A little while ago, I saw some remarks posted online about "Intelligent Design" (or "ID"). You may have heard of this: it is an attempt to make the traditional Argument from Design (an argument for the existence of God) into a respectable scientific theory. One of my friends is strongly in favor of ID as an idea, and he tells me he spends a lot of time on pro-ID websites (presumably talking with people who agree with him). Anyway, he pointed me to this piece somebody had written which linked ID to some of its intellectual antecedents, and asked me what I thought of it.
The essay was OK, I guess, as far as it went. There was only one lone commenter who had posted anything in reply, and that was a short note saying nothing one way or the other about ID but simply pointing out a couple of elementary flaws in the essay's argument. But there was something I really wanted to ask (although I didn't):
Who cares? What difference can it possibly make?
Here's the thing: according to the little blurb after the article, the author is not a professional biologist. He is not a paleontologist. He has no practical reason for caring one way or the other how life on Earth got started. So why does he work himself into such a lather over it? Maybe he's like my friend, who always complains about the arguments made by the pro-Darwinian, anti-ID camp: they are wrong on the facts (so he tells me), they are smug, they are condescending ... and so he just has to spend all his free time lambasting them across the Internet to prove to everybody how wrong they are. Excuse me? Like this is going to change anybody's opinion about anything? Like this is going to generate even the smallest amount of light to go along with all that heat and noise? I don't know about you, but when I meet someone who is smug and condescending and wrong my preference is to spend as much time away from him as possible -- not to hang around him obsessively cataloguing his faults. It's just a happier and pleasanter way to live.
Somewhere along the line I think my friend -- and the author of this article -- have lost a sense of perspective; and among other things, I think that loss is related to a misunderstanding of what this kind of knowledge is for. It's not for its own sake: knowledge is not some kind of ultimate good that needs no justification. If it were, then the most knowledgeable people would be the happiest; and if I think about my friends and family as examples (choosing them as a small but easy sample) I'm pretty sure that's not the case. But if knowledge is for the sake of something else (and not itself), then in some sense the justification behind learning anything is what we can do with it.
This doesn't always mean building a better mousetrap. The justification for learning Greek, for example, is that then you can read Greek and there's a lot of good stuff written in Greek. The justification for certain particularly recondite branches of mathematics -- stuff that could never find its way into mechanical of industrial application -- is that it is beautiful; and contemplating a beautiful thing, be it a sculpture, a sonnet, a sonata, or a theorem, brings joy.
But neither classic Darwinism nor ID is a particularly beautiful theory, so that justification is not available. Remember too that in talking about natural science we are not talking about The Truth, whatever that is. Natural science is always provisional. There is always the possibility that a new discovery tomorrow will overturn some allegedly established fact of today. This is why the focus, in science, must be resolutely on usefulness. If a theory can prove itself useful, that's good enough; it's all that a theory has to do. And therefore the only point at issue between two scientific theories is which one does a better job of explaining and predicting the world around us. If either contestant could prove itself to be more practical in developing new antibiotics, say, or in mapping the spread of diseases across a population as they develop immunities to known cures -- well in that case the palm goes to whichever one does a better job, and the argument is over. And if, on the other hand, the argument has nothing useful about it -- if neither contestant makes the slightest difference to the life of the working biologist, epidemiologist, or doctor -- then the whole thing is a waste of time.
Plato cautions us somewhere that we should never expect perfect knowledge about the natural world ... that we may have to content ourselves with a "likely story". It's a practical approach -- and a kind of humility about knowledge that would forestall a lot of pointless bickering. Too bad nobody quotes it in the middle of these kinds of arguments.
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