George:

I have what some may regard as an heretical notion -- that if we allow the debate to shift to evolution vs. intelligent design, as opposed to evolution vs. creationism, we will actually be taking a big step forward. I am a firm Darwinist, but I can empathize with those who feel a sense of wonder and awe at the complexity of human life, and who are not able or willing to wrap their minds around the entire theory of evolution. I have no such empathy for those who believe, in the face of mountains of scientific evidence and analysis, that the world was created in six days about 10,000 years ago, or on October 6, 4004 B.C., as one analyst fixed it.

I spoke with some friends of ours this summer -- Republicans, if it matters -- whose son went to the University of Arizona for four years. He found when he got there that many of the students were Mormons, who had grown up in schools where their science curricula were the subject of voluntary censorship -- the teachers did not teach certain areas, because they knew they would catch too much flak from parents. So these otherwise intelligent, supposedly well-educated students were arriving at the pre-eminent educational institution in their state with no knowledge of geology, genetics, cellular biology, quantum physics, or evolutionary biology. Many of them had to take what amounted to remedial science when they came to the University of Arizona.

The basic premise of intelligent design is that the level of complexity that we see in life -- and particularly in human life -- is too great to be understood as anything other than the product of intelligent design. The idea in its basic form, as articulated by the scientists who have written about it (not the Tom DeLays and George Bushes) does not argue against the known scientific facts about the age of the universe, or about dinosaurs, or about the kinship of homo zinjanthropus to homo sapiens. The more scientific versions of the hypothesis acknowledge that there was a Big Bang that created the universe, that the world is billions of years old, that the species did not all appear at the same time, that they underwent change based on mutations and genetic change, and that humans did not emerge fully blown in their present form but underwent some degree of "perfecting" of an earlier prototype.

Let's face it -- that represents a HUGE leap forward in the base position. Adherents to intelligent design at least will have some understanding of the flow of modern science. One might believe in intelligent design and still accept as valid science the great majority of what evolution adherents are taught. And that would represent a great step forward for science education in that portion of the country
-- mainly the so-called red states -- that regards evolution as objectively false.

A year or so ago, the New York Times published an op-ed column by Tom Friedman, I think it was, who talked about a conversation that he had with the Dalai Lama. The battle, said the Dalai Lama, was not between Christianity and Islam, or among any other combination of religions -- it was between those who believe in the Enlightenment and those who do not. The Enlightenment -- the philosophical movement that grew out of a belief that rationality rather than superstition should be the basis of our scheme of ethics, government and science -- reached its height in the writings and life's work of Thomas Jefferson, and we in Charlottesville obviously have a deep reverence for the Jeffersonian. But a little history of the Enlightenment is, well, enlightening.

The Enlightenment was not a monolithic movement. Some of the Enlightenment philosophers attempted to use reason to prove the existence of a Supreme Being. Some -- like Voltaire -- used reason to deny the divinity of (and even the existence of) Jesus. (One "Voltairism" that some may find appropriate to the current situation: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities"; if people believe in what is unreasonable, they will do what is unreasonable.)

I have read some of writings of some of the more sane proponents of intelligent design, and they strike me as the 21st-Century equivalents of the philosophers who, in the 18th Century, were trying to use reason to prove the existence of God. I don't agree with them, but let us not lose sight of the fact that they are at least conducting the debate on grounds that do not attempt to ignore that which we accept as scientifically true. At least we would be having a debate between two sides that agree that science matters. They go astray, in my view, when they confront a question to which we do not yet know the answer -- for example, why there was a seemingly sudden burst of diversity and complexity in life forms 542 million years ago (the so-called "Cambrian explosion") -- and attribute to divine intervention what most other scientists attribute to a scientific explanation not yet clearly proven. While this is not a pro-science stance, it is at least not an anti-science stance.

The proponents of "intelligent design" end up acknowledging that a six-day creation story is wrong. They end up acknowledging that Adam and Eve are metaphors, not the ancestors of us all. If the debate becomes "evolution vs. intelligent design," we end up with the other side conceding much of what they now contest.

Unfortunately, the intelligent design advocates include some folks who are best described as wackos. One of the most prominent is William Dembski, a mathematician by training who seems to have gone off the deep end -- he was in essence banished from Baylor University as being too far out even for that very Baptist school. (The Baylor science faculty charged that Dembski was a garden-variety creationist who sought to embellish his views with pseudoscience.) He had at one point concluded that the Cambrian explosion could not possibly be the result of a random (i.e. Darwinian) process, and in the 1990's he had suggested that there were a number of possible explanations, one of which was God. I have read some of his earlier writings, and while they may not be "scientific," they at least don't ignore reality. By 1999, however, he was suggesting that the only explanation for intelligent design was a specifically Christian God -- a conclusion that he based on Scripture as literal truth, a decidedly anti-scientific position. His later writings make it clear that his support for intelligent design is based not on an Enlightenment view that, in the words of Jefferson, "we are not afraid to follow the truth, wherever it may lead," but on an openly evangelical view: "In its relation to Christianity, intelligent design should be viewed as a ground-clearing operation that gets rid of the intellectual rubbish that for generations has kept Christianity from receiving serious consideration."

I would like to suggest a way of looking at any of these issues, and it is an Enlightenment view. Let us hold fast to the Enlightenment view that rationality must drive our educational system. If there are legitimate questions that cannot be answered by present scientific knowledge, let us not be afraid to acknowledge those facts. If some people advance answers that are based on superstition rather than rationality, let us have that discussion on those terms, in that context, and let us arm our science students with the analytical tools to distinguish science from pseudo-science. Our science students should be taught about the nature of science, and the difference between theory and hypothesis, and that the fact that there are questions that have not yet been fully answered does not invalidate a scientific principle.

Our children should also be taught, from the first time that they are taught about science and government and history, about the Enlightenment. They should be taught that this country was founded on the philosophy of the Enlightenment. They should be taught that the God that the Enlightenment thinkers referred to was not the theistic "God-as-puppeteer", but a Deistic "God as clockmaker," who created the universe and then makes no further intervention in its affairs. (Not that either belief structure is to be taught as correct -- just that, as a matter of history, we all need to understand what Jefferson meant by his Deistic references in the Declaration of Independence.) There is a decent chance that unless a student happens to take a course in American political thought, or in basic political science, he or she could graduate from college without ever having learned anything more about the Enlightenment than a dictionary definition needed to pass a multiple-choice test.

I do not advocate teaching intelligent design in the schools; even the proponents of intelligent design don't agree on what they mean by the phrase, and they don't agree on what questions it purports to answer better than the theory of evolution. Until those two basic questions can be answered, there is nothing to teach, or even really to analyze. At this point "intelligent design" is a bumper sticker, not a competing hypothesis (one that includes details that can be tested, for example.)

Suppose that Dembski set forth clearly in writing an imaginary hypothesis of intelligent design that could explain the emergence of human beings. Suppose that he said, "About six million years ago, genetic engineers from another galaxy visited Earth and decided that Earth needed a language-using, religion-forming species on it, so they sequestered some primates and re-engineered them to give them the language instinct, and enlarged their frontal lobes for planning and reflection. It worked, and that's why we are here." Now, at least, there would be something to try to test. We could compare the DNA from other primates, to see if we could find some DNA that showed signs of having been changed abruptly six million years ago. Or we could look in the fossil records for the graves of the first few attempts by this master race. And so on.

The point is that if the intelligent design advocates articulate an actual hypothesis, our scientists could do what scientists do -- test it. But right now, the debate about intelligent design is taking place in the political realm, not the scientific or academic realm.

Those who are deeply involved in this debate -- from Dembski on the side of the proponents to those who rail against him -- see the battle starkly as being for or against the Enlightenment. Interestingly, though, many lay people are attracted at a visceral level to the hypothesis of intelligent design because it feels like a way to marry religious faith with the science that they learned in high school or college. They are looking for a way to marry their sense of wonder and awe at the complexity of our natural world -- a variant of what Bonhoeffer has referred to as that "God-sized hole in our heart" -- with their reason. These are people who are conflicted. We need to speak to them with reason rather than with knee-jerk name-calling.

One of the favorite examples of the proponents of "intelligent design" is the complexity of the human eye. How, they wonder, could we have developed such a complex system, with rods and cones, an adjustable iris, and a focus-able lens? And what proof is there of actual evolution -- incremental change -- in the structure of the eye? Surely that argues for an intelligent designer?

These arguments are easily met on the facts. For example, there are many examples to be found in nature of eyes with less complexity, starting with sightless animals that have patches of photo-sensitive skin. We know that there are sightless animals for whom those photo-sensitive patches have become light-sensitive craters that can detect the direction from which light came. We know that there are examples of intermediate stages of sight -- with primitive lenses, for example -- in living animals today.

Or another answer -- if we truly had an intelligent design, the retina would be designed without a blind spot. What kind of intelligent designer designs an eye with a big blind spot in it?

Wouldn't it be better to counter intelligent design advocates on the facts, rather than just to say, "You're just a crypto-creationist?"

If we treat intelligent design advocates as being essentially indistinguishable from creationists, we miss a chance to change the framing of the debate. We draw a line that lumps potential allies in with our most committed adversaries, and it should be no surprise that many of those potential allies don't realize that they have more in common intellectually with us than with the creationists. If we who are persuaded by Darwin and the theory of evolution turn up our noses at those whose sense of wonder and awe is greater than their scientific knowledge, we do our side no favors.

Lloyd Snook (electronic mail, August 29, 2005)