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Del Ratzsch, "How Not to Critique Intelligent Design theory. A Review of Niall Shanks, God, The Devil, and Darwin" (2005)
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Del Ratzsch, "How Not to Critique Intelligent Design theory. A Review of Niall Shanks, God, The Devil, and Darwin" (2005)
"Ars Disputandi" 2005, vol. 5; http://www.arsdisputandi.org/
> <em><font size="2"><font color="#6670ad"><span class="by">discussion note by <span>
> <div class="biography">Calvin College, Grand Rapids, USA<div>
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[1] I have been an interested observer of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement for some years, and although I have argued elsewhere that some of the philosophical points made by a number of ID advocates are right, I have been critical of other aspects of ID views. (In fact, in one ID conference at which I was an invited speaker, I was publicly identified as a ‘subversive’ to the design cause.) Having that interest, I would welcome a comprehensive, competent, evaluation and critique of ID. The structure, the catalogue of topics addressed, and the Oxford University Press imprimatur initially suggest that Niall Shanks’s God, the Devil, and Darwin, may be exactly the book.
[2] The substance of the book is contained in six chapters which are bracketed between introductory and concluding sections. The core chapters (and foci) are:
- ‘The Evolution of Intelligent Design Arguments’ – the history, structure and relation to science of design arguments,
- ‘Darwin and the Illusion of Intelligent Design’ – Darwin’s thought and its relationship both to design and to religion more broadly,
- ‘Thermodynamics and the Origins of Order’ – thermodynamic laws and the implications for, and purely natural mechanisms capable of, the generating of highly (and relevantly) ordered systems,
- ‘Science and the Supernatural’ – the contrasting characters of genuine science and supernaturalism, and the various stratagems via which ID covertly pushes the latter agenda,
- ‘The Biochemical Case for Intelligent Design’ – explication and criticisms of ID attempts to co-opt biological complexity (‘specified’ or ‘irreducible’ complexity) into the design agenda, and
- ‘The Cosmological Case for Intelligent Design’ – explication and criticism of ID attempts to appropriate cosmology (specifically ‘fine tuning’) for design purposes.
[3] The concluding section addresses a perceived wider – and profoundly pernicious – social/political/religious ID agenda.
[4] The book has its positive points. Various parts of the treatment of evolutionary theory and of thermodynamics are nice, wide-ranging discussions which may prove useful to some. And I am unaware of any previous discussion of the at least prima facie difficulties which William Dembski’s assertion of an inverse relationship between entropy and ‘complex specified information’ (Dembski’s proposed evidence of choice for intelligent agent activity) may generate for other parts of his views. I think that Shanks is on to something here (cf. the final section of Chapter 3). Further, I think that Shanks – and many others – are right that contemporary ID has not produced very much to this point.
[5] Unfortunately, however, this book seriously fails on crucial counts. Shanks has a substantive agenda (no surprise given that the ‘Foreword’ is by Richard Dawkins, whose anti-religious emotionalism gets ever more shrill). In his straining eagerness to denigrate anything associated with ID, Shanks inflates the rhetoric, misconstrues history, blurs important distinctions, and seriously skews the views of various ID advocates. And along the way there are repeated cries that the sky is falling. (For instance, although various critics argue that ID is a threat to science, education, Enlightenment values and so forth, were it not for Shanks it is unlikely that many of us would realize that the alleged progenitor of ID – creationism – is a threat even to NATO (‘Introduction’), or that ID is in part really a cover for pushing religious extremist opposition to assisted suicide [p. 230].) (Unless otherwise indicated, all page references are to Shanks’s book.)
[6] Overall this book is more likely to detract from than to contribute to objective and on-target discussion/evaluation/criticism of Intelligent Design. Consequently, I shall focus on what I take to be some of the major problems of the book. If ID and the ID movement do have serious flaws (and I will not here dispute that), then those should by all means be exposed rigorously and vigorously. But real exposure – or any sort of productive discussion – is not a likely immediate outcome of the sort of inaccuracies, slants and vilifications which unfortunately pervade this book.
[7] Critics of Intelligent Design routinely tar ID with a creationist brush (‘Intelligent Design Creationism’ is now the term of choice of ID critics), and although both polemically driven and in some sense misleading, use of the term is understandable given that significant numbers of lay creationists have enthusiastically appropriated ID into their own efforts. Nevertheless, the term is misleading because key figures in the birth and early development of the contemporary ID movement had no prior connection either with creationism or creationists. Key figures with no such prior ties include people like Phillip Johnson and the biochemist Michael Behe. To the extent that the ID movement has a founder and head, it is Johnson (Shanks himself identifies Johnson as ‘the architect of the intelligent design movement’ [p. 11]). And Behe (whom Shanks identifies as a ‘leading light of the contemporary intelligent design movement’ [p. 40]) was arguably the ID movement’s first (and still one of its two most recognized) scientific theorist. On the other hand, a number of dominant creationist figures have sharply criticized ID. That number includes Henry Morris, who was arguably the world’s dominant young-earth creationist during the last third of the 20th century.
[8] Yet, Shanks simply asserts – without providing substantive evidence – that ID was ‘spawned’ by the creationist movement [p. 6], which ‘gave rise to modern intelligent design theory.’ [p. 7] He further claims that ‘[m]odern biological creation science... descend[ed] with little modification from the positions articulated by Paley’ [p. 35], and refers to ‘the natural theologians of old from whom they [modern creationists] descended’ [p. 48–9]. In this latter context, it is worth noting that (unless I missed it) in his definitive history of the creationist movement (The Creationists, University of California, 1993), Ronald Numbers does not so much as mention William Paley, The Bridgewater Treatises, the natural theology movement or other things which, if Shanks were right, would constitute the core roots of creationism. Numbers traces contemporary creationism to the work of George McCready Price, and in the chapter devoted to Price the whole concept of design is mentioned only once in passing, and the design argument not at all. (Incidentally, Price held that teaching creationism in public schools would violate the U.S. Constitution, and the Discovery Institute – which Shanks identifies as ‘the home base for intelligent design theory’ [p. 226] – opposes teaching ID in public schools. Despite that, Shanks still insists that ID is really a plot to get religion into public schools [p. 7].) Thomas Woodward, in his recent book-length history of the design movement argues that the 1986 book Evolution: A theory in crisis by the Australian biochemist Michael Denton was an initial spur for both Johnson and Behe, and says that ‘It was Denton, more than anyone else, who triggered the birth of Design’ (Doubts About Darwin: A History of Intelligent Design (Baker, 2003) p. 32.). Denton, who is generally identified as an agnostic during his entire adult life, is not a creationist by anyone’s definition.
[9] The creationist movement of course took nature to be designed and without much comment took design arguments to be cogent (and many creationists gratefully appropriate ID as an anti-evolutionary and anti-naturalistic resource). But attempts to make design arguments ‘scientific’ were not the focus of creationism – the driving scientific themes were the age of the earth, a global flood, and rejection of evolution. (The early 20th century creationist Harry Rimmer may have been an exception in this regard, but Numbers does not connect even him to the earlier design tradition. And for what it’s worth, creationists themselves apparently don’t construe their own history the indicated way. Creationist Henry Morris, in his nearly 400 page History of Modern Creationism (Master, 1984) devotes a total of three sentences to Paley and the traditional design argument, and does not mention the natural theology tradition. [1]) But even had Shanks’s story of ID reflected actual history, that would have been of limited critical significance, given that the history, the scientific legitimacy, and the truth of a theory are all separate issues. To be of any interesting present consequence, any flaws in ID must be more than mere blotches on its (alleged) past pedigree.
[10] The level and type of ad hominem and otherwise derogatory rhetoric in this volume is really quite remarkable for something from Oxford University Press. We learn that ID advocates wish to ruin science, to close minds, that they engage in deception, they lie, they are actually bent on gaining political power for repressive and extremist purposes, etc. It often gets specifically personal. For instance, Shanks says that Phillip Johnson makes him think of people who ‘hang around schoolyards peddling soft drugs so that a taste for the harder stuff will follow’ [p. 12].
[11] Attempts to denigrate frequently run to misrepresentation. Following are a number of examples. (I must ask readers’s indulgence for going on at some length – I think that the problem exhibited is serious and pervasive enough to warrant multiple, detailed examples. Readers in a hurry may wish to read the first three cases, involving William Dembski’s work, then skip the cases involving the work of Phillip Johnson, Nancy Pearcey, Michael Behe and John West, and move on to Section 4.)
[12] A. William Dembski. (Example 1) Shanks remarks, sarcastically, that Dembski (on p. 169 of his No Free Lunch, Rowman and Littlefield, 2002) ‘modestly claims to have discovered a fourth law of thermodynamics.’ Dembski’s proposed fourth law is ‘something he calls the Law of Conservation of Information’ [p. 123]. But 40 pages prior to the cited passage in No Free Lunch, Dembski says:
> <p><sup>[13] <sup>Ten pages prior to the passage Shanks cites, Dembski says:
> <p><sup>[14] <sup>As Dembski notes, there was discussion of a possible ‘Fourth Law’ as early as the 1970s [No Free Lunch, p. 167]. Dembski simply suggested that Medawar’s principle – which he repeatedly explicitly attributes to Medawar – is the law for which others had previously sought. That hardly fits Shanks’s denigratory (and repeated) accusation.
[15] (One further oddity concerning Shanks’s treatment of Dembski’s work is worth noting. Despite supposedly presenting a scholarly study of ID, Shanks does not so much as mention Dembski’s initial scholarly ID book on complex specified information (The Design Inference, Cambridge University Press), published six years prior to Shanks’s book. It is remarkable that a book subtitled ‘A Critique of Intelligent Design Theory’ should completely overlook the theoretical manifesto of the design movement. On the contrary, much of what is cited in Shanks’s discussion of Dembski comes from popularizations (e.g., an article with the subtitle ‘A Primer on the Discernment of Intelligent Design’ in a collection from a popular Christian press, and another book from a different Christian publisher). This, like the above ’history’, is one of a number of instances of Shanks’s apparently not having done the homework.)
[16] B. Dembski (Example 2). Shanks quotes Dembski on self-organization as follows:
> <p><sup>[17] <sup>Shanks immediately responds:
> <p><sup>[18] <sup>One hint of trouble here is the following from Dembski’s No Free Lunch:
> <p><sup>[19] <sup>This is hardly a comment one would anticipate from someone claiming that the conservation laws of physics forbid self-organization. But there is a deeper problem. The above quote from Dembski continued thus:
> <p><sup>[20] <sup>Dembski’s claim is that some interesting things (e.g., Benard cell phenomena) can perfectly well emerge in the relevant sense and that other things cannot (things prohibited by conservation laws, for instance). Dembski’s question – left out by Shanks – is: which category does design go in? Design theorists, says Dembski, plump for the ‘not on the cheap’ category. Note that that question itself would have been pointless if the relevant sort of emergence – explicitly including self-organization – were forbidden by physical law. The claim that Dembski thinks that ‘conservation laws of physics forbid self-organization’ doesn’t even have much appearance of plausibility absent the clipping of the quote.
[21] C. Dembski (Example 3). Critics of ID frequently ask advocates: who designed the designer? The underlying suggestion is that the designer would have to be designed as well and that chasing alleged design back one level thus gains no explanatory ground at all, and in fact invites a regress. There is an obvious answer to that question, and it is that there can be a significant explanatory gain at the immediate level even if comparable things remain unexplained on a deeper level. For instance, suppose that panspermia theories were correct. That life was planted on earth by life forms from elsewhere would contain genuine explanatory substance (indeed, important and interesting substance) even if one did not know much of anything about the life forms that planted life here, how they came to be, etc. And it would cut no ice whatever for a critic to claim that that specific theory concerning how life on earth came to be was not really legitimate unless advocates could explain how the aliens who seeded earth themselves came to be. That latter would be a crucial question (and one would not have a complete theory of life until it was answered) but the answer to it can be bracketed from the question of life on earth, and the absence of such an answer has no bearing upon the rightness, wrongness, rationality, evidential support, etc. of the initial question.
[22] Dembski makes exactly that straightforward point. Here is Shanks’s introduction and quotation of Dembski [Shanks, p. 170]:
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> <p><sup>[23] <sup>Two paragraphs later, Dembski’s above point is referred to as ‘Dembski’s suggestion that we stop and content ourselves with the progress we have made’ and is described as ‘utterly fatuous.’ Dembski’s general – correct – point that not having an explanation of level b does not imply that things on level b cannot nonetheless give proximate explanations of things on level a is now misrepresented as a (fatuous) suggestion to stop at level a. Dembski neither said nor implied anything of the sort.
[24] D. Phillip Johnson. According to Shanks, part of the ‘dark side’ of ID strategy is
> <p><sup>[25] <sup>Here is the relevant passage from Johnson:
> <p><sup>[26] <sup>There is not the slightest hint in that passage that the rules of logic will have to change. The issue is what foundational premises one should employ one’s logic on, in order for the rules of logic to get one to true conclusions. Since trying to reason to foundational premises is quite clearly logically unworkable one must acquire them by some other means. There is nothing even mildly pernicious about that. (Indeed, that general point is part of the standard philosophical criticism of classical foundationalism.) On the other hand if, say, Shanks’s apparent suggestion is right – that starting with some set of premises makes critical thinking about those premises impossible – then since any reasoning requires prior premises any reasoning will face precisely that problem. But the point at the moment is that Johnson neither says, suggests nor says anything that implies any slightest hint of the dire and threatening matters of which Shanks accuses him - that the rules of logic will have to change and critical thinking will be literally unthinkable.
[27] E. Nancy Pearcey. One of Shanks’s key contentions is that ID motivations are socially pernicious – that ‘the real motivations of the intelligent design movement …in reality have little to do with science but a lot to do with …the imposition of discriminatory, conservative Christian values on our educational, legal, social, and political institutions’ [p. 230]. In pursuit of that contention, Shanks says:
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> <p><sup>[28] <sup>But what was the basic intuition Pearcey was talking about – her reference to which Shanks italicized? Pearcey tells us, in the sentence immediately preceding the above – a sentence Shanks does not include. It was this:
> <p><sup>[29] <sup>Ironically enough, Shanks’s whole book is an attempt to establish precisely that – that more is at stake than just a scientific theory. Indeed, on the very next page Shanks himself says:
> <p><sup>[30] <sup>But, of course, that ‘one thing’ was Pearcey’s point – a fact that was obscured by omission of the key sentence, thus causing the ‘basic intuition’ to appear to be referring to something different and ‘more than a little disturbing.’
[31] F. Michael Behe. Sometimes misrepresentations are more subtle than mere clipped passages. According to Michael Behe, an irreducibly complex system would be a ‘powerful challenge to Darwinian evolution.’ Although he does not believe that gradualist natural selection provides a good explanation, his reasons for thinking that are probabilistic. But in discussing Behe, Shanks says that
> <p><sup>[32] <sup>and that it
> <p><sup>[33] <sup>Shanks apparently forgets the following passage occurring earlier in his own book:
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> <p><sup>[34] <sup>But Shanks’s use of Behe’s quote, even when acknowledged in that earlier passage, involves an oddity. The above Behe quote comes from a 2001 article (‘Darwin’s Breakdown’) and is described by Shanks as a ‘significant admission.’ The oddity is that this ‘admission’ appears nearly word for word quite early on (p. 40) in Behe’s original piece (Darwin’s Black Box, Free Press) published in 1996:
> <p><sup>[35] <sup>That ‘admission’ quoted from the 2001 piece was part of Behe’s original argument in his very first piece on the topic in 1996.
[36] G. John West. Political scientist John West is, predictably enough, interested in the possible political – and other humanities – implications of ID. But among West’s ‘profoundly muddled’ statements that arouse Shanks’s ire is the following:
> <p><sup>[37] <sup>In response, Shanks first points out that ‘Free will is not guaranteed simply through an appeal to the nonmateriality of the soul’ [p. 227]. Perfectly true, but of course West suggested nothing to the contrary. West was talking about materialistic reductionism, and what he said was that immateriality of the soul would diminish the grounds on which deterministic pictures of humans could be erected. Since denying that humans are purely material would remove the possibility of purely materialistic determinism, West’s point is trivially true. Diminish does not mean remove any and all possible alternative grounds. (And, of course, this is all in the context of questioning West’s motives, integrity, etc. – but luckily Shanks quickly uncovers West’s real motives.)
[38] So far, then, the history is mistaken, the polemical index is distressingly high, and ID advocates are frequently misrepresented (as are creationists, on occasion), the misrepresentations in question serving as occasions for attribution of pernicious motives and character slurs. And again, the foregoing cases are merely examples – not an exhaustive catalogue. Beyond all this, the book exhibits some problematic philosophical shortcomings as well. For instance, important distinctions are sometimes systematically blurred. Following is one particularly striking example.
[39] One key flashpoint of dispute over ID is the matter of methodological naturalism (MN). On this issue, Shanks gets even the views of his own allies wrong. Shanks begins his discussion by quoting two characterizations of MN from Dembski:
> <p><sup>[40] <sup>and again
> <p><sup>[41] <sup>According to Shanks,
> <p><sup>[42] <sup>I’m at a bit of a loss here. Consider the following, all from prominent advocates of methodological naturalism (and almost all from fervent opponents of ID) and which are overwhelmingly representative of the literature:
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> <p><sup>[43] <sup>Shanks also repeatedly asserts that methodological naturalism is a (loosely) empirical result ‘based on an inductive generalization from 300 to 400 years of scientific experience’ [p. 141]. Shanks does not provide historical documentation or sources spanning that 3–400 year history during which, he claims
> <p><sup>[44] <sup>But in any case that induction claim does not fit well with the claims of many of his fellow ID critics, who tend to see MN as an essential conceptual stipulation:
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> <p><sup>[45] <sup>And even earlier:
> <p><sup>[46] <sup>Another interesting statement in explicit contradiction of Shanks’s type of position comes from the Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin (also no friend of ID):
> <p><sup>[47] <sup>Not only is MN definitive of science, Lewontin claims, but far from exclusion of the non-natural being an induction from several hundred years of scientific experience, science is deliberately constructed around a prior philosophical commitment to just that exclusion.
[48] In any case, Dembski’s definition of MN is spot on. The truly puzzling characterization is Shanks’s own, according to which
> <p><sup>[49] <sup>After getting the view of nearly everyone on all sides of the issue wrong, Shanks then uses his own misconstrual as a platform for another bit of ad hominem:
> <p><sup>[50] <sup>(I apologize for reproducing so many characterizations of MN above, but it is difficult otherwise to give a sense of how astonishingly off target Shanks is on this – which he only compounds by dismissing (with no supporting evidence) Dembski’s perfectly correct characterization as a ‘gross and egregious mischaracterization’ [p. 141].)
[51] One of Shanks’s dominant concerns is to expose ID as (deliberately concealed) religion. And the religion in question is portrayed as of a particularly pernicious and dangerous sort. Despicable religion-driven motives are constantly sought and ‘exposed’ – the underlying intent (deliberately obscured ‘under cover of smoke and mirrors’) being ‘the imposition of discriminatory, conservative Christian values …The real issues are …about who shall count, whose views shall be heard, and who shall be silenced.’ [p. 230].
[52] In any case,
> <p><sup>[53] <sup>And not just any sort of supernatural. ID advocates ‘know’ the identity of the designer:
> <p><sup>[54] <sup>But there is one especially notable peculiarity in this connection specifically regarding the alleged identification of the designer. Shanks says:
> <p><sup>[55] <sup>So mere design tells us little or nothing about the identity of the designer. But major ID advocates agree wholeheartedly. Indeed, Dembski specifically says (in this passage quoted by Shanks himself) that:
> <p><sup>[56] <sup>And in a related passage (also quoted by Shanks) Dembski says:
> <p><sup>[57] <sup>Dembski thus claims to have a method to detect design, but insists that that tells us essentially nothing beyond the fact of design (a claim many other ID advocates, e.g., Michael Behe, endorse.) Dembski thus seems to be making exactly the same point as did Shanks above. But the fact that ID people make the precise distinction Shanks demands doesn’t get them off the hook. In fact, Shanks dismisses Dembski’s statement here as ‘technically correct but irrelevant.’ Why irrelevant? Shanks tells us in the very next sentence after the last Dembski quote:
> <p><sup>[58] <sup>That is followed by the routine ad hominem: ‘Dembski and his friends know this as well as I do.’
[59] But motivation obviously has no relevance to the point Dembski is making – especially since Shanks himself made precisely the same point without sharing the slightest whiff of Dembski’s alleged motivation. Notice too that, oddly enough, making the distinction Shanks himself demanded apparently counts against the integrity of ID advocates. And why should that be? Because
> <p><sup>[60] <sup>Here is where things get interesting. Says Shanks:
> <p><sup>[61] <sup>So if Dembski and ID advocates ignore the distinction Shanks demands (and which Dembski of course made above), and try to infer the supernatural character (and other identifying characteristics) of the designer from the proposed fact of design they are making a serious logical error – an ‘unwarranted leap’ But if they do make the distinction Shanks demands and claim to be separating design from their religious identification of the designer, they are ‘telling lies’. This particular playing field isn’t merely slanted – it’s vertical.
[62] But suppose that Shanks was right about the hidden, pernicious religious motivation and agenda of the design movement. Why should one think that design theory itself was really about the supernatural – that design claims were ‘really claims about the supernatural’? There is nothing much like a formal case here, but the factors which continually resurface are
[63] (a) that ID advocates believe (mistakenly) that purely naturalistic explanations of relevant phenomena in nature are scientifically inadequate,
[64] (b) that ID advocates typically believe that there are gaps in nature,
[65] (c) that ID advocates have religious motivations, and
[66] (d) that ID advocates believe that the designer in question is the Christian God.
[67] Of course, (c) is simply irrelevant in this context, whatever its importance regarding other issues might be – motive does not constitute content. And the fact that ID advocates might believe (as does Dembski) that they knew on other grounds the actual identity of any designer – (d) – would not of itself turn the content of inferences about a designer into content about the preferred candidate. Someone might infer the existence of an alien designer from some artifact found on Mars, and that person might for independent reasons believe in Alpha Centaurians, and might be utterly convinced that the designer of the alien artifact was in fact Alpha Centaurian. That would not in the slightest mean that Alpha Centaurian was part of the content of either the initial inference or any of its premises or its conclusion.
[68] What of (b)? It is certainly true that most ID advocates believe that there are gaps in nature, and that design theories are required to bridge such gaps. And it is certainly plausible to think that any designer which bridged gaps in nature would be outside nature – i.e., supernatural. Although that is indeed reasonable and is what most ID advocates in fact personally believe, that is not an entailment of design theories – and ID advocates sometimes call attention to that fact by citing the logical possibility of advanced aliens or some such being the designers of things which we intuitively take to be parts of nature. (Shanks himself refers to one such case on p. 155.)
[69] Things are a bit trickier with (a). Shanks, naturally, believes that ID advocates are seriously mistaken on this point. But ID advocates sometimes (at least, in principle) believe that some natural systems or mechanisms have perhaps been designed to in turn produce – without intervention, gaps, etc. – phenomena exhibiting design signatures and which, while they could not arise without design somewhere in their causal history, are the immediate products of natural processes. Darwin himself endorsed this view on occasion. (Shanks sometimes talks as though all design thinking is gap thinking (cf. e.g., p. 92). That is simply inaccurate.) In any case, showing that some thing was a product of apparently unbroken natural causes would not show that design theories were defective (contrary to e.g., p. 125).
[70] In any case, Shanks believes that ID advocates have failed both to establish the inadequacy of the theories they oppose and to establish the adequacy of their own alternative theories. He may well be right about that (I have some sympathy for the latter, anyway), but assessing his case is not straightforward because, it seems to me, the playing field he deploys is again not quite level.
[71] How so? In keeping with his repeated contention that design theories are utterly empty, Shanks at every turn demands that ID advocates provide details of mechanisms for supernatural activity – while suggesting that since such theories are implicitly about the supernatural, that such details cannot be supplied (and that ID advocates have refused in any case to try to supply them). Indeed, Shanks claims, it is not even clear that ID theories are coherent. Here are some characteristic contentions:
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> <p><sup>[72] <sup>And, of course, the routine ad hominem makes its appearance in this connection too:
> <p><sup>[73] <sup>and Shanks also refers to
> <p><sup>[74] <sup>Despite throwing up a thicket of demands for specific mechanisms, assurances of intelligibility, etc. for design theories, naturalism-friendly views get nearly automatic passes. For instance, on p. 183 we are told that we cannot follow Behe on a specific point because [my italics]:
> <p><sup>[75] <sup>On the very next page, however, the following from Cairns-Smith is waved through the checkpoint without even an eyebrow, much less a question, being raised:
> <p><sup>[76] <sup>So Behe must demonstrate while (even in the face of the ‘seemingly paradoxical’) Cairns-Smith need only speculate about accidents (unspecified) that seem (no demonstration) like they every so often (unspecified) may (uncertainty) produce (unspecified mechanism) something (unspecified) new.
[77] Or again, Shanks favors a materialist account of mind, in part, it appears, because ‘we have no good account of how a nonphysical mind could interact with a physical body…’ [p. 213]. (Shanks cites this as in some respects resembling the issue of whether and how ‘supernatural objects…can interact with physical objects’ [p. 212], and takes lack of proposed mechanisms as leaving open even the question of whether alleged ID claims of interaction between the supernatural and the physical are even coherent.) But in materialist views of consciousness we have absence of understood mechanism in spades. Jerry Fodor (of the Center for Cognitive Science at Rutgers, and one of the top people anywhere in the relevant field) has remarked that
> <p><sup>[78] <sup>Sometimes even absences are adequate:
> <p><sup>[79] <sup>And it seems ironic that after belaboring ID advocates for providing no mechanism for the allegedly designed cosmic fine tuning, that Shanks reveals that he thinks that the (apparent) fine tuning was a result of ‘blind chance or luck’ [p. 219] – a view which would itself seem to be a bit short on specific mechanism.
[80] There are a variety of other types of difficulties of which I shall only briefly mention one. In any such discussion, a crucial underlying issue will involve the nature and interpretation of evidence. Shanks notes – rightly – that:
> <p><sup>[81] <sup>Shanks takes this to tell against alleged design inferences. But that would seem to suggest that what something was or was not legitimately taken as evidence for depended at least in part upon the background interpretive context – and possibly that whether something was or was not legitimately taken as evidence for design might depend upon background interpretive context as well. That fact would make problematic such repeated, universal, and often unqualified claims as this:
> <p><sup>[82] <sup>The above – and similar – unqualified blanket denials [e.g., p. 228] are peculiar in other ways as well. Earlier, Shanks asserted that
> <p><sup>[83] <sup>and noted that
> <p><sup>[84] <sup>The ‘except’ and ‘other than’ are hardly trivial qualifications. It is in fact the apparently outrageous unlikeliness of the ‘cosmic coincidences’ that initiated the cosmic fine-tuning discussion among professional cosmologists in the first place. And the fact that a theory can explain patterns which would otherwise represent mere coincidence or sheer luck counts as evidence (whether decisive or not) for the theory in question. Indeed, there are philosophers of science – e.g., John Leslie – who hold that that is definitive of what evidence is. In any case, by p. 228 the previous significant qualification [p. 217] has disappeared.
[85] As indicated at the outset, I do think that ID has some worrisome and significant shortcomings, and I think that as discussion – both professional and lay – continues to heat up both in the U.S. and elsewhere, that a rigorous, accurate, penetrating, careful and balanced critique of ID would be enormously valuable. Unfortunately, this book isn’t it.
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