Editor’s note: C. W. Howell’s Designer Science has been pulled by its publisher, NYU Press. See, “Scholarship Hits the Fan: Designer Science Now Gone from Multiple Sites.”
In a series, I have been reviewing C. W. Howell’s thesis in Designer Science that ID is not science but religion and that it has developed nothing new in the past twenty years. It is as if he were unaware of huge amounts of what has happened in those two decades. (Find the full series here.)
But there’s another important core argument in Howell’s book — that ID is the root of all science skepticism. Or as he puts it, various ID proponents have sometimes committed the thought crime of “doubting the science consensus outside evolution” (p. 180).
Howell is undoubtedly aware of recent events and trends in the scientific community. He knows, for example, that for the past five years, a major concern among scientists has been the loss of the public’s trust in them. Headlines like “Why Do So Many Americans Distrust Science?” or “Why So Many Americans Are Losing Trust in Science” or “Major declines in the public’s confidence in science in the wake of the pandemic” abound. Howell knows that many scientists today are extremely bothered that the public is skeptical of their views, and he thus finds it an efficient and timely method of attack to blame all that skepticism on intelligent design.
Journalists and opinions writers would call this a news angle, which is first cousin to a news hook. It’s eye-catching and relevant, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true.
William Dembski accurately diagnosed what’s going on:
Howell credits intelligent design with widespread doubts about the seriousness of climate change and hesitancy about the effectiveness vaccines (among other controversial scientific topics).
This is an interesting, as well as a self-serving, thesis. It is interesting because it makes a connection that’s not immediately obvious (whether true or false) between ID and the wider public perceptions of science. It is also self-serving because Howell needs some justification for writing a full-scale history of ID if indeed ID is the colossal scientific failure he suggests and, more so, if that failure has been widely recognized now for two decades.
If ID is mostly dead and defunct, why write about it? Well, if Howell can link it to what annoys defenders of Big Science the most these days — people who question their claims — then he’s definitely got an angle that will attract interest.
Howell’s Claims
Even if Howell is unsuccessful at “fully” documenting the history of ID, he is a good writer and he’s good at putting things succinctly. Here are a couple of representative passages where he explains his basic thesis:
- “[I]ntelligent design both planted the seeds and nurtured the growth of extreme skepticism in the world of US conservatism, a trend that has continued to grow ever since, sprouting in contemporary antivaccine movements and climate change denialism, among other things. We are all grappling with intelligent design’s legacy, even when we are not talking about its serious intellectual content and its highly technical scientific attacks on Darwin.” (p. 7)
- “ID’s lasting contribution thus looks not to be its challenge to Darwin but its post-Dover challenge to the reliability of scientific practice and its both tacit and explicit support for a host of suspicious movements that are ideologically, if not practically, unmoored from any religious worldview: vaccine hesitancy, AIDS denialism, and climate change denial.” (p. 208)
What’s the evidence for this thesis? It’s pretty thin. Most ID proponents spend little time talking about topics like vaccines, AIDS, climate change, etc. Many leading ID scientists may not even be skeptical about them at all. In one case, a couple of ID proponents wrote a book challenging the Covid lockdowns (a view aligned with that of the current head of the NIH, no less!). Howell seeks to make hay about the science skepticism of the late Tom Bethell, but although Bethell was a great friend of ID, he was a journalist, not a scientist. These things are just a very small part of our overall work, and they are tangential to ID at best. Oh, and probably half the country is skeptical of lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and the rest. It’s hardly a niche ID position.
Howell’s secondary thesis is thus built upon cherry picking an article here, a stray comment there, and the one-off book that someone who likes ID happened to write. For whatever my saying so may be worth — according to Howell’s theory, you can’t believe me anyway — ID’s goal is absolutely not to try to take down all of science. It’s to show that there is evidence for design in nature. If ID proponents advocate skepticism on Darwinian theory, that doesn’t make ID the root of all science skepticism, nor does it make ID wrong. After all, even prominent non-ID scientist James Shapiro at the University of Chicago wrote in 2024 that “The ID argument has a valid point with regard to the explanatory limits of neo-Darwinism.”
If Americans are skeptical about other science subjects, having realized during Covid that scientists are not Delphic oracles, that could make some people more open to skepticism on evolution. But Howell is trying to work the chain of causation in the opposite direction, blaming it all on ID, and there’s just no persuasive evidence for that.
Howell’s Personal Arguments Against ID
One thing that I appreciated about Howell’s book is that he is open about his personal skepticism towards ID, as well the reasons for his skepticism. For Howell, it comes down to Thomist objections — an argument that we have covered in detail before. For example, Jay Richards and Father Michael Chabarek have written very persuasive rebuttals, and Professor Logan Gage did an excellent podcast (in addition to his chapter in God and Evolution). We’ve had a lot to say about this over the years, not that Howell appears to be aware of it. Brian Miller already posted a specific response to Howell’s book on the topic of Thomism.
But one of Howell’s strangest concerns is his claim that when ID proponents say that ID is a scientific argument, this somehow gives ID a “scientistic tone,” agreeing with our “atheistic opponents” that “all ‘reality’ must be scientifically documentable” (p. 56).
Scientism is the idea that modern science is the only reliable path to knowledge. That criticism of ID is of course absurd: If you close one eye and look at ID with the other, it’s religion in disguise. If you close that eye and look at with the other, it’s now atheism in disguise. Remember how in Part 1 of this series I showed that Howell used a fake quote from Michael Behe to claim there’s “something nonempirical at the heart of ID”? Howell is trying to make that argument while also smearing ID as “scientistic,” but it amounts to an incoherent critique. Obviously, people — both theists and non-theists — make scientific arguments all the time and the fact that they do so does not mean they are guilty of “scientism.” For example, theistic evolutionists — who also frequently critique scientism — also regularly cite the “science of evolution,” and argue that evolution is good science. Are they now scientistic, too?
Howell might reply that ID proponents spend an unusual amount of time trying to argue and establish that ID is science. Well, what did you expect? Critics say what we’re doing is religion, non-empirical fantasy, self-deception, or whatever, and that there’s no real-world empirical evidence for our viewpoint. Again, Howell himself tried to tell his readers ID is “non-empirical” (using fake evidence no less)! Walk in our shoes for a few days, and you’ll appreciate why we feel the need to show why our argument fits squarely within science and how we have lots of evidence showing it is correct.
I challenge Howell or anyone else to find a single ID proponent who claims that science is the only reliable pathway to knowledge. We think science is great, and you’ll find plenty of ID proponents critiquing scientism on a regular basis — we’ve been doing this for years. For a few recent examples, try here, here, here, here, here, here, or here for starters.
Is Howell Adopting Scientism?
This brings us to a strange contradiction in Howell’s central thesis (aside from calling ID “non-empirical” and “scientistic” at the same time): He attacks ID for supposedly being a partner of scientism, yet he also attacks it for engendering skepticism against Science — the kind with a capital S. By attacking ID as the root of all science-skepticism, he treats science as a sacred thing that ought not be questioned, whether on evolution or Covid or global warming, or whatever. Howell is a theist (I believe he comes from an Orthodox Christian background) and I have little doubt that he too would disagree with scientism. But treating Big Science as sacrosanct, maligning those who dare to question it, makes for a far stronger alignment with scientism than anything you could legitimately hang around ID’s neck. At the very least, surely his strong push to defend the consensus of Big Science exudes a much stronger “scientistic tone” (whatever that may mean) than do ID proponents who simply defend intelligent design against critics who constantly tell us we’re “non-empirical.”
The Lessons Learned: The obvious lesson is that making a scientific argument and then defending that argument against insatiable critics who unfairly label you as “non-empirical” does not make you a proponent of scientism. But everyone probably knew that already. So a more useful lesson here is probably that one should be wary of a bit of hypocrisy — and even exuding a “scientistic tone” yourself — by attacking those who (supposedly) promote scientism, while simultaneously making your book’s main angle to defend Big Science by also attacking those who (supposedly) doubt “the science consensus.”
Tomorrow, “C. W. Howell in Context: A Brief History of Histories.”