Proponents of intelligent design should stop fighting battles they cannot win, writes William Reville
THE intelligent design (ID) movement believes that life is far too complex to have arisen and developed by natural mechanisms. ID proposes that life is a product of conscious design by a super-intelligent designer - in other words God - although ID does not specifically identify the designer. This interpretation flatly contradicts the scientific explanation of the origin of life and the evolution of life by natural selection. The latest argument recruited by ID is the complexity of consciousness, which, they claim, has a non-material basis.
ID picks various examples of complex biological organisation and tries to illustrate that they could not have developed naturally by the chance and necessity mechanism of evolution.
The best known example of such "irreducible complexity" used by ID is the bacterial flagellum and I have written before in this column about this particular example. The ID case does not hold up and science can show convincingly that the flagellum, and other complex cases, are adequately explained by evolution through natural selection.
The hardest scientific problem remaining in biology must be to explain the physical basis of the self-conscious mind. How do objective patterns of electrical firings of nerve cells in the brain produce subjective reasoning and consciousness?
At present science is undoubtedly a long way from explaining this and, so, ID sees this as fertile ground on which to mount an attack. The core objective of ID is the defeat of materialism and it considers that it has no hope of achieving this unless it defeats the scientific materialistic explanations of life. ID aims to replace a materialistic worldview with a Christian one.
Headquarters of the ID movement is the Seattle-based Discovery Institute. The institute is now funding research into "non-material neuroscience", hoping to demonstrate that human cognitive capacities require a non-natural explanation. Indeed, JP Moreland, a professor of theology and fellow of the Discovery Institute, has neatly sorted out the matter in his own mind. He argues, since God "is" consciousness, "the theist has no need to explain how it came from materials bereft of it. Consciousness is there from the beginning."
In order to support the dualist position that the brain has a material and non-material nature, ID points to experiments such as those conducted by Jeffrey Schwartz in the 1990s. Schwartz used brain scans to study patients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. He studied the scans and then asked patients to actively change their thoughts by using "mindful attention". When patients did this the brain scans registered changes showing that we can change our patterns of neural firing at will. Schwartz interprets this as showing that the mind can change the brain and, so, must be something other than the brain, something non-material. Mainstream neurology counters Schwartz's interpretation by pointing out that his results simply show that the material brain can change the material brain.
Science is a long way from explaining how electrical activity causes the mind, but all this means for certain is that this problem is very difficult. We cannot conclude that there is a spiritual dimension to the brain just because a full material explanation is not yet to hand.
As someone who values moderate mainstream Christianity, I am saddened to see religion attack science and I think it is particularly unfortunate for religion when the attack is made on science's own ground. History shows that this is a most unproductive line of approach for religion. The ID movement at base is little more than a "God of the Gaps" approach.
In the short term it may introduce some uncertainty in people's minds, but in the longer term it will surely lose its battle with science, thereby weakening religion and strengthening materialism.
ID fundamentally misinterprets the nature of science. Science is materialistic in its method and scope, but science does not imply metaphysical materialism. The scope of science is the natural world and, outside of the natural world, science has no competence or authority to back up this or that position. Science has nothing to say about values (moral, aesthetic or economic), nothing to say about the meaning and purpose of life and nothing to say about religious beliefs (except where religion makes statements about the natural world that contradict science).
There is no contradiction between Christianity and science once each remains in its proper domain. Proponents of ID should recognise this, make friends with science and stop fighting battles they cannot win.
Of course, proselytising atheists such as scientist Richard Dawkins exacerbate the situation. Dawkins advocates a materialistic worldview and vigorously attacks religion. He is a readymade bogeyman figure for the fundamentalist religious creationists, but he damages science by giving the impression that his personal opinions on this matter are the official position of science.
William Reville is associate professor of biochemistry and public awareness of science officer at UCC
http://understandingscience.ucc.ie