ID v Darwinism

Trying to understand the cultural gulf between Muslims and the West has taken me in some unexpected directions. None are more surprising than into the never ending debate raging around Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, Creationism, and now Intelligent Design. Ever since I was old enough to think about such things I have accepted the idea that all species evolved from a common ancestor, but that the story of Genesis is also true. That seems to me not such a step for a Roman Catholic who believes in a mystical Trinity, transubstantiation, and an omnipotent God not bound by human logic or perception. Until recently I’ve been more or less ignoring this particular fight. Then a few weeks ago I came across an article by Mustafa Akyol claiming that atheism inherent in Darwinism has for two centuries been “the major source of Muslim contempt for the West.” He thinks “Intelligent Design could be a bridge between civilizations.” Now I have to say I didn’t know the first thing about ID so I decided to do some reading. I was surprised at the level of rationalist thought that has gone into it, and at the vehemence of the Darwinist rebuttal, refusing to accept even the possibility of design. I’m not surprised to find myself siding with ID. ID got its start a dozen or so years ago and was perhaps best articulated in a 1996 book by Lehigh Biology Professor Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box where he made the case that immense strides in biological science since Darwin’s day do indeed support the fact of evolution, but they also reveal an ever increasing and staggering complexity that make the odds of successful random mutation into new species wildly improbable and in fact at some point, not possible. Some sort of design had to be at work. Some not yet understood physical laws must have affected the outcome. Darwinism can account for much adaptation within species and maybe even new species but not the giant steps required for the evolution of the dizzying array of life we see around us. In his latest book, The Edge of Evolution, Behe attempts to put some boundaries around what Darwinism can account for and what it cannot. He concludes that it can explain the rapid growth of resistance to antibiotics seen in certain infectious diseases because the resistance is usually the result of a minute change in a single protein at a specific point in genetic makeup. These sorts of changes do occur as errors in copying the genes when organisms reproduce themselves. Usually they are harmful or indifferent and the changes don’t become common in the population at large but if they help the organism survive then natural selection causes the change to proliferate. But Behe also concludes that if resistance requires multiple simultaneous mutations or copying errors then the likelihood of resistance developing becomes a statistical near impossibility. He goes further to argue that at a number of points in evolutionary history the development of radically different species required too much complexity to have occurred in small gradual steps, each one involving the mutation of a single gene. The extant issue is called “irreducible complexity.” Darwin acknowledged that if it turned out some evolutionary steps had to occur in large jumps his theory would not hold. What he could not have imagined was the almost incomprehensible sophistication of molecular biology at the cellular level as scientists understand it today. To Darwin the steps from a wolf like land mammal to aquatic adaptations such as flippers instead of legs and eventually to whales were all small. To Behe the necessary changes to genetic coding are huge. Behe focuses on microscopic cellular life where populations are large and many generations can be observed in a short period of time, decades as opposed to eons. He acknowledges that extrapolating results to higher life forms is tenuous but then Darwinism suffers the same constraint. Behe’s Darwinist critics, and they include almost all mainstream scientists (not just biologists) don’t so much refute his proposals as rail against them. Behe isn’t just wrong. He is a heretic. A common theme is that ID is just creationism in disguise, an attempt to get God back into high school biology class. They mostly ignore Behe’s central contention, that some evolutionary steps are irreducibly complex. If they address it at all they just say it hasn’t been proven. They focus instead on evidence in the fossil record and in genetics to support the fact that life has evolved, and that random mutation followed by natural selection accounts for a lot of it. But of course Behe acknowledges all of that at the outset. It makes me think it says more about the state of political correctness in American science than it does about the merits of the argument. One of ID’s loudest critics is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago named Jerry Coyne who has been writing about it since it first came on the scene. Coyne doesn’t say so but he is apparently the sort of atheist that so bothers Akyol, lacing his writing with derisive references to God. He reviewed Edge of Evolution in a June issue of The New Republic with a piece called The Great Mutator. Coyne takes the position that only formal training in evolutionary science will equip one to spot the flaws in Behe’s logic. It’s probably beyond us members of The Great Unwashed. But Coyne’s sarcasm isn’t an argument. It’s just changing the subject. He also suggests that the development of quantum physics disproves the notion that God made the sun shine. I presume that’s another shot at Genesis and a gratuitous one. Scientists have proved one thing about genetic mutations. They don’t have to be random and they don’t have to occur naturally. They can be produced in the laboratory. They can be designed. Behe cites the example of experimenters producing mutant fruit flies with eyes where they shouldn’t be. (Thankfully they were standard multi-lens fruit fly eyes and not the sort found in mammals.) This is important because if Behe is right, researchers should be able to design beneficial drugs that diseases can’t easily develop resistance to. Now I’m not one to suggest we go back to teaching miracles in science class. I certainly don’t think we should be teaching atheism either. To return to my original point, I don’t see a conflict between belief in God and the idea that He might have used ways and means in creation that will eventually be understood by science. That’s the job of science, to explain the physical world. I wish theology were making as much progress in explaining the spiritual world. It won’t surprise me if science discovers a natural means of overcoming Behe’s irreducible complexity and it won’t bother me one whit if it turns out to be random mutation after all. Just because God used quantum physics to make the sun shine doesn’t mean it all just happened by accident. Just because He used chemical properties to create life and eventually to create me doesn’t mean that happened by accident either. As for Akyol’s contention that Darwinism (and by Coyne’s extension science in general) is inherently atheistic, I submit that’s an exercise in anthropomorphism. They are imposing human limits on an all powerful and all knowing God. Sure we have our atheists. So does the Muslim world. But I don’t feel particularly threatened by them and I don’t see why Muslims should. Maybe we can talk this out.