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Intelligent Design and the State University:
Accepting the Challenge

This paper argues that the emerging discipline of intelligent design (ID) is an academically justifiable subject for teaching and study at the state university, both in the hard sciences and in philosophy. If ID arguments are allowed to enter into academic debate at the university level, scientific categories will be rightly expanded and philosophical questions related to the rationality of Christianity will be rightly raised within the sphere of science.

My thesis is that ID is legitimately scientific and lends epistemic support to Christian theism. As such, it gives science another tool for discovery and serves as a key witness for prosecuting an anti-trust suit against the monopoly of naturalism (or philosophical materialism) in the sciences, a perspective that disallows any theistic understanding of nature a priori. ID lends credibility to Christian theism as an explanation for nature, since Christianity claims that evidence of God qua designer should be detectible in nature (see Psalm 19:1-6; Romans 1:18-21). However, ID in and of itself does not argue for a full-fledged Christian theology, since it does not—and cannot—speak to distinctively Christian matters such as the Trinity or the Incarnation.

I. Christianity and Freedom of Thought at the State University

In a nation that enshrined freedom of religion and freedom of speech in the Constitution, it is ironic and tragic that the leading organ of higher learning in this nation—namely, the university—has separated Christian knowledge claims from its curriculum and its ethos. By “knowledge” I mean justified, true belief, which is the classical understanding, going back to Plato.[1] This situation, of course, was not always so, as George Marsden and others have amply documented.[2] Many colleges that originally shared a Christian vision have become secularized, and secularization has resulted in a fact/value dichotomy in many areas of American life, including the university. Facts abide in the domain of knowledge; they are empirical and public in nature. Values repose somewhere in the realm of subjective opinion and are private in nature. Given this conceptual apartheid, religious truth-claims—Christian or otherwise—are typically excluded from the sphere of the university with respect to their being candidates for genuine knowledge. Science speaks to facts; religions to values. While higher education should be an environment open to genuine pluralism, principled disputation, and academic freedom, Christian perspectives are largely ignored and not allowed into academic debate.[3]

Some have attempted to break apart this dichotomy by arguing that secular claims are not value-neutral or epistemologically disinterested, and that even hard science is motivated by presupposed worldviews.[4] This approach has its strengths and evens the playing field to some extent, as long as it doesn’t devolve into postmodern nonrealism or hard perspectivism.[5] However, I suggest another contrarian approach to science that can serve to make the university more open to and respectful toward Christian knowledge-claims. That approach is intelligent design.

II. Detecting Design in Nature

ID is a fairly young movement made up of scientists, philosophers, and others who deny the sufficiency of Darwinism for explaining nature. What it disputes about Darwinism is not that natural selection occurs, but that undirected natural causes alone are sufficient to explain all of life. The Discovery Institute, the leading organ of ID research and activism, defines ID thusly: “The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.”[6] Unlike the older and less intellectually sophisticated creationism, ID does not argue for a young earth, young universe, or a global flood.[7] Moreover, it is a big tent movement, with members holding to a variety of religious and non-religious convictions.[8] Thus it cannot be stereotyped as a fundamentalist revolt against science. While some of the arguments of ID may have religious implications hostile to naturalism and friendly toward theism, its methodology and presuppositions are scientific and not uniquely theological. ID does not appeal to any sacred texts for any evidential support of any of its theories.

William Dembski has done more than anyone else thus far to theoretically ground the ID movement in a bona fide scientific strategy. The details of Dembski’s thinking—which often reach a high theoretical level—cannot be pursued at length here. His most theoretical work is The Design Inference, published by Cambridge University Press in 1998. Here Dembski lays out a method for detecting design in nature by means an empirical strategy that makes use of rigorous criteria. This method of detecting intelligent causes is already accepted in several areas of science, such as, archaeology, forensic science, intellectual property law, insurance claims investigation, cryptography, random number generation, and the search for extra terrestrial intelligence (SETI).[9] ID simply employs these methods used for detecting or falsifying design and applies them to the natural sciences as well.

Design is detected through the use of an “explanatory filter” which checks for the marks of contingency, complexity, and specificity. An event or object may be reckoned the result of an intelligent cause—as opposed to a non-intelligent, material cause—if it exhibits all three of these factors. In other words, each factor by itself is a necessary, but insufficient condition, of design. But if all three factors are combined, then this threefold cluster becomes a necessary and sufficient indicator of design. 

An event or object is contingent if it is not explicable on the basis of automatic processes lacking in intelligence. An event is not contingent if it can be explained simply on the basis of natural law, such as a waterfall or a sunrise. To be more specific, Dembski notes that a salt crystal can be explained on the basis of chemical processes described by chemical laws. Thus, it is not contingent in the sense meant by Dembski. However, a complex setting of silverware is not explicable on the basis of automatically functioning natural laws. We infer from its properties that it was laid out by an intelligent agent. While natural laws act on contingent events (gravity affects the place setting), natural laws cannot exhaustively account for them.

Complexity is a form of probability, and the greater the complexity, the less the probability that the event or object came about by chance—that is, without intelligent causation. But as Dembski notes:

Complexity by itself isn’t enough to eliminate chance and indicate design. If I flip a coin 1,000 times, I’ll participate in a highly complex (or what amounts to the same thing, highly improbable) event. Indeed, the sequence I end up flipping will be one in a trillion trillion trillion . . . , where the ellipsis needs twenty-two more "trillions." This sequence of coin tosses won’t, however, trigger a design inference. Though complex, this sequence won’t exhibit a suitable pattern.[10]

Thus far, we have seen that contingency and complexity are necessary, but not sufficient, indicators or design. The last indicator is specification. If an object or event is to pass successfully through the design filter, it must exhibit a pattern independent of its mere improbability. That is, the pattern of improbable and contingent factors must be specified ahead of time, not fabricated after the fact. If one shakes up a box of scrabble pieces and throws them onto a table, the resulting arrangement of English letters will be improbable (since any number of arrangements are possible) and contingent (since the throwing of the pieces is not attributable to an automatic process). However, the pattern of letters will be largely gibberish, only pocked by an occasional short word such as “be” or “to.” This will be the case even if the procedure is repeated many, many times. But what if we compare the results of the random throwing of pieces on the table with the results of a finished game of scrabble? The pieces arranged by humans according to a game of scrabble will show many words arranged intentionally. That is, the letters will be arranged according to a pattern independent of themselves—the rules of English spelling. This orderly arrangement of parts (the scrabble pieces), then, conforms to the specificity of words. When comparing the results of the random scrabble throw with that of a game of scrabble, the marks of design are readily detectable.

Another example may help. If you randomly throw a dart against the side of a barn from twenty feet away, where the dart lands will be improbable in the sense that it might have landed in any number of places. This is still the case when you paint a bull’s eye around the dart and then remark on what an accurate dart thrower you are. This is what Dembski calls a fabrication instead of a specification. However, if a bull’s eye is painted on the barn before the dart is thrown, and one hits the bull’s eye, the result is specified. This likely indicates skill instead of luck—especially if the results are repeated. However, chance and necessity can adequately explain the destination of the randomly hurled dart.[11] To claim otherwise—by painting on a target after the fact—is ad hoc and indicates a fabrication.

The design filter is an attempt to locate instances of “specified complexity” in the natural world. This specified complexity is a mark of intelligence and cannot be reduced to chance and necessity. There many candidates for a design inference in the natural world, but I will speak only of the bacterial flagellum, a motor on the back of bacteria in a cell.

III. Michael Behe and Molecular Machines

Biochemist Michael Behe claims that Darwinism cannot account for certain features of molecular biology, since its appeal to natural law and chance (its only explanatory resources) falls short. Behe’s essential argument is that certain molecular machines could not have been brought about through gradualist, naturalistic Darwinian mechanisms that lack intelligent causation. This is because their component parts are all required to function at once and together in order to confer their vital function. Behe calls this phenomenon “irreducible complexity.” Behe writes:

By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional. An irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would be a powerful challenge to Darwinian evolution.[12]

Irreducible complexity can be contrasted with “cumulative complexity.” The latter describes a system in which complexity is built up piece by piece, as in the founding and growth of a city. Any number of buildings and roads could be removed without the city ceasing to be a city. But irreducible complexity is another animal altogether. As Behe notes

An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced…by slight, successive modifications or a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional. . . . Since natural selection can only chose systems that are already working, then if a biological system cannot be produced gradually it would have to arise as an integral unity, in one fell swoop, for natural selection to have anything to act on.[13]

Behe illustrates this concept through a mousetrap, in which every part of the device is needed for its function of catching mice.[14]

In Darwin’s Black Box, Behe gives several examples of molecular machines he takes to be irreducibly complex, including the blood clotting cascade, the cilium, and (most famously) the bacterial flagellum. He claims that “examples of irreducible complexity can be found on virtually every page of a biochemistry textbook.”[15] We will briefly consider the flagellum: an extremely complicated outboard motor used by bacteria to swim. He notes that the available scientific literature on these systems—all written by Darwinists—fail to even attempt to explain how this could be formed in a gradualist manner. It is just assumed.[16] But Behe takes the assumption to be presumption and proposes an alternative. These systems were designed ahead of time (with the entire unit in mind) such that each part was intended to work with every other part to produce the end result. This notion of planning the relationship of parts to a whole to perform a function—so common in human experience—is utterly antithetical to Darwinism, which rejects any hint of antecedent intentionality by any intelligent cause.

Behe summarizes the workings of the flagellum: 

The flagellum is quite literally an outboard motor that some bacteria use to swim. It is a rotary device that, like a motorboat, turns a propeller to push against liquid, moving the bacterium forward in the process. It consists of a number of parts, including a long tail that acts as a propeller, the hook region, which attaches the propeller to the drive shaft, the motor, which uses a flow of acid from the outside of the bacterium to the inside to power the turning, a stator, which keeps the structure stationary in the plane of the membrane while the propeller turns, and bushing material to allow the drive shaft to pike up through the bacterial membrane. In the absence of the hook, or the motor, or the propeller, or the drive shaft or most of the forty different types of protein that genetic studies have shown to be necessary for the activity or construction of the flagellum, one does not get a flagellum that spins half as fast as it used to, or a quarter as fast. Either the flagellum does not work, or it does not even get constructed at all. Like the mousetrap, the flagellum is irreducibly complex.[17]

The flagellum’s irreducible complexity is an example of Dembski’s concept of specified complexity. The flagellum is contingent— its constitution is not explicable on the basis of any natural law; it is amazingly complex; and it is specified in its functions. It is not merely improbable. The complexity fits a pattern that is independent of the actual living system. That is, the key functions of the flagellum are found elsewhere, as in outboard motors. The complex functionality of the flagellum is a case of specified complexity, which is sufficient evidence for design.[18] Moreover, the genetic assembly instructions for the flagellum are a further indication of irreducible complexity, since they indicate contingency, complexity, and specification. ID theorists have made much of the “information argument” from the specified complexity of genetic information.[19]

IV. Objections to The Design Inference

Of course, various Darwinists have challenged Behe and have advanced naturalistic explanations for the flagellum. Behe has kept track of the objections and responded to them forcefully.[20] The objection heard most often is that one must simply presuppose naturalistic explanations because of the very nature of science. This is called “methodological naturalism.” The implicit or explicit definition of science, according to methodological naturalism, is this:  

Science pursues material/unintelligent explanations for natural phenomena through empirical observation and rational theorizing.

This definition commits the fallacy of begging the question in favor of naturalistic explanations. It also insures that if there is any design evident in nature, science—so defined—is sure to miss it. Such a presuppositional veto is a knowledge-stopper, since if there is any knowledge of a designer available in nature, this understanding of science precludes it in principle. It unfairly excludes intelligence as having an empirically detectable causal primacy in any natural system.

I propose another general understanding of scientific investigation that does not suffer from this conceptual squint:

Science pursues the best explanation for natural phenomena through empirical observation and rational theorizing.

This may—or may not—include causes that are not entirely explicable on naturalistic grounds: that is, intelligent causes or intelligent design. We should, thus, follow the empirical evidence wherever it leads in the search for truth.

While the design inference is viewed by Richard Dawkins and others as a science-stopper because it is supposedly based on ignorance, it is nothing of the sort. ID does not appeal to ignorance of natural causes, but to the inadequacy of natural causes to explain the entity in question. Furthermore, the design inference is based on substantial increases in our knowledge of the natural world (from microbiology to astrophysics),[21] a knowledge that has revealed specified complexity at many levels.

But some would exclude any non-material causation from science. Consider this from Richard Lewontin, a well-known biologist:

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen. [22]

Lewontin’s “divine foot in the door” worry commits the fallacy of the false dichotomy: either naturalistic science or a divine foot in the door that kicks the life out of science. By divine foot, Lewontin (and many others) means admitting a random element into science that would play havoc with science’s desire to find meaningful patterns of explanation. After all, God (or any other supernatural agent) could supposedly do anything in nature, thus destroying orderly patterns. But this objection misfires because ID theorists do not insert intelligent causes at any and every place in the natural world such that natural laws would no longer hold. ID explains the origin or basic structure of certain natural phenomena by virtue of intelligent causes.[23] They appreciate microscopes and telescopes as much as anyone. (Moreover, the God of Christian Scripture does not intervene capriciously or irrationally.)

One last objection, repeatedly given by Richard Dawkins, is that any appeal to a designer is pointless, since this designer must also be explained by a designer, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. But the design inference gives the best explanation for certain observable states of affairs. Since the designer is not observable, its specific nature is undetermined by the design inference. Of course, if the designer is the God of Christianity, He is self-existent and not subject to further explanation (see Acts 17:25). (Elsewhere I have argued that one personal agent is the best candidate for the designer.[24]) Moreover, the specific character of the designer may be fleshed out by philosophical and theological arguments outside the ken of a design inference simpliciter.

V. Bring it On: Intelligent Design at the University

 I have not given all the arguments for ID, nor have I responded to all the objections raised against it. However, I have tried to suggest that ID is authentically a scientific model for investigation. If successful, ID arguments lend rationality to one necessary component of Christian theism: namely, that God’s designing intelligence is observable in nature. The fact that many Christians are advancing ID arguments in no sense disqualifies their arguments as being religious instead of scientific. One’s motivations in this case are irrelevant; it is one’s theories of explanation that count decisively.[25] Thinking otherwise commits the fallacy of poisoning the well. Moreover, the secular university should admit the possibility that Christianity can muster significant rational support for its worldview, even from science. If so, a genuine deliverance of science can have theological implications without violating the nature of either science or theology.[26] This possibility of the rationality of Christian theism should not be shut down a priori by any de facto ban on the presentation of ideas that are friendly toward theism and particularly Christianity.

My practical recommendations are that ID be allowed—not required—to be taught in both science and philosophy classes at the university. Critics cannot rightly argue that teaching ID is a partisan or proselytizing activity barred by the First Amendment. No specific religion is advocated and no religious texts are used for evidential purposes. Recent rulings against the teaching in ID in public high schools do not discredit my point because (1) the rulings are eminently disputable[27] and (2) the legal situation for state colleges and universities is significantly different from that pertaining to compulsory education. Even my modest proposal, however, faces severe challenges from the Darwinian establishment, given how ID advocates have been treated at state universities. Nevertheless, if my arguments succeed, this proposal is warranted and beneficial for science itself, for students, who should be exposed to rational alternatives to naturalism, and for the presentation of Christianity as a claim to knowledge.

Copyright © 2007 Douglas R. Groothuis. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.
File Date: 1.04.08

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