On Saturday we looked at the first part of a very interesting interview at Salvo magazine with philosopher of science Bradley Monton in which Monton, an atheist, expresses support for Intelligent Design.
He said at the end of the portion included on Saturday's post that his open-mindedness has been rewarded with calls by some of his colleagues at Colorado State University for him to be fired. This is, of course, a ridiculous response, one typical of narrow-minded people so insecure in their own convictions that they fear having them subjected to open and critical examination.
Anyway, I'd like to post some highlights today from the rest of the interview. The interviewer's questions are in bold font and excerpts from Monton's answers follow:
You've written that intelligent-design arguments have made you less certain of your atheism. What would it take to make you abandon it altogether?
Some people have come to believe in God on the basis of divine revelation, which is intellectually legitimate, as far as I'm concerned. I wish that I could have that sort of profound revelatory experience because then I could stop struggling with philosophical arguments and the extent to which the fine-tuning of the universe points to a creator. But the fact is that I haven't. A lot of other people haven't either, which leaves us searching for alternative forms of proof.
I don't find the historical evidence for Christianity—or any other religion, for that matter—especially compelling. It's not that this sort of evidence is definitely flawed; it's just that it isn't compelling enough for me. Absent revelation and historical evidence, the best place to find God, in my opinion, is in science, and that's one of the reasons I'm so motivated to think about intelligent design.
So what sort of scientific evidence would be compelling enough to change your mind?
It would be evidence for mind as a fundamental feature of the universe. As far as I'm concerned, God would have to be a purely mental entity, not connected to physical reality in the way that we are through our bodies.
So if we could discover some kind of evidence that mind is fundamental, then that would go a long way toward making me a believer. And if we could find evidence that the physical world isn't causally closed—that not only is mind a fundamental entity, but it likewise plays a causal role in the structure of the world—then that would also be compelling evidence for the existence of God.
Now, if it is found that mind plays a role in our brain processes alone, that by itself wouldn't make me believe in God, though it would certainly make me more open to the idea. But if we were to discover that mind is intervening in other places in the world besides our brain processes, then that would pretty much be the smoking gun.
[My note: This is a fascinating answer inasmuch as there's a growing number of physicists who believe that reality is indeed fundamentally mental rather than material, i.e. that mind, not matter, is what's ultimately real. I wonder what Monton thinks of this.]
Are there other atheist scientists out there who believe that intelligent-design arguments hold some merit?
Thomas Nagel comes to mind as someone who feels that intelligent-design arguments have value, even though he's an atheist and not inclined at all to believe in God. In his new book Mind and Cosmos, he pushes for a teleological theory of reality, which is different from the standard naturalistic science view, but also different from the intelligent-design hypothesis.
Nagel's view is that the universe is fundamentally goal-oriented. It has this teleological structure to it that we will someday discover through scientific investigation. Part of how Nagel argues for his theory is by positively citing the arguments of intelligent-design proponents, which he believes support the existence of his teleological structure rather than a designer.