The Dover Decision

By now, most readers of this newspaper know that in Dover, Pennsylvania, U.S. District Court Judge John E. Jones III struck down the discussion of intelligent design in biology classes. This legal decision followed an electoral one by the citizens of Dover to vote out of office all member of the Dover School Board who had supported the teaching of intelligent design. What should not go unrecognized in the case, however, is the breadth of the judge’s decision.

Judge Jones allowed the case to concern not merely technical legal points, but the larger issue of whether intelligent design can be considered a scientific theory. Intelligent design is the view that posits, contrary to evolution, that the appearance and unfolding of life is not a matter of natural causes, but requires the intervention of an intelligent designer. The identity of the designer is left up to our imagination, although there seems to be a remarkable convergence of opinion among proponents of intelligent design on the view that the designer very nearly resembles a Christian god.

So what happened when intelligent design was put to the test? In a word, it failed. Most observers of the trial concurred with Judge Jones that intelligent design is not science at all but rather religion—in this case, creationism—dressed up in scientific garb. The arguments for intelligent design, far from being scientific in nature, amount to no more than what the biologist Richard Dawkins had called “the argument from personal incredulity.”

How does intelligent design fail at being a science? Its most glaring failure is that it cannot be tested. Intelligent design is based on the purported inability of science to explain certain biological phenomena, like the emergence of vision. In the case of vision, a common example in intelligent design, its emergence has in fact been explained. That point aside, however, one can see where this method of argumentation leads. It does not lead one toward further research - it, in fact, stifles the notion completely. Intelligent design argues, in effect, that if certain phenomena have not yet been explained by appeal to traditional scientific methods, that is because they cannot be so explained. Better to give up and posit an intelligent designer. Of course, it is precisely the existence of an intelligent designer that cannot be tested, because the designer is invoked at the very moment explanation seems to falter.

Seen this way, it is clear that intelligent design is not a matter of science. It is not a scientific theory, nor is it a practice of science - it is the abandonment of science.

Proponents of intelligent design have a rejoinder to this line of thought. They complain that the traditional scientific method is materialistic, and therefore prohibits from the outset any recourse to an intelligent designer. But traditional science does not refute intelligent design, it just defines itself in such a way as to preclude it from the outset.

This line of thought involves a deep misunderstanding of the project of science. Is science materialistic? Does it prohibit from the outset appeal to an untestable hypothesis? Does it make the appeal to intelligent design as an explanatory principle extraordinarily unlikely, if not impossible? Yes, yes, and yes. Why? Science is a project of explaining the natural world by means of forming testable hypothesis and then going out and testing them. This means that, no matter how occult the posits scientists invoke (quarks, strings, etc.), they must somehow be tested by means that lead back to observable phenomena. Without that, you simply don’t have science.

Some readers sympathetic with the Dover decision may worry here that the materialism of science threatens to drain our world of the mystery that the fundamentalists, however misguided in their moethods, tried to reintroduce. This would be a mistake. Science is at once powerful and limited. Its power lies in explaining the natural world of which we are a part. But science does not present us with the kind of beauty that poetry or music or literature does. It does not answer the question of how we should live, or how we might live. It does not tell us what a just society consists of. There is so much more to living our world than explaining natural phenomena, as important as those explanations are. (In fact, those explanations may have bearing on our answers to our other questions, just as our answers to those other questions may tell us a bit about what kinds of natural phenomena are worth trying to explain.)

What the fundamentalists would have us believe is that the materialism of science and the materialism of our daily lives are deeply entwined. It is puzzling, however, that fundamentalists do not look more directly at the materialism of our daily lives, instead of looking at it askew through scientific explanation. Perhaps the reason for this lies in what a direct look would likely yield: that the materialism they decry is not a product of the science they seek to undermine, but rather of the rampant capitalism they are at pains to support.