requires that all the parts be present at once and able to perform at a level suitable to their purpose.28
Behe concludes, logically, that irreducibly complex systems point to intelligent design as their cause. I say “logically” because ultimately there is no other logical conclusion possible, though materialists will continue to make appeal to some causal third force, neither a Creator/Designer nor Chance-plus-Time but some unthinkable Other Process. Such prevarication shows well how subjectivist ideology, with its materialist presupposition, has taken captive sections of the scientific establishment. Behe himself, discreetly, does not go on to plead for a Creator as the Intelligent Designer behind the intelligent design, but his scientific work opens the way for metaphysicians and theologians to do so.
Behe’s thesis has been challenged scientifically, however. Michael Ruse, in his book entitled Darwin and Design, takes issue with Behe by citing a number of examples of complex processes that appear to have come about over time, incrementally, through the process of natural selection. Instancing the case of the Krebs cycle, whereby energy from food is converted into a form that can be used by cells, he makes the important point that intermediate stages, or subprocesses, of the cycle, which initially had no fitness functionality with respect to the complex final product, started off their existence doing something quite different and were subsequently coopted by the cells and put to a new use. Ruse insists that this re-deployment by natural selection of material that already exists is the answer to the problem of irreducibly complex systems and explains how it is possible for such systems to emerge progressively. No intelligent design, he affirms, is necessary to explain their existence; natural selection performs the operation.29
While Ruse’s argument is cogent and may indeed point to the evolutionary process that normally may make possible the emergence of irreducibly complex systems (though of course this is unproven), it still leaves unanswered the fundamental question of how the mechanism of natural selection itself emerged in the first place. Undoubtedly natural selection is evolution’s principle if not exclusive method, but to imagine that such an efficacious method simply happened and is itself the result of . . . natural selection (!), is metaphysically jejune.
Equally odd, even disingenuous, is the argument of the traditional Darwinian that what he is expecting to find by virtue of natural selection—and does find—is not design but the appearance of design. “The question,” writes Ruse, “is not whether design demands design. All can grant that. The question is whether design-like demands design, or if selection can do the job instead.”30 The same question is begged. Whether we are speaking of design or of the appearance of design, we are confronted by order that appears to arise, as far as we can determine at present, through the remarkably efficient mechanism of natural selection. But how did such an order-producing mechanism arise?
One thinker who has given much thought to the metaphysics involved in these issues is the Frenchman Claude Tresmontant, who observes that there are two kinds of metaphysics: a woolly, speculative type, arbitrary and imaginary, constructing castles in the air, which is what most scientists think metaphysics is and what most scientists who engage in speculation outside their field—usually on origins, cosmological and biological—do; and a responsible type, founded on the experimental sciences, which pushes the rational analysis of reality to its utmost limits.31
Tresmontant finds scandalous the contemporary divorce of science and metaphysics, unknown before Kant, which has major philosophers being untrained in the sciences and oblivious to their findings, so caught up in their existentialism or their linguistic analysis or their pragmatism that the metaphysical and cosmological implications of paradigm-shattering recent discoveries such as that the cosmos is evolving and so had a beginning and will have an end, go virtually unnoticed, as if philosophical reflection need not concern itself with experimental science. (Ironically, the same philosophers, untrained in hard science or in traditional metaphysics, are usually materialists who, while presuming that science provides the only kind of knowledge we can have, yet unaccountably refuse to probe the implications of its discoveries.)32
Tresmontant, in discussing Chance-plus-Time as the possible source of the emergence of life and its astonishing orderly complexity, reminds us that modern materialists, as distinct from the Greek pre-Socratic philosophers such as Parmenides, no longer have available to them the categories of infinite time and space and an infinite quantity of matter, when they consider cosmic and biological existence.33 Most thinkers (such as the eminent American geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, the biologist Pierre Lecomte du Noüy, and the astronomer Arthur Eddington) who have given any attention to the issue are aware that the statistical probability that life as we know it has emerged by undirected chance, through incremental mutations and natural selection, is effectively nil.34 The fact that the implications of this observation are rarely faced up to by materialistic evolutionists35 is another disturbing commentary on the level of thinking in this discipline.
Michael Ruse maintains, however, that Richard Dawkins has “scotched” this argument according to which random mutation cannot of itself ever produce adaptation or design-like effects.36 There is a big difference, Ruse points out, citing Dawkins, between a computer program operating by cumulative selection, where the program is jigged so that a successful move toward adaptation is remembered and built upon, and a program using single-step selection of the sort referred to above, where every new attempt to work toward a target is a fresh one. The obvious objection, acknowledged by Dawkins, is that in nature there is no ascertainable prior goal, as there is with the computer program. To this point Dawkins replies simply that if selection is factored into an evolutionary process, one has an entirely different trajectory—a very effective one, in fact—from that of the infinite randomness that, he admits, cannot possibly produce a design-like effect. This is certainly true, but it solves nothing, since the question remains as to how selection could ever come to be factored into the process in the first place.
Tresmontant, by metaphysical analysis, takes the discussion much further. Observing that living beings are not just more or less complex combinations of atoms, he draws on the concept of substance in the Aristotelian sense of a form, or identity (to be distinguished from a physical body), that subsists through the constant change of atomic matter (atoms in a living organism are continuously flowing in and out and being renewed) and that integrates, by its own proper activity, a huge number of elements and functions in a synthetic unity. He writes:
Living beings are substances, beings that subsist even while their integrated matter is being constantly renewed; they are substances capable of action and reaction; they are psychic entities; and finally, with the last animal that has appeared [man] they are psychic entities capable of conscious reflection—what we call persons. . . . It is because they have not perceived the philosophical, metaphysical dimension of the problem that so many thinkers remain focused on the mathematical analysis of probabilities in connection with the composition of genetic messages. But again, a genetic message in itself is not enough to explain the existence of a substance that is a psychic entity and, finally, a person. This is of another order.37
An aggregate of elements, no matter how complex, does not make a living creature with its own proper activity capable of self-repair, assimilation, elimination, and reproduction. Along with the questions of the very existence of matter and of the nature—energy—of the matter that exists, there is the question of the information of matter, constantly increasing all the way up to the emergence of living beings and on to man. The passage from an aggregate of elements to a substance/subject is a mystery. A living being is constituted from its conception by a form, an idea, an organizing genetic message that is the principle of its activity and operations and that endures over time until the organism’s death, whereupon it turns into the mere aggregate it never was while living, with the inevitable result that it disintegrates.38 Where does this integrating principle of life come from? There can be no recourse here to random mutations as an explanation of such a radical novelty; and to give the cause as natural selection simply begs the question, as we have seen.
A correlative mystery involves the passage from a generic type, normatively coded—cat, say—to a particular
