EVOLUTION VS. INTELLIGENT DESIGN – HERE WE GO AGAIN!

Rev. Abhi Janamanchi

February 24, 2008

On Tuesday, Feb. 19, the Florida Board of Education adopted new science standards that embrace evolution. The board approved the standards by a 4-3 vote only after they added language describing evolution as a "scientific theory" in a political attempt to appease religious conservatives who had threatened legal action otherwise. Science won the day albeit narrowly by a 4-3 margin.

Tuesday's decision followed months of mounting drama. The proposed standards, put together by a committee of scientists and science teachers, were unveiled in October. New standards were proposed in response to various factors including the current standards receiving an "F" in 2005 from a respected think tank, the poor showing of Florida students on state and national science tests, an economy increasingly driven by high-tech industries, and the need for better science literacy among school going children across the nation. In late November, the Florida Baptist Witness published comments from board member Donna Callaway who said that she opposed the new standards as she did not believe that evolution should be taught in exclusion of other theories of origin of life such as creationism and intelligent design. From then on, tension mounted with more than a dozen North Florida school boards filing resolutions in opposition to the new standards. On the other side, scientists and organizations like the National Academy of Sciences, the National Center for Science Education, and the American Institute of Biological Sciences rallied in support of the proposed standards. A St. Pete Times poll released a couple of weeks ago found that 50 percent of registered voters statewide wanted public schools to teach only creationism or intelligent design and 22 percent wanting only evolution to be taught.

Though I am personally disappointed that the board did not have the courage or clarity to go with the proposed standards as they were without diluting them, I am glad that their decision will help establish the groundwork for science standards that are more specific than the ones that exist now, empower teachers to teach evolution in classrooms, and allow students to get a better science education by learning about evolution as the basis for modern biology. I am also glad that the board did not give in to the pressure from religious conservatives to allow intelligent design to be taught in classrooms along side evolution. Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory and does not belong in a science classroom. I will come back to that issue a bit later.

The board said that evolution is a scientific theory. They are technically correct on that one. Evolution is a scientific theory just like gravitation is a scientific theory. We don't have to "believe" in evolution any more than we need to "believe" in gravity. Evolution is a theory, not because it is under continued debate by knowledgeable people, which it is not, but it is a theory in the scientific meaning of the word, because it so well and so helpfully describes so many aspects of the real world. A "theory" in science is not based on pure guesswork but is actually a framework that explains observable facts. The nation's science organizations all say that the "fact" of evolution is uncontested, while at the same time the "theory" of how various mechanisms may bring about evolution remains a healthy area of research.

The evidence in favor of evolution is utterly compelling. Darwinian theory of natural selection provides a fundamental framework for understanding the relationships of all living things. The predictions of evolution have been borne out in more ways than Darwin could have imagined when he proposed the theory 150 years ago.

So then, why is there a lack of public support for its conclusions like, for example, the results of the St. Pete Times poll that I referred to earlier or, for that mater, a 2004 national poll conducted by the distinguished Gallup organization which also yielded similar results. Francis Collins, the head of the Human Genome Project, a leading geneticist and practicing Christian, in his book The Language of God says that there is lack of public support because evolutionary theory is counterintuitive. He says, "Darwin's idea was revolutionary because it offered such a totally unexpected conclusion. Seeing new species evolve was not part of anyone's everyday experience. Despite the unquestioned complexity of certain inanimate objects, the complexity of life forms seemed wildly out of proportion to anything observable in the inanimate world... A major part of the problem in accepting the theory of evolution is that it requires one to grasp the significance of extremely long periods of time involved in the process. Such intervals are unimaginably beyond human experience."

Another reason that he cites in the book relates to the perception that evolution argues against the role of a supernatural designer or, worse, denies the existence of God. Darwinian evolution, while it does not specifically reject God, does reject the notion that there is an intelligent creative mind behind everything that happens. That is, it rejects "teleology," the idea that there is a given meaning or end to our existence.

Darwin himself was uncomfortable with the reality which he had articulated in his Origin of the Species, the idea "that there is a great procession of life evolving over millions of years by the blind happenstance of natural selection [Rev. John Gibbons]." He was far more uncomfortable, however, with the notion of a God who would or could condone suffering. He once wrote:

"The impossibility of conceiving that this wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God but whether this is an argument of real value, I have never been able to decide. I am aware that if we admit a first cause, the mind still craves to know whence it came, and how it arose. Nor can I overlook the (theological) difficulty (posed by) the immense amount of suffering through the world. I am, also, induced to defer to a certain extent to the judgment of many able people who have fully believed in God; but here again I see how poor an argument this is. The safest conclusion seems to be that the whole subject is beyond the scope of human intellect; but we humans can still do our duty."

Let me shift gears now and take a closer look at intelligent design and why it shouldn't be taught in public school science classrooms. At the same time, I want to clarify that I am not opposed to intelligent design being taught in a philosophy class or a world religions class because I have come to appreciate and respect the thought and depth with which some of the arguments are being presented by ID proponents. What I don't agree is the notion that ID is a scientific theory and should therefore be taught in science classes along side evolutionary theory.

What is intelligent design anyway?

The two words 'intelligent design' encompass a broad range of interpretations of how life came to arise on this planet, and the role that God or an intelligent agent might have played in that process. The basic ID message is that biological structural complexity was impossible to achieve through unguided natural causes, that it required supernatural intervention.

ID burst onto the scene in 1991. Some of its roots can be traced back to earlier scientific arguments pointing out the statistical improbability of the origins of life. But ID places its major focus not on how the first self-replicating organisms came to be, but rather on perceived failings of the theory of evolution to account for life's subsequent stunning complexity.

ID's founder is Phillip Johnson, a California lawyer and evangelical Christian, whose book Darwin On Trial first laid out the ID position. Those arguments have since then been further expanded by others including Michael Behe, whose book Darwin's Black Box elaborated the concept of irreducible complexity, and more recently, William Dembski, a mathematician trained in information theory, who proposed 'complex specified information' which is related to what he calls 'design inference.' Both are attempts to identify phenomena in nature that are unexplainable through natural causes – the structurally complex systems and molecular machines that require the action of an intelligent agent. ID tends to operate on the underlying assumption that either evolution or an intelligent agency explains nature. Disproving evolution leaves ID as the default winner. As a result of this mindset, ID literature focuses on problems with evolution.

According to Francis Collins, ID basically rests upon three propositions:

1. Believers of God need to resist evolution because it promotes an atheistic worldview.

2. Evolution is fundamentally flawed since it cannot account for the intricate complexity of nature.

3. If evolution cannot explain irreducible complexity, then there must've been an intelligent agent who stepped in to provide the necessary components during the course of evolution.

This leads me to share with you why ID fails as a scientific theory and therefore, should not be taught in science classrooms.

It fails as a scientific theory because all scientific theories represent a framework for making sense of a body of experimental observations. The primary utility of a theory is not to look backward but to look forward. ID fails profoundly in this regard. ID also fails with regard to its emphasis on irreducible complexity of multicellular organisms. Michael Behe suggests that primitive organisms may have been preloaded with all of the genes that would ultimately be necessary for the development of complex multicomponent molecular machines. Behe makes a fundamental error with his God-of-the-gaps theology which argues that anything which cannot routinely be explained by known physical laws must be ascribed to the intervention of God. In Behe's case, of course, it is an intelligent Designer who assumes the role of filling in the gaps. Setting aside the fact that no primitive organism can be found today that contains this cache of preloaded information for future use, our knowledge of the mutational rate of genes that are not being utilized make it highly improbable that such a storehouse of information would have survived long enough to be of any use. Also, cell biologists like Kenneth Miller have shown that biochemical machines that Behe found mysterious provide us with powerful and compelling examples of evolution in action.

ID fails from a theological standpoint as well. If we place God or a transcendent designer within the gaps of our knowledge, we run the risk that when science advances and a natural explanation is found, the place for God disappears. ID tends to present God as a clumsy creator who didn't quite know what he/she was creating and then having to intervene at regular intervals to fix the inadequacies of his/her own initial plan for generating the complexity of life. Modern theologians have frequently registered their doubts that such a God-of-the-gaps method is reliable for depicting God's action in the natural world. For all these and other reasons, as Francis Collins says, "ID is not headed to the promised land; it is headed instead to the bottom of the ocean."

In conclusion, I want to state that the standard model of evolutionary biology constitutes the best science. ID and creationism are unsatisfactory models for scientific research; further, they are not even science at all, as I understand the discipline. It is incumbent on us to offer young people only the best science, and the best biological science in our era proceeds from the recognized theory of evolution complete with random variation and natural selection.

I take this position because I believe that science at its best and religious commitment at its best honor truthfulness. Further, I believe that religious communities and scientific research along with science education must cooperate for the betterment of our society. As Unitarian Universalists, our faith demands the best science; the best biology follows in the tradition of Darwinism and neo-Darwinism and subsequent emendations to Darwinian Theory. Faith seeks understanding said St. Anselm eight centuries ago and right now the best understanding of living things requires the theory of evolution. In short, I support evolutionary biology as an expression of my religious faith, not in contradiction to it.

I am not suggesting that it should become a dogma of faith. Science should remain science, even when pursued by people of faith. Like all science, evolution must be subject to critical review and revision over time. Based on my theological support for the best science, I embrace this ongoing critical process and fully expect to see expansion and deepening of our understanding of biological life in the generations to come.

The Darwinian model may not be the whole truth, to be sure. No scientific theory can count as apodictic truth. Yet there is enough truth in evolutionary theory to spawn progressive research and advance the study of medicine and related disciplines to benefit humanity. This makes it the best science available today. It is our ethical responsibility to provide young people in classrooms with the best science available, and today that's Darwin's model of evolutionary biology.

REFERENCES:

St. Pete Times cover story and editorial, Feb. 20, 2008

Francis Collins, The Language of God

Eugenie Scott & Glenn Branch, editors, Not In Our Classrooms: WHY ID Is Wrong for Public Schools

Sermon on evolution by Rev. John Gibbons