Thomas Nagel's paper in Philosophy and Public Policy makes the case that Intelligent Design has the same philosophical or theoretical status as the Darwinian view it challenges. Nagel's argument is all the more provocative given that he is himself an atheist and a Darwinian. We've looked at the first part of his paper in earlier posts and consider more of it here. Nagel asserts that the critic of ID often bases his opposition on philosophical, rather than scientific, grounds. He writes that:
Those who would not take any amount of evidence against evolutionary theory as evidence for ID ... seem to be assuming that ID is not a possibility. What is the status of that assumption? Is it scientifically grounded? It may not be a matter of faith or ecclesiastical authority, but it does seem to be a basic, ungrounded assumption about how the world works, essentially a kind of naturalism.
In other words, the rejection of ID is grounded not on scientific reasons, but on reasons which are best described as theological. Either there is no God, the critic maintains, in which case ID is impossible, or, if there is, we can be assured that He doesn't work the way the IDers think He does. Nagel explains:
The denier that ID is science faces the following dilemma. Either he admits that the intervention of such a designer is possible, or he does not. If he does not, he must explain why that belief is more scientific than the belief that a designer is possible. If on the other hand he believes that a designer is possible, then he can argue that the evidence is overwhelmingly against the actions of such a designer, but he cannot say that someone who offers evidence on the other side is doing something of a fundamentally different kind. All he can say about that person is that he is scientifically mistaken.
I think there are only two possible justifications for this asymmetry. Either there is strong scientific evidence against the existence of God; or there is a scientific default presumption that the prior probability of a designer is low, and the only possible basis for assigning it a higher probability - high enough to make it eligible as an explanation of what is empirically observed-is faith, revelation, or ecclesiastical authority. Is either of those things true, however?
The claim that ID is bad science or dead science may depend, almost as much as the claim that it is not science, on the assumption that divine intervention in the natural order is not a serious possibility. That is not a scientific belief but a belief about a religious question: it amounts to the assumption that either there is no god, or if there is, he certainly does not intervene in the natural order to guide the world in certain directions.
This is a point similar to that made by Cornelius Hunter in Darwin's God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil. The irony is that Darwinians base their argument on particular theological suppositions about God whereas IDers maintain theological neutrality and say nothing about God. Yet the Darwinians wrap themselves in the mantle of science while calling the IDers religious zealots. Pretty amusing.
More on Nagel's paper anon.
RLC