Some notes on Intelligent Design

There are a couple of good items in the April issue of First Things (not yet online) concerning intelligent design that I wanted to highlight.

First, Fr. Edward T. Oakes has a letter responding to Christoph Cardinal Schönborn’s article from January. Fr. Oakes makes the very important point that one concedes way too much in advance to atheist Darwinians by allowing that Darwinism is incompatible with theism. Most importantly, it’s just not true (and I agree with Fr. Oakes there). Secondly, it’s not especially smart for Christians to put all their eggs in the ID basket. Even if proponents of ID are correct in pointing out lacunae in evolutionary theory, there’s no guarantee that those shortcomings won’t end up being filled out in a purely naturalistic way. To think otherwise risks falling into a bad “god of the gaps” kind of reasoning. It’s better for Christians to engage people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett on philosophical grounds where they’re vulnerable in their inference that Darwinism entails the denial of theism.

The other item of note is an article on the Dover, PA ID case by Villanova law professor Robert T. Miller. Miller thinks the case was rightly decided, but that the judge erred in saying that ID is religion. It’s not science, Miller says, in the sense that it provides an explanation for observed phenomena in terms of lawlike generalizations, but it’s not religion in the sense that it appeals to sacred texts or other purportedly revealed knowledge.

What ID does, he says, is posit an intelligent and purposive entity to explain observed phenomena. But such a deity-like being, by definition, doesn’t act according to prescribed law-like regularities, so ID can’t be science in a robust sense (Miller allows that it could be considered science in the “thin” sense that it offers a rational explanation for observed phenomena). ID is better understood as a kind of metaphysics, and not an especially promising kind compared to more traditional metaphysical arguments (e.g. the cosmological argument), for the same kind of “god of the gaps” reasons as mentioned above.

Miller suggests that, rather than trying to insert complicated philosophical arguments into science courses, it would be both constitutionally permissible and desirable for other reasons to have high schools offer a course on metaphysics where students learn about the classic philosophical arguments for God’s existence, as well as the criticisms of those arguments. Makes sense to me.