Is Intelligent Design Science?
John M. Frame
“Intelligent
Design” (henceforth ID) is the view that the universe gives evidence of being
the product of an intelligent designer. As such it is a very old view.
Certainly this was the position of the biblical writers (as Ps. 19:1, Rom.
1:18-20). Historically, many have articulated this position by means of the
“teleological argument:” that when unintelligent beings act for a purpose, they
must be under the control of a personal intelligence.
For the past 150 years or so, the
focus has been on teleology as opposed to atheistic evolution. Many like B. B.
Warfield accepted evolution in its general outlines, but they insisted that the
evolutionary process must have been directed by a personal God. Others, such as
the Institute for Creation Research, argued that evolution, as usually
conceived, has not occurred at all. In their view, the earth is only around
10,000 years old, and the fossil record can be explained by Noah’s flood.
Although the ICR has been accused of imposing on nature a view derived from the
Bible, they have protested that no, their arguments are based on science alone.
Today, however, “ID” refers to a
specific movement that became famous with the 1991 publication of Phillip
Johnson’s Darwin on Trial.
[1]
Johnson is a Christian and a professor of law at the
Unlike the ICR, the ID group does
not argue for a young earth or for flood geology. They are willing to accept
the chronological sequence of life-forms more or less as the evolutionists
present it. But evolutionism today (“neo-Darwinism,” as it is sometimes called)
argues that natural forces (mainly natural selection and genetic mutation) are
sufficient to account for all living beings; it is not necessary to invoke God.
This is the specific issue between neo-Darwinism and ID.
As a critique of evolution, ID has
attracted more support than ICR and others, even among scientists, though its
support among them is still fairly small. Many Christian philosophers of
science have applauded their work.
So the question has come up as to
whether ID should be taught to school students. Developments following the
Scopes trial in 1925 established the teaching of evolution in the public
schools. Almost nobody today seeks to exclude the teaching of evolution in the
schools. Even Christian creationists, on the whole, acknowledge that students
should know what the theory of evolution is, since it has become the pervasive
view of biologists and geologists. But the question now arises whether ID
should be taught alongside evolution as an alternate view.
For the most part, the legal
situation has not gone well for ID. Courts have ruled that because it is “religion,” not “science,” it has no place in a science curriculum. Further, to
teach ID, many contend, is to violate the principle of the “separation of
church and state.”
I hold an originalist view of the
church/state issue. The US Constitution says nothing about a “wall of
separation” between church and state. It only forbids Congress to set up a
nationally established church. When the Constitution was written, several
states had established churches. Part of the intent of the Constitution was to
give freedom to the states in this regard. Certainly none of the founders
intended to abolish all support of religion by government. Nevertheless, my
view is not the one currently sanctioned by the courts. Probably the question
of the teaching of ID will not be resolved by a rethinking of the relation of
church and state.
But more should be said on the
relation of religion and science. Is ID religion, rather than science? In my
judgment, religion and science are not easily separated, for reasons such as
the following:
1. Science is religious. A great many writers (Kuyper, Dooyeweerd,
Clouser, Van Til, Polanyi, Kuhn, Hanson, Poythress) have made an impressive
case that science is not religiously neutral. At the most obvious level,
science presupposes many things that it cannot prove, but must take on faith:
the uniformity of nature, the correspondence of thought with reality, the
universality of physical laws, the values required for the honest pursuit of
truth. Indeed, their ideas and methodology presuppose Christian theism, though
not all of them are willing to admit it.
[4]
Despite the uncertainty of much
science, there is also a sense in which science, like religion, imposes “orthodoxy” on its participants. As Kuhn indicates, bodies of research create
communities of scientists, and if anyone wants to enter that community he must
not deviate from the standard paradigms. Certainly something like this has
happened among Neo-Darwinists. So there is a strong analogy between science and
religion that has been overlooked in much of the discussion.
2. Science is more than observation and experiment. As many of the
abovementioned thinkers point out, scientists do not simply gather data. They
also propose hypotheses for investigation. Then they must deduce consequences
from those hypotheses. Observation and experiment seek these consequences in
order to verify or falsify the hypothesis. But the hypothesis itself is not
necessarily the result of observation or experimentation. Einstein, for
example, did not develop his theories of relativity on the basis of observation
or experiment. Rather, his ideas initially came from “thought experiments,” imagining how things are likely to be. Many of his hypotheses have subsequently
been verified by observation and experiment. Einstein was not himself an
experimental scientist. But no one would deny that he was a scientist of the
first order.
The work of science, then, is not
only observational and experimental, but also imaginative and logical. The
scientist must use his imagination to determine significant hypotheses, and his
logic to determine what it would take to verify or falsify these hypotheses and
whether an experiment has, in fact, verified or falsified it.
People often complain that ID is
not science, because it is not based on observation and experiment. This charge
is false, because ID writers rely on research already done by others. And some
ID writers like Behe have done and published significant research. (Some other ID
writers have done the same, but have had trouble publishing their findings
because, they claim, of bias.)
But the main contribution of ID to
the discussion is logical: to evaluate what is required to verify evolutionary
theory, to judge whether the evidence establishes it, and if not, what changes
must be made to evolutionary theory to make it credible. ID primarily interprets data, rather than
accumulating it. But that doesn’t make ID unscientific.
Most neo-Darwinism today is
explicitly anti-theistic. Neo-Darwinists believe that they have established a naturalistic basis for the origin and
development of life. ID denies that they have established this and brings up
evidence to the contrary. Why should the denial of theism be considered
science, while the affirmation of it is considered “religion?” It is no less
scientific to deduce intelligent design from the data than to deduce an
unintelligent origin.
[5]
So Darwinism, in some senses, is
religious, and ID is scientific.
3. Science must be open to all truth. Even if science and religion can
be sharply distinguished, which I deny, it is important to understand what is
involved in the “openness” of science to truth. Let’s imagine that the Bible is
the inerrant word of God, and that in that book God speaks on some matters of
importance to science. Now in the current discussion this possibility would be
dismissed as an encroachment of religion on science. But, whether Scripture is
religion or science, at least its believers claim that it is a source of truth.
If it is a source of truth, how can scientists justify ignoring or denying it?
Of course, many scientists deny
that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. But if it is, those scientists are missing out on something important,
just as if they neglected important data in a study of the effect of a drug. So
the question of whether the Bible is true is a question of importance to
science, as well as to all other studies.
ID claims that its assertions are
not based on the Bible, though most practitioners of ID are Christians. It is
hard for me to imagine that they would make the claims they do if they were not
Christians. But that issue is irrelevant. To establish the scientific character
of one’s assertions, it is not necessary to prove that they don’t come from a religious authority.
Since I believe the Bible is true, I think that reliance on the Bible (properly
interpreted) would be an argument in favor of ID, rather than against it. The
attempt of ID writers to distance themselves from the Bible is, I think, an
expedient to avoid certain popular objections, rather than a position necessary
to bona fide science.
I conclude that ID is just as
scientific, and just as religious, as neo-Darwinism. As such it should be given
a position of parity with Darwinism in the schools. This is not likely to
happen in the near future, because of the courts’ homage to a sharp separation
between religion and science, and because of an illegitimate doctrine of church
and state. But on the intrinsic merits of the case, the two positions should at
least be taught side-by-side.
Schools typically claim to be open to all significant points of view. Students learn to think critically by being exposed to different positions for evaluation. No human theory is infallible. Mistakes can be found in the writings of neo-Darwinists and of ID writers alike. To expose children only to the neo-Darwinist position, and to make the (to my mind fantastic) claim that it is “fact, not theory” is to deprive them of a serious opportunity for critical thought and to impoverish their education. That kind of dogmatism is, to my mind, the final proof that evolutionism is religion as well as science. Those who deny that orthodoxy, like the ID writers, are by that very denial making a substantial contribution to science.