John Farrell, a science and technology blogger who writes for Forbes magazine and who is also the author of The Day Without Yesterday: Lemaître, Einstein, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology, has just written a highly critical review of Stephen Meyer’s latest book, Darwin’s Doubt. No surprise there, for those who are familiar with Mr. Farrell’s views on Intelligent Design. Nor is it particularly surprising that National Review Online should see fit to publish them; after all, it has published articles critical of Intelligent Design (see here) as well as rebuttals by other contributors (see here) since 2005. The terms “conservative” and “pro-ID” are not synonymous.
The aim of this post is not to rebut Farrell’s latest review, but to address a particular comment he made at the very end of his review, the conclusion of which is re-printed in an online post by Professor Jerry Coyne, titled, Another Pan of Darwin’s Doubt:
In the end, Darwin’s Doubt boils down to a fundamentally weak argument — the argument from personal incredulity about the origin and evolution of life on earth. As John Henry Newman wrote in 1872: “I have not insisted on the argument from design. . . . To tell the truth, though I should not wish to preach on the subject, for 40 years I have been unable to see the logical force of the argument myself. I believe in design because I believe in God; not in a God because I see design.”
In the first sentence, Farrell regurgitates a very silly myth (popularized by Richard Dawkins) that has been refuted more times than I’d care to count: the myth that Intelligent Design arguments, in the end, boil down to an argument from personal incredulity. The general form of an argument from incredulity (and I’m quoting from RationalWiki here) goes like this:
Minor premise: One can’t imagine (or has not imagined) how P could be so.
Major premise (unstated): If P, then one could imagine (or would have imagined) how P could be so.
Conclusion: Not-P.
However, Intelligent Design arguments take a different form, known as inference to the best explanation. To understand the difference, consider the following syllogism (I’ve retained the “P” in order to keep it as similar as possible to the foregoing argument, despite the vast differences in the style of reasoning employed):
Premise 1: Based on our current knowledge, the likelihood that P could bring about X appears to be astronomically low.
Premise 2: By contrast, we know that Q is perfectly capable of bringing about X.
Conclusion: Q is a much better explanation of X than P. (Hence, probably not-P.)
We can use this kind of argument to explain, for instance, why a Darwinian-style explanation of the origin of protein folds is extremely unlikely to work (as Dr. Douglas Axe has convincingly argued) and why a design-based explanation is intrinsically superior: building structures that perform a particular function is one of the things that intelligent agents do very well.
A skeptic might complain that the foregoing Intelligent Design argument is incomplete, because it only compares two explanations: P and Q. But if we define P as the ensemble of all known explanations (P1, P2, P3, ….. Pn) that exclude Q, and if we then calculate that the total probability that either P1 or P2 or P3 ….. or Pn could bring about X is still astronomically low, then it is perfectly rational to prefer Q as an explanation, based on what we know. Of course it’s possible that some hitherto unknown P-style explanation – let’s call it P(n+1) – might overturn this conclusion, at some future date. But the question we have to answer is: what conclusion should we draw, based on what we know now? In short: Intelligent Design is an argument from ignorance if and only if making decisions in accordance with the best information you have to date is arguing from ignorance.
I won’t belabor the point; for it should (I hope) be apparent to the reader that in faulting Darwin’s Doubt for resorting to an argument from ignorance, John Farrell is resurrecting a tired old canard. Ironically, in the very same review, Farrell observes that the discovery in 1967 by astrophysics student Jocelyn Bell Burnell of “a fantastically rapid pulse — too rapid to be natural, it was first believed” led them to seriously consider the possibility that might be the work of an intelligence. As it turned out, a natural source – a pulsar – was later shown to be responsible, but my question for Farrell is this: if “too rapid to be natural” is enough to warrant a preliminary ascription of intelligent design as the most likely cause for a signal, then why shouldn’t “too high in complex specified information to be natural” warrant a similar ascription of intelligent design?
John Farrell on Newman and the argument from design
But enough of that. I’d now like to pass to what Mr. Farrell has to say about John Henry Newman (who was later made a Cardinal). His first error is one of chronology: Newman did not write the words quoted by Farrell in 1872, but in a letter to a Mr. Brownlow, dated April 13, 1870, quoted in Volume 2, Chapter 28 of Wilfrid Ward’s Life of Cardinal Newman. Why does the date matter? Actually, it’s quite informative. It is highly unlikely that two authors would independently make the same idiosyncratic error in their writings. Thus when I discover that Professor Michael Ruse, in an article he wrote in 2007, makes exactly the same error in chronology – in his article, Ruse refers to “a letter written in 1872” by Newman, about “his seminal philosophical work, A Grammar of Assent,” and I can find no other source on the Internet making a similar mistake – I am forced to conclude that Farrell copied his information directly from Ruse’s article, without bothering to check his sources. (I hope Mr. Farrell will not accuse me of resorting to an “argument from personal incredulity” in making this inference.)
But there’s more. Mr. Farrell’s quote from Newman’s contains an ellipsis … and that got me wondering what he’d left out.
Here’s the quote from Farrell’s article:
As John Henry Newman wrote in 1872: “I have not insisted on the argument from design. . . . To tell the truth, though I should not wish to preach on the subject, for 40 years I have been unable to see the logical force of the argument myself. I believe in design because I believe in God; not in a God because I see design.”
And here’s how Professor Michael Ruse quotes the passage from Newman, in his article:
About his seminal philosophical work, A Grammar of Assent, he wrote,
“I have not insisted on the argument from design, because I am writing for the nineteenth century, by which, as represented by its philosophers, design is not admitted as proved. And to tell the truth, though I should not wish to preach on the subject, for forty years I have been unable to see the logical force of the argument myself. I believe in design because I believe in God; not in a God because I see design.” (This is from a letter written in 1872.) He continued, “Design teaches me power, skill and goodness — not sanctity, not mercy, not a future judgment, which three are of the essence of religion.” (Emphasis mine – VJT.)
Hmmm. Now that puts a different slant on what Newman was saying, doesn’t it? Newman wished to avoid making arguments for God’s existence, based on arguments that his philosophical contemporaries in the nineteenth century would have regarded as inconclusive. Simple as that. And fair enough, too, given that his aim was to convince people. In Newman’s day, design arguments were less intellectually rigorous than they are now. Newman was also perfectly correct in pointing out that design arguments tell us little or nothing about God’s moral attributes – an area which properly falls within the province of religion.
I might add that Newman speaks of “the argument from design”, but it is not clear which argument he is referring. As I have argued in a previous post, the inductive argument from design which Hume refuted, which relied heavily on analogy, is quite different from the design argument defended by Rev. William Paley, which was deductive in form and argued from an identical feature in both living systems and artifactual systems – namely, what we would now call specified complexity.
Newman’s argument from order
But it turns out that even Professor Ruse left out something very important, in his quote from Newman’s letter. Here it is, in full:
‘The Oratory: April 13th, 1870.
‘My dear Brownlow, — It is very pleasant to me to hear what you say about my new book—which has given me great anxiety. I have spoken of the argument for the being of a God from the visible Creation at page 70 paragraph 1. “Order implies purpose” &c. I have not insisted on the argument from design, because I am writing for the 19th Century, by which, as represented by its philosophers, design is not admitted as proved. And to tell the truth, though I should not wish to preach on the subject, for 40 years I have been unable to see the logical force of the argument myself. I believe in design because I believe in God; not in a God because I see design. You will say that the 19th Century does not believe in conscience either — true — but then it does not believe in a God at all. Something I must assume, and in assuming conscience I assume what is least to assume, and what most will admit. Half the world knows nothing of the argument from design — and, when you have got it, you do not prove by it the moral attributes of God — except very faintly. Design teaches me power, skill, and goodness, not sanctity, not mercy, not a future judgment, which three are of the essence of religion.’ (Emphases mine – VJT.)
Note the words Newman uses about the argument from design: “when you have got it, you do not prove by it the moral attributes of God — except very faintly.” Newman seems to conceding here that the argument has a certain validity, even if also he thinks it lacks suasive force; and he adds that it can tell us nothing of God’s holiness, mercy and justice.
I was intrigued, however, by Newman’s opening remarks: “I have spoken of the argument for the being of a God from the visible Creation at page 70 paragraph 1. ‘Order implies purpose’ &c.” I decided to consult Newman’s Grammar of Assent and check out what Newman had written. Here’s what I found: an argument for God’s existence, not from design, but from the order in the cosmos, but one which appeals to specified information which is repeated in every nook and cranny of the cosmos where the laws of Nature hold sway:
Of these two senses of the word “cause,” viz. that which brings a thing to be, and that on which a thing under given circumstances follows, the former is that of which our experience is the earlier and more intimate, being suggested to us by our consciousness of willing and doing…
6. As to causation in the second sense (viz. an ordinary succession of antecedents and consequents, or what is called the Order of Nature), when so explained, it falls under the doctrine of general laws.… For instance, the motion of a stone falling freely, of a projectile, and of a planet, may be generalized as one and the same property, in each of them, of the particles of matter; and this generalization loses its character of hypothesis, and becomes a probability, in proportion as we have reason for thinking on other grounds that the particles of all matter really move and act towards each other in one certain way in relation to space and time, and not in half a dozen ways; that is, that nature acts {70} by uniform laws. And thus we advance to the general notion or first principle of the sovereignty of law throughout the universe.…
But, it may be urged, if a thing happens once, it must happen always; for what is to hinder it? Nay, on the contrary, why, because one particle of matter has a certain property, should all particles have the same? Why, because particles have instanced the property a thousand times, should the thousand and first instance it also? It is prima facie unaccountable that an accident should happen twice, not to speak of its happening always. If {72} we expect a thing to happen twice, it is because we think it is not an accident, but has a cause. What has brought about a thing once, may bring it about twice. What is to hinder its happening? rather, What is to make it happen? Here we are thrown back from the question of Order to that of Causation. A law is not a cause, but a fact; but when we come to the question of cause, then, as I have said, we have no experience of any cause but Will. If, then, I must answer the question, What is to alter the order of nature? I reply, That which willed it;—That which willed it, can unwill it; and the invariableness of law depends on the unchangeableness of that Will.
And here I am led to observe that, as a cause implies a will, so order implies a purpose. Did we see flint celts, in their various receptacles all over Europe, scored always with certain special and characteristic marks, even though those marks had no assignable meaning or final cause whatever, we should take that very repetition, which indeed is the principle of order, to be a proof of intelligence. The agency then which has kept up and keeps up the general laws of nature, energizing at once in Sirius and on the earth, and on the earth in its primary period as well as in the nineteenth century, must be Mind, and nothing else, and Mind at least as wide and as enduring in its living action, as the immeasurable ages and spaces of the universe on which that agency has left its traces.
Newman’s argument that archaeologists discovering certain characteristic marks on flint celts (implements with a beveled cutting edge) all over Europe would be able to infer from that fact alone that they were made by an intelligent being is strikingly reminiscent of Intelligent Design arguments. The key difference is that whereas for ID proponents the hallmark sign indicating an intelligent cause is specified complexity, for Newman it is simply specified information (where the information itself does not have to be of high probabilistic complexity, but where its recurrence in a wide variety of locations and times is deemed by scientists to be overwhelmingly improbable).
I for one would like to know if Farrell considers the above reasoning by Newman to be an example of an argument from ignorance. Note his wording: “A law is not a cause, but a fact; but when we come to the question of cause, then, as I have said, we have no experience of any cause but Will.” I repeat: was Newman also guilty of arguing from ignorance? If so, then why does Farrell quote him against Intelligent Design proponents, if he thinks they are both guilty of the same error? If not, then on what grounds does he fault the Intelligent Design movement for having recourse to such an argument?
John Henry Newman and James Clerk Maxwell
Actually, Newman’s argument is strongly reminiscent of an argument for God’s existence put forward by the Scottish mathematician and physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell argued that while science cannot tell us about the creation of matter out of nothing, science can tell us that molecules of matter were made, and that they were not made by a natural process.
(a) Maxwell’s scientific argument for the existence of a supernatural Creator
I would like to quote from Maxwell’s famous Discourse on Molecules, delivered before the British Association at Bradford in September 1873. In the concluding paragraphs, Maxwell puts forward a scientific argument for the existence of a supernatural Creator:
But in the heavens we discover by their light, and by their light alone, stars so distant from each other that no material thing can ever have passed from one to another; and yet this light, which is to us the sole evidence of the existence of these distant worlds, tells us also that each of them is built up of molecules of the same kinds as those which we find on earth. A molecule of hydrogen, for example, whether in Sirius or in Arcturus, executes its vibrations in precisely the same time.
Each molecule therefore throughout the universe bears impressed upon it the stamp of a metric system as distinctly as does the metre of the Archives at Paris, or the double royal cubit of the temple of Karnac.
No theory of evolution can be formed to account for the similarity of molecules [here Maxwell is talking about molecular evolution, not Darwinian evolution – VJT], for evolution necessarily implies continuous change, and the molecule is incapable of growth or decay, of generation or destruction.
None of the processes of Nature, since the time when Nature began, have produced the slightest difference in the properties of any molecule. We are therefore unable to ascribe either the existence of the molecules or the identity of their properties to any of the causes which we call natural.
On the other hand, the exact equality of each molecule to all others of the same kind gives it, as Sir John Herschel has well said, the essential character of a manufactured article, and precludes the idea of its being eternal and self-existent.
Thus we have been led, along a strictly scientific path, very near to the point at which Science must stop, – not that Science is debarred from studying the internal mechanism of a molecule which she cannot take to pieces, any more than from investigating an organism which she cannot put together. But in tracing back the history of matter, Science is arrested when she assures herself, on the one hand, that the molecule has been made, and, on the other, that it has not been made by any of the processes we call natural.
Science is incompetent to reason upon the creation of matter itself out of nothing. We have reached the utmost limits of our thinking faculties when we have admitted that because matter cannot be eternal and self-existent it must have been created. It is only when we contemplate, not matter in itself, but the form in which it actually exists, that our mind finds something on which it can lay hold. (Emphases mine – VJT.)
What Maxwell is proposing here is an interesting argument for a Creator, on scientific grounds: the fact that molecules are perfectly identical to one another suggests that they were manufactured according to an intelligent plan. What he had in mind was a “uniformity intended and accomplished by the same wisdom and power of which uniformity, accuracy, symmetry, consistency, and continuity of plan are … important attributes…” as he wrote in a letter to a friend. (See E.Garber, S.G.Brush, and C.W.F.Everitt, (Eds) Maxwell on Molecules and Gases, 1986, MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, p. 242.)
(b) Maxwell on the dividing line between science and religion
Note that the dividing line between science and religion is quite different for Maxwell than it is for modern scientists. For Maxwell, science could not explain the modus operandi of the Creator (especially the creation of matter out of nothing). But Maxwell felt quite confident in pronouncing, as a scientist, that certain entities (hydrogen atoms) did not have a natural origin. Today, proponents of the cosmological version of Intelligent Design have refined Maxwell’s position somewhat: they would argue that the laws of nature describing the behavior of hydrogen atoms do not have a natural origin.
If there is a moral to be drawn from the above, it is this: never quote from eminent people without checking what they actually had to say. Mr. Farrell might do well to take that moral to heart.