Salvo magazine has reprinted an interview with philosopher of science Bradley Monton in which Monton, an atheist, expresses surprising support for Intelligent Design, the view that life and the cosmos give very strong reasons for believing that they have both been designed by an intelligent agent or agents.
Here are a few highlights. The interviewer's question are in bold font and excerpts of Monton's responses follow:
What makes you take intelligent design (ID) seriously?
....I find the arguments of the opponents of ID too emotionally driven and not as intellectually robust as one would hope. I get upset with my fellow atheists who present bad arguments against intelligent design and then expect everyone to believe that they have somehow resolved the debate with these bad arguments.
Why do you think some scientists refuse to take intelligent design seriously?
....I would say that some atheists exhibit a fundamentalism that prevents them from even imagining that someone reasonable, rational, and intelligent could hold views different from their own.
You write in your book that you don't fully endorse intelligent design. In your opinion, what are some of the weaknesses of ID?
At one time, I would have said that the greatest weakness was the failure of ID proponents to put a theory on the table that makes testable predictions, but that all changed with Jonathan Wells's book The Myth of Junk DNA. In it, Wells predicted that this purported junk DNA—these stretches of DNA in our genome that many scientists had claimed were useless—would be purposeful for the structure of human biology.
Well, within the past year or so, empirical investigation has confirmed that there is in fact much less junk DNA than scientists had previously thought. It's just a great example of a testable prediction that was made by a proponent of intelligent design that turned out to be successful.
Then why can't you fully support intelligent design?
I still believe that ID scientists need to do a lot more in terms of testable predictions. I recognize that this is difficult to do. I'm not saying it's an easy project. However, it sure would be nice if they had more of a full-fledged research program that led to the development of theories in science. I think this is possible, though it's incredibly difficult to come up with new scientific theories that result in a paradigm shift....
So what are the strengths of intelligent design?
The main strength is that it is getting people to think very carefully about the extent to which there is scientific evidence for either God or some other creator. Plus, the specific arguments themselves are interesting and important to consider. For example, I find Michael Behe's investigation into irreducibly complex biological systems an extremely compelling line of inquiry, even if it turns out to be a flawed argument. It simply helps the progress of science to put arguments such as Behe's on the table.
The same goes for the more physics-based fields of intelligent design, such as the work being conducted by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards. They believe that our universe is ideally suited not just for the existence of life, but also for observability. Why is there a correlation between the regions of the universe that are habitable by creatures such as us and regions that are suitable for making observations and learning about the universe?
That's an interesting question, but as far as I know, no atheist-minded physicist had ever thought about it before Gonzalez and Richards came on the scene. Advocates of intelligent design get people thinking in new ways about science and scientific investigation.
Do you think intelligent design should be taught in public schools?
I think it could be pedagogically useful to do so, certainly. What I know from being a teacher these past thirteen years is that it's wrong to ignore matters that students may have heard about or are certainly going to hear about in the future.
For example, did you know that the California teacher guidelines for K–12 students state that if a student asks about intelligent design, he should be told that it doesn't belong in the science classroom—that he should talk to his family or pastor about it instead?
Shutting down discussion and debate in this fashion is bad pedagogy. Teachers should be forthright about all of the evidence and tell students that issues regarding the origin of life are still open for debate.
Do you think academic freedom is limited for non-tenured proponents of intelligent design?
There certainly are documented cases of professors getting in trouble for putting forth intelligent-design ideas, and I think that's really unfortunate. The academy should be about respecting ideas, however controversial they might be. Once you screen people on their ability to be intellectually sophisticated, they should be allowed to pursue the issues they want to pursue, even issues that go against the current orthodoxy—that violate the standard canons of how thinking should be done.
Intelligent design should be allowed in the academy because most of the proponents of intelligent design are intellectually sophisticated. There's no doubt about it. People such as Michael Behe and Jonathan Wells should be allowed to pursue empirical and philosophical investigations in whatever way they think best leads to truth.
How have other academics responded to your writings and statements on intelligent design?
The degree to which I have been attacked is actually pretty ludicrous. I gave a public lecture on intelligent design here at the University of Colorado, and a number of the school's biology professors demanded that I be fired. One such professor, Michael Klymkowsky, went so far as to organize his own public lecture in response to mine.
Unfortunately for him, his lecture ended up being a mess, misrepresenting my views and then failing to make arguments of its own. At the beginning, the audience was mostly on his side, but by the end they didn't know what to think because his arguments were so weak.
So I've received preposterous critiques such as that one, but I've also had a lot of support, especially from philosophers who don't have a dog in the intelligent-design fight. They haven't gone to great pains to investigate ID, but they appreciate my open-minded perspective.
They have also told me that they are disturbed by the narrow-minded and emotionally driven attacks on the part of the philosophical and scientific critics of intelligent design. It has been quite heartening to receive that kind of support.
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There's more to the interview and you can read the entire Q&A at the link. There are a couple of additional questions to which Monton gives what I think are fascinating replies, and I'll discuss these a bit on Monday.