Metaviews 013. 2000.02.02. Approximately 2347 words.

Below is another column from William Dembski at Baylor University in
Texas.  He responses indirectly to Francisco Ayala's criticism of
Intelligent Design Theory in Meta 010.

Dembski distinguishes between *apparent*, *optimal*, and
*intelligent* design.  He argues that Gould, Ayala, and others,
regularly conflate intelligent design with optimal design and thus
are compelled to defend apparent design against intelligent design on
what are essentially theological grounds.   Dembski discusses
"constrained optimization" as a better formulation of what is
admittedly a sub-optimal universe in which suffering, wastefulness,
and evil exist.  He discusses the question of theodicy, the
justification of God in the face of evil, and why this is such an
important undercurrent to these heated debates.   Dembski writes:

"Philosophical theology has abundant resources for dealing with the
problem of evil, maintaining a God who is both omnipotent and
benevolent in the face of evil. The line I find most convincing is
that evil always parasitizes good. Indeed, all our words for evil
presuppose a good that has been perverted...  Boethius put it this
way in his *Consolation of Philosophy*: "If God exists whence evil;
but whence good if God does not exist?"[7]

On other matters, I want to alert Meta subscribers that the 2000
archives, while temporarily unavailable,  are now fixed and online at
<http://www.meta-list.org>.  There you will also find a powerful
full-text search engine that you can use to find postings over the
last three years on subject matters, keywords, date ranges, or
authors.   Take a moment to familiarize yourself with this tool with
a search for "Quantum Mechanics", "Cliff Pickover", "Reductionism",
"Holmes Rolston", "Book Review", or any other interest.  Remember
also that you are invited and encouraged to send Meta postings to
friends and colleagues or to otherwise reproduce them, but that you
should always include the credit to Meta.  It is quite a collection,
which we have put together over the last three years.

-- Billy Grassie


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From: William_Dembski@baylor.edu (William A. Dembski)
Subject: INTELLIGENT DESIGN IS NOT OPTIMAL DESIGN

I was recently on an NPR program with skeptic Michael Shermer and
paleontologist Donald Prothero to discuss intelligent design. As the
discussion unfolded, it became clear that they were using the phrase
"intelligent design" in a way quite different from how the emerging
intelligent design community is using it.

The confusion centered on what the adjective "intelligent" is doing
in the phrase "intelligent design." "Intelligent," after all, can
mean nothing more than being the result of an intelligent agent, even
one who acts stupidly. On the other hand, it can mean that an
intelligent agent acted with skill, mastery, and éclat. Shermer and
Prothero understood the "intelligent" in "intelligent design" to mean
the latter, and thus presumed that intelligent design must entail
optimal design. The intelligent design community, on the other hand,
means the former and thus separates intelligent design from questions
of optimality.

But why then place the adjective "intelligent" in front of the noun
"design"? Doesn't design already include the idea of intelligent
agency, so that juxtaposing the two becomes an exercise in
redundancy? Not at all. *Intelligent design* needs to be
distinguished from *apparent design* on the one hand and *optimal
design* on the other. Apparent design looks designed but really
isn't. Optimal design is perfect design and hence cannot exist except
in an idealized realm (sometimes called a "Platonic heaven").
Apparent and optimal design empty design of all practical
significance.

A common strategy of opponents to design in biology (like Stephen Jay
Gould, Richard Dawkins, and Francisco Ayala), is to assimilate
intelligent design to one of these categories--apparent or optimal
design. The problem with this move is that it constitutes an evasion.
Indeed, it utterly sidesteps the question of intelligent, or actual,
design. The automobiles that roll off the assembly plants in Detroit
are intelligently designed in the sense that human intelligences are
responsible for them. Nevertheless, even if we think Detroit
manufactures the best cars in the world, it would still be wrong to
say they are optimally designed. Nor is it correct to say that they
are only apparently designed.

Within biology, intelligent design holds that a designing
intelligence is indispensable for explaining the specified complexity
of living systems. Nevertheless, taken strictly as a scientific
theory, intelligent design refuses to speculate about the nature of
this designing intelligence. Whereas optimal design demands a
perfectionistic, anal-retentive designer who has to get everything
just right, intelligent design fits our ordinary experience of
design, which is always conditioned by the needs of a situation and
therefore always falls short of some idealized global optimum.

No real designer attempts optimality in the sense of attaining
perfect design. Indeed, there is no such thing as perfect design.
Real designers strive for *constrained optimization*, which is
something completely different. As Henry Petroski, an engineer and
historian at Duke, aptly remarks in *Invention by Design*: "All
design involves conflicting objectives and hence compromise, and the
best designs will always be those that come up with the best
compromise."[1] Constrained optimization is the art of compromise
between conflicting objectives. This is what design is all about. To
find fault with biological design because it misses an idealized
optimum, as Stephen Jay Gould regularly does, is therefore
gratuitous. Not knowing the objectives of the designer, Gould is in
no position to say whether the designer has come up with a faulty
compromise among those objectives.[2]

Nonetheless, the claim that biological design is suboptimal has been
tremendously successful at shutting down discussion about design.
Interestingly, that success comes not from analyzing a given
biological structure and showing how a constrained optimization for
constructing that structure might have been improved. This would
constitute a legitimate scientific inquiry so long as the proposed
improvements can be concretely implemented and do not degenerate into
wish-fulfillment where one imagines some improvement, but has no idea
how it can be effected or whether it might lead to deficits
elsewhere. Just because we can always imagine some improvement in
design doesn't mean that the structure in question wasn't designed,
or that the improvement can be effected, or that the improvement,
even if it could be effected, would not entail deficits elsewhere.

The success of the suboptimality objection comes not from science at
all, but from shifting the terms of the discussion from science to
theology. In place of *How specifically can an existing structure be
improved?* the question instead becomes *What sort of God would
create a structure like that?* Darwin, for instance, thought there
was just "too much misery in the world" to accept design: "I cannot
persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have
designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of
their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat
should play with mice."[3] Other examples he pointed to included
"ants making slaves" and "the young cuckoo ejecting its
foster-brother."[4] The problem of suboptimal design is thus
transformed into the problem of evil.

The problem of evil is to reconcile the following three propositions:
(1) GOD IS GOOD; (2) GOD IS ALL-POWERFUL; (3) EVIL EXISTS. Since the
existence of evil is taken for granted, the problem is to account for
evil given that God is both good and all-powerful. If God is
all-powerful but not good there is no problem reconciling the
existence of evil (in that case God is free to be nasty).
Alternatively, if God is good but fails to be all-powerful, there is
no problem reconciling the existence of evil (in that case God means
well but can't quite pull it off).

Critics who invoke the problem of evil against design have left
science behind and entered the waters of philosophy and theology. A
torture chamber replete with implements of torture is designed, and
the evil of its designer does nothing to undercut the torture
chamber's design. The existence of design is distinct from the
morality, aesthetics, goodness, optimality, or perfection of design.
Moreover, there are reliable indicators of design that work
irrespective of whether design includes these additional features
(cf. my previous posts to META).

Some scientists, however, prefer to conflate science and theology
(despite being members of the National Academy of Sciences and
professing that these are separate and mutually exclusive realms).
Consider, for instance, the following criticism of design by Stephen
Jay Gould:

"If God had designed a beautiful machine to reflect his wisdom and
power, surely he would not have used a collection of parts generally
fashioned for other purposes.... Odd arrangements and funny solutions
are the proof of evolution--paths that a sensible God would never
tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows
perforce."[5]

Gould is here criticizing what he calls the "panda's thumb," a bony
extrusion that helps the panda strip bamboo of its hard exterior and
thus render the bamboo edible to the panda.

The first question that needs to be answered about the panda's thumb
is whether it displays the clear marks of intelligence. The design
theorist is not committed to every biological structure being
designed. Mutation and section do operate in natural history to adapt
organisms to their environments. Perhaps the panda's thumb is such an
adaptation. Nonetheless, mutation and selection are incapable of
generating highly specific, information-rich structures that pervade
biology. Organisms display the hallmarks of intelligently engineered
high-tech systems: information storage and transfer capability;
functioning codes; sorting and delivery systems; self-regulation and
feed-back loops; signal transduction circuitry; and everywhere,
complex, mutually-interdependent networks of parts. For this reason,
University of Chicago molecular biologist James Shapiro regards
Darwinism as almost completely unenlightening for understanding
biological systems and prefers an information processing model.[6]
Design theorists take this one step further, arguing that information
processing presupposes a programmer.

Once the intelligent design of some structure has been established,
it is a separate question whether a wise, powerful, and beneficent
God ought to have designed a complex information-rich structure one
way or another. For the sake of argument, let's grant that certain
designed structures are not just, as Gould puts it, "odd" or "funny,"
but even cruel. What of it? Philosophical theology has abundant
resources for dealing with the problem of evil, maintaining a God who
is both omnipotent and benevolent in the face of evil. The line I
find most convincing is that evil always parasitizes good. Indeed,
all our words for evil presuppose a good that has been perverted.
Impurity presupposes purity, unrighteousness presupposes
righteousness, deviation presupposes a way (i.e., a *via*) from which
we've departed, sin (the Greek *hamartia*) presupposes a target that
was missed, etc. Boethius put it this way in his *Consolation of
Philosophy*: "If God exists whence evil; but whence good if God does
not exist?"[7]

One looks at some biological structure and remarks, "Gee, that sure
looks evil." Did it start out evil? Was that its function when a good
and all-powerful God created it? Objects invented for good purposes
are regularly co-opted and used for evil purposes. Drugs that were
meant to alleviate pain become sources of addiction. Knives that were
meant to cut bread become implements for killing people. Political
powers that were meant to maintain law and order become the means for
enslaving citizens.

This is a fallen world. The good that God initially intended is no
longer fully in evidence. Much has been perverted. Dysteleology, the
perversion of design in nature, is a reality. It is evident all
around us. But how do we explain it? The scientific naturalist
explains dysteleology by claiming that the design in nature is only
apparent, that it arose through mutation and natural selection (or
some other natural mechanism), and that imperfection, cruelty, and
waste are fully to be expected from such mechanisms. But such
mechanisms cannot explain the complex, information-rich structures in
nature that signal actual and not merely apparent design--that is,
intelligent design.

The design in nature is actual. More often than we would like, that
design has gotten perverted. But the perversion of
design--dysteleology--is not explained by denying design, but by
accepting it and meeting the problem of evil head on. The problem of
evil is a theological problem. To force a resolution of the problem
by reducing all design to apparent design is an evasion. It avoids
both the scientific challenge posed by specified complexity, and it
avoids the hard work of faith, whose job is to discern God's hand in
creation despite the occlusions of evil.[8]




==NOTES==

[1] Henry Petroski, *Invention by Design: How Engineers Get from
Thought to Thing* (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996),
p. 30. Petroski is a professor of civil engineering as well as a
professor of history at Duke University.

[2] For a critique of Gould's objections to design based on
optimality see Paul Nelson, "The Role of Theology in Current
Evolutionary Reasoning," *Biology and Philosophy* 11, 1996: 493-517.

[3] Francis Darwin, ed., *The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin*,
vol. II (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1888), p. 105.

[4] Charles Darwin, *On the Origin of Species*, facsimile 1st ed.
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964 [1859]), pp.
242-244.

[5] Stephen Jay Gould, *The Panda's Thumb* (New York: Norton, 1980), pp. 20-21.

[6] See his review of Michael Behe's *Darwin's Black Box* in James A.
Shapiro, "In the Details ... What?" *National Review*, 19 September
1996: 62-65.

[7] See Boethius, *The Consolation of Philosophy, in Loeb Classical
Library* (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 153.
Alvin Plantinga's free will defense is a resolution of the problem of
evil that has provoked much response from philosophers of
religion--for a synopsis see Kelly James Clark, *Return to Reason*
(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1990), ch. 2. Finally, a significant
number of contemporary philosophers of religion resolve the problem
of evil by denying traditional accounts of divine omniscience and
omnipotence. Process theologians have taken this view for some time,
but more traditional philosophers and theologians are now taking this
line also--see William Hasker, *God, Time, and Knowledge* (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989).

[8] For more in this vein see Diogenes Allen's *Spiritual Theology*
(Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 1997).

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