Happy Birthday, Lincoln, Darwin.

Lincoln and Darwin both turn 200 today. Visiting Springfield and subsequently the Lincoln Museum, Library and Memorial a few years ago was truly awe-inspiring. And I recently visited Darwin’s memorial at Westminster Abbey in London. With the latter hero in mind, I wanted to re-post an article I wrote in 2005, after discovering Spinoza:

What if Spinoza Encountered Intelligent Design?
December 15, 2005

“When they survey the frame of the human body, they are amazed; and being ignorant of the causes of so great a work of art, conclude that it has been fashioned, not mechanically, but by divine and supernatural skill.”

More than three centuries ago, rationalist Benedictus de Spinoza, wrote the above in his magnum opus, Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata and infuriated Jewish and Christian scholars. Today, school boards and politicians across the country would do well to take another good look at his writings.

Spinoza believed that nature equated God, often somewhat misquoted as the maxim Deus sive natura (Ethics, Part IV). He did not believe in a God with a personality. Two and a half centuries later, Albert Einstein agreed and said: “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals Himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.

Today, hearing about intelligent design, Spinoza and Einstein would turn around in their graves and find the debate nothing more than a pseudo-debate about a pseudo-science.

However, the popular tendency of giving equal validity and weight to both sides of a debate in news reporting and political discussions is removing debates far from rationality and sensibility. The media, public, and politicians seem to forget that, sometimes, balance is unwarranted and the other side to an argument fictitious.

Richard Dawkins, professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford University, and Jerry Coyne, professor in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, explain this further in their article One Side Can Be Wrong in The Guardian of September 1, 2005: “When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong.”

The basic idea of the intelligent design movement is that life is too complex to have evolved naturally, or, according to William Dembski in his book The Design Revolution: “There are natural systems that cannot be adequately explained in terms of undirected natural forces and that exhibit features which in any other circumstance we would attribute to intelligence.”

The intelligent design advocates look only to the insufficiently explained elements of the evolution theory and fill these gaps with speculative beliefs. Or, as Spinoza put it: “We must not omit to notice that the followers of this doctrine, anxious to display their talent in assigning final causes, have imported a new method of argument in proof of their theory–namely, a reduction, not to the impossible, but to ignorance; thus showing that they have no other method of exhibiting their doctrine.”

Dawkins and Coyne write in contemporary language: “There is a hidden “default” assumption that if Theory A has some difficulty in explaining Phenomenon X, we must automatically prefer Theory B without even asking whether Theory B (creationism in this case) is any better at explaining it.”

Intelligent design does not follow scientific method, violates many principles of what defines science, and makes a priori assumptions that are not open to empirical testing, change or corrections. Proponents of intelligent design use arguments from ignorance: the intelligent design proposition must be true on the basis that it has not been proven false, but since the designer cannot be observed, claims about its existence can neither be supported nor undermined by observation.

The existence of God is based on the very same principle, which is why religion is based on the concept of faith. Religious believes often cannot be proven true or false; and faith becomes the means of believing and accepting the existence of God without the need for evidence. This, however, is philosophy, not science, and therefore does constitutionally not belong in a science class.

Creationists and advocates of intelligent design have dubbed the scientists and proponents of evolutionary biology “Darwinists” and frequently use the term “Darwinism” to describe the science. They have, in effect, cast evolution in the light of a doctrine or belief opposing religion, strengthening the idea that there really are two sides of the debate. Spinoza, who experienced similar name-calling in his time, remarked: “Any one who strives to understand natural phenomena as an intelligent being, and not to gaze at them like a fool, is set down and denounced as an impious heretic by those, whom the masses adore as the interpreters of nature and the gods. Such persons know that, with the removal of ignorance, the wonder which forms their only available means for proving and preserving their authority would vanish also.”

It is not a contradiction to believe in God and simultaneously believe in evolution. One can, like Spinoza, believe that God exists in everything; that God is the natural world; that the natural world created itself; and that “All things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.” The laws of nature and physics, including evolution, are part of the natural world, or God, and they are the conditions in which the world exists and operates. The more we know about evolution and nature and remove ignorance, the more we know about God.

Intelligent design campaigners have been successful in planting their questions in class rooms for some time now and “they will pursue their questions from cause to cause, till at last you take refuge in the will of God–in other words, the sanctuary of ignorance,” as Spinoza observed.

Dawkins and Coyne conclude that: “The seductive ‘let’s teach the controversy’ language still conveys the false, and highly pernicious, idea that there really are two sides. It would hand creationism the only victory it realistically aspires to. Without needing to make a single good point in any argument, it would have won the right for a form of supernaturalism to be recognised as an authentic part of science. And that would be the end of science education in America.”