Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology

Rating:
Summary: This book is supposed to be intelligent???
Review: This book introduces the theory of "intelligent design creationism" (IDC) to a lay readership, but it is fairly dense in some places and requires careful reading.

Dembski says IDC is 3 things: a scientific research program investigating the effects of intelligent causes; an intellectual movement challenging Darwinism; and a way of understanding divine action. Interestingly, Dembski does not cite a single published scientific study utilizing IDC concepts in biology. What kind of research program is it that doesn't perform or publish any actual research???

Chs. 2 and 3 review the place of miracles and design in the history of philosophy. These were interesting chapters, especially Spinoza's epistemological critique of miracles as a "God of the gaps" kind of reasoning. Dembski denies that IDC involves GOTG reasoning, but IDC looks tailor-made to serve as the bull's eye for Spinoza's withering critique.

The meat of the book is Chs. 4 thru 6, exposing evolution's alleged flaws and highlighting IDC's alleged strengths, but Dembski must be a vegetarian, cause there's precious little meat here. Apparently the flaws of evolution consist of the fact that there are still important issues that have not been resolved yet. (GOTG???) But why that requires us to abandon evolution is never explained. There are important, unresolved issues in the theories of gravity, medicine, and mathematics too, but few people demand that we abandon those disciplines. Why treat evolution differently? Dembski never explains.

Dembski uses the word "rigorous" over a dozen times to characterize IDC, but merely claiming to be rigorous is not the same thing as actually being rigorous. Dembski's claims seem to rest on a single scientist, Michael Behe, and on a single concept, irreducible complexity (IC). But placing all of his intellectual eggs in Behe's basket is risky, not rigorous. As my review of Darwin's Black Box reports, Behe`s concept of IC is obviously unworkable.

For example, Dembski recommends that "knock out" experiments be done to help increase knowledge of IC systems. (One protein is "knocked out" of a complex system to test what happens next.) The problem is that many such experiments have already been done, and they've been a disaster for Behe and IC. Supposedly "irreducible" systems frequently still work fine, even with dozens of parts missing, exactly the opposite of what Behe claims!

With Behe "knocked out," Dembski's empirical support for IDC vanishes, and he is left with nothing but analogies, and even those do more harm than good.

Dembski's first analogy, a hypothetical SETI broadcast of the prime numbers from 2 to 100, supposedly shows that "designed" information is similar to biological information. But the SETI numbers are all lined up neatly, in perfect order. Analogizing that to the helter-skelter arrangement of DNA hardly shows equivalent signs of design. Quite the opposite, the obvious DIS-similarity indicates that biological information is different from "designed" information.

Dembski's next analogy, that a rat making its way through a long maze without making a single wrong turn demonstrates the same sort of intelligence that we see in biological information, backfires too, since millions of extinct species demonstrate that there have been millions of "wrong turns" in the history of life. (Perhaps the designer got lost???)

Dembski is finally reduced to claiming, "Because God is intimately involved with the world moment by moment, there is no question that God interacts with the world." In other words, the pretense of empirical evidence is abandoned, the claim of scientific rigor is forgotten, and the proof of IDC turns out to be nothing more than the assumption that it is true. Can you spell C-I-R-C-U-L-A-R?

Interestingly, in Chapters 4 and 7 Dembski makes it very clear that he considers the young-earth creationists (YEC) completely ridiculous. Dembski openly rejects the literal meaning of Genesis 1 and 2 and insists that modern interpretations of Genesis must accommodate modern scientific knowledge, like the Big Bang and billions of years. YECs won't like that!

Members of other religions are likely to be just as unhappy. Dembski calls Greek and Hindu religious beliefs "pathetic."

Dembski's intolerance is worrisome, since his theory seems to be linked to definite political goals. According to Dembski, if humans are in fact designed, then we are probably hard-wired with psychosocial constraints which should NOT be transgressed. Dembski says many modern attitudes and behaviors undermine human flourishing, and says IDC "promises" to reinvigorate natural law conceptions of social ethics and eliminate those attitudes and behaviors.

That promise sounds more like a threat. Clearly Dembski thinks IDC should lead to social engineering based on his personal interpretation of the Bible; but idiosyncratic ideas for Bible-based social engineering have been tried before, in Nazi Germany, America's racist South , and apartheid South Africa, for example. The results were not good.

Hitler argued in Mein Kampf that it was morally wrong under his idiosyncratic view of the Bible to educate blacks, a position that other creationists still endorse today. Is this the kind of social engineering that Dembski has in mind?

If blacks are genetically inferior because of the Hamitic curse, as many Christian creationists, including Henry Morris, propose, then it is morally defensible, if not required, to deny blacks promotions to positions of responsibility. Is this the kind of social engineering that Dembski has in mind?

The Bible and related books also teach us about God's design for women in society, mostly in roles subservient to men. Is relegating women to second class status the kind of social engineering that Dembski has in mind? Osama bin Laden and the Taliban tried that in Afghanistan, with poor results.

In short, Dembski's book is interesting, but not good. His negative complaints about evolution are trivial. His positive claims for IDC are laughable. Social engineering plans based on idiosyncratic hallucinations about "God's will" are a menace.

Blacks, women, and other minorities should be concerned about this book. Professional biologists will laugh at its amateurishness. Neo-Nazis and KKK members will love it. Take your pick.