By William A. Dembski
Fourth World Skeptics Conference
June 21, 2002


Talk delivered at CSICOP's Fourth World Skeptics Conference in Burbank,
California, 21 June 2002, at a discussion titled "Evolution and Intelligent
Design." The participants included ID proponents William Dembski and Paul Nelson as well as evolutionists Wesley Elsberry and Kenneth Miller. Massimo Pigliucci moderated the discussion.


This conference focuses on skepticism's prospects over the next 25 years. I want
in this talk specifically to address skepticism's prospects for unseating
intelligent design in that time. Though as a proponent of intelligent design I'm
no doubt biased, I believe that over the next 25 years intelligent design will
provide skepticism with its biggest challenge yet. I want in this talk to sketch
why I think that.

A few years ago skeptic Michael Shermer wrote a book titled Why People Believe Weird Things. Most of the weird things Shermer discusses in that book are definitely on the fringes, like holocaust denial, alien encounters, and witch
crazes -- hardly the sort of stuff that's going to make it into the public
school science curriculum. Intelligent design by contrast is becoming thoroughly
mainstream and threatening to do just that.

Gallup poll after Gallup poll confirms that about 90 percent of the U.S.
population believes that some sort of design is behind the world. Ohio is
currently the epicenter of the evolution-intelligent design controversy. Recent
polls conducted by the Cleveland Plain Dealer found that 59 percent of Ohioans
want both evolution and intelligent design taught in their public schools.
Another 8 percent want only intelligent design taught. And another 15 percent do
not want the teaching of intelligent design mandated, but do want to allow
evidence against evolution to be presented in public schools. You do the
arithmetic.

Perhaps the most telling finding of this poll is how Ohioans view the
consequences for their state of having intelligent design taught in their public
schools. According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer (June 9th), "About three of
every four respondents said including intelligent design in the curriculum would
have either a positive effect or no effect on the state's reputation or its
ability to attract new business." One could hardly imagine the same response if
the question were whether to teach astrology, witchcraft, or flat-earth geology.
Intelligent design has already become mainstream with the public at large.

Even so, the mainstreaming of intelligent design doesn't cut any ice with
skeptics. Skeptics know all about logical and informal fallacies, and the
argumentum ad populum heads the list. Skepticism purports to keep a gullible
public honest. Accordingly, just because intelligent design is acceptable to
most Americans doesn't mean that it deserves acceptance (witness America's
fascination with horoscopes). All the same, there's reason to think that the
usual skeptical assaults are not going to prosper against intelligent design.

One of skepticism's patron saints, H. L. Mencken, remarked, "For every problem,
there is a neat, simple solution, and it is always wrong." Yet in writing about
Darwin's theory, Stephen Jay Gould remarked, "No great theory ever boasted such
a simple structure." Intelligent design claims that Mencken's insight applies to
evolutionary biology, overturning not just mechanistic accounts of evolution but
skepticism itself.

Skepticism, to be true to its principles, must be willing to turn the light of
scrutiny on anything. And yet that is precisely what it cannot afford to do in
the controversy over evolution and intelligent design. The problem with
skepticism is that it is not a pure skepticism. Rather, it is a selective
skepticism that desires a neat and sanitized world which science can in
principle fully characterize in terms of unbroken natural laws.

Indeed, why have a skeptical organization with a name like CSICOP? The "COP" in
CSICOP is not accidental. CSICOP is in the business of policing claims about the
paranormal. The paranormal, by being other than normal, threatens the tidy world
bestowed by skepticism's materialistic conception of science.

No other conception of science will do for skepticism. The normal is what is
describable by a materialistic science. The paranormal is what's not. Given the
skeptic's faith that everything is ultimately normal, any claims about the
paranormal must ultimately be bogus. And since intelligent design claims that an
intelligence not ultimately reducible to material mechanisms might be
responsible for the world and various things we find in the world (not least
ourselves), it too is guilty of transgressing the normal and must be relegated
to the paranormal.

There is an irony here. The skeptic's world, in which intelligence is not
fundamental and the world is not designed, is a rational world because it
proceeds by unbroken natural law -- cause precedes effect with inviolable
regularity. In short, everything proceeds "normally." On the other hand, the
design theorist's world, in which intelligence is fundamental and the world is
designed, is not a rational world because intelligence can do things that are
unexpected. In short, it is a world in which some things proceed "paranormally."

To allow an unevolved intelligence a place in the world is, according to
skepticism, to send the world into a tailspin. It is to exchange unbroken
natural law for caprice and thereby destroy science. And yet it is only by means
of our intelligence that science is possible and that we understand the world.
Thus, for the skeptic, the world is intelligible only if it starts off without
intelligence and then evolves intelligence. If it starts out with intelligence
and evolves intelligence because of a prior intelligence, then the world becomes
unintelligible.

The logic here is flawed, but once in its grip, there is no way to escape its
momentum. That is why evolution is a nonnegotiable for skepticism. For instance,
on two occasions I offered to join the editorial advisory board of Michael
Shermer's Skeptic Magazine to be its resident skeptic regarding evolution.
Though Michael and I are quite friendly, he never took me up on my offer.
Indeed, he can't afford to. To do so is to allow that an intelligence outside
the world might have influence in the world. That would destroy the world's
autonomy and render effectively impossible the global rejection of the
paranormal that skepticism requires.

Skepticism therefore faces a curious tension. On the one hand, to maintain
credibility it must be willing to shine the light of scrutiny everywhere, and
thus in principle even on evolution. On the other hand, to be the scourge with
which to destroy superstition and whip a gullible public into line, it must
commit itself to a materialistic conception of science and thus cannot afford to
question evolution. Intelligent design exploits this tension and thereby turns
the tables on skepticism.

Skepticism's love affair with evolution predates Darwin. In fact, it is easily
traceable to the atomist and mechanical philosophers of antiquity like
Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius. Evolution throughout the ages has taught
that all aspects of nature, biological complexity included, result from material
mechanisms. Within contemporary biology, these include principally the Darwinian
mechanism of natural selection and random variation, but also include other
mechanisms (symbiosis, gene transfer, genetic drift, the action of regulatory
genes in development, self-organizational processes, etc.). These mechanisms are
just that: mindless material mechanisms that do what they do irrespective of
intelligence. To be sure, mechanisms can be programmed by an intelligence. But
any such intelligent programming of evolutionary mechanisms is not properly part
of evolutionary theory.

Intelligent design, by contrast, teaches that biological complexity is not
exclusively the result of material mechanisms but also requires intelligence,
where the intelligence in question is not reducible to such mechanisms. The
central issue, therefore, is not the relatedness of all organisms, or what
typically is called common descent. Indeed, intelligent design is perfectly
compatible with common descent. Rather, the central issue is how biological
complexity emerged and whether intelligence played a pivotal role in its
emergence.

Suppose, therefore, for the sake of argument that intelligence -- one
irreducible to material mechanisms -- actually did play a decisive role in the
emergence of life's complexity and diversity; how could we know it? This
question is a special case of a more general question, namely: If an
intelligence were involved in the occurrence of some event or the formation of
some object, and if we had no direct evidence of such an intelligence's
activity, how could we know that an intelligence was involved at all? This last
question arises in numerous contexts, including archeology, SETI, and data
falsification in science.

I want here to focus on data falsification because it will help point up the
legitimacy of the techniques for design detection on which intelligent design
depends. On May 23rd of this year the New York Times reported on the work of "J.
Hendrik Schn, 31, a Bell Labs physicist in Murray Hill, N.J., who has produced
an extraordinary body of work in the last two and a half years, including seven
articles each in Science and Nature, two of the most prestigious journals."

Schn's career is on the line. Why? According to the New York Times, Schn
published "graphs that were nearly identical even though they appeared in
different scientific papers and represented data from different devices. In some
graphs, even the tiny squiggles that should arise from purely random
fluctuations matched exactly." As a consequence, Bell Labs appointed an
independent panel to determine whether Schn "improperly manipulat[ed] data in
research papers published in prestigious scientific journals."

The theoretical issues raised in this case of putative data falsification are
precisely those that my own work on design detection seeks to address. The match
between the two graphs in Schn's articles constitutes an independently given
pattern or specification. Moreover, the random fluctuations in the graphs are
highly improbable. What's more, the randomness here is well-understood. As a
consequence, no unknown mechanism is being sought for how the graphs from
independent experiments on independent devices could have exhibited the same
pattern of random fluctuations. At issue is the question of data manipulation
and design, and we resolve it by identifying what I define as "specified
improbability" or, as it's also called, "specified complexity."

Regardless whether specified complexity constitutes, as I claim, a sufficient
condition for detecting design, it certainly constitutes a necessary condition.
Essential to intelligent design is the ability to detect design in cases where
the evidence is circumstantial and thus where we lack direct evidence of a
designing intelligence. In the case of Schn's graphs, under the relevant chance
hypotheses characterizing the random fluctuations in question, the match between
graphs had better be highly improbable (if the graphs were merely two-bar
histograms with only a few possible gradations in height, then a match between
the graphs would be reasonably probable and no one would ever have questioned
Schn's integrity). Improbability, however, isn't enough. The random
fluctuations of each graph taken individually are indeed highly improbable. But
it's the match between the graphs that raises suspicions. That match renders one
graph a specification for the other so that in the presence of improbability a
design inference is warranted.

By itself detecting design by means of specified complexity does not implicate
any particular intelligence. Specified complexity could show that the data in
Schn's papers were improperly manipulated. It could not, however, show that
Schn was the actual culprit (though as first author on these papers he, like
the captain on a proverbial sinking ship, would be in deep trouble). To identify
the actual intelligence would require a more thorough causal analysis (an
analysis that in the Schn case is being conducted by Bell Labs' independent
panel).

I want now to bring this discussion back to the main question of this paper,
namely, the prospects for skepticism to unseat intelligent design. To answer
this question, let's first consider what intelligent design has going for it:

A method for design detection. There's much discussion about the validity of
specified complexity as a method for design detection, but judging by the
response it has elicited over the last four years, this method is not going
away. Some scholars (like Wesley Elsberry here) think it merely codifies an
argument from ignorance. Others (like Paul Davies) think that it's onto
something important. The point is that there are major players who are not
intelligent design proponents who disagree. Such disagreement indicates that
there are issues of real intellectual merit to be decided and that we're not
dealing with a crank theory (at least not one that's obviously so).
Irreducibly complex biochemical systems. These are systems like the bacterial
flagellum. They exhibit specified complexity. Moreover, the biological
community does not have a clue how they emerged by material mechanisms. The
great promise of Darwinian and other naturalistic accounts of evolution was
precisely to show how known material mechanisms operating in known ways could
produce all of biological complexity. That promise is now increasingly
recognized as unfulfilled (and perhaps unfulfillable). Franklin Harold, not a
design proponent, in his most recent book for Oxford University Press, The Way
of the Cell, states "There are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the
evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful
speculations." Intelligent design contends that our ignorance here comprises
not minor gaps in our knowledge of biological systems that promise readily to
submit to tried-and-true mechanistic models, but rather indicates vast
conceptual lacunae that are bridgeable only by radical ideas like design.

Challenge to the status quo. Let's face it, in educated circles Darwinism and
other mechanistic accounts of evolution are utterly status quo. That has
advantages and disadvantages for proponents like yourselves. On the one hand,
it means that the full resources of the scientific and educational
establishment are behind you, and you can use them to squelch dissent. On the
other hand, and especially to the extent that you are heavy-handed in
enforcing materialist orthodoxy, it means that you are in danger of alienating
the younger generation, which thrives on rebellion against the status quo.
Intelligent design appeals to the rebelliousness of youth.
The disconnect between high and mass culture. It's the educated elite that
love evolution and the materialist science it helps to underwrite. On the
other hand, the masses are by and large convinced of intelligent design.
What's more, the masses ultimately hold the purse strings for the educated
elite (in the form of state education, research funding, scholarships, etc.).
This disconnect can be exploited. The advantage that biological evolution has
had thus far is providing a theoretical framework, however empirically
inadequate, to account for the emergence of biological complexity. The
disadvantage facing the intelligent-design-supporting masses is that they've
had to rely almost exclusively on pretheoretic design intuitions. Intelligent
design offers to replace those pretheoretic intuitions with a rigorous
design-theoretic framework that underwrites those intuitions.

An emerging research community. Intelligent design is attracting bright young
scholars who are totally committed to developing intelligent design as a
research program. We're still thin on the ground, but the signs I see are very
promising indeed. It's not enough merely to detect design. Once it's detected,
it must be shown how design leads to biological insights that could not have
been obtained by taking a purely materialist outlook. I'm beginning to see
glimmers of a thriving design-theoretic research program.

What's a skeptic to do against this onslaught, especially when there's a whole
political dimension to the debate in which a public tired of being bullied by an
intellectual elite find in intelligent design a tool for liberation? Let me
suggest the following action points:

Conflate intelligent design with creationism. I'm not sure how much longer
this tactic will work because the public and press are now catching on to the
difference, but as long as there's mileage to be obtained, go for it.
Emphasize science as a great force for enlightenment and contrast it sharply
with fanatical religious fundamentalism. Then stress that intelligent design
is essentially a religious and political movement. Generously use the "C-word"
to confuse intelligent design with creationism, and then be sure to liken
creationism to astrology, belief in a flat earth, and holocaust denial.
Argue for the superfluity of design. This action point is also getting
increasingly difficult to implement simply on the basis of empirical evidence,
but by artificially defining science as an enterprise limited solely to
material mechanisms, one conveniently eliminates design from scientific
discussion. Thus any gap in our knowledge of how material mechanisms brought
about some biological system does not reflect an absence of material
mechanisms in nature to produce the system or a requirement for design to
account for the system, but only a gap in our knowledge readily filled by
carrying on as we have been carrying on.

Play the suboptimality card. For most people the designer is a benevolent,
wise God. This allows for the exploitation of cognitive dissonance by pointing
to cases of apparent incompetent or wicked design in nature. I believe
intelligent design has good answers to this objection, but the problem of evil
is wonderfully adept at clouding intellects. This is one place where
skepticism does well exploiting emotional responses.

Achieve a scientific breakthrough. Provide detailed testable models of how
irreducibly complex biochemical systems like the bacterial flagellum could
have emerged by material mechanisms. I don't give this much hope, but if you
could pull this off, intelligent design would have a lot of backpedaling to
do.

[And finally] Paint a more appealing world picture. Skepticism is at heart an
austere enterprise. It works by negation. It makes a profession of shooting
things down. This doesn't set well with a public that delights in novel
possibilities. In his Penses, Blaise Pascal wrote, "People almost invariably
arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what
they find attractive." Pascal was not talking about people merely believing
what they want to believe, as in wish-fulfillment. Rather, he was talking
about people being swept away by attractive ideas that capture their heart and
imagination. Poll after poll indicates that for most people evolution does not
provide a compelling vision of life and the world. Providing such a vision is
in my view skepticism's overriding task if it is to unseat intelligent design.
Good luck.