Monologues Passing in the Night

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Design Theory and its Critics:

Monologues Passing in the Nightight

Review article of: Robert T. Pennock (ed.), Intelligent Design Creationism and its
Critics, Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2001; xx + 804 pages; hb. $ 110.00, pb. $
45.00; ISBN: 0-262-16204-0/0-262-66124-1.

discussion note by Del Ratzsch

3. Naturalism: Methodology and Beyond

The natural sciences are, obviously, characterized by some sort of naturalism, but
exactly what the type, scope, and implications of that naturalism are has become an
epicenter of the current dispute—an epicenter which several of the essays address
directly.

The most extended discussion on this issue takes the form of an exchange between
Johnson and Pennock. What is most striking about the exchange is a failure of clarity
about several key issues. The exchange begins with a Johnson essay which originally
appeared in the semi-popular periodical First Things. In it, Johnson primarily presses
one of his two usual cases: that in some instances, evidential standards within science
have been corrupted by an a priori allegiance to philosophical naturalism. The allegation
is that naturalism is the stipulated metaphysic of contemporary mainstream science,
meaning that non-naturalistic concepts – purpose, design, creation, supernatural agency
– are excluded by fiat and that purely naturalistic theories are the only ones even eligible
for a hearing. (That is, as Johnson sees it, particularly true with Darwinian versions of
evolutionary theory.) Consequently, even if naturalism is false, and even if some
implicitly supernaturalist theory is true, the (or a) competing – and ex hypothesi
mistaken – naturalistic scientific theory will triumph within the scientific community,
and since any force that the available evidence might have had in a non-naturalistic
direction will be denied as a matter of policy, the naturalistic theory will be advanced as
scientifically established by objective evidence. At that point, of course, evangelical
atheists within the scientific community (e.g., Dawkins) will publicly proclaim that
science has established their naturalistic worldview. In simplest terms, the idea is that if
one imposes a priori human constraints on the range of legitimate theories, then if
reality itself happens to fall outside those human stipulated constraints, human science
is at serious risk of generating an irreparably skewed scientific picture of reality. Surely,
as Johnson sees it, the rational thing to do, the objective thing to do, indeed the scientific
thing to do is to let data – and not human edict – establish the relevant boundaries.
Johnson’s second (and related) usual contention is that if the philosophical naturalist
protection were removed from selected scientific theories – most notably, evolutionary
theory – and such theories were required to live or die on their own explanatory and
empirical merits, evolution as a biological theory (including even non-naturalistic
versions—e.g., theistic evolution) would fall. Thus, for instance, he says:

"What [is taught] as “evolution” and label[ed] as fact, is based not upon any incontrovertible
empirical evidence, but upon a highly controversial philosophical presupposition. [Johnson, p.
60—all page references are from the present volume]"

But even if Johnson were right that naturalism has been imported into science and that
evidence is not even in principle allowed to point toward non-naturalistic theories, it
does not follow that the evidence we have does not point overwhelmingly toward some
version of natural evolution anyway, just as our theories on plumbing would likely
remain exactly as they are even if we didn’t normally insist on naturalistic plumbing
theories. Our evidence and theories might, even on a ‘level playing field,’ run in precisely
the evolutionary direction current mainstream science takes it to. Of course, the evidence
might, on a ‘level playing field,’ run some different direction.

But even though Johnson’s latter allegation does not follow from the earlier point, it
could nonetheless be correct. Is it? Most professionals in the area would deny that. Still,
Johnson is not wholly to blame for making the claim. Dawkins, for instance, has claimed
that even if the empirical evidence did not support Darwinism, it would still be the best
theory we’ve got. [1] More immediately, in a later essay in the present book, Matthew
Brauer and Daniel Brumbaugh say the following:

"Of course, such studies may not show the evolution of a new “kind”…as demanded by some neo-
creationists. To scientists, however, such a concern is simply irrelevant since evolution
necessarily generates higher-level patterns from lower-level processes. [Brauer and Brumbaugh,
p. 297, my emphasis])"

So when of evolution ask for evidence that, say, micro-evolution can result in
macro-evolution, the apparent response is that such questions of evidence are just
irrelevant because evolution just has to work as advertised.

Whatever the truth of the matter here, in making the claim he does Johnson has gone far
beyond his area of professional expertise. But regardless of who is right on this specific
point, there is one thing, it seems to me, that Johnson has gotten exactly right. If there is
a supernatural being whose purposes, decisions, and actions are involved in the
existence, governance or structure of physical reality, then any stipulated blanket
prohibitions against non-naturalistic explanatory resources runs the serious risk of
producing an inescapably skewed picture of physical reality. That is not, of course, to say
that if the supernatural does play a role, that if we dropped any naturalistic restrictions
that we would automatically be able to construct the correct theory. But the alternative
route (under the conditions postulated) would guarantee that we would not.

It seems to me that Pennock (and some others in this volume) have failed to fully
appreciate Johnson’s point here. Pennock’s response to Johnson is to claim that Johnson
has missed a crucial distinction between philosophical (or metaphysical) naturalism on
the one hand, and methodological naturalism on the other. Methodological naturalism
is, roughly, the principle that regardless of whether or not there are non-natural or
supernatural dimensions to reality, science must as a matter of methodological policy
restrict itself to the natural realm—natural phenomena, natural concepts, natural
methods, and natural explanations. On this view, anything supernatural (if such exists)
is beyond the scope and competence of science, and science consequently cannot
properly have anything whatever to say on such matters.

Perhaps there are occasions on which Johnson has indeed failed to take that distinction
into account. But what Pennock has apparently overlooked here is the fact that for
Johnson’s initial intended point, that distinction does not make the slightest difference—
i.e., even if Johnson has failed to see the difference, his initial point still stands. If
(perhaps for overwhelmingly good reasons) science is restricted (even just
methodologically) to ‘natural’ explanatory and theoretical resources, then if there is a
supernatural realm which does impinge upon the structure and/or operation of the
‘natural’ realm, then the world-picture generated by even the best science will
unavoidably be either incomplete or else wrong on some points. Unless one assumes
philosophical naturalism (that the natural constitutes the whole of reality) that will be
the inescapable upshot of taking even mere methodological naturalism as an essential
component of scientific procedure.

But even seemingly more innocuous assumptions can lead in similar directions. First, if
one restricts science to the natural, and assumes that science can in principle get to all
truth, then one has implicitly assumed philosophical naturalism. But second, consider
what happens if one stipulates methodological naturalism as essential to science, then
this does not assume that science can in principle get to all truth, but merely that science
is competent for all physical matters, or that what science does (properly conducted, and
in the long run) generate concerning the physical realm will, in principle, be truth. Again,
if the truth of the specific matter in question is non-natural, and if science is restricted to
natural conceptual resources, even the most excruciatingly proper naturalistic scientific
deliverances on that matter may be wide of the mark. Indeed, they will typically be
mistaken in exactly the way a science built on philosophical naturalism would be. [2] For
practical purposes, that comes close to importing philosophical naturalism into the
inner structure of science.

One of Johnson’s main points, then, is that methodological naturalism is not quite the
lamb it is sometimes pictured as being, and that if one conceptually links methodological
naturalistic science to truth in certain ways, something paralleling philosophical
naturalism comes out of the mix. Oddly enough, while criticizing Johnson for profound
confusion concerning distinctions among variant types of naturalism, Pennock
essentially concedes Johnson’s point. That emerges in the following passage:

"To be sure, this [referring to a statement about a particular Darwinian mechanism] is an
approximate and tentative scientific truth, not an ontological (metaphysical) truth in the sense
that it cannot rule out the possibility that a supernatural Creator is involved in the
process…Surely we may accept that statement [referring to a statement concerning a different
evolutionary, genetic explanation] as true, even though, as a merely naturalistic scientific truth, it
does not rule out the possibility of an intelligent supernatural cause…so it cannot be said to be
absolutely true in the ontological (metaphysical) sense. Similarly, the Creationists’ supernatural
story may be a metaphysical truth – God may have created the world 6,000 years ago but made it
look older as “Appearance of Age” creationists hold – but it is not a scientific truth. [Pennock, p.
104]"

So Pennock here distinguishes between ‘merely naturalistic scientific truth’ (presumably
what a proper science defined by methodological naturalism generates) and ‘ontological
(metaphysical) truth’ (what most of us would call real truth). If we do make that
distinction, then although mere naturalistic scientific truth may often or even usually
correspond to real truth, if we mistakenly equate real truth with mere naturalistic
scientific truth even on such purely material matters as the age of the earth we will be
implicitly doing something akin to assuming philosophical naturalism. And that is
Johnson’s point.

One underlying source of disagreement in this general area concerns the fundamental
character of science. Ruse and Pennock seemingly take science to be defined by
commitment to a specific method. Thus Ruse:

"This is not to say that God did not have a role in the creation, but simply that, qua science, that is
qua an enterprise formed through the practice of methodological naturalism, science has no
place for talk of God…[I]nasmuch as one is going to the scientist for science, theology can and
must be ruled out as irrelevant. [Ruse, pp. 365–66, my emphasis]"

and Pennock:

"The Methodological Naturalist does not make a commitment directly to a picture of what exists in
the world, but rather to a set of methods as a reliable way to find out about the world – typically
the methods of the natural sciences, and perhaps extensions that are continuous with them – and
indirectly to what those methods discover. [Pennock, p. 84]"

Hence, Pennock’s idea of a distinct category of ‘scientific truth’ in terms of the outcomes
of the initially accepted method. But ID advocates and sympathizers typically have a
different conception of science, as involving a commitment to getting at ontological
truths of nature, regardless of methodological restrictions. Thus, Plantinga:

"But of course what we really want to know is not which hypothesis is the best from some
artificially adopted standpoint of naturalism, but what the best hypothesis is overall. [Plantinga,
p. 138, his emphasis]"

and Behe:

"Science is not a game in which arbitrary rules are used to decide what explanations are to be
permitted. Rather, it is an effort to make true statements about physical reality. [Behe, p. 255]"

On this conception, there is no philosophically distinct category of scientific as opposed
to ontological truth, and if stipulated methodological restrictions begin to get in the way
of pursuit of truth, then so much the worse for the restrictions. It is worth noting that in
the absence of a presupposition of philosophical naturalism, there is no guarantee that
these two conceptions of science (the ‘methodic’ and the ‘alethic’, we might call them
respectively) will be equivalent.

Of course, it might be that removing methodological naturalist restrictions would prove
empirically unfruitful, for various reasons. (Indeed, most ID take that as already
historically substantiated in connection with Paley and Darwin.) But some of the reasons
typically given seem a trifle overheated. For instance, Pennock says:

"Once such supernatural explanations are permitted they could be used in chemistry and physics
as easily as Creationists have used them in biology and geology. Indeed, all empirical
investigation beyond the purely descriptive could cease, for scientists would have a ready-made
answer for everything. [Pennock, p. 90]"

Historically, of course, no such thing happened. Indeed, if the history told by of ID
is accurate, previously entrenched supernatural explanations lost the scientific battle to
mere fledgling naturalistic explanations in the 19th century—hardly what one would
expect if merely allowing currently disenfranchised supernatural explanations into the
discussion were likely to destroy current mature science. In any case, ID advocates don’t
buy the idea that considering the possibility of design would destroy all ‘natural’ science:

The fact that some biochemical systems were designed by an intelligent agent does not mean that
any of the other factors are not operative, common, or important. [Behe, p. 255]

One could try to escape Pennock’s unusual ‘two truth’ theory (mere naturalistic scientific
truth, and ontological (metaphysical) truth) by claiming that the methodological
restrictions on science were not constitutive of science, but were merely provisional
advice which could be given up even within science under suitable circumstances. Thus if
science ever got to the point where methodological naturalistic procedures had pushed
science into, say, Lakatosian ‘degenerative programmes’ (as ID advocates believe has
already happened), then that provisional advice could be given up.

That is the line taken by Kelly Smith in a (rather ill-tempered) response to Paul Nelson.
(Incidentally, I think that Smith misunderstood Nelson’s intent, which was to raise
questions about the process by which naturalistic evolutionists dismiss creationist
alternative explanations. Nelson was attempting to suggest some defeater-defeaters, as
epistemologists would call them, rather than attempting to construct a positive case for
creationism, as Smith seems to have read him.) Concerning methodological naturalism
and science, Smith says:

"MN [methodological naturalism] is, after all, methodological. It is part of the very nature of
science to be open to new possibilities, and it is not in the business of ruling things impossible.
Science is in the business of trying to figure out which explanations – out of all those (including
theological ones, at least in principle) that might be true – are more likely to be true…Science
does tend to shy away from theological explanations, but on purely methodological grounds…The
rule “Don’t involve divine mechanisms in a scientific explanation” is simply a rule of thumb
(though a good one)—it does not say that such explanations are unacceptable in principle, much
less that it’s impossible they are correct. [Smith, p. 713, his emphasis]"

Smith says this in support of his assertion that Nelson is confused about the very nature
of methodological naturalism. But nearly everyone – including nearly everyone on
Smith’s own side of the ID issue – would be surprised to hear that science is [Smith’s
emphasis] in principle in the business of evaluating theological explanations, and that
prohibitions to the contrary are mere rules of thumb, to be jettisoned if need be. For
instance, just in the present volume:

"Methodological naturalism is not a dogmatic ideology that simply is tacked on to the principles of
scientific method; it is essential for the basic standards of empirical science. [Pennock, p. 90,
emphasis mine]"

Indeed, Pennock more than once suggests that challenges to methodological naturalism
are philosophical attacks on scientific method itself. [Pennock, e.g., p. 760]
Others take similar positions:

"[T]he methodological naturalist insists that, inasmuch as one is doing science, one avoids all
theological or other religious reference. In particular, on denies God a role in creation. [Ruse, p.
365, emphasis mine, and see again Ruse, pp. 365–66 quoted above]"

According to Nancey Murphy that insistence is not casual, but is definitional:

"[W]hat we might call methodological atheism [her term for methodological naturalism]…is by
definition common to all natural science. [Murphy, p. 464, second emphasis mine] [3]"

In any case, Johnson and other ID advocates may be seriously mistaken about the
implications for both science in general and evolution in particular were the
methodological naturalistic lid lifted from science. (Indeed, I think they have tended to
overinflate the case.) But they seem to be right that that restriction, if strictly observed,
does have potential serious consequences both for evidential assessment procedures and
for deeper philosophical matters if the science it generates is conceptually linked to truth
claims in certain ways. Again, if the cosmos does not run completely on naturalistic
principles – if the supernatural, for instance, is a substantive factor in the existence,
structure or governance of the cosmos – then any approach which excludes such factors
by fiat risks a skewed understanding of relevant features of that cosmos.

The potential seriousness of the possible implications is – ironically – perhaps attested
by the lengths to which various ID find themselves driven: Pennock to a theory of
two sorts of truth (one of which may in some cases not be true at all), Smith to asserting
that theological explanations may in principle have a legitimate place in science after all.
The former runs counter to what most scientists and others take science to be ultimately
about – real truth – and the latter is precisely what ID advocates are routinely pilloried
for (allegedly) claiming.

4. Science and Substance

In addition to the more philosophical wrangles discussed above, disputes between ID
advocates and ID opponents routinely involve critical attacks on the empirical nuts and
bolts of the scientific preferences of the opposite side.

As a group ID advocates doubt or deny that random variation and natural selection (in
conjunction with other contemporarily-accepted mechanisms) can generate the
‘irreducible’ and ‘specified’ complexity seen (they claim) in the biological realm, and
doubt or deny that such processes can generate and increase genetic information. [4]
(This purported inadequacy of Darwinian evolutionary resources is generally a
significant component in ID cases for intelligent design in nature.) Such doubts and
denials have often elicited stinging responses. These denials take a variety of forms, but
the two most common involve rejection of the legitimacy of extrapolating from
microevolution to macroevolution, and rejection of the idea that genuine genetic
information can be produced or increased by random genetic alteration sieved by natural
selection. In response to such alleged barriers to evolution, ID often sketch out
this standard general scenario:

"Genes mutate, as a consequence of molecular mishaps. Organisms have their structure and
behavior affected by the mutations, usually for ill but occasionally for good. The organisms live,
reproduce, and die, and those carrying novel genes either reproduce more or less than other
organisms in the population. If they reproduce more, and certain other conditions are realized,
the frequency of those genes in the population will tend to increase. Through this process, useful
modifications slowly accumulate. Genetic material is duplicated within the genome, and the
duplicates acquire new roles, making more complex structures possible. Populations change over
time, split, and diverge. The striking features of evolution…are a consequence of the accumulation
of a great many of these small steps…If there is more “complex specified information” in a camel
than in a bacterium, then the natural process described above is able to create this information.
[Godfrey-Smith, p. 588]."

Such thoroughly general and programmatic glosses – ‘duplicates acquire new roles,
making more complex structures possible’ – do not sit well with challengers (including
ID advocates) who insistently ask both for more precise technical details of the proposed
processes of ‘acquiring’ and ‘making possible,’ and for more empirical evidence that
those particular processes really did characterize actual biological history. Such
demands are seldom well received. ID advocates are sometimes chided for demanding
evidences which are almost inevitably unavailable (e.g., fossilized soft tissue, such as
ancestral reproductive systems—both Kitcher [p. 275] and Brauer and Brumbaugh [p.
303] criticize Johnson on this count).

Interesting enough, parallel demands that ID advocates produce fine detail for their
theories are considered not only legitimate, but particularly telling. Kitcher, for instance,
asserts that a view such as Behe’s would ‘require…Behe, to explain just what it is that the
Creator does, and why he does things that way. [Kitcher, p. 285, see also p. 282])’ and it
is fairly evident that Kitcher suspects that neither Behe nor anyone else could do that in
any respectably defensible way. Information concerning ‘just what it is’ that God did far
in the past may well be as principially unavailable as are fossilized reproductive organs.

On both sides, it should not be overlooked that a particularly prominent characteristic of
even inevitably absent evidence is its absence. (Incidentally, care is certainly required in
connection with Kitcher’s claim. To recognize and explain some phenomenon as being
designed does not in the slightest require that we have any clue as to how it was
produced, what it is for, who produced it, or what motivated the production. Discovery of
some incomprehensible but inarguable alien artifact on Mars would make that very
clear.)

Exchanges of the above sort are often not terribly productive. Challenged to cite a
specific example of a random mutation which would increase genetic information,
Dawkins, for instance, seems to think that even asking the question in this way somehow
counts against the inquirer [Dawkins, p. 617]. But regardless of what one thinks of the
question, the answer it elicited was, to say the least, peculiar. Dawkins first chooses to
understand ‘information’ as Shannon information, then cites a randomly generated
decrease in available alleles in a gene pool as, in the Shannon sense, an increase in
genetic information [Dawkins, pp. 617–631]. But of course, no one trying to understand
the mechanism by which a sequence of (selections from among) random mutations in
DNA could increase genetic information or produce genetic novelty in the sense of
expanding genetic capabilities from that of, say, a millipede to that of a lobster, is
seeking, as Dawkins seems to suppose, for an explanation of how genetic diversity can be
reduced in the relevant gene pools, or even how such decreases can drive reproductive
isolation.

It is clear, it seems to me, that despite enormous progress, explanations of the massive
genetic diversity and the overwhelming biological complexity we see around us (and are
still discovering) are still to some degree programmatic. Advocates of ID are right about
that. Advocates of evolution, citing that enormous progress and what they see as the still-
robust track record of evolutionary theory, counsel patience, viewing current puzzles as
‘signaling a need for further research’ and suggesting that ‘in a few decades time,
perhaps, in light of increased knowledge of how development works at the molecular
level, we may be able to see’ answers to some currently open questions [Kitcher, pp. 263
and 265] of contemporary evolutionary theory, including most ID advocates,
focusing on the programmatic character of the explanatory glosses such as that quoted
earlier, think that a century and one half after Darwin, it is time to pull the plug on the
more empirically tenuous, perhaps overly-theoretically-dependent parts of Darwinian
theory, or at least to encourage parallel exploration of alternatives.

[8] There are factual errors in other essays as well. For instance among other problems,

Braur and Brumbaugh repeatedly classify Michael Denton as a creationist. Denton has
classified himself variously as an agnostic or an Aristotelian teleologist or most recently
as a ‘skeptical theist’—but by no stretch is he a creationist. And Kitcher says: ‘How are we
to explain the regular, worldwide, ordering of the fossils? The only creationist response
to the latter question has been to invoke the Noachian deluge: the order is as it is because
of the relative positions of the organisms at the time the flood struck. [p. 259]’ But not
only is that inaccurate, it is inconsistent with Kitcher’s own discussion of creationist
flood geology in his Abusing Science. Concerning the ordering, Kitcher says: ‘Morris
appears to have three possible explanatory factors: (1) habitat (lower dwelling animals
were deposited first), (2) hydraulic characteristics (the order of deposition depends on
the animal’s resistance to the downward waters), (3) mobility (more mobile animals will
be deposited later). The passages I have quoted juggle these three methods so as to
obtain the desired results. [Abusing Science, p. 131, his emphasis]’ Kitcher goes on to
argue that those methods are not successful, but it is clear that there are more proposed
mechanisms than simply the first, as claimed by Kitcher in the initial quote.

http://www.calvin.edu/academic/philosophy/virtual_library/articles/ratzsch_del/design_theory_and_its_critics.pdf

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