Why Darwin Matters_ The Case Against Intelligent Design - Michael Shermer [27]
The technical term for this process is methodological naturalism, and Intelligent Design theorists harp about it incessantly. Methodological naturalism holds that life is the result of natural processes in a system of material causes and effects that does not allow, or need, the introduction of supernatural forces. In his book Darwin on Trial, University of California, Berkeley, law professor Phillip Johnson, the founding father of the Intelligent Design movement, accused scientists of unfairly defining God out of the picture by limiting the search to only natural causes, and argued that scientists who postulate that there are supernatural forces or interventions at work in the natural world are being pushed out of the scientific arena on the basis of nothing more than a fundamental rule of the game. Johnson wants the rules of the game changed to allow methodological supernaturalism.
Okay, let’s change the rules. Let’s allow methodological supernaturalism into science. What would that look like? How would that work? What would we do with supernaturalism? For the sake of argument, let’s assume that Intelligent Design theorists have suddenly become curious about how exactly the Intelligent Designer operates. As researchers who are now given entrée into the scientific stadium with an addendum to the rules that allows supernaturalism, they call a time out during the game to announce, “THEN A MIRACLE OCCURS.” What do we do now? Do we halt all future experiments? Since science is what scientists do, what are we supposed to do with such supernatural explanations? My response to the God of the Gaps argument is: “I THINK YOU NEED TO BE MORE EXPLICIT HERE IN STEP TWO.”
Even if Intelligent Design advocates are willing to continue searching, what will they do if they discover a new force of nature that accounts for design? How will they identify it? Will it be considered a natural force, or a supernatural force? When electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces were discovered in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scientists did not identify them as supernatural forces; they simply added them to the known forces of nature. If IDers eschew all attempts to provide a naturalistic explanation for life, they abandon science altogether.8
There is no such thing as the supernatural or the paranormal. There is only the natural, the normal, and mysteries we have yet to explain.
Intelligent Design’s Best Arguments
As we have seen, creationists and Intelligent Design theorists have made dozens of arguments trying to disprove evolution, most hinging on the truly meaningless search for a single piece of data that will fill the gap of the week. But much of their recent success in classrooms and with school boards has been in using the language of science to argue that the data support Intelligent Design rather than evolution. Here I present their ten most cogent—and most commonly presented—arguments, followed by an evolutionary response grounded in the latest scientific theories on the origin and evolution of the universe and life.9
The Anthropic Principle:
The universe is fine tuned for life.
We begin with what I consider to be the best scientific argument that creationists and Intelligent Design theorists have in their arsenal: The universe is finely tuned and delicately balanced to support life. Change any number of physical parameters or initial conditions of the universe by even the tiniest amount, and life would not be possible. Fine tuning implies that there is a fine tuner, an Intelligent Designer, a God.
There is no shortage of observations from leading scientists on this condition of the cosmos. No less a personage than Stephen Hawking wrote:
Why is the universe so close to the dividing line between collapsing again and expanding indefinitely? In order to be as close as we are now, the rate of expansion early on had to be chosen fantastically