Science and Intelligent Design

Despite what you may have learned in high school about the "steps" of the scientific method there's really only one absolute rule in the practice of science: An explanation to qualify as science must be naturalistic.

Whatever a scientist might believe in his or her private life, in professional practice the scientist cannot resort to non-natural causes as explanations for the data they accumulate in their investigations. They thus impose upon themselves a methodological constraint called methodological naturalism (MN).

MN seems a reasonable rule of practice although it leads to at least one difficulty. An investigator never knows when he or she has reached the limits of what naturalistic causes can explain. When naturalistic explanations fizzle out the best a scientist can say is that science is at an end of its ability to explain the phenomena. Unfortunately, too often it's assumed that whatever science can't explain is somehow not worth explaining.

In any case, one of the objections to the theory of intelligent design is that, whatever its philosophical merits, it's not a scientific theory because it necessarily posits an intelligent creator who is not subject to empirical verification or testability, and which is therefore beyond the scope of the rule of methodological naturalism.

This objection is not quite right. Whatever the usefulness of MN may be in the practice of science, the rule is not violated by intelligent design as an article at Evolution News points out. Here's an excerpt:

MN states that science cannot appeal to the supernatural. But ID does not appeal to the supernatural, and thus does not require non-natural causes.

ID begins with observations of the types of information and complexity produced by intelligent agents. Intelligent agents are natural causes that we can understand by studying the world around us. This makes intelligent agency a proper subject of scientific study. When ID finds high levels of complex and specified information, or CSI, in nature, the most it can infer is that intelligence was at work. Because ID respects the limits of scientific inquiry, it does not make claims beyond the data by trying to identify the designer.

Philosopher Stephen Meyer explains:

Though the designing agent responsible for life may well have been an omnipotent deity, the theory of intelligent design does not claim to be able to determine that. Because the inference to design depends upon our uniform experience of cause and effect in this world, the theory cannot determine whether or not the designing intelligence putatively responsible for life has powers beyond those on display in our experience.

Nor can the theory of intelligent design determine whether the intelligent agent responsible for information life acted from the natural or the “supernatural” realm. Instead, the theory of intelligent design merely claims to detect the action of some intelligent cause (with power, at least, equivalent to those we know from experience) and affirms this because we know from experience that only conscious, intelligent agents produce large amounts of specified information.

Many other ID proponents have pointed out that ID only appeals to intelligent causes, not supernatural ones. Michael Behe writes:

[A]s regards the identity of the designer, modern ID theory happily echoes Isaac Newton’s phrase hypothesis non fingo [“I frame no hypothesis”].

William Dembski and Jonathan Wells explain:

Supernatural explanations invoke miracles and therefore are not properly part of science. Explanations that call on intelligent causes require no miracles but cannot be reduced to materialistic explanations.

Now some might argue that ID violates MN by leaving open the possibility of a supernatural designer. It's true that ID leaves open such a possibility. But ID does not claim to scientifically detect a supernatural creator. Again, the most ID claims to detect is intelligent causation. Many (though not all) ID proponents may believe the designer is God, but they do not claim this is a scientific conclusion of ID. In this respect, ID is no different from Darwinian evolution, which claims that if there is a supernatural creator, that would be beyond science’s power to detect.

But is MN a good rule for science? A quote from atheistic cosmologist Sean Carroll in the article suggests that he, at least, is skeptical.

Science should be interested in determining the truth, whatever that truth may be – natural, supernatural, or otherwise. The stance known as methodological naturalism, while deployed with the best of intentions by supporters of science, amounts to assuming part of the answer ahead of time. If finding truth is our goal, that is just about the biggest mistake we can make.

Carroll's words remind me of one of my favorite quotes from a philosopher. The passage is from the American pragmatist William James who wrote that "a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule." Metaphysical naturalism is certainly a rule that would prevent us from seeing that there's an intelligence behind the cosmos, if, indeed, that intelligence is really there.