kant hume darwin and design_why intelligent design wasnt science before darwin and still isnt

8/9/2019 Kant Hume Darwin and Design_why Intelligent Design Wasnt Science Before Darwin and Still Isnt

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KANT, HUME, DARWIN, AND DESIGN: WHYINTELLIGENT DESIGN WASNT SCIENCE BEFOREDARWIN AND STILL ISNT

JONATHAN LOESBERG

I

There are two historical claims about the end of the argument from design and

they do not fit together well. According to the first, Humes Dialogues Concerning

Natural Religion made the argument untenable and marked its end. Although this

claim might be logically true, we know it not to be historically true since the

standard version of the argument usually cited, William Paleys Natural Theology,did not appear until 1802, well after Humes work first appeared in 1779 and in

full cognizance of it. And the Bridgewater Treatises, although they certainly had

a mixed reception, were written two decades later still. Thus, we get the second

claim, that Darwins theory of natural selection provided a natural mechanism that

explained the appearance of design in living things without recourse to a super-

natural being and thus undid the argument from design. Of course both these

claims might be taken to be true in a certain sense. One could argue that Hume

undercut the logic of the argument, making it philosophically untenable. Unfor-

tunately, however, philosophical arguments, even good ones, do not always swaypeople. Darwin, by providing a mechanism to explain how organic function came

to be, thus provided a more sociologically powerful disconfirmation of the argu-

ment. One almost never finds this position, however. Philosophers who credit

Hume with ending the argument do not refer to Darwin while those who think

Darwin ended the argument from design usually find Humes argument less than

complete.

This debate has a relevance beyond getting an intellectual history articulated

correctly because the claim that Darwin undid the argument from design has led

to the current Intelligent Design movement. This movement maintains, first, thatthe argument from design still holds as a scientific proof that one must construe at

least elements of nature as designed by an intellect and not resulting from natural

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mechanisms and, second, that this renewed design argument makes Darwins

theory of natural selection scientifically questionable. And one must give the

position of Intelligent Design this much: If a scientific theory can in principledisconfirm evidence for Intelligent Design, then it follows that design theory does

make a scientific claim in the sense of a claim that is empirically disconfirmable.

And further, if Intelligent Design could make its case, it would then call Darwins

disconfirmation and thus the sufficiency of natural selection as an explanation for

the order of biological organisms into question. Politically, this would mean that

as long as one discounts Humes arguments and holds natural selection to be

relevant to disconfirming design theory, and as long as Intelligent Design can hold

tenably that natural selections explanation of order in biology is less than fully

persuasive, then Intelligent Design will have earned a place in the scientificcurriculum. The response of most scientific polemicists to this problem has been,

as we will see, at least logically contradictory. The same authors will argue both

that Intelligent Design is not science and that science disproves its validity.1

I want to argue, in contrast, that the arguments of Kant and Hume are sufficient

to show that natural theology and thus Intelligent Design as well do not success-

fully make scientific arguments. In its original embodiment, natural theology

claimed to ally religion with the contemporaneous scientific theories rather than

refute them, to ground religion in empirical evidence. Both Hume, in Dialogues

Concerning Natural Religion, and Kant, not only in The Critique of Pure Reasonbut more fully in The Critique of Judgment, undid this claim. They did not explain

the material cause of the appearance of design in nature, but showed that that

appearance could not function as evidence for an extra-natural intelligent

designer.2 Indeed, what Kant and Hume show, I think, is that limiting oneself to

seeking natural causes for natural effects is notas Intelligent Design theorists

from Philip Johnson through Michael Behe and William Dembski have

insisteda metaphysical principle with no inherent grounding in science but

rather a disciplinary condition of doing science, the only way to get the particular

1 As I will argue further down, it is consistent to hold that scientific claims made, for instance, by

Michael Behe that cellular mechanism cannot be explained by natural selection are incorrect and also

that whether or not they are incorrect, Behes theory of those mechanisms as proving the existence

of an intelligence that created them will not hold logically as a scientific claim. But Behes critics

have almost all held that the first error is evidence of the second, which is a different matter.2 The Critique of Judgment actually goes further than either The Critique of Pure Reason or Hume

toward accepting nature as manifesting end-directed design since it assents to the intellectual

necessity of seeing nature as purposive and in providing that necessity a regulative role in making

moral judgments. Since Kants argument for the extent to which we may allow teleology to play a

role in our apprehension of nature and even the moral necessity of our giving it this role, though,

specifically eschews scientific claims, that part of his argumentthe main part reallyconcerns ushere only to the extent that it indicates how someone sympathetic to the perspective of natural

th l d d b th ki d f id it ff th l d i d th t it d it

JONATHAN LOESBERG


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kinds of answers that science seeks within the terms of the evidentiary warrants it

demands.3 Consequently, the problem with Intelligent Design is not that it is

scientifically inaccurate but that it fails to have any scientific relevance at all. Itwill follow, however, that Darwinists who use natural selection to question Intel-

ligent Design also fail in their attempt. It is not only logically possible both for

natural selection to be true and for the world to have been designed, but more to

the point, the status of Darwins theory cannot change the nature of the evidence

Intelligent Design cites. As a matter of both rhetoric and logic, it is as important

to recognize that Darwin does not provide counter-evidence to the argument from

design as it is to recognize that a design argument is not in fact a scientific one. In

fact, Intelligent Design is about as relevant to a course in biology as quantum

mechanics is to a course on Victorian literature.Before discussing this intellectual history, I will give two classic statements of

the argument from design, noting the features from them that give the argument its

strength and its problems. The first, Thomas Aquinass fifth proof for the existence

of God in the Summa Theologica is admirably direct:

The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence,

such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always,

in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly,

do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it

be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to itsmark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed

to their end; and this being we call God.4

3 Various scientific opponents of ID (e.g., see Niall Shanks, God, the Devil, and Darwin: A Critique

of Intelligent Design Theory [New York: Oxford UP, 2004] 14245; and Mark Perakh and Matt

Young, Is Intelligent Design Science? Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the

New Creationism, ed. Matt Young and Taner Edis [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2005] 18596,

at 189) have claimed that science does not disallow supernatural explanations in principle but just

always has found the evidence for them insufficient. This claim is importantly wrong. To the extent

that science evaluates evidence importantly in terms of the repeatability of experimental results, itssystem of justification disallows evaluating the likelihood of supernatural or non-natural one-time

interruptions to natural regularities. This may be described as a disciplinary limit rather than a

necessary limit to knowledge: philosophers and literary critics are constrained by their goals to be

open to different non-experimentally verifiable forms of evidence with less rigorous warrant and yet

that constraint, by itself, would not disallow them making accurate statements and true arguments,

though it probably demands holding the conclusions as less certain (assuming that both scientific and

other disciplines can make true statements, a problem on which this article has no bearing). And no

doubt the argument from design will always be taught in courses in philosophy and intellectual

historyprobably as an exploded argument but not as one without relevance to those disciplines. But

even if scientific warrants are disciplinary limits and set boundaries to the kinds of questions science

may answer, history and the success of scientific inquiry have shown that they are not artificial limits.4 Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, 2nd ed. Vol. 1. trans. The Fathers

f th E li h D i P i (L d B O t & W hb Ltd 1914) 17

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One should note that Aquinas does not in fact speak of any kind of design in the

sense of complex patterns or interrelationship of parts. The word designedly

designates end-oriented structure or process. It means things that manifestly actfor an end, things that can be seen to be structured to serve a purpose (the Latin

is ex intentione). The having of ends is the manifestation of an intelligence

behind those things because unintelligent things cannot have ends unless directed

by some intelligence outside themselves. Since this issue will matter, one should

note that there is at this point no element of an argument from analogy (the simile

regarding the archer is illustrative but not really logically necessary). The argu-

ment presumes that the structure of natural things as end-directed is self-evident

and that things with such structures are self-evidently the products of intelligence.

The argument from analogy, in which one first looks at humanly created productsand specifies what about them, makes us conclude that they were designed and

then notices that natural objects have the same features, which both Hume and

Kant contest, gets articulated through the 17th and 18th centuries, first as a logical

shoring up of Aquinass case, and second as part of the enhanced ambition of the

argument.

We see the first purpose of the analogy if we jump forward to Paley, who,

writing in the wake of Humes critique of the argument from analogy, begins his

Natural Theology by insisting on that analogy. The book begins with a famous

walk on a heath in which one first encounters a stone and then a watch. The stone,Paley says, for all we know, might have been there forever and offers no evidence

of how it was created. But the watch is a different case: When we come to inspect

the watch, we perceive (what we could not discover in the stone) that its several

parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e.g. that they are formed and

adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point to the hour

of the day.5 Although Paley also points to the end-directed structure in the watch,

he adds an element to that structure: It has several parts and those parts work

together to produce the end. The watch thus shows evidence of contrivance, a

word that becomes central to Paleys argument. Contrivance rather than merelyend-directed structure evidences that the watch is a product of an intelligent agent

because, while purpose evidences intelligence, as Aquinas argues, contrivance

inescapably evidences purposive form, for Paley, as mere end-directedness does

not. The appearance of end-directedness could occur by accident, but contrivance

shows a complexity that implies an intelligent planning needed to produce that

end. Paley, then, famously goes on to instance the human eye as exhibiting exactly

this contrived structure, as indeed working like the humanly produced telescope

but in a much more complex and articulated manner. Paley, as we will see, uses

5 William Paley, Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Col-

l t d f th A f N t (B t MA G ld K d ll d Li l 1850) 5

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complexity to counter Humes suggestions that the analogy between the design of

human products and the design of natural objects is an uncertain one. 6

Paley uses analogy, in the tradition of the 18th-century natural theologians suchas Bishop Butler, to make a more far-reaching argument than Aquinas, one that

claimed to use Enlightenment reason to prove that the world showed itself to be

ruled by a moral governor and that the features of that governor were Christian.

But he also needs analogy to make Aquinass conclusion seem more certain. The

appearance of end-directedness in nature could be accidental, but contrivance in

the service of end-directedness makes its occurrence by accident much less likely.

Thus, whenever we see both end-directedness and complexity in human activity,

we see intention and the same will be true in nature. Both Hume and Kant hone in

directly on both the analogy and its basis as inadequate as evidence and theircritiques are much more devastating than both sides of the current debate between

biologists and Intelligent Design theorists realize.

II

In going back to Hume to refute the argument from design, I am well aware that

his argument has not seemed that persuasive to numbers of philosophers. Humes

core argument is taken to be that: (1) the argument from design depends on an

analogy between human products and natural products that is less than certain,and (2) to the extent that the analogy is an induction, it is even less certain,

inasmuch as it is based on a single example (ours is the only world we know).

Elliott Sober argues against Hume by reconstructing the argument from design as

not an analogy but the choice of the likeliest of two competing inferences (either

complex organisms came together by chance or they were designed).7 But this

argument is not very persuasive because it evades the question Hume asks, which

is why intelligence seems a likelier cause of design than mechanical causation or

accident. The answer to that question depends on how much the structures of

natural organisms appear analogous to the structures of human, purposive objectsand whether that appearance is reliable evidence. The question at issue thus

remains whether this is a good analogy or not and, then, further, what other

consequences, desirable or not, it might entail. Because Dialogues Concerning

6 In instancing contrivance, Paley does not introduce a new element to the argument. Hume was

already aware of its role since it was a common element in the 18th-century natural theology. But

Paley, whose knowledge of biology was far superior to Humes, sought to overcome Humes logical

hesitations with an overwhelming account of the intricacy of contrivance in the features of natural

organisms. The closeness in the language that both Paley and Darwin use to describe features of

nature and the wonder, albeit of different kinds, both convey at the spectacle of natures intricacy,perhaps accounts for our sense that Darwins way of thinking about nature has replaced Paleys.

7 Elli tt S b Phil h f Bi l 2 d d (B ld CO W t i P 2000) 34 35



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Natural Religion is in the form of a dialogue, in which positions are tested by

dialogic argument and also, at times, by dramatic irony, Humes position must at

times be teased out. Virtually no writer on the issue of Darwin and design givesatisfactory accounts of the course of the argument and how he addresses the

problem of the analogy.8 To get to that argument more clearly, it will help to start

with Kant, who poses a more direct, logical argument, without the divagations of

dramatic dialogue. Here again, we need to go beyond the usually quoted para-

graph in The Critique of Pure Reason to the far more extensive discussion in The

Critique of Judgment.9 The analysis of Kant will show three parts to his argument:

First, in the familiar argument, the first Critique seems to allow the argument from

design to establish a lesser intelligent force but not a Divine Creator of the world.

But, second, even though Kant accepts that some objects have what he callsobjective purposiveness, only explanations of their structure via natural mecha-

nisms can be taken as material explanations of that structure and one should

always carry such explanations out as far as they will go because, third and most

importantly, the analogy between human and non-natural intelligent cause fails

precisely where it needs to succeed if it is to be meaningful. There is one final part

to Kants argument, however, that goes to the more extravagant claims on behalf

of the theory of natural selection made by Dennett and Dawkins: Natural expla-

nations of purposive structure can never really give a satisfactory explanation of

the final source of purposiveness any more than the argument from design canadequately conclude the existence of a designer. Consequently, non-scientific

arguments may not be refuted scientifically. Following the reading of Kant and

Hume, I will then turn to how they first show the arguments not only of natural

theology but of Intelligent Design to fail to have scientific purchase and second

also show how Darwin therefore must be irrelevant to disproving the claims of

Intelligent Design theorists.

Even Kants basic argument against natural theology, in The Critique of Pure

Reason, read carefully is much more comprehensive than it appears:

[. . .] the purposiveness and harmonious adaptation of so much in nature can suffice to prove the

contingency of the form merely, not of the matter, that is not of the substance in the world. To prove

the latter we should have to demonstrate that the things in the world would not of themselves be

capable of such order and harmony, in accordance with universal laws, if they were not in their

substance the product of supreme wisdom. But to prove this we should require quite other grounds

8 Neither Dennett, Dawkins, and Ruse on the one side nor Dembski and Behe on the other (who show

little sign of having read Hume carefully at all) have anything like even accurate summaries of what

Hume says.

9 Only Ruse discusses Kants Critique of Judgment and he astonishingly seems to think that Kantmeant to argue that final purposes were material features of objects. See Michael Ruse, Darwin and

D i D E l ti H P ? (C b id MA H d UP 2003) 46 50

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of proof than those which are derived from the analogy with human art. The utmost, therefore, that

the argument can prove is an architect of the world who is always very much hampered by the

adaptability of the material in which he works, not a creator of the world to whose idea everything

is subject. This, however, is altogether inadequate to the lofty purpose which we have before our

eyes, namely, the proof of an all-sufficient primordial being. To prove the contingency of matter

itself, we should have to resort to a transcendental argument, and this is precisely what we have set

out to avoid.10

Kants argument, of course, is directed at Christian natural theologians, who took

the argument from design to prove the existence of, if not a specifically Christian

god, at least a monotheistic creator with recognizably human-like intention. He

thus seems to allow that the argument might admit the modest conclusion of a

more limited creator (a seeming possibility that, as we will see, Intelligent Designwill want to take advantage of). The problem with this reading is that it does not

really respond to the implications of Kants argument. The architect, he posits, is

not merely a smaller, more limited divinity. It is no divinity at all but a human-like

force struggling with obdurate matter. And that figure is unsuitable not only to the

lofty purpose of natural theology but even to any argument for a non-natural

creator.11

Kants objections to the argument from design become much more pointed in

his Critique of the Teleological Judgmentprecisely because the aim of that second

half of The Critique of Judgment is to justify judging natural objects in terms oftheir having an objective purposiveness. In other words, Kant wants to grant what

natural theologians argue, that nature may be productively analyzed in ways that

see it as designed to produce ends, as teleologically structured. And yet he

rigorously denies that one may infer a designer from natures purposiveness. And

his reason for doing so explains better than any scientist does the basis for what,

as we will see, Dembski and Johnson claim is sciences mere prejudice in favor of

naturalism. Kant writes well before Darwin and has no knowledge of natural

selection as a proposed cause of the appearance of design. And he explicitly

rejects evolution not as theoretically impossible but as empirically unlikely.

12

Andyet he insists that the fact that one may not know what mechanically caused the

appearance of purposiveness does not allow us to stop considering mechanical

10 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martins

Press, 1965) 522.11 A version of the argument from design that asserted that beings from outer space created the

purposiveness of terrestrial organisms would be a scientific argument, albeit not, I think, a very good

one since we would expect natural beings to leave natural traces of their work. And even if such an

argument for a cause of design in terrestrial organisms gained acceptance, the question with regard

to the design of the extra-terrestrial MacGuffins would remain unchanged.12 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett

P bli hi C 1987) 305 06



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causation as a possible explanation and his reason goes to why naturalism is not

a prejudice but a regulating principle for empirical thought. In discussing why no

ultimate explanation for the appearance of design in nature can be satisfying, Kantends with the theistic explanation, which he considers in many ways as the best of

the ones he proposes. It is quite clear that Kant has a certain respect for the

argument from design and his reservation is all the more powerful for his instinc-

tive sympathy with it:

For [theism to succeed in its explanation,] we would first of all have to prove, adequately for

determinative judgment, that the unity of a purpose, which we find in matter, could not possibly

result from the mere mechanism of nature. Only such a proof would entitle us to postulate

determinately that the basis of this unity lies beyond nature. But in fact all we can make out is that

the character and limits of our cognitive powers (which give us no insight in the first, inner basis ofeven this mechanism) force us to give up any attempt to find in matter a principle [that implies]

determinate references [of this matter] to a purpose, so that we are left with no other way of judging

natures production of things as natural purposes than in terms of a supreme understanding as the

cause of the world. That basis, however, [holds] only for the reflective and not for the determinative

judgment, and is absolutely incapable of justifying any objective assertion.13

Kants logic here effectively constructs a logical basis for limiting scientific

explanation to natural causes, even without regard to issues of evidentiary warrant.

He argues that what may seem compelling evidence of a non-natural cause of a

material effect will only be compelling on the basis of certain knowledge about thebasic principle of matter and that knowledge is empirically unavailable. The most

that natural theologians can say they have shown is that the understanding is

incapable of thinking otherwise about purposive form than that it results from an

intelligent designer and that conclusion Kant says cannot justify making deter-

minative or scientific claims about the sources of seeming purposiveness.

But Kant has a further point to make about naturalism, one that will finally go

to the whole basis of making an analogy from human to non-natural design and

that will provide a conceptual background for understanding some of the turns in

Humes more empirical argument. Explaining purposiveness by reference to intel-ligence, Kant notes, does not really explain anything:

Reason is tremendously concerned not to abandon the mechanism nature [employs] in its products,

and not to pass over it in explaining them, since without mechanism we cannot gain insight into the

nature of things. Even if it were granted that a supreme architect directly created the forms of nature

as they have always been, or that he predetermined the ones that in the course of nature keep

developing according to the same model, still none of this advances our cognition of nature in the

least; for we do not know at all how that being acts, and what its ideas are that are supposed to

contain the principles by which natural beings are possible, and [so] we cannot explain nature by

13 Ibid 276 77

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starting from that being [. . .] Or suppose we try to explain by ascending (in other words a

posteriori), i.e., we start from the forms of objects of experience because we think they display

purposiveness, and then, to explain this purposiveness, we appeal to a cause that acts according to

purposes: in that case our explanation would be quite tautologous and we would deceive reason with

[mere] words [. . .]14

Kants point, which will bring us to Hume, also brings us to the core of why

neither natural theology nor Intelligent Design theory can have any coherent

empirical claim to make. He notes that the only explanations of natural events that

actually give information about those events are natural causes and so we should

never abandon mechanistic explanation. Given that we cannot know anything

about a non-natural designer (not merely a Supreme Creator but any non-natural

designer), we cannot know how the designer did what he or she did or why or howthe designed object came into being materially.15 In effect, concluding the exist-

ence of a designer does not tell us anything new about the object, but merely

moves tautologously from the pointing out that one perceives purposiveness to

claiming one sees purpose.

Kant expands his refusal to disallow mechanistic explanations in principle to a

direct attack on the principle of analogous reasoning from human design to

non-natural design:

[. . .] from the fact that in the case of beings of the world we must attribute understanding to the

cause of an effect that we judge to be artificial, we can in no way infer by analogy that the same

causality that we perceive in man can also be ascribed to the being that is wholly distinct from

nature, with nature itself as [its effect] [. . .] The very fact that I am to think of divine causality only

by analogy with an understanding (a power we do not know in any being other than man, who has

a condition in the sensible) forbids me to attribute to this being an understanding in the proper sense

of the term.16

The argument here is that when we judge a thing to be made by humans, we do

more than merely move from a form of purposiveness to the inference of an

intelligent cause. We know how that cause works in the material world (what Kant

calls the sensible), what kind of effects it can and cannot achieve, what kinds ofevidential marks it leaves in addition to the abstract concept of purposiveness.17

Nor should we allow Sober to object that he does not argue by analogy but only

14 Ibid: 295.15 When it suits him, as for instance, when it allows him to argue against concluding from flawed

designs an absent or flawed creator, Dembski agrees that we have no knowledge about a non-natural

designer other than its existence that would allow us to move from the fact of design to a judgment

of motive or capability. He does not recognize what this argument does to his larger aim though.16 Kant (1987): 35758.

17 Niall Shanks and Karl H. Joplin, in Of Mousetraps and Men: Behe on Biochemistry, 23http://www.etsu.edu/philos/faculty/NIALL/Mousetraps.and.Men.htm make a similar point in

i i l t

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by inference on the basis of natural hypothesis. Every case of known intelligent

causes of purposiveness is known because they are human and Kants point is that

we do not know in advance, nor can we know whether that is a relevant set fromwhich to draw an inference because we cannot know that a non-human creator has

an even remotely human-like understanding and the analogy is based on the

working of the human understanding.

In the light of Kant, we may start to make sense of the various divagations of

Humes argument (Kant detests Humes argument as disrespectful but he never

disputes its conclusions about natural theology). Humes claims that the argument

from design is based on first a questionable analogy and second an insufficient

induction all occur in Part II. If he thought that was his entire case, he might have

left the rest of the book unwritten. In fact, Cleanthes, the proponent of arguingfrom design to intelligence, at the opening of Part III, strengthens the case from

analogy to look very much like Sobers claim that intelligent causation is the only

likely conclusion to the fact of design. And he concludes by addressing the critic

of design theory, Philo: Choose, then, your party, Philo, without ambiguity or

evasion; assert either that a rational volume is no proof of a rational cause or admit

of a similar cause to all the works of nature.18 We could hardly imagine a stronger

claim for the validity of the design inference as, in Sobers terms, the likeliest

hypothesis, and, indeed, Philo manifests at least a momentary assent to that

conclusion in terms of a chapter long silence.But Hume buttresses the uncertain critique of the strengths of the analogy by

noting the difficulties that occur if one accepts the hypothesis on the basis on which

it is made. Hume does not, like Kant, divide sharply between a sensible or material

and a transcendent world, so he does not precisely criticize natural theology for

trying to get from a material effect to a transcendent cause, but his opening

argument against analogy and the insufficient basis of the induction is essentially

the same. He argues that we can only reliably conclude from effects enough to

account for their existence and that the argument from design attempts to conclude

too much. Cleanthes argues that the appearance of design in natural objects is soexact that we are more nearly arguing from identity than analogy. When Philo

re-enters the argument, he attempts, as he says, to show Cleanthes the inconve-

niences [. . .] in your anthropomorphism.19 Philo proceeds to argue that if we grant

an extreme connection between human contrivance and the appearance of natural

design, we have a right to make the same kinds of inferences from that design that

we would make from human contrivance. We can no longer appeal to the fact that

the divine intelligence is unknowable because we have claimed to know it to be as

close to human in its effects as would be a book growing on a plant. Philo thus

18 David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (New York: Hafner, 1966) 28.19 Ibid 37

JONATHAN LOESBERG


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proceeds to formulate all the types of human-like designers we could construe from

the appearance of design. His point is not to show that the world is an imperfect

place but that the design analogy only works if the designing intelligence is thoughtof as human, and when we think of human contrivances, we conclude much more

than merely the fact of contrivance and the fact of human causation. This, in effect,

reverses the order of Kants argument: Instead of contesting the analogy and leaving

it with an unsatisfactory alternative, Hume momentarily stipulates the analogy in

order to show the unfortunate implications that follow from it. If Kants argument

with regard to the basic analogy is better, Humes point is more telling with regard

to Kants allowing an architect: The basis for allowing that architect, rather than

being a modest first step toward monotheism, equally allows various other, far less

acceptable alternatives while failing to resolve in any final way where design comesfrom. Accepting an architect, while still not really resolving the question about the

ultimate cause of design, thus becomes far less attractive for a theist than admitting

absence of proof. Much of the rest of the dialogue can be described as Philos

struggle to get Cleanthes to see that either the analogy is less than persuasive or that

it is less than happy in its results.

Neither Kant nor Hume wants to replace the Enlightenment vision of a designed

world with the concept of an accidental or undesigned world. Kant, indeed, thought

that thinking about the world purposively has a philosophic role to play in thinking

about ultimate meanings. He just refuses it a scientific role to play in investigatingnatural objects insofar as they are natural. Humes battle is with what he takes to be

the assumptions of the Enlightenment that one can reason ones way into meta-

physical certainty. Both of them show, therefore, not that the conclusion of the

design argument is either right or wrong about ultimate questions, but that it simply

has no ability to say anything meaningful about the material world. If that critique

is accurate, then far from confronting natural selection as an opposed scientific

theory, Intelligent Design should not be able to succeed in grappling with it at all.

And its failure should result from the kinds of weaknesses Kant and Hume point out,

in particular that the assertion of an intelligent designer turns out not to change ourunderstanding of nature in any empirically meaningful way and that the connection

between human design and non-natural design fails for the same reasons that make

the theory unable to confront natural selection. And a look at the Intelligent Design

arguments will show, I think, that these precise flaws disable their case.

III

This final section has two ends, each of which is part of the larger claim that

neither is Intelligent Design part of scientific discourse nor can scientific discourseprovide a disproof of Intelligent Design. Before proceeding to the discussion of

Intelligent Design and some of its most significant materialist opponents Dennett



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and Dawkins, though, I would like to begin with Kants classifications for all

ultimate explanations of the appearance of purposiveness, or design, and the

reasons he gives for their unsatisfactoriness since they nicely structure the kinds ofobjections I will be making. Kant divides the explanations for the appearance of

purposiveness in nature into two main groups, each of which has two analogous

sub-categories.20 He calls the main responses idealist (the purposiveness is not

intentional and thus only appears to be purposiveness) and realist (the purposive-

ness is intentional and is thus really purposive) and the sub-groups into physicalist

(the explanation of the appearance or the reality is an entirely physical or material

one) or hyperphysicalist (there is a force behind material reality causing either the

appearance or the reality of purpose). And he explains why each of these expla-

nations is unsatisfactory.21

The fourth of these categories, hyperphysical realist,refers to natural theologian and the flaws he finds in this argument have been

sufficiently detailed for us to apply them, with the aid of Hume, to Intelligent

Design. The middle two categoriesthe Spinozist hyperphysical idealists and the

hylozoist physical realistsdo not describe any group among modern controver-

sialists and so need not detain us here. The first of the categories, the physical

idealists, who think the appearance of purposiveness to be mere appearance and to

be explicable in terms of natural or mechanical causes, should be the group to

which scientists belong. Kant faults this group with failing really to explain how

even the appearance of purposiveness or design occurs in the first place. And, byattempting to offer such an explanationinstead of following Kants warning that

one cannot offer any ultimate explanation for the appearance of purpose

Dawkins and Dennett will, interestingly, fall back into the hyperphysical realist

camp of natural theologythough in their fashion.

Intelligent Design means to escape the kinds of critiques that occur in Kant and

Hume by making three claims, each of which intends to revise and strengthen

natural theology. Each of these claims fails, either by failing to achieve persua-

sively the revision of natural theology it intends or by failing to escape Kants and

Humes critique regardless of the revision. These claims are first that IntelligentDesigns conclusion of an intelligent designer has no theological content, makes

no claims about the identity of that designer, but posits the mere bare necessity of

a non-natural intelligent designer of some kind and, second, that nothing empiri-

cally or scientifically authorizes a limitation of empirical investigation to natural

causes of natural effects.22 These two claims in effect, as we will see, Kant has

20 Kant (1987): 27073.21 Ibid: 27377.

22 This argument is not a direct revision of natural theology since those theologians did not recognizea distinction between natural and non-natural causes and effects. Establishing that distinction is one

f K t hi t d di ti it t b t f th d th

JONATHAN LOESBERG


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already responded to. The core of the argument is the third contention that

Intelligent Design is a rigorously empirical claim. Responding to this argument

will entail going into both William Dembskis and Michael Behes claims in somedetail. Before proceeding to dispute these claims, however, it is worth noting first

their political and then their intellectual roots since these non-logical elements

condition the shape their argument has taken.

The challenge to teaching Darwin in the classroom begins of course with the

Scopes trial in 1925. Once laws disallowing the teaching of Darwin were struck

down, however, the modern attempt has been to have some version of Christian or

theistic creation taught as an alternative scientific explanation to natural selec-

tion and/or evolution as an account first of human origin and more recently of

biological function. The most immediate political sources of Intelligent Designbegin with the legal rulings in the 1980s stating that creation science was not

science and could not be taught in science classrooms. The core decision in these

cases was the 1987 Supreme Court ruling in Aguilard, which saw creation science

as essentially religious in content and therefore forbidden from the classroom by

the First Amendments Establishment Clause.23 This decision helps explain Intel-

ligent Designs unlikely claim that its conclusion of an intelligent designer has no

theological and thus no religious content. But the earlier ruling by Judge Overton

in McLean, in 1982, has also been important because of Overtons listing of

features that make a discipline a science, among which were the criteria thatscience concern itself with explanations in terms of natural law and that it draw its

conclusions from empirical evidence.24 From this element in the ruling, comes the

attack on what Intelligent Design theorists refer to as metaphysical naturalism.

Intelligent Design, as a political movement, is usually dated to the publication of

Philip Johnsons Darwin on Trial, in 1991, which gave considerable attention to

the Overton ruling25 and took as one of its themes the idea that Darwinian

evolution maintains naturalism as an extra-scientific philosophical commit-

ment.26 Since, Intelligent Design theorists argue, that philosophical doctrine is not

itself scientifically grounded, empirical evidence that led to the conclusion of anon-natural intelligence behind nature would have to deserve scientific consider-

ation, at least to the extent that science claims to be a system of empirical

23 See Edward J. Larson, Trial and Error: The American Controversy over Creation and Evolution ,

3rd ed. (New York: Oxford UP, 2003) 17980.24 William R. Overton, McLean v. Arkansas. United States District Court, Eastern District of Arkan-

sas, Western Division. Opinion of William R. Overton, U.S. District Judge, reprinted in Science,

Technology, & Human Values 7 (Summer 1982): 2842, at 36.25 Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1991) 11213.

26 Intelligent Design theorists define naturalism as a metaphysical commitment to the propositionthat all things can ultimately be explained by natural causes and see this as the philosophical

ti b hi d th f l ti b f t l l ti



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explanation and not a metaphysical position. Further, as long as this argument did

not presume any explicit religious doctrine but only claimed evidence for a

designing intelligence, it could not be found to contravene the EstablishmentClauses prohibition of teaching religion in the classroom. This article intends to

take Intelligent Design theory explicitly on its own terms and not as a politically

reconstituted creationism designed to get religion back in the classroom, even

though there seems little doubt that it has had the explicit aim of changing the high

school curriculum and of operating as a political force.27 Logically, of course, the

political ends of an organization are not relevant to the intellectual quality of the

arguments its adherents make. Still, one can easily see the sources for the three

claims Intelligent Design makes, outlined above, in the history of rulings against

creationism.But the sources of Intelligent Designs challenge to Darwinian natural selection

were by no means all political. In 1986, between the McLean and the Aquilard

rulings, Richard Dawkins published The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of

Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. Ironically, as Dawkins declared the

argument from design dead, he aided in its revivification. Phillip Johnsons move

toward articulating Intelligent Design as a theory opposing Darwins began in part

with his reading of Dawkins.28 And one can see why, since Dawkins certainly laid

down a challenge:

Paley knew that [the appearance of design in nature] needed a special explanation [. . .] it is

sometimes said that [David Hume] disposed of the Argument from Design a century before Darwin.

But what Hume did was criticize the logic of using apparent design in nature as positive evidence

for the existence of a God. He did not offer any alternative explanation for apparent design, but left

the question open. An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume, I have no expla-

nation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isnt a good explanation, so we must

wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one. I cant help feeling that such a position,

though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism

might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually

fulfilled atheist.29

27 See Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross, Creationisms Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent

Design (New York: Oxford UP, 2004). This book more than adequately outlines the political

workings and aims of the organizations that sponsor Intelligent Design theorists.28 Ibid: 17.29 Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe

Without Design (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996) 6. One should note that although Darwin did think

his theory undercut Paleys, he did not think that that was because natural selection offered a better

explanation of complex design. He argued, in The Origin of Species and the Descent of Man (New

York: Modern Library, n.d.), that natural selection could tenably explain what he called organs of

extreme perfection and complication (13335), but he classed these organs as difficulties to histheory that the theory could deal with. He did not think those explanations were the strength of the

th R th i hi A t bi h D i i t d t th l i f V i ti f D ti

JONATHAN LOESBERG


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Dawkins sets up an intellectual history in which Paleys argument survives

Humes critique (written, of course, before Paley), slightly damaged but more or

less intact. Darwins theory then offers a positive explanation for the design.Dawkinss claim about natural selections importance as an explanation of

complex organization among living things sets up a clear pathway for design

theory to re-enter scientific discourse. If Darwins theory can be shown to be, at

the very least, an improbable explanation of complex organization, then the

philosophical objections to the argument having been found more or less wanting

by Darwins allies, Intelligent Design re-emerges as a positive explanation for that

complexity. Even a cursory reading of Michael Behe and William Dembski will

show that most of their arguments are concerned specifically with why natural

selection will not explain biological complexity rather than more generally withnatural complexity as implying Intelligent Design. Dembski does offer a positive

argument in favor of design, but, as we will see, it is both thin and problematic. He

is quite explicit, though, that he thinks that if Darwin fails, then Intelligent Design

re-emerges, and that these are the only two competing explanations.30 Darwin

having been shown unlikely, and naturalism disposed of as a philosophical pre-

supposition, inferring an intelligence as causing biological complexity becomes

an empirical argument claiming its place in the scientific curriculum.

The first claim of Intelligent Design theorists, and most significantly William

Dembski, that the inference from design to an intelligent designer, need have notheological content if it remains sufficiently modest, may be dealt with fairly

quickly. We have seen Kants distinction between what natural theology could

prove, a limited architect, and what it cannot, a force from outside nature that

brings it into existence. Dembski seems to think that Kant, by allowing an

architect of the world, is criticizing only what Dembski thinks of as immodest

claims for a theologically specified intelligent designer that he himself would not

make.31 Since Intelligent Design, he says, makes no claims to know the nature or

Animals and Plants as the reason Paleys argument fails (Charles Darwin, Autobiography [New

York: W.W. Norton, 1958] 8788). And that conclusion argues that natural selection manifests itself

in the way in which natural mechanisms operate with a dependence on what falls to hand, rather

than by the strictures of contrivance Paley discussed (Charles Darwin, Variation of Animals and

Plants Under Domestication, 2 vols. [NewYork: Appleton, 189092] II, 431). In other words, unlike

Dawkins, Darwin thought natural selection was evidenced by natural contingency, though it could

explain complex organization when it occurred. Although John Stuart Mill shares Dawkinss logic

in his Essays on Ethics, Religion, and Society, Vol. 10 of Collected Works, ed. John M. Robson

(Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1969) 44950, it is really far more characteristic of the late 20th-century

argument than of the mid-19th-century abandonment of natural theology.

30 William A. Dembski, The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About IntelligentDesign (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004) 26566.

31 Ibid 68



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extent of the designer, it can be quite satisfied with Kants architect and use

further, theological reasoning to determine the unitary, Christian nature of that

designer. Aside from the fact that this argument is politically disingenuous, it also,as we have seen, does not really grasp the distinction Kant makes. Because the

evidence for intelligence is the intention behind contrivance, contrivance can only

evidence the workings of an intelligence that needs to work through contrivance,

effectively a natural designer with perhaps greater than human powers. Dembski,

though, will not accept a natural designer (aliens from outer space, for instance)

because they do not really answer the kinds of ultimate questions he wants to

answer. Further, as we have seen, Humes extension of this argument for a

human-like intelligence entails acceptingas Dembski explicitly does not

drawing inferences from the imperfections of natural design about the intentionsor abilities of the designer. In effect, to accept a design inference sufficiently

modest to meet the objections of Kant and Hume, Dembski would have to accept

that he is arguing not for a non-natural first cause but merely for a natural cause

in the form of a natural, though non-human, designer. In addition to being a weak

scientific conclusion, as we have seen (though not a non-scientific one), such an

argument does not exit from the naturalism that is Intelligent Designs complaint

against Darwinism. But a conclusion of a non-natural designer will fall afoul of

the objections to natural theology that Dembski claims to escape.

And this brings us to the argument against metaphysical naturalism. One cansee what is at stake by turning to Michael Behes version of the argument from

design. Behe effectively allows all of Darwinian theory above the level of molecu-

lar development,32 but then steps back to argue that natural selection cannot

explain cellular function. He adduces notoriously, although not solely, bacterial

flagella, which have multiple moving parts that work together to produce a

function, propulsion. Paley argued that relations of parts to whole in the eye

evidenced contrivance. Although Behes argument is slightly different in the light

of Darwins theories, his point is the same. He argues that in complex organiza-

tions, all features need to be in place for a given function to result. Behe charac-terizes such organizations as having irreducible complexity and he explicitly

claims that Darwin cannot explain it:

Irreducibly complex systems like mousetraps, Rube Goldberg machines and the intracellular

transport system cannot evolve in a Darwinian fashion. You cant start with a platform, catch a few

mice, add a spring, catch a few more mice, add a hammer, catch a few more mice, and so on: The

32 Michael Behe, Darwins Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: Free

Press, 1996). Behe explicitly accepts common descent (5) and, although he does not say anything

about the role of natural selection in speciation, he at least seems to stipulate the DarwinDawkinsexplanation of the eye at the level of the features they describeretinas, lenses, etc.only demur-

i b t th ll l k f th f t (38 39)

JONATHAN LOESBERG


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whole system has to be put together at once or the mice get away. Similarly, you cant start with a

signal sequence and have a protein go a little way toward the lysosome, add a signal receptor

protein, go a little further, and so forth. Its all or nothing.33

Behe, by insisting on the relation of parts to a function which will only occur in

the presence of all of parts working together, adduces precisely what Paley

adduces about watches and eyes.34 And, like Paley, he also argues that irreducible

complexity is a positive indication of Intelligent Design. However, unlike Paley,

who merely argues from design to a designer, Behes argument has two parts: (1)

Darwins theory of natural selection will not explain certain features of cells, and

(2) in the absence of natural selection, the only explanation left is that of an

intelligent designer.

Since I will be arguing that Intelligent Design is not science because it has

insufficient purchase on material reality to make an effective scientific claim, at

this point, I need to face an objection that both Behe and Dembski make with some

justice. If Intelligent Design is not scientific because it makes no measurable

scientific claims, how is it that scientists have mounted scientific refutations of its

claims? As Behe notes: Now one cant have it both ways. One cant say both that

ID is unfalsifiable (or untestable) and that there is evidence against it. Either it is

unfalsifiable and floats serenely beyond experimental reproach, or it can be criti-

cized on the basis of our observations and is therefore testable.35 And, indeed,

many of the objections of scientists to Intelligent Design, as we will see, are more

metaphysical than they would admit. But Behes objection points nicely to the

logical separation of the two parts of his argument. The first of these claims, that

natural selection will not explain certain features of cells, is quite obviously a

claim within biology and therefore theoretically capable of being refuted within

that discourses terms. Arguments in favor of how natural selection might have

produced bacterial flagella are thus refutations of Behes scientific claim. Whether

they are effective refutations this article will not judge. Indeed, it does not have to

make that judgment. We have seen Kant argue that only what he calls mechanical

principles advance our scientific knowledge and that the argument for a designer

amounts to abandoning the search for that knowledge rather than a scientific

inference. The distinctness of Behes two arguments indicates the way the second

claim departs from the kind of argument made by the first. His second claim rests

precisely on the metaphysical leap Kant showed Paley to have made. Behes

33 Ibid: 11011.34 Behes critique of Paley for missing his point about the irreducible complexity of the watch

(21516) by the way is quite unjust. Paleys point about contrivance captures Behes point and also

accommodates evidence Behe wrongly thinks is beside the point.35 Michael Behe, Philosophical Objections to Intelligent Design: Response to Critics, 2 http://

t i i /b h 06

http://www.trueorigin.org/behe06.asp%E2%8C%AAhttp://www.trueorigin.org/behe06.asp%E2%8C%AAhttp://www.trueorigin.org/behe06.asp%E2%8C%AAhttp://www.trueorigin.org/behe06.asp%E2%8C%AAhttp://www.trueorigin.org/behe06.asp%E2%8C%AAhttp://www.trueorigin.org/behe06.asp%E2%8C%AA


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argument thus shows us the split between the metaphysical and the biological

argument. Dembskis argument will show us why the metaphysical argument fails

to refute Darwin and also, in the attempt, fails to make the empirical case it claimsto make.

In order to show the ways in which Dembskis argument both fails to disallow

natural selection and fails to avoid the critiques of Kant and Hume against natural

theology, we need to start by recognizing the revisions he makes to natural

theology in an attempt to make it a more completely empirical argument. Aquinas,

as we have seen, argued that the existence of means to ends relationships in natural

entities entailed a designer since such relationships are only caused by intelligent

planning. Paley went a step further and argued that the relation of different parts

working together to produce a function indicated contrivance, which is a specificfeature of intelligence. But arguing from contrivance to a contriving intelligence

led to difficulties in natural theology that Dembski wants to avoid. He thus

proposes what he offers as a more direct, empirical, and modest proposition, one

that has no claims about the kind of intelligence at work, but merely posits the

existence of intelligence as a necessary conclusion. In the place of purposive form

or contrivance, Dembski articulates the concept of complex, specified information

(CSI), which he defines as follows: An object, event, or structure exhibits speci-

fied complexity if it is both complex (i.e., one of many live possibilities) and

specified (i.e., displays an independently given pattern). A long sequence ofrandomly strewn scrabble pieces is complex without being specified. A short

sequence spelling the word the is specified without being complex. A sequence

corresponding to a Shakespearean sonnet is both complex and specified.36

Because the example of the sonnet here is also an example of intended meaning

and thus purposive, this definition must be refined a little further. Dembskis

concept of specification entails a pattern that is either explicitly stated beforehand

(an archer specifies the target she shoots at in Aquinass example) or may be taken

as sufficiently special in some sense as to count as specification: A sequence of 50

coin tosses resulting in heads is no more specified than any other sequence of 50results, but if we saw it happen, we would think it an improbable enough event to

demand further explanation, possibly in terms of human intervention in the form

of a loaded coin.

But in the absence of a contingent end, such as winning a bet, tossing fifty heads

in a row does not by itself imply an external end in the way that the relationship

among parts in the mammalian eye suggests an explanation of that relationship as

having the function of producing sight. Coin toss results by themselves do not

evidence intentions or contrivance, even if, when they fall in certain patterns, we

36 William A. Dembski, No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot be Purchased without

I t lli (N Y k R & Littl fi ld 2002) iii

JONATHAN LOESBERG


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do start to make guesses about loaded coins. Because he does not refer to qualities

of intelligence such as contrivance or intention, Dembski asserts the connection

between CSI and intelligence as one of purely empirical, causal sequence: Thejustification for [the] claim [that CSI always indicates Intelligent Design] is a

straightforward inductive generalization: in every instance where specified com-

plexity obtains and where the underlying causal story is known (i.e., where we are

not just dealing with circumstantial evidence but where, as it were, the video

camera is running and any putative designer will be caught red-handed), it turns

out that design is actually present.37 One should note that this claim can be taken

as making a buried analogy. Since all cases in which we already know the causes

of specified complexity are not only cases where the causes are intelligence but

cases where the causes are human intelligence, the induction that Dembski claimscan be taken as, like Paleys, to point to examples of humanly created design and

argue that natural objects share certain significant features with those cases.

Dembski vigorously denies that Paleys argument was essentially one of analogy

and that his is in any sense an analogy (following Sobers critique).38 In order for

this denial to make sense, however, Dembski must be claiming simply that CSI

just is an inescapable empirical sign of Intelligent Design. The fact that all the

cases we know happen to be humanly produced is for him irrelevant. What

matters, he says, is that in all cases we know, except possibly for the case of

biological organisms, we would as a result of the presence of CSI infer anintelligence as the cause. Since Dembski sees no basis for excepting biological

organisms (and we must grant that we cannot except them a priori without

begging the question), CSI would then be a positive, empirical indication of

Intelligent Design.

In a certain sense, as I will argue further down, the argument could be left here,

without it being relevant to any scientific explanation for functions in organs. If

CSI just did indicate intelligence, then even if natural selection could produce CSI

as a mediate cause, this fact could not disprove the prior argument. It would only

mean that natural selection was the natural means that intelligence used to produceCSI. But, as we have seen, both Darwins allies, such as Dawkins and Dennett,

and his enemies, Johnson and Dembski, accept natural selection as an alternative

explanation that must be disproved. And the argument of Intelligent Design

against it has been that it cannot sufficiently explain complexity. Ever since

Darwin, that argument has regularly entailed accounting for the structure of the

37 William A. Dembski, The Logical Underpinnings of Intelligent Design, Debating Design: From

Darwin to DNA, ed. William Dembski and Michael Ruse (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004)

31130, at 320.38 William A. Dembski, Intelligent Design: The Bridge between Science and Theology (Downers

G IL I t V it P 1999) 271 75



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mammalian eye, but both Darwin and Dawkins do offer a picture of how natural

selection could produce the eye.39 And although Dembski does not really grant

Dawkinss argument, he does not expend much energy trying to refute it, offeringrather an argument that simply makes an end run around natural selection.

We have seen that, according to Kants claim that one can never rule out of

court a mechanical cause of a natural effect just because it is unknown, even if

Behe were right that natural selection could not explain irreducible complexity or

purposive structure at the cellular level, that would not support the leap to a

non-natural designer. Dembski shows us the inability of concluding the existence

of a designing intelligence even to rule out natural selection. In order to show that

CSI cannot be the consequence of natural causes, Dembski argues, in No Free

Lunch, that simply as a matter of fact, no natural cause, by itself, can ever producespecified complexity. To deal with cases of CSI that seem to be produced by

necessary causation, he refines this claim to say that natural causation may, in a

sense, shuffle CSI from one place to another, thus giving the appearance of having

created it. This allows Dembski to argue that even if Darwinian evolution is the

means by which the panoply of life on earth came to be, the underlying fitness

function [the algorithmic formulation that describes how selection produces its

results] that constrains biological evolution would not be a free lunch and not a

brute given, but a finely crafted assemblage of smooth gradients that presupposes

much prior specified complexity.40

To take this statement out of Dembskisprobabilistic formulation, his claim is that natural selection will not work unless

there are already prior conditions that allow it to work and those prior conditions

enable its success. The prior conditions he posits will hardly disturb any evolu-

tionary theorist (that the earth be in physical existence, that DNA work to repli-

cate, that there be some general survival advantage to complexity to ward off

selections tendency to simplify). Nor would they really look like the kind of

specifications that demand inferring Intelligent Design, unless again one presumes

that specified complexity must evidence intelligence even if we have knowledge

of secondary causes that might have produced it. Thus, in effect, rather thandisproving natural selection, as Dembski usually claims to do, in order to deal with

the more general problem of bracketing all examples of necessarily produced CSI

as the results of secondary causes, the design inference must stipulate natural

selections possibility and declare it irrelevant.

But the fact that Intelligent Design cannot overturn natural selection or any

other theory offering natural explanations of biological complexity that might

39 Darwins explanation occurs in The Origin of Species, 13334. Dawkinss more fleshed out

discussions are first in The Blind Watchmaker, 8486 and then in Richard Dawkins, Climbing MountImprobable (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996).

40 D b ki (2002) 212

JONATHAN LOESBERG


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replace or augment natural selection does not, by itself, show the inference to a

designer to be an insufficient one on its own terms. It is likely that if my contention

were accepted that design theory has no grip on scientific conclusions and thushad no particular claim to the time of at least high school science curricula, the

political impetus for the movement would end and with it the movement itself. But

the intellectual claims of the movement remain separable from its political aims.

And, in particular, Dembskis theory, whether he meant it to or not, may be taken

to respond to one aspect of Kants claim that the basic analogy at the core of the

argument from design does not hold and thus to the inconveniences that Hume

claimed to find in its anthropomorphism. Kant responded to the claim of all design

theorists up to his time that what one saw in nature was evidence of purpose or

intent and so he noted that the analogy from humanly artificed object to naturalobject presumed we could get from human intelligence to the working of divine

intelligence or understanding.41 Dembskis theory of CSI, however, explicitly

intends to eschew reference to the problem of other minds. He distinguishes CSI

from semantic information, claiming that CSI is a formal description of the

external features of objects, without reference to the purpose, meaning, or func-

tion of the object42 and asserts that unembodied designers are no more a difficulty

to his theory than embodied ones because the theory does not assert anything

about a designers mental processes.43 If he can make good on the argument that

CSI entails Intelligent Design, without reference to how the CSI was effected orwhy, then, even if Intelligent Design would not have much to say in a science

classroom, it would at least remain an empirical conclusion of sorts.

The problem with this formalization of the evidence for design is that it

produces problems on one side of the analogy and wildly improbable descriptions

of how evidence works on the other. In other words, on the one hand, there are

natural patterns that look enough like CSI to fit Dembskis criteria but do not look

like things to which we want to attribute design to make it unclear that in fact CSI

is as uniformly attached to design as purposiveness or contrivance seemed to be to

Paley. And, on the other hand, Dembskis descriptions of how we conclude humandesign from the evidence of CSI are instructively unlikely. To start with the first

problem, scientists have offered two examples of patterns that seem to meet the

criteria of being CSI but that, they say, do not entail a designer: Bnard cell

formations (when heated under certain conditions, water forms hexagonally and

41 Elliott Sober, in The Design Argument, Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA, ed. William

Dembski and Michael Ruse (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004) 98129, at 10514, makes a similar

argument but does not see it working in either Hume or Kant.42 Dembski (2002): 147.43 Ibid 147 48



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pentagonally shaped cells)44 and the fact that leaves on some plants form patterns

around the stem that follow a Fibonacci sequence (a sequence of numbers in

which each number in the series is the sum of the prior two numbers).45

Dembskisreplies to each of these examples have been different. He has simply denied that

Bnard cell formation makes it through his explanatory filter because it is the

result of causal specificity, thus an example of something occurring necessar-

ily.46 In the case of the Fibonacci sequence of leaf arrangement, Dembski is less

clear. On the one hand, he suggests that the sequence may be necessary and thus

not necessitating a design inference. On the other hand, he also suggests that the

necessity may result from some prior biological cause that would, as inputting

CSI, result in the design inference.47 Dembskis responses are not, on their own

terms, very satisfying. With regard to the Fibonacci sequence of leaves, no one hassuggested a biological cause to the sequence, so in order to get to the design

inference, he has to propose more than he knows. And, since his explanatory filter

never really explains why causally necessary patterns are not specified complex

information regardless of their origins, the relegation of Bnard cells to causal

specificity seems no more satisfying. Moreover, we are left with the question of

why Dembski accepts Fibonacci sequences as designed but rejects Bnard cells.

Why not just have said that both exhibit CSI and both are therefore designed? And

why did his opponents think that Bnard cells would be exceptions rather than

designed patterns for Dembski and why were they at least partially right?The answer, I think, has to do precisely with the lack of contrivance or purpo-

siveness these effects seem to display. Unless we imagine that a designer provided

Bnard cell patterns for our aesthetic pleasure (in which case we imagine a

purpose for them), we see no reason for the patterns, no end that they serve. In the

case of the leaves, that which allows us to recognize specified complexity, the

mathematical pattern, is not that which benefits the leaves, assuming there is a

benefit to the pattern, and this differentiates the pattern from the ostensibly

irreducible complexity present in the eye for Paley or bacterial flagella for Behe.

One must say that the scientists proposing these patterns seem no more aware ofwhy they present the possibility of counter-examples than Dembski does and so

though they tax his answers with scientific inaccuracy or logical contradiction,

they do not tax them, as I am here, with missing the point of the problem. And yet

44 See Shanks (2004): 12528; and Niall Shanks and Istvan Karsai, Self-Organization and the Origin

of Complexity, Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism , ed.

Matt Young and Taner Edis (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2005) 85106, at 9194.45 See Korthof http://home.planet.nl/~gkorthof/kortho44.htm.

46 Dembski (2002): 243.47 Ibid: 12, 14. In The Design Revolution, 90, Dembski more straightforwardly attributes the sequence

t i d i d bi l i l l it

JONATHAN LOESBERG
http://home.planet.nl/~gkorthof/kortho44.htm%E2%8C%AAhttp://home.planet.nl/~gkorthof/kortho44.htm%E2%8C%AAhttp://home.planet.nl/~gkorthof/kortho44.htm%E2%8C%AAhttp://home.planet.nl/~gkorthof/kortho44.htm%E2%8C%AA


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that the abstract, non-intentional element of the CSI is the problem one may see,

again, by asking why Dembski does not simply assert both patterns as evidence of

Intelligent Design. To do so would make his argument more logically coherent butalso more obviously detached from the biological features he ostensibly seeks to

explain.

Still the design inference, although with a weakened and more arbitrary

seeming basic claim, might hold formally if Dembski simply accepted Bnard

cells and Fibonacci sequenced leaves as examples of CSI demanding the existence

of an intelligent designer. The Fibonacci sequenced leaves, however, in the dis-

tinction between what gives their sequence complex specified information (that

the leaves are in a numerical sequence), and whatever about that sequence might

create a function, indicate another problem with Dembskis theory, which is thatit really does not apply, as he thinks it does, to the cases where we do know or

should know that design occurs. To show the problem, I want to look at one of

Dembskis examples of how we make a judgment about CSI. Dembski imagines

a probability professor assigning some of his students to produce a report of the

results of flipping a coin 100 times and assigning others to produce simulated

random sequences that they mentally construct without actually flipping coins.

The professor can almost always differentiate between actual reports of tosses and

constructed reports because there are arcane features of coin flipping sequences

that unknowing students imagining a sequence would not create. Dembski thenimagines a student knowledgeable in probability who sets out to fool the professor

into guessing wrongly by knowingly recreating all the arcane features of

sequences of 100 coin tosses in his or her report. At first, Dembski imagines the

professor being fooled. But the professor then looks at the reported sequence more

closely, reading it, instead of in terms of heads and tails, in terms of 0s and 1s. She

then notices that the sequence created by 0s and 1s is the sequence that reproduces

counting to 100 in a binary system and concludes that the report was constructed

instead of real.48 Should she have so concluded? For Dembski, the point of the

anecdote is that she has noticed a specified complexity and thus knows that she isnot in the face of chance. But if the features of counting to 100 in binary numbers

only accidentally reproduces the features of sequences of 100 tosses of a coin and

is not one of the tests for such features, then that conclusion is not a clear one. Why

would the knowledgeable student trying to fool the professor have used that

sequence, except as an act of ego to see if he could get away with it? Why would

the professor have tested for that sequence since it is normally irrelevant to the

features she is looking for (except that it happens to be one such sequence out of

many containing those features)? Even knowing the student to have been knowl-

edgeable in probability, we are not warranted, merely from the unlikelihood of the

48 D b ki (2002) 16 18



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sequence, to draw the conclusion that the student chose that sequence since there

is no reason for him to have done so. We need to imagine the student intentionally

encoding the binary sequence as a result of some motivation that goes beyondmerely fooling the professor. If we knew the student to enjoy, like master crimi-

nals in detective stories, leaving traces of his deceptions, we might then take the

presence of the binary code as evidence of his having worked up the sequence

rather than having flipped the coin. But this is precisely the kind of knowledge

Dembski denies we need to draw a design inference. Thus, not merely pattern but

actual intention and purpose do enter into the design conclusion here. One could

easily multiply such examples in Dembski of accounts in which he claims we

would infer design where we might not or of accounts where we would infer

design because of elements of motivation he explicitly denies are relevant.49

Kantand Hume show us why the appearance of design does not constitute empirical

evidence of a non-natural human-like intention. Dembskis attempt to avoid the

concept of intention shows us the failure of the argument without that concept to

make empirical sense in its own terms. So, not only does Intelligent Design fail to

disprove natural selection as at least a mediate cause of complex structure in

nature, it fails, even in its revised form, to make a case for itself as an empirical

conclusion as well.

There is one more step to this argument and it turns not on the argument from

design but on the claim by Darwinian controversialistsnotably Dawkins andDennett, but also othersthat Darwin in fact puts the nail in the coffin of natural

theology by providing an alternative explanation of design. My point will not quite

be Stephen Jay Goulds of defining science and religion as non-overlapping

magisteria,50 in which their claims have nothing to do with each other ever. At the

very least, science and religion overlap in the disciplines of philosophy and

intellectual history, or this article would have no entry point into the debate over

Intelligent Design. And just as there are other reasons for endorsing theism rather

than natural theology, there are powerful reasons for being an atheist that do not

depend on Darwins having provided one with intellectual fulfillment. Rather, mypoint is limited to undoing an overreaching among scientific controversialists that,

oddly, provides ground for the claim by Intelligent Design theorists that their

inference must be scientific at least to the extent that scientists think they can

49 One should note in this connection Gary Hurds contention that archaeology and forensic science,

fields that Dembski cites as unproblematically making design inferences based on CSI, actually

look for the kind of information about motivation and actual human, physical intervention, the

relevance of which he denies. See Gary Hurd, The Explanatory Filter, Archaeology and Forensics,

Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism, ed. Matt Young and

Taner Edis (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2005) 10720.50 Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York:

B ll ti B k 1999) 6

JONATHAN LOESBERG


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refute it. If scientists could refute Intelligent Design in the way they do the

empirical claims of older style creationists (that the earth is only 6,000 years old,

that homo sapiens lived in the time of dinosaurs), Intelligent Design might be falsescience or bad science. But in fact scientists can never quite close with this

opponent because it is not theirs (in intellectual terms; it is theirs, of course,

culturally in wanting to presume on their discipline) and, again, Kant argues out

why in the four categories of explanation for design discussed in the opening of

this section.

Since natural theology is the fourth of these types (hyperphysical realist), it

would be convenient to include scientific explanations (as Kant thought he could)

within the first group (physical idealists) and accept the reason we will see that he

gives for the insufficiency of that explanation. But surely, Dawkins and Dennett,who I will use as the most obvious examples here, would not entirely accept Kants

description of the physical idealist argument. As a consequence, their theories

appear at times to exhibit elements of each of the categories of explanation and

ultimately become not refutations of the argument from design but versions of it.

It should be the case that contemporary scientific belief in natural selection

would fit in Kants category of physicalist, idealistic explanation of purposiveness.

Science surely does not think that there is an intending force (although that may

depend, as we will see on how we interpret the concept of an intending force) and

it thinks that necessary physical laws explain the appearance of natural purpo-siveness. Kants knowledge of physical laws was, on the evidence ofThe Critique

of Judgment, not very advanced, even for his own time, and limited to ontological,

philosophical explanations. The only physical idealist explanation he considered

attributed the appearance of purposiveness to laws of motion, in the manner of

Epicurus or Democritus. Kant considered this explanation manifestly absurd.

Thus, when he characterizes why a mechanist explanation will not really explain

even the appearance of purposiveness, Dennett and Dawkins might rightly ques-

tion whether his argument applies to them. Kant says that the physicalist idealists,

who explain purposiveness as an unintended consequence of the laws of motion,adopt blind chance to explain not only [natures] technic, i.e., why [natures]

products harmonize with our concepts of a purpose, but even natures mechanism,

i.e., how the causes of this production are determined to this production according

to the laws of motion. Hence nothing has been explained, not even the illusion in

our teleological judgments, so that the alleged idealism in them has by no means

been established.51 But Dawkins, for instance, pointedly and repeatedly denies

that the natural process he describes is in fact blind chance. He describes natural

objects that appear to be purposive to be designoid52 because they have been

51 Kant (1987): 274.52 D ki (1996) 6



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shaped and molded like a designed object, not by chance, but by a natural force

that reproduces purposive design53 selecting for functions that offer survival or

reproductive advantage and thus explaining the appearance of purposiveness.But from Kants perspective, this answer is insufficient. He would surely and

happily admit that the Darwinian explanation for the appearance of purposiveness

is far from being manifestly absurd and might well admit to its being likely. But

from an ontological perspective, its explanation of the appearance of design only

works because it fiddles with the concept of function. In pre-Darwinian terms,

function described the function an object was intended to perform. Chairs may

be used to tame lions or to stand on and reach high objects, but they have the

function of being a thing to be sat on because, in addition to all

kant hume darwin and design_why intelligent design wasnt science before darwin and still isnt

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