Arguing over design

The intuition that complex objects must be the result of intelligent design remains a major motivation for thinking that our world was created by a divine intelligence. In scientific circles, however, design has become another unnecessary supernatural hypothesis. Philosophers and theologians have never lost interest in design arguments, but workaday science has ignored their debates as irrelevant to the real task of explaining the world. Even the emergence of a sophisticated anti-evolutionary movement under the 'intelligent design' (ID) banner has not changed many scientists' attitudes. Intelligent Design has had a negligible effect on mainstream science; it only attracts attention due to the unending creationist attempts to interfere with science education.

Taner Edis reviews the books, Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA, edited by William Dembski and Michael Ruse, and Gerald Schroeder's book, The Hidden Face of God: Science Reveals the Ultimate Truth.

He finds them lacking.

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There is much in the book that is good; for example, Michael Ruse contributes a very useful short history of the design argument, and for getting a taste of some of the current philosophical and quasi-scientific attempts to find a divine design behind the universe, this book is a must-read. Theologically conservative ideas such as ID, more liberal critiques of ID, and speculations about signs of a God who does not interfere with nature as obviously as in ID are all well-represented. Still, most contributions will leave the scientifically aware reader with the feeling that something is lacking.

What's mainly lacking is any feel of how well ID-IOT meshes with real science and real biology. One critic of ID-IOTic arguments addresses them from a philosophical point of view, but never really addresses how well ID-IOT addresses the real world. Dembski, for example, makes specific performance claims for his theories, and his theories can be evaluated based on whether these claims hold up or not. Whether or not they succeed is not addressed. (They don't.)

Other essays in the book wander off into the kind of bad science that permeates the "new age science" literature, or wander in a philosophical cloud that makes ID-IOT seem almost lucid in comparison.

Schroeder's book should be sufficient grounds for whatever university granted his Ph.D to revoke it.

Though Schroeder proudly claims to be a PhD physicist, he keeps making errors that should embarrass an undergraduate; for example, he throws out 'hf = mc2' in the context of de Broglie waves. He consistently tries to combine quantum mechanics and folk-physical intuitions, making a complete hash of modern physics....He also claims, in classic ID fashion, that information in the universe just appears as given, with no physical origin. This leads to a number of strange statements, such as his interpreting gauge particle exchange as a photon having the wisdom to find an electron. Being clueless about how life and evolution fit very nicely with the second law of thermodynamics, he speaks of life getting hold of the wisdom or information to 'outwit' the second law. Presumably without external infusions of information, entropy would swallow all. All of this is profoundly silly

Schroeder does accept that life descends from a common ancestor, but he maintains a faulty understanding of what evolution means. He spends way too much time on a 21^st century re-hash of Paley's Watchmaker argument, and declares natural law insufficient to explain life and the mind.

Clearly, the question of design remains of interest to philosophers, but any philosopher who wants to say something worthwhile on either design in general, or ID in particular, should pay closer attention to current science – certainly not, as Flew did, on popular science-inspired tripe. Moreover, scientists should do their own dirty work. It will not do to expect philosophers to deal with the threat the ID movement poses to science when the most solid arguments against ID come from within science.

And ultimately, that's the problem these books have. The science they use as the basis for their arguments is, at best, distorted – rather the way you might expect at the end of a game of "telephone". At worst, the science is wrenched out of all semblance of reality in order to support an agenda. Philosophers and theologists are incapable of addressing these problems. The only people capable of correcting these errors are those who know what real science looks like.

They need to speak up.

They can correct the errors now, or they can correct them – one student at a time – as they bring these errors into science classes later.