What Was Ward Thinking?

Recently, a debate on intelligent design was held at Town Hall, Seattle, between Dr. Peter G. Ward, University of Washington astrobiologist, and Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, philosopher of science and Director of the Center for Science & Culture.

Having listened to the debate, it is clear to me that Ward was out of his element. On the positive side, Ward was generally warm and amiable during the debate, a significant improvement over his shrill rhetoric of several months ago, when he denounced proponents of intelligent design with name-calling, ad hominem attacks, and ridiculous comparisons to the political regimes in Iran and China. Notwithstanding his improved public manners, however, it was difficult to identify a single cogent argument made by Ward during the entire debate. He clearly had little command of the scientific and logical arguments underpinning intelligent design, and instead spent his time trying to press the tired propaganda point about intelligent design being religion.

Apparently so confident was Ward that all he needed to do was label his opponents as religious zealots and the debate would be won, that he did not deem it necessary to actually prepare any meaningful critique or analysis of intelligent design. As a result, the debate came off as a rather one-sided affair, with Meyer calmly making scientific point after point, while Ward – clearly outclassed on the substantive side – vainly attempted to stay afloat by flailing away at religious accusations and similar irrelevancies.

At one point in the debate – a particularly ironic turn of affairs – Ward even claimed that a genetic code could be created and altered by an intelligent being. Now, what Ward actually said was that NASA researchers have "taken DNA and they’ve changed the code, they’ve made it a different code. They’ve also made 5-stranded DNA. You don’t have to have DNA as we have our kind of DNA. And it makes perfectly usable organisms. This is all the bacterial size, and it’s kind of the dirty little secret that we’re no longer just having life as was originally evolved on this planet, but we have artificially evolved life on planet earth now, too."

Now, let’s place Ward’s comment in context. What Ward was responding to was Meyer’s contention that DNA did not write itself and that the best explanation for its existence was an intelligent cause. The moderator then questioned Ward whether the DNA encoding had come about "by dint of some cosmic coincidence." In that context, Ward made the comment about NASA researchers creating a new code and 5-stranded DNA.

Beyond Ward’s wholly incoherent statement about the designers of a new code having "artificially evolved life" on the earth, what would possess Ward to argue that an intelligent agent can create and alter a genetic code? Why, in attempting to challenge Meyer, would Ward put forth a proposition that is supportive of intelligent design?

One possibility, of course, is that Ward was simply so flustered that he made an unintentional blunder. The other, more likely, possibility is that Ward actually believes that if a human designer is capable of creating and altering a genetic code, that this somehow challenges, rather than supports, intelligent design. This raises the next question, namely how could Ward be so confused about what does and does not support intelligent design?

The answer to the latter question is this: Ward mistakenly assumes that intelligent design is religion. Starting from that false premise, Ward then mistakenly believes that if he can provide evidence that any cause other than God is capable of designing and altering DNA, that this will be evidence against intelligent design. He thus walks straight into the self-made trap of citing a potential intelligent cause for the existence of DNA, thinking all the while that this will somehow challenge Meyer’s argument that God must have made DNA. Unfortunately, however, Ward apparently did not actually hear what Meyer was saying during the debate, but rather only heard an echo in his own mind of false NCSE talking points. Meyer did not in fact make the argument that God must have made DNA, only that it must have had an intelligent cause. And Ward, hearing echoes of his own biases and thinking his moment had come to challenge the (non-existent) argument that God had made DNA, triumphantly trotted out recent empirical evidence of the fact that an intelligent agent can create DNA.

What lessons can be gleaned from all of this? For one thing, we could recommend that debaters respond to the issues their opponents actually raise, rather than responding to what they think their opponent should say or what they think their opponent secretly means to say. More importantly, the Ward/Meyer debate underscores a sad fact about the state of the larger debate: numerous critics of intelligent design are not actually criticizing the premises or conclusions of intelligent design, but rather are attacking a religious caricature. As a result, not only are they unsuccessful in challenging intelligent design, they render themselves incapable of even addressing the basic issues in question. They attempt to debate the social and political side, rather than addressing the scientific and logical issues that interest most proponents of intelligent design. To be sure, a lack of good faith and understanding arises at times on both sides of the aisle, but Ward’s approach seems unfortunately typical.

Many similar examples abound. One can listen, for example, to Nick Matzke of the NCSE debate Dr. Meyer and Dr. Jay Richards, here and here. Frankly, I am rather embarrassed for Matzke: here is an individual who has spent the better part of a decade and is still unable to comprehend the basic issues underlying intelligent design, as evidenced here. Or perhaps unwilling. Matzke, like the rest of the NCSE clan and like Ward in the recent debate, is committed to spreading the false idea that intelligent design is nothing more than religion. Unfortunately for Matzke and the NCSE, having taken a particular position in a court trial and having staked, at least in part, careers on a particularly infectious meme, it is difficult to correct course later on, even though the meme is demonstrably false.

Eric Anderson

June 3, 2006