Debate on Religion Continues

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    KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- A central question in the growing debate over the intelligent design movement is this: What's religion got to do with it?

    As is often the case when science and religion clash, some of the answers, though offered with certainty, are polar opposites.

   "This is all about Christian theology," said Niall Shanks, author of "God, the Devil and Darwin: A Critique of Intelligent Design Theory."

    Not so, said John Calvert, a managing director of the Kansas City-based Intelligent Design Network Inc. "What we (intelligent design advocates) are doing is taking religion out of science."

   Even if the religion question isn't asked directly, it will be at the heart of coming hearings by the Kansas Board of Education, which is debating science curriculum.

    Proponents of modern theories of evolution propose that something as microscopic as a single cell has evolved over billions of years in a completely unguided way into something as complex as, say, a human being.

   Instead supporters of intelligent design say that some things in the universe - things even as tiny as that single cell - are far too complex in design to be the result of time and random chance. They say such design required thoughtful engineering.

    To demonstrate this, they often refer to something called the bacterial flagellum. The flagellum, which can be seen only with an electron microscope, appears to be a long tail that helps bacteria move about.

   Upon examination, it looks like a biological machine with a high-speed rotary motor made up of at least 40 interlocking components. Intelligent design backers believe these tails were present in the very earliest bacteria, billions of years ago. They also contend these tails won't work unless all parts are present at once.

   They refer to the tail and its multipart motor as an example of what they call "irreducible complexity." The presence of all these parts, they conclude, means the tail couldn't have assembled by accident but must have been designed.

    Such complexity suggests that from its earliest origins, life results from a guided process, these advocates say, and scientists can discover this irreducible complexity by looking for patterns in nature that aren't likely to happen by chance.

    "The argument I present is based completely on physical data," said Michael Behe, a leading intelligent design proponent and a Lehigh University biochemist. "It's based on the structures of things we find in the cell and on pretty straightforward logic of how we recognize design. It's not based on any dogma."

    While some advocates of intelligent design say outright that the "designer" will turn out to be the God of Christianity, the theory itself does not say who or what the designer may be. Does this sound plausible?

    Not to George Gale at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

   "There is no such thing as irreducible complexity," said Gale, executive director of the Philosophy of Science Association, "(Intelligent Design advocates) are saying there never is going to be a time when we could explain this. If you're a betting person, you'd never put money on that."

    He gives this example: In the year 1200 no one could explain how a nail rusted, but by the late 18th century, scientists could.

    "Science is like a leaky boat they're constantly rebuilding in mid-ocean," Gale said. "Scientists like it that way. Religionists don't."

   So just because scientists may not offer a good explanation now of something like that tail, which appears to be irreducibly complex, it doesn't mean they won't be able to as knowledge increases.

    "(Intelligent design supporters) appear to be reasonable," said Gale, who teaches philosophy at UMKC, but "they sucker in the unscientific schlub who thinks there's a legitimate debate going on."

    Gale thinks the term "intelligent designer" is a code word for God and that the intelligent design movement's refusal to acknowledge it is "ill-willed dishonesty."

   "The thing that bothers me about most of these guys (is) they're Christians who don't observe the Ninth Commandment (against false witness). There's so much dishonesty."

   Shanks is just as critical.

   "Intelligent design theory is most assuredly not scientific theory," said Shanks, philosophy professor at East Tennessee State University. "It would be a mistake to call it philosophy. What it is, is bad theology repackaged as science."

    His opposition to intelligent design, he said, is "not a prejudice against nonmaterial explanations. If there is evidence, science is open to it. ... The trouble is, there is not a shred of evidence of intelligent design."

   A basic tenet of science is that the validity of theories must be testable through experiments and observations. Shanks said that means intelligent design theorists should be offering ways to investigate whether the "designer" has the materials, resources and knowledge needed to construct something like a bacterial flagellum.

   But they haven't done so, he said.

  Meanwhile biologists say there are ways bacterial flagella could have evolved, meaning they had no need of a designer. They, too, might not be able to say exactly how just yet. But as Gale of the University of Missouri-Kansas City said, science is a work in progress, changing constantly as scientists make new discoveries.

   If theorists of intelligent design are being accused of trying to sneak God into the lab, they criticize Darwinian evolutionists for trying to keep out the idea of an intelligent designer.

    "Science has to be theoretical," Calvert said. "Religion is dogmatic. It's doctrinaire. And when you move from the theoretical to the doctrinaire, you're putting religion into science."

    That's what Calvert and other intelligent design backers say traditional evolutionary biology has done, though they describe biology's religion as nontheistic, or without a god. And they insist that when the scientific establishment refuses to consider the possibility of intelligent design, it's following its own godless religion.

   "Evolution clearly furthers an atheistic, materialistic worldview, and that's every bit as religious as Christianity and any other theistic faith," said William A. Dembski, a leading intelligent design advocate and Baylor University mathematician.

   Calvert adds: "In origin science, we're addressing questions fundamental to religion - where did we come from? So they (evolutionary biologists) say, `OK, we're going to do that science with a (no-design) bias.' I think the institutions of science (such as universities, peer-review journals and scientific organizations) are wrong when they say that we have to ignore that (design) hypothesis."

   The intelligent design movement, however, insists it is different from the various forms of scientific creationism and their explicitly religious pleadings. That's because most creationists look for scientific evidence that backs the Genesis creation accounts, whereas intelligent design proponents say they are unable, through their science, to answer who the intelligent designer is.

   Evolution has been debated inside religious institutions since Darwin first published his theories, and there's no universally accepted religious conclusion about it.

   In 1996 the late Pope John Paul II, in a message to his Pontifical Academy of Sciences, said supportive things about evolution, a theory the church has never condemned.

   "Fresh knowledge," he said, "leads to recognition of the theory of evolution as more than just a hypothesis."

   Similarly, last year, the Vatican's International Theological Commission said science "furnishes mounting support for some theory of evolution to account for the development and diversification of life on earth."

   The commission mentioned critics of Darwinism who "point to evidence of design" and then seemed to support the charge of intelligent design proponents that some evolutionary biologists are biased. It said "neo-Darwinians" who conclude that "evolution is absolutely unguided are straying beyond what can be demonstrated by science."

    Proponents of the design theory say they're in for the long haul.

   "Intelligent design is "perceived as being strong enough to be dealt with by the scientific establishment," Behe said. "I'm encouraged by that. I'm very optimistic that the progress of science itself will continue to throw up more evidence pointing toward design. Things are not getting simpler, they're getting much more elegant."

   Dembski said parents and school boards "are tired of being bullied. I think these issues are not going to go away. If anything, they'll be intensified."

   But Gale believes intelligent design has no long-term future: "They're very good at raising questions in areas of ignorance: `You can't explain this, therefore it's intelligent design.' You can't just put God into our gaps in knowledge."

WEB SITES

• The Kansas City-based Intelligent Design Network: www.intelligentdesignnetwork.org
  
• William Dembski's description of Intelligent Design: www.arn.org/docs/dembski/wd(UNDERSCORE)idtheory.htm
  
• The American Association of the Advancement of Science resolution criticizing Intelligent Design: www.aaas.org/news/releases/2002/1106id2.shtml
  
• A Public Broadcasting System list of hundreds of publications about evolution: www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/index.html

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