Intelligent Design has made the news recently, with a well-published scientist at Iowa denied tenure for being an ID advocate.

Philosophy

The debate brings out all the usual suspects, with comments sections being dominated by strident "ID isn't science!" countered by "Evolution is just a theory!". Unfortunately, neither side seems prepared to explain what an affirmation would look like. "Yes, ID isn't science, so tell me, what is science?" Or conversely, "That's right, evolution is just a theory, so what isn't just a theory?"  Now it seems to me that one should be able to define both sides of a distinction or the difference doesn't matter. That is, as Karl Popper would say, any useful theory must know both what evidence would help and what would hurt its thesis, what is verifiable and what is falsifiable. And responding to those meta questions, requires the philosophy of science.

This is the first hurdle, because Kant has poisoned the well; those who know something about science know little philosophy and those who know philosophy, know little science (or more precisely, think that Kant is the last word on the philosophy of science). It is in this context that the Cardinal of Vienna writes a most eloquent plea for Aristotelean causes. I could almost weep for joy that someone understands the poison of Kant, the passion of Aristotle, and the mind games of Newton. There is something to be said for a religion that doesn't stop teaching Aristotle just because it fell out of favor for 300 years. Here's a sample:

But alas, the Cardinal is influenced by the 20th century Catholic apologists such as Tielhard de Chardin, or Lemaitre, who think that evolutionism can be separated from evolution, that the materialism driving Darwin can somehow be separated from the science of natural selection. They are no doubt influenced by the deep and profound progress made by materialist science in the 20th century, and like many of that age, believe that progress must reveal some validity to the method that gives it shape. After all, didn't Pope John Paul II say that evolution as science was not incompatible with scripture?

I would vehemently disagree, and suggest that many bad philosophies are able to operate for a few generations on "borrowed capital". Thus, for historical example, the Spanish empire under Charles V and  Philip II never produced any net value for the world, but in a empire-sized borrowing spree, illustrated the dangers of leveraged buyouts by transferring wealth from the New World to the Old while spreading slavery, disease, inflation and bad theology. In the same way, the militant caliphates and Ottoman empire did equally great damage to the world economy in previous centuries. Therefore it is my claim (and possible Stanley Jaki's as well) that the Enlightenment materialism fed off the investments of the medieval church, co-opting all the progress made by the church for the secular rationalism of Kant. If this be so, then one should look with suspicion any "advance" of evolutionary theory, as if the bad metaphysics of materialism could produce anything of value.

But in time, suspicion turns to certainty when the creditors catch up with the borrower. Philip II declared bankruptcy some 5 times, destroying not only Spain, but Continental banking and the Catholic church as well. The caliphate dissolved into the mess we today call Baghdad. Likewise biology has found it increasingly harder to advance with the Darwinian paradigm, despite some rapid progress in the early 20th century borrowing from Catholic monk Gregor Mendel's work,  reaching glum stalemates on areas as varied as "the origin of life" problem, synchronizing morphological and genetic clocks, or deciding "minimal B-trees" of evolutionary inheritance. Things that should only get clearer with additional data, get murkier, evidence that there are serious problems with Darwinian presuppositions. Even the "best typical examples" that get duplicated in high school biology books are all shown to be frauds, making Darwinian evolution more and more a candidate for Thomas Kuhn's paradigm shift.

So rather than taking the good Cardinal's convoluted attempt to rescue the good bits of evolutionary science from the obviously bad metaphysics of materialist evolution, I think it is high time to scrap the entire endeavor and recover the riches of full Aristotelean biology. That is, Aristotle's biology had four causes, Darwin only two, making Darwin a subset of Aristotle. With the violation of the materialist reductionism at every level, beginning with Quantum Mechanics and moving all the way up to Lamarckian self-control of evolution, there is no longer any reason to neglect the other two Aristotelean causes: the formal and the final cause. And in fact, there is much good science to be gained in incorporating them.  (For one thing, it eliminates all the convoluted self-referential circumlocution of calling final causes "apparent cause" before discussing Nature as if it were God.) Nor do I think hysterics over the medieval danger of making final causes superior to the others remains likely, given the history of the last three centuries without final causes. There just isn't any good reason left to lobotomize half the brain, to deny purpose to science.

And that is precisely what Intelligent Design is doing, bringing back Aristotle's four causes to the realm of science. One would think that even if the materialist science community is howling "Not fair!", at least the good Cardinal would approve. But his piece is strangely silent on the subject, perhaps swayed by a vocal opposition to ID, or the identification of ID with some Protestant scientists, or perhaps by the reticence of Vatican scholars that have vested interest in the Darwinian paradigm.

And so we have the curious situation that the one group of scholars who best understand the limitations of modern philosophy are unwilling to accept the scientists who best understand the limitations of modern science.

Science

After saying that ID is a perfectly useful scientific attempt to broaden the definition of science to include the other 50% of Aristotle's causes, we still haven't said whether our Iowa State University professor is doing good science. It is undeniable that "Privileged Planet" is a apologia for design (and hence Aristotle), and it is also undeniable that it irritates other astronomers and physicists on his tenure committee. But is it good science?

Richard Hoover, an astrobiologist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, has published findings on both extremophile life and extraterrestrial life. Extremophiles are known that can live at -30C to +150C. (The upper range is unpublished because the gene sequencing enzymes used to uniquely catalog new bacteria do not work on this bug from undersea hydrothermal vents.) Similarly, black crumbly meteorites, the rare carbonaceous chondrites that land on Earth about once every 50 years, have been photographed with an electron microscope and large algae mats of fossilized life, hundreds if not millions of years old. (One fossil acritarch recovered from the meteorite was last seen on Earth 200 million years ago). Since these CI meteorites are thought to be extinct comets, Hoover suggests that the solar system, and possibly the entire galaxy, is filled with comets bearing living bacterial communities.

Thus the major thesis of "Privileged Planet", that we are living in a unique zone of temperature that sustains life, is not nearly unique as first thought. I pressed him which parts of the solar system are then truly inhospitable, sterile, life-free. He said near the Sun, of course, probably Mercury and most of Venus excluding the cloud tops, and maybe the interior of the rocky planets, which for the Earth would be deeper than 5 miles (the upper crust being full of chemolithotrobes). And that's about it. Life could exist on Mars, on Jupiter's moon Europa, all the comets in between, and even Saturn's moon Titan where the recent Huygen's probe detected argon40 and the amino acid alanine, suggesting a deep interior ocean of liquid water with life. Perhaps Earth isn't so privileged after all.

But Gonzalez' detractors didn't make any of these points, and for good reason. Because Hoover's discoveries undermine Darwinian theory just as much as "Privileged Planet", making the smooth historical fiction of random evolution a series of abrupt turns and singular events. That is, Darwin is actually not famous for his science, but for his philosophy, despite the defense of scientists who attempt to elevate Darwin above the fray.  For evolution wasn't Darwin's idea, it had been previously discussed by Lamarck. and natural selection was Malthus' idea. What Darwin did, was to find an argument that proposed design by accident, thereby removing the designer. Now mind you, it was a proposal motivated by metaphysics, and 150 years of scientific work have shown that the hypothesis is fatally flawed. Design can't come about by accident, by natural selection or any other random search algorithm invented by computer scientists. But at the time Darwin proposed it, it was considered possible, and therefore one could raise doubts about the necessity of a designer and the entire Teleologicall Proof of God's existence. This was not science, it was philosophy, and its major appeal was to destroy the last philosophical barrier to radical materialism, to make it respectable to be an atheist (which for 2500 years had been the least respectable philosophy on the planet).

So the irritation with "Privileged Planet" is that it denies the respectability of atheism. Of course that can never be stated so baldly, so one finds all sorts of other things to say about ID which are unsupported, but underneath is this deep insecurity, this fear, this outrage that one's religion is being blasphemed. 

Sociology

Now after discussing Philosophy and Science, we turn to the practice of science, the sociology of scientists and faculty members. It's a dog-eat-dog out there, and academic faculties are even more Darwinian than most companies, if for no other reason than they have fewer ethical compunctions. So when the academic community signal that it is morally upstanding to attack ID, it is like pouring blood in shark-infested waters. The feeding frenzy of scientists looking to improve their own position at Gonzalez' expense is only embarrassing  to outsiders. Like the Salem witch trials, the attacks are not principally about the fear of ID, so much as unscrupulous faculty securing tenure slots for one's own specialty at the expense of his. After all, there are a limited number of tenure slots available as determined by state legislatures, so its a zero-sum game. Having been the subject of such academic power struggles myself, I know the relative ease with which he was branded a pariah and dismissed from Iowa State. It is a grave mistake to think that academia is unbiased and impartial, or that it follows the rules outlined in its own faculty handbooks. Once again, it is the curse of centrally planned communist economies that turn faculty hires into zero-sum games. If it surprises the American public, it is no surprise at all to my (formerly) communist colleagues, who are all apparently more adept at this game than I.

So there are complex reasons for Gonzalez' failed bid for tenure. None of them flattering to academia, but all very understandable.