The Intelligent Design Falsifiability Myth?

Intelligent design proponents, like those found at the Discovery Institute, love to claim that their intellectual weapon of choice, ID, has a basis in science and the scientific method. A prominent claim within this is that ID is falsifiable, just as all good (wait, no, just all) hypotheses must be in order to be scientific. However, this is frequently disputed by people who see the obvious philosophical flaws in intelligent design – such as Steven Novella and myself, and after we’re finished we think it’s over and done with. Not so, apparently.

My my, David Klinghoffer, what do we have here? “Wikipedia and the Myth of Falsifiability”? Interesting.

David, in this recent work of art, argues that us “Darwinists” love to switch around the supposed falsifiability of intelligent design in order to suit our own needs – it’s falsifiable when we have scientific evidence against it, yet unfalsifiable when we don’t:

Regarding the mythic idea that intelligent design can’t be tested or falsified and is therefore unscientific, the Wikipedia editors quote the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. They cite the distinguished scientist and philosopher Judge John E. Jones. They cite blogger PZ Myers on “Rule 702 of the Federal Rules of Evidence.” They quote philosopher Elliott Sober: “Defenders of ID always have a way out. This is not the hallmark of a falsifiable theory.”

Yet isn’t it funny that the Darwinist faithful are often perfectly happy to launch attempts to clobber intelligent design on factual and scientific grounds — just as if ID were genuine science — only to retreat immediately behind the barricade of the Falsifiability Myth? If they had confidence either in the myth or in the attack, presumably they would choose one and stick with it.

A clever strategy from David – he can claim we don’t have an intellectually-honest foot to stand on without actually making the argument that intelligent design is falsifiable. Nice. But is this true? Do we, the critics of ID, shift from philosophical foot to philosophical foot when doing what we so love to do?

The problem here is that ID can be defined in different ways. In a general sense, it could be defined as the idea that a designer, supernatural or not, created the life we see on Earth today. However, from this, it can be posited, ala. the Discovery Institute, that living systems should contain features that are irreducibly complex and that all parts of the genome are functional and important, etc. ID can encompass a wide variety of claims, and this, unsurprisingly, is confusing to a lot of people who enter the ID minefield.

The general definition of ID – that all life is designed – is straight-out unfalsifiable: you cannot conclude from any conceivable evidence that some sort of designer was not involved in all/part of the existence of life. It’s a claim that’s compatible with everything! Junk DNA? The designer wanted it to be that way. Vestigial organs? The designer wanted it to be that way. The backwards human retina? The designer wanted it to be that way.

Modern intelligent design arguments, quite different to classical ID thinking, have come about through an attempt to change the nature of the ID argument so that, instead of showing that nothing can prove the absence of design, it can show the presence of design in living things. A standard modern ID argument is irreducible complexity – that some biological systems have an inherent lack of evolvability due to their functionally-fragile nature. This posits that if irreducible complexity (IR) is found, this is positive evidence for intelligent design.

One scientific problem with IR is that even though examples of potential evolutionary pathways can be found for the various systems being examined, ID proponents might never be satisfied with those pathways – they may call them “just-so stories” or demand more evidence. Since the argument rests completely on the fulfillment of the desire for the ID proponent to see evolutionary pathways that they accept according to undefined standards, it cannot be falsified unless they choose to accept the explanation being put forward – something that I doubt they will ever do. In other words, IR is just a game of moving the goalposts, a classic logical fallacy that doesn’t deserve to be called a scientific argument.

So, to the ID proponent that thinks that arguments like IR are scientific, such as David Klinghoffer, it does seem like the willingness for scientists to give out evidence “against” them is verification of their scientific status. But this is not the case – data can be thrown at an unfalsifiable claim, but the action of doing so doesn’t change its status.

When evolutionary biologists produce pathways for the evolution of biological systems called irreducibly complex by people such as Michael Behe, they’re not rising to the challenge in order to falsify ID – they’re putting scientific evidence out there in order to support evolutionary theory. Since IR is an argument that rests on the assumption that if evolution can’t explain a system then ID can, showing the ways in which evolution can, in fact, explain that system simply shows the lack of a need for the inclusion of the intelligent design idea into thinking about the origins of life.

This is all well and good – some ID arguments are unfalsifiable, including irreducible complexity. But are some of them different? Are some them actually falsifiable? For this to be true, you’re going to have to narrow the definition of ID into specific claims about the nature of living systems (or even the world) according to the traits you assign to the designer that you’re positing. For example, Young Earth Creationism is a form of intelligent design and it has specific claims about the nature of the world that can be drawn out of the “worldview” that most Young Earth Creationists hold to: all life was created approximately 6000 years ago, so all the fossils that we find must have been living creatures at that time etc. We can test these claims – and unfortunately for this brand of creationism, they turn out to be completely counter to the evidence.

In YEC, the nature of the designer is “known” through the Bible, so specific claims can be made. With modern intelligent design, the nature of the designer is specifically made ambiguous in an attempt to shy people away from the religious nature of the idea. However, this comes at a cost – it makes the claims of ID completely and utterly unfalsifiable.

What a dilemma for the ID proponent! Either they admit that ID isn’t scientific, or they produce a defined designer and face either being labeled as a religion (creationism) or a panspermia hypothesis that can’t be supported. Tricky.

What does this, overall, mean for David’s claim that ID critics jump around about falsifiability? Well, it doesn’t really hold any water. But, and this is a big but, it means that ID critics must stop calling out ID as being “disproven” or “debunked” – simply put, it can’t be, in its modern form. We need to spread the knowledge that it isn’t scientific – but most importantly, continue to show the general public that evolutionary theory is fine just that way it is, it doesn’t need unfalsifiable ideas such as a designer to come in and explain the parts that we don’t currently understand completely.

Most intelligent design “arguments”, especially put forward by the Discovery Institute and the various YEC organisations, are not positive arguments for ID but negative arguments against evolutionary theory. If we can sufficiently defend evolution from those attacks (which is a scientifically easy, yet practically difficult, task), then the wind really will be knocked out of the sails of the ID movement. Only then will a real victory occur.