Response to Paul Gross, “Response to Collins,” in Science and theology News, http://www.stnews.org/commentary-2605.htm

First, I would like to think Paul Gross for his response to my essay. Unfortunately, I feel he falls into the typical unhelpful rhetoric of “good” versus “bad” science. Instead, we must recognize that science is a social enterprise with an ill-defined boundary. This is widely agreed upon by historians and philosophers of science: the search for a way of demarcating science from non-science, a project starting this century with philosopher Karl Popper, is widely agreed to have failed. Further, what is considered “science” has changed through history. Before the sixteenth century, any systematic body of knowledge was considered science. After the sixteenth century, science was more and more restricted to “natural philosophy.” And only until the latter part of the nineteenth century did natural theology begin to be excluded from science.

            Because there is no trans-historical essence defining what science is, whether or not we should include the hypothesis of a transcendent or generic designer as part of “science” is partly a pragmatic question, which involves what we take the goal of science to be. If, for instance, we take the goal to be finding the true causes of physical phenomena, then we should not exclude as a matter of principle “supernatural” causes from science. If we do, then we cannot claim, without begging the question, that science is a reliable procedure for uncovering the true causes of phenomena, at least in the case of origins. Scientists such as Richard Dawkins and Peter Atkins are inconsistent in this regard, promoting science as telling us the true account of things while in principle excluding an appeal to a transcendent designer as part of science. Contrary to what Gross says, methodological naturalism is not about evidence, but about limiting the goal of science in certain ways for practical reasons.

             As I pointed out in my essay, an hypothesis can have evidence in its favor and still fall outside the realm of science. So, this alone would not settle the issue. Further, as historians of science have pointed out, many scientific hypotheses were “born refuted” – with lots of evidence against them. Examples include Copernican Astronomy, Continental Drift Theory, and even Darwin’s theory. For instance, when Darwin’s theory was first proposed, calculations of the age of earth made by Lord Kelvin did not allow enough time for evolution to occur. Thus, at most, one could say that in order to worthy of consideration by scientists, an hypothesis must have significant explanatory merits, even if the weight of evidence is against it at the time.

            Gross also too readily dismisses the idea that there is any evidence for design in biology. As is well-known, even Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA and an avowed atheist, claimed in his 1981 book Life Itself that the origin of life appears to be almost a miracle. Because of the seemingly insuperable difficulty facing any naturalistic account, he even proposed a form of intelligent design: namely, that life arrived here from outer space, carried by aliens. Although some progress has been made on this question since 1981, the origin of life still presents a major problem for a completely naturalistic explanation of life on earth. The only thing that I think one is warranted in claiming is that there is no unambiguous evidence for design in biology: the jury is still out, and may always be out. Excluding ID from science will have to be based on other grounds, not on lack of any evidence. 

            The cause for my doubts about the usefulness of including appeal to a transcendent or generic designer as part of science is that it is not a tractable hypothesis. Unlike what Gross says, tractability is a very different notion from consilience. Concilience is about multiple lines of evidence pointing to a single hypothesis. Tractability has to do with being able to use scientific methods and other branches of science to elaborate a hypothetical cause of a class of phenomena. If an hypothetical cause is not tractable, scientists cannot elaborate the hypothesis in order to make detailed explanations or predictions. Thus, it is much more difficult to see the usefulness of such an hypothesis for the everyday practice of science. This is one major difficulty with invoking God, or some other transcendent or generic designer, as a scientific explanation of the origin of life. In any case, I think advocates of ID need to make a better case as to why it would be useful to include ID as part of science, other than simply saying the aim of science is to find the true causes of phenomena.  

            As for my proposal to include the hypothesis of design as a metascientific hypothesis, it is not a mere appeal to authority. Despite what Gross says about Newton (which is historically inaccurate), the history of science amply testifies to the positive role that belief in a designer has played in grounding the incredibly fruitful idea that nature has a underlying, elegant, mathematical order and that nature is intelligible by human beings. The question is whether such an idea can play a positive role beyond physics, even if following Einstein it is merely considered as a useful fiction. I am not advocating that scientists in general treat the world as if it were designed when they are doing science. I am only advocating that this be considered a legitimate position for a scientist to take as she theorizes and evaluates hypotheses about the structure of the natural world. What I am ultimately opposed to is the requirement that one be a methodological atheist, according to which one must treat the world as if it were not designed when doing science.