Last week I noted how much Stephen Meyer's book Signature in the Cell is selling and wondered whether I should start refuting it. This almost instantly triggered a comment from Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute, saying, please, please, do precisely that. Oh well, so much for that idea. If this is what DI wants, this is not what DI is going to get. There is not much to say about Meyer's "God of the Gaps" argument anyway, now applied to the origins of life just as it has previously been applied to the bacterial flagellum, the Cambrian explosion, and so on. Research is going on into the origins of life, but we have not yet solved the mystery. It just isn't scientifically fruitful to invoke "intelligent design" in this context, as if it solves a problem, rather than just raising another one (who designed the super-complex designer, and so on). However, I do want to comment on one aspect of Meyer's book that's really jaw-dropping--albeit not in a strictly scientific area. Meyer is trained as a historian and philosopher of science, not a biologist. So one would think he would know what his own field has to say about the relationship between science, religion, and naturalism. Yet on the contrary, in Signature in the Cell--and especially in Chapter 6, "The Origin of Science and the Possibility of Design"--he selectively uses historical science research to claim that modern science can still be infused with a sense of the divine. In the process, Meyer selectively ignores important developments from the 19th century and on. As historians of science like Ronald Numbers have shown, after the Darwinian revolution, science became closely tied to methodological naturalism and a sense of fixed natural laws that are unchanging--and therefore capable of being studied in controlled experiments. In this context, appeals to miracles, divine intervention, intelligent design, and so on, were ruled out by practicing scientists, whether they were personally religious or not--for very good reason. They were seen as an inappropriate hinderance, and not based on testable data or inference. They were vague, and didn't have any explanatory power. They might be religously satisfying, but as science, they were a cop-out. Granted, we have to go a bit closer into what Meyer is saying, as there is a grain of truth mixed into the sands of dubiousness. In citing early modern scientists like Kepler, Boyle, Newton, and so on, Meyer rightly notes that these pioneers felt that the order in the nature that they could detect was the work of an organizing intelligence--a great clockmaker for the clockwork universe. Therefore, science itself was, in a very strong sense, inquiry into the nature of the divine. And so Meyer asks:
How could the act of invoking something so foundational to the history of science as the idea of design now completely violate the rules of science itself, as I had repeatedly heard many scientists assert? If belief in intelligent design first inspired modern scientific investigation, how could mere openness to the design hypothesis now act as a "science stopper" and threaten to put an end to productive scientific research altogether, as some scientists feared?
Clearly, the idea of intelligent design had played a formative role in the foundation of modern science. Many great scientists had proposed specific design hypotheses. This seemed to suggest that intelligent design could function as a possible scientific hypothesis. But many contemporary scientists rejected this idea out of hand. Why?
The answer to this question is obvious, and if Meyer is a historian of science, he should know it. In the 19th century especially--but it began even earlier--science differentiated itself from religion and decided that supernatural appeals were no longer testable or within the purview of science. Great battles were fought on this head, by the likes of John Tyndall, Thomas Henry Huxley, and many more. "The more we know of the fixed laws of nature, the more incredible do miracles become," wrote Darwin in his Autobiography. This is why, when lightning strikes, we no longer fear it is godly punishment. Rather, we know it is electricity. This is why, if patients' symptoms improve after they pray or are prayed for, we know it is the placebo effect. Or at least, we know that is all that science can say about the matter. Meyer is right about how Kepler and Newton thought, but modern scientists have long since decided that they don’t work in the way Kepler, or Newton, or Paley did. Religious or otherwise, they leave claims about the supernatural out of what they do professionally, because there is no way to test such claims, or get other scientists to agree about them. For instance, you couldn’t convince an atheistic scientist, or even many Christian scientists, to accept the idea of supernatural design as a scientific, testable hypothesis. Science has left behind the supernatural for very sound methodological reasons; ID wants to bring it back. But that just isn't going to happen. Stronger distinctions have been built between science and religion as science advanced and professionalized, and that’s a good thing. Vast progress has been made in this way; many pointless discussions have been avoided. There is no way that ID is going to pull science back to the 17th century, and as a historian of science, Meyer ought to know that.
