Theistic Science?

Intelligent Design as Theistic Science

In chapter 3.4, I analysed methodological naturalism and some of the critique against strong methodological naturalism. I have argued that the question of the definition of science is a side-issue for the evaluation of the argument. To understand the structure of the argument, however, ID´s ideas about science do need to be understood. Whereas methodological naturalism (as typically understood) seeks to build science on a non-religious foundation, the ID movement has often been understood by both its critics and defenders to be a project of theistic science, meaning a programme of natural science openly influenced by theistic beliefs. But the ID movement’s relationship to the idea of theistic science is ambiguous, and the views of the majority can fit in the framework on weak methodological naturalism.

In the contemporary discussion, Alvin Plantinga has been the foremost defender of the idea of theistic science. Plantinga´s argument has two main parts. First (1), Plantinga argues that science cannot always be religiously neutral. Though scientists can co-operate on many scientific questions regardless of their worldview or religion, some parts of science (such as

371 Collins 2006.

belief in Darwinian evolution) are inevitably worldview-colored. Plantinga also argues for the non-neutrality of science on theological grounds: if the world is understood as the battleground between the “City of God” and the “City of the world” then it would be strange if natural science alone was outside the influence of this struggle. Second (2), Plantinga argues that Christian believers should consult all they know when forming, testing and evaluating scientific hypotheses. So, theological and philosophical knowledge should influence the practice of science. According to defenders of this theistic science, this would make getting at genuine truth about the world easier, because Christian beliefs are true. It would also, in Plantinga's estimate, be important for protecting the believing community from unwittingly embracing scientific theories that are based on naturalistic presuppositions that are not credible to Christians.³⁷²

In the ID literature, Johnson’s “theistic realism” is an application of the theistic science -approach to the debate on evolution, creation and design arguments. Johnson argues explicitly that it is legitimate for Christian theists to take the existence of the Creator into account when trying to understand natural history and when interpreting the results of empirical science.³⁷³ On this understanding, since theists know that God could have used any mechanism in creating life, they can be open to seeing the signs of design in nature, and to discover gaps in the abilities of nature. These gaps can then be interpreted as evidence of divine intervention beyond the laws of nature.³⁷⁴ Thus on this understanding of Intelligent Design, the background assumption of theism makes it possible to consider design as a probable possibility for explaining the apparently rational structures of nature.

Other ID theorists have also sometimes been understood to be engaging in a project of theistic science.³⁷⁵ William Dembski has argued that “Intelligent Design is just the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.”³⁷⁶ From these and other statements by Dembski, it can be inferred that his information-theoretical arguments have been influenced by his interpretation of the biblical scriptures.³⁷⁷ Indeed, most of the ID theorists are Christian theists, and it is not unreasonable to assume that this must have influenced their thought about design. Understood like this, the ID movement’s design argument might be seen as a reaffirmation of a pre-existing theistic belief through scientific discoveries or as “faith seeking understanding” to use Anselm’s famous phrase.³⁷⁸

372 I am following Ratzsch’s (2004) understanding of Plantinga (1991; 2001).

373 Johnson 1995. Moreland (1994) also argues for theistic science in an early collection of ID-friendly articles, showing the influence of theistic science on the formation of ID. For Johnson (2000, 176), theism is actually the foundation of all reasoning, not just science: “If reason is to be a reliable guide, it must be grounded on a foundation that is more fundamental than logic and that provides a basis for reasoning to true conclusions about ends. Instrumental reason is not enough. That is why the fear of the Lord is not the beginning of superstition but the beginning of wisdom.” I will return briefly to Johnson’s broad understanding of the necessity of theism in chapter 8.

374 Reynolds 1998.

375 As seen in the introduction, critics of ID typically portray Intelligent Design as a religious project.

376 Dembski 1999c.

377 Similarly Forrest & Gross 2003, 140-141.

378 On Anselm, see Williams 2013.

However, the reality is more complex than this, because in principle Johnson’s theistic realism emphasises openness to different explanations. According to Johnson, theism supposes that God created nature in an orderly way, which makes it possible for us to study nature. However, theism is compatible with many different accounts of natural history. God could have used an evolutionary mechanism or he could have chosen to create living beings through miraculous instantaneous acts of creation. He could have hidden his actions, so that the order of nature would not give evidence of his actions, or he could have given us at least some evidence of his existence.³⁷⁹

Johnson argues that his theistic realism is actually a more open investigation of nature than methodologically naturalistic science. Theists believe that God could have used natural mechanisms and laws to do the creating, as in evolutionary theory, or God could have worked through miraculous events inside history, as in creationism. Instead of metaphysical speculation, theists must consult the empirical evidence to see what the most plausible account of natural history is, and what mechanisms God used in creating life.³⁸⁰ Johnson’s emphasis on the independence of God from the world and his ability to create any sort of world at all is reminiscent of the medieval debates on the logic of “possible worlds”.³⁸¹ Pierre Duhem dates the beginning of the scientific revolution at March 7, 1277, when a set of theses of Aristotelian physics was condemned as wrongfully imposing limits on God’s omnipotence. Duhem argued that this lead to the rise of empirical science, because now Christians could not discover how God had created the world based just on philosophical first principles, but had to rely on empirical observations and experiments.³⁸² This type of theistic background assumption can also be identified in many of the founders of modern science, such as Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, and is commonly referred in the theology and science -discussion.³⁸³

It seems that Johnson’s theistic realism is quite minimalistic and insufficient to provide the conclusions of the ID movement’s design argument. For an ID theorist working under his

“theistic realist” paradigm, it is still necessary to examine the evidence and to make a design argument to show that a certain pattern in nature does give evidence of intelligent design by this Creator. Johnson too affirms this. He writes that “the intelligent design position is not that miracles should be arbitrarily invoked in place of logical inferences from evidence, but rather that evidence pointing to intelligent causes, where present, should not be disregarded due to bias.”³⁸⁴ In practice, Johnson’s theistic realism therefore comes quite close to weak methodological naturalism. The major difference is that Johnson’s theistic realism includes a higher background probability for the occurrence of miracles and finding evidence of design in nature.

379 Johnson 1995.

380 Johnson 1995, appendix.

381 Knuuttila 1993.

382 Koons 2003, 80.

383 Clark 2014, chapter 3.

384 Johnson 2000, 130.

Is there nevertheless a tension between theistic realism and the ID theorists’ insistence that the design argument works independently of any religious presuppositions? Though they admit the effects of their Christian theology on the design argument, Dembski, Behe and Meyer all regard the virtues of design as an explanation to be quite obvious and commonsensical. Theism is not seen to a necessary background supposition for the design argument. In Behe’s interpretation of Johnson, cultural, religious and philosophical reasons are required to convince people that the intelligent designer is the God of Christianity.

However, Behe writes that the conviction that there is a designer is based on “inductive evidential inference”. Scientific “observation and experiment” indicate that “law-like regularities explain much of nature”, and “intelligence accounts for other aspects”. Behe notes that the designedness of nature has also been affirmed by atheists and agnostics such as the astronomer Fred Hoyle. This means that the argument cannot depend on controversial religious premises, even though it may be more easily acceptable to religious thinkers and have religious implications.³⁸⁵

Dembski and Meyer have explicitly shown some support for a complementarist understanding of the dialogue between theology and the natural sciences. They believe that theology and science provide independent, but convergent perspectives of reality which both converge on the idea of intelligent design. On this model, science and theology are understood to be quite independent of each other, though they can find common ground.

For Dembski and Meyer, design provides supportive evidence for Christian theism, rather than Christian theism providing a necessary basis for ID.³⁸⁶ The design argument does not have religious presuppositions, but it may have religious implications. This is where similar to Barbour's dialogue model, or Robert John Russell's model of creative mutual interaction, which I discussed in chapter 2.3. Dembski himself also notes the central difference: “Where I part company with complementarianism is in arguing that when science points to a transcendent reality, it can do so as science and not merely as religion. In particular, I argue that design in nature is empirically detectable and that the claim that natural systems exhibit design can have empirical content.”³⁸⁷

385 Behe 1999a . See also the discussion on Behe’s thought experiments in chapter 8.2 and Behe 2006b for Behe's own account of how Johnson influenced Behe.

386 Dembski 1999, Meyer 1999a. The idea of convergence may be illustrated with a quote from the astronomer Robert Jastrow (2000, 106-107): “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” The difference between theistic science and the type of neutral science seen in the convergence model seems to be parallel to the difference between theologies of nature and natural theologies analysed in chapters 2.4 and 2.5. The question is: Do design arguments start from a non-neutral religious starting point or from some supposedly neutral scientific starting point?

387 Dembski 2000b.

Intelligent Design as Naturalistic Science

In practice, most ID theorists’ views of science can be characterized as “weak methodological naturalism”, whatever the influence of their background suppositions. They think that the natural sciences should include a preference for finding natural explanations, but should also be open to evidence of intelligent design. For example, Behe argues that even if supernatural designers were allowed in science, “the fear of the supernatural popping up everywhere in science is vastly overblown. If my graduate student came into my office and said that the angel of death killed her bacterial culture, I would be disinclined to believe her.”³⁸⁸ According to Behe, science’s belief in a rational, understandable, law-bound universe is not threatened by belief in a Creator, but is something that religion and science can agree on.³⁸⁹ Behe’s weak methodological naturalism leads him to always look for naturalistic explanations, but also allows him to say that naturalistic explanations for something do not seem to be forthcoming.³⁹⁰ Behe attempts to define science in a way acceptable to the broader scientific community as follows: “I count as

“scientific” any conclusion that relies heavily and exclusively on detailed physical evidence, plus standard logic. No relying on holy books or prophetic dreams. Just the data about nature that is publicly available in journals and books, plus standard modes of reasoning.”³⁹¹ As I will show in chapters five and six, the ID theorists argue that the problems of explaining the fine-tuning of the cosmos, the origin of life, and the origin of biological machinery point to the necessity of design as an explanation, using such “standard modes of reasoning.”

While critiquing what I have termed strong methodological naturalism, the ID theorists typically also insist that their designer does not have to be supernatural. While Johnson’s early argumentation in Darwin on Trial critiqued the way methodological naturalism bars supernatural design from science³⁹², later ID writings have emphasized that design can be detected without knowing anything about the designer and without reliance on any prior religious beliefs.³⁹³ The idea that ID does not require supernaturalism is common in the ID literature. Dembski, Behe and Meyer all emphasizes that ID does not violate the rule against supernatural agents, because ID’s designer is not identified as supernatural and indeed the question of the designer’s identity cannot be settled by the scientific evidence. As seen in chapter 3.1, the ID theorists generally argue that the identification of the designer requires philosophical and theological arguments which are beyond science.³⁹⁴

Because of this emphasis, it seems to be open to the ID theorists to even accept strong methodological naturalism, but simply argue that their design argument does not violate its

388 Behe 2006a, 241.

389 Behe 2006a, 241.

390 Similarly Monton 2009a, 62.

391 Behe 2007a, 233.

392 Johnson 1993, chapter nine.

393 See Luskin 2008 for one overview.

394 Meyer 2009, 428-430; Dembski 2004a, chapter 25; Behe 2006a, 251.

limits. Sometimes later ID texts indeed agree with strong methodological naturalists that the supernatural should be barred from science. Thus William Dembski and Jonathan Wells argue in the ID textbook The Design of Life (2008) that “supernatural explanations invoke miracles and therefore are not properly part of science. Explanations that call on intelligent causes require no miracles but cannot be reduced to materialistic explanations.”³⁹⁵ However, the ID writers themselves do not defend any criteria for excluding the supernatural from science beyond saying that the supernatural is not required by their argument. The statement of the textbook is not typical of Dembski’s writings: elsewhere he writes that science should not exclude the possibility of “non-embodied designers”. This certainly sounds suspiciously supernatural.³⁹⁶ Allowing supernatural designers within science would be consistent with the ID movement’s critique of demarcation criteria between science and non-science. Dembski writes that “the fact that the designing intelligence responsible for life can’t be put under the microscope poses no obstacle to science. We learn of this intelligence as we learn of any other intelligence – not by studying it directly but through its effects.”³⁹⁷ Dembski's defence here is that human intelligences also can't be studied directly, but are only known through their effects. However, this defence also makes it clear that ID’s designer can’t be put under the microscope or studied directly any better than a designer identified as supernatural. In both cases the evidence presented is indirect, and it is unclear how the ID movement could consistently claim that supernatural designers cannot be part of science if the ID movement’s designer can be.

In any case, these defences of ID make it clear that the ID theorists do not generally believe their argument to require a theistic view of science. Behe, Dembski and Meyer all admit the effect of theistic beliefs on the credibility of the design argument, but go on to argue that their design argument and their critique of Darwinism is credible even without these presuppositions – as long as one does not accept a naturalistic metaphysical bias which makes such arguments impossible.³⁹⁸ The analysis of this chapter shows that the ID theorists generally see the design argument as supported by theistic premises, but not absolutely requiring them.

Intelligent Design and the Neutrality of Science

What should we think about this sort of influence of religion on the practice of science? In chapter 2.3, I introduced Mikael Stenmark’s analysis of the four different levels of the interaction between religion and science. These are the sociological level, the teleological

395 Dembski & Wells 2008, 13-14.

396 Dembski 2004a, 191. Similarly Behe 1998b, 34-35.

397 Dembski 2004a, 191.

398 E.g. Berlinski 2006 and Berlinski & Klinghoffer 2009; see also Monton 2009a. Antony Flew’s change of views from atheism to deism was also partly motivated by biological design arguments related to the origin of life. See Flew & Varghese 2007. Oppenheimer (2007) has challenged the evidential value of Flew’s change of views, arguing that an old Flew was misled by his Christian friends into changing his views without adequate justification.

level, the epistemic level and the theoretical level. Stenmark also differentiates scientific practice into the problem-stating phase, the development phase, the justification phase and the application phase. Stenmark argues that though there are some complications, it is in general acceptable for the problem-stating, development and the application of scientific results to be influenced by religions and ideologies. In chapter 2.3, I also noted some cases where science has influenced religion and vice versa. However, Stenmark goes on to argue that on the level of the justification of theories, science should seek to be worldview-neutral in the sense of not presupposing the truth of any ideology or religion.³⁹⁹

According to Stenmark, scientific theories should be accepted or rejected as science based on their scientific merits, rather than their fit with a particular ideology or religion. He gives several arguments in favour of this view. First (1), the neutral basis of science and the collaboration of scientists from different religious backgrounds is a historical ideal of science.

Though scientists were influenced by religious considerations, they typically did not reference these while trying to justify a theory scientifically. Second (2), there are examples where ideologically directed science has led to serious distortions, such as Lysenkoism. This should lead us to be cautious about worldview-partisan science. Third (3), the acceptance of worldview-partisan science would lead to the fragmentation of the scientific community. In addition to theistic science, other forms of worldview-partisan science would include feminist science, left-wing science, Islamic science and naturalistic science. Fourth (4), if naturalistic science distorts the meaning of empirical results because of a philosophical bias, then this bias can be revealed and critiqued by a thorough philosophical analysis, even without theistic science. Actually, the acceptance of theistic science would mean that we could no longer critique scientists who present other ideological assumptions (such as atheism) as a part of their science.⁴⁰⁰

So, Stenmark argues that even if belief in a scientific theory or the motivation for doing scientific research is religiously motivated, this does science no harm. The important thing is that the arguments scientists use must not presuppose the truth of any religious creed and are as widely acceptable as possible. There are a few points which make Stenmark’s defence of the neutrality of science friendlier to the project of theistic science than might initially seem, however. First, because Stenmark rejects scientism, he believes that rationality is not

So, Stenmark argues that even if belief in a scientific theory or the motivation for doing scientific research is religiously motivated, this does science no harm. The important thing is that the arguments scientists use must not presuppose the truth of any religious creed and are as widely acceptable as possible. There are a few points which make Stenmark’s defence of the neutrality of science friendlier to the project of theistic science than might initially seem, however. First, because Stenmark rejects scientism, he believes that rationality is not