Truth in Science

The Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, David Sedley, has published a scholarly account of the debate over intelligent design among classical philosophers.

“David Sedley’s treatment of ancient views on intelligent design will transform our current thinking”, writes Oxford University’s Dr Thomas Johansen on the book’s cover.

The book, published by the University of California Press, is titled “Creationism and its critics in antiquity”. In the preface Professor Sedley makes clear that he has a particular definition of “creationism” in mind:

What I intend by creationism is neither [creation out of nothing or creation at some past time], but rather the thesis that the world’s structure and contents can be adequately explained only by postulating at least one intelligent designer, a creator god. This is indeed the primary issue that divides modern “creationists” from their Darwinian critics. It also divided the greatest thinkers of antiquity.

As a history from 500 to 300 BC, this book is a powerful refutation of the view that intelligent design was invented in the United States in the late 1980s.

The arguments between ancient philosophers have a surprisingly modern ring, as Dr Armand Leroi (evolutionary biologist at Imperial College London) points out in his review in Nature [Nature 452, 153 (13 March 2008)]:

Listen to Empedocles describing a time when the world was filled with a diversity of creatures with improbable combinations of features, most of which were then winnowed out, and you hear the late Stephen Jay Gould illuminating the body plans of the Burgess Shale fossils. Listen to Aristotle heaping scorn on Democritus for supposing that living things self-assemble from accidental combinations of atoms, and you hear Fred Hoyle's gambit that "a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein". Truly it has been, as Darwin said, just "one long argument".

How did the ancients argue for intelligent design? Here are two examples.

Xenophon’s Socrates would take a statue or painting, which everyone would attribute to an artist or craftsman, and argue that the human body, with its greater complexity and functionality, must have been formed by a greater artist or craftsman.

The Stoics would take Archimedes’ mechanical model of the world’s rotations in space. Even an ignorant barbarian would not doubt that this was the work of intelligence. Yet the celestial motions of the world are a vastly more complex and superior machine, and therefore we can infer that they are the work of a greater intelligence than Archimedes.

These arguments are similar to the recent argument that complex, specified information in computer programs and in the DNA of living organisms both allow us to infer intelligent design

The arguments against intelligent design in the ancient world also have close similarities to those used today. The Atomists of 3rd-1st Century BC used the idea of infinitely many worlds as a way of explaining away highly improbably structures, just as the idea of multiple universes is used today. Lucretius also used the idea of natural selection: “that accident on a sufficiently vast scale accompanied by the systematic survival of the fittest could account for the presence of apparently purposive structures in nature” (p. 151). Sedley argues that this idea was not original even to Lucretius, but that he gained it from the earlier poet Empedocles.

Clearly, the modern debate over intelligent design is not new. Professor Sedley argues that it developed when thinkers first began to question something that had previously been taken for granted: that there is a supreme governing power present in the world.