Recently the Chronicle of Higher Education and Scientific American both ran articles warning of the dangers posed to helpless college students by the advance of Intelligent Design (ID) thinking. In case you haven’t heard, that’s the growing academic movement which holds that the universe is the product of some sort of (as the name suggests) intelligent mind, not mere unguided evolution. To most Americans, this position might represent plain common sense. To the authors of these articles, however, it’s simply beyond the pale.

The Chronicle noted the inroads made by ID in academic circles in recent years but was quick to reassure its readers that "most scientists are quick to dismiss the idea as religion cloaked in scientific jargon." Michael Shermer, writing in Scientific American, pursued a similar tack, arguing that the best defense against the dangerous ascendancy of ID was better science education. The online magazine Slate, however, ran a snide and poorly argued piece by William Saletan deriding ID as "the last gasp of (dying) creationism."

Having followed this debate for some time now, I have to say that the Shermers and Saletans of the world are whistling past a graveyard. ID is a vital movement that’s making gains on any number of fronts. In the Ohio legislature, ID backers are fighting to include it in science education. Their ranks include a substantial number of scientists — a reflection of a growing number among scientists nationwide. It seems likely that ID opponents are starting to worry, which may play a role in the recent media assaults.

There are, however, two major problems with all of these criticisms, and both originate with false assumptions about the nature of the whole controversy. The first is that ID supporters are motivated wholly by religious beliefs; the second, that evolutionists are not.

“War Between Science and Religion”

Both Shermer and Saletan in their respective articles couch the debate in terms of (in Saletan’s words) "war between science and religion." Both authors are mired in what mathematician and prominent ID supporter William Dembski rightly derided as the "comfortable delusion" that all opponents of evolutionary theory are "motivated solely by religious considerations." This is simply untrue, and it always has been. As Philip Samson points out in chapter two of his book, Six Modern Myths About Christianity and Western Civilization, the chief critics of Darwin's theory in Darwin's lifetime were not clergymen, but scientists, who found the theory implausible.

Take Dembski. As a profile in the Houston Press noted, “William Dembski wasn't always a religious man. The only child of a college biology professor (who, in fact, didn't question Darwin's theories) and an art dealer, he spent six days a week at an all-male Catholic preparatory school in Chicago. He went through the motions at school, but he didn't buy into Christianity. ‘Any sort of God who was behind it all, who we were accountable to, who really cared for us, with whom we could have any connection, that was just off my radar,’ Dembski says.” Yet the more he thought about it, “It seemed to him statistically improbable that natural selection could produce the diversity of life all around him.” He started subjecting evolutionary theory to rigorous scrutiny through statistical analysis of probabilities. And when he did, evolution flunked the test.

The same is true of me; it was logic, not faith, that first made me question evolution. Confronted with Haldane's Dilemma — in brief, the mathematical problem of a species' ability (or, rather, inability) to acquire significant, adaptively beneficial mutations before being overloaded by harmful ones (what’s called "error catastrophe") — I was led to the conclusion that evolution was a fool's bet. Many Intelligent Design backers, like the 19th-century critics of Darwin, are motivated primarily by the same sort of thing. Naturalistic evolution — a completely unguided process of descent plus modification driven by selection plus mutation — simply goes against overwhelming mathematical odds, which indicate that such a process can’t plausibly account for the complexity, interdependence, and diversity of observed life on Earth.

These aren’t the only problems with the theory of evolution, but they’re significant enough to give the lie to science philosopher’s Michael Ruse’s oft-repeated assertion that "evolution is a fact, fact, fact!" Indeed, the "natural selection plus mutation" model of evolution requires a great deal of willing suspension of disbelief. (It’s based on a phenomenon that no one has ever observed — the creation of whole new functional organs and systems of organs through mutation.) All that we have ever seen, as Berkeley-educated biologist Jonathan Wells has pointed out, is the modification of existing structures in existing species. The proposition that mutations affecting large sets of genes could generate new, functional biological systems is simply unproven and unprovable. It's an article of faith.

Evolution as Religion

Those familiar with the background of Darwin's formulation of his theory know well that his starting point was a theological one. Unable to account for the suffering and pain he saw in the world, he sought to create an explanation for life on Earth that would eliminate the need for a benevolent, directly involved Creator. Built into evolution from its very start were assumptions about "what God wouldn't do," something that Cornelius Hunter's book Darwin's God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil (reviewed in Boundless a few months back) describes as "negative theology." The same theological presuppositions about "what God wouldn't do" recur (glaringly) in criticisms of ID, nowhere more so than in the works of the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen J. Gould.

Gould's famous example about the panda's thumb — how its clumsiness indicates that it’s the product of random evolution instead of intelligent design — is entirely based on negative theology of the "God wouldn't do it that way" sort. Likewise, Saletan's article snidely derides ID by asking "why our backs and feet are so poorly designed for walking" and "why viruses attack us." Neither question can be asked without assumptions about what God would or wouldn’t do. These critics also mistakenly assume that ID backers think the world maintains its original, perfect design. Yet ID proponents don’t argue that the world as we see it is in a state of Edenic perfection — only that it betrays unmistakable signs of being a product of directed, intelligent action rather than random, undirected events.

The trust in random chance in overcoming problems such as Haldane's dilemma is reminiscent not of science, but of a very old and widespread superstition: luck. The Vikings, the Romans, the Ming dynasty Chinese, the Sumerians, and countless other cultures have had some religious element honoring chance or "luck" as the determining force in the universe, the supreme divinity to whom all other forces — even other gods — are beholden. Faith in the explanatory power of luck is also characteristic of the theory of evolution; Darwinists who can’t accept an intentional God end up oddly resembling primitive pagans. This being the case, the "war between science and religion" is a fiction. It’s a war between two religions, or more precisely, between superstition and religion. It’s belief in luck vs. belief in an intentional, benevolent Creator.

As the history of the last millennium has shown, the question of which of the two theologies – luck worship or belief in a single, rational Creator – provides the better basis for scientific investigation has already been settled in favor of the latter. All the revolutionary scientific discoveries that have shaped our civilization in the last millennium, from Copernicus to Newton to Faraday to even Einstein, have come about because of the belief in a rational Creator.

As of this writing, the battle in Ohio has yet to be settled, though a hopeful sign has come in the form of the aforementioned pro-ID declaration issued by a group of more than 50 university professors and science professionals working in that state. The battle on university campuses throughout this country, however, has barely begun.