Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [109]
Indeed, Psalm 19:1 declares: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork.” The design inference is not confined to the ancient Hebrews. In fact, in 1999 social scientist Frank J. Sulloway and I conducted a national survey, asking Americans why they believe in God. The most common reason offered was the good design, natural beauty, and complexity of the world. One subject wrote: “To say that the universe was created by the Big Bang theory is to say that you can create Webster’s Dictionary by throwing a bomb in a printing shop and the resulting explosion results in the dictionary.”
The reason people think that a designer created the world is because, well, it looks designed, and some evolutionary theorists, such as the philosopher of science Michael Ruse, think that it’s high time we quit tiptoeing around this inference. In his book Darwin and Design, Ruse says we should admit from the start that life looks designed because it was . . . from the bottom up by evolution. Purpose follows functional adaptation: “At the heart of modern evolutionary biology is the metaphor of design, and for this reason function-talk is appropriate. Organisms give the appearance of being designed, and thanks to Charles Darwin’s discovery of natural selection we know why this is true. Natural selection produces artifact-like features, not by chance but because if they were not artifact-like they would not work and serve their possessors’ needs.” More cautious evolutionary theorists such as Ernst Mayr worry that “the use of terms like purposive or goal-directed seemed to imply the transfer of human qualities, such as intent, purpose, planning, deliberation, or consciousness, to organic structures and to subhuman forms of life.” To which Ruse replies: “Well, yes it does!” So what? At the heart of science is metaphor—Ruse notes that physicists talk of force, pressure, attraction, repulsion, work, charm, and resistance, all quite useful metaphors—and the metaphors of design and purpose work well as long as we stick to natural explanations for nature and understand that natural selection (another metaphor) is the primary mechanism for generating design and purpose, from the bottom up.
What role, then, is there for a top-down designer? If you are one of those 37 percent in the 2001 Gallup poll who believe that God guided the process of evolution then, on one level, you are in good company. In his 1996 encyclical Truth Cannot Contradict Truth, Pope John Paul II told a billion Catholics that, in essence, evolution happened—deal with it: “It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory.” Since both the Bible and the theory of evolution are true (and “truth cannot contradict truth”), John Paul II reconciled theological dualism with scientific monism by arguing that evolution produced our bodies while God granted us our souls.
This conciliatory position is fine as far as it goes, but many thinkers are not content to keep the magisteria of science and religion (per Gould) separate. They want empirical data to prove faith tenets, and it is here where the New New Creationism becomes William Paley redux. Paley was the eighteenth-century natural theologian whose “watchmaker” argument became the foundation of all modern design arguments. IDers recast Paley in modern jargon with new and more sophisticated biological examples (such as bacterial flagellum and blood-clotting