A PLAGUE ON BOTH THEIR HOUSES :

REVIEW : of No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence by William A. Dembski (H. Allen Orr, Boston Review)

While usually admitting that life on earth is billions of years old and that people, pigs, and petunias are related by common descent, the Intelligent Design (ID) movement maintains that some bits of biology show the unmistakable handiwork of an intelligent agent. And while this agent may not wholly displace Darwin, the two at least stand shoulder to shoulder. The ID movement further maintains that intelligent design, as a legitimate scientific hypothesis, deserves a place alongside blind evolution in public schools and that students should, at the least, be exposed to both sides of the debate. [...]

Dembski-whose new book, No Free Lunch, is sure to ignite new firestorms over design vs. Darwin-is perhaps the most impressively credentialed of the lot. He wields a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago, another in philosophy from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a Master of Divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary. He is also author of seven books, including The Design Inference, a fairly technical work that laid out a statistical method allegedly allowing reliable detection of design. He is also an able writer, a skilled polemicist, and an indisputably bold thinker. And, yes, he believes-contrary to everything biologists told us for the last 150 years-that an intelligent agent helped shaped you and me.

To appreciate the magnitude of Dembski's claims in No Free Lunch you need to appreciate the relative modesty of Darwin's claims in the Origin of Species. Darwin did not rule out the formal possibility of a designer. Instead, he showed that the (apparent) design residing in organisms could be explained naturally, without recourse to a designer. And while he marshaled great masses of evidence for the role of his natural mechanism (natural selection) and against the role of a designer, Darwin made no claims about the impossibility of the latter hypothesis. Dembski's claims are more ambitious. Darwinism, he says, is formally incapable of explaining certain features of organisms. This is not to say that Darwinian mechanisms might not act now and then-Dembski agrees they might-but it is to say that Darwinism is mathematically barred from explaining certain things we always thought it could explain. And unfortunately for evolutionary biology, these things are not trivial arcana but the characteristic features of organisms: their staggeringly complex designs. [...] Dembski does not mince words: "[I]ntelligent design utterly rejects natural selection as a creative force capable of bringing about the specified complexity we see in organisms."

Both are theology; why teach either in school? Posted by Orrin Judd at August 6, 2002 8:22 AM