The Darwin debate has assumed a new form in the so-called Intelligent Design movement armed with a surprisingly sophisticated critique of current theories. This movement has now resurrected the world of Paley, and the obsessive dialectic of theists and atheists heats up once again. Darwin’s theory as a challenge to Paley was the defining moment for evolutionary biology. The realization that the theory was inadequate for that purpose is unsettling. But it is puzzling that modern science cannot seem to defend itself against this kind of argument, and finds itself besieged by Intelligent Design factions trying to invade the school system. It is a sign that an inflexible ideology is at work. The more Darwinists try to use selectionist theory to refute Paley, the stronger the critics grow. These religious challenges to Darwinism tend to hijack the Darwin debate, leaving the false impression of two basic alternatives. It would seem to be a canned debate of conservative factions intangibly in league with one another.  

Associated with the Intelligent Design movement is a recent critique, Darwin on Trial, by the lawyer Philip Johnson,  in a renewed effort by a religionist to look closely at the difficulties with Darwin’s theory. We seem almost back in the world of Mivart, one of the first religious critics of Darwin. Reviews of Darwinism by lawyers seem a new genre, beginning with Norman Macbeth’s Darwin Retried. Johnson’s arguments are as cogent as any, and reflect the right of any group confronted with implied non-existence in the name of modernism to hire itself a good lawyer. The problem with lawyers is that you need two of them, one for each side.

We cannot forget the political context of the debate, in the midst of the American political polarization between liberal and conservative factions. We might trust design sophistries armed with advanced statistics much more if they were not found to be electorally strategic in the provincial culture politics of American rightwing reaction. The next thing we will discover is that design theology is being used for class warfare, of an especially clever kind. And we should note that the legacy of fundamentalist challenge to Darwinism included that of William Jennings Bryan, whose critique of Social Darwinism  in the Gilded Age of monopoly capital is well forgotten in this current phase. Not surprising if the neo-liberal Social Darwinist conservatives now share the same American reactionary political spectrum with fundamentalists. Once politicized discourse ceases to adhere to any truth standard beyond the level of party-line rhetoric, a Machiavellian standard voids scientific veracity on both sides. The design argument has long since perished from such abuse, leaving even such theistic figures as Kant to steer clear of it. Proponents of Darwinism automatically close ranks against any criticism, furthering the confusion. Many fail to grasp that there is a problem with the theory.

Johnson also launches a campaign against scientific naturalism. In some sense, he is right. The much-heralded ‘naturalistic explanation’ remains almost an impostor, if its definition cannot state the limits of nature. This issue is almost irresolvable given the shifting foundations of physics, in the complexities of this ‘nature’, the gaps in our knowledge, and the tenacity of claims of the sacred against the secular. It is nonetheless true that rote assumptions about naturalistic explanation influence all thinking here. But Johnson apparently is assuming the miracles of the Bible are givens, evidence for the non-naturalistic. There is no separate category for ‘miracles’. This parochial Christian assumption is without merit in an age of global culture and Biblical Criticism . Thus ‘design’ might be a surrogate for an extended realm of nature. But these are old debates, as old as Spinoza, their modern replay in fundamentalist language especially confusing, and counterproductive. Between Spinoza, Kant, Hume, and Hegel, naturalistic explanation endured a shock treatment from which it has never recovered. But the ‘spiritual’ wasn’t the winner either. At one and the same time, a critical methodological naturalism remains a useful, almost inevitable, starting point, and this has consistently born fruit in the empirical discoveries of the facts of evolution.

In a subsequent book, Reason in the Balance, Johnson engages the lists for a near campaign against modernism itself, with Darwin  placed beside Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud as the triad of culprits for the evils of secularism. The themes of postmodernist fashion are now the grounds for a comeback of the sacred against the domination of the secular. But the dilemma is false, and the postmodern strategy quixotic. This strategy is based on an incorrect perception of what constitutes ‘modernism’, which certainly includes the Protestant Reformation. So evidently Johnson is referring to the abrogation of the treaty of Westphalia. This postmodern strategy shared by conservatives, traditionalists, New Age groups, and leftist vanguards is completely self-contradictory, and silly, a clear sign of historical disorientation created by general propaganda versions of history. This issue is often confused by Darwinian secularists wishing to define the modern in an exclusionary sense using Darwinian theory, as a reductionist triumph of the Enlightenment narrowly defined. There is no inherent equation between ‘modernism’ and Darwinism, or even the viewpoint of science with the Enlightenment. If anything, the theory of Darwin represents a mere episode of scientism deviating from the far richer starting point of evolutionary thinking in the generation before Darwin.[i]

The problem then is the obvious agenda of those promoting Intelligent Design. If Johnson is against modernism, hence modern freedoms, and secularist achievements of religious neutrality, we hardly dare agree to anything on the grounds that a cultural tide of reactionaries will use our interest, or assent, against us. And the current politics of these questions in the North American scene shows this is no idle objection. These are fronts for some very dangerous people wishing to destroy liberal culture. And these elites need to produce allegiance against class interest in a multitude. Religious mystification foots the bill quite well. Small wonder Darwinists live in a reductionist foxhole. 

Intelligent Design thinking suffers the same problem as Darwinism, unverified abstractions arrived at by indirect inference. These tactics are especially misleading because they don’t directly reference divinity, since that would impinge on the long-refuted arguments by design. The process of innuendo, with a different behavior behind the scenes or with different audiences, exploits this ambiguity. Once we get down to the basics, e.g. an issue of ‘historical design’, we will discover the evidentiary ambiguity of the design arguments, equal to that of natural selection. We might see something like ‘design in history’, but we have no evidence whatever of theistic action operating on history. This fact must be faced, and, further, any design argument should be extracted and made neutral with respect to theological, e.g. Christian, historicism. Without such an explicit agent the use of the term ‘intelligent’ in ‘Intelligent Design’ is simply meaningless. A consideration of Buddhism would remind us that the ‘cessation of agency’ is a higher state than any proposed state of divinity. Therefore to what are we referring to in a speculative inference about a ‘designer’?

Is it not strange that science cannot produce a self-critique? Any serious technical subject, viz. the mechanics of a rocket, induces severe caution in real scientists at the limits of theory. The results of failure are immediate. By that standard Darwin’s theory couldn’t last the afternoon. But apparently theories of evolution are exempt from proper scrutiny. We see the reason. The results of failure would disadvantage those with an agenda, and no need to properly verify the theory. This analogy is, of course, misleading, since theories of evolution tend to be engineering solutions to problems that won’t yield to the methods of physics. The limits of such solutions are never taken into account.

The argument by design has a long history, and this is not the same as the issue of ‘design’ as such. It is not hard to see that ‘something like design’ is at work in genetic structures. Historical amnesia reigns. We might, for example, review the early debates here, and consider a Kantian perspective or the classic critiques of the argument by design. The Intelligent Design group has not demonstrated the argument by design. These tactics can be very destructive. We cannot examine design under the aegis of particular religious groups with ambitious social strategies. Such questions require strict religious neutrality. But that is unlikely here, making discussion pointless. In any case the design interpretation thrives only because Darwin’s theory is very extreme in its claims for natural selection.

The sense of design is more general and could as well be, and historically has been, taken in the mood of science, as a naturalistic finding, and is clearly present from the beginning with the Stoics or Pre-Socratic philosophers. Monotheism tends to create metaphysical obsession unknown to the pagan, and science with Darwinism appears to have caught a strain of the ‘dis-ease’.

If ‘design’ is important, we must scrap the claimed monopoly of the monotheist with a ruthless examination of his Biblical claims, soon to be found wanting in the challenge of Biblical Criticism to the miracles of the Bible, or the ideological hypnosis of the Christological resurrection myth. The Christian must take these as givens in some historical argument by design, under duress to believe, in the prerequisites of redemption. This cruelty severely stresses discourse. No more motivated fact checker could be asked for than a man who finds his salvation on the line. The cocoon of Christian theology is a weak refuge in this high stakes collision of worldviews, and we must demand a level playing field to engage such issues. In the final analysis, the sense of design is a common heritage of mankind, befuddled Darwinists exempted.

We need not, and cannot, resurrect the argument by design, as a metaphysical proof (Darwin’s theory often being one taken as one such, in reverse), to consider the clear element of ‘design’ visible everywhere in the data of evolution, and indeed history. The concept is intuitively ‘obvious’ at one level but fails a series of Kantian metaphysical presumption tests. Big Science propaganda moves with great stultification to confuse all dissent at the critical point by denying that complex biochemical systems show ‘design’. But of course this complexity is beyond the means of current theory, and one finds the standard electronics text passing in brief mention by the logically sound circumstance of non-causal systems, ‘not physically realizable’. Mathematics, at least, may not be so limited.

This ‘design’ in quotation marks falls between two stools, scientific and religious, and can hardly be taken as a proof of divinity. It is, at least, an aspect of nature, one that monotheistic traditions seem unable to confront. Such thinking is meaningless if we know so little about nature. Only the false claim that Darwin’s theory of natural selection resolved the issue of design could have started such a confused discourse on both sides. This acknowledged, the design obsession falls away, and we have a lot of explaining to do. But it is possibly true that the ‘design’ factor fronts for a deep unknown and that theories of evolution are impossible in closed form. That gives the opportunity to the religiously ambitious to break the impasse with ‘faith’ mythologies. We can criticize but might need to protect the otherwise fine research tradition of the evolutionists as a truncated reductionism, in the metaphysical overshoot and undershoot that may never settle into a stable conception of the whole. Biologists are attempting something difficult, and deserve a form of patience. But they cannot be allowed to fudge data with metaphysical substitute theories pretending to be science. This ‘design’ question, in any case, is not our topic. The question almost deserves a shrug. Design? What else is new? Everywhere we see design. Every generation of man has puzzled over this sense of design. It arises because we have no real theory of evolution. Does anything ever change here?

Let us set this booby-trapped terminology aside, having acknowledged the cogency of the critique, without succumbing to theological legerdemain. We will proceed on a different tack. The problem, as Darwinists do indeed insist, is that man tends to divinize this overall feeling of design. It is very difficult for the culture of the Western monotheist to produce a theory of evolution. So we are back where we started, finding an account of the data of evolution, naturalistic by default unless some evidence of divinity is found. The Biblical texts do not provide this evidence. But natural selection won’t foot the bill here either. Nor will current definitions of naturalism be able to decide the issue by a deduction of ‘what science really is’ or ‘how things work’ based on vatic reductionism or physics models. Nor can the proponent of design resolve this as divinity simply because reductionist science is limited. But history shows a clear ‘design’. We will attempt a version of this with an ironic idea of ‘history’s black box’, to use the phrase of a current design theorist. The problem is that we can see clear design, indeed in the evolution of religion, but this is a poor case of any argument by design.

There is a far broader, essentially secular, critique of Darwinism already latent in the legacy of the Enlightenment. How is that possible? Didn’t science proceed in linear fashion in the progress of knowledge to found evolution as a new understanding of man? The question is not that simple. We should recall that Newton was a proponent of design, and that Kant tried to correct his physics. The overall period of Enlightenment was not the source of Darwinism, although it did resurrect the ancient idea of evolution from its long dormancy. Diderot at the dawn of modern biology is already concerned over embryological issues, now resurfacing in the age of complex genetics. For some reason this seminal era was able to maintain a strange clarity. Darwin’s theory is a poor rendition of the initial discovery of the fact of evolution. And one of the real achievements of the earlier period was to distinguish the human from the natural sciences. The emergence of secular modernism produced its own cultural software to mediate the long foreseen problems with the scientific worldview, but Darwinism has crippled our ability to use it.[ii]

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