Review: Signature in The Cell

I highly recommend Steven Meyers's book Signature in the Cell. Nevertheless, in this post I'm going to focus on a aspect of his argument that seems to be a failure.

Setting aside the question of how life evolved, Meyers focuses on the origin of life. He shows how even the simplest known living things have an extremely complex teleology: they appear to be designed. Darwinian natural selection cannot explain this apparent design because for natural selection to get off the ground, there must already be a living (self-reproducing) system in existence. Meyers points to the interdependence of, on the one hand, the proteins that act as machines to perform the functions maintaining an organism's life, and, on the other hand, the DNA and RNA molecules that contain the information without which those proteins cannot be constructed. He demonstrates the implausibility of the RNA-world hypothesis, and of metabolism-first alternatives. He claims that the hypothesis of a designer provides the best explanation for the apparent design in biology. And he says that this is a properly scientific inference, which takes the same form as inferences in geology and other sciences that study the past, for it appeals to the vera causa criterion championed by Darwin himself: the best explanation for ancient events should appeal to causes now known to be in operation. Minds are the only things now known to be capable of originating complex teleology (i.e., apparent design). And since other possible explanations are either unavailable before the origin of life (natural selection) or poor explanations (chance, necessity, or combinations thereof), the theory of intelligent design (henceforth ID) should be accepted on scientific grounds as the best explanation for apparent design in biology.

Meyers has consistently distinguished ID from any religious or philosophical implications that might be drawn from it. It is analogous, in his view, to the big-bang theory: the old steady-state universe was a more intellectually comfortable home for an atheist; the big-bang theory seems to point in the direction of a first cause that transcends the physical world. But when one makes this inference to a first cause (whether justified or not) one has stepped outside of science. But the fact (if it is a fact) that big-bang cosmology entails, or suggests, something like the existence of God, does not make the big-bang theory itself non-scientific. Similarly, the design hypothesis is a scientific inference from the empirical evidence. It does not seek to identify the nature of the designer. It only postulates that some mind is, or some minds are, responsible for the very complex teleology that is present in all known living things. As far as the ID theory goes, those minds could be physically embodied, like our own minds. If that seems implausible, then the ID theory might seem to point to a transcendent designer, as the big-bang theory might seem to point to an ex-nihilo creator; but the fact that that inference from the ID theory is beyond science does not make the inference to ID non-scientific.

Now, my own view is that science and philosophy overlap that philosophical assumptions are equally present in evaluating the evidence for both Darwinism and ID, and that teleological and cosmological arguments for God's existence, and their rebuttals, can be legitimately called scientific arguments. But for this blog post, I am going to assume, arguendo, that a truly scientific inference can be distinguished from one that goes beyond science. And I aim to demonstrate that ID cannot be a good inference if it is of a purely scientific nature.

Philosophy of Education I

In this first post, I begin to define what I don't mean by “education.” In the next, I'll begin to ask what an education is.

Practical Training
Such things as typing, driving a car, auto-repair, carpentry, are sometimes taught in schools, and are sometimes called “education.” They certainly are a matter of teaching and learning, but this sort of practical training isn't what a philosophy of education needs to address. Peoples' reasons for taking a class in such things may vary widely, but none of that makes much of a difference in how they are taught. There a well defined body of knowledge/know-how, and conveying that information and those skills is a rather straigtforward matter.

Unfortunately, the way “subjects” (history, literature, music, mathematics, science, etc.) are often taught in schools makes it seem as if they are nothing more than a certain sort of training. This is especially the case in mathematics and science, the idea being that we are training people so that they can do certain useful and important jobs in our society: Teach 'em biology, chemistry, physics and math so that they can become doctors, pharmacists and engineers. Honest work, all; but it turns out the best way to prepare people for the higher level of training they will need in those jobs is to give them an education the purpose of which is not to prepare them for those kinds of jobs, but to pass down to them the cultural and intellectual heritage of a free-born mind. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Suffice it to say that education isn't just a form of practical training.

Bildung
“Education” is sometimes used in a very broad sense to mean what in German is called Bildung. It means something like character formation, in a very broad sense of “character.” It includes the inculcation of moral virtues, and also of hygiene, the forms of politeness, cultural ways of signifying gender differences, and much more besides. In short, it is everything that forms individuals into a good persons and good members of their particular society. Taken as a whole, this is not the sort of thing that can be done by a school or by a tutor. In fact, it can't even be done by parents alone, though they play the primary role in the younger years. Still, an important part of Bildung occurs when the parental role is diminishing as a young person transitions to full adulthood and must learn to interact with other adults as peers.

Some theories of education lean very heavily on the notion that education is for all of life. Someone has summarized Wolterstorff's view in these words: “Education for life is, for Wolterstorff, not simply education for students' future lives but also for their present lives, and not simply for the lives of their rational, moral souls but for their full lives as whole persons in their communities and in the midst of ordinary human society. Christian education is for Christian life in God's world.” Since education is for the whole person, and since persons are body-and-soul in unity, not souls that just happen to have largely irrelevant bodies attached to them, Wolterstorff concludes that physical education should be part of the school curriculum.

Now, if “education” means Bildung, then it is certainly true that education is for all of life. And since Christ is Lord over all of life, I believe that the Bildung of a Christian should be a Christian Bildung. But what schools do is not, cannot be, and should not try to be, all of education in that broad sense. The special charge of a school or teacher is not a child's character formation. To say that this is not their special charge is not to say that they should remain entirely aloof from it. Anyone who performs the role of a caretaker for children is ipso facto involved in their character formation. Consider the analogy of a child, about twelve years old, in an agrarian society, whose family cannot afford to give him the leisure to get a thorough liberal education. The child must do productive labor. So he goes to work for a neighboring family, who could use some help on their farm. The adults in that family are in charge of him while he's working for them, and they have responsibility for his character formation during that time. Teachers have the same sort of responsibility. But in addition they have a special responsibility as teachers. And that special responsibility is to teach them, to give them an education. But what is an education?