“A Not So Intelligent Design”
By Reverend James Kubal-Komoto
Saltwater Church
Des Moines, Washington
September 4, 2005
It was 80 years ago this summer that the nation’s attention was riveted on a Tennessee courtroom as the great orator William Jennings Bryan and the great lawyer Clarence Darrow debated whether Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution should be taught in public schools.
You would think that the debate about what high school students should learn in a biology class would be over by now, but it’s not.
As our nation begins a new school year, there are 70 clashes in 26 states about what students should be learning in their biology classrooms.
This time around, it’s not the theory of evolution vs. a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis. Rather, there is a new challenge to the theory of evolution, and it’s called “intelligent design.”
This morning I want to address three questions: “What is intelligent design?” “What’s wrong with intelligent design?” and “How should we as Unitarian Universalists respond?”
Let me start with the question, “What is intelligent design?” but let me do this by first saying what it’s not.
If you’re ever driving to Mt. St. Helens, about 10 miles off I-5 in Silver Lake, Washington, you can find the “Mt. St. Helens Creation Information Center,” which purports to offer geological evidence that the earth is only about 6,000 years old and that it was created by God as described in the Book of Genesis. This is not intelligent design, but rather creation science.
Then what is intelligent design?
Intelligent design isn’t a new idea. In fact, it’s a rather old idea. Simply stated, it is the idea that apparent “design” we see in nature, especially in biological organisms, is too complex to have arisen by chance and points to the existence of an intelligent designer, namely God.
The medieval Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas used it as one of his five proofs of the existence of God. Newton believed in intelligent design as did most scientists up until Darwin, who did himself early in his career.
It wasn’t until Darwin proposed the theory of evolution, the idea that random genetic mutations combined with natural selection could explain the diversity of life on the planet, that many people began to question intelligent design, and today nearly all scientists reject intelligent design.
Recently, however, a new crop of advocates of intelligent design have popped up. Unlike so-called young earth creationists, some who believe that the earth is only 6,000 years old and that human beings and dinosaurs once walked the earth together like Fred and Dino, these intelligent design folks are scientifically sophisticated.
Many of today’s advocates for intelligent design agree with other scientists that the universe is about 14 billion years old. They even accept that mutation and natural selection have contributed toward change within species. Some intelligent design advocates even accept common descent, the idea that all species came from a common ancestor and that all of us have a monkey’s uncle on our family tree.
Past advocates of intelligent design often used the human eye as an example of a biological structure that couldn’t possibly have arisen as a result of chance, but today’s advocates focus their attention on the inner working of cells. However, their argument is still the same.
Michael Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University, is probably the most well-known advocate for intelligent design. His book Darwin’s Black Box was surprise best seller, and in this book he argues that the inner workings of a human cell are “irreducibly complex.”
What does he mean by “irreducibly complex?”
Behe uses the analogy of a mousetrap: A typical mousetrap, he says consists of five different parts - -platform, spring, catch, hammer, and hold-down bar. If any one of the five parts is missing, the mousetrap won’t work. Thus, a mousetrap, he suggests, is “irreducibly complex.”
Many of the chemical processes that take place within cells, Behe says, are also irreducibly complex. If one part of the process was missing, he says, the whole process would break down, and thus it doesn’t make sense that they could be formed by “numerous, successive, slight modifications,” because the development of each modification would provide no selective advantage for survival until all of them had occurred.
One very specific example that Behe uses is the development of the bacterial flagellum - - a tiny propeller-like structure that sticks out the back of a singled-celled organism. It’s a rather complex structure that is built of at least 20 different proteins, and again, if any of the parts are missing, it won’t work.
As a result of the theory of evolution’s alleged inability to explain the development of such structures, advocates of intelligent design say, “Darwin’s theory is under increasing scientific attack.”
Advocates of intelligent design are also saying that high school students should hear about these criticisms of Darwin. In fact, in Ohio, New Mexico, Minnesota, and Kansas, state curriculum standards require teachers to acknowledge that there is controversy among scientists over evolution. Dover, Pennsylvania, has gone further, requiring teachers to tell students that the theory of evolution “is not a fact”, that “gaps in theory exists of which there is no evidence” and “intelligent design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view.
And in August, President Bush supported the “teach the controversy” approach and said that the theory of intelligent design should be taught along side evolution in the nation’s public schools so that students can “be exposed to different ideas” and “understand what the debate is about.”
And a poll released this past week shows that nearly two-thirds of Americans support teaching both evolutionism and creationism in public schools.
Let me now answer the second question, “What’s wrong with intelligent design?” If there are legitimate criticisms of the theory of evolution, shouldn’t students get to hear about them and discuss them?
What’s wrong with intelligent design? First, intelligent design isn’t really science. The proponents of intelligent design don’t have any evidence at all of an intelligent designer. All they are saying is that, “It can’t be just random mutation and natural selection, so there must be an intelligent designer there,” whose name just happens to be spelled with three letters. It’s an interesting hypothesis, but as any sixth grade science student knows, science is more than hypothesis. It includes testing and evidence.
This is why the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Academy of Sciences have both described intelligent design as scientifically unwarranted - - not because their members are all atheists, because they aren’t, but because of lack of evidence.
If scientists found a messaged encoded within the molecules of our DNA saying, “Made by God,” that would be good evidence. Otherwise, the subject of intelligent design is not really science. It’s philosophy.
Now from my perspective, it might not be a bad idea to have high school students examine intelligent design from a philosophical perspective, but if they ever did, it does make me wonder about some things.
Consider this: In the human body, the opening to the esophagus is right next to the opening to the trachea. More than 99.9 percent of the time, there are no problems, but when a piece of food goes down the wrong way, this design flaw can be fatal.
If there is an open and honest discussion of intelligent design in our nation’s classrooms, will teachers and students be able to discuss the possibility that if there is an intelligent designer, the designer might not be as intelligent as some might think?
Also consider all the suffering that exists on this planet, human and otherwise. We’ve seen too much of it this past week. If there is an open and balanced discussion of intelligent design in our nation’s classrooms, will teachers and students be able to discuss the possibility that if there is an intelligent designer, that designer was either drunk or cruel when creating life on this planet?
Also consider this: Throughout human history, people have turned to God as an explanation when they couldn’t figure any other explanation. This God is commonly called “the God of the Gaps.” However, throughout human history, natural phenomena that were once thought to be unexplainable, or explainable only by reference to supernatural events, have turned out to have a scientific explanation. For example, when Anthony Hewish and Jocelyn Bell discovered the first pulsar in 1967, they wondered whether it was a beacon signaling the existence of an alien intelligence. Only later, it was discovered that there were natural, unintelligent explanations for the same phenomenon. Will teachers and students be allowed to have an open and balanced discussion about how often arguments for intelligent design have turned out to be wrong?
Another problem with intelligent design is that argument for “irreducible complexity” is flawed.
How does nature evolve complex processes and parts with dozens of simpler, interdependent processes and parts over time? The answer, scientists say, is that very simple structures and processes that arose as a result of mutation and natural selection for one function sometime get co-opted for another more complicated function.
Now what exactly does this mean? Here’s an analogy to everyday life.
Imagine your standing in the middle of a park wanting to play baseball. It would be highly improbable for 17 other people to randomly show up also wanting to play baseball. However, it’s not unlikely that 17 other people might show up for other reasons, and if you were persuasive enough, you might convince them to play baseball together. It seems like that’s what happens in nature a lot.
Or in other words, it seems like nature is a lot like Martha Stewart, able to take several things originally used for other purposes and create something totally new out of them that you wouldn’t have even thought possible before hand, like making a grandfather clock out of old toothbrushes - - though I’ve never seen Martha Stewart make a bacterial flagellum out of different proteins. But as Francis Crick, the co-discover of DNA once said, “Evolution is cleverer than you are.”
The third problem with intelligent design is the motivations of the organizations advocating it. Many of the advocates of intelligent design would have you believe that they are among a growing number of scientists who have independently begun to question Darwin.
Such is not the case.
There are relatively few scientists really questioning Darwin today, and most who do are affiliated with the Discovery Institute, a think tank whose world headquarters are located in downtown Seattle. I want to suggest we should be suspicious of the Discovery Institute.
Why?
When you look closely at the Discovery Institute you discover that intelligent design is less about a scientific critique of Darwinism than it is a political strategy to create a place in public life for God and the conservative political and religious values in public life they believe God stands for.
You see, the Discovery Institute receives its funding from 22 foundations, at least two-thirds of them with explicitly religious missions. For example, the Stewardship Foundation, which was started by the Weyerhauser family, is a major funder. One of the original purposes of the Stewardship Foundation, according to its website, was “to teach the Christian faith as laid down in the Old and New Testaments of the Holy Scriptures.”
This doesn’t sound like a good starting place for impartial science.
To make matters worse, according to individuals associated with the Discovery Institute, many of the social problems that we face as a society are related to the disappearance of a supernatural understanding of God and human beings.
As one Discovery Institute document says the “materialist conception of reality” - - the legacy of thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud - - has “infected virtually every area of our culture, from politics and economics to literature and art” and has had “devastating effects” on our attitudes toward “personal responsibility,” “criminal justice, product liability, and welfare,” and has led to “coercive government programs.” The Discovery Institute “seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies” and a return to a theistic understanding of the universe.
How does the Discovery Institute plan to do this?
They want to start by creating doubt about the theory of evolution. For now, they don’t even advocate teaching intelligent design in public schools and actually oppose the folks in Dover, Pennsylvania, who want to do so, most likely because they’re worried that the current U.S. Supreme Court might rule that teaching intelligent design is unconstitutional, as it has ruled regarding the teaching of creationism.
But within five years, they want to see “intelligent design theory as an accepted alternative in the sciences and scientific research being done from the perspective of design theory,” and within twenty years, they want “to see design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life.”
Why?
John West, a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute, says: “In short, intelligent design opens the door to a theory of a nonmaterial soul that can be defended within the bounds of science.”
“Once the idea of a nonmaterial soul gains new currency,” West says, “the ethical context in which issues such as abortion and euthanasia are debated will considerably expand.”
“At the very least,” he says, “the grounds on which science can undercut free will and personal responsibility will be significantly diminished.”
To summarize, the intelligent design movement is the result of a few dozen scientists backed by wealthy religious conservatives who hope that intelligent design will bring about a cultural and political transformation in this country which will lead to restrictions on abortion and euthanasia, unrestricted free market capitalism, and a reduction in government-funded services to the poor, because everyone will finally realize it’s the fault of the poor that they’re poor.
There is a certain historical irony here. William Jennings Bryan, Clarence Darrow’s opponent in the “Scopes Monkey Trial,” was religiously conservative but politically progressive, and opposed the teaching of evolution, in part, because he thought it also provided justification for unrestricted capitalism, - - an economy in which only the fittest survived. Eighty years later, critics of evolution are arguing the opposite, that belief in evolution justifies restrictions on capitalism.
(Is it any wonder President Bush wants to teach the controversy?)
Let me now try to answer my third question, “How should we as Unitarian Universalists respond to intelligent design?”
I want to suggest that we need to keep this junk science out of our schools. Currently in Washington State, there is no mandate to either teach intelligent design or to teach the non-existent controversy among scientists about Darwin’s theory of evolution, but that could change.
I also want to suggest that the emergence of intelligent design as an issue in this country is related to a broader trend that we should be concerned about, a decline in knowledge of and respect for science in our society.
Why is this so important?
Throughout human history, three related trends have often gone hand in hand. Skepticism toward religious orthodoxy, knowledge of and respect for science, and improvement of the living conditions for most people.
When you have found one or two of them, you usually also find the other. When one or two is missing, the other is usually as well.
Why is this? Is it because the technology that science makes possible makes peoples lives easier?
Technology may play a role, but more importantly, it is the qualities of mind that the study of science engenders - - namely open-mindedness and skepticism - - that are also the qualities of mind that are most important for good citizens in a democratic society, which history shows is the form of society which leads to the best living conditions for the most people.
Such being the case, we should not be so surprised that scientists are found in disproportionate numbers in the ranks of social critics and social reformers since the questioning and skepticism that science engenders also leads scientists to more readily question the injustices and irrationalities of society- - such as classism, racism, sexism, and homophobia, which are too often justified by religious authorities (which is where religious skepticism comes in).
But in the United States today, knowledge of and respect for science is in trouble
Not only do many of our political leaders simply ignore the teachings of science regarding things such as global warming and stem cell research, but most people in this country are woefully ignorant of both the methods and teachings of science. As the New York Times reported this past week, most American adults really don’t understand what molecules are; fewer than a third understand DNA as having to do with heredity; only about 10 percent know what radiation; and 20 percent believe the Sun revolves around the earth. And regarding the Discovery Institute’s goal of creating doubt about evolution, they don’t have far to go: A poll released this week shows that only 26 percent of Americans believe that natural selection alone is responsible for the diversity of life on this planet.
So if I am right about the relationship between religious skepticism, respect for science, and the improvement in living conditions of most people, this country is in real trouble.
I can’t help but wonder, if more people had the critical thinking skills that a good science education engenders, would we now be bogged down in the quagmire of Iraq? Would so many people be suffering and dying in New Orleans if more people had paid attention to what science teaches us about global warming, hurricanes, and levees?
Finally, I think we need to loudly object to the Discovery Institute’s claims about the negative effects of learning about evolution.
You see, I am a religious naturalist. (No, this doesn’t mean I like to pray naked.) Rather, to be a religious naturalist means that to the best of my finite, limited, and imperfect knowledge, the natural world is all that exists. I do not deny the possibility of something existing beyond the natural world, but I have no experience of this and know no convincing evidence of this. Beyond the natural world, there is only mystery. And to be a religious naturalist means that, for me, God is a word I use to metaphorically describe all the aspects of the natural world that are inspiring, sustaining, transforming, and redeeming as well as to describe that mystery beyond all knowing that lies beyond the natural world.
And as a religious naturalist, I find a great deal of meaning in the story that evolution tells. When I reflect on the story that evolution tells, I find a very important message in that story because the story of evolution not only tells how life emerged and has changed but also tells that all of life is connected, that there is something inside of me that is not only inside of each and every one of you but is most likely inside of each and every living thing on this planet.
In a time of so much division between humanity, in a time in which so much separates us from one another, in a time in which we are destroying our planet and such much of the diversity of life on it through our neglect, is there a more important lesson for any of us to learn than that we truly are all connected?