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Letter in Response to Book Review of Tower of Babel

Phillip E. Johnson
ChemWeb
10 November 2000

Charles Goodwin's review portrays the debate over Darwinism through the perspective of what I call the `Inherit the Wind' stereotype. To quote from the review "Ignorant or dishonest Bible-thumpers like Phillip Johnson are campaigning to replace proper scientific reasoning with some mystical nonsense because they can't face reality". I don't take seriously brickbats based on a preposterous caricature, but perhaps some readers would like to know what I really say. I reply to Robert Pennock and Kenneth Miller in Chapter Six of my latest book, The Wedge of Truth (Intervarsity Press 2000). Here, from the opening pages of that chapter, is a brief description of the case for intelligent design in biology.

The Case for Intelligent Design
A good place to begin is with the acknowledgment by Richard Dawkins that "Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose." More precisely, all living organisms are characterized by immense amounts of genetic information that enable them to function.. Dawkins puts it vividly:

Physics books may be complicated, but ... the objects and phenomena that a physics book describes are simpler than a single cell in the body of its author. And the author consists of trillions of those cells, many of them different from each other, organized with intricate architecture and precision-engineering into a working machine capable of writing a book.... Each nucleus... contains a digitally coded database larger, in information content, that all 30 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica put together. And this figure is for each cell, not all the cells of the body put together. [The Blind Watchmaker, pp. 2-3]

In short, the very complex processes of the cell must be directed by some information-rich entity which can be likened to a computer program. As I explained in Chapter Two, the information which directs the life processes - like any other meaningful text - needs to be complex, aperiodic, and specified. [See my review essay on The Fifth Miracle, by Paul Davies] The first requirement means that a very long string of letters or symbols is required. The second means that the order of the letters is not directed by physical or chemical laws, which by their nature produce only simply repeating patters (such as "print ABC, ABC, ABC... over and over again until the printer runs out of paper). The third requirement means that not just any order will do, but only the precise order required to produce the encyclopedia, or the computer operating program, or the array of cellular proteins coded for in the DNA nucleotides. Genuinely creative evolution thus requires a mechanism capable of creating immense amounts of complex specified aperiodic genetic information. Random mutation is not such a mechanism, nor is natural selection, nor is any physical or chemical law. Laws produce simple repetitive order, and chance produces meaningless disorder. When combined, law and chance work against each other to prevent the emergence of a meaningful sequence. In all human experience, only intelligent agency can write an encyclopedia or computer program, or produce complex specified aperiodic information in any form. Therefore, the information necessarily present in organisms points to the conclusion that they are products of intelligent design.

The concept of intelligent design does not rule out `evolution', in the sense of variation or diversification. Many examples of variation within the type occur, and humans by selective breeding produce impressive varieties of dogs and roses. (Selective breeding is itself a form of intelligent design, however, because the breeders employ purposeful intelligence and protect the overspecialized breeds from the natural selection that would otherwise eliminate them.) These uncontroversial examples of what is commonly termed `microevolution' involve no increases in genetic information and hence are not creative in the important sense. Reference to intelligent causes is indispensable not to account for mere change, but to account from the creation of new complex genetic information. One convenient way of expressing this distinction is to say that the standard examples of microevolution are all of horizontal evolution, while the grand creative process should be called vertical evolution.

Whatever the terminology, the essential point is that something besides mere `change' is required to create new complex organs, and that something must be capable of a task equivalent to writing a computer operating program or an encyclopedia. Unless biologists can provide a testable mechanism capable of doing the job, then the correct scientific conclusion is that biological creation is an unsolved mystery. Calling the mystery `evolution' provides only the illusion of an explanation unless there is a specific theory available to explain how the required transformations are possible. Neo-Darwinism is specific enough, but it doesn't fit the facts and its mechanism has no real creative power.

A wise proverb warns that "it isn't what you don't know that gets you in trouble, it is what you do know that isn't so". Often the first step towards true understanding is to eliminate false concepts that merely conceal our ignorance by, for example, encouraging the belief that cyclical variations in finch beaks illustrates how birds came into existence in the first place. Science should never fear honest intellectual tools such as precise use of terms, unbiased investigation of evidence, and refusal to accept unjustified extrapolations. If use of those tools leads to the undermining of a cherished theory, then that is a gain and not a loss for the advance of knowledge - even if it leaves scientists bewildered for a time. If no true answer is available, it is not an advance in knowledge to embrace a false answer.

Finally, intelligent design theorists need to explain why the vast majority of evolutionary scientists refuse to consider evidence of intelligent design in biology, scornfully dismissing the entire concept as `religion' rather than `science'. This is because they identify science with naturalism, meaning that only `natural' (i.e. material or physical) forces may play a role in the history of life. Where the designer is itself some natural entity, such as a human being, evidence for design is welcome. Space aliens are also permissible entities, and so Carl Sagan's Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) radio telescopes scan the sky for signals, which they could identify as products of intelligence by precisely the same methods which intelligent design theory applies to biology. The difference is that scientific naturalists want to find evidence for extraterrestrial life, in part because they would count it as evidence that natural laws produce life wherever favorable conditions exist, and hence as clinching the case for naturalism. They don't want to find evidence for what they think of as an `interfering' God, meaning a God who does not leave everything to law and chance. Hence they will refuse to see evidence of design that is staring them in the face until they are reassured that the designer is something whose existence they are willing to recognize.

Readers of this explanation will see it bears little resemblence to the caricature portrayed by Charles Goodwin. My subject is what the acknowledged evidence of the role of complex specified information in the life processes tells us about what the creative forces must have been capable of doing. Far from saying that "human beings are incapable of discovering any truths about the world," I say that they are capable of discovering profound truths if they evaluate all the evidence impartially and do not blind themselves by materialist prejudice. Far from telling software engineers to pray instead of designing carefully, I tell them to recognize that software is the product of design. Far from wishing to limit scientific investigation on the basis of subjective preference, I want materialists (and everyone else) to separate their subjective preferences from an objective evaluation of what the observed facts are trying to tell us. If Darwinists can demonstrate a mechanism capable of creating the necessary information, under realistic biological and pre- biological conditions, then so be it. When they say they have already discovered such a mechanism, I say they are bluffing. One reason I know they are bluffing is that they so reliably respond to reasoned criticism as bluffers typically do, with bombastic denunciations and appeals to prejudice.

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(Johnson, Phillip E., "Letter in Response to Book Review of Tower of Babel," ChemWeb, 10 November 2000.)

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