AC Grayling - Origin of the specious

AC Grayling looks at a defense of Intelligent Design at Origin of the specious

Fuller describes Intelligent Design (ID) theory as the project of establishing “by the usual scientific appeals to reason and evidence” that the world and life in it were purposefully designed by an intelligent agency competent to the task of creating a universe. Call this Point 1.

Fuller claims that ID is “behind the scientific revolution that has been under way in the West since the 17th century” because the motivating belief behind scientific enquiry is that “nature is so constructed” that it can be understood because – as St Augustine taught us – man is made in the image of God and is therefore capable of understanding the universe. Call this Point 2.

Fuller claims that there is no such thing as a “scientific consensus” anyway, and that it is false that evolutionary theory is the cumulative result of progress in scientific enquiry. Call this Point 3.

Fuller claims that science results from religion, that “no plausible alternative has yet been offered to justify the pursuit of science as a search for the ultimate systematic understanding of reality” other than belief in a divine personal creator, and that “atheism has done precious little for science.” Call this Point 4.

On Point 1: no, ID theory is not a project that proceeds on “the usual scientific appeals to reason and evidence.” It starts from a fixed conclusion, and looks for evidence to support it.
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On Point 2: from a thousand years before St Augustine, Thales and the Pre-Socratics and Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics and Epicureans were thinking in recognisably scientific and proto-scientific ways about the nature and functioning of the universe, on the assumption that human intelligence is competent to understand the workings of nature, which observation abundantly suggests are regular and ordered – it needs no gods to point out how spring returns after every winter, and the crops grow again as they did before, and so manifestly on. Not only did people emphatically not have to wait for St Augustine to discover that they could enquire thus, without invoking supernaturalistic beliefs of any sort, but it is indeed a mark of the thought of Thales and his successors that they did not start from such beliefs, but began their thinking from observation and reason.
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Now as to Point 3, about the alleged absence of a “scientific consensus” and the “mistake” of thinking that evolutionary theory is a success story of cumulative enquiry. The latter we can pass over briefly. Let us allow the cumulative confirmation of evolutionary theory to speak for itself, thus leaving Lyell’s geology, Darwin’s observations of the finches of the Galapagos, Mendel’s peas, the combination of genetic theory and understanding of selection both natural and artificial, the fossil record, comparative anatomy and physiology, and a mass of observation, experiment and discovery, to one side (nothing cumulative and progressive about this, eh?), and just remark that Fuller – as with everything else he tries to discuss in this book – must really do a lot more homework.

The “consensus” point requires a bit more attention. Fuller’s claim here is the open-a-gap technique; if scientists disagree about something, if there is no consensus among them, perhaps you can slip an alternative – a god or two? a bit of putative intelligent design? – into the gap. But Fuller really is in a muddle here. He says there is no scientific consensus (in general? or only on a case-by-case basis in regard to some cutting-edge, currently researched problem?) but nevertheless that there is a “scientific orthodoxy” which, if you do not sign up to it, excludes you from access to its structures – presumably, to jobs and funding in science.