Intelligent Design

John Perry
It’s Philosophy Talk. Evolution? Natural selection? Random mutation?

Chris Smither
Well, Charlie Darwin looks so far into things the way things are, he caught a glimpse of God’s unfolding. God said, I’ll make some DNA, they can use it any way they want—that’s what I call intelligent design.

Daniel Dennett
If you think that God is designing individual species, then there’s a real conflict.

Ken Taylor
Our guest is Daniel Dennett, author of “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.”

Daniel Dennett
The biological world is packed with design. What Darwin showed is how that design can come to exist without a designer. That’s what the theory of evolution is all about.

Chris Smither
I’ll just sit back in the shade while everyone gets laid—that’s what I call intelligent design.

John Perry
Coming up on Philosophy Talk… after the news.

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

John Perry
…except your intelligence. I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. We’re coming to you from the studios of 91.7 KALW—San Francisco’s local, innovative public radio station.

John Perry
Continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus.

Ken Taylor
And from that oasis of thought down philosophers corner, we migrate to this oasis of the air via the signal of this with our ever growing a number of affiliates. And then from the air to the blog, our blog, the blog, dot Philosophy Talk dot O R G, where John’s already kicked off our discussion on this topic.

John Perry
Yes, I’ve got a blog there on intelligent design. And it’s not half bad if I do say so myself, that can, you know, intelligent design is often said, with a bit of a sneer these days by the cognitive end and the inner intellectual, secular humanists and all those guys. But it’s, it’s an argument that philosophically has a venerable history. David Hume, in his dialogues on natural religion considers the argument and his character Philo comes to the conclusion that the cause or causes of order in the universe probably do bear some remote analogy to human intelligence. Although Hume makes the point, that very important point that it doesn’t follow that they are at all similar to the conception of the Christian God.

Ken Taylor
Right, I mean, Hume was no big fan of the argument from design. I mean, he kind of demolishes sit by some people’s life, certainly later, Darwin Absolutely, demolishes it. But I actually think that if you didn’t believe in the argument from design before Darwin, you were just flapping your lips. I mean, life is really complex. You know, we have all these juices in our stomach to digest our food we, we can run we can grab, we can do all this stuff, our eyes could finely tuned to the light. How did that all happen? And to see before Darwin, it was just a mystery. So you might as well I believe the design argument in those days.

John Perry
Well, you know, in the dialogues on natural religion, Philo actually puts forward a little kind of proto natural selection type view. And he comes to the conclusion, well, that really isn’t going to explain everything. And he kind of sets the form that these arguments have continued ever since up to the present day that there’s there’s some feature, that natural selection or evolution just can’t explain that his own candidate wasn’t too plausible. It was that we have two arms, when only one is needed for survival, but still, maybe some argument of that formal work.

Ken Taylor
Yeah. But you know, if he had been around with Darwin, Darwin would have said, it’s because we’re descended from ancestors who have four limbs we go up right to go up right and Tuesday to the ground, you know, natural selection works by working on what’s there. So that argument wouldn’t have been, that argument would not have been too powerful in the post Darwinian age.

John Perry
I completely agree with you. I don’t think two arms is going to demolish the theory of evolution. We’ve come a long way since then, and we must have come a long way from the Scopes Trial to when you couldn’t even teach evolution in some of the public school.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, I mean, nowadays, natural selection is the dominant theory of the day. And the question is really whether it’s kind of reversed. Can you teach intelligent design in schools today? And to help us sort out that question, our roving philosophical reporter, Polly Stryker, went out and talked to people on both sides of that issue. She files this report.

Polly Stryker
The film “Inherit the Wind” is a dramatization of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, about the tension between evolution and creationism. Here’s Dick York getting arrested for teaching Darwinism.

Inherit the Wind
From the first wiggly protozoa here in the sea, to the ape, and finally, to man. As some of you fellows out there probably going to say, that’s why some of us act like monkeys. But what Mr. Charles Darwin was trying to tell us in his own way—

Inherit the Wind
Bertram T. Cates, you’re charged with violation of public act 31428 volume 37 statute number 31428 of the state code, which makes it unlawful for any teacher of the public schools to teach any theory that denies the creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals. I hereby place you under arrest.

Polly Stryker
It seems like a long time ago, but this debate is far from over.

Doug Cowan
My primary focus in teaching evolution is to show evolution, warts and all.

Polly Stryker
Doug Cowan is a high school biology teacher who’s careful to say that he does not teach intelligent design.

Doug Cowan
I dive into, you know, what is accurate? What is factual about evolution will go through all the main pillars of evolutionary theory. And then we’ll come back and we said, Well, let’s look at these evidences even closer. And I would say that Id intelligent design and design theory are the same thing. I don’t mention intelligent design, I will mention design inference or design theory. If it’s brought up, some kids will ask some of the articles I have them read on criticism of Darwinian evolution. We’ll bring it up. And then I say, well, there is a new theory that’s out. It’s growing in popularity, but it’s not very accepted point that’s constitutionally protected, and school districts face jeopardy if they discriminate.

Nick Matzke
I think intelligent design is just a new label for creationism.

Polly Stryker
Nick Matzke is spokesperson for the National Center for Science Education, a watchdog group that keeps track of what’s going on with evolution education around the country.

Nick Matzke
It is a legal strategy that was devised in about 1987 When creation science went down in flames before the US Supreme Court. Proponents of Intelligent Design will tell you that intelligent design is not creationism, that’s probably the most important thing that they will claim about it. And they will say that it’s it’s an attempt to discover intelligence in biology and cosmology. I’m really what I think the core of Intelligent Design is substantively is really the idea of special creation.

Doug Cowan
I don’t use the term intelligent design. That’s like a boogie man. It’s like creationism. And they’re not the same thing. As much as evolutionary biologists want to paint the picture that design theorists are really gussied up creationist they don’t know what they’re talking about. The whole hang up there is the designer. Well, who’s the designer? And I tell kids, you know, if you’re asking me what the designer is, I don’t know, could be Vishnu.

Nick Matzke
The Intelligent Designer is clearly God, it’s clearly the God of Western theism. If you look at the intelligent design movement, when you look at what they’re really after, it’s exactly the same thing that was bugging the creationists in the 1980s. And before, people are afraid that if evolution is true, then God doesn’t exist. And if God doesn’t exist, then there’s no basis for morality, and therefore you’re gonna have societal chaos.

Doug Cowan
Let’s take a biochemical machine that is used, especially by Michael B, the bacterial flagellum, here’s this perfectly designed little motor, and it’s got 40 specific parts, all proteins, how do those proteins get made? How did they get put into place? can you infer design from this specified complexity? What explains their formation was it by CO option, living things, borrowing other things, to end up at a functioning system by blind chance, and the chances of that are practically zero just happening by itself? It would be like saying, you take a 747 jet aircraft, you got all the pieces, you got them in a big pile, self organized into a flying jet.

Nick Matzke
The intelligent design movement will say, well, things look designed. And that’s our positive argument for intelligent design. And the real problem with the design argument is that it’s all one massive analogy between the structures we see in life and the structures we see in human technology. The next strategy that’s in the wings is something probably that we could call quote, unquote, critical analysis of evolution. And basically the idea there as well, if we can’t mention the intelligent designer, which clearly implicates God, at least we can get our objections to evolution in which is 95% of what we were talking about anyway. Even though intelligent design is lost this latest court case, it’s not going away perhaps until it reaches the Supreme Court. I’m creationism doesn’t go extinct. creationism evolves.

Polly Stryker
For Philosophy Talk. I’m Polly Stryker.

John Perry
Thanks, Polly, for that interesting piece. Ken, there’s a lot of controversy about intelligent design, it’s time for us to jump in the fray. I’m John Perry. With me is Ken Taylor.

Ken Taylor
And we’re joined by our guest, Dan Dennett, who’s director of the Center for cognitive studies and professor of philosophy at Tufts University. He’s author of lots of stuff, all kinds of important philosophy, but particularly relevant for today’s topic, “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, and his latest, “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.” Dan, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Daniel Dennett
Good to be here.

John Perry
Welcome. Dan. Let me start things off with a kind of a two part question. First, could you tell us a little bit about the research that has led to these claims by B, he and others that there’s some kind of intractable evidence of design that just can’t be explained evolutionarily and what evolutionists have said about that? And second, give us Europe Can you run a more abstract question? Could there be some kind of structure that was found in living things that just couldn’t be explained except by design?

Daniel Dennett
Yeah, I think that be he is in a long line of skeptics about evolution who’ve tried to find, you can’t get here from there, phenomenon, something that is in his terms, irreducibly complex. And if anybody ever finds a genuinely irreducibly complex phenomenon, it will refute the theory of natural selection. There’s no question about that. The question is, has he found that enhancer is no. And in fact, if you look closely at what he’s written, you can see he himself admits it in several points in his book, he says, Well, at this point, I just can’t imagine how this could be any other way. Well, this is this is a failure of imagination on his part, that’s not the way you do science. So he’s right to look for irreducible complexity, if you want to try to refute the theory. That’s the way to do it. Could there be such a proof? I don’t see why not. But they haven’t come through yet. In fact, one of the ironies is that, for over a century, skeptics have been looking for these irreducibly complex things, what I call sky hooks, you know, they hang from the sky, you can’t get there, building up from the bottom. And instead, what they’ve discovered again, and again, and again, there’s what I call cranes, perfectly natural evolution by natural selection. It just turns out that evolution is much cleverer than people thought it looked.

Ken Taylor
And I take your point, evolution is very clever and Skyhooks, or at least rare. Let’s let’s put it that way, isn’t just be he’s failure of imagination. Aren’t there open questions about how such and such a feature came to be? I mean, there is a lot of complexity, especially in organisms that have had, you know, high on the tree of life, because there have been a lot of walks through evolutionary space. And through some open questions there.

Daniel Dennett
There are, there are there are hundreds or 1000s of open questions. And in fact, it occurred to me recently, that we could we could make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear here. If b He can can raise the enthusiasm and raise the money. There are lots of questions about how specific things evolved that we don’t yet know the answer to. And one of the reasons we don’t is that a lot of bright young evolutionary biologists just don’t want to work on them, because they’re very hard. And the chances are, they’ll spend 2030 years, and they’ll never really get a good explanation.

Ken Taylor
Or they’re even controversies about exactly what the mechanism of selection is, is group selection, Kin selection, you know, all this stuff. Because some of these things, like you can’t figure out how they could have evolved, you know, sort of through The Selfish Gene hypothesis, like altruism or something like that. They’re all these complicated things, that we don’t really have a clue.

Daniel Dennett
In fact, we have too many clues. Yeah, yeah. Okay. We got lots of, we got lots of stories about how it might have done and we just haven’t figured out which is the right one.

Ken Taylor
Okay, how it might have done is designed not even a contender about how it might have been, isn’t it?

Daniel Dennett
Really, it really isn’t, because it has no detail. These others have testable details, they say, look, here’s how the bacterial flagellum might have evolved. And that has implications that then can be tested. We’ve got a lot of untested, concrete hypotheses about how it might have evolved. If you instead said, Well, maybe it didn’t evolve at all, maybe it was just intelligently designed, then that simply turns off the whole enterprise. There’s no, there’s no further science, and there’s no way of testing it.

John Perry
But now you’re saying that the theory of evolution is not finished? There’s lots of lots of gaps in it. Sure. Does that mean it’s a mere theory and not fact?

Daniel Dennett
It means that there are large parts of it, which is just theory, and then there’s the rest of it, which is a proven theory. So it’s a little bit I would say that, that the the basic structures of evolutionary theory are as clearly proven as the fact that the the Earth is round.

John Perry
So so our suppose we took a whole field like astronomy, that rests on the idea that the Greeks were wrong, these aren’t holes in some piece of plastic. These are far off bodies of fire and, and things like that. That’s pretty secure. That’s fact to zillions of open questions.

Daniel Dennett
Yeah, I think evolutionary theory is in that good shape.

Ken Taylor
One, one thing along this line, you know, natural selection is a nice story once you’ve got some living things going, right, and then how they how changing the set of living things happens. But one of the things that intelligent design People sometimes talk about is how the whole thing gets started in the first place. How does life arise from non life at all? And they say there’s no naturalistic story to tell us about that?

Daniel Dennett
Well, again, they’ve got part of the story right and part of the story wrong. It’s not that there’s no naturalistic story to tell. It’s the right now we have an embarrassment of riches. There are too many stories out there that have not yet been sorted out. But there’s there’s no end of interesting plausible, not yet disproven. Stories about how life could evolve in the first place.

Ken Taylor
So why not put again, I’m going to press there, why not put intelligent design not in the alternative to natural selection but as the story about how any life over Well, well, well, what is their story? What’s the any other story? Mean? What’s the what what are some there are the naturalistic stories.

Daniel Dennett
The RNA world story and there’s and there’s stories about using clay as a prebiotic Evolver as a sort of scaffolding. There’s a whole raft of different theories that have been put forward and very ingenious theories. And there’s, there’s eigenes hyper cycles, we’ve got no end of interesting and technical, just making theories about how life could start.

Ken Taylor
Make it clear to me why intelligent design is worse than any of those other as yet to be confirmed story.

Daniel Dennett
Becaus they, the the scientific stories that I’m saying hadn’t been sorted out, they have testable consequences, they have details, they actually make predictions, they actually depend on the known or, or predicted features of molecules of, of the conditions on the planet and so forth. If you simply say, a theory isn’t, it isn’t a theory because, well, I don’t think any of those are true and I don’t think you’ll ever explain it. That’s not an alternative.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Our subject today is intelligent design. Our guest is Daniel Dennett from Tufts University.

John Perry
We’ve talked about what the arguments for design are when we return we’ll ask if intelligent design is science. Could it be? Why or why not?

Ken Taylor
God, science, and your calls—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Inherit the Wind
Men are sort of evoluted from the Old World monkeys. Did you hear that, my friends? Old World monkeys. According to Mr. Cates, you and I aren’t even descended from good American monkeys!

John Perry
That was Frederick March from the 1960 courtroom drama “Inherit the Wind.” I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. You know, I actually played a role in that play when I was in high school John, one Best Supporting Actor for that part.

John Perry
You must have played the Spencer Tracy role because you look so much like Spencer Tracy.

Ken Taylor
No, I played the preacher. Anyway, today we’re talking we’re taking a philosophical look at intelligent design. The federal court in Pennsylvania ruled one waym but how do you feel? Is intelligent design a science? If so, why? If not, why not join us? For 158414134 That’s 415-841-4134.

John Perry
Outside the Bay Area, you can call toll free at 1-800-525-9917. You can also email us at comments@philosophytalk.org. If you are one of the causes or causes of order in the universe, give us a call or send us an email.

Ken Taylor
There you go.Our guest is Dan Dennett from Tufts University. Dan look, I’m gonna go to this question of whether intelligent design is science. There are folks who Biggie and Dembski all those guys, they present themselves as engaged in a scientific endeavor. And they say there’s a scientific controversy. Why do you think?

Daniel Dennett
Well, if there’s a scientific controversy, why don’t they publish their papers in scientific journals in peer reviewed journals? They don’t. In fact, there’s a few there’s a few things that they’ve managed to get published in peer reviewed journals, but they haven’t behaved like scientists, they haven’t responded to their critics in scientific journals. They haven’t got any predictions. They don’t have any experimental results to point to, they’ve in fact, pretty well abandoned the scientific arena. And now we’re trying to win the case in the in the court of public opinion.

Ken Taylor
Maybe that’s because of the prejudice of the scientific establishment. I mean, we don’t have one of them on here to speak for themselves. But the scientific establishment is filled with people, you know, who who are wedded to evolution and natural selection will keep them out?

John Perry
Willing to publish a fraudulent paper about cloning a human being but not willing to publish a serious paper about intelligent design, perhaps?

Daniel Dennett
Well, they haven’t they haven’t been sent the serious paper to publish, apparently.

John Perry
Let me make an analogy for the history of philosophy just to just to get your gray cells at a high fever pitcher. Now, now, Kepler was a real religious nut. And he mainly was trying to show that the way the planets worked, fell into some mathematical ratio that a reasonable God might have liked. Buried in all that was his discovery that the orbits are elliptical. Don’t we have to be a little careful about dismissing people with far out ideas like intelligent design, even if they do come from religion?

Daniel Dennett
Absolutely. But But let’s, let’s see their ideas. Let’s see what they have to offer. There are lots of wild and wonderful and crazy revolutionary hypotheses out there in evolutionary biology land that are not in the textbooks and aren’t taught in the schools because the people haven’t yet been able to marshal the case for them. For it. My favorite is the aquatic ape theory, which says that our ancestors went through a period of going into the sea they were becoming more like sea otters or seals, and they spent some time pretty much living in the water before they came back on land. There’s actually a lot more evidence for that than there is for any of the Intelligent Design.

Ken Taylor
I looked at you, you you’ve in your writings talked about something called the design stance. Yeah. And the physical stance and something else you call the intentional stance. I mean, it doesn’t seem, design is all around us. I believe the inference from, you know, the functioning of this thing, that complex functioning of this thing to the conclusion that design is an inference we make all the time.

Daniel Dennett
Absolutely. But there’s a fatal equivocation in the word design that that Paley was right. The biological world is packed with design. Absolutely. What Darwin showed is how that design can come to exist without a designer. That’s what the theory of evolution is all about. When When Francis Crick makes a joke and talks about Oracle’s second law, which is that evolution is cleverer than you are. He’s not advocating intelligent design. He’s saying that the process of natural selection, which is itself, has no foresight, no intentions is completely stupid, nevertheless creates brilliant designs.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re talking with Dan Dennett about intelligent design, you can join our discussion by calling 415-841-4134. And Professor Curtis from Seattle is on the line now. Welcome to philosophy Talk, Professor Curtis.

Curtis
Greetings, gentlemen. Yeah, I actually just defended my dissertation in philosophy of religion and theology and based my work substantially on Professor Dennett’s theories of consciousness. So it’s pretty relevant.

Ken Taylor
So that’s why we’re calling you Professor Curtis. Obviously, we used to get a first name, but Okay, so what’s your comment or question?

Curtis
Well, actually, I had a question for, for Professor Dennett, which relates to the work that I was that I’ve been doing. And for my part, I mean, I think that intelligent design is bad science and bad theology. But clearly, there’s something important in the fact that we tell stories about where we came from. And that was, and that relates to my question is that I argue that the narrative that formed the narrative web of consciousness, as Bennett describes them, have a history and anthropological history, and that religion has traditionally occupied the place of telling the most important narrative. And I was just wondering what—

Ken Taylor
So you want to claim that because of the role, sort of net role of religion in shaping our collective narratives, even though intelligent design is bogus, a scientist still has a place in our kind of collective consciousness, is that going to play me?

Curtis
I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t argue that we should hold on to Intelligent Design per se, but that we do need to tell stories about where we came from. I personally think we need to tell stories that we have good evidence for, but that we need to tell stories. And that’s why these stories have an enduring appeal.

John Perry
Well one point you make is that, you know, in religion, we find in some ways, the roots of science, at least many people have claimed that that is the idea that there is an explanation that it does make sense. What do you think about all that, Dan?

Daniel Dennett
Well, I like your last point, I think it’s true. I think that in fact, religions have played a very useful role in sort of keeping society together long enough for science to develop, I don’t think we could have had science without having religion first. But that doesn’t mean that that religion is a worthy competitor of science, on matters of scientific fact, or, for that matter, on the matter of the narrative. Now, I agree with the professor about the importance of narrative and, and the evolutionary narrative is an absolutely stunning tale. And in fact, the most recent book by Richard Dawkins is called the ancestors tale. And it’s based loosely on Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, and it traces backwards from us, from homosapiens, back to the very first living life form, and it tells the tales along the way. And it is a gorgeous piece of literature. It’s a wonderful story.

John Perry
Let me read some email it just came in. This is from a guy with an interesting name, Gregory mango, he says, Hi, Guys, please distinguish between the dominant paradigm and evolutionary theory Neo Darwinism, which holds that there are virtually no significant sources of evolutionary forms other than random variation in natural selection, and which seems to be all the intelligent design people know about and other aspects of evolutionary theory, especially self organization theory, which shows how forms can emerge in non random ways. Got any thoughts about that, Dan?

Daniel Dennett
Yeah, there’s some interesting work by Stuart Kauffman and others at the Santa Fe Institute, that show that there are phenomena of self organization and that they no doubt play some sort of role in biological evolution. And this is not a revolution within evolutionary theory. It is simply a wrinkle in addition, I think, yes, we make a big mistake. If we imagine that the we have a blank slate on which natural selection writes everything. No, in fact, the terrain whichever late loops and takes place is itself kind of rather interesting landscape and chaos and complexity theory and self organizing systems helps to describe some of that.

Ken Taylor
But that doesn’t that doesn’t leave any obvious room actually, obviously doesn’t leave room for intelligent design.

Daniel Dennett
No, none at all.

John Perry
There’s a lot more in the evolutionist toolbox than natural selection.

Ken Taylor
415-841-4134 Nick in San Francisco is on the line. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Nick.

Nick
Hi, guys. Thanks for putting me on. I just a quick question. There’s an article that has been completely mind blowing for me. And I’m wondering if you would comment on it. It’s by Paul Bloom, it’s in the Atlantic Monthly of December 2005. Is God an accident? And I think well, it goes into the biological basis of perhaps our belief in God. And I think that’s interesting. You This is a Philosophy Talk program. And I was wondering if you could comment on it from that standpoint, from the standpoint perhaps of the limitations or the way that we think based on evolution, and how that might be one of the points they make in this is we’re all creationists we’ve evolved into being creationists, we must see patterns and things. It’s part of our survival mechanism. So anyway, I was just wondering if you would if you knew the work of Paul Bloom and these other people that he mentioned Scott Atran, and Pascal Boyer.

Daniel Dennett
And now not only do I know the work, I talked about it at some length in my new book and breaking the spell, and I agree entirely that it is appropriate to look at the evolution of religious ideas, and to look in the evolution of our own psychology and our biology. To see why it is that these ideas have such a holdovers why we have, if I may put it this way, such as Sweet Tooth for the idea of God. Why do we have a sweet tooth for for sugar? That’s interesting evolutionary story, which I remind my readers of. And then I point out that we can tell the same sort of story about why we have a sweet tooth for the idea of God.

John Perry
That sounds like a fascinating book. I’ll have to I’ll have to get a hold of it. I admit it. Yeah, my book behind me on my dinner reading. Let me toss out an idea here. Let’s go back to Philo, who seems convinced, although some people think it’s ironical. That cause or causes of order in the universe bear some remote analogy to human intelligence, you can read that two ways. I mean, leave the God part out of it, you can read it two ways you can say we know what human intelligence is. And so we’ve learned something about the cause or causes of order in the universe. But you can look at it a different way, you can say, My gosh, maybe this amazing fact that there’s order in the universe gives us some explanation for the kind of order we find coming out of human intelligence. And in that sense, maybe there’s a deep truth in that much of the argument from design. What do you think of that?

Daniel Dennett
I think that’s exactly right. And in fact, that’s what Crick was getting at with Oracle second rule that evolution is cleverer than you are. And in fact, a large part of my work in the in the philosophy of mind and in cognitive science has been to put forward and defend an idea that our own intelligence is itself, the product of an evolutionary process of natural selection that occurs in our own brains. How many people have had this idea, but the idea that human creativity and that human ingenuity, is itself, the result of a process of very swift Generate and Test evolution in individual brains is an idea which has so many variants that it’s hard to keep track of them all down.

Ken Taylor
I like it. I like that idea. I’m a big fan of that kind of that kind of thinking. But I want to go back to the earlier callers comment about our need for narrative narratives. I take it narratives we can rally around construct a life around construct cultures around a lot of people will say, Gee, I’m not really ready to rally around the the story that makes me an evolved ape, you know, I mean, how can we tell a kind of life affirming uplifting culture and grounding narrative on on the basis of such ideas? I mean, a lot of people will wonder about that.

Daniel Dennett
Well, I think that’s a good challenge can and it’s one that I myself have tried to rise to. And I’ve tried to show that the if we contrast the the trickle down theory of importance, which is the tradition where all importance that we have we comes from our being the creation of something even more important and more wonderful. And if instead we look at the bubble up theory of importance, which says, right, evolution itself, natural selection doesn’t have any importance. But once life gets going, things get more and more complex things get more and more interesting, and and our own evolution in our own lifetimes on our cultural evolution, grounds and makes possible the political discoveries and discussions that lead to morality to the difference between right and wrong. And, and we really do, us human beings, we really do hold an exalted place in this on this planet. We’re the ones that appreciate our own destiny were the ones that will either ruin this planet or save the planet.

John Perry
A long time ago, BF Skinner wrote a book a very scientifically behaviorist oriented book called Beyond freedom and dignity. He thought if you took the scientific perspective, you had to give up some of these concepts. I take it your point of view is quite different that we can have a viable concept of freedom in a viable concept of dignity and morality within the context of a naturalistic evolution based understanding of human nature.

Daniel Dennett
You’re absolutely right, John, I’ve been combating BF Skinner’s ideas for 30 years.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, 415-841-4134. Or if you’re outside the bay Bay Area. One 805 25917. And Pablo in San Francisco is on the line. Welcome to Philosophy Talk. Pablo.

Pablo
Hi, thanks very much. My question which got summed up by your screener, although enhanced by what your guest recently said, essentially, boils down to what is the crux of what a theist and I’m consider myself to be a believer of in God, to to be so anathema to the concept of, of evolution? I sort of, you know, tag that along to your guests, you know, recent comment I, I just don’t see the inherent contradiction, it strikes me as being much more political, that there’s been a certain

John Perry
it’s a good, it’s a good question, Pablo, Dan, is there an inherent contradiction between adopting evolutionary theory and being a theist? The argument from design goes beyond that. And that says that there’s a real argument in the in the nature of biology for intelligent design, but that you can deny that without thinking there’s a real contradiction between being a theist and believing in evolutionary biology, what do you think?

Daniel Dennett
Well, it all comes down to what you mean by a theist? To put it perhaps a little bit rudely. What kind of a job description you have for God? If you think that God is creating individual species and designing with foresight, all the particular details, designing the is sort of supernatural engineer, then there’s a real conflict, because all the work that that God would do that work is done by natural selection just fine.

Ken Taylor
But you could have a, you could have a fine tuner. We had George Ellis, who won the Templeton Prize a couple of years ago, and he believes in this fine tuning argument. Exactly. It’s like, there’s so many universes possible. How did this one that supports life happened, God fine tuned it set the parameters of the fundamental constants so that evolution would be a consequence of it. Fine.

Daniel Dennett
That’s the next that’s the first that’s the first fall back is God is not so much the the designer by retail that the designer by wholesale, he fine tunes the constants of nature so that evolution can then take over the job. However, we now have theories which say, No, we don’t even need God for that role. He doesn’t have to be the law giver, or the law of finder. Because, in fact, what for instance, string theory suggests is that all the tunings are, exist, in some sense. And we just happen to, of course, to live in one of the parts of the universe where, where we can live where, where the things are tuned just right. So the past for God as the fine tuner is also in jeopardy, which leaves really only the role of sort of Master of Ceremonies. If that’s all you mean, by God is sort of a benign overseer who doesn’t intervene and doesn’t have to do anything, then, then of course, you can go on being a theist.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, you’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re discussing intelligent design with Dan Dennett.

John Perry
The idea that the cause or causes of order in the universe bears some remote analogy, human intelligence, that’s Humes formulation, is one that many generations of thoughtful people found persuasive. And as a matter of fact, I teach this not as the truth but as an interesting idea. Well, we’re thinking about every year in introductory philosophy classes Stanford, so I teach it in the schools. Why shouldn’t it be taught in the high schools? Shouldn’t we be teaching intelligent design as an interesting and important idea? What do you think the number is? 415-841-4134? That’s 415-841-4134.

Ken Taylor
We’ll get to more of your intelligently designed calls and emails and there’s lots of them—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Inherit the Wind
We must not abandon faith—faith is the most important thing! Then did God appoint us with the power to think Mr. Beatty? Why do you deny the one faculty of man raises him above the other creatures of the Earth: the power of his brain to reason?

John Perry
Spencer Tracy, as attorney Henry Drummond from Inherit the Wind. I’m John Perry. This is Philosophy Talk. I just before I get into a little quote, I want to point out that in that movie, the two great protagonists William Jennings Bryan And Clarence Darrow, we’re both liberals both way over on the liberal side of things. The argument over evolution those days was not politicized the same way it is. Now, having said that, this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
except your intelligence. And I’m Ken Taylor, we’re discussing intelligent design, join us for 158414134. That’s 415-841-4134.

John Perry
For those of you poor souls outside of the Bay Area, call toll free 1-800-525-9917 That’s 1-800-525-9917 or email us comments at Philosophy Talk dot org.

Ken Taylor
So Dan look, Al Plantiga, who’s a very smart philosopher from the University of Notre Dame has this argument, I don’t want to, I don’t want to bastardize his argument. But I can’t repeat it all here. But the conclusion of the argument is something like because evolution is so controversial, especially in certain sections of our country, and it Avaya, it goes against the grain of many people’s most fundamental beliefs, at least in those places, we should not teach evolution as settled truth in the schools. He also says we shouldn’t teach intelligent design a settled truth, we can kind of teach them both those kind of provisional things that some people believe, what do you think about that teach neither Intelligent Design nor evolution, natural selection as settled truth?

Daniel Dennett
Well, when Copernicus theory was first put forward, it was controversial. And there were those who argued very passionately that it shouldn’t be taught in the schools because it was too upsetting. But children have no trouble with the idea that the Earth goes around the sun. They don’t, they don’t, you know, have nightmares or anything like that. And, and we’re quite used to the fact that anybody thinks otherwise it’s just benighted. It’s just wrong. And I think the the case for evolutionary biology is now so secure, that it’s simply out of date, to suppose that we shouldn’t teach it if it’s if it’s controversial to people that are going to have to suck it up and get used to the case.

Ken Taylor
The case is so overwhelming, if you accept kind of the science, the canons of scientific rationality, but there are people who don’t accept the canons of scientific rationality, and they’re, they’re citizens. They’re one citizens, among other have equal right to their fundamental beliefs. So should we be telling those parents who aren’t quite, you know, kind of 21st century secular scientific rationality types? Too bad for you? I mean, do we have the right to do that in a democratic society?

Daniel Dennett
Actually, I find it we have not just the right I think we have the duty. Right now we are facing, for instance, the danger of a worldwide pandemic of bird flu. And if it happens, it will happen because the current bird flu, which is in birds, will evolve into a virus, which can spread readily in human beings, and there’s no immunity to it in human beings. And if we don’t understand the evolutionary phenomena that are occurring right in front of us, we are we are risking the lives of our children and grandchildren, we’re risking the lives of all it’s very important that people know the facts.

John Perry
Well, it’s very important that biology continue to thrive, and that good intelligent children be brought into the practice of biology and that they know and aren’t misled at all, about the fact that evolutionary theory is absolutely the warp and woof of biology, but I’m not sure anything should be taught as settled truth. I mean, most of what we teach in high school is full of value judgments. We teach kids all sorts of things that really go contrary to my funnel, mental beliefs. We usually teach them that World War One was a good thing. I think that’s just horrible. So I think a certain skeptical thing ought to pervade high school education. And I really do think, just as Judge Jones says, there’s plenty of room to talk about intelligent design outside of the biology class.

Daniel Dennett
That’s fine with me, too.

Ken Taylor
Esther in San Francisco. What do you think about these issues? Welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Esther
Hi, there. I have laryngitis. So forgive me that. Forgive the cell phone if you can hear me. All right. sound fine. Great. Well, I just had to make this somewhat comical comment Preface by the the following facts. I have a bachelor’s in anthropology and philosophy.

John Perry
Good for you.

Esther
It’s pretty funny already. But in addition to that, it just occurred to me listening to this conversation that I have. What I imagine is a similar reaction to the the Intelligent Design proponents as they have to me, which is I just think it’s a crock. Think it’s absurd.

John Perry
Well, thank God, you’ve got all this training and philosophy and anthropology to allow you to put your points so delicately and subtly.

Esther
Yeah, that’s why I thought it was funny. Anyway, thanks for the show.

Ken Taylor
Oh, thanks. Dan look, there’s a serious. There’s a serious question here. I think. I believe in the canons of scientific rationality, I worship canons of scientific rationality, but there’s point. I mean, why is that not just one contestable point of view among others? And do we secular scientifically rational people really have the right to impose those Canons on all thinking creatures, all thinking beings in our, in our body politic.

Daniel Dennett
Actually, I think I think we do can for a fairly simple reason. Everybody depends on respect for the facts for truth. If, if we allow politicians to say, Well, look, I just have a different reality, the the millions that you think I took in bribes, that’s just your reality. No, we, we have an every day notion of truth, which we all pretty much abide by. And it doesn’t matter whether we’re religious or not. If somebody says that there’s supposed to be cocoa in this cup, and there is no cocoa, that’s a lie. And you can be you can be, you know, sued for misrepresentation, the whole structure of a democratic society depends on being an Informed Electorate and information requires that we have a respect for truth, and scientific canons of rationality or simply the every day, canons of truth made rigorous.

John Perry
Well, I think that’s exactly right. I want to go back to something that came up earlier when Ken mentioned Ellis and his fine tuning argument. Yep. Now, evolution is one thing, string theory. And some of these other things are another thing. I’m not saying they’re not good science. But I’m saying when it comes to believing fantastic things, some of the interpretations of quantum theory, some of the explanations of string theory, don’t sound all that more fantastic to me, than the kind of explanation Alice wants to get. So why don’t you draw a line there?

Daniel Dennett
I agree with that. But my point is just some intelligent design, people have thought they had a knockdown drag, which says, look, look at the amazing fine tuning of the constants of nature. How else could we possibly explain that other than by an intelligent God? To which we have three or four answers? One is string theory. One is at least Mullins, evolution of universes theory. There’s several others.

John Perry
So we’d agree it’s not a knockdown argument for design, but at least it’s an interesting question. That’s an interesting question. That’s where you’d want the design argument to come in. It seems to me if you’re serious design argument person these days.

Daniel Dennett
I think that would be a good place for it. It can it can it can live on in the in the debates between the cosmologists until it gets squared away,

Ken Taylor
Kelly in San Francisco is on the line. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Kelly.

Kelly
Hey, thanks for having me on. I was, you know, I was raised to the public school system, it was taught evolution. But one thing I noticed is oftentimes, evolutionary theory is taught as fact. And when I look at religion being any organized system of beliefs, a lot of times I see that evolutionists are almost religious about evolution, and I like science. But when science steps from fact to theory, doesn’t, doesn’t theory, allow for more of a broader perspective, because even facts and science at times have been gone back over and disproven. And so I guess what we’re getting at is, you know, when you this allow a an idea, I mean, the idea of God versus being evolved out of something. Those are all theories, we can’t go back in time and theorize, I mean, and actually say, we were there at the Big Bang, or they’re at creation. And yet so often it’s taught factually, so I guess what I’m getting at is, shouldn’t science be taught as a as academic? And then the theories evolution design? Shouldn’t those be theoretical? Shouldn’t they, you know, instead of being possible.

John Perry
But I mean, but I mean, some theories are true. I mean, the word theory has several meanings. But I think the sense in which you’re using it, it’s a it’s a body of conjectures that’s put out and, and tried, some of them turned out to be true.

Ken Taylor
Diane in Oakland is on the line. Welcome to Philosophy talk, Diane.

Diane
All right, thank you. I don’t necessarily think that it’s a great thing that spirituality is avoided in school. I think that there are a lot of phenomena that science can’t explain. Along with that, I think that we live in a multicultural society, and that maybe some theories aside from intelligent design could be taught, again, as theory that come from other religious backgrounds than Christianity.

Ken Taylor
And I’ll take my own stuff here. Dan, this goes back to this goes back, I think to constructing our narrative together, what does the evolution guy say, to us who are trying to construct narratives about your book about Darwin is called the meanings of life. I mean, part of the story thing we have to do is construct narratives. And well, how does evolution I mean, that’s just it doesn’t help us.

Daniel Dennett
I think evolution is full of stunningly interesting stories about how various things evolved, including by the way the bacterial flagellum, which is He’s number one example. It’s quite a fascinating story about how that evolved. Not impossible to say at all. We don’t know the details yet. We know a lot of the details.

Ken Taylor
But but when I tell us how to live a human life, earlier caller.

Daniel Dennett
I wanted to say something which might surprise you. Well, I think we should have more religion taught about in school, in all schools, I think grade school children and high school children should have as part of the curriculum, a good deal of information about religion, about all religions, is that they think that would be a wonderful thing to understand.

Ken Taylor
Is that because you want to undermine their belief, and I suspect you have a hidden agenda, I don’t know that you want to show people that religion is an arena of irrationality, not an arena of rationality.

Daniel Dennett
I want religious people to confront the fact that whatever religion they are, they’re in a minority, and that there are more people who believe something else.

John Perry
Well, you know, when we go to, I want to go back to that color too, because I have a certain sympathy with one of his ideas. It’s not that I think the theories of science are our religious hypotheses, where I would get into is something we just announced that, you know, we’re sending this mission to Pluto, these things are very costly. We build these huge things to find out more about quantum reality. It’s hard for me to see anything but a religious impulse, a religion that says that knowing everything is very important. That explains why we invest money that way. It’s a little bit like building these huge cathedrals in the Middle Ages, when they could have used the money for so many more human purposes. So I think he’s right there is a religion involved in science, not in the theories of science, but in the funding of science. What do you think of that dead?

Daniel Dennett
Well, it all depends what you mean by religion, if you mean a passion for something that you think is more important than you are? Yes. But that’s, I think that if that’s what what religion is, then of course, there are lots of religions that nobody would call religions. Science is one and baseball is another and football is another. I think it’s great that people can I don’t think I don’t important to devote their lives to.

John Perry
I don’t think people devoting your life is one thing, but I don’t think people give you these arguments that it’s really part of the human quest to find out more and more and spread the, you know, baseball forever, so but we probably will have to bring it to a close out. Nice topic of baseball.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, Dan, thank you for joining us. It’s been really great having you.

Daniel Dennett
I’m glad we finally got together.

Ken Taylor
Our guest has been Daniel Dennett, Director of the Center for cognitive studies, and a professor of philosophy at Tufts University. He’s author of many things, including Darwin’s dangerous idea of evolution in the meanings of life and his most recent, breaking the spell religion as a natural phenomena.

John Perry
We also want to thank all the callers and we had a lot of callers today that we didn’t get a chance to talk to. And we also had several interesting emails we couldn’t get around to. Very sorry about that.

Ken Taylor
So John, you’re wiser. I know, you started out kind of believing this design arguments stuff soreness, giving it a lot of credence, what do you think now?

John Perry
Well, I just I think that you first you don’t want to, you don’t want to commit the genetic fallacy that’s taking the validity of argument. As somehow, depending on the source, it may be that the people as the Judge Jones in Pennsylvania points out, the people who put forward the Intelligent Design argument were religiously motivated, were funded by the same Institute’s that funded creationism. Still, is there a germ of interest in the argument? I think when you interpret it in Alice’s way, and you really think about string theory and all that stuff, it’s something that deserves a little bit of attention.

Ken Taylor
I think it deserves a little bit of attention. But I do think, you know, I really do believe that before Darwin, the design argument was really intellectually respectable. I don’t think it is anymore. And and I think we’re having a hard time coming to grips with that in our in our culture and society.

John Perry
Well, if certainly, if the design was to come in, in the in the design of species. I’d have to agree with that.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, but this conversation continues on our blog, the blog dot philosophy talks about o r g, where our motto is Cogito ergo Blago, I think therefore I blog John’s already got the conversation started, it’ll go on go check it out. The blog dot Philosophy Talk dot org.

John Perry
Philosophy talk is a presentation of Ben Manila productions and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University.

Ken Taylor
Our executive producer is David to Demarest.

John Perry
Special thanks go to Rujun Shen, Neil van Leeuwen, Nicole Sawaya, Ben Temchine, and Alan Farley.

Ken Taylor
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association.

John Perry
Also from various groups at Stanford University, the Friends of Philosophy Talk, and the members of Ka LW local public radio San Francisco, where our program originates.

Ken Taylor
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

John Perry
The conversation continues on our website www dot Philosophy Talk dot org. I’m John Perry

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening.

John Perry
And thank you for thinking.