Abstract
If intelligent design (id) is to compete with evolutionary theory (et), it must meet the modified falsifiability challenge, that is, make some deductive or probabilistic observational assertions. It must also meet the modified translatability challenge, which it fails if et makes all the observational assertions of id, while id does not make all the observational assertions of et. I discuss four prominent but diverse formulations of id and show that each either fails one of the two challenges or is analytically false.
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Notes
With a reference to his discussion of the trinity, Swinburne adds in a footnote: “In understanding God as a person, while being fair to the Judaic and Islamic view of God, I am oversimplifying the Christian view.”
As all claims in this section, this one is defended in more depth in the companion piece.
Note that given a set of justified statements there may be multiple honest conjunctions of auxiliary assumptions.
In this section, it suffices to rely on an intuitive notion of csi: New York, brains, and computer chips have it, Kazimir Malevich’s “Black Square”, rocks, and sweat do not.
The substitution of ‘caused’ for ‘crafted’ is meant to align the paraphrase with the definitions by id proponents discussed below.
Unlike ‘regular quotes’, \(\ulcorner\hbox{quasi quotes}\urcorner\) allow the substitution of variables within their scope, so that, for example, ‘Anne is an intelligent designer’ is an instance of \(\ulcorner x\) is an intelligent designer\(\urcorner\).
I thank Casey Luskin for helpful discussions about this definition. The csc’s definition can perhaps be seen as representative because, with the exception of P. William Davis, all proponents of id mentioned in this article are directly affiliated with the csc: Stephen C. Meyer is the program director; Michael J. Behe, William A. Dembski, and Jonathan Wells are senior fellows; Dean H. Kenyon and Mark D. Hartwig are fellows; Casey Luskin is a staff member (CSC 2012). Davis is a co-author of Kenyon (Davis and Kenyon 1993).
This is somewhat puzzling because the conjecture does not seem to be inductively supported by the observations and, in fact, false: Even many objects intentionally produced by intelligent agents, for example the “Black Square”, anvils, and (sometimes) sweat, do not show csi. Note that the conjecture’s converse is just id 2, and thus cannot be assumed to be inductively supported without begging the question (cf. Sober 2008, 176).
Logically redundant, that is. Mentioning living things puts an emphasis on the main application of id, irreducible complexity in organisms.
Of course, it is claimed of many theories that they explain some phenomenon or other, but that does not mean that the theory itself uses the concept of explanation.
Like Hempel’s explication, this explication of ‘explanation’ is extremely implausible if explanation is considered as a psychological phenomenon. But taken as a technical concept, it is arguably at least as good as the deductive one.
I will argue below that id 3 is analytically false, and thus too strong. Hence the focus on id 3—possibly only a necessary condition for the csc’s full definition of id—is a charitable reading, and so is the use of the disjunction in the definition of id 3.
Following the principle of charity, one should take id to be the most plausible of the possible definitions given in this section. Excluding id 3 from the discussion would thus not help the case of id.
Note that neither id 3 nor id 4 exclude the alleged fine-tuning of cosmological constants as evidence for an intelligent designer (which is a focus of Monton’s discussion): Dembski (2002, xiii) claims that the fine-tuning is an instance of csi.
The condition in Eq. (15) for term q xyzwO does not need to contain the conjunct \(\ulcorner\exists y(Dy\land Cyx)\urcorner, \) as this is entailed by \(\ulcorner Dy\land Cyx\urcorner\) for any y.
This assumes that ‘good’ has its usual meaning in theistic statements. The contrary assumption led to the original falsifiability challenge (Flew 1950, 258–259).
Again because one can observe many objects that, intuitively, have csi: Miami, eyes, etc.
I thank an anonymous referee for inquiring about the following.
Focusing only on deductive observational assertions, a formal analogy is the difference between \(\exists y(Dy\land Cyx) \rightarrow O\, |{\!}{=}{\!}| \,\forall y(Dy\land Cyx \rightarrow O)\), which corresponds to claim (a), and \(\exists y(Dy\land Cyx\rightarrow O)\), which corresponds to claim (b).
As Hume already argued in connection with the existence of God, even if one is able to infer the existence of an intelligent designer, one may still not be able to infer anything from this fact (cf. Mackie 1982, 136–137).
Of course, the second premise is also very problematic if one has no definition of disconfirmation at all.
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that id is also often formulated with so little precision that even charitable interpreters (which I take Monton and me to be) can arrive at fundamentally incompatible conclusions about its content.
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Thomas Müller and Janneke van Lith for helpful discussions and two anonymous referees for trenchant and exceptionally gracious comments.
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Lutz, S. Empiricism and Intelligent Design II: Analyzing Intelligent Design. Erkenn 78, 681–698 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-012-9392-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-012-9392-5