More evidence for my theory that Americans aren’t happy unless they’re making a big deal about something is all this fuss over Intelligent Design. Reason, the New Yorker, and of course the New York Times have all been weighing in. Slate, never one to let anyone else get more hysterical than they, has been been running articles on practically a daily basis. The one article really worth reading is Salon’s interview with Michael Ruse (thank you Andro); the rest is very bad, written by people who have evidently read little or nothing in the philosophy of science and are too lazy to think about the issue clearly, or, one suspects, even read the relevant books.

Part of the confusion, I think, arises from a failure to understand the real terms of the debate, which are both metaphysical and scientific. There are really two questions here. The scientific question is, how did the present order and diversity of life arise? The metaphysical question is more difficult to state but essentially comes down to, is the material world the only reality? There is also third question, which has to do with the interaction between the scientific and metaphysical questions.

The scientific question is, like all scientific questions, still open. I don’t interact with it on a professional level except when I delve into comparative neuroanatomy, where I think the evidence for common ancestry and evolution is extremely strong. I must say, however, that if my fellow evolutionists go on saying things like, “intelligent design is a faith-based theory with no scientific validity or credibility,” or if I have to hear any more ignorant yammering about what science is and is not, I am going to hand my card back in. Shame on you. Yes, ID is currently little more than an attack on the dominant paradigm, and has little to offer, scientifically, as an alternative explanation. But if someone wants to seriously examine the question of agency in a scientific context, you can hardly call yourself a scientist if you try to shut them down.

Agency has been a thorn in the side of science since Newton, and with the notable exception of information theory there has been little effort to deal with it. There is no room for agency in a purely mechanical universal (whether deterministic or random), and yet our brains have no problem detecting the presence, actions, and motivations of agents (whether a lion, another person, or the Bank of England). It is, of course, manifestly possible that agency is a mental illusion, and that even what we take to be our own free will is reducible to purely physical processes. But it is possible that it is not, and if that is the case then science will have to make room for agency.

The reductionist project has not been particularly successful; it turns out that a great many things are controlled by nonlinear and chaotic interactions that are impossible to model. The point, however, is that materialism – the contention, of which reductionism is a special case, that all events and entitites are explainable in terms of physically observable processes – is a metaphysical position. That is a hard pill for real materialists to swallow, accustomed as they are to denying the relevance of metaphysics.

Materialists can however take some comfort in knowing that it is a pill their intellectual enemies also look upon with distaste. For there is a strain in Christianity (and many other religions) that insists that the opposite position – which we can call theism, even though it’s more complicated than that – is not metaphysical either. There are people who insist that God must have left some trace of his existence in the world, without realizing that a God who compels (and thus needs) faith is not truly infinite.

The one thing ideologues of every color have in common is their hatred of each other: they are so uncertain of their beliefs that the very existence of someone who disagrees with them is unnerving. The vast majority of people, scientists or not – I hope – still believe that people have a right to their metaphysical opinions. They have been goaded into fighting one another through a classic ruse de guerre in which the causes of the fight are presented differently to each side. Scientists feel threatened by evangelicals because faith has been presented as inherently opposed to reason and free inquiry, and evangelicals feel threatened by evolution because it has been presented as inextricably linked to materialism. Neither presentation is accurate except in description of the idealogues, who of course are the loudest and easiest to demonize.

So everyone calm down. A special word for the anti-evolutionists, though. You might be descended from a monkey. So what? What do you have against monkeys? Is the uniqueness and beauty of your soul sullied by the fact that monkeys throw their feces at each other any more or less than by the fact that your great-great-grandfather killed people in the Civil War, or your father was an alcoholic? Stop blaming bad behavior on things that are out of your control. Nobody killed someone or made babies out of wedlock because Mr. Dembrowski the science teacher told him humans descended from apes. If anyone has reason to doubt his meaningfulness and humanity it’s going to have a lot more to do with whether people showed him love.

(cdm | IDRedux)