Darwinism, Intelligent Design and the God ‘thing’

Nobody doubts the existence of change in nature. We know that our lives follow a trajectory from foetus through childhood, to old age, if we are lucky, and to very old age if we aren’t. We understand that the earth contains a certain rhythm: species emerge, adapt, die or transform. We don’t doubt that evolution occurs.

But by what mechanism? ‘Darwinian’ evolution makes the following claims: that all life can in principle be traced to a common ancestor; that species will adapt by a mechanism of natural selection acting on random variation; and that complex biological systems are built up from simpler ones. The important claim, stressed so often by Darwin’s 21st-century cheerleaders (let’s call them neo-Darwinists) is that the progress of life is unguided. The appearance of design in nature is no more than the appearance of design in nature. God’s invitation to the discussion is thereby rescinded, allowing the most famous of the neo-Darwinists, Richard Dawkins, to declare himself an “intellectually fulfilled atheist” (although not, unfortunately, a particularly reticent one). The science, write it down, is settled, and if anybody attempts to unsettle it then they can expect to find themselves exposed to the righteous fury of which only a complacent consensus is capable.

Enter the provocatively unsettling defenders of Intelligent Design Theory (ID), the most rigorous of whom, the biologist Stephen Meyer, sets out his case in his Darwin’s Doubt; and the most hilariously irreverent of whom, the polymath and contrarian David Berlinski, executes an exquisitely polemical exegesis in his The Deniable Darwin.

The revolution in molecular biology, they suggest, speaks truth to the power of the Darwinian Establishment.

Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, and is, therefore, exculpated from any failure to appreciate that the basic unit of life – the single living cell – contains machinery of bewildering complexity. Modern molecular biology has shown that his ‘basic’ building block, far from being a sort of Lego brick, is in fact more of a dystopian universe to which we can only dimly relate – like the world of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Mysteriously, this universe contains information encoded along strands of DNA molecules, and this coding is essential in the production of proteins which, in turn, are necessary for the viability of the living cell itself. The DNA molecule is a sort of set of assembly instructions. The ID theorist suggests that they have been written in Japanese and handed over to an English monoglot.

Why that suggestion? Because the mathematics of DNA coding demonstrate that it is overwhelmingly unlikely that these processes could take place without something (or someone) being in charge of the show. Think of a blind monkey attempting to assemble an IKEA wardrobe and multiply that by a trillion, trillion times. Even then you aren’t close to an approximation of the unlikelihood. Information theory, mathematics and molecular biology combine to suggest that the teleology the neo-Darwinists claim is illusory at the level of nature, somehow reasserts itself at the most basic level of life. Maybe, just maybe, the cancellation of God’s invitation was premature?

The neo-Darwinian response to the ID argument has tended to border on the discourteous. Like Vito Andolini on arrival at Ellis Island, the ID theorist has found her identity confiscated and replaced with a new one. She is, the Establishment claims, merely religious interloper, determined to insert God into a conversation that is the exclusive property of a secular science. She is, whisper it softly, no more than a creationist. Her position is that of the person who turns up at a dinner party thinking, wrongly, that it was supposed to be fancy dress. With luck, her embarrassment will foreshorten her stay.

She has, though, nothing to be embarrassed about.

To argue that ID theory is a version of creationism is to misunderstand the nature of theology and, indeed, of argument. Creationism deploys premises with an explicitly theistic (scriptural) content. But if ID has anything to say about religion at all then it is at the level of conclusion. The premises of ID theory are mathematical and scientific. Its conclusion might be consistent with theism, but it does not imply it. It might be a reasonable inference that the guiding intelligence implied by the ID argument is the Mind of God, but it is not unreasonable to decline to make a reasonable inference.

And there are, in any case, religious grounds for thinking that the ID position is not happily accommodated by theistic metaphysics. ID conjoins information theory with a mechanistic conception of the way causes occur in the natural world. The God suggested by ID is an architect; the Christian God is a musical conductor. Classical theism interprets the act of creation as ongoing: God spoke the universe into existence 14 billion years ago and sustains it from moment to moment. If he ever loses interest, then the music will stop. According to this view, the natural world is rinsed in a teleology that can only be explained in terms of an account of causation that is not mechanistic in the way the ID theorist presupposes. It is a picture developed by St Thomas Aquinas from insights attributable to Aristotle; and it offers a tentative solution to the mysterious fact that the universe is in any way intelligible to us at all.

There is no such thing as ‘settled science’ that adds up to more than ‘settled consensus’ and history – including the history of science – loves nothing more than burying a consensus. Scientific ‘proof’ operates, perhaps, at the level of mathematical physics and certainly not that of biology. Scientific revolutions occur and when they do they are like thunderbolts from a blue sky, or a Kasparov mating attack. The fact that all seems well is just history’s way of softening you up. And if the neo-Darwinist is so convinced he has such a good hand, then why does he insist on playing it so mischievously?