Description
A certain genre of book promises to follow the evidence wherever it leads, and then leads to exactly where you’d expect from the cover. This is one of those books, but it’s worth taking seriously anyway, because it’s one of the more carefully assembled examples of its kind, and because what makes it fail is the same thing that makes it interesting.
Stephen C. Meyer, a philosopher of science associated with the intelligent design movement, builds a three-stage argument. First: modern cosmology says the universe had a beginning, which materialism didn’t expect and theism did. Second: the physical constants that allow for life sit on a knife’s edge of fine tuning, which materialism also didn’t expect. Third: biological information — the digital code of DNA, the explosion of new forms in the Cambrian — has not been produced by any unguided process we know. Each stage points, Meyer says, to a designing mind. Together they point to the kind of mind religious traditions have always called God.
He is patient with this. The book is built like a graduate seminar — chapter summaries, figures, recapitulations, Bayesian symbolism — and it rewards patience. He has done his reading. He takes the strongest counterarguments seriously, particularly Hawking-Hartle and Vilenkin’s quantum cosmologies, and he lingers on Vilenkin’s own work long enough to draw out an admission worth flagging. Of his interpretation of Vilenkin’s findings, Meyer writes that they suggest the need for a preexisting mind — “though he likely would not agree.” That parenthetical does a lot of work the book never quite acknowledges. The physicist whose results are being marshaled would not endorse the conclusion drawn from them, and Meyer, having noticed this, proceeds.
The deeper problem sits in the design inference itself, the move on which everything depends. Meyer leans on Mt. Rushmore: we recognize the presidents’ faces as designed because we know erosion doesn’t make faces and humans do. Fair enough. But the cosmic argument requires us to extend this in a direction the analogy can’t support. We recognize design at Mt. Rushmore because we have independent knowledge of the maker (humans), the patterns (presidential portraits), and the alternative (weather). For the universe, we have none of these. We have one universe, no sample space, no comparison cases, and no independent acquaintance with cosmic designers. The detective on Meyer’s hike comes upon a cabin with a steeping cup of tea on the table; from this he infers an inhabitant, plausibly. But he infers an inhabitant because he has met inhabitants and made tea. The cosmic version of this hike is one in which every cabin you’ve ever seen contains tea, and you are now asked to infer the existence of a tea-maker outside the world of cabins.
Meyer is fond of writing P(E|T) >> P(E|N) — the evidence is more expected on theism than on naturalism. The Bayesian dressing is doing real work here, but the work is not what it appears. Knowing what theism predicts requires knowing the mind of God, and Meyer’s God conveniently predicts whatever the evidence shows. He asserts that a god would produce a finely tuned universe — though there’s no obvious reason a god couldn’t equally produce a universe where life appeared without any tuning being necessary. The “expectation” is built after the evidence is in, which is the failure mode the formalism was supposed to prevent.
Meyer denies that any of this is a god-of-the-gaps argument. He is right that the rhetorical critique is often careless — his chapter on Newton corrects a popular misreading by Neil deGrasse Tyson with patience and primary sources. Still, his argument runs: naturalistic explanations have so far failed at X; therefore design is the better inference. The tailoring is more careful than usual. The structural problem he denies is the one he reproduces.
What I keep returning to is the closing chapter. Meyer ends with the story of his own adolescence — being fourteen, lying awake, terrified by the thought that human achievement would amount to nothing under the heat death of the sun. He calls it “a metaphysical panic, a fear of the meaninglessness of life.” It is the most affecting writing in the book. It is also the moment the project’s center of gravity becomes visible. The cosmology, the protein-folding probabilities, the Cambrian phyla — all of it has been in service of an answer to the teenage panic. There’s no shame in that; it would be more suspicious if there weren’t some such motivation. But it does mean the book is best read as something other than what it advertises. Not impartial inference. A search for ground that has been wandering through physics on its way home.
Whether the ground holds is a separate question, and the kind of question this book — with its formal apparatus and its tidy abductive structure — is least equipped to answer.
If you’d like to read the full book in EPUB or MOBI format, feel free to send me an email—I’d be happy to share a free copy with you. Please reach me at: thenovaleaf@gmail.com
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