edited by John Brockman
reviewed by Anika Smith & Casey Luskin
When sixteen leading Darwinists write essays on a crash schedule to get a book out by the end of the school year, you might suspect a sense of urgency, and indeed, editor John Brockman opens Intelligent Thought with a plea for his colleagues to defend Darwin-based civilization from “the Visigoths at the gates,” the proponents of Intelligent Design, “whose only interest in science appears to be to replace it with beliefs consistent with those of the Middle Ages” and who pose “the gravest of threats to the American economy.”
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On this site, Brockman shared an e-mail sent to him from a Darwinian who teaches freshmen at Columbia, who was concerned that students aren’t rejecting Intelligent Design for the right reasons, but “merely because the religious and conservative stripes of ID can sometimes look a little uncool.” He and his colleagues wrote Intelligent Thought to present the public, especially students, with scientific reasons to reject Intelligent Design.
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Despite the promise of the subtitle, much of Intelligent Thought is devoted not to scientific but to philosophical and especially dysteleological arguments against Intelligent Design. A dysteleological argument makes certain extra-scientific, theological assumptions about the moral purposes of the designer, then asserts that life or the universe could not be the result of intelligence because nature is (allegedly) not the nature those assumptions require.
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Darwin himself was unable to reconcile what he saw as natural evil (in particular, a family of parasitic wasps) with his view of a loving and powerful God. Again and again, the arguments set forth in this volume and presented by the Darwinians as scientific resolve into the classic theological debate over the problem of evil.
These theological objections have nothing to do with the theory of Intelligent Design. Indeed, such objections can be disposed of through the simple observation that even things with an evil moral purpose can be intelligently designed. Torture chambers and electric chairs are clearly designed, often ingeniously so, the evil uses to which they are put notwithstanding. What this book poses are questions not about the world as science can study it, but about final causes, about which science has nothing to say. (more)
