by William A. Dembski
Cosmic Pursuit
Spring 1998


According to Darwinism, undirected natural causes are solely responsible
for the origin and development of life. In particular, Darwinism rules out
the possibility of God or any guiding intelligence playing a role in
life's origin and development. Within western culture Darwinism's ascent
has been truly meteoric. And yet throughout its ascent there have always
been dissenters who regarded as inadequate the Darwinian vision that
undirected natural causes could produce the full diversity and complexity
of life.

Until the mid 1980s this dissent was sporadic, focused largely at the
grass roots, and seeking mainly to influence public opinion through the
courts (and not very effectively at that). With the Intelligent Design
movement this dissent has now become focused, promising to overturn the
cultural dominance of Darwinism much as the freedom movements in eastern
Europe overturned the political dominance of Marxism at the end of the
1980s.

The Intelligent Design movement begins with the work of Charles Thaxton,
Walter Bradley, Michael Denton, Dean Kenyon, and Phillip Johnson. Without
employing the Bible as a scientific text, these scholars critiqued
Darwinism on scientific and philosophical grounds. On scientific grounds
they found Darwinism an inadequate framework for biology. On philosophical
grounds they found Darwinism hopelessly entangled with naturalism, the
view that nature is self-sufficient and thus without need of God or any
guiding intelligence. More recently, scholars like Michael Behe, Stephen
Meyer, Paul Nelson, Jonathan Wells, and myself have taken the next step,
proposing a positive research program wherein intelligent causes become
the key for understanding the diversity and complexity of life.

Through this two-pronged approach of critiquing Darwinism on the one hand
and providing a positive alternative on the other, the Intelligent Design
movement has rapidly gained adherents among the best and brightest in the
academy. Already it is responsible for Darwinism losing its corner on the
intellectual market. If fully successful, Intelligent Design will unseat
not just Darwinism but also Darwinism's cultural legacy. And since no
aspect of western culture has escaped Darwinism's influence, so no aspect
of western culture will escape reevaluation in the light of Intelligent
Design.

What then is Intelligent Design? Intelligent Design begins with the
observation that intelligent causes can do things which undirected natural
causes cannot. Undirected natural causes can place scrabble pieces on a
board, but cannot arrange the pieces as meaningful words or sentences. To
obtain a meaningful arrangement requires an intelligent cause. This
intuition, that there is a fundamental distinction between undirected
natural causes on the one hand and intelligent causes on the other, has
underlain the design arguments of past centuries.

Throughout the centuries theologians have argued that nature exhibits
features which nature itself cannot explain, but which instead require an
intelligence over and above nature. From Church fathers like Minucius
Felix and Basil the Great (3rd and 4th centuries) to medieval scholastics
like Moses Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas (12th and 13th centuries) to
reformed thinkers like Thomas Reid and Charles Hodge (18th and 19th
centuries), we find theologians making design arguments, arguing from the
data of nature to an intelligence operating over and above nature.

Design arguments are old hat. Indeed, design arguments continue to be a
staple of philosophy and religion courses. The most famous of the design
arguments is William Paley's watchmaker argument (as in Paley's Natural
Theology, published 1802). According to Paley, if we find a watch in a
field, the watch's adaptation of means to ends (that is, the adaptation of
its parts to telling time) ensure that it is the product of an
intelligence, and not simply the output of undirected natural processes.
So too, the marvelous adaptations of means to ends in organisms, whether
at the level of whole organisms, or at the level of various subsystems
(Paley focused especially on the mammalian eye), ensure that organisms are
the product of an intelligence.

Though intuitively appealing, Paley's argument had until recently fallen
into disuse. This is now changing. In the last five years design has
witnessed an explosive resurgence. Scientists are beginning to realize
that design can be rigorously formulated as a scientific theory. What has
kept design outside the scientific mainstream these last hundred and
thirty years is the absence of precise methods for distinguishing
intelligently caused objects from unintelligently caused ones. For design
to be a fruitful scientific concept, scientists have to be sure they can
reliably determine whether something is designed.

Johannes Kepler thought the craters on the moon were intelligently
designed by moon dwellers. We now know that the craters were formed
naturally. It's this fear of falsely attributing something to design only
to have it overturned later that has prevented design from entering
science proper. With precise methods for discriminating intelligently from
unintelligently caused objects, scientists are now able to avoid Kepler's
mistake.

What has emerged is a new program for scientific research known as
Intelligent Design. Within biology, Intelligent Design is a theory of
biological origins and development. Its fundamental claim is that
intelligent causes are necessary to explain the complex, information-rich
structures of biology, and that these causes are empirically detectable.
To say intelligent causes are empirically detectable is to say there exist
well-defined methods that, on the basis of observational features of the
world, are capable of reliably distinguishing intelligent causes from
undirected natural causes. Many special sciences have already developed
such methods for drawing this distinction-notably forensic science,
cryptography, archeology, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence
(as in the movie Contact).

Whenever these methods detect intelligent causation, the underlying entity
they uncover is information. Intelligent Design properly formulated is a
theory of information. Within such a theory, information becomes a
reliable indicator of intelligent causation as well as a proper object for
scientific investigation. Intelligent Design thereby becomes a theory for
detecting and measuring information, explaining its origin, and tracing
its flow. Intelligent Design is therefore not the study of intelligent
causes per se, but of informational pathways induced by intelligent
causes.

As a result, Intelligent Design presupposes neither a creator nor
miracles. Intelligent Design is theologically minimalist. It detects
intelligence without speculating about the nature of the intelligence.
Biochemist Michael Behe's "irreducible complexity," physicist David Bohm's
"active information," mathematician Marcel Schützenberger's "functional
complexity," and my own "complex specified information" are alternate
routes to the same reality.

It is the empirical detectability of intelligent causes that renders
Intelligent Design a fully scientific theory, and distinguishes it from
the design arguments of philosophers, or what has traditionally been
called "natural theology." The world contains events, objects, and
structures which exhaust the explanatory resources of undirected natural
causes, and which can be adequately explained only by recourse to
intelligent causes. Scientists are now in a position to demonstrate this
rigorously. Thus what has been a long-standing philosophical intuition is
now being cashed out as a scientific research program.

Intelligent Design entails that naturalism in all forms be rejected.
Metaphysical naturalism, the view that undirected natural causes wholly
govern the world, is to be rejected because it is false. Methodological
naturalism, the view that for the sake of science, scientific explanation
ought never exceed undirected natural causes, is to be rejected because it
stifles inquiry. Nothing is gained by pretending science can get along
without intelligent causes. Rather, because intelligent causes are
empirically detectable, science must ever remain open to evidence of their
activity.

Where does this leave special creation and theistic evolution? Logically
speaking, Intelligent Design is compatible with everything from the
starkest creationism (i.e., God intervening at every point to create new
species) to the most subtle and far-ranging evolution (i.e., God
seamlessly melding all organisms together in a great tree of life). For
Intelligent Design the first question is not how organisms came to be
(though this is a research question that needs to be addressed), but
whether they demonstrate clear, empirically detectable marks of being
intelligently caused. In principle, an evolutionary process can exhibit
such "marks of intelligence" as much as any act of special creation.
If you're a Christian, what is the theological payoff of Intelligent
Design? It is important to realize that Intelligent Design is not an
apologetic ploy to cajole people into God's Kingdom. Intelligent Design is
a scientific research program.

That said, Intelligent Design does have implications for theology. The
most severe challenge to theology over the last two hundred years has been
naturalism. Within western culture, naturalism has become the default
position for all serious inquiry. From biblical studies to law to
education to art to science to the media, inquiry is expected to proceed
only under the supposition of naturalism.

C. S. Lewis put it this way:

Naturalistic assumptions ... meet you on every side.... It comes partly
from what we may call a "hangover." We all have Naturalism in our bones
and even conversion does not at once work the infection out of our system.
Its assumptions rush back upon the mind the moment vigilance is relaxed.
(quoted from Miracles)

By making the design in nature evident, Intelligent Design promises to
cure western culture of this unfortunate Enlightenment hangover. Indeed,
Intelligent Design provides the clearest refutation of naturalism to date.
Naturalism looks to science to justify its rejection of purpose in nature.
Intelligent Design shows that naturalism fails on its own terms. To be
sure, there are good philosophical reasons for rejecting naturalism-the
very existence of the world and the intelligibility of the world raise
questions which science cannot answer, and which point beyond the world.
Intelligent Design shows there are also good scientific reasons for
rejecting naturalism.

For Further Study:

The Intelligent Design movement begins with the publication of The Mystery
of Life's Origin by Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, and Roger Olson
(Philosophical Library, 1984) and Evolution: A Theory in Crisis by Michael
Denton (Alder & Adler, 1986). These two books presented a powerful
scientific critique of evolutionary theory. Moreover, they set the tone
for subsequent publications by refusing to mix the scientific evidence for
design with theological views about creation.

The next key text in the movement was Phillip Johnson's Darwin on Trial
(InterVarsity, 1991). Johnson not only reviewed the scientific evidence
against evolutionary theory, but also showed how evolutionary theory was
hopelessly compromised with naturalism. Johnson continued his analysis in
Reason in the Balance (InterVarsity, 1995) and Defeating Darwinism by
Opening Minds (InterVarsity, 1997).

Dean Kenyon and Percival Davis's Of Pandas and People (Haughton, 1993) and
J. P. Moreland's Creation Hypothesis (InterVarsity, 1994) proved
transitional texts. Whereas previous texts criticized evolutionary theory
without offering a positive alternative, these texts began examining what
a design-theoretic alternative to evolutionary theory would look like.
With the publication of Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box (Free Press,
1996) the dam burst. Here for the first time were the outlines of a
full-fledged scientific research program for design in biology. Behe's
book was reviewed everywhere from Science and Nature to the New York Times
and the Wall Street Journal. It was voted Christianity Today's "Book of
the Year." Its impact has been phenomenal.

My own The Design Inference (Cambridge) and Mere Creation: Reclaiming the
Book of Nature (InterVarsity) will appear fall of 1998. Key researchers
with books in preparation include Stephen Meyer, Paul Nelson, Del Ratzsch,
John Mark Reynolds, and John Wells. The movement has a professional
journal entitled Origins & Design (www.arn.org/arn). The Discovery
Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture coordinates many
of its efforts.