The reactionary brigade in any field of science, given its usual intellectual constraints, adheres to fundamentalisms that often coalesce into slogans. It’s not science! they are wont to exclaim concerning any field, hypothesis or concept, which challenges their categories in too radical a manner. One area of enquiry thus dismissed is that of Intelligent Design – briefly, the idea that the highly ordered complexity observed in nature is best explained by an intelligent cause. Here it is mostly the pro-Darwin lobby, with moral support from philosophical materialists in general, which maintains the charge that ... Intelligent Design is not science.
Let us then examine the statement (as a class of assertion of the type described, and with specific reference to Intelligent Design theory) ‘such-and-such is not science’. What can we make of the statement, ‘X is not science’?
Well, it’s firstly not saying anything profound in the sense of engendering insight or fertility of ideas. It’s more like, X is not science – end of story. The implicit meta-statement is of disengagement, of keeping the matter at arm’s length. Thus already we see some dissonance between the overt statement and its implicit purport. Prima facie the claim is of an analytical nature, purporting to say something about its object – Intelligent Design. What it rather discloses, however, is its own inherent stance, saying in effect, I cannot / will not engage with the matter. But even this is all quite immaterial insofar we are dealing with what, on closer scrutiny, turns out to be a non-statement. That’s right – the assertion ‘X is not science’ is quite meaningless. And let us be emphatic here: It is pure gibberish.
For let us consider what its champions would needs be implying, namely that conceptual entities such as fields of enquiry – ideas, conjectures, theoretical constructs – come ready-labelled, as the case may be, with the appropriate designations – such as science, non-science, and of course pseudo-science – and that they (bold, dauntless, and independent thinkers that they are) can detect these labels. But this, of course, is pure nonsense. Nature does not come thus ready-labelled for the convenience of ostensible sceptics, whose intellectual horizons preclude engagement across paradigm boundaries. It is not that ‘science’, as a mystical quality, somehow adheres to fields, to theories and ideas. It is whether the question at hand – whatever it is – is engaged in a scientific manner. This would seem elementary. Yet it continues to elude our self-appointed vigilante guardians of permissible ideas.
Thus, in stating that such-and-such is not science, they are saying in effect that it is they who lack the ability to consider the matter scientifically – whether for want of the requisite intellectual tools or, as is more typically the case, out of philosophical paradigm constraints. The deficiency, as per our example of Intelligent Design, thus does not inhere in the field under consideration, but in its critics.