DARWIN'S MELTDOWN --
cover story
http://www.worldmag.com/world/issue/04-03-04/home.asp
The view from 2025: How Design beat Darwin
Cover story: WORLD ASKED FOUR
leaders of the Intelligent Design Movement to have some fun: Imagine writing in
2025, on the 100th anniversary of the famous Scopes "monkey" trial,
and explain how Darwinism has bit the dust, unable to rebut the evidence that what
we see around us could not have arisen merely by time plus chance.
By The Editors
WORLD ASKED FOUR leaders of the Intelligent Design Movement to have some
fun: Imagine writing in 2025, on the 100th anniversary of the famous Scopes
"monkey" trial, and explain how Darwinism has bit the dust, unable to
rebut the evidence that what we see around us could not have arisen merely by
time plus chance. Our fanciful historians are:
Phillip Johnson, WORLD's Daniel of the Year for 2003, is a law professor at the
University of California at Berkeley and the author of Darwin on Trial (1991)
and many other books, including Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds, Reason in
the Balance, The Wedge of Truth, and The Right Questions.
Jonathan Wells, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and the author of
Icons of Evolution (2000), received both a Ph.D. in biology from the University
of California at Berkeley and a Ph.D. in theology from Yale University.
Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz, research professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of
Medicine, is the author of more than 100 scientific publications in the fields
of neuroscience and psychiatry. His latest book is The Mind and the Brain
(released in paperback last year).
William Dembski, associate research professor at Baylor and a senior fellow of
the Discovery Institute, received a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of
Chicago and is the author of, among other books, The Design Inference (1998)
and The Design Revolution (2004).
=-=-=-=-
The demise of naturalism
INTELLIGENT DESIGN:
Methodological naturalism used to be a regulative principle for science and for
all serious academic thought. Not any longer. It is now (in 2025) an outdated
dogma, and the Scopes trial stereotype, as depicted in the movie Inherit the
Wind, is now effectively dead
By Phillip Johnson
IN 1980, ASTRONOMER CARL SAGAN commenced the influential national public
television series Cosmos by announcing its theme: "The cosmos is all there
is, ever was, or ever will be." Sagan's mantra was spoken more than 20
years before the landmark Santorum Amendment to the Federal Education Act of
2001 encouraged science educators to teach students to distinguish between
testable scientific theories and philosophical claims that are made in the name
of science.
In those unsophisticated pre-Santorum years, celebrity scientists like Sagan
freely promoted a dogmatic naturalistic philosophy as if it were a fact that
had been discovered by scientific investigation-just as previous generations of
celebrities had promoted racism, class warfare, and Freudian fantasy in the
name of science. The celebrities felt themselves free to ignore both evidence
and logic, because the approval of the rulers of science, who had a vested
interest in persuading the public to adopt a philosophy that maximized their
own influence, was all that was needed to induce the media to report an
ideological dogma as a scientific conclusion.
Millions of schoolchildren and credulous adults were led to accept the voice of
Sagan as the voice of science and thus to believe that scientists had proved
that God does not exist, or at least is irrelevant to our lives. In brief, the
message of this government-promoted television series was that philosophical
naturalism and science are one and the same. The series did contain scientific
information, much of it inaccurate or misleading, but primarily it was an
appeal to the imagination, promoting the worship of science and the adventurous
vision of exploring the universe.
The perennially popular Star Trek television series further conditioned the
youth of America to dream of a technological utopia in which disease and
distance were conquered and the great adventure of mankind was to explore the
many inhabited planets supposedly existing throughout the universe. Throughout
the second half of the 20th century, which we now know as the "century of
scientism," the popular media relentlessly pursued the theme that
liberation and fulfillment are to be found through technology, with the
attendant implication that the supernatural creator revealed in the Bible is a
superfluous and obsolete entity doomed to expire from terminal irrelevance.
Social scientists further affirmed this myth with their secularization thesis,
which predicted that supernatural religion would steadily lose adherents
throughout the world as public education enlightened the multitudes, and as
people came to see scientific technology as the only route to health,
happiness, and longevity. Problems such as pollution and warfare were acknowledged,
but these too could be mastered if we insisted that our politicians heed the
advice of the ruling scientists.
The cultural path that led to this apotheosis of scientific naturalism began
just after the middle of the 20th century, with the triumphalist Darwin
Centennial Celebration in 1959 and the 1960 film Inherit the Wind, a stunning
but thoroughly fictionalized dramatization of the Scopes trial of 1925. The
real Scopes trial was a publicity stunt staged by the ACLU, but Broadway and
Hollywood converted it to a morality play about religious persecution in which
the crafty criminal defense lawyer Clarence Darrow made a monkey of the
creationist politician William Jennings Bryan, and in the process taught the
moviegoing public to see Christian ministers as ignorant oppressors and
Darwinist science teachers as heroic truth-seekers. As the 20th century came to
an end, science and history teachers were still showing Inherit the Wind to
their classes as if it were a fair portrayal of what had happened in Dayton,
Tenn., in 1925.
Superficially, it seemed that scientific naturalism was everywhere triumphant
at the start of the 21st century. Scientific rationalists were nonetheless
uneasy, for two reasons.
First, literary intellectuals had pushed naturalism to the limits of its logic
and drawn the conclusion that, since an uncreated nature is indifferent to good
and evil, all values are merely subjective, including even the value of
science. It seemed to follow that nothing is forbidden, and pleasure can be pursued
without limit. Both highbrow literature and popular entertainment became
strongly nihilistic, scorning all universal standards of truth, morality, or
reason.
Second, public opinion polls showed that a clear majority of the American
public still believed that God is our creator despite the heavy-handed
indoctrination in evolutionary naturalism to which they had been subjected for
several decades in textbooks, television documentaries, and museum exhibits.
The seemingly solid wall of Darwinian orthodoxy was crumbling under the
pressures described in the accompanying article by Jonathan Wells.
Naturalism was losing its essential scientific backing, and then it also
suddenly lost its hold on the popular and literary imagination, as the American
public tired of nihilism and began to count the cost of all that had been
destroyed during the century of scientism. New historical scholarship reflected
in a stunning PBS television documentary exposed the Inherit the Wind portrayal
of the Scopes trial as a hoax, kicking off an era of historical revisionism in
which book after scholarly book exposed how propaganda techniques had been
employed to create a mythology of inevitable progress toward naturalism,
similar to the governing mythology of the Soviet Union, which had proclaimed
the inevitable replacement of capitalism by communism.
The collapse of the Soviet Union put an end to the Soviet myth, just as the
scientific collapse of Darwinism, preceded as it was by the discrediting of
Marxism and Freudianism, prepared the way for the culture to turn aside from
the mythology of naturalism to rediscover the buried treasure that the
mythology had been concealing. A hilarious Broadway comedy titled Inherit the
Baloney enacted a sort of Scopes trial in reverse, with the hero a courageous
Christian college professor badgered incessantly by dim-witted colleagues and
deans who keep telling him that the only way to preserve his faith in a
postmodern world is to jettison all the exclusivist truth-claims. They wanted
him to admit that Jesus was sorely in need of sensitivity training from some
wise counselor like Pontius Pilate, because "nobody can surf the web every
day and still believe that there is such a thing as 'truth' or goodness."
Overnight, the tendency of naturalistic rationalism to decay into postmodern
irrationalism became a national joke.
Then the rise of Islamic extremism at the start of the new century came just as
scholars and journalists were finally taking notice of the rapid spread of
active, vibrant Christian faith in Africa, South America, and Asia, especially
China. The secularization thesis was consistent with the facts only in a few
parts of the world where long-established Christian churches had succumbed to
complacency and the slow poison of naturalism. Where life was hardest and
persecution frequent, the flame of faith burned brighter than ever. For those
with a global outlook, the question was not whether God was still important in
our lives, but rather, "What does God want us to do?" Once Darwinism
had joined Marxism and Freudianism in the dustbin of history, the entire world
seemed new and full of exciting possibilities.
The crucial turning point in America came in the year 2004. In that year the
"same-sex marriage" explosion, abetted by public officials, brought
to public attention the extent to which long-settled understandings of law and
morality had been undermined as judges, mayors, and citizens internalized the
nihilistic moral implications of naturalistic philosophy. That same year, with
the spectacular success of two great movies, The Return of the King and The
Passion of the Christ, it became clear that the public was hungering for art
and entertainment that affirmed traditional values rather than flouted them.
Surprise: The Bible still provided, as it had for many centuries, the
indispensable starting point for the artistic imagination.
Artists and humanities scholars recognized that the human imagination had been
stunted by blind adherence to a philosophy that denied the artist or poet any
sense of the divine power that gives meaning to the realm of nature. As sanity
reasserted itself, even the secular intellectuals saw that the fact of creation
provides the essential foundation not only for the artistic imagination, but
even for the scientific imagination, because science itself makes no sense if
the scientific mind is itself no more than the product of irrational material
forces.
As that insight spread, naturalism became yesteryear's fashion in thought, and
the world moved forward to the more realistic understanding of the human
condition that we in 2025 now take for granted. Only the fool says that there
is no God, or that God has forgotten us. Folly like that is as dead today as
the discredited Inherit the Wind stereotype, which fit the facts of history no
better than the secularization thesis. We no longer expect to meet intelligent
beings on other planets, for we have learned how uniquely fitted to shelter
life our own planet has been created to be. Now we have a much more exciting
adventure. We can dedicate our minds and our courage to sharing the truth that
makes us free.
=-=-=-=-
Whatever happened to evolutionary theory?
INTELLIGENT DESIGN: Intelligent
design has now (in 2025) become a thriving scientific research program and replaced
materialistic accounts of biological evolution (in particular, Darwinism). ID
theory led to new understanding of embryo development and the importance of
"junk DNA"
By Jonathan Wells
IN 1973, GENETICIST THEODOSIUS Dobzhansky wrote: "Nothing in biology makes
sense except in the light of evolution." By "evolution," he
meant the synthesis of Charles Darwin's 19th-century theory that all living
things have descended from a common ancestor through natural selection and
random variations, and the 20th-century theory that new variations are produced
by mutations in DNA. By 2000, the biological sciences had become almost totally
dominated by this view. Millions of students were taught that Darwinian
evolution was a simple fact, like gravity. Oxford professor Richard Dawkins
even proclaimed that anyone who doubted it must be ignorant, stupid, insane, or
wicked.
Now, a mere quarter of a century later, Darwinian evolution is little more than
a historical footnote in biology textbooks. Just as students learn that
scientists used to believe that the Sun moves around the Earth and maggots are
spontaneously generated in rotting meat, so students also learn that scientists
used to believe that human beings evolved through random mutations and natural
selection. How could a belief that was so influential in 2000 become so
obsolete by 2025? Whatever happened to evolutionary theory?
Surprising though it may seem, Darwinism did not collapse because it was
disproved by new evidence. (As we shall see, the evidence never really fit it
anyway.) Instead, evolutionary theory was knocked off its pedestal by three
developments in the first decade of this century-developments centered in the
United States, but worldwide in scope. Those developments were: (1) the
widespread adoption of a "teach the controversy" approach in
education, (2) a growing public awareness of the scientific weaknesses of
evolutionary theory, and (3) the rise of the more fruitful "theory of
intelligent design."
The first development was a reaction to late 20th-century efforts by dogmatic
Darwinists to make evolutionary theory the exclusive framework for biology
curricula in American public schools. Biology classrooms became platforms for
indoctrinating students in Darwinism and its underlying philosophy of
naturalism-the anti-religious view that nature is all there is and God is an
illusion. In the ensuing public backlash, some people demanded that evolution
be removed from the curriculum entirely. A larger number of people, however,
favored a "teach the controversy" approach that presented students
with the evidence against evolutionary theory as well as the evidence for it.
The U.S. Congress implicitly endorsed this approach in its No Child Left Behind
Act of 2001. A report accompanying the legislation stated that students should
learn "to distinguish the data and testable theories of science from
religious or philosophical claims that are made in the name of science,"
and that students should "understand the full range of scientific views
that exist" with regard to biological evolution. Despite loud protests and
threats of lawsuits from the Darwinists, hundreds of state and local school
boards across America had adopted a "teach the controversy" approach
by 2005.
In the second major development, students who were free to examine the evidence
for and against evolution quickly realized that the former was surprisingly
thin. Although Darwinists had long boasted about having "overwhelming
evidence" for their view, it turned out that they had no good evidence for
the theory's principal claim: that species originate through random mutation
and natural selection. Bacteria were the best place to look for such evidence,
because they reproduce quickly, their DNA can be easily mutated, and they can
be subjected to strong selection in the laboratory. Yet bacteria had been
intensively studied throughout the 20th century, and bacteriologists had never
observed the formation of a new species.
If there was no good evidence that a Darwinian mechanism could produce new
species, still less was there any evidence that a Darwinian mechanism could
produce complex organs or new anatomical features. Darwinists discounted the
problem by arguing that evolution was too slow to observe, but this didn't
change the fact that they lacked empirical confirmation for their theory.
Of course, there was plenty of evidence for minor changes in existing
species-but nobody had ever doubted that existing species can change over time.
Domestic breeders had been observing such changes-and even producing them-for
centuries. Unfortunately, this was not the sort of evidence that evolution
needed. After all, the main point of evolutionary theory was not how selection
and mutation could change existing species, but how that mechanism could produce
new species-indeed, all species after the first-as well as new organs and new
body plans. That's why Darwin titled his magnum opus The Origin of Species, not
How Existing Species Change over Time.
A growing number of people realized that the "overwhelming evidence"
for evolutionary theory was a myth. It didn't help the Darwinists when it
became public knowledge that they had faked some of their most widely
advertised evidence. For example, they had distorted drawings of early embryos
to make them look more similar than they really are (in order to convince
students that they had descended from a common ancestor), and they had staged
photos showing peppered moths on tree trunks where they don't normally rest (in
order to persuade students of the power of natural selection).
In the first few years of this century, the cultural dominance of Darwinism was
so strong, especially in academia, that critics were slow to speak up. By 2009,
however, when Darwin's followers had hoped to stage a triumphal celebration of
their leader's 200th birthday, millions of people were laughing at the emperor
with no clothes.
The third and perhaps most decisive development was a series of breakthroughs
in biology and medicine inspired by the new theory of intelligent design. Everyone,
even the Darwinists, agreed that living things look as though they were
designed. Darwinists insisted that this was merely an illusion, produced by the
combined action of random mutation and natural selection; but design theorists
argued that the design was real. For years the controversy remained largely
philosophical; then, in the first decade of this century, a few researchers
began applying intelligent-design theory to solving specific biological
problems.
One of these was the function of so-called "junk DNA." From a
Darwinian perspective, "genes" were thought to determine all the
important characteristics of an organism, and gene mutations were thought to
provide the raw materials for evolution. When molecular biologists in the third
quarter of the 20th century discovered that certain regions of DNA encode
proteins that determine some of the characteristics of living cells, and
equated these with "genes," Darwinists assumed that their theory was
complete. They even proclaimed DNA to be "the secret of life."
Yet molecular biologists learned in the 1970s that less than 5 percent of human
DNA encodes proteins. Darwinists immediately declared the other 95 percent
"junk"-molecular accidents that had accumulated in the course of
evolution. Since few researchers were motivated (or funded) to investigate
garbage, most human DNA was neglected for decades. Although biologists
occasionally stumbled on functions for isolated pieces of "junk,"
they began to make real progress only after realizing that the DNA in an
intelligently designed organism is unlikely to be 95 percent useless. The
intensive research on non-coding regions of human DNA that followed soon led to
several medically important discoveries.
Another insight from intelligent-design theory advanced our understanding of
embryo development. From a Darwinian perspective, all the information needed
for new features acquired in the course of evolution came from genetic
mutations. This implied that all essential biological information was encoded in
DNA. In contrast, intelligent-design theory implied that organisms are
irreducibly complex systems in which DNA contains only part of the essential
information. Although a few biologists had been arguing against DNA
reductionism for decades, biologists guided by intelligent-design theory in
2010 discovered the true nature of the information that guides embryo
development.
All three of these developments-teaching the controversy, educating people
about the lack of evidence for evolutionary theory, and using
intelligent-design theory to make progress in biomedical research-were bitterly
resisted by Darwinists in the first decade of this century. Defenders of the
Darwinian faith engaged in a vicious campaign of character assassination
against their critics in the scientific community. Meanwhile, their allies in
the news media conducted a massive disinformation campaign, aimed primarily at
convincing the public that all critics of Darwinism were religious zealots.
More and more people saw through the lies, however, and within a few short
years Darwinism had lost its scientific credibility and public funding. By 2015
it was well on its way to joining its intellectual cousins, Marxism and
Freudianism, in the dustbin of discarded ideologies. By 2020, Darwinism was
effectively dead.
=-=-=-=-
Mind transcending matter
INTELLIGENT DESIGN: For a time,
cognitive neurophysiology attempted to reduce the mind to brain function. Such
a materialist reduction of mind to brain can no longer (in 2025) be reasonably
maintained. We've learned that we can control our minds and act responsibly
By Jeffrey Schwartz
LOOKING BACK, IT SEEMS INEVITABLE that advances in brain science during the
20th century led almost all people esteemed as "scientifically
literate" to believe that eventually all aspects of the human mind would
be explained in material terms. After all, in an era when the unquestioned
cultural assumption was "for science all causes are material causes,"
how could one be expected to think differently? What's more, tremendous
advances in brain-imaging technologies during the last two decades of that most
materialist of centuries enabled scientists to investigate the inner workings
of the living human brain. This certainly seemed to further buttress the
generally unexamined and often smugly held belief that the deep mysteries of
the brain, and the "laws" through which it created and ruled all
aspects of the human mind, would someday be revealed.
Thus arose the then virtually hegemonic belief that human beings and everything
they do are, like all other aspects of the world of nature, the results of
material causes-by which the elites of the time simply meant results of
material forces interacting with each other. While primitive, uneducated, and
painfully unsophisticated people might be beguiled into believing that they had
minds and wills capable of exerting effort and rising above the realm of the
merely material, this was just-as Daniel Dennett, a widely respected
philosopher of the day, delighted in putting it-an example of a "user
illusion": that is, the quaint fantasy of those who failed to realize, due
to educational deficiencies or plain thick-headedness, that "a brain was
always going to do what it was caused to do by local mechanical disturbances."
Were you one of the rubes who believed that people are capable of making free
and genuinely moral decisions? Then of course haughty contempt, or at best
pity, was the only appropriate demeanor a member of the intellectual elite
could possibly direct your way.
On a societal and cultural level the damage such spurious and unwarranted elite
opinions wreaked on the world at large was immense. For if everything people do
results solely from their brains, and everything the brain does results solely
from material causes, then people are no different than any other complicated
machine and the brain is no different in principle than any very complex
computer. If matter determines all, everything is passive and no one ever
really does anything, or to be more precise, no one is really responsible for
anything they think, say, or do.
What's more, if anything they think, say, or do causes problems for them or
society at large, then, the sophisticates of that thankfully bygone era
believed, the ultimate way to solve the problem would be to make the required
changes in the brain that would make it work the way a properly functioning
machine is supposed to. This naturally led to the widespread use of drugs as a
primary means of treating what generally came to be called "behavioral
problems."
After all, if the brain is the final cause of everything a person thinks, says,
and does, why bother with old-fashioned and outdated notions like
"self-control" or even "making your best effort" to solve a
problem? If the brain is the ultimate cause underlying all the problems, then
the sophisticated thing to do to rectify things is to give a chemical (or even
place an electrode!) that gets right in there and fixes things. "God helps
those who help themselves?" Not in the real world, where science knows all
the answers, sneered the elites of the time.
Happily for the future of humanity, in the early years of the 21st century this
all started to change. The reasons why, on a scientific level, grew out of the
coming together of some changes in perspective that had occurred in physics and
neuroscience during the last decades of the previous century. Specifically, the
theory of physics called quantum mechanics was seen to be closely related,
especially in humans, to the discovery in brain science called neuroplasticity:
the fact that throughout the lifespan the brain is capable of being rewired,
and that in humans at least, this rewiring could be caused directly by the
action of the mind.
Work using new brain-imaging technologies of that era to study people with a
condition called obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) played a key role in this
development. OCD is a medical condition in which people suffer from very
bothersome and intrusive thoughts and feelings that give them the sense that
"something is wrong" in their immediate surroundings-usually the
thought or feeling that something is dirty or contaminated or needs to be
checked because it isn't quite right.
This is what is called an obsession. The problem the medical condition causes
is that although the sufferers generally know this feeling that "something
is wrong" is false and doesn't really make sense, the feeling keeps
bothering them and doesn't go away, due to a brain glitch that was discovered
using brain imaging. Sufferers often respond to these gut-wrenching thoughts
and feelings by washing, checking, straightening things, etc., over and over
again, in a desperate but futile attempt to make things seem right. These
futile repetitive acts are called compulsions.
In the 1990s it was discovered that OCD sufferers were very capable of learning
how to resist capitulating to these brain-related symptoms by using a mental
action called "mindful awareness" when confronting them. In a
nutshell, mindful awareness means using your "mind's eye" to view
your own inner life and experiences the way you would if you were standing, as
it were, outside yourself-most simply put, it means learning to use a rational
perspective when viewing your own inner experience.
When OCD patients did this, and as a result came to view the bothersome
intrusive thoughts and feelings just as medical symptoms that they had the
mental power to resist, they found they were empowered to direct their
attention in much more useful and wholesome ways by focusing on healthy and/or
work-related activities. Over several weeks, and with much mental effort and
faith in their ability to overcome the suffering, many OCD patients were found
to be capable of regularly resisting the symptoms.
This greatly strengthened their mental capacity to focus attention on useful
wholesome activities and overcome compulsive urges. The major scientific
finding that was discovered using brain imaging was that when OCD sufferers
used the power of their minds to redirect regularly their focus of attention in
wholesome ways, they literally rewired their own brains in precisely the brain
circuit that had been discovered to cause the problem.
In the early years of the current century brain imaging was used to reveal many
similar and related findings. For instance, people with spider phobia, or
people viewing stressful or sexually arousing films, were found to be entirely
capable of using mental effort to apply mindful awareness and
"re-frame" their perspective on their experience. By so doing it was
clearly demonstrated that they could systematically change the response of the
brain to these situations and so cease being frightened, stressed, or sexually
aroused, whatever the case may be.
This latter finding was realized by some at the time to be potentially relevant
to teaching sexual abstinence strategies to adolescents-for if you have the
power to control your brain's response to sexual urges, then practicing sexual
abstinence in arousing situations will not only strengthen your moral
character; it will also increase your mental and physical capacity to control
the workings of your own brain-an extremely wholesome and empowering act!
All this work came together when physicist Henry Stapp realized that a basic
principle of quantum mechanics, which because of the nature of the brain at the
atomic level must be used for proper understanding of the brain's inner
workings, explains how the action of the mind changes how the brain works. A
well-established mechanism called the quantum zeno effect (QZE) readily explains
how mindfully directed attention can alter brain circuitry adaptively. Briefly,
we can understand QZE like this: The mental act of focusing attention tends to
hold in place brain circuits associated with whatever is focused on. In other
words, focusing attention on your mental experience maintains the brain state
arising in association with that experience.
If, using mindful awareness, a brain state arises associated with a wholesome
perspective, the sustained application of that mindful perspective will
literally, because of the QZE mechanism, hold in place the brain circuitry
associated with the wholesome process. Of course, the QZE mechanism would be
expected to work the same way to hold in place the brain's response to
meditation or prayer, and brain-imaging research in the early years of this
century demonstrated that to be the case.
The rest, as they say, is history. Once a solid scientific theory was in place
to explain how the mind's power to focus attention could systematically rewire
the brain, and that the language of our mental and spiritual life is necessary
to empower the mind to do so, the materialist dogma was toppled. We may not
have all lived happily ever after in any simplistic sense, but at least science
is no longer on the side of those who claim human beings are no different in
principle than a machine.
=-=-=-=-=-
The new age of information
INTELLIGENT DESIGN: A
mechanistic view of science has now (in 2025) given way to an
information-theory view in which information rather than blind material forces
is primary and basic. This change has affected not only science but worldviews
By William Dembski
AT THE TIME OF THE SCOPES TRIAL, and for the remainder of the 20th century,
science was wedded to a materialistic conception of nature. The architects of
modern science, from Rene Descartes to Isaac Newton, had proposed a world of
unthinking material objects ruled by natural laws. Because these scientists
were theists, the rule of natural law was for them not inviolable--God could, and
from time to time did, invade the natural order, rearrange material objects,
and even produce miracles of religious significance. But such divine acts were
gratuitous insertions into a material world that was capable of carrying on
quite nicely by itself.
In the end, the world bequeathed to us by modern science became a world of
unthinking material objects ruled by unbroken natural laws. With such a world,
God did not, and indeed could not, interact coherently, much less intervene.
Darwinian evolution, with its rejection of design and its unwavering commitment
to purely material forces (such as natural selection), came to epitomize this
materialist conception of science. If God played any role in the natural world,
human inquiry could reveal nothing about it.
This materialist conception of the world came under pressure in the 1990s.
Scientists started asking whether information might not be the fundamental
entity underlying physical reality. For instance, mathematician Keith Devlin
mused whether information could perhaps be regarded as "a basic property
of the universe, alongside matter and energy (and being ultimately
interconvertible with them)." Origin-of-life researchers like Manfred
Eigen increasingly saw the problem of the origin of life as the problem of
generating biologically significant information. And physicist Paul Davies
speculated about information replacing matter as the "primary stuff,"
therewith envisioning the resolution of age-old problems, such as the mind-body
problem. Thus he remarked, "If matter turns out to be a form of organized
information, then consciousness may not be so mysterious after all."
Such speculations became serious scientific proposals in the first decade of
this century as proponents of intelligent design increasingly clashed with
Darwinian evolutionists. The irony here is that the very sorts of arguments
that Darwinists had been using to try to discredit intelligent design and
relegate it to the sphere of religion rather than science ended up discrediting
Darwinian evolution itself and exposing its unscientific presuppositions.
To see how this happened, recall how exchanges between Darwinists and the early
design theorists used to go. The design theorists would go to great lengths to
analyze a given biological structure, show why it constituted an obstacle to
Darwinian and other materialistic forms of evolution, and lay out how the
structure in question exhibited clear marks of intelligence. To such carefully
drawn lines of scientific argument and evidence, the Darwinist invariably
offered stock responses, such as, "There you go with your religion
again" "You're just substituting supernatural causes for natural
causes" "You just haven't figured out how evolution did it"
"You're arguing from ignorance" "You're lazy; get back in the
lab and figure out how evolution did it."
These responses were effective at cowing critics of Darwinism so long as the
scientific community agreed with the Darwinists that science was about
understanding the natural world solely in terms of unguided material processes
or mechanisms. But in the first decade of this century it became clear that
this definition of science no longer worked. Science is, to be sure, about
understanding the natural world. But science is not about understanding the
natural world solely in terms of material processes.
The problem is that material processes, as understood by the Darwinists and
most of the scientific community at the time, could not adequately explain the
origin of biologically significant information. Darwinist Michael Ruse saw the
problem clearly, though without appreciating its significance. Describing the
state of origin-of-life research at the turn of the century, he remarked:
"At the moment, the hand of human design and intention hangs heavily over
everything, but work is going forward rapidly to create conditions in which
molecules can make the right and needed steps without constant outside help.
When that happens, ... the dreaming stops and the fun begins."
Sadly for the Darwinists, the dreaming never stopped and the fun never began.
Instead, the work of theoretical and applied intelligent-design theorists went
forward and showed why scientific explanations of biologically significant
information could never remove the hand of design and intentionality. The
watchword for science became information requires intelligence. This came to be
known as the No Free Lunch Principle, which states that apart from intelligent
guidance, material processes cannot bring about the information required for biological
complexity.
The No Free Lunch Principle led to a massive change in scientific perspective.
One notable consequence for biology was a thoroughgoing reevaluation of
experimental work on prebiotic and biotic evolution. Invariably, where
evolutionary biologists reported interesting experimental results, it was
because "intelligent investigators" had "intervened" and
performed "experimental manipulations" that nature, left to its own
devices, was utterly incapable of reproducing.
This led to an interesting twist. Whereas Darwinists had been relentless in
disparaging intelligent design as a pseudoscience, Darwinism itself now came to
be viewed as a pseudoscience. Intelligent design had been viewed as a
pseudoscience because it refused to limit nature to the operation of blind
material processes. Once it became clear, however, that material processes were
inherently inadequate for producing biologically significant information, the
Darwinian reliance, and indeed insistence, on such processes came to be viewed
as itself pseudoscientific.
What would you think of a chemist who thought that all explosives were like TNT
in that their explosive properties had to be explained in terms of
electrostatic chemical reactions? How would such a chemist explain the
explosion of a nuclear bomb? Would this chemist be acting as a scientist in
requiring that nuclear explosions be explained in terms of electrostatic
chemical reactions rather than in terms of fission and fusion of atomic nuclei?
Obviously not.
Scientific explanations need to invoke causal powers that are adequate to
account for the effects in question. By refusing to employ intelligence in
understanding biologically significant information, the Darwinian biologists
were essentially like this chemist, limiting themselves to causal powers that
were inherently inadequate for explaining the things they were trying to
explain. No wonder Darwinism is nowadays considered a pseudoscience. It does
not possess, and indeed self-consciously rejects, the conceptual resources
needed to explain the origin of biological information. Some historians of
science are now even going so far as to call Darwinism the greatest swindle in
the history of ideas. But this is perhaps too extreme.
The information-theoretic perspective did not just come to govern biology but
took hold throughout the natural sciences. Physics from the time of Newton had
sought to understand the physical world by positing certain fundamental
entities (particles, fields, strings), specifying the general form of the
equations to characterize those entities, prescribing initial and boundary
conditions for those equations, and then solving them. Often, these were
equations of motion that, on the basis of past states, predicted future states.
Within this classical conception of physics, the holy grail was to formulate a
"theory of everything"-a set of equations that could characterize the
constitution and dynamics of the universe at all levels of analysis.
But with information as the fundamental entity of science, this conception of
physics gave way. No longer was the physical world to be understood by
identifying an underlying structure that has to obey certain equations no
matter what. Instead, the world came to be seen as a nested hierarchy of
systems that convey information, and the job of physical theory was to extract
as much information from these systems as possible. Thus, rather than see the
scientist as Procrustes, forcing nature to conform to preconceived theories,
this informational approach turned the scientist into an inquirer who asks
nature questions, obtains answers, but must always remain open to the
possibility that nature has deeper levels of information to divulge.
Nothing of substance from the previous "mechanistic science" was lost
with this informational approach. As Roy Frieden had shown, the full range of
physics could be recovered within this informational approach (Physics from
Fisher Information: A Unification, Cambridge University Press, 1998). The one
thing that did give way, however, was the idea that physics is a bottom-up
affair in which knowledge of a system's parts determines knowledge of the
system as a whole. Within the informational approach, the whole was always
truly greater than the sum of its parts, for the whole could communicate
information that none of the parts could individually.
The primacy of information throughout the sciences has had profound
consequences for religion and faith. A world in which information is not
primary is a world seriously limited in what it can reveal about God. This
became evident with the rise of modern science-the world it gave us revealed
nothing about God except that God, if God exists at all, is a lawgiver. But
with information as the primary stuff, there are no limits on what the world
can in principle reveal about God. Theists of all stripes have therefore found
this newfound focus of science on information refreshing.