An intelligent design of the times

October 22, 2005

Photo: Mick Connolly

Juliette Hughes examines the boundaries between religion and science.

I think I have fairly heard and fairly weighed the evidence on both sides, and I remain an utter disbeliever in almost all that you consider the most sacred truths ... I can see much to admire in all religions ... But whether there be a God and whatever be His nature; whether we have an immortal soul or not, or whatever may be our state after death, I can have no fear of having to suffer for the study of nature and the search for truth ... - Alfred Russel Wallace, 1861

AT CLONARD Brigidine Convent in the 1960s there were meticulously executed drawings on classroom blackboards in coloured chalks, forming banners or side borders. It was like pavement art that you see sometimes these days, vividly detailed with an embroiderer's aesthetic, full of flowers and twining leaves enfolding a religious symbol or word. They changed from month to month: a new saint, the rosary, the missions, whatever the new theme was. But the ones in the science lab never changed. Mother Basil had put a lot of work into those images.

They depicted the evolutionary sequence of living things: simpler forms giving way to more advanced ones until you arrived at man. Beside it there was a list of the order of creation, as found in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis. The general idea was that the Bible and science had no quarrel with each other on how life on earth developed. The two lists were similar enough to make a devout Catholic of the times reflect that the writers of the Bible had probably been given a bit of a nudge from God about the order in which life appeared. There was no reference to the Bible, however, in any biology class I attended, nor were we ever told to discuss it. Our biology classes were completely secular. In the mid '60s evolution had only recently become respectable for Catholics.

Teilhard de Chardin, after all, had been given a yellow card by the Holy See as recently as 1962.

Mother Basil, however, was a scientist as well as a Catholic, and a Brigidine nun to boot. Brigidines are a doughty, unsinkable order: full of holy women who are also political activists. She would say, often, (and only now do I realise the significance) "Science doesn't ask why, girls; science always asks how."

Rather than religion intruding into science, you could say that science intruded into our religion classes. Mother Basil was my headmistress, biology teacher, RE teacher and life coach. At the start of my matric (year 12), she had decreed that we were going to enter Melbourne University's science talent quest. "We" consisted of the other biology student (it was a small school then) and myself. Our entry was a genetic experiment, modelled on 19th-century monk Gregor Mendel's work with peas. Peas take time, so we were to breed albino rats with black-andwhite ones over several generations to demonstrate dominant and recessive genes. We began in February with a guaranteed purebred black-hooded rat, Beta, and her grumpy albino mate, Alpha. By June we had run out of Greek alphabet; by August there were about 70 of them, eating, fighting, screwing, pooing; we had run out of money for cages and had to segregate the sexes.

Posses of reluctant juniors were dragooned to muck out the cages and feed them; matric students had more cerebral tasks to perform.

Mother Basil loved the rats. She started to bring one or two to senior religion classes, which were always about the new, exciting world opening up for us in the documents of Vatican II, the paperback of which was our RE set text for the year. Discussions were lively, and we got used to the young rats peeping out from her big black sleeve or running under her veil. One day one of the young ones drowned when a drinking water bottle malfunctioned: Mother Basil tried to resuscitate it by blowing through a pipette into its mouth. It didn't work.

WAS lucky. I was taught by someone who was a real scientist and a real theist. Any girl taught by that eccentric, brilliant woman may have had to endure lectures on the unacceptability of wearing slacks or bikinis, but would have been under no misapprehension at all regarding any conflict between God and the scientific process.

Evolution, we were taught, was the best way of explaining the diversity of life in the natural world.

Biology class was not teleology class. We didn't need to look for God to fill any gaps in scientific understanding because we were being taught that God had no problems with science as long it wasn't trying to find out more ways to kill people.

When religion criticises science for researching germ warfare, for amoral experiments on animals and even people, religion is right. When science criticises religion for ignoring and opposing the wisdom and insights into the human condition that have been given by psychology and medicine, science is right.

Should these boundaries be forever clear? Some people don't think so. They want to bring God into the science class, not with a Mother Basil-type of discreet visual reminder that there isn't a problem, but with the ringing soundbite: "Teach the controversy." But what is this controversy?

At this very moment, 11 parents of children attending Dover High School in Pennsylvania, US, are taking the school district and its board of directors to court. Last October the school board passed a resolution that intelligent design should be taught in year 9 science class. Later, they put out a statement that was to be read to the class by the teacher, which included the words "the theory is not a fact". This referred to Darwin's theory. All the science teachers refused to do this.

The assistant superintendent himself visited each class and read out the statement. The 11 parents' lawsuit asks that this policy be rescinded, because, among other things, it amounts to coerced religious instruction. It seems to belong to an old American tradition of pushing religion into science classes, as was seen in the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925, when a teacher in Tennessee was prosecuted for teaching the theory of evolution. But Australia is feeling the intelligent design pressure, too: in August, federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson commended the idea of teaching it in schools.

Antony Campbell, an Australian Jesuit priest, writer and theologian, is a specialist in the Old Testament, and interested in cosmology. I asked him what he thought of intelligent design. He had three questions for starters: who is pushing it?

How honest is the presentation? How good is the theory?

Well, the answer to who is pushing it in America seems to be the Discovery Institute, a conservative think tank based in Seattle.

Campbell pointed me to an article by Jerry Coyne in New Republic Online. Coyne points out that the Discovery Institute's Centre for Science and Culture (CSC) is the nerve centre of the intelligent design movement. Campbell's second question was answered by Coyne, who quotes the CSC as being designed, in its own words, to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies and to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.

This makes intelligent design seem less like a theory than a dogma in theory's clothing.

The third question is the one that needs to be answered primarily by science educators.

Margaret Mazzolini, director of curriculum development at Swinburne University of Technology, is an astrophysicist who has written many science courses and contributed to many texts. She and her husband, Alex (also a scientist), go to the same Catholic church I attend."

When we put a science syllabus together," she said, "the focus is on helping students to master simple scientific models of the world around them and to learn how to put that understanding to practical use. Rather than teaching science as dogma, learning about science involves understanding how to apply the scientific process.

However, to my knowledge, no one (especially struggling students) demands we give equal time in school and undergraduate classes to all the competing science theories that might exist at any time in any particular field of science."

It seems to me that the proponents of intelligent design want to buck the scientific peer review system and get their particular theories given equal time in the already crowded syllabi of schools and universities not on the basis of scientific credibility, but primarily for religious or philosophical reasons. Until the weight of peerreviewed scientific evidence for intelligent design manages to cause a conceptual shift in biological sciences (if that ever happens), one solution would be for schools which wish to focus on teaching intelligent design to offer it in religion or philosophy classes, rather than in science classes."

Junk science is seen in such things as the proliferation of anti-global warming think tanks and institutes all receiving funding from oil companies, notably Exxon. ID and creationism, its older sister, are in this category.

Their closely co-ordinated publicity tries to insert biblical literalism into science classes in secular schools by sloganeering instead of a body of scientifically observed phenomena. Such science has no natural flow, no real vitality of its own. It has to be pushed along by devotees, and they have deep pockets and a sense of high destiny. But it has no experiments. All of its existence is based on picking holes in evolution. Intelligent design's big slogan is irreducible complexity. To this end its supporters cite the eye as a complex mechanism that could not have evolved, but must have been designed uniquely. This can be refuted by a single middle-school science lesson on the evolution of the eye from groups of light sensitive cells on flatworms up to the complex but imperfectly functioning eyes that we now possess.

ID proponents attack Darwin, the originator of evolution, as if discrediting a small part of his thought would negate everything he said. But much has been built on it since Darwin; it's more than a theory: it's a framework for exploration in an open rational way. Most scientists acknowledge that there are gaps in evolutionary theory: how important are they? Not very.

Evolution is not just a theory; it's a vibrant, living matrix for exploration of the universe. It offers ever-opening possibilities, and can contain conflicting ideas. Richard Dawkins, author of the influential book The Selfish Gene is in deep disagreement with Stephen Jay Gould about the processes of evolution. Gould believes that organisms evolve in fits and starts: punctuated equilibrium. Dawkins, on the other hand, believes that organisms, from amoebas to humans, are simply vehicles for genes to replicate themselves.

(That one seems to me to be strangely anthropomorphic, attributing intentionality to something that has no brain.) All this goes to show, however, that evolution, far from being a socalled theory in crisis, is in fact literally and ironically a broad church, full of healthily contending viewpoints that can all be sustained within the sturdy framework of evolutionary theory.

One criticism of evolution is that there are gaps in the fossil record. This presupposes that an example of every organism that ever lived must be preserved as a fossil, which is unrealistic. And transitional forms are very rare: creationists leap on this as evidence that all creatures were created as it were hermetically without any link from one form to another. Intelligent designists use essentially the same argument. But it's far more likely that one form gave way to a later form because one previously numerous organism was environmentally challenged, dropped precipitately in numbers, then was superseded by a mutation that adapted the original form in a way more suitable to the environment, eventually giving rise to a more fully adapted form that became numerous enough to leave a fossil record.

OW MANY fossil humans are there, for instance? Becoming a fossil requires you to die in a very particular way, so that you calcify rather than rot. This is very very rare, so their absence from fossil records is not an indication that there were no humans before biblical times, or that we didn't evolve from earlier primate ancestors.

It seems that the opponents of evolution theory want to say that any gap, however small, completely confounds the theory. Yet they ignore a welter of evidence that can be inferred not only from fossil records and carbon dating but from myriad examples of evolution that go on around us on a smaller scale. (Examples include the breeding of animals for certain traits and the ability of bacteria, insects and weeds to acquire immunity to substances used against them.) The anti-evolutionist answer to this seems to be that the act of creation created a cosmos not from the very beginning, but somehow at a snapshot point 6000-10,000 years ago with teasing false evidence of age, in order to test whether people would go on believing.

Their reaction to evolution's small but resolvable problems is pretty much one that could be taken straight from the Gospel, when Jesus talks of offering to take a mote (splinter) out of your neighbour's eye while ignoring the beam (tree trunk) in your own.

I am not a scientist or a theologian, but some of my friends are extremely learned in these disciplines and they tell me things and answer my questions. I find no conflict in being a believer in God and in evolution. Indeed, I find it far more congenial to read Stephen Jay Gould or even Richard Dawkins than to read the articles on intelligent design on the Discovery Institute's website.


Why does it seem to want to gain converts by subterfuge? Perhaps its proponents have despaired of the more accepted means of helping the poor, healing the sick and being there for people who need a friend. In a world admittedly materialistic, adhering literally to a scripturally based explanation may give comfort. Tony Campbell, veteran scholar of the Bible, has also written a book on unconditional love, God First Loved Us. The difference between his view of the human search through life and that of intelligent designists is profound. For in the end, fundamentalists all want you to strike a bargain with God: no more questions, and you can go to heaven. Bow down and stop thinking any more, just believe in one simple version of a biblical creation myth.

Fundamentalists are terribly afraid of God, because the God they believe in will send you to burn eternally in a lake of fire, tormented by devils.

In their world, Satan is really God's Karl Rove, the dirty tricks guy, the enforcer. Strange how they describe such a deity as righteous, when humans who torture people with fire for disagreeing with them are rightly called evil, psychopathic. Tony Campbell, Margaret Mazzolini, and Mother Basil would never worship that, and neither would I.

Neither science nor religion should ask you to abdicate from your reason.


The Republican War on Science
By Chris Mooney

Published in September in the US, I have yet to read it, but have ordered it because of its subject matter. It argues that there is a culture of rightwing political correctness affecting the way science is supported and directed in the US under the Bush Administration.

Was Darwin Wrong?
By David Quammen,
National Geographic, November 2004. magma.nationalgeographic .com/ngm/0411/feature1/
Quammen is one of the best science writers around, making difficult concepts accessible without patronising his readers. The online page has a good set of links for further reading.

The Understanding Evolution website evolution.berkeley.edu/ A wealth of resources for everyone, from schoolchildren doing projects to advanced articles for teachers and tertiary students. A refreshing antidote to the obfuscatory negativity of the Discovery Institute's website.

Inherit the Wind Directed by Stanley Kramer, starring Spencer Tracy and Fredric March.

Partly fictionalised account of the Scopes trial in Tennessee in 1925. Made in 1960, the year that JFK was elected president of the US, it was an expression of confidence in an enlightened present.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
By Douglas Adams.
Hitchhiker began as a radio program and has been made into TV series, video games and a movie. Adams got the idea for it while lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck, looking at the stars. As imaginary cosmologies go, it's instructive, amusing, and very intelligently designed.

Flying Spaghetti Monsterism
is a great religious joke.Its adherents are called Pastafarians, and they agitate for equal time in science curriculums. Started by Bobby Henderson, a physics graduate, it has been reported on in New Scientist, The Guardian, Der Spiegel and other prestigious publications.

FSM can be found at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Spaghetti_Monster.

Subscribe to The Age and save up to 35%*