Intelligent design’s relationship to religion

First of all, I’m not necessarily one to run around saying that intelligent design is nothing more than creationism spruced up to pass off as science. It is obvious why its validity could be used as an argument for many Judeo-Christian religious life origin ideas, but the implications don’t make it wrong automatically. However, let’s investigate the implications some. For a scientific theory to mean anything, it needs to make predictions. A modern example might be string theory. At this time, there are very few testable predictions of string theory. It makes some claims, and looks quite pretty, but until you can test a prediction and say that your hypothesis is supported or falsified, you haven’t got a very solid theory in the scientific sense, just some ideas. That doesn’t mean you can’t investigate your ideas, but failing to come up with testable predictions is a huge blow to your credibility. Looking at intelligent design, what does it say? In short, that “the theory of intelligent design holds that there are tell-tale features of living systems and the universe that are best explained by an intelligent cause” [1]. But does this really answer the question if you claim that the theory is non-religious? In fact, it merely postpones the question. The whole question that they are trying to answer is “how did intelligent life come to exist?” And the answer is, “Intelligent life came to exist by the design from intelligent life.” Intelligent design advocates don’t make any mention of what this intelligence might be, but the only conclusion that doesn’t result in the exact same question is supernatural. Any natural (meant here as “part of the observable universe”) source would be intelligent life that would beg the exact same question: How did it get started? So, while the implication for a creator god doesn’t falsify the theory outright, it seems plain that either the theory is at the very least deistic or it doesn’t answer the question it pretends to.

Irreducible Complexity

The science behind intelligent design has never seemed more than vague and, frankly, unscientific to me. (No, I have not read every single article on ID that exists. If you have one that just blows me out of the water, show it to me. I’ll think about it and let you know if it changes my mind).  So let’s go into some of the major arguments, as I’m familiar with them. The one that I seem to hear most about is “Irreducible Complexity”: the idea that some biological systems are complex in a way that removal of one piece causes the entire function to cease. The infamous example is a mousetrap. There are several key components to a mousetrap, and until they are all present, the mousetrap will not function. The claim is that there are such systems in biology that could not have been built up by gradual processes because the intermediate steps would not be justified by a Darwinian process.

I have two major issues with this idea. First, it supposes a lot of understanding about the intermediate steps that they do not possess. There is no reason to say that every step of the way to evolving my eye had this result in mind. Nor is there any reason to say that every step of evolving my eye had something to do with sight. The intermediate steps could have had an organ that resembled my eye in a basic way, but supported survival in a completely different way. Or, one might argue that a partially functional eye is still beneficial, even though it may not work in exactly the same way as it does today. My second argument with it is that it doesn’t give any falsifiable predictions. The prediction is, “There exist biological systems of irreducible complexity.” This is not a hypothesis because there is no counter proof. The only test is this: “Is this one irreducibly complex? No. Ok, is this one? No. Ok, how about this one?” It’s a question designed to be unanswered forever, unless we can somehow show that we have exhausted the search of every single biological system.

Fine-Tuned Universe

As pointed out by the commenter on my post about the anthropic principle, the idea can be used by both sides of this debate to justify certain arguments. Personally, I don’t see this as a big problem. Two theories can use a previous result in different ways, and that doesn’t invalidate it, nor the theories. But the question of the finely-tuned universe is less a reason to invoke intelligence and more a realization that we don’t know everything there is to know – not very surprising.

Still, it’s worth considering its validity. The idea is that there are several universal constants that seem to be exactly what they need to be for life to form. My first reaction to this was “Well, that just means that a different kind of life might have formed”, but I think this is not necessarily correct. The question may be a valid one, because it involves the production of elements in stars. Certain constants, like the gravitational constant and the strong nuclear force, would impact the way that stars come together, if they were to come together at all, and if they would produce a useful array of elements or not.

But intelligence is not dictated at this point. It’s merely a lack of knowledge, not some “knob-turner” in the sky. Consider people long ago that didn’t have the knowledge of science that we enjoy. Does it seem like an intelligent source is making sure that the sun rises and sets at regular times that correspond very well with our need to sleep? How could it be so finely tuned that we don’t need only 2 hours of sleep and have so much extra dark time? Or how about sailors using a compass before they understood magnetism? It seems like an intelligent source is directing the movement of the needle to always show us north, no matter where we are. (And yes, the compass very much precedes knowledge of magnetism[5]). I have never seen any evidence for intelligence for this position, even from ID advocates. Usually what I see is the idea that it sure looks too good to be random, so therefore intelligence. This is not science.

I don’t claim some authoritative understanding on intelligent design. This is how I understand it, based on my own experience and research. Everything that I’ve seen and investigated has led me to consider intelligent design a pseudo-science at best. I don’t take it seriously, because I tried to take it seriously and found it empty.  No, I don’t think that evolution has all the answers to all the questions, but that’s what science is: continuously improving our theories based on evidence. Intelligent design does not do this, so I don’t take it seriously. It’s as simple as that.

[1]http://www.discovery.org/a/3059

[2]http://www.discovery.org/a/2640

[3]http://www.iscid.org/papers/Luskin_HumanOrigins_071505.pdf

[4]http://www.intelligentdesign.org/index.php

[5]http://inventors.about.com/od/cstartinventions/a/Compass.htm

There are two ways that I can see this argument going. The first is a sort of implied “god of the gaps” argument, where essentially we’re faced with a question that we don’t know the answer to (but in this case, I think we do) and that points us to the conclusion that God is responsible. I’m going to assume that perhaps the person asking did not mean this line of thought, because I don’t think it’s a valid argument. Even if this one isn’t unknown, there are certainly questions for which we don’t know the answer. But a lack of understanding on our part doesn’t imply God’s presence. It merely means that we don’t know, yet. Every age has had its questions, and we’ve developed an increasing understanding of the natural world. Marvel at lightning from the gods has turned into understanding of principles of electricity – lightning rods protect buildings, where a god throwing them would not behave so nicely. This understanding of electricity allows me to type these words right here. I don’t claim that we know everything, and maybe we can’t know everything (but then maybe we couldn’t know that we can’t know everything… and we start to get a little philosophical for this talk). But the point is that people in the past have made the mistake of thinking that there was no other explanation, and it’s just as fallacious today.

The other path that this question could follow is a sort of key idea to intelligent design – irreducible complexity. I don’t claim to know all the ins-and-outs of intelligent design, but from my understanding this is the main idea of irreducible complexity can be thought of like this: Consider that you have a watch.  It has hundreds of working pieces that all fit together very nicely (like the human body). However, if you were to remove even one of these components, the whole thing would fail. It’s said that we can find a point in biological life where you can’t ‘build it up’ from individual pieces because you need all of the pieces to come together and work at once.

One unfortunate problem with irreducible complexity is that it doesn’t stand unless there are examples. It merely says “there exists in nature an irreducibly complex system,” and there’s not a clean way to show this to be false. So, we’re given an example of something irreducibly complex, and even showing why it is not proves only that this example is not valid. Then we wait for the next example. There’s no such thing as a counter example without examining every biological system to some arbitrary detail.

But what choice have we here. It’s the same as saying, “You can’t know that God doesn’t exist because you haven’t looked everywhere he could exist.” Well, fine, but if you give me an example of where you think he might be, I’ll tell you why I don’t agree.

As for the heart/blood question, I think the simplest answer is “the blood”, but only in a vague way because blood has changed too. Most organisms need a way to move things around – nutrients, waste, etc. In especially small organisms, this obviously doesn’t need to be very sophisticated.  Diffusion, where concentrations of a substance tend to find a state of equilibrium within their boundary, could account for a very small organism getting nutrients to all it’s parts, or allowing waste out. But even very simple organisms also have muscle-like functions that serve to move the ‘carrier substance’ (that only vaguely resembles blood) around. As these organisms grow in size, only then does a specialized heart begin to develop, which may not have resembled our 4-chambered heart for thousands of iterations. There has also been some real study of this progression. I have not read this entire article (you’ll need an account if you want to), but the abstract is helpful on its own anyway.  In any case, our vantage point is that our body seems to work exactly right, but this isn’t insightful. It only means that our heart is the one that works for us, right now, where we are. If it didn’t work for us right now, it would have evolved differently, to fit those requirements. And the ones that didn’t would die out or find a different role to fit into some other survival spot.

This also brings up an interesting point that my fiance and I have discussed many times. People often see evolution as some sort of slow march toward a goal, or like the evolution posters show with an ape that slowly morphs into common-day man. It’s a misleading way to think about it, and I think it causes some misconceptions when taken to the simplest interpretation. First, species either survive or they don’t, and the ones that survive happen to continue on their line. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t species that failed, or that there is a single line of lineage. It’s more like a gigantic tree, with branches here or there, this branch going off and creating many branches of its own, that branch going off and stopping. We may be able to trace back the path that we evolved from to some extent, but that is not the whole story. Second, evolution does not have a goal in mind. It is not the case that you can look at some creature and say that it is 5 million years behind us. That species is evolved to fit its particular spot in the ecosystem. Crocodiles may not be on the path to being able to fly, and dogs may never evolve to talk to us, because that might not have anything to do with their survival, which is all that really matters.

To think of evolution as a straight line from a single cell to some final ‘perfect’ evolved form is incorrect. All species wouldn’t evolve to be the same, because there would be no balance, no niche for each species to survive in. If everything was trying to be the same, there would be that much more competition for survival in that area. And we can’t view evolution with a magnifying glass. It works on large scales, letting the stuff that doesn’t work die off and the stuff that does fit keep going. It only looks like everything fits perfectly because we don’t get to see the countless number of things that didn’t.

But what makes me almost laugh about this commentary is the way he seems to bring up a good point, and ignore the elephant in the room. Exactly what has history taught us about religiously backed explanations for natural phenomena? I’ll tell you: in every instance, EVERY single instance, the religious explanation has been shown to be wrong. It is a crutch during times that we didn’t have the knowledge to actually explain it. Ancient people cowering at the lightning, thinking that Zeus was angry with them look pretty silly to us today don’t they? How can you ask the question “What has history taught us?” and igonore the obvious end to your question? History has taught us that when we think we know, we don’t. The difference between science (real science, not intelligent design) and religion is that science expects to be wrong and has mechanisms to absorb new information and evolve (pun intended). Religion fights it with all its might. Whether it’s today, next year or in 500 years, this one will too. The evidence will pile up until it is overwhelming and we will come up with something new. The common component is science, humming along in the background, making itself better and better all the time. You can try to fight it, or you can swallow your pride and let go of outdated superstitions.

Learn from history: you’re fighting a losing battle.