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Robert Pennock's book is an all-out attack on the "new creationists," a.k.a. the Intelligent Design Movement (hereafter IDM), an informal group of which I am currently the most prominent representative. It is an honor to be the main subject of a book-length attempted demolition by a professor of philosophy, and I welcome the opportunity to respond.
Here is where the debate stands, as I see it. The IDM aims to transform the evolution/creation debate by focusing on the main issue and pushing the details to the background. The main issue is the scientific naturalist claim that the origin and development of life can be explained employing only unintelligent natural causes like chance, chemical laws, and natural selection. This claim is as important for philosophy and theology as it is for science. The neo-Darwinian theory was discovered by a science that was committed a priori to methodological naturalism, the principle that research should always be guided by a commitment to discover strictly natural causes for all phenomena. Most educated people today have been taught to regard the theory as unassailably confirmed by objective scientific testing. Many think that it follows that the success of the theory provides a powerful justification for basing research in all fields, including even biblical studies, on methodological naturalism. Darwinism (i.e., naturalistic evolution) is thus not just a scientific theory but a creation story so culturally dominant that it is even protected by judge-made law from criticism in the public schools.
We in the IDM argue that the supposed confirmation of the neo-Darwinism as a general theory is the product of philosophical bias in the selection and interpretation of evidence. When the evidence is interpreted without a bias in favor of naturalism, it does not support the claim that evolutionary biologists have discovered a mechanism that can create life in the first place, or cause simple life forms (like bacteria) to develop into complex plants and animals, or build even relatively simple adaptive organs such as bacterial flagella. Our argument makes no reference to the Bible or to any other authority other than empirical testing. Indeed, we argue that it is the Darwinists who embrace a religious prejudice by refusing to give fair consideration to evidence or reasoning unless it supports their a priori commitment to naturalism.
I will illustrate the difference between IDM thinking and Darwinian thinking with two examples from Pennock's book. The first is the most famous instance in which evolution by natural selection has actually been observed, the variation in finch beaks on an island in the Galapagos. To tell the story as briefly as possible, the average size of the beaks in the island population increased by 4 to 5 percent after a devastating drought, probably because the larger-beaked birds had an advantage in opening the last tough seeds that remained. A few years later there were floods, again killing most of the birds, following which the average beak size returned to the predrought norm. Nothing new emerged, and no permanent change occurred.
Pennock says that the scientists "were able to see the Darwinian mechanism at work, sculpting individual traits." He argues that to accept such an example of "evolutionary change within the type is tantamount to accepting it generally," because "[t]here is no essential difference in kind between microevolution and macroevolution; the difference is simply a matter of degree." To set any limits to change would be arbitrary, because all creatures are made from the same genetic material and one needs only to change a fraction of the genes to produce a new species. Hence, for Pennock the cyclical finch beak variation demonstrates a mechanism that is in principle capable of the kind of major changes, producing new species and even new phyla, that we call "macroevolution."
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