On intellegent design and the scientific field

Article in the New Yorker addresses something that the scientific community cannot: the scientific claims of intelligent design. In a quote that could have been lifted out of Bourdieu's essay on the scientific field, H. ALLEN ORR notes that addressing the claims of ID are actually an act of consecration that most [actual] scientists would rather not perform.

If a scientific claim can be loosely defined as one that scientists take seriously enough to debate, then engaging the intelligent-design movement on scientific grounds, they worry, cedes what it most desires: recognition that its claims are legitimate scientific ones.

The article looks at two of the main theorists who have challenged the theory of evolution and it seems that the main challenge is that it seems implausible on some level that these things have evolved in the way that they have in some "natural" manner. The main focus is on the questions of cellular structures which are so complex that it doesn't seem possible that they evolved. It is quite a leap in logic to say that because something seems implausible the only possible explanation is that they were created by an intelligent individual. On some level, the problem from my perspective is that there is a belief in God being some uber-human sitting on a cloud somewhere, thinking things up and coordinating the movements of 6 billion humans and trillions and trillions of other life forms. A more dispersed notion of god--as an energy that flows through the universe that we channel in some way--as touchy feely and utterly unacceptable to a judeo-christian tradition of monotheism would be much more able to explain the intricacies of development and the possibility of there being some sort of intention or goal in the design of organisms. This is an idea which I never feel comfortable considering and realize the ways that it is very likely a partial result of the intellectual current I am swimming in and, possibly, the result of the current state of capitalist social relations, a point recently made by Zizek

But I also have seen some of these ideas reference to Feurerbach's Essence of Christianity. The latter, according to Robert Tucker was a key influence for Marx in that he helped to make Hegel's philosophy of history viable again. Here I will quote at length from Tucker's description of F's innovation:

Briefly, Marx created his theory of history as a conscious act of translation of Hegel's theory into what he, Marx, took to be its valid or scientific form. In this he followed the procedure of the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, author of The Essence of Christianity (1841), who had argued that Hegel's philosophy could reveal scienticif truth if subjected to "transformational criticism." This consisted in the inverting of its principle presuppositions, meaning that one transposed subject and predicate in them. For Hegel man is spirit (or God) in the process of self-alienation and self-realization, i.e. man presents himself in history as self alienated God. The truth, says Feuerbach, is just the reverse. Instead of seing man as self-alienating God, we must see God as self alienated man. That is [and here's the key section that I find stimulating] when man, the human species, projects an idealized image of itself into heaven as "God" and worships this imaginary heavenly being, it becomes estranged from itself; its own ungodly earthly reality becomes alien and hateful. To overcome this alienation man must repossess his alienated being, take "God" back into himself, recognize in man--and specifically in other human individuals--the proper object of care, love and worship.--Marx Engels Reader, 2nd ed., Norton, xxii-xxiii.

This idea of god being something that works through people or through nature is a longstanding pagan belief, but it is also pivotal to what I understand to be the fundamental of Gnostic Christianity. The ideas of that tradition, which are, arguably, coeval with the dominant Christian traditions today and possibly even connected to buddhism and what we now call hinduism, are very much about overcoming this self-alienation and preventing this division, projection and idealization of god by seeking knowledge of the self and the world; as Pagels summarizes, "According to the gnostic teacher Theodotus, writing in Asia Minor (c. 140-160), the gnostic is one has come to understand who we were, and what we have become; where we were... whither we are hastening; from what we are being released; what birth is, and what is rebirth. Yet to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God; this is the secret of gnosis."

Though maybe I am weaving too many disparate threads here together, it seems that there is a way that this connects with a tradition of study and theory of the way that spiritual forces are distributed throughout "creation." This understanding of god is, again according to Tucker, central to Marx's theory of civil society as being the source of the production of value. [ Rosenberg says this creation is contingent on the development of a separate political realm of the sovereign state, i.e they are mutually constitutive rather than cause and effect and by separating civil society from the possible realm of politics (even, as Polanyi points out, if the constitution of that divide was also, in part, a political act enacted by people who believed in the existence of the divide)]. Tucker says that Marx "inverted the Hegelian proposition on the relation between the state and "civil society" (bürgerliche Gesellschaft, by which Hegel meant the realm of private economic endeavor). Civil society was not an outgrowth of the state, as in Hegel's view; rather, the state was an outgrowth of civil society. The primary sphere of man's being was not his life as a citizen of the state but rather his economic life in civil society." (Ibid, xxiv)

There is a lot to unpack here--and I am certain contradictions abound above, but all of this is to say that it doesn't make much philosophical sense to join a libertarian philosophy of human relations with fundamentalist Christianity. In some ways, I am a bit shocked that adherents of free market capitalism can adhere to these notions of God as they do. The author of this article on ID often makes analogies to other forms of human social formation and techological creation and one such discussion seems ripe for comparison to both Hayek and Marx:

It’s true that when you confront biologists with a particular complex structure like the flagellum they sometimes have a hard time saying which part appeared before which other parts. But then it can be hard, with any complex historical process, to reconstruct the exact order in which events occurred, especially when, as in evolution, the addition of new parts encourages the modification of old ones. When you’re looking at a bustling urban street, for example, you probably can’t tell which shop went into business first. This is partly because many businesses now depend on each other and partly because new shops trigger changes in old ones (the new sushi place draws twenty-somethings who demand wireless Internet at the café next door). But it would be a little rash to conclude that all the shops must have begun business on the same day or that some Unseen Urban Planner had carefully determined just which business went where.

What I find interesting is that both Hayek and Marx would probably agree with the historical narrative of how this city developed and the only difference would be that Hayek would say that there was no need for a state at all and the city would develop on its own without any intervention and based solely on the mechanism of the market, Marx, in my crude understanding of both, would probably agree if only one could dispense with political power in general and the presence of classes who would insist on the alienation of some others.

[would be interesting to consider the problem of use-value production in both cases and the emergence of vapid strip malls in place of a vibrant urban setting with something more than commerce in mind.]

Either way, it is entirely contradictory to claim that human society, with it's complex rules, mores, inventions, practices, etc. is possibly the outcome of a simple interplay of natural motivations which balance each other out and lead to the "survival of the fittest" while simultaneously claiming that in nature this idea seems so unplausible that it can only be explained by introducing a single intelligent planner.

If I do get a chance to elaborate on this, I would point out the way that Darwinism, according to Hielbroner, as an idea, both fed into and on the economic philosophies of the nineteenth century, leading eventually to the social darwinism that helped to justify all sorts of economic and political injustice and, in many ways, still informs the mainstream belief in the fundamental character of the market--what's best and most worthy, rises to the top. Yet the people who advocate most strongly for the market as a mechanism in this country are also those who seem most adamently opposed to the idea of Darwinism in explaining natural development. The opposite, or vice versa, of course, is true of some unreflexive leftists. But all of this is to be saved for another time. I have class to teach tomorrow.