Home | Introduction | Chapter 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Conclusion
Last modified 02/15/2008
| If reductionist science is not adequate to the question of evolution, then it is not surprising that religious, or other, dissent should arise to challenge scientism. But the Darwin debate should be a question of science, even if a critique of current science, and the injection of religious themes into that debate, although in and of itself not illegitimate, has produced still more confusion. One of the current challenges to Darwinism in this respect lies in the Intelligent Design movement, whose ambiguous relationship to American religious groups tends to discredit its attempt to revive the vein of the nineteenth century Paley. It is interesting that the philosopher Kant is roughly contemporaneous with Paley, although his critiques of metaphysical issues remained relatively unknown in the context of English social and intellectual life. Kant's classic refutation of the design argument can help to put design thinking in perspective. This refutation is of the design argument for the existence of god, and any such proof we come to see must remain suspect. This does not resolve necessarily the issue of design in general, and in one sense it is 'obvious' that biological structures show design, design of some kind, as long as we don't jump to conclusions about the theological innuendos in such a statement. The problem is that 'design' could just as well be an aspect of nature, and the splendid self-organization of biological systems remains elusive to standard scientific or biological thought. Nonetheless, methodological naturalism remains the default perspective on such questions, and if we find structures that seem to defy the claims of natural selection it does not follow that we can infer a 'designer'. Our thinking is conditioned by our language and the verb wants a noun to go with it, a 'designer' to match 'design'. But design in general shows merely that we are confronted with structures that are more complex than our current understanding. And these are biological structures, not necessarily reducible to the principles of physicalist explanation. It is significant that here Kant, immersed in Newtonian physics, nonetheless challenged its extensions into the life-sciences by reopening the question of teleology, but teleology in a natural context. There is no inherent reason why physical understanding can't graduate to a renewed analysis of teleological questions. And this should by all means be seen without the hasty assumption that teleological structures defy the laws of nature. We need to see the 'pun' in our usage of the term 'design', distinguishing supernatural from natural design. We could call the former 'G-design', the action of a designer, and the latter 'N-design', the natural teleological aspect visible in biological systems. | ||
|
|
||