As the body of evidence against the Darwinian model has grown ever larger, many scientists have started peeling off to look for other options. A whole community of scientific scholars are seeking a “third way” to explain life, besides the unacceptable options of (a) benighted creationism or (b) the now-defunct neo-Darwinian synthesis. University of Chicago molecular biologist James Shapiro, engineer Raju Pookottil, and Oxford physiologist Denis Noble have even launched The Third Way website to aggregate the works of sympathetic scientists.

The homepage of website contains this interesting proclamation: 

It has come to our attention that THE THIRD WAY web site is wrongly being referenced by proponents of Intelligent Design and creationist ideas as support for their arguments. We intend to make it clear that the website and scientists listed on the web site do not support or subscribe to any proposals that resort to inscrutable divine forces or supernatural intervention, whether they are called Creationism, Intelligent Design, or anything else. 

Clear enough. “Supernatural intervention” is out of the question for Third Way evolutionary biologist. 

Or is it? I wonder how closely the Third Way team has paid attention to the views of its contributors. 

“Our Reality Emanates from Them”

Take Andreas Wagner, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Zürich. As a true third-way-er, Wagner is no friend of creationism or ID, but he admits that the mechanism of neo-Darwinism doesn’t explain how new innovations could emerge. So he has written his own book to explain how evolution really works, The Arrival of the Fittest. Wagner believes that beneficial mutations are chosen from a sort of “library” of theoretical possibilities, with many possible mutations leading to each type of adaptation, scattered all throughout the library. This supposedly allows lifeforms to evolve far more quickly than they would otherwise. 

So far, so good. No “supernatural intervention” here. But look what Wagner has to say about this library idea, from an interview:  

Think about this library that I mentioned… This library’s essentially a mathematical concept. And we could say it’s a Platonic concept in the sense that it exists in an abstract space of our minds — or somewhere out there, we are not quite sure where. And so the question arises… abstract mathematical concepts, are they real in some sense, in some general sense, or are they just figments of our imagination? And I think that’s a very interesting question. You know, I don’t have a final answer to that question, but I’m leaning towards the answer that Plato has given — namely, that they are actually realer than our reality, that our reality emanates, if you will, from them.

Platonic forms, “somewhere out there,” “realer than our reality” … that sounds pretty supernatural to me. “Our reality emanates from them” is practically the definition of “supernatural.” If not, what is the distinction between “supernatural” and “natural”? If we were to find something truly “supernatural,” what would it be like? 

Of course, you could come up with a definition of “natural” that includes these Platonic forms. The truth is, naturalism is infinitely adaptable: since it is defined as the belief that only the “natural” exists, it can always be preserved by simply broadening the membership of “natural,” forever. If something, once dismissed as “supernatural,” turns out to be real, it can be redefined as “natural.” So even if science were to discover, say, an immaterial human soul, naturalists could just call it a “quantum entity” or something, and go on with business as usual. The same goes for leprechauns, love, Narnia, or God himself. Anything supernatural that might be discovered — up to and above an entirely different universe or plane of being — can simply be redubbed “part of nature.” 

The reasoning is circular and tautological: Naturalism asserts that the natural is all that exists, and all that exists is defined as “natural.” 

This by itself wouldn’t be such a terrible thing. If calling things “natural” makes people feel better, why not let them? The trouble is that some scientists — such as those at The Third Way — try to treat this as an actual distinction, not a mere matter of definition. And then everything undesirable is excluded on the basis of being “supernatural.”

Exploiting Hemple’s Dilemma 

They get away with this by using a clever (though no doubt unconscious) equivocation. You see, “naturalism” in this context has two possible interpretations. One is obviously false, and the other is trivial. 

It could mean that natural sciences must only study things that have already been discovered by the natural sciences. In that case, science is going to be sadly limited. Or, it could mean that anything the natural sciences do in fact discover will be defined as “natural,” since natural sciences were able to discover it. That is perfectly fine, though rather uninteresting. (This problem, first proposed by the philosopher Carl Hemple, is called Hemple’s Dilemma.)

Here’s where naturalists like those at The Third Way get tricky: when they say that science must be methodologically naturalistic, it isn’t clear which version of the thesis they are referring to. And rather than defining terms, they exploit the ambiguity to equivocate.

First, they maintain that science can only study natural entities — not supernatural entities. They are here using the weaker definition of naturalism: whatever science discovers is natural by definition. 

But then they go on to say that God cannot be investigated by science, because God is supernatural, not natural. Here they are using the stronger definition: that only entities that are already known to be part of nature can be hypothesized.

No one could defend this stronger definition, but no one has to. It’s slipped in, unnoticed, by scholars who are unwilling to consider evidence for entities they find unappealing. 

Well, they can do that if they want. We can’t stop them. But as they uncover evidence that truly implies design in life — “supernatural” or otherwise — we will continue (with sincerest respect) to reference it.