One of the problems with a good understanding of some domain is that we adopt such understandings as rigid habits of thought even when they deal with empirical matters and should be rethought as we learn more or as new possibilities emerge as a result of human activities. We forget we’re mortal creatures in a story during which more knowledge and deeper understandings of established knowledge emerges over time, at least if we live courageously and faithfully. The story is what it is but we move forward gaining richer and more complex understandings the story, its living characters, and its nonliving stuff.
The take-down of Intelligent Design in the realm of biology, to my own experience, will usually ignore the fact that complex systems can never be intelligently designed in the way that a child will design and build a simple car from Lego or from other similar or more powerful toys. Intelligent Design not only fails in trying to understand the world of carbon-based lifeforms, it also fails in trying to understand the world of asphalt road-systems, though it can explain cars to a greater extent, and steel-and-concrete bridges, though it can explain concrete piers and steel arches to a very great extent indeed. Sometimes systems which work in some sense end up doing more harm than good, such as a well-designed, well-built bridge which destroys a community by interfering with the general flow of life in that community. As time goes on, a variety of adjustments are made to road-systems, to working methods in machine shops, to computer networks. It’s likely a project will fail, sometimes in a spectacular and embarrassing way, if it doesn’t properly consider that greater context. Anyone wishing to explore these issues can look into the writings of the engineer and historian Henry Petroski, an expert in failure analysis, who has written intelligently and in a truly humanistic manner about the greater context of engineering.
Let me concentrate on computer networks for discussing this lack of validity of Intelligent Design as a general concept; it’s not just a good idea wrongfully applied to understanding the forms and functions and relationships of living creatures. The Internet itself as first proposed by the Pentagon’s `blue-sky’ technology division, , was to be a flexible network which would adapt its communication routes to disasters, such as a nuclear attack, though the system lived on a rigidly designed physical network. The system was designed to use selection processes more directly oriented to specific goals than the processes of evolutionary theories in biology, but the designers tried to leave the Internet as flexible as possible. There was an attempt to move away from strictly mechanistic, rationalistic design techniques of the sort which are assumed to be true intelligence by advocates of Intelligent Design and by many others. We don’t yet know the results, but it could certainly be argued, and has been argued in various ways, that the Internet is very successful as an open system which can be changed in various ways to meet the various needs of its users, ranging from insurance companies to journalists to social clubs to teenaged would-be engineers or software designers to teenaged gossipers to various sorts of consumers or producers or archivers of music and literature.
Not only is Intelligent Design a misapplication of rationalistic thought to evolutionary biology, it’s a very limited understanding of intelligence, of mind if you will, and it pretty much excludes intellect as defined by Jacques Barzun:
Intellect is the capitalized and communal form of live intelligence; it is intelligence stored up and made into habits of discipline, signs and symbols of meaning, chains of reasoning and spurs to emotion—a shorthand and a wireless by which the mind can skip connectives, recognize ability, and communicate truth. Intellect is at once a body of common knowledge and the channels through which the right particle of it can be brought to bear quickly, without the effort of redemonstration, on the matter in hand.
This capitalized and communal form of live intelligence truly is live intelligence just as a human community truly is a form of human life. The intellect includes all that knowledge found in the memories of pipe-layers and the files of a local government: where are the rock ledges which might create problems for future sewer projects. It includes knowledge of how to shop in the local retail stores, going to farm-stands for fresh fruits and vegetables at the right time and knowing where to find veal loaf for the Polish cousins when they come to town. It includes the knowledge in the hand-movements of the local fiddlers and the local painters of murals. It includes the knowledge held by only a few nowadays of what worthwhile books remain on the shelves of the public library. It also includes the engineering and other knowledge which allows proper installation of optical cables and the proper way to start up a link to the Internet and the knowledge of useful or interesting sites on the Web, including the websites of various local institutions.
On the whole, intellect isn’t always rationalistic or even necessarily self-aware. Nor is our personal intelligence. Self-awareness of the wrong sort can tangle up the fingers of a musician or even the thought processes of a talented student tackling an interesting problem in high school calculus. Conservative thinkers of the sort who appreciated tradition and the way it changes behavior, makes it intelligent by some plausible standard, have known this for centuries and perhaps there were some who knew this in ancient times.
Flexibility can be united with this sort of intelligence of a form which can be embodied in ways below the self-awareness of most human beings, though one or the other can overwhelm. A flexible system with a good tradition can decay, melting into a hunk of putty or rigidifying into a concrete wall.
Flexibility isn’t found just in thriving human communities and well-functioning human technology. It’s also found, to a very high degree, in nature. For example, bacteria live in a sea of various sorts of antibiotic resistance genes which can be taken up by specific lines of bacteria though only some can be active in any given bacteria and there are sometimes trade-offs with other characteristics conducive to bacterial prosperity. This is intelligence, though not the rationalistic intelligence of Intelligent Design nor its ancestral and more plausible form found in the writings of some brilliant thinkers, and many lesser thinkers, of the Age of Enlightenment.
There is a general feeling, one anticipated by many a science-fiction author from days when computers were large and clumsy calculators, that our networks of technology will soon take on a limited sort of life, perhaps even becoming self-aware and self-sustaining and self-reproducing. There is talk on the part of credentialed experts that drones might soon be a physical equivalent to computer viruses, self-reproducing and capable of taking on or shedding particular parts or characteristics. I can’t evaluate the timing of this sort of technology but I’d be pretty sure it’s coming before too many decades go by though I’d prefer it be developed for peaceful purposes.
Our simpler tools, such as a carpenter’s saw or a surgeon’s scalpel or writing systems, become part of us as we learn to use them skillfully as the chemist and surgeon and philosopher Michael Polanyi told us. I dealt with this issue in an essay, Does the Body of Christ have non-human components?, which I wrote in response to a Scientific American article on the effect of Internet usage on our memories. I have no problems with God’s story working out as it will work out, though I know that some changes which are all-right with God will scare and disorient us, especially if they come too fast. In the short-term, the primary issue is that the development of our minds is increasingly occurring in response to highly technological environments though we seem intent on proving that we can also use technology to dull our senses and our minds and to reduce our physical health or to otherwise harm ourselves or our important technological systems.
The current celebrity computer viruses, Stuxnet and Flame have their own individual ways of invading a host of the right type. They start out dangerous and have the potential to become viruses invading and harming a variety of computer networks, including factory control systems and power plants and airplanes and so on. They allegedly are capable of acting a bit like biological organisms living at a rapid pace. They change in ways that correspond at least somewhat to biological evolution. Most changes, as is true of biological evolution, will end in failure, by bad luck or because the software entity (or living organism) resulting from the change is dysfunctional or at least not as functional as other entities filling the `living’ space. [Disclaimer: I’m not claiming to be exploring new ground here nor to be developing these ideas in a good way from most perspectives but only to be exploring old ground for colonization by my ideas.]
To return to my starting point, this entire mess and far greater potential mess caused by computer viruses, not just the recent celebrity viruses, supports my claim that so-called Intelligent Design doesn’t work even when we try to understand technology. I’d just say it’s not a viable way of thinking about this world or all of Creation. Nor is it a viable way of analyzing either natural or man-made systems. More generally, it doesn’t accord well with the way reality works. To a Christian, that means that it’s a misunderstanding of the thoughts and thought-processes which the Almighty manifested in this world. We need to understand viruses as well as primates, computer viruses as well as computer systems, to understand the story God is telling. We need to understand systems beyond rationalistic understanding, systems which can be understood only by building a narrative understanding of this world which understanding respects our knowledge of stuff and the relationships it forms and a lot more knowledge which can’t often be put into a schematic form.
Anyone wishing to explore my speculations about the nature of Creation and the nature of a proper mind as an encapsulation of that Creation can read a short essay I recently posted, Moon-dust Really is More Ethereal Than Earth-dust, where my summary also provided pointers to more detailed discussions of this issue:
This moon-dust is thing-like being which exhibits some of the nature of more abstract forms of created being such as that we know as quantum wavefunction. I’ve claimed in my writings that the abstract being from which thing-like being is shaped remains in that thing-like being. We and the things around us are yet the truths manifested by God as the raw stuff of Creation, the stuff from which all created being is shaped. Moon-dust provides an interesting and unexpected support for the Thomistic claim that “Things are true” and also of my additional claim that “Truths are thing-like.” For one of my earliest, but still relevant discussions of this issue of abstract and concrete realms of created being, see Negative Theology in Physics and Metaphysics. A somewhat more advanced viewpoint, with simple graphs, is developed in the essay: From Abstract Being to Concrete Being and Narratives.
The abstract stuff from which we’re shaped is still here and particularly here in moon-dust.
Mind isn’t just a set of rational operations nor is technology just a set of fully controllable mechanical entities. A fuller understanding of mind, of Creation, including such human contributions as technology, can come only on the foundation provided by a better understandings of being in its full spectrum from abstract to concrete and in an understanding of the nature of narratives in this concrete world.