Debating Darwin: the 'intelligent design' movement; a new generation of anti evolutionists has arisen based on the perceived inadequacies of Darwin's theory

Christian Century, July 15, 1998 by Edward B. Davis

To prevent students from being indoctrinated with this type of irreligion, Johnson offers them a primer on thinking critically about evolution and a brief account of ID. The latter is essentially the opposite of the strong biological reductionism associated with Dawkins, according to which (in Johnson's accurate description) "everything, including our minds, can be `reduced' to its material base." For Johnson, matter is preceded both ontologically and chronologically by intelligence, in the form of the information necessary to organize it into living things, and this is "an entirely different kind of stuff from the physical medium [e.g., DNA] in which it may temporarily be recorded." A principal goal of the ID movement is to convince scientists that information cannot and does not spring from matter, which they understand as brute and inert. This is essentially the same dualistic conception of matter that was shared by 17th-century founders of mechanistic science such as Rend Descartes, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. Although the mind-matter distinction remains philosophically problematic, and although some types of dualism may be possible to defend, most contemporary scientists (including most Christian scientists) no longer hold to this type of dualism, even if they retain the mechanistic science with which it was once linked. The same is true of many contemporary theologians, especially those committed to panentheism or process theology. They generally hold a more active view of matter and its capabilities, believing either that matter itself can think or that cognition arises out of it in some naturalistic manner yet to be determined. An important flaw in the program of the ID adherents is that they don't really confront the fact that the philosophical landscape has changed, and they fail to engage those Christian thinkers who recognize this.

Johnson bases his case substantially on Michael Behe's notion of "irreducible complexity"--the idea that because certain parts of living organisms are so complex, and are composed of many separate parts that cannot function properly on their own, we cannot account for them (in reductionistic fashion) as merely the products of blind selection. Rather, we are forced to invoke a deus ex machina who assembled the parts supernaturally according to a preconceived design. Johnson uses this strong form of the teleological argument to challenge both materialism and naturalism. He calls his strategy "the wedge" and sees himself opening up a crack in scientific materialism.

Behe attempts to widen that crack. A biochemist at Lehigh University, he is not a creationist in the sense in which that word is most often used. For example, he believes that the earth is billions of years old, something self-styled scientific creationists deny, and he thinks that natural selection can account for much of life's diversity, which an old-earth creationist like Johnson probably does not accept (if so, he is awfully quiet about it). What natural selection cannot explain, in Behe's opinion, is how the original building blocks of living things were formed.