In the last decade or so, creationists have grown sophisticated. The old-fashioned ones are still around. They're the ones who believe that the earth is a few thousand years old, that God created it in six days and that fossils are a product of Noah's flood. In the early 1990s, however, a new breed of creationists appeared. These "neo-creos" have PhDs and occupy positions at some of the better American universities. The case they make against Darwinism does not rest on the authority of scripture; rather, it proceeds from premises that are scientific and philosophical, invoking molecular biology, information theory and the logic of hypothesis testing.
When neo-creos go public-as they did recently in Ohio, petitioning for equal time in the classroom with Darwinism-they do not stake any obviously foolish claims. They concede that the earth is billions of years old, and that some evolution may have taken place once basic biochemical structures were formed. What they deny is that Darwinian theory, or any other "naturalistic" theory that confines itself to mechanical causes operating gradually over time, can explain all of life. The biological world, they contend, is rife with evidence of an intelligent designer.
Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics is a fat collection of three dozen essays which examine this thesis from every imaginable angle. Its editor, the philosopher Robert T Pennock, admits that his selection is stacked against the neo-creos by about two to one. Yet most major proponents of intelligent design are represented: Phillip E Johnson, a law professor at Berkeley, and father of the movement; the biochemist Michael J Behe; the mathematician William A Dembski; and the philosopher of logic Alvin Plantinga. They are given the chance to present their reasoning and to defend it against their Darwinian critics, such as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins. The debate ranges over genetics, theology, history of science and theory of knowledge. The rhetoric is sometimes barely civil.
Unlike old-fashioned creationists, the neo-creos are not worried about evolution conflicting with a literal reading of Genesis. So why can't they join with the mainstream religions, which have made their peace with Darwinism? In 1996, Pope John Paul II said that the theory of evolution had been "proved true." Stephen Jay Gould, though agnostic himself, salutes the wisdom of this papal pronouncement, arguing that science and religion are "non-overlapping magisteria." But the neo-creos aren't buying it. They think that belief in Darwinism and belief in God are incompatible. Here, ironically, they are in agreement with their more radical Darwinian opponents. Both extremes concur that evolution is a purposeless, undirected process and as such must be at odds with the idea of a purposeful creator.
The neo-creos are right to think that evolution is not religiously neutral. It undercuts what has traditionally been the most powerful argument for God's existence, the "argument from design." Christian intellectuals who accept Darwinism insist that evolution still leaves ample scope for a creator-god, one who got the universe rolling in the right way so that, by sheer chemistry and physics, beings like us would inevitably appear without further meddling. Ernan McMullin, a philosopher of science at Notre Dame as well as a Catholic priest, argues that the resources of God's original creation "were sufficient for the generation of the successive orders of complexity that make up our world."
This deistic notion of God holds little appeal for the neo-creos. They try to establish their intelligent-design theory as the only alternative to Darwinism for explaining life; then they proceed negatively, deploying various arguments to show that Darwinian mechanisms could not possibly do the trick. The logic of this strategy is impeccable: either Darwinism or intelligent design; not Darwinism, therefore intelligent design. Armed with that conclusion, they hope to pry scientifically-minded people away from a purely secular worldview.
At the moment, there is no serious scientific rival to Darwinism. Indeed, if the explanations for life must be sought in physical mechanisms, then an evolutionary theory of some sort would seem to be inevitable. But why, the neo-creos ask, should intelligent causes be ruled out? To do so betrays commitment to "metaphysical naturalism," the doctrine that nature is a system of material causes and effects sealed off from outside influences; and that, they say, is a matter of faith, not proof. The Darwinians have a retort to the charge of metaphysical naturalism: nothing succeeds like success. As Michael Ruse points out, the refusal of modern science to cry miracle when faced with explanatory difficulties has yielded "fantastic dividends." Letting divine causes fill in wherever naturalistic ones are hard to find is bad theology-it leaves you with a "God of the gaps"-and bad science.
Besides, the evidence for Darwinism looks awfully strong. There are internal disagreements over the mechanisms and tempo of evolution. But the core thesis that all living things have a common ancestry, long supported by the pattern of structural similarities among them and by the fossil record, has received stunning new confirmation from molecular genetics. Johnson does his lawyerly best to cast doubt on the evidence for common ancestry. However, the more tough-minded of the neo-creos will accept the claim that organisms evolved from one another. They even acknowledge a role for the standard Darwinian mechanism (natural selection operating on random variation). To make good on the second part of their strategy, the not Darwinism part, they instead try to show that for deeper reasons Darwinism is bound to fall short of telling the whole story. They have three main arguments, all of which seem clever at first blush.
Michael Behe attacks Darwinism at the molecular level. If you peer inside a cell, Behe says, you see intricate little machines, made out of proteins, that carry on the functions necessary for life. They are so precisely engineered that they exhibit what he calls "irreducible complexity": alter a single part and the whole thing would grind to a halt. How could such machinery have evolved in piecemeal fashion through a series of adaptations, as Darwinism holds?
Alvin Plantinga makes a philosophical assault on Darwinism, claiming that it is self-undermining. Suppose the Darwinian theory of evolution were true-our mental machinery, having developed from that of lower animals, would be highly unreliable when it came to generating true theories. (Darwin himself once confessed to the same doubt: "Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind?") In other words, if our belief in Darwinism were true, then none of our theoretical beliefs would be reliable-including our belief in Darwinism. But theism escapes this difficulty: if we are made in the image of God, he can be counted on to have supplied us with reliable cognitive faculties.
William Dembski bases his anti-Darwinian argument on what he calls "the law of conservation of information." Our DNA contains a wealth of complex information, he observes. How did it get there? Natural causes can't be responsible. Chance and necessity cannot create information. Therefore, the origin of genetic information "is best sought in intelligent causes."
Watching the Darwinians rebut these arguments makes for high entertainment. To counter Behe's complexity argument, they give a fascinating account of how proteins that evolved for one function can be co-opted by the cell for another; through such "exaptation," complicated cellular machinery can be built up. And Plantinga's argument that Darwinism is self-undermining? That is met by a subtle exploration of issues in the theory of knowledge; in particular, the evolutionary relationship between true belief and successful action.
Despite the ingenuity of the neo-creos, the not Darwinism part of their strategy is pretty clearly a failure. And they have another problem, which might be labelled "Not intelligent design." If nature were fashioned by a higher being, it ought to exhibit a certain elegance and efficiency. Then what of all the imperfections we see in the biological world? Why are organisms burdened with maladaptive features like the webbed feet of the frigate bird, which does not need them? Why is our genome littered with nonfunctional junk DNA? Why have 99.99 per cent of the species that have ever existed become extinct? As Stephen Jay Gould says, "Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution-paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce."
With Darwin, you remain free to believe or disbelieve in God. Have the neo-creos at least made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled creationist? On the evidence of this volume, not quite.
