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Opinion: Two Views of Intelligent Design (Part2 of 2)  <<...OLE_Obj...>>  
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	Philosophy Is Essential to the Intelligent Design Debate
	Mano Singham 
Predictably, the attempts by advocates of intelligent design (ID) to
persuade Ohio's state school board to overrule the state's science advisory
board and insert ID ideas into the Ohio science standards have sparked a
controversy. Inevitably, the usual combatants in the sciencereligion wars
have rushed to their respective barricades.1 
ID advocates argue that scientists are somehow conspiring to suppress ID
ideas. They accuse scientists of practicing censorship by arbitrarily
excluding ID ideas from journals and science textbooks, thus not giving the
ideas a fair chance to gain adherents. To overcome this perceived injustice,
ID advocates have appealed directly to political power structures such as
school boards and legislative bodies to mandate what should be included in
science. 
Although such bodies may have the authority to tilt science curricula toward
religion, history has not looked kindly on such efforts. The attempts in
Louisiana and Arkansas in the 1980s to mandate the teaching of creation
science, and the more recent attempt in Kansas to eliminate the teaching of
evolution, were debacles for their proponents. They invited dismal
comparisons with the Roman Catholic Church's attempt in 1616 to ban
Copernican theory or the Soviet Central Committee's attempt in 1949 to
dismiss Mendeleevian genetics as pseudoscience. One wonders why this dubious
strategy is still being pursued. 
What is interesting about this battle is that both pro-ID and anti-ID sides
casually toss around terms like the "verifiability," "testability," and
"falsifiability" of theories, as if the meanings of the words were
self-evident. Both sides display little awareness that historians and
philosophers of science created and have exhaustively studied the terms in
the quest to understand the nature of science. These scholars find that all
such concepts fail to satisfactorily explain how science progresses.26 The
problem of how to unambiguously distinguish science from nonscience is an
extremely difficult one.6 It even has a venerable name, "the demarcation
problem." This rich scholarly tradition should play an important role in
this discussion, and there is no excuse for ignoring it. 
For example, ID advocates claim that "empirical science" consists of those
disciplines in which the merits of competing theories can be evaluated by
running controlled experiments to "test" them. However, ID advocates also
claim that "origins science" (like evolution of life or the cosmos) cannot
be investigated empirically because the experiment cannot be run again with
controlled initial conditions. Hence they propose, as an alternative
methodology for evaluating origins science, that all competing hypotheses be
applied to see which one gives the best explanation. They further assert
that the only sound hypotheses for the evolution of life are natural
selection or ID, and that since natural selection fails in certain
situations (referred to as "irreducibly complex" systems7), then, by the
rules of "falsifiability,"3,4 ID must be the correct theory. 
This argument has four flaws. First, although the tools of analysis may be
different for so-called origins science and empirical science (consisting
mainly of observations for origins science and experiments for empirical
science), the ways in which competing theories are evaluated are the same
for the two cases. Second, it is never the case that only two explanations
exist for any scientific phenomenon. Scientists are creative people. They
can generate plausible alternative explanations with little effort. Third,
ID theory does not satisfy the criteria to be considered part of science.
Fourth, "falsifiability" is not the rule by which scientific theories are
evaluated. 
Although research in the history and philosophy of science convincingly
demonstrates that there are no simple and unambiguous methodological rules
for deciding which of two (or more) competing theories are better,2,4,5
theories must meet two criteria if they are to be seriously considered at
all. The first criterion is that any scientific theory must be naturalistic.
No serious scientific theory in modern times has invoked explanations that
appeal to inscrutability or the miraculous. As the paleontologist George
Gaylord Simpson put it, 
	The progress of knowledge rigidly requires that no nonphysical
postulate ever be admitted in connection with the study of physical
phenomena. We do not know what is and what is not explicable in physical
terms, and the researcher who is seeking explanations must seek physical
explanations only.8
The second criterion is that the theory must be predictive. No scientific
theory is ever just an explication of the currently inexplicable. It must
also postulate some mechanism that can be used to predict new phenomena that
could not have been conceived under older theories. If a new theory is used
to explain result a in situation A, then that same mechanism must be able to
predict result b in situation B, predict c in situation C, and so on. This
feature of producing new and interesting areas of exploration attracts
adherents to a new theory, enabling it to become a serious competitor to the
existing dominant theory.4 It is a theory's predictive aspect that leads to
new and important discoveries. These two criteria comprise necessary (but
insufficient) conditions for a theory to be considered a part of science. ID
fails to satisfy either criterion, and that alone is reason enough for its
exclusion. 
ID advocates respond that these are philosophical rules, as if that were a
disqualification. But just because a rule is philosophical does not mean
that it lacks value. In fact, these particular rules have been key to the
tremendous advance of science. While scientists may accept that some
problems are unsolved--or cannot be solved until new technology or data
become available--they never accept that a scientific problem is inherently
insoluble. This belief that only their own ingenuity or effort stands
between them and success is what makes them persevere for years and leads to
great breakthroughs. But when ID is invoked as an explanation for something,
its advocates are essentially stating that the problem is inherently
insoluble and the solution is inscrutable. Research in that area would
presumably come to a halt. 
It is absurd for some scientists to defend Darwinian natural selection by
saying that there is no feature of life that cannot be explained by it. No
scientific theory has ever explained all the phenomena that fall within its
domain.2,4,5 Unexplained problems will always arise that resist solution for
a long time. In fact, a good theory is one that keeps generating new
problems that scientists can work on and that lead to new discoveries and
insights. ID advocates will never run out of cases in which Darwinian
natural selection has not yet provided an explanation. But the presence of
such anomalies has never been sufficient, by itself, to prompt the
scientific community to abandon a dominant theory.2,4,5 
For example, the motion of the perigee of the moon was a well-known unsolved
problem for over 60 years after the introduction of Newtonian physics.2 It
constituted a serious problem that resisted solution for a longer time than
the problems in evolution indicated by ID advocates. Yet no supernatural
explanation was invoked. Eventually, the problem was solved, and the result
was seen as a triumph for Newtonian theory. Similarly, the stability of the
planetary orbits was an unsolved problem for more than 200 years.5 
These two examples successfully illustrate why simple methodological rules
like falsifiability do not explain science's progress. If such a rule were
rigorously enforced, then Newtonian physics (and indeed every scientific
theory ever proposed) would have been falsified and rejected at birth and we
would not have had any science at all. Clearly, scientists make judgments
about which theories to keep and which to reject for reasons that are far
more complex and subtle than suggested by simple rules like falsifiability. 
Scientists consider the merits of competing theories only when science
enters a period of crisis--that is, when a dominant theory, despite repeated
attempts by its most seasoned practitioners, fails to explain something that
should be explainable using existing knowledge, technology, and techniques.2
The biological science community apparently does not perceive that natural
selection is in such a state of crisis. But even if natural selection were
in crisis, biologists would not accept ID as a worthy rival. Instead, they
would look for alternative naturalistic and predictive theories. If the
history of science is any guide, biologists will find and agree on an
acceptable theory. That is the way science has evolved. 
The last philosophical question about ID involves the role of "truth." ID
advocates argue that it is wrong to keep ID ideas out of science by
appealing to naturalistic and predictive rules because the goal of science
is to seek "the truth." How, they ask, will we know if ID is the true
explanation for a phenomenon if it is not allowed to compete? 
But there is no reason to think that "truth" plays a major role in this
discussion.2 Science constantly produces new theories and discoveries that
are powerful, useful, and enlightening. But does that imply we are
approaching "the truth"? Alas, no--although many scientists would like to
think so.2,9 
Given the continuing success of science, this limitation is not an easy idea
to grasp, especially for scientists. To better understand it, compare the
progress of science with that of biological evolution itself. Organisms
evolve; new ones emerge from the old, which results in the impressive array
of living systems around us that are, for the most part, wonderfully adapted
to their present environments. Does this mean that the process of evolution
was directed toward a goal? That the present living forms were preordained
in the primeval soup? Of course not. The life forms that exist now just
happen to be the ones that arose from a vast number of initial
possibilities. 
Likewise, scientific theories evolve according to how well they answer, at
any given time in history, the immediate questions of interest to
scientists. As a result, the present impressive array of theories has
developed to satisfactorily answer the questions that interest us now. But
that does not mean that science is goal-directed and thus progressing toward
the "truth." The present theories were not predetermined to be discovered,
any more than the first amphibians that crawled out of the oceans many years
ago had the concept of humans encoded for future emergence. Science
works--and works exceedingly well--because of its naturalistic approach,
predictive nature, and methods of operation. To be valid, science does not
have to be true.9 

Mano Singham teaches physics at Case Western Reserve University in
Cleveland, Ohio. He is also a member of Ohio's science advisory board, which
drafted the guidelines for the state's science standards. 

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References 
1. M. Singham, Phi Delta Kappan 81, 424 (February 2000). 
2. T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, U. of Chicago Press,
Chicago, Ill. (1970). 
3. K. R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific
Knowledge, Harper and Row, New York (1963). 
4. I. Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, Cambridge
U. Press, New York (1978). 
5. P. K. Feyerabend, Against Method, Verso, New York (1993). 
6. L. Laudan, Science and Relativism: Some Key Controversies in the
Philosophy of Science, U. of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill. (1990). 
7. M. J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution,
Free Press, New York (1996). 
8. G. G. Simpson, Tempo and Mode in Evolution, Columbia U. Press, New York
(1944), p. 76. 
9. M. Singham, Quest for Truth: Scientific Progress and Religious Beliefs,
Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation, Bloomington, Ind. (2000).