Towards Intelligent Debate
Interview with Loren Haarsma and Uko Zylstra

This summer Intelligent Design came to the forefront of public discourse. What were your general reactions you had as scientists listening to the public debate this summer?

Loren Haarsma: It's frustrating that most of the debate over Intelligent Design is over the wrong issues of Intelligent Design. A lot of opponents try to cast it as just a religious issue, and therefore it has to be excluded from science. Advocates of Intelligent Design try to say that it's a purely scientific issue that can be completely divorced from religion. And that's not true either.

Often opponents of Intelligent Design argue that science must restrict itself to naturalistic explanations, all the time, and that this is a fundamental definition of science. But the situation is more subtle than that. I am against the idea that science is a demarcation, that everything must always be a matter naturalistic explanations. On the other hand, I.D. opponents probably do have some legitimate concern that if you too quickly say that an intelligent being did this, then that might stop your looking for natural explanations when there might be one. So these subtleties are often ignored, and one side makes very simplistic mischaracterizations of the other side.

Uko Zylstra: I think an underlying issue is, what is the meaning of naturalistic explanation? What is natural? Part of the problem is that we have a tendency to have a reductionist view about what is natural. And I think the Intelligent Design movement has accepted that reductionist view, by saying that a physical-chemical explanation of phenomena does not adequately account for biological phenomena. And so when you've got biological phenomena that can't be reduced to chemistry and physics, then how do you account for such matter? I think Michael Behe did a pretty eloquent job of pointing out that there are shortcomings to that approach.

What the Intelligent Design movement is doing is giving a critique of present scientific explanations for phenomena, which is part of scientific discourse. But, their solution, I think is misplaced.

At the same time, evolutionary biologists don't adequately distinguish among different meanings of evolution, and so that if we think that evolution is the explanation for phenomena-that is a very broad, kind of like a god-of-the-gaps explanation. And when the public hears that, I think they intuit that evolution is kind of an agent of its own, and say that scientists make greater claims for what evolution can do than what they have tested empirically, and let's be open about the shortcomings of the empirical basis of those claims.

So I think we've got both sides that are making larger claims for the agency, either the evolutionary explanation as an agency or Intelligent Design as an agency, and that is part of the difficulty.

Haarsma: To follow up on that, opponents of Intelligent Design spend most of their time trying to classify it as not science, and don't spend enough time actually looking at the scientific arguments put forward by Intelligent Design and engage them. Similarly, the scientific arguments of advocates of Intelligent Design sometimes do have flaws that need to be pointed out, but they spend so much of their time trying to sell their argument as purely scientific argument, but they're not fooling anybody into thinking that there is not religious motivations behind it, and the harder they try, opponents get all the more suspicious of what's going on.

But what frustrates me the most, when you get into the public sphere and the media, you're often offered only two options: Option 1: evolution is scientifically true and God doesn't exist or doesn't do anything; Option 2: evolution is scientifically false and God exists. Obviously there is more than those two options.

Is it difficult to push the debate past that point at the public level partly because of this mutual suspicion; I.D. opponents see Intelligent Design as part of a larger religious agenda, while I.D. advocates see opposition to I.D. as an ongoing secular agenda to reduce the role of religion?

Zylstra:  One clear problem is that there is this dividing into two camps. It is very strange when you say that by I.D. people you mean Michael Behe. Michael Behe himself basically asserts common ancestry; that is a fundamental evolutionary concept. And to exclude that and say he's really a creationist simply belies what he himself so strongly asserts. By most definitions, Michael Behe is a very strong evolutionary biologist. But as a scientist, he is basically trying to look critically at one of the common explanations for evolutionary or biological phenomenon, and says there is a real shortcoming.

Haarsma: I always dislike discussion over motives. People are always assuming they know what another person's motives are, and they're often wrong. And even when they're right, it's not necessarily relevant. That is a huge factor here. It is in fact true that the leaders of the Intelligent Design movement are religiously motivated; they have admitted so in some of their writings. But that doesn't mean that the points they make are wrong. The points they make still need to be discussed and examined.

Similarly, some opponents of Intelligent Design are motivated at least in part by a secular or naturalistic or atheistic agenda. But that doesn't mean that their critiques are wrong. For that matter, there are a lot of Christians who are scientists who have critiqued Intelligent Design scientifically, and they're not motivated by a secular agenda. They just are critiquing the scientific claims. But the suspicion over motives is a huge factor in how the debate plays out in the public, and how people who are in debates see their opponents.

So is the first step is just to clear that up before we can push the debate towards the framework that you're laying out for the discussion of I.D.?

Haarsma: Christians who are scientists who are sort of caught in the middle-who say both evolution and Design can be true-have been trying for years to sort of clear the air, with very limited success. People like to see it as two positions, and only two positions. That's another critique I have of the Intelligent Design movement-the way they use the word "design" as an alternative to evolution. Both evolution and design can be true, but not they way that the I.D. movement is using the word "design." They are trying to restrict the use of "design" to only mean, "could not have evolved."  

Loren writes about the blurring of the lines between scientific underpinnings, theological underpinnings, and philosophical underpinnings of I.D., and argues that opponents of I.D. have failed to appreciate those distinctions. Are advocates of I.D. equally culpable in blurring those lines and not clarifying the distinction?

Haarsma: In my experience, yes. I know of very few people who try to take all of the Intelligent Design arguments and sort them out between scientific and philosophical and theological. Mostly you see opponents of I.D. try say that none of it is science, and advocates of I.D. typically say, it's all science, and any potential religious motivations are irrelevant. I think both strategies are poor and only make it harder to discuss the issue.

Loren points out that, going back to the time of Isaac Newton, there weren't these distinctions and clear boundaries among science, theology, and philosophy that we have now. He advises that I.D. advocates might just have to have patience until those boundaries might eventually become a little more dissolved or fluid. Is it true that in history, there was more of a blur between science and philosophy and religion, and in the future there might be again, but we are in a different situation in the meantime?

Haarsma:  People have been trying for centuries to say, This is science, This is not. You can talk to any philosopher of science and find all the ways that has failed historically. Many people try to make these demarcation lines, and those demarcation lines never work. There is always a blurring of the line, and the line shifts around historically, and anybody's attempt to draw the line never works completely. Rather than trying to push the boundary one direction or the other to include or exclude the arguments from science, which I think is a pointless exercise, don't worry where the boundary is drawn, just ask, is the argument valid?

Zylstra:   Even in the very definition that science only deals with naturalistic definitions-at the heart of that is really a philosophical question: what is natural? That is a philosophical question; you can't prove that empirically with science, so you've got a dilemma. To say, 'This is science because it's natural,' is going beyond that narrow meaning of science.

Uko writes about biotic laws. What are biotic laws, and what is the significance of that term?

Zylstra: It is a question of what you mean by physical and chemical. There is much about biological phenomena that has a chemical and physical aspect. But the heart of what we're dealing with is the problem of life, which is more than just biology and chemistry.

So if you look at biological phenomena, the fact that laws essentially order and govern reality, and that certain patterns are permanent, there are patterns in the biological world that reflect those laws that are not biology and chemistry that I would call biotic.

For example, look at the regularity of cell division. That isn't simply a matter of molecules dividing, but it is a matter of the cell as a whole undergoing phenomena subject to some kind of ordering principle that can guarantee that kind of division. That's a different kind of way addressing that problem, but certainly biologists recognize the pattern there and that pattern that has a regularity. I would argue that regularity is a result of being ordered by biotic laws. So I'm trying to get at an understanding of reality that simply goes beyond a reductionist view that only chemistry and physics are involved.

It's not that much different from the chemist trying to explain or account for the question of why the atom has the particular structure that it does? That becomes a very complex question. We are gaining more insight into that, and how that relates to a chemical law,except to recognize that there are chemical ordering principles that guarantee that kind of structure and behavior in atoms and molecules by that same kind of analysis to biological phenomenon.

Loren writes that I.D. advocates have deprived themselves of the possibility of "self-assembly" as a possible argument that they might use in their favor. Why have they avoided this?

Haarsma: There you are getting into the question of motives, and it's an interesting situation. When Intelligent Design advocates talk about the fine-tuning of the natural laws-the fundamental laws of physics as it were-they often accept self-assembly.

For example, that elementary particles can assemble into atoms, that stars can assemble out of gas clouds, that heavier elements can self-assemble out of lighter elements in the centers of stars, that planets with oceans and atmospheres can assemble according to the laws of nature, and the fact that the laws of nature are so finely tuned to allow that self-assembly is sometimes taken as an intuitive appeal to-it looks like-design.

But advocates and the leaders of the Intelligent Design movement have completely rejected that path when it comes to biological complexity. Scientists are working on the question, can more and more complex things evolve over time? It's a hard problem.

There are several hypotheses for how it could happen. It seems to me that if the laws of nature-physical, biological, and so on-are set up so that complexity can evolve and evolution can bring about more and more complexity, then that's a good intuitive argument that these laws of nature are designed, but that's exactly counter to the argument that leaders of the Intelligent Design movement. They, in essence, want to prove that complexity cannot evolve. Why? Some of them will say that they're fine with the idea that complexity can evolve, they just scientifically think it can't happen.

Some of them will say, if complexity can evolve, Design might still be true, but you can't prove it. Whereas, if complexity cannot evolve, then maybe you can prove Design, and they're trying to prove Design.

And then you have to ask the question about theological motivation.   Some leaders in the Intelligent Design movement have written theological papers where they almost seem to argue that theologically that it must be the case that God did sort of miraculous things in the history of life that we ought to expect to see, and if the evolutionary story is true, then that's bad news for Christianity. Now, I think there's a lot of bad theology there, but some advocates of Intelligent Design have written along those lines, so that might be part of the motivation for why they reject the idea of self-assembly.

Zylstra: But we need to be careful how we use the term "evolve," because the fact that there is a change at some point does not necessarily explain how that change came about. And I think that's part of the difficulty in our dialogue.

I would urge that we need to be very careful how we use a word like "evolve," which I think has multiple meanings. And if we aren't careful how we use that word, then we aren't communicating what aspect of evolving contributes to what we are talking about, whether it be simply a change, a pattern that we observe, or the actual mechanism of what brought that about. And for most evolutionary biologists, they don't make that distinction, so it's hard to say.

Now, the other question about the term "self-assembly" is what is implied by the word "self." And just to say that self-assembly has occurred gives the obvious impression that there better be forces, or agencies or whatever it is, that account for that assembly. And I think the challenge is, whether it be size or structures or cells, to what extent can that assembly occur apart from a cell structure? In other words, how can you get eight structures when you had one cell?

And so I'm concerned when I read a discussion about self-assembly. One of my concerns is, to what extent are they really giving an adequate account of that assembly versus causation? Or does it become a larger embracing concept, a kind of cover statement to explain something that we really don't fully understand and have appropriate? And I think that is one reason why Intelligent Design people don't necessarily accept claims of self-assembly.

One question I haven't heard much about in this debate about Intelligent Design is the word "intelligent" and the question of imperfection in creation. Hurricane Katrina and presented both Christians and non-Christians with some vexing questions about dysfunction in nature, or at least suffering in nature. How does that change the debate, and what capacity do I.D. advocates and other Christians in science have to talk about brokenness, suffering, and cruelty in nature? How does that relate to the idea of divine design or oversight?

Zylstra: That's basically dealing with a theology question, the problem of evil. A related question is, what does it mean when we say God is perfect? I don't like to say that God created a perfect creation, or that in Genesis 1 everything was perfect, because I'm not sure that perfection included predator-prey relationships. Now, is a predator-prey relationship of itself evil? Is biotic death evil, as some would want to claim? It's not, in my perspective.

This is a problem Darwin struggled with. Darwin had difficulty with God being the author of what he considered evil, and so he wanted to provide a "natural cause" for design so that, in some sense, he could remove God as a source of that evil. In course of that, he became what we would probably characterize as an agnostic. He didn't know what to do with God.

But Darwin's central question-how could God be the designer of what he saw as cruel or evil-raises other questions. Is what we see necessarily cruel or evil? I would say there are two issues here. First of all, what is evil in that sense? And secondly, how do we understand God in relation to that?

Haarsma: The argument that imperfection contradicts design is a classic example of a bad argument used by opponents of Intelligent Design. They have a picture of what a designer might be; it has to make everything absolutely perfect, and we see biological organisms that don't work the way we think are perfect, therefore, the designer isn't perfect.

Most advocates of Intelligent Design don't put forward that kind of designer. They have something more along the lines of a God who used a lot of natural and evolutionary processes but also injected extra information and complexity in various points along the way.

Now it still creates a question for advocates of Intelligent Design in the following instance. They like to point to examples of, say, the bacteria flagella, a very complex biological structure, which they hold up as an example of something which must have been actively assembled by an intelligent agent. But the disease organisms, which use equally complex and amazing sorts of things in order to do disease things-does that mean that if the designer had to assemble the bacteria flagellum, the designer had to also assemble these disease organisms to do these things? That is a question they have to deal with.

In general, when you look at the idea of predator-prey relationships or parasites and disease, and God making a world that has these things, a defense that is often used is called a free process defense. This is an analogy to the free world events, which goes like this: Why does God permit human moral evil? The free world defense is that the good of having human beings having the ability to freely choose between good and evil is a greater good than the cost of having the existence of moral evil.

A free process defense is that the good of God creating the world in which species can adapt to their environment, in which natural processes can bring about a vast complexity of ecosystems and organisms, all interacting, a world in which creatures can live and thrive, and intelligent beings can life, there will also be in such a world earthquakes and parasites and predators, but that the good is greater than the natural evil, and that God has chosen to make the world in this way.

So on one level there is evil and suffering, which, as you say, steers us into philosophy. But just at the level of what we perceive as imperfect design, and this idea that if oppoents of I.D. can spot any redundant structure or system, or any feature disadvantageous to survival, they can critique design and say that a designer wouldn't do that.

Haarsma: It's only a problem if your view of a designer is one who would make every species optimally designed from the get-go. I don't think that's a common view of advocates of Intelligent Design. It may be intuitive to some people, but people who are actively involved in the Intelligent Design debate don't take that path.

It is a trivial example, but I've a got a low spot in my garage that always collects water when rain drips off the car, and that happens to be exactly between the door into the house and car, so I have to walk through the puddle every day. Is that a sign of an imperfection? Probably the ground just settled under that spot, and the person who laid the cement didn't know it was there. Well, what's the problem? Is the problem the ground settles, or is the problem that I get annoyed all the time by it? That shouldn't be counted as evidence against God, the fact that there is a low spot in my garage, right where I have to walk through it. That's a trivial example, but you can see how it applies.

Advocates of Intelligent Design for the most part are finding that lots of natural processes and lots of evolution, plus a little iraculous injection of information and complexity-such a scenario has no trouble with suboptimal design. Assuming you even know what's optimal.

Zylstra: The notion of imperfection still caters to the sense that a lot of people have of perfection. I know in my classes, my students will talk about perfection, and I say, ' What do you really mean by this? Is this an appropriate way to talk about God's creation?' Our view of perfection makes us consider ourselves so wise that we know what perfect is.

How can Calvinist theology inform this point and shed some light into creation and suffering in creation?

Zylstra:   For me the key to thinking about this is structure and direction of creation. The Fall did not really affect structure in the sense of altering the chemical and biological laws. That distinction is critical, and that can certainly be derived from a biblical Calvinist view of Scripture and what God is doing with regards to the creation and the Fall.

Haarsma: For the big picture, one way Calvinist theology really helps is its emphasis on the sovereignty of God, so that even if we have a scientific explanation of the natural processes, that doesn't mean that God isn't involved. God is still very much in control, and that's a fundamental starting point I wish everybody was at in this debate, but a lot of people miss. They see either science or God, one extreme or the other. On the issue of predator-prey relationships and parasites, another aspect we understand is our human limitedness. We don't understand all of God's purposes. Our ideas of how we would run the universe are not necessarily God's ideas. And so, by studying Scripture and by studying nature we learn something about how God is choosing to run the universe.

Interview by Nathan Bierma

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