God: The Failed Hypothesis (7 page)

chance plus natural selection—as these processes explore the space of possible survival solutions.

Dembski’s Information

While to this date Behe has written one book, his Discovery Institute colleague William Dembski has been highly prolific, with several books and many articles on intelligent design
²²
. Dembski claims that design in nature is mathematically demonstrable. Since his arguments are couched in highly and often ambiguous technical language, they require a certain expertise to understand and evaluate. Fortunately, many experts have taken the trouble to carefully examine Dembski’s work. Almost universally they show it to be deeply flawed
²³
. I will just mention here one example where Dembski, like Behe, makes statements that are provably wrong.

In his popular book
Intelligent Design: The Bridge between Science and Theology
(no hiding the religious motive here), Dembski asserts, “Chance and law working in tandem cannot generate information
²⁴
.” He calls this the
Law of Conservation of Information.

In
Has Science Found God?
I disproved this “law” by simply and trivially showing that the quantitative definition of information, as used conventionally and, somewhat obscurely, by Dembski is equivalent to negative entropy
²⁵
. Entropy, which is the quantitative measure of disorder in physics (hence information being related to negative entropy, or order), is not a conserved quantity like energy. In fact, the entropy of an “open” system (one that interacts with its environment by exchanging energy)

can either increase or decrease. Certainly living systems on Earth are open systems. Indeed, a living organism is kept away from thermodynamic equilibrium by its use of sources of outside energy to maintain order.

The Political Battle Today

While at this writing intelligent design continues to gain adherents among those believers who cannot reconcile Darwinian natural selection with their faith, scientists of many faiths and scientists of no faith have agreed overwhelmingly that intelligent design has not made its case scientifically. All the major scientific societies in the United States have issued statements supporting evolution and rejecting intelligent design. Behe’s own department at Lehigh University has put it as well as any:

The faculty in the Department of Biological Sciences is committed to the highest standards of scientific integrity and academic function. This commitment carries with it unwavering support for academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas. It also demands the utmost respect for the scientific method, integrity in the conduct of research, and recognition that the validity of any scientific model comes only as a result of rational hypothesis testing, sound experimentation, and findings that can be replicated by others.

The department faculty, then, are unequivocal in their support of evolutionary theory, which has its roots in the seminal work of Charles Darwin and has been supported by findings accumulated over 140 years. The sole dissenter from this position, Prof.

Michael Behe, is a well-known proponent of “intelligent design.” While we respect Prof. Behe’s right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally, and should not be regarded as scientific
²⁶
.

Amid faculty protests, Dembski has left Baylor University, the largest Baptist university in the world, for the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
²⁷
. Many scholars at Baylor and other Christian universities have come to realize that intelligent design does not provide respectable support for their religious beliefs
²⁸
.

The battle over intelligent design, which is fought in the political arena rather than in scientific venues, is producing its share of litigation
²⁹
. In a court case that attracted world attention in December 2005, a federal court in Dover, Pennsylvania, determined that intelligent design was motivated by religion and thus presenting it in science classes in public schools is unconstitutional
³⁰
. This would seem to signal the death knell for intelligent design except for a subtle point that has escaped the notice of most of the scientific community and others that support evolution.

In the Dover trial Judge John E. Jones
III
ruled that teaching intelligent design (ID) in public-school science classes is an unconstitutional violation of church and state. This case mirrored
McLean v. Arkansas,
described above.

In both trials, the presiding federal judges went further than was necessary in making their rulings. Not only did the jurists rule creation science and ID as unconstitutional entanglements of government with religion, which would have been sufficient to decide each case (as Judge Jones admitted in his decision), but they also labeled them as not science. In doing so, they were forced to define science—something on which neither scientists nor philosophers have been able to reach a consensus.

In Arkansas, Judge William R. Overton relied mainly on the testimony of philosopher Michael Ruse and defined science as follows
³¹
:

(1) It is guided by natural law;

(2) It has to be explained by reference to natural law;

(3) It is testable against the empirical world;

(4) Its conclusions are tentative, that is, are not necessarily the final word;

(5) It is falsifiable.

The eminent philosopher Larry Laudan, my colleague at the University of Hawaii at the time, had worked for years on the socalled demarcation problem, how to draw a line between science and nonscience. When the Arkansas decision was announced, Laudan objected strenuously. He pointed out that creation science is in fact testable, tentative, and falsifiable. For example, it predicts a young Earth and other geological facts that have, in fact, been falsified. Falsified science can still be science, just wrong science. Laudan warned that the Arkansas decision would come back to haunt science by “perpetuating and canonizing a false stereotype on what science is and how it works
³²
.”

Coming up to date, we similarly find that intelligent design is testable, tentative, and falsifiable. As described above, the claims of primary design theorists William Dembski and Michael Behe have been thoroughly refuted and in some cases falsified.

I am not quibbling with the ruling that ID, as practiced by the Dover Board of Education, represented an unconstitutional attempt to promote a sectarian view of creation under the guise of science. And I also agree that ID has all the markings of pseudoscience rather than genuine science.

Judge Jones relied on the Arkansas precedent and witnesses from both sides who testified that for ID to be considered science, the ground rules of science would have to be broadened to allow the consideration of supernatural forces. This position was both unwise and incorrect, for reasons I discussed in chapter 1. It is unwise because it plays into the hands of those who accuse science of dogmatism in refusing to consider the possibility on non-natural elements at work in the universe. It is incorrect because science is not forbidden from considering supernatural causes.

Furthermore, some reputable scientists are doing just that.

Self-Organization

Proponents of intelligent design often point to a statement by “400 scientists” that is purported to demonstrate their support for intelligent design. Let me quote the exact statement: “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged
³³
.”

Note that “intelligent design” does not appear in the statement. In fact, it is rather a mild expression of skepticism, always a reasonable scientific attitude, and a gratuitous call for careful examination of the evidence for Darwin’s theory—unnecessary because this has been the rule in evolution science since Darwin’s voyage on the
Beagle.
Indeed, Darwin’s work still serves as an exemplar of the best in empirical and theoretical science, and is one of the most strenuously tested.

Nevertheless, there may indeed be more to the mechanism of evolution than random mutation and natural selection. It simply isn’t intelligent design. Complex material systems exhibit a purely natural process called
self-organization
and this appears to occur in both living and nonliving systems.

In his beautifully illustrated book
The Self-Made Tapestry,
Philip Ball gives many examples of pattern formation in nature that should provide a strong antidote for those who still labor under the delusion that mindless natural processes are unable to account for the complex world we see around us
³⁴
. The fact that many patterns observed in biological systems are also present in nonliving systems and can be understood in terms of elementary, reductionist physics also should provide an antidote for those who still labor under the delusion that special
holistic
or
nonreductive
processes are needed to account for the complexity of life.

Simplicity easily begets complexity in the world of locally interacting particles
³⁵
. The whole is the sum of its parts.

One remarkable observation, for example, is the frequent appearance in nature of the
Fibonacci sequence
of numbers. This is the set of numbers in which each entry is the sum of the preceding two: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55,… The number of petals on many flowers is a Fibonacci number. Buttercups have five petals, marigolds have thirteen, and asters have twenty-one.

Dembski has attempted to argue that the appearance of what he calls
complex specified information
is evidence for “intelligent design” in the universe. He claims that simple natural processes are incapable of producing complex specified information
³⁶
. In his 1999 book,
Intelligent Design,
Dembski gives an example of the type of complex specified information that, when observed in nature, would in his view provide evidence for an intelligent source of that information. He refers to the film
Contact,
based on the novel of the same name by famed astronomer Carl Sagan
³⁷
.

In the film, an extraterrestrial signal is observed by astronomers and interpreted as the sequence of prime numbers from 2 to 101. The astronomers in the story take this as evidence for an extraterrestrial intelligence. Dembski argues that many living things on Earth exhibit this kind of complex specified information that can only be produced by extraterrestrial, or perhaps extra-universal intelligence.

But Dembski does not have to wait for signals from outer space to provide an interesting mathematical sequence. He can walk out into his garden and count the petals on flowers. He will find that most contain “complex specified information” that comes from purely natural processes.

One example, given by Ball, is the double spiral pattern that is commonly found in nature. In 80 percent of plant species, leaves spiral up the stem, each separated from the one below by a constant angle turn
³⁸
. A double spiral pattern, twisting in opposite directions, is seen when viewed from above. This double spiral pattern is also seen in the florets of flower heads such as the sunflower (see fig. 2.1) and the leaflets in a pinecone.

It might be thought that some biological process, perhaps associated with Darwinian evolution, is taking place. However, it turns out to be simple physics—the minimization of potential energy.

In 1992 Stephanie Douady and Yves Couder placed tiny droplets of magnetic fluid on a film of oil. They applied a vertical magnetic field that polarized the droplets and caused them to repel one another. Another field was applied along the periphery that pulled the droplets to the edge. They observed the droplets arrange themselves in a double spiral, thus demonstrating that the mechanism for spiral formation is physical rather than uniquely biological
³⁹
.

Several computer simulations have reproduced this result.

However, I decided to try one myself that made as few assumptions as possible. I started with an electrically charged particle, such as an electron, and added more particles one at a time in rings of increasing radius from the central particle. I chose a particle location in each ring as the position for which the electric potential energy for a particle in that ring is minimum. The result is shown in figure 2.2. We see that the double spiral pattern is reproduced. Please note that this pattern was not built into the algorithm used, which involved only minimizing the total potential energy, where the potential energy surrounding a point particle is spherically symmetric.

Fig. 2.1.

A sunflower showing the double spiral pattern of florets in the flower head.