The ID Report

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Of course, I have forgotten or omitted lots of worthy titles, but fundamentally it was much easier then than now to rhyme off the key titles you would need to read to really keep up with the ID controversy. Today, you need a library shelving cart and a budget to match.

The pace of publishing new books about the intelligent design controversy (and accompanying DVDs), has grown significantly, as has the degree of specialization of their topics. When I first started studying the subject in depth in 2002, while writing my overview of the controversy, By Design or by Chance?, only a few key books out there argued one thesis or another on ID.

In 1991, the worthwhile titles suitable for the lay person included law prof Phillip Johnson's Darwin on Trial (which really brought the question about whether one was allowed to believe that Darwin might be wrong to the lay public). End stop. That was about it. In 1996 Darwin's Black Box laid out biochemist Mike Behe's argument for irreducible complexity, and then in 2000 Icons of Evolution, embryologist Jonathan Wells sset out at book length the often shoddy arguments that prop up textbook Darwinism. Basically, he made it clear that if you learned your Darwinism from a mid-90s textbook and if the subject of evolution is in any way important to you, well, you've been snookered in defense of a philosophical cause. Of course, if you wanted to risk the wilds of information theory, you could try mathematician William Dembski's The Design Inference (1998) or No Free Lunch (2002).

The anti-ID titles I recall were Robert Pennock's Tower of Babel (2000), Ken Miller's Finding Darwin's God (2000), and John Haught's God After Darwin (2001). Michael Ruse's The Evolution Wars was especially helpful for the excerpts from various older works that many lay readers might not be able to get from the local public library.

In the meantime, Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards' Privileged Planet , whose DVD was the subject of the 2005 second Smithsonian uproar, and journalist Lee Strobel's Case for a Creator , and - on the anti-ID side - Barbara Forrest's Creationism's Trojan Horse (2004).

Of course, I have forgotten or omitted lots of worthy titles, but fundamentally it was much easier then than now to rhyme off the key titles you would need to read to really keep up with the ID controversy. Today, you need a library shelving cart and a budget to match.

Publishers who might have avoided the ID controversy in the past do not seem as afraid to touch it any more. My own By Design or by Chance?, for example, was published by a liberal, not a conservative Christian book house. A liberal house might have been expected to produce a dull rant against ID by a process theologian rather than an examination of the roots of the growing controversy. (Note: Lots of dull rants have been published all across the board, but presumably you, gentle reader, are only interested in hearing about books that could conceivably be of interest to a lay public.)

So where are we now? We have arrived at the point where titles about the ID controversy clearly and obviously sell well, over a fifteen-year period. And therefore I must now write my first ever year-end book list on ID. The following are certainly not the only important books/DVDs published this year, but they are the ones I have read, on which I can offer some thoughts. The books are in alpha order by author; they are too disparate to rank in any order of excellence or usefulness.

■ Mike Behe's publisher, Free Press, has put out a tenth anniversary edition of Darwin's Black Box, featuring an Afterword, in which Behe reflects on the uproar that followed the 1996 publication and addresses some of his critics:

... although the cultural dynamic is still playing itself out, a decade after the publication of Darwin's Black Box is stronger than ever. Despite the enormous progress of biochemistry in the intervening years, despite hundreds of probing commentaries in periodicals as diverse as The New York Times, Nature , Christianity Today , Philosophy of Science, and Chronicle of Higher Education, despite implacable opposition from some scientists at the highest levels, the book's argument for design stands.

For a book that was supposed to sink out of sight amd catcalls, DBB did pretty well for Free Press (a Simon and Schuster division). Apparently, Behe is publishing a new book with Free Press in 2007, answering his critics in more detail. So contrary to rumors I have heard, FP is still interested in ID titles. (And they'd be fools not to be.)

■ Recently, I created something of a flap over at the American Scientific Affiliation public list (which provides a wonderful window into the views and character of scientists who are anti-ID and - for the most part - also profess some state of Christianity). A number of people with time on their hands have expressed annoyance that I said that their poster child, genome mapper Francis Collins, is an intellectual lightweight, at least to judge from his recent book, The Language of God. I had previously only hinted at that. Collins' anti-ID take on the ID controversy sounds shallow and derivative, but that is certainly not the reason I regard him as a lightweight. After all, the ID controversy is not germane to his book, the key subject of which is his personal conversion to Christianity. In any event, I have spoken well of scientists such as Alister McGrath and Simon Conway Morris who are anti-ID but whose books certainly do not come across as lightweight.

No, the reason I think you should give Collins only to people who need to be reassured that a scientist can indeed be a Christian - but are not expected to think too hard about what that might actually mean - are

(1) He should have said way less about ID and found much more space for some questions directly relevant to his position, like the problem of patenting and commercialization of human gene sequences, a problem which caused his atheist predecessor Watson to walk out on principle. There is room here for a detailed ethical approach, one that will take us into the next few decades.
(2) As I noted elsewhere, he seems not to grasp that finding testable gene sequences, as he did for cystic fibrosis, mainly results in the abortion of babies who end up in the Medical Waste bucket because they are personally rejected by their parents for not having the right genes. Obviously, Collins has the right to do the research, but if he is going to walk away from a detailed examination of that issue and sing folk songs about making CF "history" instead, I cannot advise taking him very seriously. In other words, he talks about all kinds of issues, including origin of life and the universe, but not much about the issues that are germane to his position as a Christian physician and genome mapper.
(3) Most damaging, he never properly addresses the "evolutionary psychology" challenge to his claims about religious experience and the nature of the human being, mainly because he seems not to have updated his knowledge base from when C.S. Lewis was writing in the mid-twentieth century. Those challenges can, of course, be addressed and refuted, but Collins does not seem to be the man to do it.

In fairness to Collins, he is not alone in failing to grasp the significance of this last point: David B. Hart, reviewing Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell in First Things, writes, amazingly,

Certainly the Christian should be undismayed by the notion that religion is natural "all the way down." Indeed, it should not matter whether religion is the result of evolutionary imperatives, of an inclination toward belief inscribed in our genes and in the structure of our brains, or even (more fantastically) of memes that have impressed themselves on our minds and cultures and languages. All things are natural. ...

Hart then goes on to talk about ... God.

One wonders how he can possibly get this so wrong. IF religious feelings can be accounted for by an evolutionary adaptation or accident, they do not testify to any truth about the universe or God. They provide information only about a given state of the life form that experiences them.

Religious beliefs can testify to a truth about the universe or God only to the extent that they correspond to actual information from the outside. That is the one and only reason why atheists are so anxious to find an evolutionary explanation such as Dennett offers - and why Christians, among others, do not generally accept it. Hart was certainly missing a step when he wrote that!

Still, many people will read Collins' book and coo over the fact that a scientist can be a Christian because they won't ever think too hard about it, which is why I have elsewhere recommended the book - but not to you if you are indeed a sharp cookie.

■ Earlier this year, I reviewed Norbert Smith's Passive Fear: Alternative to Fight or Flight, detailing Smith's research into the way many animals such as alligators may choose to neither fight nor flee a threat; they may simply reduce their metabolic rate. Animal lovers will find Smith's work of considerable interest, as it shows that much may be learned from moving a little off the broad highway of conventional ideas about animals, like "fight or flight."

■ "Annoy a godless liberal; buy this book!", says Ann Coulter of Jonathan Wells' new The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. The book is in many ways an update of Icons of Evolution (2000), but the furore was a story in itself. The cover is much more fun, and the book uses sidebars, of which I am a great fan.

■ In a recent book, Darwinian Conservatism, Larry Arnhart argues that American conservatives should embrace Darwinism as their salvation. John West, a Discovery Institute senior fellow, argues the contrary inDarwin's Conservatives: The Misguided Quest. It would be a great idea to read both books together. Personally, I think the answer depends on what you mean by "conservatism." Currently, there seem to be about four different conservative currents: family values conservatism, free market activism, libertarianism, and old-fashioned toryism. The latter three can probably at least support Darwinism, but the family values activists not only oppose it, they contribute heavily to the fray. So promoting faith in Darwinism would probably split a conservative movement and deprive it of most of its foot soldiers.

■ Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt, also Discovery Institute fellows, have written a book, A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature , that set me thinking about my school days. I used to think I was so lucky, studying classical literature instead of stocking shelves in the family business (as one of my brightest classmates had to rush back home to do, after his father suddenly dropped dead). contrary to the self-serving memoirs of Sixties radicals, in the mid-60s, many of us assumed we were lucky to be in school and that classical literature had something to teach us. Actually, it did and does, but you would never know that from current courses in chimp footprint art, creative profanity, or whatever. This book links ID ideas with art and literature, offering some interesting observations on Shakespeare.

■ Lastly, in Darwin Strikes Back, historian of science Thomas Woodward advances the thesis that the mid-decade is a crisis point and that the battle is shifting in favor of intelligent design. He is likely right about the crisis point. For one thing, ID is spreading to many countries worldwide. One difficulty for people attempting to assess the field and determine who is winning is that contemporary popular media are nearly useless as sources of information.

Case in point: North American mainstream media report that the vast majority of Americans do not believe Darwinism, with the clear implication that there must be something wrong with them. It is almost inconceivable that media boffins, for whom materialism is the normal way of thinking, would actually be interested in knowing why so many who are at liberty to doubt take up that option. And the media boffins are not likely to change. The media they govern are more likely to simply decline in importance as a source of information.

As a result, assembling any clear picture of the struggle requires more than an average amount of trouble. But Woodward provides arguments worth considering for his position that the tide is shifting in favor of ID.

Merry Christmas, Season's Greetings, Happy Chanukah, and Happy New Year.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).