God vs Darwin? Three Questions for America by Ronald Dworkin (2006)
In recent years a few religious scientists have claimed a refutation of the main tenets of Darwinian evolution that does not rely on biblical authority or the biblical young-Earth account of creation. This refutation purports only to show that an “intelligent design” rather than the unguided processes of random variation and natural selection that Darwin postulated must be responsible for creating life and human beings. The thesis has quickly gained enormous attention and notoriety. Several states have considered requiring teachers to describe the intelligent design theory as an available alternative to standard evolutionary theory in public high school biology classes. A Pennsylvania school board adopted that requirement a few years ago, and though a federal judge then struck the proposal down as an unconstitutional imposition of Christian doctrine in public schools,1 other public bodies in other states are still pursuing similar programs. President Bush recently appeared to endorse these campaigns: he said that “I felt like both sides ought to be properly taught.”2 The Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, who is said to covet the Republican nomination for the presidency in 2008, agreed. He said that teaching intelligent design theory along with evolution, as competing scientific explanations of the creation of human life, was fair because it “doesn’t force any particular theory on anyone.”3
If there is any scientific evidence against evolution, then of course students should be taught what it is. But the intelligent design movement has discovered no such scientific evidence at all. We must distinguish the following three claims. (1) Scientists have not yet shown to all their satisfaction how the Darwinian processes of random mutation and natural selection explain every feature of the development of plant and animal life on our planet; some features remain areas of speculation and controversy among them. (2) There is now good scientific evidence that these features cannot be explained within the general Darwinian structure; a successful explanation will therefore require abandoning that structure altogether. (3) This evidence also at least suggests that an intelligent designer created life and designed the processes of development that have produced human beings.
The first of these claims is both correct and unsurprising. The details of evolutionary theory, like the phenomena it tries to explain, are enormously complex. Eminent biologists disagree in heated arguments about, for example, whether some features of developed life are best explained as accidents or byproducts of no survival value in themselves. Evolutionary biologists face other challenges and disagree in how best to meet them.
The second of the three claims is false. It does not follow from the fact that evolutionary scientists have not yet found or agreed on a solution to some puzzle that their methods have been shown to be defective, any more than it follows from historical controversies or unproved mathematical conjectures that the methods of historians or mathematicians must be abandoned. Scientists have so far found no reason to doubt that the evolutionary puzzles can be solved within the general apparatus of neo-Darwinian theory that supplements Darwin with the dramatic recent discoveries of genetic biology. None of the rival solutions that scientists offer to the puzzles of evolution calls that general apparatus into question. The proponents of intelligent design theory claim in their lectures, popular writing, and television appearances that the irreducible complexity of certain forms of life proves that Darwin’s theory must be rejected root and branch. No element of certain even primitive forms of life could be removed, they say, without making it impossible for that form of life to survive. But their arguments are very bad, a judgment confirmed by their failure so far to expose these arguments to professional review by submitting articles to peer-reviewed journals.4 It is no explanation of this failure to suppose that the scientific establishment would reject even well-reasoned articles that challenged Darwin. On the contrary, a scientifically sound general attack on evolution would be very exciting news indeed: a Nobel Prize might be around the corner.
The third claim would be false even if the second claim were true. The proponents of intelligent design do not state explicitly that the designer must be a god—they try to avoid overtly religious claims in hopes that the constitutional bar to religious instruction in public schools would not prevent their theory being taught there—but that is the clear and unacceptable implication of their argument. If the failure to find a natural physical or biological explanation of some physical or biological phenomenon were taken to be evidence of intervention by a god who intended to bring about that phenomenon, science would disappear.
Science depends on the possibility of verification or falsification through positive evidence. There might conceivably be evidence that a superhuman power exists and has caused an otherwise inexplicable event. But the mere absence of a more conventional scientific explanation is in itself no such evidence. If it were, then we could postulate divine intervention in pursuit of some divine plan to explain anything we could not otherwise explain. Doctors have established a strong correlation between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, but they do not yet know the mechanisms through which one causes the other. Why should we not then say that an explanation is nevertheless at hand: that God punishes selected cigarette smokers in that way? Indeed, divine intervention would then be available even as a rival to a fully adequate conventional explanation. Why should we prefer a climatologist’s account of global warming, which suggests that the process will continue unless and until people reduce the level of their carbon pollution of the atmosphere, to the rival account that a god is warming the planet for his own purposes and will cool it again when he wishes?
Very few socially conservative Americans would vote for a school board that allowed teachers to explain anything they wished by citing a supernatural intelligence at work. The intelligent design theory appeals to some of them because it uses the idea of such an intelligence only to confirm the plausibility of the specific miraculous claims that are described in the Bible... read more:
Debate:
In his essay [“Three Questions for America,” NYR, September 21] on the teaching of Darwinian theory and “intelligent design” in schools, Ronald Dworkin rightly condemns those scientific theories that are “dictated” by religious convictions. But he fails to notice that Darwinism itself is such a theory.
The scientific evidence is clear. Each human being is a blood relative of every known living organism on the planet, implying that all life derives from a common ancestor. For this to be the case there must have been a series of transformations of species, both progressive (advancing in complexity) and lateral (deviating in accidentals). The fossil record appears to confirm this, although it does not tell us whether the transformations were gradual or abrupt. Recent discoveries concerning the modular format of DNA suggest that the progressive transformations were typically abrupt. The extensive human experience of animal and plant husbandry (a particular interest of Darwin, incidentally) suggests that the lateral transformations were typically gradual.
If we turn now to Darwinian theory itself, which purports to explain these discoveries and which is taught in most schools and colleges in the developed world, we find that it is based on, as Darwin puts it, “the unguided processes of random variation and natural selection.” Take the first part: random variation. By random is meant, presumably, accidental, and clearly accidents do happen, but there is no scientific evidence to the effect that the transformations that took place in evolutionary history were always, or even typically, accidental.
The second unguided process, natural selection, is yet more curious. Let me propose, for an example, an alternative. One of the processes by means of which successful variations are selected is love, in all its varieties but in particular maternal love. An animal that is loved will survive, prosper, and reproduce. Love selects. If we take this idea to a Darwinist, however, he or she will say, no, what happens is that love is selected for: those animals that are loved will have an advantage over those that are not and, over time, will multiply, while the others, unloved, will die out. Thus, natural selection selects love. But therein lies the real scientific scandal of Darwinism: the effect is claimed to be the cause of the cause of the effect. Such an idea, when allowed, is immune to refutation... read more:
