Irreducible stupidity?

For someone like me, for whom the idea of overarching patterns and underlying design helps to confer some meaning to life, Intelligent Design — the idea that there are natural systems that cannot adequately be explained by natural forces and that exhibit features which in any other circumstance we would attribute to intelligence — has a selfish attraction.

Indeed, what would the point of all this be, if the works of all my favourite novelists, poets, film-makers and artists weren’t the product of a universal mind, weren’t the victory of meaning over coincidence?

The problem is, if you’re going to take scientists to task, you’d better know your science. It’s difficult — if not impossible — to make a stand over Intelligent Design without understanding the intricacies of biology and quantum physics.

Right. I’ll get me coat.

Meanwhile, the mainstream scientific community, says Wikipedia, opposes claims that ID is a solid scientific theory: “Despite ID sometimes being called Intelligent Design Theory, the National Academy of Sciences has said, intelligent design ‘and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life’ are not science because their claims cannot be tested by experiment and propose no new hypotheses of their own. Instead it is argued that they find gaps within current evolutionary theory and fill them in with speculative beliefs.”

We’ve all seen those credulous, wide-eyed geezers in anoraks on our TVs, clutching their Da Vinci Code maps and their Bible Code log tables, rummaging through the French countryside in search of the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, accepting even that which is labelled as fiction as Gospel; never mind the myths that are sugar-coated in a little science to help make them more palatable with passing time. “I don’t believe all of it, of course, but there must be an element of truth in there someplace because it can’t all be coincidence…”

It’s when religious and controversial thinkers try to displace or to discredit science with their own theories that the real problems begin for ID.

Leon Wieseltier (whose surname translates from German, in a wonderfully evolutionary way, as “weasel animal”), the literary editor of The New Republic, calls the proponents of intelligent design “cunning souls”. “Intelligent design was conceived as the solution to a religious problem, not a scientific one. The problem is that the cosmogony in Genesis does not resemble what we know about the origins of the world.” But, as Wieseltier says, “Sanctity is not an excuse for stupidity”.

The most famous proponent of ID is William A. Dembski. Dembski, says Wikipedia, is a US mathematician, philosopher and theologian who advocates the idea of intelligent design in opposition to the theory of evolution through natural selection. While Dembski concedes that “lightning strikes are readily explained in terms of the laws of physics, with no need to invoke a designer”, he does argue for evidence of design in physics and cosmogony.

In order for a counter-theory even to be entertained by the scientific community, it has to be credible, which means rigorous testing. ID proponents protest that their theories are being ignored by academia, which breeds ignorance. “How does presenting only one theory breed ignorance?” asks Jason Rosenhouse in Should we teach “the Controversy”? “If there is only one theory that is supported by the available evidence, then surely it breeds ignorance to present anything other than that theory.”

Such critics of intelligent design, and of Dembski in particular, say no papers have been published in peer-reviewed scientific literature that support ID. Dembski has claimed that his book, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities, was peer reviewed. But the reviewing was done by mathematicians and philosophers, not by biologists and evolutionary scientists. Wikipedia says:

“While it is true to say that a work about ID has been published in a peer-reviewed journal for mathematics and philosophy, it is false to claim that any work actually supporting the existence of intelligent design has been so published in the arena of scientific press in which the topic is debated, which is what Dembski implies.”

Of course, Dembski has his own blog and his posts accumulate plenty of inflammatory comments. But even to a layperson like me, it rapidly becomes apparent that his science is armed with a peashooter while the other side has the WMDs. Philosophically, he fares a little better, but he’s widely satirised by the scientific community and many websites are dedicated to discrediting his beliefs and spoofing those of other ID proponents.

Dembski’s writings, and in particular this paper, make persuasive reading, in a Dan Brown sort of way, but he struggles to prove that ID is indeed science, and not, as many claim, politics.

It’s interesting to me that Dembski refers to a work of fiction, Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel Contact, to explain himself; his point apparently being that Sagan based his characters’ methods on actual scientific practice:

“In that novel, radio astronomers discover a long sequence of prime numbers from outer space. Because the sequence is long, it is complex. Moreover, because the sequence is mathematically significant, it can be characterised independently of the physical processes that bring it about. As a consequence, it is also specified. Thus, when the radio astronomers in Contact observe specified complexity in this sequence of numbers, they have convincing evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.”

Detractors would say, though, that if you create a long enough string of numbers you’ll always find patterns in it; just as a study of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick will produce multiple arrays of equidistant letter sequences that apparently ‘predict’ the assassination of well-known personalities.

Terrestrial intelligence is proving itself to be increasingly resistant to Dembski’s ideas. It’s as though the world, if not the universe, is moving irreversibly away from him. There are sufficient biologists and physicists capable of rubbishing his science for the amusement of their peers. But it takes a really good novelist to utterly destroy confidence in it for the benefit of the common man. Martin Amis, in his 1995 novel The Information, contrasts the vastness of the universe with his own protagonist and antagonist to remind the reader how insignificant are their earthly fixations:

“It would seem that the universe is thirty billion light years across and every inch of it would kill us if we went there. This is the position of the universe with regard to human life.”

It has to be said, though, that in discrediting and lambasting Dembski, the scientific community has occasionally been guilty of a similar form of sloppy logic to that of which they accuse him. Proponents of intelligent design are not proposing a form of creationism and they do not literally interpret the first chapters of Genesis.

Critics of intelligent design, such as Jacob Weisberg at Slate, say the IDers are resisting scientific reality, but if you read Dembski’s white paper, in it he argues dispassionately for a separation of ID from creationism, and does not say that because it seems to him that there are signs of design behind physics theory and cosmogony that this is proof of the existence of God. Dembski is not proposing supernaturalism as an explanation or a cause of ID:

“… the charge of supernaturalism against intelligent design cannot be sustained. Indeed, to say that rejecting naturalism entails accepting supernaturalism holds only if nature is defined as a closed system of material entities ruled by unbroken laws of material interaction. But this definition of nature begs the question. Nature is what nature is and not what we define it to be. To see this, consider the following riddle: How many legs does a dog have if one calls a tail a leg? The correct answer is four. Calling one thing another thing doesn’t make it something else.”

Unfortunately, Dembski’s punchline works as well against him as it does in his favour. Good science requires there to be a debate about definitions and principles, but riddles don’t really contribute anything meaningful to the debate when Stephen Hawking and Sir Roger Penrose are on the opposing team.

And yet, history bears the testimony of plenty of scientists who ignored contrary points of view simply because they were considered incompatible with the prevailing view of the universe at the time.

If ID science (such as it is) is wrong, immature, or incompatible with the science of Hawking and co., fair enough. While I can understand the traditional scientific community snubbing its nose at creationists and those seeking to rewrite the evolutionary textbooks, I find it a little difficult to understand why such noble minds even bother to grace the philosophy of ID with their scholarly attention if the science is so egregious. Dembski says:

“The controversy surrounding intelligent design occurs at many levels, but it is ultimately a scientific controversy within the scientific community… if there were no scientific controversy here, these other aspects would never have gotten off the ground.”

But others, such as Rosenhouse at Talk Reason, argue for ID to be utterly disregarded by scientists because: “its defenders have not shown that their theory can account for any of the data evolution accounts for, and they have not provided any reason for believing that their theory even has the potential to produce anything useful to science.”

Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.” To that, the proponents of intelligent design would probably say, “Define Nature.”

But it is perhaps Amis who makes the strongest, and saddest, point of all:

“The information is nothing. Nothing: the answer to so many of our questions. What will happen to me when I die? What is death anyway? Is there anything I can do about that? Of what does the universe primarily consist? What is the measure of our influence within it? What is our span, in cosmic time? What will our world eventually become? What mark will we leave — to remember us by?”

Whether or not Amis is right about the meaning of life being nothing (and not, as so many of us had come to believe, 42), asking such questions is natural enough. And the likely answer is a sobering, if peace-filled, one. Science is showing it’s increasingly likely that seeking a meaning is the only meaning we’re going to get. However you spell the name of your supreme being, if there is one, it’s become progressively more challenging to accept that it’s operating at a secular level. Coming to terms with this is going to require an evolutionary leap of humanity equivalent to those required by the Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution.

In this regard, at least, Mr Dembski and his kind are being left behind by the collective consciousness. Here’s Amis, one last time, from The Information:

“It might help if we knew where we were going, and how fast.
The Earth revolves at half a kilometre per second.
The Earth orbits the Sun at thirty kilometres per second.
The Sun orbits the centre of the Milky Way at 300 kilometres per second.
The Milky Way is travelling in the general direction of Virgo at 250 kilometres per second.
Astronomically, everything is always getting further away from everything else.”

(P.S.: The King of Gonzo’s memorial celebration makes for a suitably absurd footnote.)