Debating Design
The Concordia Conference on Intelligent Design
by Patrick Henry Reardon
From June 22 to 24 of this past year, Concordia University in Mequon, Wisconsin, hosted a conference entitled “Design and Its Critics,” jointly sponsored by the Cranach Institute and Touchstone. The purpose of this conference was to bring together some of the leading names on both sides of the current controversy regarding the application of intelligent design theory to the various branches of science. As my own active participation in the conference was limited to a modest 30-minute presentation of the role of logical positivism in modern science, I was blessed with the leisure to compare and reflect on the more substantial papers presented by a series of philosophers, biochemists, physicists, mathematicians, and other scholars.
Arriving at the conference I was not entirely sure what to expect. Although Touchstone’s involvement with intelligent design theory (cf. Touchstone, July/August 1999) had made me familiar with the general lines of argument supporting this theory, my reading of literature explicitly critical of the theory was pretty much confined to Robert T. Pennock’s Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism, a book singularly disappointing in every respect. In spite of the promising subtitle, the author of this volume introduced not a shred of new evidence in support of Darwinism, unless under that heading we include his puerile remarks about the variety of sexual postures employed by other primates as confirming their bio-historical relationship to human beings. Largely ignoring the strong evidence advanced against Darwinism from biochemistry and microbiology, Pennock spent most of his efforts on the purely rhetorical and deceptive task of painting intelligent design theorists as simply a new species of Creation scientists. As the Wisconsin conference began, I sincerely hoped that the arguments raised against intelligent design in the ensuing days would be marked by a greater intellectual integrity than that displayed in Pennock’s remarkably bad book.
In this respect the opening night of the conference was hardly reassuring. It featured a “debate” between two entirely mismatched opponents. The first lecturer, Stephen C. Meyer of Whitworth College, delivered a brilliant 45-minute presentation on the genetic structure of living cells, with particular attention to the storage and dispersal of genetic information. This masterful performance was “answered,” in a style chiefly reminiscent of a circus barker, by Michael Shermer, the well-known agnostic talk-show persona who serves as director of the Skeptics Society. As he devoted the first part of his presentation to explaining why he is no longer a Christian, one observed that Shermer’s delivery seemed to be somewhat off in timing. The reason became clear rather quickly. Accustomed to pausing slightly for laughter and snickering from his audiences after his profane and irreverent attempts at humor, Shermer found his efforts on this particular night rather wasted. No one in this audience was laughing. Indeed, those who did not actually feel sorry for his failure began scratching their heads in wonderment at how seriously this poor man had misread his listeners. Shermer went on to contend that intelligent design theory is essentially a disguise for reintroducing the biblical God into the world of science. In all, then, the first night was something of a disappointment for those who had hoped to witness a genuine debate. Someone compared the event to an encounter between an Olympic wrestler and some overwrought actor from the World Wrestling Federation.
Fortunately for the conference, that initial debacle was never repeated. Over the next two days the participants were treated (from the design side) to Michael Behe’s argument from “irreducible complexity,” William Dembski’s mathematical foundation for “the design inference,” Scott Minnich’s stunning analysis of the structure of the unicellular flagellum, and arguments from physics by John Leslie and Robin Collins.
From the critical side, these presentations were answered by Ken Miller, who endeavored to show (unsuccessfully, in my opinion) that a natural selection hypothesis can explain Behe’s “irreducible complexity”; by Brian Josephson, who challenged Dembski’s computations with regard to random selection; by Michael Ruse and Larry Arnhart, who very helpfully cautioned against anthropomorphizing the very concept of design; and by Lenny Moss, who reminded the assembly of other “naturalistic options” more compatible with theism, such as epigenesis, developmental fields, and autopoesis. One regrets that Moss had such a short time for his presentation; I told him afterwards that I could have listened to him all day.
The other plenary lecturers included Kelly Smith, Ted Davis, Paul Nelson, Mike Thrush, Robert O’Connor, Michael Roberts (who spent some time correcting historical errors in the aforesaid book by Robert T. Pennock), Del Ratzsch, and Walter and Lawrence Starkey.
With respect to the political question of introducing intelligent design theory into high-school science curricula, David De Wolf, Stephen Meyer, and Warren A. Nord argued pro, and the renowned historian Ronald Numbers argued contra.
Three other aspects of the conference should be mentioned: (1) a series of 35 concurrent presentations held over two afternoons; (2) a luncheon lecture by Dr. Jean Staune, of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales in Paris, on the current state of Darwinism in Europe; and (3) an after-dinner speech by Dr. Diogenes Allen, who examined the relatively late introduction of Creation themes into the faith of ancient Israel (selon Gerhard Von Rad some half-century ago).
The conference was helpful in the sense of being hopeful. It augured well for the continuing scientific discussion properly raised by the intelligent design theory.
Patrick Henry Reardon is pastor emeritus of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, Illinois, and the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Out of Step with God: Orthodox Christian Reflections on the Book of Numbers (Ancient Faith Publishing, 2019).
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