Editor,

I am afraid I was more confused than edified by the article on ‘Intelligent Design’ by Paul Nelson in the January 2005 Nucleus (pp13-21). Why do Christians get so wound up about evolution? We need to beware of being distracted from the five relevant messages in the Bible relating to creation:

• God is the Creator of all things.
• The Bible is primarily concerned with ‘why’ when it describes God’s work. Knowledge of mechanisms has grown enormously over the centuries, whilst God’s purposes remain unchanged; it is by faith (not reason or science) that we believe the universe was formed at God’s command (Heb 11:3). Only rarely are we told how God interacts with his world. One occasion is in Exodus 14:21 (‘the Lord drove the sea back with a strong east wind’ allowing the Israelites to cross the Red Sea, but drowning the pursuing Egyptians); the importance was the timing, not the cause of the event. As Galileo wrote in the 17th century, ‘the Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.’
• Creation is God’s work - a miracle. Many people are surprised to realise that miracles are not always instantaneous (Mk 8:24,25) and that God sometimes uses extraneous materials to do his will (eg 2 Ki 5:10-14; Jn 9:6,7). In Genesis 2:7, the creation of man is described as a two-stage process: God took ‘dust’ and only when he ‘breathed into’ it, did the man become a living being. This parallels Genesis 1:26 where it is ‘the image of God’, not our anatomy or our genes, that distinguishes us from other living creatures.
• The Bible makes it clear that God is both transcendent (above and beyond creation) and immanent (present and active in creation). Just as we experience answered prayer and learn about God at work in our everyday life, there is no intrinsic reason why we cannot find out more of God’s activity in the world as we carry out scientific investigation into creation (Ps 111:2).
• God presides over change: the story of man in the Bible begins in a garden, in Eden, and ends in the new Jerusalem, a city; the Israelites travelled through a wilderness to a promised land; by God’s intervention, we go from sin to salvation.

In his article, Paul Nelson reminds us of many errors made by those seeking to understand our origins, but they should not distract us from the clear teaching of Scripture.

Nelson attacks evolution on the grounds that it is ‘naturalism’. Naturalism can be defined as ‘sympathy with the view that ultimately nothing resists explanation by the methods characteristic of the natural sciences’. There is nothing intrinsically wrong in this; the real enemy is dogmatic (or ontological) reductionism - assuming that a single explanation accounts for everything, ie that a naturalistic assumption necessarily excludes divine action. Nelson has fallen for the fallacy of ‘nothing buttery’, which is the very error he is trying to condemn.[1]

Although he does not say it, the argument for intelligent design that he espouses is usually coupled with the notion of ‘irreducible complexity’ propounded by the biochemist Michael Behe in his book Darwin’s Black Box[2] and demolished by all who have examined it in detail.[3,4] Irreducible complexity is a very weak argument. It was disposed of by Darwin himself in chapters six and seven of The Origin of Species. Worse, it is dangerous because any discovery showing that a structure or function is not irreducibly complex destroys the validity of the argument. It is no more than a reinvention of the ‘God of the Gaps’ - putting God into the gaps of our knowledge, which means his territory gets smaller and smaller as our knowledge increases. Moreover, it is a claim that we do not need: we believe that God designed us (perhaps using evolutionary mechanisms that in principle we can discover, although we will rarely know whether they are the ones he actually used); to interpolate an ‘Intelligent Designer’ into the process is redundant and could be regarded as adding to the Bible.[5]

Nelson concludes his article with an exhortation that ‘Christians must continue to struggle to understand the relationship of science and faith.’ He is right; we desist at our peril.[6] But let us be clear: there are two witnesses: the Bible and scientific understanding. We can learn from history and we may be helped by philosophical analysis, but in the last resort we have to return to what have been called God’s two books - his Book of Words (the Bible) and his Book of Works (creation). He is the author of both, and any apparent conflict between them must be due to our failure to read one of them properly - and we need humility to realise that it can be either.[7]

Sam Berry
Professor Emeritus of Genetics University College, London

Author’s response

As a fellow Christian, I find little with which to disagree, and much to applaud, in Professor Berry’s five messages from the Bible. As a philosopher of science and student of evolutionary theory, however, I am entirely unpersuaded by 1) Berry’s defense of naturalism, 2) his worries about the God of the Gaps, and 3) his assessment of the strength of evolutionary theory. Let me consider each of these points in turn.

Science as naturalism

Berry defines ‘naturalism’ as ‘sympathy with the view that ultimately nothing resists explanation by the methods characteristic of the natural sciences’. This skates dangerously close to circularity (ie science should be understood as naturalistic, and naturalism explains the world with the methods of science). Moreover it does not address the genuine content of naturalism, which holds that the physical universe (all that exists) is causally closed. Physical – non-mental – causes are ultimate, says the naturalist, and they are sufficient to explain what we observe. Now, Berry would call this ontological reductionism, which as a theist and Christian he rejects. The physical universe is not all that exists; Berry and I agree, and God may act as he pleases, including within the universe, directly. But if the universe is not causally closed, then naturalism cannot be a reliable philosophy of science.

The problem can be stated simply. If it is possible that intelligences (including God’s) act in nature to leave traces of their activity, then science, if it is a truth-seeking enterprise, must be open to that possibility. But naturalism forecloses this mode of explanation, because any intelligence or mind irreducible to physical causes violates naturalism’s closed ontology. If God exists – indeed, if Professor Berry himself exists, as a unique and irreducible agent, which he surely does – then as reasoning beings we need to refer to more than physical causes to understand and explain the world. No physical law, for instance, explains Berry’s letter to Nucleus: a pattern of symbols expressing information. Only he does.

The God of the Gaps

Consider Professor Berry’s letter again, as a real information-carrying pattern in nature. It would be folly to try to explain the origin of this pattern in terms of physics, chemistry, or biology – that is, without also referring to the intent of a particular agent (intelligence) residing in the UK. There is a detectable causal ‘gap’ – an actual discontinuity – in the history of the letter’s pattern, properly filled or explained only by the agency of a well-known Christian professor of genetics.

Is it possible that such discontinuities exist in the history of life on Earth? Yes, and any science worthy of the name should be free to find them. Science gains nothing by insisting on the sufficiency of ‘natural’ (physical, non-intelligent) causes. That is a dictate of the philosophy of naturalism, but not of the evidence itself.

Of course, one may err in inferring an intelligence-caused discontinuity. But the risk of error is the common lot of any empirical investigation. Stripped of his terrifying philosophical armour (supplied by naturalism), the God of the Gaps turns out to be a mild, rather ordinary fellow, known for centuries as the problem of induction. Given our finitude, we may err in drawing our empirical generalisations. But if one fears error, science is the wrong pursuit; best to stay safely in bed.

The strength of evolutionary theory

I am trained as a philosopher of science – the science in this instance being evolutionary biology. Since the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859, evolutionary biologists have learned much about God’s world, generating knowledge that is reliable, useful, and likely to persist. What they have not done, however, is to solve the central problems of their discipline, including the origin of biological complexity, the origin of form, and the origin of those traits that make humans distinctly what we are. An increasing number of biologists – still a minority, to be sure, but a rapidly growing minority all the same – are coming to understand this failure for what it is: the collapse of naturalism as a philosophy of science. Books such as Darwin’s Black Box mark the shift from ‘biological complexity as unsolved problem’ to ‘biological complexity as fundamental anomaly pointing in another direction altogether – towards design’ (the ‘demolitions’ of the notion of irreducible complexity Berry claims are nothing of the sort; see Behe’s replies at www.discovery.org/csc).

So what sustains evolutionary theory? Go to science meetings, as I do (I’m a member of the Society for Developmental Biology), and talk with evolutionary biologists. Science must be naturalistic, they’ll say, and evolution by natural selection is the best naturalistic theory available.

That it may be – but the best naturalistic theory is by no means necessarily the best theory. Science needs to be set free from its slavery to a 19th century philosophy. Every natural regularity God created remains to be discovered, but we know that the universe is a richer and vastly more interesting place than that. If intelligence (mind) cannot be reduced to physics, then its action may leave traces pointing to itself; thus, the possibility of intelligent causation belongs within the toolkit of science. The long-unsolved problems of evolutionary theory may be unsolved because they are predicated on a false philosophy – naturalism. If so, we would do well to jettison that philosophy with alacrity, as a dead weight holding back science. And may the best theory win.

Paul Nelson
Philosopher of biology and a fellow of the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design