Viewpoint: Two Notions of Intelligence in Design
By Lloyd EbyWorld Peace Herald Contributor
Published: January 30, 2006
Source: http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20060130-090253-1504rWASHINGTON — Some critics of intelligent design (ID) ask, “How can the designer of biological species be intelligent, given that so many species have come into existence and then disappeared. How can an intelligent designer design some of the mistakes and monstrosities found in nature, such as disease causing bacteria or malaria-carrying mosquitoes?” As one such critic put it, “Really, where is the intelligence there? Even if you can make the case that God ‘predesigned’ everything, I doubt you can make the case for intelligence in the design.”
I suspect these questions are at least somewhat tongue in cheek. But I will treat them as being entirely serious.
Those questions arise from confusion between two different notions of intelligence in design. The first (#1) is design by an intelligence or intelligent being or rational agent — an “artificer,” in the terminology of eighteenth century philosopher-theologian William Paley (1743-1805) — as opposed to spontaneous, non-designed, appearance of things. Darwinian and neo-Darwinian evolution theory deny the need for such an intelligence or artificer to account for the appearance and development of different species of living things, while ID theory asserts the need for such a designer or artificer. The second (#2) notion of intelligence in design means an efficient, good, or well thought out design of something. The first does not at all imply, depend on, or require the second.
Consider, Paley’s famous watchmaker argument:
“In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it lain there for ever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer, which I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there…. The watch must have had a maker: that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use…. Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.”
Put aside, for purposes of this essay, the question whether Paley’s argument is a good one and consider the question of the quality of the watch and the effect of such quality on Paley’s argument. The short answer is that the quality of the watch is irrelevant to the question whether Paley’s argument is a good one. If the watch is of excellent quality we could say that it has an intelligent designer or artificer. If the watch is of poor quality and poorly designed, then it has a stupid or poor designer or artificer. But in either case we recognize that the watch had a designer or artificer, and that this designer was an intelligent agent or artificer (sense #1) because only rational/intelligent beings can design watches. Even bad quality watches that are poorly designed nevertheless have an intelligent being, in the sense of a rational agent, as the designer or artificer behind them. We recognize that a human designer or artificer or architect – a rational/intelligent agent – can make good designs, or what we might call intelligent designs, as well as poor designs, or what we might call unintelligent or stupid ones.
Consider, for an actual example, the East German Trabant automobile. It was a poorly designed car of execrable quality, and in that sense (#2 above) it was not an intelligent design, but it was still made by human (rational/intelligent) designers (#1); it did not grow through a process of naturalistic evolution, without human intervention in its creation.
Most ID theorists — although not necessarily all of them — identify God as the being who, they hold, exists and who is the intelligent designer of biological species. This means that those ID proponents hold that God is an intelligent creator/designer in the first sense (#1) of that term given above. It does not follow from that, however, that God must be an intelligent designer in the second sense (#2) given above. God might be unintelligent or improvident or even malicious in designing some things, just as the designers of the Trabant car were unintelligent in designing that car.
In order to avoid this confusion, I think that ID theorists would do well to choose a different term for their view. Perhaps they could call it “design by an agent” or “active design,” or, following Paley, “artificer design.”
I think that I understand the motive of ID theorists: They want to use the notion of what at least some ID theorists calls “irreducible complexity,” as supposedly observed in some biological organisms, as evidence that this complexity could not arise through the mechanism(s) described in neo-Darwinism, claiming that this irreducible complexity points to the need for intelligence in its design (in both sense #1 and sense #2). But I think that this confuses the issue because a Paley-style argument, if it works at all, works both for intelligent and stupid designers and intelligently and stupidly designed things.
One can be a theist without thereby necessarily believing that God is always good, or smart, or intelligent (sense #2), or benevolent. The existence of God, if God really exists, does not imply the goodness of God, despite what many theologians and philosophers have claimed. In fact, that is the view I actually hold: I am a theist who also thinks that God is not always good or beneficent. I think that God is sometimes selfish, brutal, mean, irrational, stupid, and unethical, and I think that my view of God accords far more accurately with both the nature of God as depicted in various religious scriptures and with many people’s experience of God and God’s activity. (My view does subvert, or at least make very difficult, usual notions and forms of piety, but that is a problem not germane to the discussion at hand.)
I suspect that my view is a minority one — most theists and religious believers seem to have held that God is supremely good, beneficent, and intelligent. But, whether I am right or wrong about that, it is completely clear that the existence of God — or any intelligent designer, whoever it may be – as the artificer or designer of biological species does not imply that God, or that intelligent designer, must create or bring into existence only good species or organisms, and the fact that some badly designed species or organisms exist does not imply that no intelligent designer of them could exist.
Lloyd Eby teaches in the philosophy department of the George Washington University in Washington, DC