“Intelligent Design” theory and mechanism

From an Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) point of view, one of the main problems with “Intelligent Design” theory is that it presupposes the same mechanistic conception of nature that underlies naturalism. (See here, here, and here for some of my earlier remarks on this and other problems with ID.) ID theorists sometimes object to this characterization of their position, as William Dembski does several times in his book The Design Revolution (e.g. at pages 25 and 151).

Well, I guess Dembski would know what ID theory is really committed to, if anyone does. The trouble is that even he doesn’t seem to know, because despite these disavowals of mechanism, the rest of the book is peppered with assertions that presuppose the truth of a mechanistic conception of nature. Or perhaps Dembski simply doesn’t understand what A-T theorists mean by “mechanism.” Either way, there can be no doubt that ID theory, as Dembski conceives of it, is mechanistic through and through in the sense of “mechanism” that A-T rejects.

Take Dembski’s discussion of Aristotle at pp. 132-3 of The Design Revolution (which, if you don’t have a copy of the book, you can read for yourself here via Google Books). Dembski here identifies “design” with what Aristotle called techne or “art.” As Dembski correctly says, “the essential idea behind these terms is that information is conferred on an object from outside the object and that the material constituting the object, apart from that outside information, does not have the power to assume the form it does. For instance, raw pieces of wood do not by themselves have the power to form a ship.” This contrasts with what Aristotle called “nature,” which (to quote Dembski quoting Aristotle) “is a principle in the thing itself.” For example (again to quote Dembski’s own exposition of Aristotle), “the acorn assumes the shape it does through powers internal to it: the acorn is a seed programmed to produce an oak tree” – in contrast to the way the “ship assumes the shape it does through powers external to it,” via a “designing intelligence” which “imposes” this form on it from outside.

Now, having made this distinction, Dembski goes on explicitly to acknowledge that just as “the art of shipbuilding is not in the wood that constitutes the ship” and “the art of making statues is not in the stone out of which statues are made,” “so too, the theory of intelligent design contends that the art of building life is not in the physical stuff that constitutes life but requires a designer” (emphasis added). And there you have it: Living things are for ID theory to be modeled on ships and statues, the products of techne or “art,” whose characteristic “information” is not “internal” to them but must be “imposed” from “outside.” And that just is what A-T philosophers mean by a “mechanistic” conception of life.

Remember, this does not mean that A-T denies that living things are created by God; far from it. The point is rather that for A-T, the way God creates a natural substance is not to be understood on the model of a shipbuilder or sculptor who takes pre-existing bits of matter and rearranges them to serve an end they have no tendency otherwise to serve. Nor is the point affected in the least if we imagine that when the pre-existing bits of matter are created this external order is imposed immediately; temporal considerations are irrelevant. For A-T, a natural substance is a composite of “prime matter” (matter having no form at all) and substantial form, rather than a piece of “second matter” (matter already having some substantial form or other) which has acquired some accidental form from outside it. And a natural substance’s causal tendencies, including biological functions in the case of living things, are inherent to it, a reflection of its essence or nature; it simply could not possibly exist as the kind of thing it is in the first place if it did not have those tendencies, and thus it would have them even if (per impossibile) it had not been created by God. The way God creates living things, then, is the same way He creates everything else, viz. by conjoining an essence to an act of existence, which in the case of material things (including plants and animals) entails conjoining a certain kind of prime matter/substantial form composite to an act of existence.

Remember too that none of this has anything to do with Darwinism, the debate over which is a separate matter. Perhaps the biological world God creates works according to Darwinian principles; and perhaps not. Either way, the question will not be resolved by weighing against Darwinian naturalism a “design inference” to some artificer who adds some extra “information” to the natural world in the way a shipbuilder gives structure to wood in order to make a ship.

As I have explained many times and in many places where this subject has come up, the core to the mechanistic revolution of the early modern philosophers was the rejection of Aristotelian formal and final causes. Other elements of mechanism (such as the notion that all efficient causes work according to a crude push-pull model) fell away over the centuries, but this essentially negative vision – that however the natural world works, it does not involve either anything like substantial forms (which are irreducible to the sum of a natural substance’s parts, or even to the sum of its parts together with an externally imposed or observer-relative function) or anything like final causality (the “directedness toward an end” that the Scholastics claimed was manifest even in basic causal regularities). In other ways too Dembski makes it clear that he accepts this mechanistic approach to the world.

For example, at p. 140 of The Design Revolution, Dembski flatly asserts that “lawlike [regularities] of nature” such as “water’s propensity to freeze below a certain temperature” are “as readily deemed brute facts of nature as artifacts of design” and thus “can never decisively implicate design”; only “specified complexity” can do that. But for A-T, such regularities are paradigm examples of final causality ; that some A is an efficient cause of some effect or range of effects B is for A-T unintelligible unless we suppose that generating B is the final cause or end at which A is naturally directed. Even the simplest causal regularities thus suffice “decisively” to show that there must be a supreme ordering intelligence keeping efficient causes directed toward their ends from instant to instant, at least if Aquinas’s Fifth Way is successful. Complexity (“specified” or otherwise) has nothing whatsoever to do with it. (I’ve addressed this issue many times in various blog posts, and see Aquinas and The Last Superstition for the full story.) That Dembski considers it at least in principle possible that such causal regularities are “brute facts” which can never decisively implicate design suffices to show that his conception of causality is mechanistic in the relevant sense, viz. one which eschews inherent final causality.

More could be said, but that suffices to make the point. It is worth adding, though, that the ambiguity in question here – denying mechanism in some places while affirming it in others – has parallels elsewhere in Dembski’s work. For example, he uses the term “information” (in The Design Revolution and elsewhere) in several different senses and freely slides from one to another without always making it clear which one is supposed to be doing the work in a given argument. In some places he insists that the “designer” that ID posits could in theory itself be something in the natural order, such as an extraterrestrial, so that there is no truth to the charge that ID has an essentially theological agenda. But elsewhere he insists that “specified complexity” cannot be given a naturalistic explanation, and even allows that positing a designer who is part of the natural order would only initiate an explanatory regress – which would imply that a genuine explanation would require an appeal to the supernatural. His main arguments all evince an unmistakable realist thrust, and yet in response to a particular objection he suggests that ID theory is perfectly compatible with a non-realist philosophy of science (though it does not seem to occur to him that his Darwinian opponents could make exactly the same move in response to some of his criticisms of them). And so forth.

In short, Dembski seems intent on sidestepping potential objections by making ID as flexible as possible, so long as the word “design” is preserved. This explains why some readers assume that there is nothing in ID that is incompatible with A-T metaphysics. But imprecision and incoherence are not the same as compatibility. And amidst all the ambiguity, Dembski’s commitment to an essentially mechanistic conception of nature (as A-T understands “mechanistic”) stands out as one of the more consistent themes of his work.

“Nothing but”

Take a few bits of metal, work them into various shapes, and attach them to a piece of wood. Voila! A mousetrap. Or so we call it. But objectively, apart from human interests, the object is “nothing but” a collection of wood and metal parts. Its “mousetrappish” character is observer-relative; it is in the minds of the designer and users of the object, and not strictly in the object itself. “Reductionism” with respect to such human artifacts is just common sense. We know that cars, computers, and cakes are objectively “nothing but” the parts that make them up – that their “carlike,” “computerlike,” or “cakelike” qualities are not really there inherently in the parts, but are observer-relative – precisely because we took the parts and rearranged them to perform a function we want them to perform but which they have no tendency to perform on their own.

But now consider claims like “Consciousness is ‘nothing but’ a complex set of electrochemical processes in the brain,”“Living things are ‘nothing but’ aggregates of physico-chemical processes,” “Water is ‘nothing but’ H2O,” and so forth. Claims like these – indeed, reductionism about natural kinds in general – are, I think it will generally be acknowledged, not in line with common sense. For the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) metaphysician, they are not true either – not even the claim about water. “H20” abbreviates a description of the chemical micro-structure of water, but for A-T essentialism, macro-level substances are not reducible to their micro-structure. (See the relevant sections of Oderberg’s Real Essentialism for a useful discussion.) A-T analysis is holistic rather than reductionist; a whole can be analyzed into its parts, but the parts in turn cannot properly be understood apart from the whole. And the end-directedness characteristic of natural substances – conscious purposes in the case of human beings, biological functions in the case of living things in general, causal tendencies in the case of inorganic phenomena no less than organic ones – is inherent to them rather than observer-relative or imposed from outside, and irreducible to patterns of efficient causation.

But leave all that aside; obviously, the A-T view is controversial. The point for now is that, to make reductionism about natural kinds plausible, one must substitute for common sense some alternative picture of the natural world – in particular, a picture on which every feature of a natural substance is either entirely definable in terms of the features of its parts or can be interpreted as observer-relative. That is to say, one must substitute for common sense the idea that a natural substance is a kind of artifact. One must think of plants and animals, solar systems and galaxies, as comparable to (say) mousetraps, watches, or outboard motors.

And that is, of course, exactly what the “mechanical” conception of the world that the early modern philosophers put in place of the Scholastics’ Aristotelian philosophy of nature made possible. The world was reconceived as a machine or collection of machines. Break a natural object down into its parts and identify the efficient-causal relations holding between them, and you know (so the moderns claim) everything there is to know about its intrinsic nature. Anything irreducible to this – such as final causality or end-directedness, or a “formal cause” over and above the sum of the parts – is extrinsic to it, observer-relative, whether the observer is a human being or a divine artificer. For Aristotle, “art imitates nature” – that is to say, artifacts copy nature’s way of doing things, but only (of course) artificially since their parts have no inherent tendency to do what we make them do. The moderns reverse this – nature is for them a kind of “art,” in the sense that natural objects are to be modeled on artifacts rather than the other way around.

Early modern thinkers like Descartes, Newton, Boyle, and Locke were quite happy to associate a “machinist” with the “machines” they saw in the natural world. Hence they did not deny that things had final causes of some sort, since God had made them for a purpose. But the purposes were now as extrinsic to natural objects as the mousetrap’s purpose is extrinsic to the wood and metal that make it up, residing entirely in the mind of the divine artificer and in no sense in the things themselves; and for Descartes, these purposes are therefore as inscrutable as the divine will is. (For a useful brief account of the transition from the Aristotelian-Scholastic conception of purpose in nature to the modern “mechanistic” conception, see Margaret Osler’s paper “From Immanent Natures to Nature as Artifice: The Reinterpretation of Final Causes in Seventeenth-Century Natural Philosophy,” The Monist vol. 79, no. 3.)

It was bound to occur to someone that if the world is a kind of machine or artifact, it might carry on in existence in the absence of the machinist or artificer, just as human artifacts do. Now, given A-T metaphysics, such a “world without God” is impossible in principle. To be sure, a natural substance’s final cause is inherent to it, something it cannot fail to have given its nature or essence; and that entails (contra Descartes) that we can know a thing’s nature and final cause without adverting directly to God’s intentions. But this does not entail that a thing could exist, even for an instant, apart from God. That the prime matter (or “pure potency”) that underlies the natural world is actualized in just the way it is at any given moment requires a “purely actual” Unmoved Mover; that a thing’s nature or essence is conjoined at any instant with an “act of existing” requires an Uncaused Cause that is ipsum esse subsistens. (See Aquinas for the full story.) But when these Scholastic metaphysical underpinnings of natural theology were pushed aside in favor of the “mechanical” conception of the world, the stage was set for deism.

The sequel, naturally, was atheism. For if the “machine” can exist now without a “machinist,” maybe it has always existed without him. Maybe the machine is all that ever existed in the first place. The only question remaining is whether this is “probable,” whether it is the “best explanation” of the “empirical evidence”; and the metaphysically unavoidable God of classical theism is transformed thereby into the “scientific hypothesis” of William Paley and “Intelligent Design” theory.

More to the present point, the way was also opened to the ever more radical forms of reductionism and eliminativism that have characterized modern philosophy. If formal and final causes – Aristotelian essences or natures, and natural ends or purposes – do not exist either inherent in nature itself or in the mind of a divine artificer, the only thing left for them to be are projections of the human mind. There is at least constant pressure, given the mechanistic model of the natural world shared by modern dualists and materialists, modern theists and atheists alike, to regard natural substances as “nothing but” material parts related by patterns of efficient causality.

The results are often absurd and even morally obscene, though modern philosophers have found themselves increasingly happy to live with that. But the mechanistic conception of nature that leads to reductionism and eliminativism is in any event incoherent. For the mind that does the “projecting” in question cannot itself coherently be either reduced or eliminated (as Cartesian mechanists realize, which makes their position at least more sane than that of the materialist); and (as Cartesian mechanists do not realize any more than materialists do) the efficient causality the whole mechanistic model presupposes ultimately cannot be made sense of apart from something like the substantial forms and final causality the mechanist eschews. (See The Last Superstition for the full story.)

Into the bargain, the whole picture gives rise, when not taken in an atheistic direction, to a theology that is difficult or impossible to reconcile with the classical theism at the core of historical Christianity. And that is why A-T philosophers are often so critical of Paley-style “design arguments” and of ID theory – a subject I have addressed in several places, including here and here. (Since certain readers seem hell bent on missing the point, let me repeat a couple of things I’ve said many times already. The A-T critique of Paley and of ID theory has nothing whatsoever to do with Darwinism – Aristotle and Aquinas were not Darwinians, after all – and it has nothing to do either with any objection to probabilistic arguments for God’s existence per se. It has to do instead with the metaphysical and theological errors A-T sees as implicit in the methodological assumptions underlying Paley’s “design argument” and contemporary ID theory.)

In short, while the “world as artifact” model the early modern philosophers put at the center of Western thought was regarded by many of them as a means of defending the religious and moral heritage of the West, it was in fact quite the opposite. In reality it was, and is – if I may wax Marxian – the “objective ally” of deism, atheism, and reductionism. Hence it is simply not to the point to debate with Darwinians whether or not the cosmic watchmaker is “blind” (as Richard Dawkins would put it). The fundamental error – made by Darwinian naturalists and ID theorists alike – is to think of the world as a “watch” in the first place.

The meaning of the Resurrection

As with Christ’s Passion, people are always trying to attach to His Resurrection various counterfeit meanings. But it is, in this case, harder to do it with a straight face. Were you present at the crucifixion, you would have seen what on the surface required no supernatural explanation – a man nailed to a cross, as so many had been before by the Romans. Were you present at Christ’s tomb on that first Easter Sunday, you would have seen a corpse returned to life. “Keep hope alive!” “Jesus is still with us in our hearts!”“You can’t keep a good man down!” and all the other banalities liberal pastors will waste their congregations’ time with today rather fail to convey this central fact about the Resurrection. It was a divine suspension of the natural order, a miracle, or it was nothing. “If Christ is not raised,” St. Paul tells the Christian, “your faith is worthless.” And by “raised” he meant raised – reanimated, brought back from the dead – not eaten by wild dogs but remembered fondly, or whatever it is the John Dominic Crossans of the world want to put in place of what Christianity has always claimed. The Christian faith has, historically, laid everything on that line: Accept the Resurrection, and you must accept what Jesus Christ taught; reject it, and you must reject Him too as a fraud.

Thus, while the Resurrection is an affront to naturalism, it is not primarily that. The most formidable pagan critics of Christianity already knew that naturalism is false. Indeed, almost all serious philosophers historically have known that; it was part of the common ground most of them took for granted in their disputes over less fundamental matters. (The atomists are an obvious exception, though their naturalism was less crude and less dogmatic than that of their modern successors.) In particular, the existence of God and the immortality of the soul were known by Neo-Platonists and others to be demonstrable through philosophical arguments; and such demonstrations ought in any event to form the preamble to an apologetic for the Resurrection, rather than its sequel (or so I would argue).

No, the Resurrection is primarily an affront to the religious rivals of Christianity. It is the point where the tedium of “dialogue” finally ends and the serious business of conversion begins. The Man Who said “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life; no one comes to the Father except through Me” was either raised from the dead or He was not. If He was, then His startling claims received thereby a divine seal of approval, and the only rational response of the non-Christian can be to request baptism. If He was not so raised, then His words reveal Him to have been a megalomaniacal lunatic. An interesting lunatic, maybe; a lunatic whose historical, cultural, religious, and moral impact has vastly – one might say miraculously – outweighed that of any sane man. But a lunatic all the same, and appropriately treated as such. There really is no third option. (Even C. S. Lewis’s “liar” alternative isn’t all that plausible – what sane first-century Jew would think claiming personal divinity a good way to raise a following? And the “guru” Jesus pushed by Crossan and his ilk is manifestly sheer unhistorical fantasy.)

The Resurrected Christ will not be dialogued with. He will be worshipped, and obeyed, or He will simply be rejected as one would reject the ravings of a Jim Jones or David Koresh. Politely rejected, perhaps, at least this side of the grave; we can concede to the dialoguers their good manners. But rejected, and in no uncertain terms. “Let your Yes be Yes and your No, No.” Unless you are prepared to call Him your Risen Lord, seek no religious meaning in His life and teachings. Nor in His death; for the Passion is what it is only in light of the Resurrection. If we who did not know Him in the flesh worship at the foot of His cross, it is because we have worshipped first at His empty tomb.

The meaning of the Passion

The bloody violence of the death of Jesus Christ – the skin torn by scourging, the nails driven through hands and feet, the thorns pushed into scalp and forehead, the spear thrust into the side – naturally impresses upon our minds His fleshly humanity. But it is in contemplating the Passion, perhaps more than in any other context, that we must fixate our minds precisely upon Christ’s divinity, lest we miss the event’s significance entirely. Modern people think they understand it well – a miscarriage of justice on the part of a corrupt political system, an affront to freedom of conscience, an expression of reactionary hostility to novel ideas comparable to the execution of Socrates. Thus is Christ transformed, absurdly, into something like an early martyr for Liberalism. (This gets the death of Socrates completely wrong too, of course. The popular understanding of both events reflects a Whiggish narcissism: “He was a great man; ergo he must have been anticipating us moderns in some way.” But that is another subject.)

In fact the significance of the Passion has nothing to do with such comparative trivialities. “We preach Christ crucified,” wrote St. Paul; “to the Jews a stumbling block, and to the Greeks foolishness.” The Jews and Greeks of old were (here as in so many other ways) closer to the truth than the moderns. For whatever else the crucifixion of Jesus Christ was, it was, first and foremost, the supreme blasphemy. It was Pure Act, esse ipsum subsistens, That Than Which No Greater Can Be Conceived, the “I Am Who Am” of Exodus, our First Cause and Last End – spat upon, beaten, and nailed to a cross. All other meanings – political, socioeconomic, legal, moral – fade into insignificance in light of this most incomprehensible of sins. Unlike us moderns, always trying to wedge moral and religious truth into our narrow, this-worldly horizon, the ancient Jews and Greeks knew this, and rebelled at the thought. How could it be? How could Being Itself be put to death? How could the Most High allow Himself to be brought so low? A metaphysical impossibility! An inconceivable sacrilege! And yet it happened.

The “death of God” of Nietzsche’s “madman” parable was not the crucifixion. Nor, of course, was it a literal killing of any sort. But the moral (if not the metaphysical) magnitude of deicide was not lost on him:

"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

No silly talk here of “Flying Spaghetti Monsters” and the like; Nietzsche, unlike so many of his successors, still had a sense of the noble, indeed of the Holy. (The New Atheist is none other than Nietzsche’s Last Man in rationalist drag.) And what he said of the modern, metaphorical “death of God” is true of the real thing: We are each of us guilty of it. We are each of us the worst of murderers. We have, each of us, slain our Maker and sought to make ourselves gods in His place. And we cannot possibly atone.

For the crucifixion, in its sublime gruesome blasphemousness, lays bare the true meaning of sin. It is Non serviam, “My will, not thine, be done!” pushed through consistently. To rationalize evil, we must obliterate the Good. To justify lawlessness, we must put to death the Lawgiver. And yet there can be no “rationalization” of any action in the absence of Good. There can be no “justification” without Law. In the crucifixion we see the sheer, satanic madness of sin.

And we cannot possibly atone. Yet we are not without hope. For the Supreme Lawgiver against Whom we offend is also Infinite Mercy. The God Who can lay down His life can raise Himself up again. And He lays it down willingly, for those He calls His “friends” – for us, His very killers! Even as we commit the greatest of crimes against Him, His thoughts are – astoundingly – with us: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Having put Him on a cross, we can but humbly kneel before it – in sorrow, in thanks, in worship.

Cardinal Ratzinger and the Murphy case

The esteemed Jimmy Akin is on the story, here and here. Andrew Sullivan replies to Akin here. Akin’s rejoinder to Sullivan is forthcoming. No doubt the scientifically-minded Richard Dawkins and the sober journalist Christopher Hitchens are carefully weighing all this evidence before drawing any conclusions.