Wednesday, March 4, 2009

What Are the Minimal Ontological Commitments of Intelligent Design?

Suppose that natural biogenesis could be proven statistically impossible. Suppose, even further, that by all scientific laws it is impossible. For example, we can imagine that a fundamental structure of life, such as DNA, might admit absolutely no plausible explanation from any scientific theory applied to it. Some claim that this is, in fact, the case. If this hypothetical situation obtains, it would demonstrate that the origin of life amounts to an ad hoc introduction of an information-containing system into the generally chaotic natural universe.

What is interesting about this hypothetical result is that we would be forced to deal with the consequences of the truth of Intelligent Design (reader beware: Intelligent Design (ID) should only be invoked in biological cases where evolution fails. This is because evolution is explainable in terms of physical science, whereas ID is not).

So who is the intelligence? Perhaps aliens, you say. Well, this is unfortunately a pseudo-answer. If Earthly life was designed by super-intelligent aliens, then there still exist life-forms whose origin is unexplained. To blame it on the aliens is to simply push the question back a step.

A Christian will scream and shout at this point that it must be God, but we must shun the Christian's dogmatism and focus on what the facts actually tell us. The standard Christian mistake is to associate the complicated Judeo-Christian God with the Designer. The designer must be an intelligence, but it seems as if this intelligence cannot simply be a material being. If it were a material being, then one might ask where the being's brain is if it has such a powerful mind that it can think such complicated patterns on such a fundamental level. In other words, the Designer, as an explanation invoked when science admits that it cannot explain the phenomenon of life, is an explicitly unscientific explanation. But keep in mind that science is nothing more than the explanation and description of the function of energy and matter. This tells us that we may infer from the (hypothetical) truth of ID that there exists some other kind of thing besides energy and matter.

Some intelligent design theorists call this third type of thing (though it is really only a second type of thing because energy and matter are reducible to each other) "information". It is interesting that this type of thing is described as information, because the only thing that can process information is a mind. So we find ourselves attributing a mind to the Designer. Well this is no surprise, though it starts to play into the hand of the Christian scientifico-theologist.

So what sort of mind must it be? The standard response is that the mind must be infinite because the universe is infinite in size (though perhaps not in matter and energy content). But is this so? An infinite mind would be required to think such a universe, but we are not talking about the creation of a universe we are only talking about the creation of life. Because the functional features of a single-celled organism (from which all life presumably sprang) are finite in detail, one may assume that an infinite amount of knowledge is not necessary to be able to design such a thing. In fact, it is not implausible that the human race might one day produce an equally complex form of life. Or at least that we might be able to completely reverse-engineer such an organism.

The only thing that ID proves to us, then, is that Mind must exist, and it must be much more powerful than we originally thought. So we have two principles: World and Mind. These principles are also know in the more familiar terms "matter" and "form". The reason I prefer "World" and "Mind" is that it is mind that thinks form and it is the universe which contains matter. The principles that I am positing are more fundamental. Where form and matter are really just categories of existing things, World and Mind are the names of the entities without which form and matter would not be possible.

In this dualism, one will find that there is no better reason to call the Designer "God" than there is to call the World "God". The reason is that each is dependent upon the other. Because the Designer's only task is to generate more beings like itself (minds), the Designer would not exist if there were nothing to design. And this is an intuitive truism, because it is almost certain that a human mind would never think if it had no sensory input. For a human mind cannot even develop out of infancy without input.

This probably reproduces Hegel's argument for the dependence of God upon creation, but I have read very little Hegel, so I feel no obligation to give him credit for this thought. In any case, it is important to note that what is minimally necessitated by the position of ID is the existence of a World and a World-Mind (if you will). But just as matter is part of the world, so we would want to say that form (or information) is part of the mind. In previous posts concerning Wittgenstein, I have gone on at length about how information -- meaning-- exists only in the mind (as distinct from physical explanations of behavior). If my argument that all meaning exists only in the mind and is merely recorded in the physical world holds, then we have an interesting result: We seem to be the peers of Mind. We are solar-systems in the galaxy that is the Mind: we emulate Mind on a smaller scale. But the solar-system is part of the galaxy, just as we are part of Mind (for we are ultimately the invention of Mind)

Thus, pantheistic-dualism is ID's bare-bones theology. Crazy, huh? Makes me wonder how plausible ID really is.

-Priam's Pride