My case for Intelligent Design

Newton, Faraday, Maxwell and Copernicus referred to the Creator in their scientific writings. No one accused them of being unscientific because of that. There’s no rule that compels science to have a materialist outlook, it’s just an incident of history.

If we may disregard the ancient reverberations of people such as the ancient Greek philosopher Anaximander in the 6th century, we can say evolution, as a controversy, started with Charles Darwin. Of course, it was the naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, who jerked Darwin out of his 20-year dither about the theory of natural selection. Today, historians are waking to the agreement that the idea of natural selection was probably Wallace’s. But, as the historian Jim Endersby says: “Natural selection was a brilliant idea but it was the weight of evidence, provided by Darwin, that made it credible. That is why we remember Darwin as its principal author.”

In more than one way, Darwin introduced modern evolution, which today does not want to include anything that is not part of the observable or measurable natural realm as a cause of species and limits the possibilities to natural forces. What scientists discounted in Wallace was his “spiritualism”. Endersby, who has edited the recently issued Cambridge University Press edition of The Origin of Species, says that in “the end, Wallace came to believe evolution was sometimes guided by a higher power… He thought natural selection could not account for the nature of the human mind and claimed humanity was affected by forces that took it outside the animal kingdom.”

Needless to say, Darwin won the day, since today his view holds sway in the scientific world. Empirical facts constitute modern criteria for a hypothesis to be scientific. This does not change the fact that evolution is still a hypothesis, with serious gaps on its proof requirements. For one, it is becoming clear that Darwinian natural selection cannot be applied at the molecular level.

The delightfully named Professor Pattle Pun of Wheaton College, in a paper given at a conference in June 2007 titled “Integration and Confrontation of Contemporary Worldviews: Evolution and Intelligent Design” put it like this: “Self-organisation theories do not address the origin of information in genetic materials… The Darwinian theory would predict the gradual appearance of more complex body plans in the fossils preceded by simpler intermediate forms. However, the [Cambrian] fossil shows unicellular organisms such as cyanobacteria around three and one-half billion years ago and then suddenly the Cambrian explosion 530 million years ago, with nothing much appearing in-between. This discontinuity poses a problem for gradualistic evolution.”

As more scientific discoveries are made  favouring the intelligent design theory, it is expanded to include not only the evidence from biology, but from cosmology and physics as well. But most scientists are unmoved, like the biologist Richard Lewontin: “We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism…we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door” (Billions and Billions of Demons, New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997).

I do not agree with this view, the origins of which are in Auguste Comte, that science rules out any non-physical beings or forms of causality. It is now almost commonplace in physics to speak of many space-times, or of this space-time as a 10- or 11-dimensional reality that dissolves into topological foam below the Planck length. Some modern physicists routinely speak of realities beyond space-time (for example, quantum fluctuations in a vacuum from which this space-time originates). We’re beginning to see now that fundamental laws of nature are actually just approximations to an open, holistic, and flexible reality, only as we encounter it in relatively isolated and controlled conditions.

God is a non-physical entity (in fact, the being of consciousness and intelligence or wisdom, who creates the universe for the sake of distinctive values that the universe generates) causally influencing the cosmos in non-physical ways. God’s mode of this causal influence is most unlikely to be law-governed, measurable, predictable, or publicly observable. To the extent that the sciences describe regular, measurable, predictable, controllable, and repeatable behaviour, acts of God will be outside the scientific remit. But that does not mean they do not occur.

Intelligent design is not an apologetic tool for the theologians or creationists to defend the Bible, although it is consistent with it. It is a way of looking at natural data that does not only confine itself to empirical facts. ID too is interested in the pattern, the design of nature without disregarding the designer.

“The concept of the Designer is a philosophical and theological question,” Prof Pattle Pun said. “The detection of patterns or design is a scientific question. ID is not against microevolution. It too is a research programme. It is not a God-of-the-Gap science stopper: ‘God says it. I believe it. That settles it for me!’” ID then seeks to restore a state of scientific practice as before the take over by militant materialism.