simply have to invest some time studying science in a serious way. For most people, however, such study is impractical. Time issues aside, most scientific disciplines are difficult to learn on one’s own. The result is that many people grow frustrated trying to sort out the various claims and counter-claims made by the two sides.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that much of the creationist fog can be dispersed via some basic understanding of how the scientific community operates. Many, indeed most, anti-evolution arguments should provoke suspicion even among those without training in science. We will consider four indicators which, when present, should strongly suggest you are dealing with a bad scientific argument.

(1) Any argument based on the premise that professional scientists have overlooked an elementary flaw in their theory is almost certainly incorrect.

Evolution has been the cornerstone of biological research ever since Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. That does not mean the theory is necessarily correct, but it does count for something. It means that evolution is not a crazy idea. It will not be overturned by a simple argument that could be explained to a high school student.

A standard example is the argument that natural selection is merely a tautology. Here is a typical formulation, from a young-Earth creationist book:

Schutzenberger and others have shown the above Neodarwinan approach to biogenesis and the origin of species to be tautological, i.e. meaningless. The reasoning behind Schutzenberger’s claim is quite elementary in reality, for he points out that the Neodarwinian hypothesis simply states nothing more than that the organism which survives has survived. Or put otherwise: the organism leaving the greatest number of offspring behind will survive. This type of depth of wisdom is not very difficult to plumb.

(A.E. Wilder Smith, The Natural Sciences Know Nothing of Evolution, 1981, pp. 127).

In a previous essay in this series I explained why this argument is incorrect (and provided other examples of anti-evolutionists raising the issue). But of relevance here is the extreme simplicity of the argument. If Wilder-Smith is correct, then many generations of scientists have simply overlooked that the central concept of their theory has no substance at all. Is that plausible? You do not need to know the details of how biologists define the term “fitness” to reply that it is not.

The oft-repeated claim that evolution runs afoul of the second law of thermodynamics provides a second example:

The discovery that life on Earth developed through evolutionary “steps,” coupled with the observation that mutations and natural selection — like other natural forces — can cause (minor) change, is widely accepted in the scientific world as proof that natural selection — alone among all natural forces — can create order out of disorder, and even design human brains with human consciousness. Only the layman seems to see the problem with this logic. In a recent Mathematical Intelligencer article ("A Mathematician’s View of Evolution,” 22, number 4, 5-7, 2000), after outlining the specific reasons why it is not reasonable to attribute the major steps in the development of life to natural selection, I asserted that the idea that the four fundamental forces of physics alone could rearrange the fundamental particles of nature into spaceships, nuclear power plants, and computers, connected to laser printers, CRTs, keyboards and the Internet, appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics in a spectacular way.

(Granville Sewell, “Evolution’s Thermodynamic Failure,” The American Spectator, 2005).

A proper understanding of the second law of thermodynamics makes it clear that Sewell’s argument is utterly mistaken. But even without that understanding we should be highly suspicious of the claim that non-scientists are capable of spotting a fallacy that has eluded professional scientists. Indeed, as long as you are aware that the second law was formulated well before Darwin published his work, you know enough to realize that Sewell’s argument is highly unlikely to be correct. It is not reasonable that for more than a century scientists have not noticed a simple contradiction between biology and physics.

As a final example, consider Michael Behe’s argument concerning irreducible complexity. He asks, “What type of biological system could not be formed by ‘numerous, successive, slight modifications'?” and answers:

Well, for starters, a system that is irreducible complex. By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional. An irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would be a powerful challenge to Darwinian evolution.

(Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, pp. 39)

If Behe is correct, then there is a simple test that can show with near certainty that a given biological system could not have evolved gradually via natural selection. Moreover, there are, according to him, numerous systems that satisfy this test. I ask again, is that plausible? Could scientists really have failed to notice so simple a criterion? Or is it more likely that there is a flaw in Behe’s logic?

(2) Any assertion that anti-evolutionists cannot get a fair hearing because the scientific community conspires to suppress their views can be dismissed out of hand.

The point here is not that scientists are so single-mindedly devoted to the truth that they would never behave in such a manner (though, as it happens, most of them would not). Rather, it is that scientists would be unable to suppress a powerful idea even if they wanted to. You see, what we refer to loosely as “the scientific community” is really just a collection of thousands of individual scientists. Each of these scientists carries out his research hoping to make a lasting contribution to our understanding of nature. And the surest way to make such a contribution is to show that a mainstream bit of orthodoxy is actually incorrect.

Scientists disseminate their work through scientific journals, and here we have a second layer of protection from conspiracies against unpopular ideas. There are hundreds of scientific journals, and they operate independently of one another. They must compete with each other for the attention of scientists. Consequently, every journal wants to be the one that publishes the next big breakthrough.

The Darwinian theory of evolution has been such a staple of biology for so long that every scientist would like to be the one to bring it down. And every journal would like to be the one that publishes the seminal paper in that regard. Both of these factors would make it impossible to squelch the arguments of anti-evolutionists, if those arguments had any scientific merit.

Here is a standard example of this sort of argument:

As we saw in Kevin Padian’s “cracked kettle” approach to biology, dogmatic Darwinists begin by imposing a narrow interpretation on the evidence and declaring it to be the only way to do science. Critics are then labeled unscientific; their articles are rejected by mainstream journals, whose editorial boards are dominated by the dogmatists; the critics are denied funding by government agencies, who send grant proposals to the dogmatists for “peer” review; and eventually the critics are hounded out of the scientific community altogether.

In the process, evidence against the Darwinian view simply disappears, like witnesses against the Mob. Or the evidence is buried in specialized publications, where only a dedicated researcher can find it. Once critics have been silenced and counter-evidence has been buried, the dogmatists announce that there is no scientific debate about their theory, and no evidence against it. Using such tactics, defenders of Darwinian orthodoxy have managed to establish a near-monopoly over research grants, faculty appointments, and peer-reviewed journals in the United States.

(Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution, pp. 235-236).

If there were only one journal and only one grant-funding agency, we might be able to take this argument seriously. In reality, however, the sheer scope of the conspiracy Wells is alleging rules it out of all serious consideration. Every major scientific organization that has taken a stand on this issue has come out in support of evolution. Not one wishes to align itself with the creationists or the ID folks. Are all of them in the hands of dogmatic evolutionists? Hundreds of scientific journals turn out tens of thousands of papers related to evolution each year, compared to almost none for ID (and the handful of papers ID folks claim in support of their view are highly debatable, to put it kindly). All of those editorial boards and all of those peer-reviewers are blinded by ideology? It is not credible.

Which does not stop the creationists and ID folks from repeating the charge:

In the final analysis, it is not any specific scientific evidence that convinces me that Darwinism is a pseudoscience that will collapse once it becomes possible for critics to get a fair hearing. It is the way the Darwinists argue their case that makes it apparent that they are afraid to encounter the best arguments against their theory. A real science does not employ propaganda and legal barriers to prevent relevant questions from being asked, nor does it rely on enforcing rules of reasoning that allow no alternative to the official story. If the Darwinists had a good case to make, they would welcome the critics to an academic forum for open debate, and they would want to confront the best critical arguments rather than to caricature them as straw men. Instead they have chosen to rely on the dishonorable methods of power politics.

(Phillip Johnson, The Wedge of Truth, pp. 141)

Perhaps. Or maybe scientists have, indeed, given fair consideration to anti-evolution arguments, and have simply found them wanting. You decide which is more likely.

(3) Any argument based on the premise of major conceptual holes in evolutionary theory should be rejected.

It is sometimes said that in science there are two sorts of open questions. There are problems, and then there are mysteries. A problem is a situation that is likely to be resolved via more research of the sort scientists are currently doing. A mystery, by contrast, is a question that seems unanswerable within the confines of current theorizing.

Evolutionary biology has numerous problems. That, after all, is why people continue to do research in the area. It is a difficult practical problem to determine the precise evolutionary relationships between modern organisms or to unravel the early stages of a complex adaptation. But many questions of this sort have been answered in the past, and there is every reason for optimism that the methods that have worked for so long will continue to bear fruit.

But there are no mysteries in evolution. By this I mean that there are currently no bits of empirical evidence that seem utterly inexplicable from an evolutionary viewpoint. This is unsurprising. Evolution has been mainstream biology for over a century. It would not have earned that status if it were unable to answer important fundamental questions.

With that in mind, it becomes easier to assess statements like this:

The impotence of Darwinian theory in accounting for the molecular basis of life is evident not only from the analyses in this book, but also from the complete absence in the professional scientific literature of any detailed models by which complex biochemical systems could have been produced, as shown in Chapter 8. In the face of the enormous complexity of that modern biochemistry has uncovered in the cell, the scientific community is paralyzed. No one at Harvard University, no one at the National Institutes of Health, no member of the National Academy of Sciences, no Nobel prize winner - no one at all can give a detailed account of how the cilium, or vision, or blood clotting, or any complex biochemical process might have developed in a Darwinian fashion.

(Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, pp. 187)

If you happen to be familiar with the scientific literature on molecular evolution, then you know that Behe’s assertion here is not correct. But even without such familiarity there is good reason to be suspicious of this claim. Explaining the formation of complex systems is one of the primary tasks facing any theory of evolution. If it were really true that after a century of research the scientific community remained “paralyzed” by such complexity, then Darwinism would have been discarded long ago.

Others are even more audacious than Behe:

Indeed, the following problems have proven utterly intractable not only for the Darwinian selection mechanism, but also for any other undirected natural process proposed to date: the origin of life, the origin of the genetic code, the origin of multicellular life, the origin of sexual reproduction, the scarcity of transitional forms in the fossil record, the biological Big Bang that occurred in the Cambrian era, the development of complex organ systems and the formation of irreducibly complex molecular machines. These are just a few of the more serious difficulties that confront every theory of biological evolution that posits only undirected natural processes.

(William Dembski, No Free Lunch, pp. 247).

A detailed discussion of each of the points Dembski raises would take many pages indeed. Such discussions are readily available, in books and on the internet, for those with the patience to slog through them. In the meantime, however, I would ask you simply to note that Dembski is suggesting that evolution is helpless before most of the major questions it is called upon to address. Accepting his claim requires you to believe that scientists have clung to this theory for more than a century in spite of this impotence. Does that seem likely? Or is it more likely that Dembski’s list is mere rhetoric intended to discredit a theory whose conclusions he finds objectionable?

(4) Any assertion to the effect that scholars from fields other than biology are better placed to see the flaws in evolution than are biologists themselves should be disregarded.

Biologists are nearly unanimous in the view that common descent is real, and that natural selection is the primary mechanism guiding the pattern of that descent. This presents a serious problem for creationists and ID folks. Since there are few professional biologists willing to be numbered among them, they must persuade people that expert commentary on the minutiae of this subject is best obtained from people outside biology. And that leads them to make statements like this:

Before undertaking this task I should say something about my qualifications and purpose. I am not a scientist but an academic lawyer by profession, with a specialty in analyzing the logic of arguments and identifying the assumptions that lie behind those arguments. This background is more appropriate than one might think, because what people believe about evolution and Darwinism depends very heavily on the kind of logic they employ and the kind of assumptions they make. Being a scientist is not necessarily an advantage when dealing with a broad topic like evolution, which cuts across many scientific disciplines and also involves issues of philosophy. Practicing scientists are of necessity highly specialized, and a scientist outside his field is just another layman.

(Phillip Johnson, Darwin on Trial, pp. 13)

That this is absurd follows from a basic consideration of how scientists approach their work. Scientists accept evolution because they can see the tangible dividends it pays in their research. Evolution is, among other things, a tool that is used by biologist to make sense of the data they collect in the field and the lab. It is not the end result of an abstract process of logical reasoning from a controversial starting point.

Furthermore, as previously noted, it is not credible to suggest that the overwhelming support for evolution among scientists is the result of their inability to spot elementary logical fallacies or hidden assumptions.

Let us close with one further example:

The other point is very simple, but also seems to be appreciated only by more mathematically-oriented people. It is that to attribute the development of life on Earth to natural selection is to assign to it—and to it alone, of all known natural “forces"—the ability to violate the second law of thermodynamics and to cause order to arise from disorder.

(Granville Sewell, “A Mathematician’s View of Evolution,” The Mathematical Intelligencer, 2000).

We have already discussed, under point number one, why the second law argument can be rejected out of hand. What is interesting here, however, is the suggestion that “more mathematically-oriented people” can see a fallacy in evolutionary thinking that professional biologists are blind to. Needless to say, a biologist claiming that his training in the life sciences allows him to see errors in current mathematical practice of which mathematicians themselves are unaware would not be taken seriously. The argument does not improve by being turned around.

Sorting through the various arguments in the evolution/creationism dispute can be a daunting and impractical task. But if you are willing to grant certain reasonable assumptions about the scientific community in general, and biologists in particular, then much of the difficulty goes away.

Professional scientists are highly competant and work under a system that makes censorship virtually impossible. They are not going to be systematically guilty of crude errors in logic, and they are not going to base their research on a theory that has no answers to the fundamental questions that are put to it. And the details of given scientific topics are best understood and assessed by the people working in that area, and not by outsiders with axes to grind. Grant these assumptions, and virtually everything anti-evolutionists say provokes deep suspicion.

And if you reject these assumptions? Well, then I suspect you have issues with science unrelated to the merits of evolutionary theory.

The present essay will be devoted to just one of the arguments upon which Coulter bases her case. The motivation for this series of essays has always been a desire to use insipid creationist prattle as a tool for promoting clear thinking about basic biological questions. It is hoped that by thinking carefully about why Coulter’s caricature of evolutionary biology is wrong, one can come to better understand the real thing.

The argument in question is sometimes referred to simply as “The Tautology Objection.” Coulter’s version goes like this:

The second prong of Darwin’s “theory” is generally nothing but a circular statement: Through the process of natural selection, the “fittest” survive. Who are the “fittest”? The ones who survive! Why look — it happens every time! The “survival of the fittest” would be a joke if it weren’t part of the belief system of a fanatical cult infesting the Scientific Community.

The beauty of having a scientific theory that’s a tautology is that it can’t be disproved. Evolution cultists denounce “Creation Science” on the grounds that it’s not “science” because it can’t be observed or empirically tested in a laboratory. Guess what else can’t be observed or empirically tested? Evolution! (pp. 212-213).

Writing in National Review Online in December of last year, conservative commentator Tom Bethell expressed the main point more clearly:

Darwin’s claim to fame was his discovery of a mechanism of evolution; he accepted “survival of the fittest” as a good summary of his natural-selection theory. But which ones are the fittest? The ones that survive. There is no criterion of fitness that is independent of survival. Whatever happens, it is the “fittest” that survive — by definition. (Emphasis Added)

Even before considering the minutiae of how fitness is defined, we should note something suspicious about this argument. Coulter and Bethell are not saying here that recent discoveries have shown that evolution is an inadequate theory. Rather, they accuse scientists of having made a simple logical oversight. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould observed (in response to a previous article, in Harper’s Magazine, in which Bethell raised the same issue):

Bethell’s argument has a curious ring for most practicing scientists. We are always ready to watch a theory fall under the impact of new data, but we do not expect a great and influential theory to collapse from a logical error in its formulation.

Indeed. Scientists are fully capable of jumping to conclusions, or arriving at incorrect theories from an inadequate supply of data. But it has never once happened in the history of science that a theory achieves mainstream status, only to fall apart when a clever outsider notices a simple logical oversight. That Coulter’s and Bethell’s formulation of evolution suggests it is tautological proves only that they do not understand the theory they are attacking (or are deliberately misrepresenting it, but we will leave aside that possibility for now).

Let us begin our reply to this argument in the most direct way possible. It is asserted that within evolutionary theory, the fittest organisms are defined as those who survive. This is the crux of the argument, and it is completely incorrect. In reality, the fittest organisms are the ones who, based on their physical characteristics and the environment in which they find themselves, would be expected to leave the most offspring. Gould described the point this way:

My defense of Darwin is neither startling, novel, nor profound. I merely assert that Darwin was justified in analogizing natural selection with animal breeding. In artificial selection, a breeder’s desire represents a “change of environment” for a population. In this new environment, certain traits are superior a priori; (they surive and spread by our breeder’s choice, but this is a result of their fitness, not a definition of it). In nature, Darwinian evolution is also a response to changing environments. Now, the key point: certain morphological, physiological and behvioral traits should be superior a priori as designs for living in new environments. These traits confer fitness by an engineer’s criterion of good design, not by the empirical fact of their survival and spread. It got colder before the wooly mammoth evolved its shaggy coat.

Let us imagine that we have perfect information about the environment in which a population of organisms finds itself. Let us further suppose that we are aware of the full range of extant heritable variation within the population. In those circumstances we could make some definite statements about the future evolution of that population. A group of scientists could examine that information and come to a consensus about which members of the population were the fittest. Plainly there are criteria for fitness independent of mere survival.

This is not the whole story, however. Predicting the future is only a very small part of what evolutionary biology is all about. Most of the interesting events in evolution took place in the distant past. Unraveling and explaining that past presents scientists with a problem almost perfectly opposite to the one considered in the previous paragraph. Instead of trying to predict the future evolution of a species given information about its present environment, now we are trying to understand ancestral environments given information about what sorts of creatures survived.

In this context scientists will, indeed, hypothesize that traits that persisted and developed over long periods of time did so because of the fitness advantages they conferred on their possessors. But here’s the catch: that’s the beginning, not the end, of the investigation. The assumption that the trait under investigation emerged from the prolonged result of natural selection is used to generate testable hypotheses about the creatures in question. In his book Plan and Purpose in Nature, biologist George C. Williams provides the following example:

Productive use of the idea of functional design, in modern biological research, often takes this form: an organism is observed to have a certain feature, and the observer wonders what good it might be. For instance, dissection and examination of a pony fish shows it to have what looks like a light-producing organ, or photopore, and even a reflector behind it to make it shine in a specific direction. So we accept the conclusion that the organ is good at producing light, but the obvious question then becomes, What good is light? The pony fish photopore is deep inside the body. Can it really be adaptive for a fish to illuminate its own innards?

The organ is situated above the air bladder, and the light shines downward through the viscera. The pony fish is small and its tissues are rather transparent. Some of the light gets through and produces a faint glow along the ventral surface. But what is the use of a dimly lit belly? Perhaps it makes the pony fish more difficult to see in the special circumstances in which it lives. It inhabits the open ocean, where it may move toward the surface as darkness approaches, but spends the daylight hours far below at depths where the light is exceedingly dim by our standards, detectable only as a murky glow from above.

Williams goes on to describe how this hypothesis led to experiments that confirmed that the pony fish’s glow has the intensity it ought to have if its primary function was to provide camouflage. This is a nice illustration of how selection-based reasoning is used in scientific practice.

Natural selection is not used as an abstract principle in biological research. “Survival of the fittest” is a catchy phrase that captures much of what is important about natural selection, but it is not one you will find very often in professional research papers. Instead, scientists will propose specific hypotheses about the fitness advantages conferred by particular traits in particular environments. There is nothing tautological about saying, for example, that moths possessing dark coloration will be less visible than light colored moths to predatory birds when resting on dark-colored trees.

The reasoning used by scientists in this way is comparable to what historians do in trying to understand why certain events happened the way they did. An historian studying nineteenth century America might begin his investigation with the fact that the North won the Civil War. From this starting point he will naturally ask himself what advantages the North had that allowed them to emerge victorious over the South. But the assumption that the North had such advantages will not be the sum total of his investigation. And no one would consider it reasonable to object to his work on the grounds that it is based on circular reasoning.

Well, populations of organisms that survive through long stretches of evolutionary history are likewise the victors in a war, this time for survival. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that those that survived had certain advantages over those that did not. Determining the precise nature of those advantages might pose a difficult practical problem, but the assertion that those advantages existed is surely unproblematic.

We have thus provided two answers to the tautology objection. The first is that its central premise, that there are no criteria of fitness independent of survival, is false. The second is that natural selection is not applied in practice in the simplistic way the phrase “Survival of the fittest,” suggests. Instead, scientists use selection based reasoning to develop specific, testable hypotheses about the organisms under investigation.

Stephen Jay Gould once observed that creationists are “singularly devoid of shame” in their willingness to use any argument, no matter how vacuous or frequently refuted, in making their case against evolution. He might have included right-wing demagogues alongside creationists. The tautology objection cannot survive the scrutiny of anyone versed in even the most basic elements of evolutionary theory. That Coulter would raise the issue so snidely, and have her book sell very well as a result, proves that knowing what you are talking about has no value for many on the political right.

This is highly significant. You see, the thermodynamics argument is one of the very worst creationists have ever used. The argument is wrong, of course. But more than that it is wrong in a way that betrays an extreme simple-mindedness about science in general and physics in particular. Consequently, among scientists the thermodynamics argument has become a symbol for the sort of mind-numbing ignorance that is the stock-in-trade of creationists.

It was precisely this level of silliness that ID proponents were keen to avoid. They, after all, were supposed to be serious scientists, not Bible thumping extremists. Now we have William Dembski, who provides most of the tiny amount of intellectual oomph the ID folks can claim, supporting this ridiculous argument. In so doing he has completely sacrificed any pretensions to seriousness ID might once have entertained.

The basic creationist argument is this: The second law states that a spontaneous, natural process can only lead to an increase in the entropy of a system. Entropy is roughly a measure of disorder or complexity. So the second law implies that natural processes can only cause things to become more disordered and less complex over time. But evolution asserts that natural processes have caused organisms to grow more complex over time. This is a contradiction, and since no one is inclined to abandon the second law, evolution must not be correct.

I first encountered this argument before I had devoted any time to learning the basic principles of thermodynamics. Even then, it struck me as suspicious. For one thing, I was aware that the second law of thermodynamics had been formulated well before Darwin did his work. Accepting the creationist argument as valid would require that several generations of scientists had simply overlooked an elementary contradiction between evolution and thermodynamics. That seemed unlikely.

Furthermore, the second law appeared to play only a rhetorical role in the creationist argument. After all, you don’t need fancy principles of thermodynamics to argue that the growth in complexity of organisms over time is something that requires a special sort of explanation. It is a simple fact of everyday life that without maintenance things tend to break down and fall apart.

Everyone agrees that the growth in complexity that evolutionists claim took place over the course of natural history requires an explanation. And biologists have one. Many generations of natural selection acting on random genetic variations can cause the average complexity of organisms to increase. This is not theoretical. Natural selection has demonstrated its ability, in both the field and the lab, to increase the level of order and complexity in organisms. The same principle is at work in artificial life experiments, and in the use of evolutionary algorithms in engineering problems. Granted, the experiments I am referring to tend to show relatively small increases in order, but that is enough to establish that no principle of thermodynamics prohibits known evolutionary mechanisms from increasing biological complexity.

Sewell himself inadvertently concedes this. When it comes time for him to explain why natural selection is not an adequate explanation for the growth of biological complexity, thermodynamics goes out the window. Instead he simply parrots the irreducible complexity argument of which ID folks are so fond. For example, in a discussion of the insect-catching apparatus of the aquatic bladderwort he writes:

The development of any major new feature presents similar problems, and according to Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, who describes several spectacular examples in detail in Darwin’s Black Box (Free Press, 1996), the world of microbiology is especially loaded with such examples of “irreducible complexity.”

It seems that until the trigger hair, the door, and the pressurized chamber were all in place, and the ability to digest insects, and to reset the trap to be able to catch more than one insect, had been developed, none of the individual components of this carnivorous trap would have been of any use. What is the selective advantage of an incomplete pressurized chamber?

Recall that Darwin’s Black Box is the book in which Michael Behe introduced the irreducible complexity argument in its modern form.

Sewell goes on like this at considerable length in an attempt to persuade the reader that natural selection is incapable in principle of explaining the growth of biological complexity over time. The arguments he makes in this regard are entirely incorrect biologically, but of more relevance to the present discussion is that they have nothing to do with thermodynamics.

Let me make things even simpler. Things that are thermodynamically impossible do not occur. But natural selection does occur, and is undeniably capable in principle of explaining increases in biological complexity. Therefore, there is no principle of thermodynamics that says that evolution is an incorrect theory.

But let’s push this a bit further. Depending on the particular textbook from which you learn your thermodynamics, you may find several different statements all labeled as the second law. There are certain physical situations in which it can be useful to think of the second law as a statement about order and disorder, and some books present it in that context. In other situations it might be presented as a statement regarding the efficiency of an engine in converting heat into work. Popular level treatments will sometimes describe the second law by the simple statement that heat always travels from a hot body to a cold body. There are other formulations as well.

Also of importance is the nature of the system to which the second law applies. Some texts require that the system under consideration be isolated from its surroundings, so that neither matter nor energy is crossing the boundary. Typically such restrictions are made to simplify the presentation, not to reflect any fundamental requirement of the physics of the situation. By contrast, others will allow even the most general situations, in which anything, either matter or energy, is allowed to cross the boundary.

In my view, however, the second law is best viewed as a purely mathematical statement. It says that the change in entropy of a system in going between two states must be larger than a certain mathematical quantity (the integral of dQ over T, for those who know some calculus and some thermo notation). The technical details of what this means need not detain us here. This is the formulation that is most relevant to determining whether or not evolution runs afoul of the second law.

If you make the added assumption that your system is completely isolated from the outside world, then the integral I mentioned ends up having the value zero, and the second law tells us that the change in entropy must be positive. In other words, the entropy must increase in this situation. Creationists of old tended to ignore this assumption, and argued simply that the second law rules out any possibility of natural forces causing order to increase. As a result, scientists generally replied that the Earth is not an isolated system, since we receive copious amounts of energy from the Sun. That is certainly an important observation, and it does, indeed, refute some primitive versions of the second law argument.

The second law still applies when energy is crossing the boundary of the system, and in this case it says that the change in entropy must be equal to or larger than the mathematical function I mentioned previously. Entropy can, indeed, decrease in this situation, but the second law still makes a definite statement about the magnitude of that decrease. Sewell understands this, and gives a tolerable, if highly non-technical, description of this fact. However, formulating the second law mathematically makes it clear that Sewell cannot merely assert that some process (evolution by natural selection in this case) violates the second law. There is a very clear test to pass to show that a given process really has a second law problem.

You see, any claim that evolution violates the second law must be backed up with a calculation. Sewell believes that the second law is a problem for evolution? Very well. Let him evaluate the integral I mentioned and show that the change in entropy has been smaller than it should be. Anything short of that is no longer an argument based on thermodynamics. It is just ye olde argument from personal incredulity, in which Sewell is expressing nothing more than his own disbelief that biological complexity could have evolved naturally. Since every formulation of the second law allows for local increases of order and complexity, the mere observation of such increases does not constitute an apparent violation of thermodynamic principles.

The reason Sewell will not carry out this calculation is that he cannot. No one can. Entropy calculations are always carried out in the context of a reversible process, and no one has the faintest idea how to describe a reversible process for assembling an organism from its component substances. That is why serious scientists do not try to apply the second law to biological processes in the simple-minded ways ID folks prefer.

Sewell, however, has another trick up his sleeve. He prefers to formulate the second law as a statement about probability. In his American Spectator article he writes:

Natural forces, such as corrosion, erosion, fire and explosions, do not create order, they destroy it. The second law is all about probability, it uses probability at the microscopic level to predict macroscopic change: the reason carbon distributes itself more and more uniformly in an insulated solid is, that is what the laws of probability predict when diffusion alone is operative.

To see what he is talking about, consider that the historically earliest formulations of the second law, and indeed of all the basic principles of thermodynamics, were made without any reference to the fact that matter is made up of smaller particles. Eventually scientists realized that viewing matter as a large ensemble of individual molecules could shed some additional light on basic thermodynamic principles. This realization led eventually to the development of statistical mechanics; “mechanics” because it was devoted to explaining the motions of particles, “statistical” because it was concerned not with the trajectory of any individual particle, but rather with the average behavior of a large number of particles. Sewell’s statement likening the second law to an assertion about probability only makes sense within this context.

The basic idea is this: Given a box that is filled with gas and has been sitting, untouched, for some time, we expect the gas molecules to be distributed roughly evenly throughout the box. We would be very surprised to find all of the gas on one side of the box with empty space on the other side. We can explain this in terms of probability: There are vastly more configurations in which the molecules are distributed roughly evenly than there are where all the molecules are on one side of the box. So other things being equal, we can say that it is vastly more likely that we will encounter one of the even distributions. The distributions in which the gas is evenly distributed can plausibly be said to be less ordered, and therefore have higher entropy, then the highly uneven distributions. This permits a probabilistic interpretation of the second law.

Sewell’s insistence that the second law is fundamentally a probabilistic statement will come as news to most physicists. Statistical mechanics offers one way of looking at the second law, but it is neither more fundamental nor better than the classical view. It is merely different, superior in certain situations but not as effective in others. In his book Understanding Thermodynamics, H. C. Van Ness described the situation this way:

Statistical mechanics adds to thermodynamics on its theoretical side, as a means for or as an aid to the calculation of properties. The other half of thermodynamics, the applied half, benefits only from a wider availability of the data needed in the solution of engineering problems. Although statistical mechanics is based on the presumed reality of atoms and molecules, it does not provide, any more than does thermodynamics, a detailed description of atomic and molecular behavior and of atomic and molecular interactions. However, it does provide, as thermodynamics does not, the means by which thermodynamic properties may be calculated whenever detailed descriptions of atomic and molecular behavior are provided from other studies, either theoretical or experimental. Thus statistical mechanics adds something very useful to thermodynamics, but it neither explains thermodynamics nor replaces it. (Emphasis added)

Returning now to Sewell’s argument, we find him summing up his thinking here with the following formulation:

In these simple examples, I assumed nothing but heat conduction or diffusion was going on, but for more general situations, I offered the tautology that “if an increase in order is extremely improbable when a system is closed, it is still extremely improbable when the system is open, unless something is entering which makes it not extremely improbable.” (Emphasis in original)

To which I reply, “Yes, of course. But so what?”

Accepting for the moment Sewell’s idiosyncratic terminology, we can say that if we take the Earth by itself as our system, then there is definitely something entering to make an increase in biological complexity more likely. The solar energy received by the Earth fuels the chemical reactions that allow living organisms to survive and reproduce. This cycle of survival and reproduction ultimately leads to natural selection, which can, in turn, lead to increases in biological complexity. Minus that energy living organisms would quickly go extinct and evolution would not occur.

Nor can Sewell retreat to the question of life’s origin, for then he must confront the fact that the various sources of energy bathing the early Earth would have fueled chemical reactions that are believed to have led to the first primitive life forms. Once again, it is for him to back up his claims about probability with something more substantive than his own beliefs.

In his online lecture Sewell describes evolution as being a “film running backwards” by which he means that we see complexity increasing in apparent violation of the second law (just as in a movie run backwards you might see the shattered pieces of a broken coffee cup reassemble themselves into a functional vessel). If he wants us to take this claim seriously, he needs to follow the dictates of his own theorizing. Does evolution require us to believe that something incredibly improbable has occurred in the course of natural history? Let him carry out the probability calculation that shows that to be the case. Then let him explain what significance his calculation is supposed to have. (Improbable things happen all the time, after all). Once he has done that, he will have an actual argument, and we can revisit this subject at that time. Without such a calculation, he has only a lot of polysyllabic bluster.

Sewell will have no more luck carrying out these probability calculations than he had with the prior (entropy) calculation. And that is because these sorts of probabilities are effectively impossible to calculate. The probability of any particular set of outcomes of several billion years of evolution depends on far more variables than can possibly be included in a practical calculation. Probability theory finds many applications in biology, but this is not one of them. There is a reason real scientists do not talk about probability calculations in Sewell’s haphazard manner.

The pattern in Sewell’s arguments is now rapidly becoming clear. When he wants to impress us with the rigor and sophistication of his arguments, he talks about entropy and order and probability and the history of thermodynamics. But when it comes time to apply any of this to evolution he retreats to simple-minded assertions about films running backwards and atoms arranging themselves into microchips. The reason he does this is that, in reality, thermodynamics and probability play no role at all in his argument. More precisely, they play no scientific role. They do play a strong rhetorical role, however, since the casual use of technical scientific jargon is an effective means of confusing lay people.

Sewell closes his essay as follows:

The development of life may have only violated one law of science, but that was the one Sir Arthur Eddington called the “supreme” law of Nature, and it has violated that in a most spectacular way. At least that is my opinion, but perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps it only seems extremely improbable, but really isn’t, that, under the right conditions, the influx of stellar energy into a planet could cause atoms to rearrange themselves into nuclear power plants and spaceships and computers. But one would think that at least this would be considered an open question, and those who argue that it really is extremely improbable, and thus contrary to the basic principle underlying the second law, would be given a measure of respect, and taken seriously by their colleagues, but we aren’t. (Emphasis in original).

Knowledgeable people will not show any respect for Sewell’s argument, because he has produced virtually no argument at all. He describes it as his opinion that evolution violates the second law. This is not the sort of thing about which scientists are supposed to have opinions. We have ample evidence that evolution happened and that natural selection was the driving force of it. Biologists find evolutionary thinking to be very helpful in their research. If Sewell believes that it runs afoul of the second law nevertheless, then he needs to carry out the calculations that show that to be case. Otherwise he has only an opinion based on nothing.

These sorts of considerations should be obvious to anyone with a modicum of mathematical or scientific training. That they are not obvious to Sewell is another reason his quest for respect will be in vain.

In this world, however, things are not so easily resolved. Much of ID’s support among the general public comes from people entirely ignorant of the basic facts and methods of science. For them, science refers not to a particular method of investigation, but rather to the totality of true statements that can be made about the world. And since they view it as self-evident that God exists, they believe that a science that makes no reference to God must be incomplete.

ID proponents find it rhetorically useful to play up this angle. They routinely tell their audiences that scientists dismiss ID not because of its lack of scientific merit, but because of arbitrary definitional conventions about what constitutes science. Sadly, they are sometimes abetted in this by naïve scientists who make, “It’s not science!” their main argument when publicly confronting ID.

Some ID supporters, however, are so enamored of their theory that they try to have it introduced into high school science curricula. When this happens it falls to the courts to decide whether such curricular changes are consistent with the constitutional prohibitions against mixing church with state. Schools, you see, are not allowed to promote sectarian religious beliefs. And one part of showing that ID is such a belief is showing that ID is definitely not science.

So the question of whether ID can reasonably be considered part of science is important over and above any consideration of the merits of its arguments. Furthermore, defeating ID requires educating the public not just in the basic findings of science, but also in its goals and methods. For these reasons it is useful to think about what science actually is.

Science is best viewed as an activity undertaken with a specific goal in mind. That goal is to understand the workings of nature. We measure our level of understanding by the extent to which we can make nature’s phenomena predictable and controllable. Any investigative technique that brings us closer to this goal can reasonably be considered part of science.

All of the standard pieces of the scientific method we learned about in high school - experimentation, hypothesis testing, inductive reasoning and so forth - have their role to play in bringing us closer to our goal of predictability and control. By contrast, hypothesizing the actions of ill-defined supernatural entities such as ghosts or poltergeists does not help us move closer to our goal. Consequently, the actions of supernatural entities play no role in modern scientific discourse. It is pragmatism, not bias, that leads scientists to abjure the supernatural in their professional work.

This pragmatic rejection of supernatural hypotheses is sometimes described by saying that scientists adhere to methodological naturalism (MN); naturalism because it rejects the idea of causality coming from outside nature, methodological because it is a convention for doing science, as opposed to an assumption about how the world actually is. ID proponents seize on this, arguing that MN is nothing but an arbitrary rule used to exclude ID from its place at the table. This claim is a bit rich, since in other contexts ID folks are keen to persuade people that their view implies nothing one way or the other about the reality of the supernatural.

More to the point, however, is that many of the terms that get thrown around in this discussion - such as testability, falsifiability, or MN- are really just ways of saying that scientists care about predictability and control. Saying that scientists adhere to MN in their work is really just shorthand for the fact that science is a very pragmatic enterprise, and that the naturalistic hypotheses are the ones that have historically proven useful. It is a phrase that accurately describes the way scientists approach their work, and it survives because the only alternative - methodological supernaturalism - has proven itself time and again to be utterly ineffective in bringing scientists closer to their goal.

I suspect my description of things will seem obvious to any professional scientist. Confronted with real data from an actual experiment, it is hard to see how invoking supernatural entities constitutes any advance over total ignorance.

But if defining science is as simple as I have suggested, then why do so many philosophers of science say that the demarcation problem, by which they mean the problem of finding a clear dividing line between science and non-science, is insoluble?

They say this because there is a difference between science in practice and science in theory. In practice it is usually fairly simple to distinguish science from non-science. Scientists have their goals and their standard methods for achieving those goals, and they seem to have little difficulty distinguishing topics that are worth their time from topics that are not. Philosophers, however, have different concerns. They are looking for checklists of abstract criteria that you could apply infallibly to any given human endeavor, and thereby come to a definite conclusion about whether or not the endeavor is science. And this turns out to be difficult indeed. The details can be found in any textbook on the philosophy of science.

The more florid pronouncements of certain philosophers notwithstanding, the insolubility of the demarcation problem does not imply that “science” and “non-science” are simply arbitrary labels that reflect cultural biases. A better way to view the situation is that science and non-science are opposite ends of a continuum, as opposed to rigidly defined categories. That there is a large gray area in the middle of the continuum does not change the fact that items at the extremes are easily identified as either science or non-science.

Perhaps my emphasis on predictability and control strikes you as misplaced. After all, is not science meant to be an objective search for the truth? The noted philosopher of religion Alvin Plantinga believes so. In his essay “Methodological Naturalism?” he responded as follows to the point about the pragmatism of scientific practice:

The claim that God has directly created life, for example, may be a science stopper; it does not follow that God did not directly create life. Obviously we have no guarantee that God has done everything by way of employing secondary causes, or in such a way as to encourage further scientific inquiry, or for our convenience as scientists, or for the benefit of the National Science Foundation. Clearly we cannot sensibly insist in advance that whatever we are confronted with is to be explained in terms of something else God did; he must have done some things directly; to know this would be an important part of a serious and profound knowledge of the universe. The fact that such claims are science stoppers means that as a general rule they will not be helpful; it does not mean that they are never true, and it does not mean that they can never be part of a proper scientific theory. (Italics in original, boldface added).

Plantinga, I’m afraid, gave away the store with that boldface remark. The fact that claims of direct supernatural action are not helpful is equivalent to saying that they cannot be part of a proper scientific theory.

Plantinga is defending a syllogism that many non-scientists would agree with. Roughly, he is arguing that: (1) Science encompasses all that is true. (2) God is true. Therefore, (3) God is part of science. Alas, there is a serious problem in viewing science this way. Truth, in the ultimate, metaphysical, capital-T sense, is a slippery beast. In defending some assertion about the natural world, what more can we say than, “It agrees with the data we have?” Even the most well tested scientific theory must face up to the possibility that it is effective only because it amuses some race of super beings to make it so. Indeed, knowing about such super beings would be an important part of any comprehensive understanding of nature. But since there is no practical difference between, “This theory is effective in predicting the outcomes of experiments,” on the one hand and “This theory is effective because super beings wish it to be so,” on the other, scientists are not being dogmatic in ignoring the possible reality of super beings.

Of course, it is possible to get carried away with this. Emphasizing pragmatism over truth does not mean that we must wallow in a relativistic morass in discussing the workings of nature. Scientists routinely describe their better-established theories as true, and I believe they are correct to do so. As long as it is understood that “true” in this context means “consistently effective at explaining and predicting empirical data,” no confusion should result. As a practical matter it seems reasonable to assume that the impressive fit between theory and data reflects something genuine about how the world actually is, but a person absolutely determined to reject this assumption is welcome to do so.

So why are people like Plantinga so eager to have their religious beliefs brought under the umbrella of science? Why is it not obvious to him that it is usefulness, and not ultimate truth, that is of importance to scientists? The reason, I suspect, is that Plantinga is only tangentially interested in proper scientific practice. His real interest is in winning for his religious beliefs the same respect accorded to the pronouncements of professional scientists. The enormous success of science both in explaining the world and in providing for people’s physical comfort has led to a situation in which for much of the public, statements are true to the extent that they are scientific. For people like Plantinga, it is already something of a defeat to have to defend their views in scientific terms.

In emphasizing pragmatism in this way, is there a danger that science is putting blinders on concerning the reality of supernatural design? Could it be that scientists are ignoring crucial evidence for supernatural design because of the methodological restrictions they put on themselves in their professional lives? The answer is no. The reason is that there is no such thing as evidence for the supernatural. There are only examples of phenomena that currently lack convincing naturalistic explanations. Such phenomena are the stock in trade of scientists. No changes in practice are necessary to make scientists pay attention to them.

To have compelling evidence for supernatural design, it would be necessary to find some phenomenon that is not merely unsolved, but one where there is good reason for believing it to be unsolvable, even in principle. ID proponents claim that such phenomena have been discovered, and they point to things like the origin of life or the complexity of the cell, to make their case. In their more exuberant moments they claim to be able to prove that there are certain phenomena in nature that simply cannot be explained without recourse to intelligent agents.

Scientists have considered the arguments made to defend this view and have found them to be utterly inadequate. It is not naturalistic blinders, but the emptiness of its assertions, that prevent ID from being accepted by scientists. There is no reason to believe that any of the open questions occupying scientists nowadays are of a sort that will forever resist naturalistic explanations.

Let us return now to the general question of whether assuming the reality of the supernatural can ever be useful to scientists. It is certainly true that many scientists in the past have been guided towards effective scientific theories as a result of their religious faith or their understanding of divine action. But this is neither here nor there. Scientists derive their inspirations from a multitude of sources, but this is wholly irrelevant to the subsequent verification of their ideas. Regardless of where an idea came from, it must pass through the ringer of experimental verification before it becomes part of science.

Are there other options? In his aforementioned essay, Alvin Plantinga argues that scientists who accept the Christian faith should integrate that faith into their work:

My main point, therefore, can be summarized as follows. According to Augustine, Kuyper, and many others, human history is dominated by a battle, a contest between the Civitas Dei and the City of Man. Part of the task of the Christian academic community is to discern the limits and lineaments of this contest, to see how it plays out in intellectual life generally, and to pursue the various areas of intellectual life as citizens of the Civitas Dei. This naturally suggests pursuing science using all that we know: what we know about God as well as what we know about his creation, and what we know by faith as well as what we know in other ways.

There is much to criticize in this paragraph. For example, the phrase “know by faith” seems oxymoronic to me. Instead, however, let me make a more general point.

There are plenty of people who share Plantinga’s view that Christian theism should inform the work that scientists do. If they want to be taken seriously, however, they must leave their armchairs, enter a laboratory, and demonstrate that their approach to science works better than the way it is currently done. The test is simple: Go discover something. Stop with the armchair theorizing, the whining about naturalistic bias, and the empty charges against well established branches of modern science. Instead, make progress on some problem that has stymied mainstream scientists.

If they succeed in this enterprise, their approach will be accepted. Otherwise, it will be rightly rejected. Everything else is irrelevant bluster.

And that brings us back to the original question. Is ID science? Not in its present form. Its central assertion is that an unfathomable intelligence took some unspecified action at some point in natural history. Since there is no hope of using that assertion to explain some formerly mysterious aspect of nature, it is plainly unscientific. On the other hand, many of ID’s assertions about the inadequacies of evolutionary theory, or about its ability to prove mathematically the intervention of an intelligent agent in natural history are, indeed, scientific. They are also demonstrably false, alas.

Any way you slice it, Intelligent Design offers nothing of value to professional scientists.

References

• Alvin Plantinga, “Methodological Naturalism,” Essay 13 in Intelligent Design Creationism and its Critics, R. Pennock, ed., MIT Press, 2001. pp. 339-362.

A “hypothetical reasonable observer,” adult or child, who is “aware of the history and context of the community and forum” is also presumed to know that ID is a form of creationism. The evidence at trial demonstrates that ID is nothing less than the progeny of creationism.

With these two, blunt sentences, the Court managed to pierce an illusion crafted by the leading proponents of Intelligent Design (ID).

The illusion was that ID and creationism were fundamentally different things. Scientific creationism (SC), they claim, is inextricably linked to the creation story in Genesis. ID, by contrast, is a solid scientific theory resting upon a firm foundation of biological fact. And while theological inferences could certainly be drawn from it, such inferences are unrelated to the theory itself.

ID’s finest minds presented this argument to the Court, and the Court, confronted with unambiguous evidence to the contrary, laughed in their faces. There has been no end to the teeth-gnashing and hand-wringing in the ID community ever since. In light of this, let us determine once and for all whether it is the Court, or the ID proponents, who have it right.

In his immodestly titled question and answer book The Design Revolution, William Dembski devotes a four-page chapter to the query, “Is intelligent design a cleverly disguised form of scientific creationism?” This seemed a reasonable place to begin my analysis. Dembski writes:

Intelligent design needs to be distinguished from creation science or scientific creationism. The most obvious difference is that scientific creationism has prior religious commitments whereas intelligent design does not. Scientific creationism is committed to two religious presuppositions and interprets the data of science to fit those presuppositions. Intelligent design, by contrast, has no prior religious commitments and interprets the data of science on generally accepted scientific principles. In particular, intelligent design does not depend on the biblical account of creation. The two presuppositions of scientific creationism are as follows:

• There exists a supernatural agent who creates and orders the world.
• The biblical account of creation recorded in Genesis is scientifically accurate. (p. 41) (Emphasis in original).

My main reference on the subject of what SC entails is the book What is Creation Science? by Henry Morris and Gary Parker. They make it very clear right in the introduction that Dembski’s characterization is incorrect:

Creation Science, therefore, is a perfectly valid area of scientific study. The Creation Model is as legitimate a scientific model as the Evolution Model. In fact, we believe we can show it to be a better scientific model, but readers can make their own judgments on that score, after they have read the book. (Emphasis in original.)

Later in the introduction they write:

In this book, we have tried to present in summary form some of the main scientific evidences supporting the Creation Model. We have not used theological literature or arguments — only science.

They also include this important statement:

Creationists believe that both scientific creationism and scientific evolutionism should be taught in public schools, but not religious creationism or the humanistic and pantheistic implications of evolutionism.

From these quotations we see that, as described by two of its leading practitioners, the assertions of SC are defended in entirely scientific terms. There is also a clear distinction between the scientific and religious aspects of creationism, paralleling the ID advocates’ claim that the theological implications of ID are separate from its scientific basis. Consequently, Dembski’s first attempt at distinguishing SC from ID is unsuccessful.

Dembski next tries to locate the difference between ID and SC in the specific factual claims made by the two sides. He lists six defining characteristics of SC and four for ID. He then writes, “A comparison of these two lists shows that intelligent design and scientific creationism differ markedly in content.”

Let us take a closer look. The four defining characteristics of ID, as presented by Dembski, are the following (p. 41): 1. Specified complexity and irreducible complexity are reliable indicators or hallmarks of design. 2. Biological systems exhibit specified complexity and employ irreducibly complex subsystems. 3. Naturalistic mechanisms or undirected causes do not suffice to explain the origin of specified complexity or irreducible complexity. 4. Therefore, intelligent design constitutes the best explanation for the origin of specified complexity and irreducible complexity in biological systems.

As I have argued elsewhere, all four of these points are mistaken. Of more relevance to the present discussion, however, is the fact that all of them feature prominently in the literature of scientific creationism.

Let me remind you that Michael Behe introduced the concept of irreducible complexity as follows:

By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional. (Darwin’s Black Box, pp. 39).

Morris and Parker present the same argument in their book:

Perhaps the biggest problem for evolutionists is “the marvelous fit of organisms to their environment.” As I mentioned in the first chapter, an adaptation often involves a whole group of traits working together, and none of the individual pieces has any survival value (“Darwinian fitness”) until the whole set is functioning together. (pp. 84)

And later:

Creationists and evolutionists agree that adaptations such as the woodpecker’s skull, cleaning symbiosis, and the bombardier beetle’s cannon all have survival value. The question, then, is not one of survival value or fitness, but rather, how did these adaptations originate: by time and chance or by design and creation. When it comes to adaptations that require several traits all depending on one another, the more logical inference from the evidence seems to be creation. (pp. 86)

Likewise, Dembski’s arguments about specified complexity and information theory are also commonplace in creationist literature (for example, see the book In the Beginning was Information, by Werner Gitt). SC’s accept and promote all four of the propositions Dembski offers as characteristic of ID.

Therefore, Dembski’s description of ID implies only that it is a subset of SC. If there is a difference in content between the two, it must reside in extra commitments made by the creationists.

The six features Dembski lists as characteristic of SC are: 1. There was a sudden creation of the universe, energy and life from nothing. 2. Mutations and natural selection are insufficient to bring about the development of all living kinds from a single organism. 3. Changes of the originally created kinds of plants and animals occur only within fixed limits. 4. There is a separate ancestry for humans and apes. 5. The earth’s geology can be explained via catastrophism, primarily by the occurrence of a worldwide flood. 6. The earth and living kinds had a relatively recent inception (on the order of thousands or tens of thousands of years).

Let us begin our analysis of this list with the fact that item six is not an essential tenet of SC. Morris and Parker write:

The question of the date of creation is separate and distinct from the question of the fact of creation. The basic evidences supporting the Creation Model — for example, the laws of thermodynamics, the complex structures of living organisms, the universal gaps between types in both the living world and the fossil record — are all quite independent of the time of creation. Whether the world is ten thousand years old or ten trillion years old, these and other evidences all point to creation, not to evolution, as the best explanation of origins. (p. 253)

And later:

The fact is, however, that the question of the age of the earth and the universe, while an important question in its own right, is quite independent of the question of creation or evolution, at least as far as the facts of science are concerned. (p. 253)

Compare these sentiments with the following statement by Dembski, from an essay responding to Henry Morris’ review of The Design Revolution:

Biblical literalism is simply not an issue for intelligent design because the problem of explaining biological complexity holds independently of the age of the earth or one’s interpretation of Genesis.

Once again there is no distinction to be found between ID and SC.

Points two and three likewise fail to distinguish SC from ID. If you believe, as ID advocates do, that natural selection is fundamentally incapable of crafting certain complex biological structures, then you must also believe it is incapable of explaining the development of complex life from single-celled beginnings. You must likewise believe that such evolutionary changes as occur do so only within fixed limits. As for point four, while ID may not commit you to such a view, it is certainly true that most ID proponents do not believe that humans and apes share a common ancestry.

That leaves only points one and five. And here we have our first genuine difference. SC literature routinely extols the virtues of catastrophism and an instantaneous creation of the universe. The catch is that they claim to believe these things not because of any prior religious convictions, but solely because their interpretation of the evidence tells them that it is so. And ID does not reject SC arguments related to these assertions, it merely takes no stand on them. There is a difference here, but hardly one of any significance.

We have now exhausted the reasons provided by Dembski for making a distinction between ID and SC. The remainder of his chapter consists almost entirely of restatements of the points discussed thus far. But let us probe a little farther, looking for distinctions Dembski might have overlooked.

Perhaps there is a difference in political strategy. Both groups seek changes in school science curricula. For ID’s the rallying cry is “Teach the Controversy.” In an op-ed published in The Cincinnati Enquirer, design advocate Stephen Meyer described it like this:

1. First, I suggested—speaking as an advocate of the theory of intelligent design—that Ohio not require students to know the scientific evidence and arguments for the theory of intelligent design, at least not yet.
2. Instead, I proposed that Ohio teachers teach the scientific controversy about Darwinian evolution. Teachers should teach students about the main scientific arguments for and against Darwinian theory. And Ohio should test students for their understanding of those arguments, not for their assent to a point of view.
3. Finally, I argued that the state board should permit, but not require, teachers to tell students about the arguments of scientists, like Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, who advocate the competing theory of intelligent design.

And here’s how Morris and Parker describe their educational ambitions:

Nevertheless, evolutionism has been taught almost exclusively in the public schools for decades. This obviously unfair situation has been defended by saying that evolution is science. The fact is, however, that the Creation Model fits the real facts of science at least as well as the Evolution Model, as we have tried to show in this book. At the very least, the two should be considered as equally valid scientific alternatives. The evidences and arguments on each side, pro and con, should all be presented in the schools, letting the students then make their own choice as to which model they believe best fits the available data. If evolution is really as scientific as evolutionists maintain, they would surely have nothing to fear from such a two-model approach. Creationists are perfectly willing to let the issue be decided on the basis of the scientific evidence alone, so why aren’t the evolutionists.

(Emphasis in original).

I see no distinction between these views.

Is there a difference in the anti-evolution arguments made by the two sides? There is not. Whether you are reading the literature of ID or SC, you can expect to read fallacious assertions about how the fossil record tells against evolution, that anatomical homologies are better explained as the result of common design, that evolutionists rely on outdated or fraudulent evidence such as Haeckel’s embryo drawings or the peppered moth experiment, that evolution is inherently atheistic, that simple probability arguments militate against evolution, or that natural selection is a meaningless tautology. Indeed, one of the hoariest anti-evolution arguments ever devised by SC’s, that evolution runs afoul of the second law of thermodynamics, was recently featured prominently in the conservative publication The American Spectator. Its author, Granville Sewell, is an ID advocate, and his article was linked to favorably by several ID friendly blogs.

And we shouldn’t overlook the most important similarity of them all. The literature of both ID and SC presents a ridiculous caricature of modern biological science, routinely quotes scientists out of context, and impugns the integrity of the scientific community.

So what has our investigation revealed? We find that both sides claim to be following standard scientific methodology in arriving at their conclusions. Both abjure any prior religious commitment. Their pro-design arguments and assertions are nearly identical. Their anti-evolution arguments are likewise nearly identical. Their goals for education policy are the same, and they make use of the same, sleazy rhetorical tricks in their writing.

Our search for a significant difference between ID and SC has been in vain.

Weighing in at 139 pages, Judge Jones’ ruling is a formidable document. Despite its length and its occasional descent into Legalese, it makes for surprisingly fast-paced and stimulating reading. I recommend reading the whole thing. Nonetheless, my intention in this essay is to provide a condensed version of all the major points and arguments it contains. The decision will no doubt be the focus of much commentary in the weeks to come, much of it by partisans trying to spin its contents for purposes of their own. Assessing the merits of such commentary will be easier armed with a firm grasp of precisely what it says.

Throughout this essay I will refer to Judge Jones as “the Court.” Furthermore, I will omit all footnotes and citations from the direct quotations I use.

The decision begins with a summary of the basic facts in the case. The facts are these: On October 18, 2004, the Dover Area School District (the Defendants) passed a resolution stating, “Students will be made aware of gaps/problems in Darwin’s theory and of other theories of evolution including, but not limited to, intelligent design. Note: Origins of Life is not taught.” On November 19, 2004, the District announced that starting in January of 2005, teachers would be required to read the following statement to ninth grade biology students:

The Pennsylvania Academic Standards require students to learn about Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and eventually to take a standardized test of which evolution is a part.

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. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations.

Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view. The reference book, Of Pandas and People, is available for students who might be interested in gaining an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves.

With respect to any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind. The school leaves the discussion of the Origins of Life to individual students and their families. As a Standards-driven district, class instruction focuses upon preparing students to achieve proficiency on Standards-based assessments.

On December 14, 2004, the Plaintiffs, a group of parents and educators from the affected region, filed suit. It was their allegation that the district’s ID policy constituted an establishment of religion, thereby running afoul of the first amendment to the Constitution (p. 1-7).

From here the decision devotes several pages to ancillary issues: Establishing that the Court has jurisdiction, introducing the Plaintiffs and Defendants, and describing a few relevant legal precedents. (p. 7-9)

Next up is a determination of the proper legal standard to apply in this case. The Court concludes that there are two relevant tests to apply in determining if the ID policy is unconstitutional: The Lemon test and the endorsement test. The former is named for the 1971 Supreme Court case Lemon v. Kurtzman and holds that a state action is unconstitutional if it violates any of the following three prongs: (1) The statute must have a secular legislative purpose; (2) Its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion; (3) The statute must not foster an excessive government entanglement with religion. The endorsement test arises from a 1989 Supreme Court decision and holds that the state action must not constitute an endorsement of religion. In its discussion of this issue, the Court rejected an argument from the Defense that the endorsement test should not apply (p. 9-14).

So how does the ID policy fare with respect to the endorsement test? To answer this question, the Court provides a thorough discussion of relevant caselaw. It notes,

The test consists of the reviewing court determining what message a challenged governmental policy or enactment conveys to a reasonable, objective observer who knows the policy’s language, origins and legislative history, as well as the history of the community and the broader social and historical context in which the policy arose.” (p. 15)

There follows some discussion of what constitutes a reasonable, objective observer (p. 16-18).

The Court’s first finding in this regard is that, “An objective observer would know that ID and teaching about “gaps” and “problems” in evolutionary theory are creationist, religious strategies that evolved from earlier forms of creationism (p. 18).” To justify this conclusion the Court provides several pages of relevant legal and social history. Of particular importance here is the famous 1982 case McLean v. Board of Ed. of Arkansas, it was found unconstitutional to mandate equal time for creation science whenever evolution is taught. One finding in McLean was that creationists relied on a “contrived dualism” in which any legitimate criticism of evolution was viewed as evidence in favor of creation. The Court in the present case will later find that ID suffers from the same defect.

Based on this history, the Court finds that a reasonable observer would quickly perceive the religious nature of ID. He cites the testimony of theologian John Haught to the effect that ID is merely an updated version of the religion-based, natural theology of Reverend William Paley from the nineteenth century. Further, Defense witnesses Scott Minnich and Michael Behe (scientists both) agreed with this characterization.

Next comes the testimony of philosopher Barbara Forrest, for the Plaintiffs, who documented the numerous religious statements made by ID proponents over the years. The Court devotes two pages to these quotes, concluding with the following statement,

Moreover, in turning to Defendants’ lead expert, Professor Behe, his testimony at trial indicated that ID is only a scientific, as opposed to a religious, project for him; however, considerable evidence was introduced to refute this claim. Consider, to illustrate, that Professor Behe remarkably and unmistakably claims that the plausibility of the argument for ID depends upon the extent to which one believes in the existence of God. As no evidence in the record indicates that any other scientific proposition’s validity rests on belief in God, nor is the Court aware of any such scientific propositions, Professor Behe’s assertion constitutes substantial evidence that in his view, as is commensurate with other prominent ID leaders, ID is a religious and not a scientific proposition. (p. 28)

Then we have a discussion of the Discovery Institute’s famous “Wedge” document, which outlines their strategy for using ID as a wedge for overthrowing the materialistic biases of modern science. This, in turn, is followed by a discussion (based on the testimony given at trial) of ID’s reliance on a supernatural designer. This discussion is especially important given the frequent insistence of ID proponents that there is no such reliance.

Also key in this regard was the ID textbook Of Pandas and People. The Plaintiff’s were able to show that while early drafts of the book made frequent reference to creationism, in later drafts those references were summarily replaced with the term “intelligent design.” This, along with other evidence, showed that ID is the “progeny” of creationism.

In total there are eighteen pages in the opinion given over to defending the conclusions described above. (p. 18-36)

From here the Court takes up the question of whether an objective student would view the disclaimer as an official endorsement of religion. After spending a few pages explaining why this question needs to be considered separately from the previous discussion of what a reasonable observer would conclude, the Court concludes “that an objective student would view the disclaimer as a strong official endorsement of religion (p. 36).

This conclusion is based primarily on a detailed textual analysis, supported by testimony from Plaintiff’s experts, of the ID disclaimer itself. This analysis takes up five pages (p. 39-44). Supplementary evidence in this regard was the fact that it was administrators, not teachers who read the statement (the teachers summarily refused to read it), and the nature of the “opt-out” feature, whereby students, with a parent’s permission, could opt-out of hearing the statement. Also important were the expressly religious terms in which various Board members defended their ID policy in public forums. Near the end of this section, the Court sums up its objections:

In summary, the disclaimer singles out the theory of evolution for special treatment, misrepresents its status in the scientific community, causes students to doubt its validity without scientific justification, presents students with a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory, directs them to consult a creationist text as though it were a science resource, and instructs students to forego scientific inquiry in the public school classroom and instead to seek out religious instructions elsewhere. (p. 49)

The finding that a reasonable Dover high school student would perceive a clear religious endorsement in the ID policy is followed by a section showing that an objective Dover citizen would come to the same conclusion. This finding is supported in the opinion by fourteen pages of evidence (p. 50-64). Especially interesting, in my opinion, was the Court’s reliance on the nature of the editorials and letters to the editor published in the local newspapers. The Court notes that these publications framed the debate in entirely religious terms. The Defense objected (strenuously, according to the opinion) to this line of evidence, but the Court allowed it for its probative value in assessing how an objective Dover resident would view the situation. Several pages of discussion about relevant legal precedents are provided in support of this conclusion.

The Court next turns to what in my view is the most significant part of the decision: the finding that ID is not science. The Court explains the importance of determining the scientific status of ID with characteristically withering language:

While answering this question compels us to revisit evidence that is entirely complex, if not obtuse, after a six week trial that spanned twenty-one days and included countless hours of detailed expert witness presentations, the Court is confident that no other tribunal in the United States is in a better position than are we to traipse into this controversial area. Finally, we will offer our conclusion on whether ID is science not just because it is essential to our holding that an Establishment Clause violation has occurred in this case, but also in the hope that it may prevent the obvious waste and other resources which would be occasioned by a subsequent trial involving the precise question which is before us. (p. 63)

The ensuing discussion occupies twenty-six pages (p. 64-90), but it is such a devastating indictment of ID that I believe it is worthwhile to consider it in detail.

The Court begins with a clear statement of its conclusions:

After a searching review of the record and applicable case law, we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science. We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking an permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed an illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980’s; and (3) ID’s negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community. As we will discuss in more detail below, it is additionally important to note that ID has failed to gain acceptance in the scientific community, it has not generated peer-reviewed publications, nor has it been the subject of testing and research. (p. 64)

The evidence supporting item one above comes from several sources. The Court first refers to the testimony of Plaintiff’s experts John Haught (a theologian), Kenneth Miller (a biochemist) and Robert Pennock (a philosopher), in providing a brief history of what is considered proper scientific methodology. He then refers to the opinion of the National Academy of Sceinces in support of their conclusions.

As mentioned earlier, the Court had already found that ID does, indeed, rely on supernatural intervention. At this point it reinforces that conclusion by referring to the ID textbook Of Pandas and People, as well as to portions of expert testimony from the Defense. In particular, he pointed to the desire of ID proponents to change the ground rules of science to allow the supernatural, something previous courts have recognized to be an inherently religious concept.

In this regard the Court was also persuaded by the fact that, “every major scientific association that has taken a position on the issue of whether ID is science has concluded that ID is not, and cannot be considered as such (p. 69).” The Court’s reliance on this point reveals the importance of major scientific organizations taking stands on this issue.

The Court next presents the evidence for item two above. Particularly telling here is the following statement:

ID proponents primarily argue for design through negative arguments against evolution, as illustrated by Professor Behe’s argument that “irreducibly complex” systems cannot be produced through Darwinian, or any natural, mechanisms. However, we believe that arguments against evolution are not arguments for design. Expert testimony revealed that just because scientists cannot explain today how biolgoical systems evolved does not mean that they cannot, and will not, be able to explain them tomorrow. As Dr. Padian aptly noted, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” To that end, expert testimony from Drs. Miller and Padian provided multiple examples where Pandas asserted that no natural explanations exist, and in some cases that none could exist, and yet natural explanations have been identified in intervening years. It also bears mentioning that as Dr. Miller stated, just because scientists cannot explain every evolutionary detail does not undermine its validity as a scientific theory as no theory in science is fully understood. (p. 71)

This comes near the beginning of a multi-page analysis of “irreducible complexity (IC),” an analysis that relies heavily on Michael Behe’s testimony at trial. The Court argues that IC is vaguely defined by Behe, is only a negative argument against evolution and not a positive argument for design, and is not even a valid criticism of evolution since current theory contains mechanisms capable of producing such complex systems. There follows more references to expert testimony to back up these conclusions.

Personally, I was especially impressed with the Court’s excellent handling of specific cases like the bacterial flagellum, the blood-clotting cascade and the immune system. A representative quotation from this portion of the opinion is the following:

However, Dr. Miller presented peer-reviewed studies refuting Professor Behe’s claim that the immune system was irreducibly complex. Between 1996 and 2002, various studies confirmed each element of the evolutionary hypothesis explaining the origin of the immune system. In fact, on cross-examination, Professor Behe was questioned concerning his 1996 claim that science would never find an evolutionary explanation for the immune system. He was presented with fifty-eight peer-reviewed publications, nine books, and several immunology textbook chapters about the evolution of the immune system; however, he simply insisted that this was still not sufficient evidence of evolution, and that is was not “good enough.” (p. 78)

In the final portion of this part of the decision, the Court takes up the claim, offered by the Defense, that a “purposeful arrangement of parts,” suggests design. In the course of explaining why this is false, the Court writes, “Although both Professors Behe and Minnich assert that there is a quantitative aspect to the inference, on cross-examination they admitted that there is no quantitative criteria for determining the degree of complexity or number of parts that bespeak design, rather than a natural process (p. 82).” I found this especially interesting, since such quantitative criteria are precisely what ID proponent William Dembski claims to have produced. Yet the Defense’s own witnesses did not defend Dembski’s methods when they had a clear opportunity for doing so.

The Court concludes its discussion of the scientific merits of ID with a brief discussion of some clear scientific distortions found in Pandas, and the inability of ID folks to produce peer-reviewed publications. He closes the section as follows:

To conclude and reiterate, we express no opinion on the ultimate veracity of ID as a supernatural explanation. However, we commend to the attention of those who are inclined to superficially consider ID to be a true “scientific” alternative to evolution without a true understanding of the concept the foregoing detailed analysis. It is our view that a reasonable, objective observer would, after reviewing both the voluminous record in this case, and our narrative, reach the inescapable conclusion that ID is an interesting theological argument, but that it is not science. (p. 89)

Everything up to this point has related to the Court’s application of the endorsement test to the ID policy. There is still the Lemon test to consider. I previously laid out the three prongs of the test. In applying the test, courts typically refer to the first prong as relating to purpose, while the second and third prongs relate to the effect of the state action in question.

The Court begins its purpose inquiry with the obligatory discussions of relevant precedents and legal standards. Its conclusion is then summarized as follows:

The disclaimer’s plain language, the legislative history, and the historical context in which the ID Policy arose, all inevitably lead to the conclusion that Defendants consciously chose to change Dover’s biology curriculum to advance religion. We have been presented with a wealth of evidence which reveals that the District’s purpose was to advance creationism, an inherently religious view, both by introducing it directly under the label ID and by disparaging the scientific theory of evolution, so that creationism would gain credence by default as the only apparent alternative to evolution, for the reasons that follow. (p. 93)

There follows thirty-nine pages (p. 93-132) of painstaking argument justifying the above conclusion. These pages are devoted almost entirely to a detailed reconstruction of the School Board’s statements and actions during the relevant time period, based on the testimony and exhibits presented at trial. At several points in this discussion, the Court states explicitly that various Board members, in their testimony for the Defense, were inconsistent or blatantly dishonest. Two representative quotations are this:

Finally, although Buckingham, Bonsell, and other defense witnesses denied the reports in the news media and contradicted the great weight of the evidence about what transpired at the June 2004 Board meetings, the record reflects that these witnesses either testified inconsistently, or lied outright under oath on several occasions, and are accordingly not credible on these points. (p. 105)

and this:

As we will discuss in more detail below, the inescapable truth is that both Bonsell and Buckingham lied at their January 3, 2005 depositions about their knowledge of the source of the donation for Pandas, which likely contributed to Plaintiffs’ election not to seek a temporary restraining order at that time based upon a conflicting and incomplete factual record. This mendacity was a clear and deliberate attempt to hide the source of the donations by the Board President and the Chair of the Curriculum Committee to further ensure that Dover students received a creationist alternative to Darwin’s theory of evolution. We are accordingly presented with further compelling evidence that Bonsell and Buckingham presented with further compelling evidence that Bonsell and Buckingham sought to conceal the blatantly religious purpose behind the ID policy. (p. 115)

In summarizing this portion of the opinion, the Court writes:

We initially note that the Supreme Court has instructed that while courts are “normally deferential to a State’s articulation of a secular purpose, it is required that the statement of such purpose be sincere and not a sham. Although the Defendants have consistently asserted that the ID policy was enacted for the secular purposes of improving science education and encouraging students to exercise critical thinking skills, the Board took none of the steps that school officials would take if these stated goals had truly been their objective. The board consulted no scientific materials. The board contacted no scientists or scientific organizations. The Board failed to consider the views of the District’s science teachers. The Board relied solely on legal advice from two organizations with demonstrably religious, cultural, and legal missions, the Discovery Institute and the TMLC. Moreover, Defendants’ asserted secular purpose of improving science education is belied by the fact that most if not all of the Board members who voted in favor of the biology curriculum change conceded that they still do not know, nor have they ever known, precisely what ID is. To assert a secular purpose against this backdrop is ludicrous. (p. 131)

The penultimate legal question to be resolved relates to the effect prong of the Lemon test. Unsurprisingly given its previous findings, the Court finds the ID policy violated this prong as well. The Court begins this section by noting that since the ID policy has already been found unconstitutional under the endorsement test and the first prong of the Lemon test, they include the effect analysis for the sake of completeness. After a brief consideration of relevant precedents related to such analysis, the Court concludes that the ID policy runs afoul of this prong as well.

The final legal issue revolves around the Plaintiffs’ contention that the ID policy is also a violation of the Pennsylvania state constitution. The Court agreed with this contention.

I will conclude this summary with the following extensive quotation from the Court’s conclusion:

The proper application of both the endorsement and Lemon tests to the facts of this case makes it abundantly clear that the Borad’s ID policy violates the Establishment Clause. In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.

Both Defendants and many of the leading proponents of ID make a bedrock assumption which is utterly false. Their presupposition is that evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general. Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs’ scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator.

To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.

The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID policy. (p. 136-137)

In reading over the entire opinion I was struck by the extent to which Judge Jones’ arguments parallel those scientists have been making for years. I suspect that prior to this case, Jones had never immersed himself in the minutiae of the evolution/ID dispute. In the course of the trial both sides had the opportunity to put their best foot forward in making their points. And in the end, it was clear to Jones that all of the good arguments were on the side of evolution, and not on the side of ID.

This, you see, is what happens when the facts for both sides are presented in a forum dominated by facts and evidence, as opposed to theater and rhetoric. Creationists and ID proponents are constantly taunting evolutionists with the charge that we are afraid to confront their arguments publicly. The result of this trial shows what nonsense that really is. Scientists are rightly skeptical of any venue in which the creationist penchant for flashy presentations and dishonest portrayals of science are free to dominate. But on a genuinely level playing field, evolution will win every time.

The full 139 page document can be found here (PDF).

The list was intended as a parody of the standard creationist tactic of producing lists of scientists said to oppose evolution. You see, the NCSE’s list has, as of this writing, 649 signatories. That is far higher than any pathetic list the creationists could produce. And, obviously, scientists named Steve represent a tiny fraction of the scientific community generally.

Here is the statement the signatories endorse:

Evolution is a vital, well-supported, unifying principle of the biological sciences, and the scientific evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the idea that all living things share a common ancestry. Although there are legitimate debates about the patterns and processes of evolution, there is no serious scientific doubt that evolution occurred or that natural selection is a major mechanism in its occurrence. It is scientifically inappropriate and pedagogically irresponsible for creationist pseudoscience, including but not limited to “intelligent design,” to be introduced into the science curricula of our nation’s public schools.

The list was named in honor of the late Stephen Jay Gould. Gould was an ardent supporter of the NCSE during his life and an equally ardent foe of creationism in all its forms.

Despite this, a self-described friend of Gould’s named Stuart Pivar has recently suggested that Gould would not have agreed to the statement above. In particular, Pivar alleges, Gould would have objected to the idea that natural selection was a major mechanism of evolution. Pivar made his views known by speaking to ID proponent Denyse O’Leary, who subsequently posted his comments at her website.

O’Leary quotes Pivar as follows:

Steve and Ronda would spend weekends at my beach house. We were close friends for years. I officiated at his funeral service.

Steve’s life work was to understand evolution. His message was that natural selection was merely an eliminative force with no creative role, capable of choosing for survival among preexisting forms which are produced by other natural structural processes.

And later:

Steve Gould (the Ursteve of the famous Steve list of the NCSE) clearly did not believe in natural selection as the primary cause of evolutionary change.

The 600 listed scientists named Steve claim the belief that evolution happened, and that natural selection is the mechanical process which causes it. Stephen Jay Gould would not have signed this list.

In a follow-up post at her website, O’Leary presented the following further quote from Pivar:

Steve Gould’s life work featured the debunking of natural selection as the cause of anything more important than the differences in the beaks of finches, in his investigation of the causes of evolution. The Steve List is the appropriation of his name in the propagation of a theory which he opposed his entire life long. Every statement SJG ever made rejects natural selection, and none can be found in its support. Is this colossal misunderstanding innocent incompetence, or a soviet style paradigm takeover? (Emphasis Added)

Is Pivar right? The question is important for two reasons. If the NCSE were genuinely trying to use Gould’s name to promote ideas he would have opposed, that would reflect very badly indeed on their integrity. Furthermore, if a scientist of Gould’s caliber were as hostile to natural selection as Pivar suggests, that would certainly be a challenge to orthodox theory worth taking seriously.

Now, we should note that no signer of the Steves list agreed to the idea that natural selection is the “mechanical process which causes evolution.” Nor does the statement say that natural selection is the primary agent of evolutionary change. They agreed only that natural selection is a major mechanism of evolution.

But is Pivar right about Gould’s views? Well, Stephen Jay Gould was one of the most prolific scientists of the twentieth century, and he expressed his views very clearly in a succession of books and essays. It is certainly true that Gould’s views of evolution differed from the mainstream in several regards, and one of those differences will be discussed later in this essay. Indeed, many of the debates about the patterns and processes of evolution, referred to in the statement, were inspired by Gould himself. But on the central point of natural selection’s importance as a mechanism of evolution Gould could not have been clearer. Not one statement in support of natural selection can be found in Gould’s writing? Let’s take a look.

In a 1997 essay for The New York Review of Books Gould wrote:

Darwin clearly loved his distinctive theory of natural selection — the powerful idea that he often identified in letters as his dear “child.” But, like any good parent. He understood limits and imposed discipline. He knew that the complex and comprehensive phenomena of evolution could not be fully rendered by any single cause, even one so ubiquitous and powerful as his own brainchild.

Ubiquitous and powerful. Case closed, right? Well, let’s keep going anyway:

Charles Darwin often remarked that his revolutionary work had two distinct aims: first, to demonstrate the fact of evolution (the genealogical connection of all organisms and a history of life regulated by “descent with modification”); second, to advance the theory of evolution. Darwin triumphed in his first aim (American creationism and the Christian far right notwithstanding). Virtually all thinking people accept the factuality of evolution, and no conclusion in science enjoys better documentation. Darwin also succeeded substantially in his second aim. Natural selection, an immensely powerful idea with radical philosophical implications, is surely a major cause of evolution, as validated in theory and demonstrated by countless experiments. (Emphasis Added)

Here we have Gould explicitly endorsing natural selection as a major mechanism of evolution, exactly as the NCSE statement says.

Gould believed that natural selection did nothing more than regulate the size and shape of finch beaks? Hardly. Consider this statement, from Essay 12 of his 1977 anthology Ever Since Darwin:

Modern evolutionists cite the same plays and players; only the rules have changed. We are now told, with equal wonder and admiration, that natural selection is the agent of exquisite design. As an intellectual descendant of Darwin, I do not doubt this attribution.

Or this one, from Essay 28 in his 1993 anthology Eight Little Piggies:

In the domain of organisms and their good designs, we have little reason to doubt the strong, probably dominant influence of deterministic forces like natural selection. The intricate, highly adapted forms of organisms — the wing of a bird or the mimicry of a dead twig by an insect — are too complex to arise as long sequences of sheer good fortune under the simplest random models.

And lest you think these are things Gould said early in his career but recanted later, consider this statement, from page 1053 of his magnum opus The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, published in 2002:

The impeccable logic of this formulation can help critics by clarifying how any potential argument against this hegemony of natural selection must proceed. At the functional vertex, one would have to identify other important mechanisms in addition to natural selection — and none have been proposed, at least to the satisfaction of this author (although the argument for “a little bit of bacterial Lamarckism” — as I like to characterize the controversial claims of Cairns et al — may have some merit in a limited domain).

These are just a few quotes that I found by the ingenious device of pulling random Gould volumes off my bookshelf and looking up “natural selection” in their indices. It has taken me longer to transcribe them than it did to find them. The fact is the creative power of natural selection was a major theme of Gould’s essays. In Ever Since Darwin he describes the role of natural selection in crafting the complex “decoy fish” of a certain freshwater mussel (Essay 12). In The Panda’s Thumb he discusses selection’s role in crafting — surprise! — the panda’s thumb (Essay 1). In Eight Little Piggies he describes selection’s role in the evolution of the mammalian inner ear from jaw bones found in reptiles. And let’s not forget that in PBS’s recent documentary on evolution, Gould is shown making the following statement, as part of a segment on eye evolution:

And what Darwin was able to do is to point out that you might think in logic that it’s difficult to imagine a set of intermediary stages between the simplest little spot of nerve cells that can perceive light to a lens forming eye that makes complex images but in fact these intermediary forms do exist in nature.

So the basic facts of the situation are perfectly clear. Stuart Pivar claims that Gould never made a single statement endorsing natural selection as a major mechanism of evolution. These charges were published at a pro-ID blog run by Denyse O’Leary. A cursory examination of Gould’s writing reveals that, actually, Gould made numerous statements supporting natural selection throughout his career. Therefore, Pivar was wrong, and O’Leary allowed her blog to be used to disseminate false information.

How would other pro-ID bloggers react when confronted with this simple situation? Would they forthrightly admit that Pivar was wrong? Not exactly.

William Dembski weighed in at his blog on October 26, 2005. Under the headline “Stephen Jay Gould - Master of Equivocation,” Dembski provided a brief summary of Pivar’s statements as reported at O’Leary’s blog. Then he produced the following quote from Gould, taken from his 1999 book Rocks of Ages (pp. 56-57):

My colleagues in evolutionary theory are presently engaged in a healthy debate about whether a limited amount of Lamarkian evolution may be occurring for restricted phenomena in bacteria. Yet the fascination and intensity of this question does not change the well-documented conclusion that Darwinian processes dominate in the general run of evolutionary matters.

Very nice, and another quote I might have used in my litany above. If Dembski had managed to produce a second quote from Gould seeming to stake out a position contrary to the one expressed above, then he might fairly have accused Gould of equivocating. As it is, however, we merely have Pivar making statements about Gould that are contradicted by everything Gould ever wrote. That’s not evidence of equivocation on Gould’s part. That’s evidence that Pivar was wrong. It’s also evidence that Dembski cares more about smearing evolutionists than he does in the basic facts of a situation.

The equivocation meme turned up again at the pro-ID blog IdtheFuture. This time it was Paul Nelson parroting it. After the obligatory summary of Pivar’s remarks, Nelson writes, “Unfortunately, near the end of his life Gould had a practice of arguing all sides of a question.” You will be shocked to learn that Nelson offered no example of this practice from any of Gould’s published writings. He does, however, provide yet another unambiguous statement from Gould endorsing natural selection, this time from The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, p 886:

Thus, we do not challenge either the efficacy or the cardinal importance of organismal selection. As previously discussed, I fully agree with Dawkins and others that one cannot invoke a higher-level force like species selection to explain “things that organisms do” — in particular, the stunning panoply of organismic adaptations that has always motivated our sense of wonder about the natural world, and that Darwin described, in one of his most famous lines as that perfection of structure and coadaptation which most justly excites our admiration.”

Nelson later took another stab at the equivocation question. In a comment left in response to a post of mine at The Panda’s Thumb blog, Nelson offered the following quote, from The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, page 886, as evidence of equivocation:

But I must confess that a stronger and more focused form of this argument has long evoked my deep distress, and has served, in substantial measure, as the impetus for personal career choices in research, and for my eventual decision to write this book. I refer to the claim, repeated almost as a catechism, and obviously copied from textbook to textbook, that macroevolution poses no problem not resolvable by a further understanding of allelic substitutions directed by natural selection in contemporary populations. We may move smoothly from one gene to an entire Bauplan, and extrapolate upwards from a few generations to a geological era. No additional problems arise in temporal vastness. Macroevolution becomes little more than industrial melanism writ large.Can the smallest scales really provide an entirely sufficient model for the largest? Can a uniformitarianism this rigid truly be sustained?Most standard textbooks make this confident assertion based on little beyond hope and tradition — thus making macroevolution a nonsubject.

Gould’s point here could hardly be clearer, but it nonetheless seems to have defeated Nelson. There is no equivocation in saying on the one hand that natural selection is a major mechanism of evolution and the primary shaper of complex adaptations, and saying on the other hand that more is involved in macroevolution than accumulated microevolution. Indeed, one of the major themes of Gould’s writing, especially in the latter stages of his career, was that natural selection should be viewed as operating on many levels simultaneously. In other words, selection not only acted on genes (as Richard Dawkins tends to emphasize) or among individual organisms (as Darwin envisioned things) but also among local populations, entire species, and clades (a collection of species all descended from the same common ancestor.) The broader issue here is whether paleontology, which studies trends over vast time scales, has any contribution to make to an understanding of evolutionary mechanisms. (The fossil collections that adorn our natural history museums do a fine job of supporting the fact of common descent, but many would argue the fossil record is too sparse to permit sound conclusions about mechanisms of change). That is a fascinating question, but it is not the one before us today.

So how would O’Leary herself deal with the facts I’ve presented here? Well, in a follow-up to her original post on this subject she wrote:

I find the whole thing both revealing and, in its own way hilarious. In his lifetime, Gould was often suspected as an indifferent Darwinist, tugging the forelock now and then to help ward off the creationists and ID people. Now friend Pivar comes along and says, yeah that’s right - and a whole herd of independent Darwinist minds rushes off a cliff - some landing in the briars of obscenity and abuse.

Revealing indeed. Apparently it does not bother her in the slightest that Pivar fed her a demonstrably false statement (that Gould never made a single statement supportive of natural selection as a major mechanism of evolution). She was perfectly happy to parrot the charge at her blog without making any effort to verify for herself whether it was true. And when numerous other bloggers provided incontrovertible evidence that she had been used to promote misinformation, she merely laughed and attacked the messenger.

Why do scientists get so angry when dealing with ID proponents? Because the truth means absolutely nothing to them. Because they would rather promote convenient propaganda than take a moment to try to get their facts straight. Because they believe they have scored a victory when their blatant falsehoods and distortions provoke an angry response from people who actually know the facts of the matter.

Frustrating, but typical.

We may as well give the last word here to Gould, who directly addressed the equivocation charge in an essay written for the anthology The Dynamics of Evolution. In the course of discussing the role of punctuated equilibrium (the theory developed by Gould and Niles Eldredge as an explanation for certain trends found in the fossil record) in revising orthodox neo-Darwinism, Gould wrote:

Nevertheless, the potentially high relative frequency of punctuated equilibrium as a geometry of macroevolution does have broader implications for a more fundamental revision of evolutionary theory. Some critics have charged that we waffle on this issue, claiming either conformity with orthodoxy in order to ingratiate or novelty in order to inspire attention — but our position is as simple and consistent as the charge is anti-intellectual in that primal sense of substituting remarks ad hominem for analysis. The geometry of punctuated equilibrium may fall within conventional theory; the high relative frequency of the geometry in its implications for the hierarchical perspective, may require revisions of the theory.

We saw last time that all such arguments fail. There are two reasons for this. First, the probability of evolving a given biological structure over long periods of time is affected by so many immeasurable variables that there is no way of carrying out a meaningful calculation. Second, learning after the fact that something terribly improbable occurred provides no reason for inferring design.

But we also considered the possibility of enhancing our argument from improbability in the following way: While it is true that improbability by itself provides no reason for suspicion, it is possible that the combination of improbability with a clearly recognizable pattern does provide such a reason. Tossing one hundred heads in a row would make us suspicious in a way that tossing a random jumble of one hundred heads and tails would not, though the two sequences are equally improbable.

Consider another example. When we look at the face of a mountain we see a complex network of cracks and grooves cut into the rock. The particular network we see is no doubt terribly improbable. It has the shape it does only because of the long-term action of countless natural forces, and if any one of those forces had been slightly different we would have found ourselves confronted with a different network. Still, this by itself does not suggest intelligent design.

But now suppose the mountain we are examining is Mt. Rushmore. In this case the network of cracks and grooves is improbable in a very special way. For now we have an easily specifiable pattern; the cracks and grooves trace out an uncanny likeness of four United States Presidents. There is no way the mindless action of erosion and weathering could produce so detailed a likeness. Thus, the combination of improbability and specification seems to suggest intelligent design.

Improbability by itself does not suggest design, since any end result of a complex sequence of natural forces is surely very improbable. Specification by itself would likewise not indicate design, since very simple patterns result from natural forces all the time. But both together? That requires an explanation.

So far this is all very reasonable. After all, it really is obvious that Mt. Rushmore was the product of intelligent design. The tricky part comes when we attempt to apply this logic to evolution.

Let us return to the eye. As one endpoint of a four billion year evolutionary process, it was surely very unlikely that our particular eye would evolve. By itself that is not significant; improbable, yes, but something had to happen. But now consider that the eye is not some random conglomeration of molecules, but a finely honed machine that performs a definite function. Can we argue that, consequently, the eye must have been designed?

This argument figures prominently in the writings of ID proponents. Indeed, it is effectively their only scientific argument in favor of design (as opposed to against evolution). Their preferred example is the flagellum of E. coli. They argue that the flagellum is plainly improbable, and specified by its striking resemblance to the outboard motors humans use to power their boats. Consequently, the flagellum must have been designed.

But is it really so simple? There are several difficulties with this approach, but the most serious comes in distinguishing those patterns that indicate design from those that do not. You see, any event that occurs can, retroactively, be matched up with some arbitrarily determined pattern. Every person who has ever looked at a fluffy, cumulus cloud and fancied seeing a dragon is familiar with this phenomenon. In describing the flagellum as an outboard motor are we emulating the Mt. Rushmore example, or the cumulus cloud example? To make this sort of argument work, we must have some mechanism through which the genuine patterns can be distinguished from the phony ones.

To resolve this dilemma let us revisit the case of Mt. Rushmore. Previously we argued that it was the recognizability of the faces that indicated design, but that was not really correct. What suggests design is our prior experience with what mountains normally look like. There are mountains all over the world, and they all look more or less the same. It is this background experience that tells us that Mt. Rushmore is something strikingly different from the norm. We are skeptical that weathering and erosion can account for Mt. Rushmore because we have seen the effects of those forces on countless other mountains. Similarly, tossing one hundred heads in a row suggests a loaded coin not because it fits some easily describable pattern, but because we have a lot of experience with coins and know what to expect when we toss them.

That experience is precisely what is lacking in biological evolution. We have only one example of evolution to consider. We have no background experience that will allow us to say, “Usually, in the course of four billion years of evolution, we end up with nothing like the bacterial flagellum. Consequently, obtaining a flagellum in this case suggests design.” Absent this experience there is no way of distinguishing the design-suggesting patterns from the “something had to happen” patterns.

Proponents of ID have no basis for their claim that complex biological systems comprise patterns that suggest design. Can evolutionists do better from their end? Are there lines of evidence to suggest that the patterns we find in nature are precisely those we would expect from prolonged evolution by natural selection? Indeed there are, quite a few in fact. Allow me to mention just two.

The first comes from the structures of the systems themselves. Scientists have studied a great many complex biological systems, and in every case they find that, from an engineering standpoint, they make little sense. They appear to be cobbled together from many small modifications of simpler precursors, just as would be expected from a process of random variation sifted by natural selection. In this they differ markedly from the sorts of machines human designers build. In light of this, the vague analogy between, say, a flagellum and an outboard motor looks entirely too simplistic.

Most of the really important aspects of evolution by natural selection can be simulated on computers, and this leads to the second line of evidence. In recent years it has become routine for engineers to use genetic algorithms to solve practical design problems. The idea is to mimic the action of natural selection to find solutions that would evade even the most creative human engineers. The solutions found by such algorithms have much in common with their biological counterparts: they are frequently quite complex and functional, but also inefficient and vaguely Rube Goldberg-like. A closely related process occurs in artificial life experiments. Here, mutating computer programs play the role of biological organisms. They are selected for their ability to perform various tasks efficiently. It is routine in such experiments to observe the evolution of complex functionalities undreamed of by the human programmers who started the ball rolling. The patterns observed in such experiments are strikingly similar to those found in nature.

The conclusion is that anti-evolutionists have yet to devise an argument based on probability theory that has any merit at all. It is nearly certain they never will. Upon hearing a creationist mention probability in his argument, you can, in good conscience, ignore him.

The irony here is that the mathematical theory of probability is an indispensable tool for studying many aspects of evolution. Indeed, there are certain fundamental concepts in evolution that can only be understood via the language of probability theory.

Take “fitness” for example. In evolutionary terms organism A has higher fitness than organism B if A is likely to leave more offspring than B in the course of their lifetimes. We cannot say for certain that A will leave more offspring than B; after all, no matter how swift, strong, intelligent, and sexually attractive A is, it is still possible that he will be struck by lightning before reproducing. We can only say that A is likely to leave more offspring than B. Describing such likelihoods in a rigorous way is the job of probability theory.

Furthermore, evolution ultimately comes down to changes in gene frequencies, and genetics is a subject shot through with probability. The reason for this is not hard to spot. Your genes are a random sample of those possessed by your mother and father. Were you to catalog your parent’s genes and attempt to predict which of them would end up in their children, you would find the effort futile. You would guess right about half the time and wrong about half the time, just as various principles of probability theory suggest.

Let us push this a little farther. Suppose we zero in on a particular gene in a large population of organisms, one that comes in two forms that we will label A and a. Every organism in the population will possess two copies of this gene (one from each parent). Consequently, we can say that every individual in the population will be of type AA, Aa or aa. In principle we could count the total number of organisms in the population, and likewise count the total number of occurrences of each allele. In this manner we could compute the probability that a randomly chosen gene will be of a particular form (A or a). Let us denote by P the probability that a randomly chosen gene will be A, and let Q denote the corresponding probability of choosing an a.

Can we predict the values of P and Q in the next generation? Will the A allele appear with higher probability among the offspring of this generation, or with lower probability? Will the probability remain unchanged? And what about the a allele? Answering these questions would enable us to predict the short-term evolution of this population, at least with respect to this particular allele.

To find an answer, we begin by asking what sorts of environmental factors might affect these probabilities. Well, one possibility is that organisms of type AA prefer mating with their own type. This phenomenon is known as assortative mating, and to keep our model simple we will assume that it does not occur. More generally, we will assume that mating in our population is random with respect to this particular allele.

Another complicating factor is natural selection. If organisms possessing an A allele are more fit than those lacking it, then the frequency of the A allele will go up in the next generation. Again, to keep our model simple, we will disregard this possibility. That is, we will assume that neither allele has a selective advantage over the other.

Having made these assumptions, we conclude that the alleles present in the offspring will be a random sample of those present in the current generation. Basic probability theory is, therefore, sufficient for answering our question. It is easily shown that genotype AA will occur in the next generation with frequency P to the power of 2, genotype Aa will appear with frequency 2PQ, and genotype aa will appear with frequency Q to the power of 2. (This means that the probability that a randomly chosen individual from the second generation is of type AA will be P to the power of 2, and so on). This result is known as the Hardy-Weinberg law. The technical details of how this conclusion is obtained need not detain us here.

Though this model is very simple, it finds a surprising number of applications. There are many real-world situations in which the frequencies of the three genotypes can actually be measured. If the frequencies match those predicted by the Hardy-Weinberg law then biologists can conclude that the assumptions they made (specifically, random mating and no selection) are valid in that case. By contrast, if the frequencies differ markedly from the expected values, then there is strong evidence that one of the assumptions does not hold. That could be a revealing fact about a population, and one that would doubtless inspire further research.

Models of the sort I just described belong to a branch of biology known as population genetics. Scientists working in this area have devised far more sophisticated models than this for short-term gene flow in populations, and these models are studied using techniques from statistics, probability, and other branches of mathematics.

For our purposes, however, what is relevant is the relative modesty of what we have done. We began with reasonable assumptions that are known to be true in a great many situations. We then focused on a single gene that comes in a mere two forms. By so restricting ourselves we ensured that our model dealt solely with quantities that could actually be measured. Our goal in applying the model was not to make sweeping generalizations about what is possible and what is not during four billion years of evolution. Instead, we simply wanted to determine if certain plausible assumptions held in one given situation. For real scientists, mathematics is just one tool among many used to solve mundane problems that arise in quotidian scientific work. It is not a device for drawing grand metaphysical conclusions.

There is an important lesson in that. A mathematical model is only as reliable as the assumptions upon which it is based. If a mountain of biological evidence says that evolution happened, but a back of the envelope probability calculation says that evolution is impossible, then what you have is evidence that your calculation was based on faulty assumptions. But since creationists use mathematics primarily to create an illusion of scientific legitimacy, they find it easy to ignore such details.

The evolution theory, especially as applied to man, likewise is disproved by mathematics. The proof is overwhelming and decisive. Thus God makes the noble science of mathematics bear testimony in favor of the true theories and against the false theories.

This refrain has been a mainstay of creationist literature ever since.

Claims of mathematical disproof of evolution typically make use of probability theory. The idea is to show that it so improbable that a given complex biological structure, such as the vertebrate eye, could have evolved gradually that it is effectively impossible for it to have done so. Frequently this argument will include actual calculations purporting to place the assertion on a rigorous mathematical footing.

As a professional mathematician, I am well aware of how impressive such calculations can appear to people untrained in probability. Math is unique in its ability to bamboozle a lay audience, which helps explain why creationists find it so appealing. Happily, though, you do not need to slog through the details of such a calculation to know that it is not correct. Probability theory is a major branch of mathematics that finds countless applications in a variety of sciences, but it is not powerful enough to support the sweeping conclusions creationists are trying to draw. To understand why, let us consider the basic elements of the subject.

Mathematicians use fractions to describe the probability that a particular event will occur. The top of the fraction records the number of favorable outcomes, while the bottom records the number of possible outcomes (among mathematicians, incidentally, it is quite common to refer to the top and bottom of a fraction, as opposed to the numerator and denominator.) In this context, a “favorable” outcome is simply one that conforms to whatever pattern we are interested in. A few examples will make this idea clear.

Let us suppose we are tossing a coin and want to know the probability that the coin will land heads. We would reason that since there are two possible outcomes (heads and tails), and only one of those outcomes is a head, we have a probability of 1/2 of tossing a head. Similarly, the probability that the coin will land tails is also 1/2.

Now suppose we have a standard deck of cards from which we draw a single card. What is the probability that the card will be a spade? This time we would argue that since there are fifty-two cards in the deck, thirteen of which are spades, the probability of drawing a spade is 13/52, which is the same as 1/4.

These two examples were specifically chosen for their simplicity. However, determining the number of favorable outcomes and possible outcomes can often be a tricky business requiring considerable ingenuity. For example, suppose we asked for the probability of being dealt a flush in a game of poker. Answering the question would require first that we determine the total number of possible five-card hands. Having done that, we would next determine how many ways there are of being dealt a flush. Both of these numbers can be calculated, but doing so requires a level of mathematical sophistication I do not wish to explore in this essay.

Instead, let us discuss a few issues that arise from my two examples above. First, in stating that the probability of tossing a head is 1/2, I was tacitly assuming that we were using a fair coin tossed in a fair way. If the coin were loaded in some way, or if a sleight-of-hand artist did the tossing, then the probability would no longer be 1/2. Similarly, I simply assumed that each of the fifty-two cards in the deck was as likely to be chosen as any other. Such assumptions are often not justified in real-world situations. In other words, instead of each outcome being as likely as any other, we might find that some outcomes are far more likely to occur than others. As we shall see, this fact presents an insurmountable barrier to most of the arguments creationists make in this regard.

Perhaps you are wondering why mathematicians use the language of fractions in describing probability. There are two reasons. One is that there does seem to be something intuitive in saying that if you draw cards over and over again from a deck, each time placing the card you chose back in the deck, then about one quarter of the time you will draw a spade. We have all flipped coins before, and we know that when we do so we commonly find that we get heads around half the time. The second reason is a bit more complicated. Often we are concerned not with the probability of an individual event happening, but rather with a whole series of events happening simultaneously. Other times we seek the probability that at least one of a given collection of events occurs. In many cases these questions can be answered by performing standard arithmetic operations on the individual probabilities of the events in question. Thus, complicated questions in probability can often be reduced to simple problems in fraction arithmetic.

Now let us attempt to apply this reasoning to evolution. What is the probability that an eye could arise gradually via known evolutionary mechanisms? In biological terms we are asking for the probability of evolving the genes necessary for constructing the eye, which immediately presents a problem. Complex structures like eyes do not arise from the action of a well-defined set of genes. Instead, there are many genes that play a role in eye formation, many of which serve other purposes as well.

But this objection is not yet fatal to the argument. While we may not be able to say specifically which genes are responsible for eye formation, we can reasonably assume there are quite a lot of them. Recall that genes are made from the four nucleotides adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine (which we will abbreviate by A, T, C and G). Consequently, a gene can be modeled as a sequence whose elements are these four letters. As a conservative estimate, let us suppose that a gene one hundred letters in length is necessary to construct an eye. The actual number is surely far larger than this.

Therefore, the total number of possible outcomes in this case is simply the number of sequences of A’s, T’s, C’s and G’s that are one hundred letters long. This number is obtained by multiplying four by itself one hundred times, which is a very large number indeed. Only one of those sequences codes for the eye, as we know it. There are surely a fair number of trivial changes we could make in the precise gene sequence that will also produce the eye. Therefore, the number of favorable outcomes in this case will surely be greater than one. However, we can assert with some confidence that the number of favorable outcomes will be far smaller than the number of possible outcomes.

This seems to show that, while we may not be able to calculate precisely the probability of evolving the genes necessary for eye formation, we can still assert that the probability is very, very small.

Have we done it? Can we conclude that it is effectively impossible for evolution to have produced an eye? Many creationists would say that we could. You will find the argument described in the previous paragraph, presented in varying levels of detail, in a great many creationist outlets. Sadly, their analysis overlooks several crucial points.

Perhaps you have already spotted the flaw in this argument. In carrying out our calculation, we simply assumed that every hundred-letter gene sequence was as likely as any other. This assumption is completely unwarranted, for two reasons.

First, keep in mind that evolution works its magic by modifying preexisting structures. Consequently, the particular gene sequences likely to occur in a given generation are those attainable from preexisting sequences via known genetic mechanisms. As an example, suppose that in some organism we find the gene sequence ACGATCT. One source of genetic variation is the point mutation, in which an individual nucleotide is replaced in the next generation with a different nucleotide. Thus, it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that the offspring of our hypothetical organism will possess the gene sequence ATGATCT. By contrast, it is highly unlikely that we will encounter the sequence TGATAAG.

Second, we have ignored the action of natural selection in our reasoning thus far. Most of the hundred-letter gene sequences we could write down would lead to a badly defective organism were they to be found in nature. So even if the odd macromutation caused one of these sequences to appear in some unfortunate organism, natural selection would ensure that the gene was quickly flushed from the population in subsequent generations.

In summary, our proposed calculation of the probability of evolving an eye over a period of millions of years runs into two major obstacles. First, the fact that evolution works by modifying preexisting structure means that certain gene sequences are far more likely to occur than others. Second, the sieving action of natural selection guarantees that defective gene sequences will not linger for long in nature.

These obstacles are insurmountable, and they are fatal to any attempt to rule out evolution via probability theory alone. It would require almost God-like knowledge of natural history and the physiologies of long-extinct organisms to produce a meaningful probability calculation for any complex biological system.

Actually, though, the situation is even worse than that. For suppose that somehow we did manage to carry out such a calculation and suppose we found that it really is terribly improbable than our eye evolved by natural means. What would we learn from such a result?

Almost nothing. Improbable things happen all the time, you see, and the fact that something is improbable does not mean that it cannot happen. As a simple example, the next time you drive somewhere think about how improbable it was that all of the drivers in cars near you would be on the same road at the same time. There is an old adage that million-to-one odds happen eight times a day in New York City. Merely discovering, after the fact, that something terribly improbable has occurred gives us no warrant for seeking an extraordinary explanation.

But perhaps the situation is not as simple as I am suggesting. Let us suppose that I flip a coin ten times and obtain the following sequence of heads and tails:

TTHHTHTHHT

It is fairly straightforward to show that there are 1,024 possible outcomes that could arise from such a series of coin flips. Since exactly one of those sequences matches the one above, we conclude that the probability of obtaining this particular sequence is 1/1024.

Now consider this sequence:

HHHHHHHHHH

We can reason as before to conclude that the probability of this sequence is also 1/1024.

The fact is that any particular sequence of heads and tails is as unlikely as any other. Many people find this hard to accept. The second sequence just looks more improbable than the first. Why is that?

What strikes us about the second sequence is that it matches an easily identifiable pattern. The first sequence, by contrast, looks like every other jumble of heads and tails we have ever obtained by flipping a coin multiple times. This suggests that, while improbability by itself does not suggest anything extraordinary, the combination of improbability with a recognizable pattern does require a special explanation. Could we use this strategy to revive our probabilistic critique of evolution?

Many proponents of Intelligent Design believe that we can. In the second part of this essay, I will show why they are wrong. We will also consider some ways in which evolutionary biologists make legitimate use of probability theory in their work.