Creation Pseudo-Science
by Joshua Adams

Liberal responses to the controversy over the place of intelligent design in high-school biology curricula have been so predictably unanimous that one might believe they were all attributable to the same creator. Who knows? Maybe there really is some master planning at work behind everyday life through the millennia. Perhaps some self-hating deity made the relevant adjustments to our DNA with the foreknowledge of a chorus of opposition to the policy of Pennsylvania's Dover Area School District, a policy that mandates that ninth-grade biology teachers mention intelligent design alongside Darwinian evolution as the latter's alternative — much in the same way the New Testament offers an alternative ending to that of the Old.

Then again, perhaps not. There is a simpler explanation for the unanimity of liberal disdain for intelligent design as a scientific theory that boils down to this: intelligent design is not a scientific theory. This is not a terribly difficult call to make. Scientific theories are, by their nature, falsifiable. Darwin's theory of evolution has stood up to evidence over the years, which is fortuitous for those of us who believe that evolution is a good way of explaining how life develops. But more important than the theory's durability is the fact that it can be tested in the first place. Even if Darwinian evolution doesn't explain everything about the origin of life — and it is indeed of little help in figuring out where and how the first organic matter originated, or what caused the Big Bang — the fact that the theory's provisional conclusions can be verified makes it scientific.

And scientific is exactly what intelligent design is not. Rather than offering an account of how life develops, intelligent design makes two claims: it points out that there are gaps in the Darwinian theory of evolution, and it insists that the great variety of life on our planet is simply too complicated to have been generated by the trial and error of natural selection alone. But the first of these criticisms originates in Darwinian theory itself, and the latter amounts to a curious hope: that some cosmic designer set life on its journey through time, after which the complicated processes of natural selection took their acknowledged course. Although most ID supporters believe that the Christian god fulfilled this role, there's nothing in their theory to contradict the claim that it was really Elvis, aliens or both who did the trick. Except, of course, for the Bible.

Much has been made of the willingness of intelligent design proponents to break from their creationist brethren in affirming the basic processes of Darwinian evolution, but these breaks are stylistic, not substantive. Intelligent design supporters don't believe the Earth was created in six days and closed for business on the seventh. They don't believe that the human race descended from two ancestors who lived in a lush garden out of which they were tricked by a snake. They don't believe that the panoply of human languages is the result of an ill-chosen design for a Mesopotamian skyscraper. Instead of all of this they offer the equally implausible conclusion that there must have been an intelligent designer present at the beginning of the universe. At least the Biblical myths are more viscerally imaginative.

Why do secularists have so much difficulty persuading the public that Intelligent Design is not science but rather an article of faith masquerading as science? It's likely because in our deeply religious country, Americans tend to look to religion for meaning and science for explanation. When segments of our culture find that their capacity for explaining the world has outpaced their ability to make sense of it, they react. The results are hybrid concoctions like Intelligent Design, which seek to harness the explanatory power of science for the meaning-making business of religious practice — the philosophical equivalent of a hedged bet. Ironically enough, these reactions themselves display an evolutionary tendency: even though intelligent design isn't scientific, it's a long, long way from Inherit the Wind.

Scientists complain that a lack of basic scientific literacy gives rise to the popularity of intelligent design, but that's only half the problem. The fact that religion remains safely unscrutinized in the classroom abets our difficulties in seeing intelligent design for what it really is: a theological proposition. In this respect it is oddly close to the deism of the 17th and 18th centuries, which was itself a reaction to the most groundbreaking discovery in science before Darwin: Newtonian mechanics. Deism preserved God from having to answer to scientific laws by suggesting that He authored them; intelligent design keeps God from having to answer to evolution by suggesting He is responsible for it. Once we treat it to this comparison, the notion that intelligent design is anything other than a religion becomes preposterous. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck.

Unfortunately, most American public-school students — and certainly the ones in Dover, Pa., if the School District's policy stands — won't be able to analyze intelligent design in this fashion. Students primarily get their religion at home, after school, and most only come to the academic — that is, critical — study of religion in college. But knowing how to look at religion from the outside, as a social practice embedded in history, is just as crucial for a liberal education as understanding the basics of the scientific method. The proponents of intelligent design and Creationism know this; that's why they won't be satisfied to push their theories in the philosophy or religion classes of public schools, where they might be vigorously contested in the same way that all religions and philosophies are challenged in an scholarly environment. Far better to claim the mantle of "science" while disallowing the possibility that scientific evidence might offer more ambiguous conclusions.

In the twin shadows of natural disaster and war, it is comforting to think the universe was set in motion by some plan, one that might involve in its inception and ultimate fulfillment neither terror nor destruction. Some, like Voltaire's "Candide," may reject this comfort out of hand as so much infantile hope; others, like Immanuel Kant, may preserve the ideal of divinity in the workings of human reason; still others will find solace in the world's variety of ancient and modern religious traditions. Regardless of our faith, however, our desire for comfort remains a mark of our own human need, not the evidence of divine intelligence. To say the opposite is to claim not that we are made in God's image, but rather that He is made in our own.

E-mail Joshua Adams at joshua at uchicago dot edu.