Reinstating Design within Science

Reinstating Design within Science William A. Dembski Design's Departure from Science Should design be permitted back into science generally, and biology in particular ? Scientists bristle at the very thought. For scientists who are atheists, design is an accident of natural history. Indeed, with no divine architect to start creation on its course, any designing agents, including ourselves, must result from a long evolutionary process that itself was not designed. For the atheist, design occurs at the end of an undesigned natural process, and cannot be prior to it. What about scientists who are not atheists? Sadly, most scientists who are theists agree with their atheist colleagues that design should be excluded from science. It is not that they agree with their atheist colleagues that the universe is not designed. Indeed, as good theists they believe wholeheartedly that the universe is designed— and not just by any designer, but by the God of some particular religious creed. Nevertheless, as a matter of scientific integrity they believe science is best served by excluding design. The worry always is that invoking design will stifle scientific inquiry, substituting a supernatural cause where scientists should be seeking an ordinary natural cause. Against this received view, I want to argue that design should be readmitted to full scientific status. To make this argument, let me begin by briefly reviewing why design was removed from science in the first place. Design, in the form of Aristotle's formal and final causes, had after all once occupied a perfectly legitimate role within natural philosophy, or what we now call science. With the rise of modern science, however, these causes fell into disrepute. We can see how this happened by considering Francis Bacon. Bacon, a contemporary of Galileo and Kepler, though himself not a scientist, was a terrific propagandist for science. Bacon concerned himself much about the proper conduct of science, providing detailed canons for experimental observation, recording of data, William A. Dembski is a Fellow in the Discovery Institute Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture in Seattle, Washington. © Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 1, No. 4, 1998, pp. 503-518 ISSN 1094-8392 504 Rhetoric & Public Affairs and inferences from data. What interests us here, however, is what he did with Aristotle's four causes. For Aristotle, to understand any phenomenon properly, one had to understand its four causes, namely its material, efficient, formal, and final cause. A standard example philosophers use to illustrate Aristotle's four causes is to consider a statue—say Michelangelo's David. The material cause is what it is made of—marble. The efficient cause is the immediate activity that produced the statue— Michelangelo's actual chipping away at a marble slab with hammer and chisel. The formal cause is its structure—it is a representation of David and not some random chunk of marble. And finally, the final cause is its purpose—presumably, to beautify some Florentine palace. Although much more can be said about Aristotle's four causes than is evident from this illustration, two points are relevant to this discussion. First, Aristotle gave equal weight to all four causes. In particular, Aristotle would have regarded any inquiry that omitted one of his causes as fundamentally deficient. Second, Bacon adamantly opposed including formal and final causes within science (see his Advancement of Learning). For Bacon, formal and final causes belonged to metaphysics , and not to science. Science, according to Bacon, needs to limit itself to material and efficient causes, thereby freeing science from the sterility that inevitably results when science and metaphysics are conflated. This was Bacon's line, and he argued it forcefully. We see Bacon's line championed in our own day by atheists and theists alike. In Chance and Necessity, biologist and Nobel laureate facques Monod argues that chance and necessity alone suffice to account for every aspect of the universe. Now whatever else we might want to say about chance and necessity, they provide at best a reductive account of Aristotle's formal causes and leave no room whatever for Aristotle's final causes. Indeed, Monod explicitly denies any place for purpose within science.1 Monod was an outspoken atheist. Nevertheless, as outspoken a theist...