**2. Intelligent Design. **
You cannot draw a metaphysical conclusion from the physics. But it is baldly asserted by IDers that the “fact” of irreducible complexity has “proven” a Designer necessary.
The statement is silly on several levels. First of all, in philosophy God is not an hypothesis put forward to explain particular physical phenomena. Oh, wait. I am repeating myself. It’s almost as if they were mirror images of… Well, ah, hmm. Let’s continue.
For some comments on Intelligent Design, per se: Michael Behe: Teach evolution and ask hard questions
Behe’s theory is: A) Some things are irreducibly complex. B) Natural selection cannot account for irreducible complexity. Therefore C) an Intelligent Designer is necessary.
Critics, driven mad by C) have attacked A) and B) with vigor. I have sometimes thought that if he had simply stopped with B) he would have been okay.
Critics of A) usually miss the point. He did not say that some things were really really complex. He specified a particular kind of complexity: one in which the whole must exist before it can function. Gradually adding parts in slow Darwinian manner would not do it. This is easily seen in artifacts: e.g. a circuit that does not function unless all components are in place. It is not clear that the same is necessarily true of organisms. Of course, Darwin started it by citing the artificial breeding of pigeons as the model for the actions of Nature. But it is not clear that truths about artifacts carry over to nature without a Breeder lurking in the background.
Critics of B) also miss the point. He does not say that natural selection is false. He believes it does account for most of evolution but does not see how it can operate at the microcellular level. (Remember, the Darwinian engine is overbreeding + ruthless winnowing.) Behe has not proven his case. Absence of evidence – no known Darwinian pathway – is not evidence of absence – no possible Darwinian pathway. But neither is it refuted by telling “just so stories” about how it might possibly could maybe happen. Behe has pointed out that in some of the proposed pathways rebutting him there are intermediate links that by Darwinian logic would have been selected against.
Against this we must put St. Thomas Aquinas, who compared Nature to an Artifact: Nature is nothing but the plan of some art, namely a divine one, put into things themselves, by which those things move towards a concrete end: as if the man who builds up a ship could give to the pieces of wood that they could move by themselves to produce the form of the ship.
– Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Physics II.8, lecture 14, no. 268
IOW, Aquinas saw no contradiction between considering Nature as an Artifact and Nature moving by her own internal powers. Behe and company missed that completely, which is why their work fails theologically before it fails as science. In fact, there very well may be biological phenomena unaccounted for by the Darwinian metaphysic. (After all, gravity does not explain how protons and neutrons form a nucleus. Electromagnetism does not account for radiation.)
Sorry for the long quote.Even if the theory of natural selection failed to account for cellular machinery, there could well be other mechanisms that do. Perhaps chemical or physical! (Though biologists would probably hate that as much as an Intelligent Designer!) One of the bad effects of creationism is that it has caused Darwinians to circle the wagons and get defensive and not look for other possibilities. Even Eldrege and Gould took flack for their punctuated equilibrium theory because it “gave comfort to the creationists.” Rally round the paradigm, boys!