It was rather serendipitous that a media agent representing Stephen Meyer reached out to me several weeks ago, since the Discovery Institute’s work popularizing intelligent design had just been brought up in a comment exchange I was having.
The agent shared a link to the new film, The Story of Everything, which is based on Meyer’s book Return of the God Hypothesis. I found it well produced and compellingly presented, even if I doubt it will persuade skeptics. There weren’t any new arguments I was not familiar with, at least.
I began by asking Meyer who the film is intended for: skeptics, the uncertain, or those already inclined toward theism who might find in the film a sense of intellectual companionship and public legitimacy? Meyer answered that it was for all of the above, but especially for college and graduate students. He emphasized that the film cannot settle every issue, but can open a porthole into deeper debates, especially given the cultural assumption, amplified by the New Atheists, that science properly understood undermines belief in God. The film, he explained, summarizes three major lines of evidence developed at length in Return of the God Hypothesis: cosmological evidence for a beginning of the universe, physical evidence of fine-tuning, and biological evidence concerning information in DNA and the irreducible complexity of cellular machinery. The film is not meant to function as a technical treatise or philosophical seminar but as an invitation into deeper study.
I next wanted to frame my own position to make clear that I did not want this discussion to fall into the usual binary of scientific materialism versus intelligent design. There are more than two sides here, and indeed, part of my point in this exchange with Meyer is that that typical debate seems to me to remain entirely within the same mechanistic paradigm. Intelligent design theorists just add that God-the-engineer can intervene into the system at various crucial moments to deliver the required software updates. To me, that sort of external interventionism does not capture the intimacy and mutual risk involved in the ongoing process of incarnation (which on this reading is ultimately synonymous with the process of creation).
I told Meyer that I share his sense that scientific materialism is woefully inadequate as an account for the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the origin of human consciousness. Matter conceived as a bunch of blind forces and fields obeying externally imposed laws cannot account for the complexity of the cosmos, the emergence of living organisms, or the human minds capable of doing science. I also agreed with him that neo-Darwinian accounts of evolution (ie, all living form understood reductively as random gene mutation plus natural selection) are inadequate to explain the creativity of life.
Mechanistic materialism is not itself a scientific discovery. It is a metaphysical assertion. Scientific evidence can be interpreted from a variety of metaphysical standpoints—idealism, panpsychism, dualism, process-relational realism, and so forth—without necessarily contradicting empirical findings. Meyer agreed that materialism is better understood as axiomatic than as a direct consequence of observation, and that the axiom itself is dubitable.
Our first major point of divergence concerned the status of God as a scientific hypothesis. I acknowledged that God can function philosophically as an explanation for the intelligibility of nature, ie, why the world is relatively ordered and knowable. I noted that something like this conviction motivated many early modern natural philosophers and scientists, including Copernicus, Bruno, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz. Indeed, as Whitehead also argues in Science and the Modern World, historically speaking, theism—the idea that the universe has a rational creator—seems to have played an important role in the inauguration of modern astronomy and physics, which assume that nature is rationally ordered. The very idea of a “law of nature” is downstream of the idea of theistic creation, or God imposing order on an otherwise formless void.
But referencing God as part of a philosophical explanation for intelligibility is very different from bringing God in to provide particular scientific explanations of natural processes. I expressed my concern that treating God as a specific hypothesis to resolve particular scientific problems—fine-tuning, the origin of life, the origin of specified information in DNA—oversteps the proper boundaries of scientific methodology just as much as scientific materialism does.
My concern here was not to defend methodological materialism, as Meyer initially assumed in replying to me. Rather, I was trying to defend a broader sense of causal continuity—not merely efficient causal closure or mechanistic continuity (which I find problematic for various reasons), but a continuity that would include some principled account of formal and final causation. Science, as I understand it, seeks patterned regularities in perceived nature. If we posit an intelligent agent arbitrarily intervening from outside the relational nexus of nature at various points to generate this or that pattern (ie, a software update), then the intelligibility of science itself breaks down. That would be like trying to do scientific research as a character inside a video game and never being sure when the laws of physics might be tinkered with by the programmer.
Meyer pushed back by distinguishing ordinary experimental sciences from the historical sciences. In the historical sciences, he argued, we often reason abductively from present effects back to past causes. Origins questions—cosmogenesis, biogenesis, consciousness—are inevitably metaphysically charged. We cannot avoid metaphysical implications when asking where the universe, life, or mind came from. On his view, methodological naturalism or materialism wrongly restricts the range of possible explanations in advance by insisting that only material causes may count as scientific. He argued that if certain features of nature are known, in our experience, to be produced by minds or intelligent agents, then excluding mind as a possible cause is a methodological prejudice.
I clarified that I was not defending such a materialistic restriction. I explicitly introduced Aristotle’s four causes—material, formal, efficient, and final—and said that modern scientific materialism (at least explicitly) recognizes only efficient causation, the push from behind. Of course, implicitly, mechanistic materialism still has its own sort of formal cause operating in the background, but this usually goes un- or under-theorized (just ask a physicist where the eternally fixed laws of physics come from!). Whitehead, by contrast, explicitly reintroduces formal and final causality, and I argued that biology, and indeed physics, cannot be adequately understood without some robust doctrine of formation and purposiveness. I described my position as perhaps a kind of expanded naturalism, a scientific worldview open to immanent teleology, value, and organismic agency, but still resistant to arbitrary external intervention.
Meyer found this refreshing. He brought in Proclus’s expansion of the causal scheme and Aquinas’s doctrine of exemplar causation. In Meyer’s reconstruction, Aquinas breaks both with Aristotle and Plato: against Aristotle, because locating form entirely in matter might lead toward materialism; against Plato, because forms existing in a realm apart from mind do not pass the test of experience. Aquinas’s exemplar causes are ideas in the mind of God, acting to shape matter. Meyer then connected this to his own design argument: form is the product of information, and information, in our experience, is produced by mind. Thus, he sees design detection as an expansion of the explanatory causal toolkit, restoring something like formal and final causation in a way that can be made scientifically rigorous.
He appealed to the iPhone as an example. We cannot explain its origin without reference to the mental agency of Steve Jobs and a team of engineers. By analogy, he argued, when we find the same sorts of effects—specified complexity, functional information, integrated information-processing systems—in cells, we are warranted in inferring mind. This, of course, is a redux of Paley’s watch argument. He also invoked Dembski’s work on the design inference and pointed to cryptography, forensics, archaeology, and SETI as domains where design detection is already accepted in science.
This opened the crucial issue of our conversation, namely, whether intelligent design really overcomes the mechanistic world-picture championed by materialists, or in fact remains trapped within the same imaginary as the materialism it critiques.
I introduced C. S. Peirce, noting that in his book Meyer draws on his account of abductive reasoning for his own methodological approach. Meyer confirmed that Peirce was one of his heroes and that abductive reasoning was also central to the first chapter of his PhD thesis. But I wanted to push beyond Peirce’s method of abduction into his cosmology and theology, since for him, abduction only makes sense methodologically within that broader metaphysical context. Peirce called himself an objective idealist, but I suggested he could also be read as an evolutionary panentheist. This is different from what usually gets labeled as “theistic evolution,” because Peirce did not understand cosmic or biotic evolution mechanistically. Rather, he saw chance, continuity, habit, semiosis, and agapic love as woven into the becoming of the cosmos from top to bottom, start to finish. God is intimately involved in cosmic creativity, not its external designer and unmoved mover.
You can read more about Peirce’s views here: C. S. Peirce’s “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” (1908)
I then laid out my biggest issue with intelligent design. It rejects the claim that blind matter can assemble the world-machine by itself, but it does not at all challenge the mechanistic image nature. Meyer frequently describes cells as factories. DNA is treated as context-free information or software. Organisms are imagined as artifacts or machines shaped by God like a potter shapes clay. Design is imagined as an idealization of human engineering: the external assembly of parts according to a preexisting plan (which is an idealization since in real design processes, prototypes are needed, leading to revisions, tinkering, etc., before a workable machine arises). I asked, what happens if we drop the machine and computer metaphors and instead adopt the organic metaphor, as Schelling, Bergson, Peirce, Whitehead, and Teilhard de Chardin each do in different ways?
The machine metaphor does not just affect how we understand nature, but we understand the God-world relation and the very nature of the act of creation. If nature is a machine, God is imagined as an engineer who is fundamentally untouched by what is created. If nature is an organism, God may be better understood as the incarnate lure immanent in cosmic becoming, the persuasive aim toward beauty, intensity, life, and mind. The world is God’s body; God suffers with creatures. This organic vision seems to me to be far more consonant with the event described in the New Testament, for those who pay attention to such things!
Meyer responded in a more nuanced way than I expected. He said that life contains machines, but is not itself a machine. Organisms are self-organizing unities in Kant’s sense, they are not just collections of parts. In a mechanical assemblage, cause and effect relations are linear and traceable from discrete antecedents. In an organic unity, causes and effects loop into one another in ways that approach a kind of inexhaustible complexity. He suggested that living systems may even be computationally incomplete in the formal sense: their full complexity cannot be exhausted within finite computational time.
This was an important concession, but I am not sure how seriously to take it given how often Meyer leans on the machine metaphor across all of his work. He also said there is an ongoing discussion among intelligent design theorists about whether organisms show a kind of inexhaustible complexity that may require a transcendent designer whose intelligence is not merely finite or computational. In this respect, Meyer sees organismic complexity itself as potentially deepening, rather than weakening, the design inference.
But he then insisted that the argument from specified complexity is not merely metaphorical. The analogy between DNA and computer code, he said, may be a metaphor rhetorically, but the design inference is grounded in formal criteria from information and complexity theories. Complexity is inversely related to probability. He granted you could explain complexification without a designer. But specification is a distinct issue for him, since it involves an arrangement that achieves a significant function or outcome. When both complexity and specificity are jointly instantiated, he argued, we have sufficient warrant for inferring design. Human language, computer code, and the information coded in DNA all instantiate these two features. So the argument, in his view, is not based merely on loose analogies but on an identity of formally characterized features of the systems in question.
I then pressed the issue of biological information. From a Peircean or process-relational perspective, DNA does not contain information in a simply located way. Its meaning and function arise within the context of the whole cellular milieu, the cell’s relation to its environment, and the entire historical sequence of organism-environment relations inherited from its ancestors. DNA only becomes biologically meaningful in relation to proteins, membranes, metabolism, regulatory networks, repair systems, cytoplasmic structure, developmental fields, and so on. A codon does not interpret itself. The genome is not software for booting up an organism. Even as metaphor, the claim is sorely lacking in that it backgrounds all the context that makes biological creativity and self-organization so fascinating.
Meyer replied that the independence of sequence from chemical necessity is what establishes the presence of specified complexity. There is nothing in the chemistry of DNA that determines the exact sequencing or functional outcome. He agreed that DNA cannot do anything without ribosomes and the whole translation apparatus. But he argued that this resembles high-tech digital computing systems, where information storage, processing, and translation require an integrated system.
I objected that computers are specifically engineered to eliminate stochasticity, whereas cells exploit stochasticity. Living systems operate amid Brownian motion, molecular fluctuations, chance encounters, and dynamic self-organization. The cell is not like a carefully insulated microprocessor whose randomness has been suppressed as much as possible. The cell is a teeming matrix where chaos and order are intertwined. Its order is not imposed in the way an Apple engineer imposes order on silicon. Its molecular machinery operates in a milieu where spontaneity is not merely a bug but feature of life’s mode of existence, part of what makes organisms so adaptable to novel situations.
Meyer pushed back in a way that makes the rift clearer, reaffirming my sense that we have very different images of what constitutes order and intelligence in the natural world. He said stochastic processes are the enemy of cellular information processing. When errors occur, the cell has proofreading and error-correction systems to “subjugate chaos” into informational order. For him, Brownian motion is not a source of organismic creativity but a problem that the machinery of life must overcome.
From my perspective, this sort of push back illustrated how Meyer’s imagination is still strongly organized around the machine metaphor. I am trying to think the cell as an organismic nexus that makes positive use of the fact that it is constantly riding the wave crest between order and chaos. He sees stochasticity as something life must master. I see it as part of the creative matrix out of which life’s order continually arises.
I then turned to Meyer’s footnote on Charles Hartshorne. In Return of the God Hypothesis, Meyer objects to Hartshornean panentheism by arguing that while we have broad experience of intelligent agents generating specified information, “we do not have experience of designing agents changing in their fundamental nature as a result of generating such information or designing technological objects.”
I told Meyer that this sentence jumped out at me because it strikes me as a naïve understanding of human intelligence. The history of the human species is precisely the story of our co-evolution with technology. Human minds are not disembodied monads that only later express their intelligence through tools. We became the beings we are through our relations with stone axes, fire, cooking, clothing, shelter, ritual, language, agriculture, writing, clocks, printing presses, computers, digital media, etc. Our physiology, perception, memory, sociality, attention, and self-understanding have all been transformed by what we make.
I mentioned Terrence Deacon’s wonderful book The Symbolic Species, where language is treated not merely as a product of an already finished human brain but as a symbolic ecology that helped reshape the brain. I also invoked Plato’s Phaedrus, where Socrates worries that the alphabet will degrade memory. The point is that technologies are not simply designed by an aloof intelligence, but immediately feedback upon their designers, transforming intelligence in turn. Human designers are changed by their designs. We are not unmoved movers. This obviously has implications for how we imagine divine intelligence. If we are imago dei, then…?
Meyer replied by emphasizing the phrase “fundamental nature.” He was willing to acknowledge neuroplasticity. But he rejected the idea that tools or technologies have fundamentally transformed human physiology. He saw that claim as too dependent on a macroevolutionary story about human origins that he does not accept. From his perspective, technology can affect attention spans, cognition, or behavior, but it does not provide evidence for fundamental anatomical transformation.
I suppose I should have expected his easy way out of my argument. Just deny that Homo sapiens evolved! Fair enough. Meyer’s response insulated “fundamental nature” from historical transformation by definition. If fundamental nature means an abstract metaphysical essence—human nature as decreed by God in a once and done way—then of course technology cannot alter it. But if fundamental nature means the concrete form of life that humans actually enact—our bodies, gestures, attention, language, sociality, memory, rituals, and sense of selfhood, etc.—then technologies have transformed us profoundly. Here again, the issue is his model of intelligence. He treats intelligence as something already constituted, which then produces artifacts. I understand intelligence as relational, extended, embodied, developmental, and historically transformed by its own expressions. I do think there is something like a human nature, but it is precisely our nature to transform.
Meyer rehearsed his standard critique of macroevolutionary change using developmental gene regulatory networks. He explained Eric Davidson’s work on how gene regulatory networks choreograph animal development. These networks function like integrated circuits controlling the timing and expression of genetic information. Attempts to alter core elements of these networks terminate development. Therefore, if transforming one body plan into another requires changing one developmental gene regulatory network into another, and those networks cannot be altered without destroying development, then macroevolutionary transformation becomes deeply problematic.
I brought in developmental biologist Michael Levin’s work at Tufts on bioelectricity and morphogenesis. Levin has shown that in organisms such as frogs and planaria, one can alter large-scale developmental outcomes—putting functional eyes on frog legs, inducing two-headed flatworms, and so on—by manipulating bioelectric patterns rather than changing the underlying DNA. This suggests levels of informational organization above the genetic sequence. Meyer responded that ID theorists are not genetic reductionists and that they welcome the discovery of hierarchical information at multiple levels. Indeed, for him, such higher-level information refutes neo-Darwinian reductionism. But he argued that induced macromutations or developmental alterations of this sort are generally non-heritable and deleterious. Thus, while he finds Levin’s work interesting, he sees it as deepening the problem of where the higher-level information comes from rather than explaining it naturalistically.
He also mentioned James Shapiro’s “natural genetic engineering,” where mutations are not random but triggered by environmental changes and brought under algorithmic control. Meyer appreciated Shapiro’s work but again located design in the pre-programmed adaptive capacity itself. If organisms have algorithmically controlled adaptive systems, then for Meyer the question becomes: where did the algorithmic control come from?
With all too many threads left dangling, in the time we had left I wanted to transition to the cosmological question of fine-tuning. I reiterated my concern that Meyer’s approach still relies on the mechanistic metaphor: the universe is a machine whose primordial dials—laws, constants, initial conditions—must be perfectly set in advance from outside by a transcendent designing intelligence. I contrasted this with Peirce’s cosmology, where matter is “effete mind” and laws of physics are more like emergent habits than externally imposed decrees. From a Peircean and Whiteheadian perspective, fine-tuning could be understood as the canalization of cosmic habits, ie, stable patterns of order that emerge, deepen, and persist because they make possible richer forms of aesthetic contrast and complexity, eventually generating life and consciousness. God is still involved, but not as a construction manager barking orders from outside the system. In Whitehead’s scheme, God is eternal and primordial with respect to possibility, but consequent with respect to the actuality of the historical becoming of nature. God is the immanent lure, the persuasive aim toward beauty goading an ensouled universe into richer expression, rather than the predetermining designer of a machine that lacks any real creativity of its own.
Meyer objected that talk of laws as historically emergent habits is, at least at present, speculative. Our observations of regularities such as Newtonian mechanics, Maxwell’s equations, and gravitational law have been stable over the period available to us. I objected that, relative to the supposed age of the universe, our period of observation is absurdly narrow, but I admitted, like him, I was doing speculative philosophy here. But Meyer’s point was that we lack empirical evidence that the laws themselves have evolved. He regarded the Peircean-Whiteheadian view as a philosophical posit rather than something compelled by experience. I grant that, within the observational range available to us, the regularities we model appear stable enough to support prediction. But our lack of evidence for evolving “laws” (ie, cosmic habits) may tell us as much about the methodological assumptions built into mechanistic physics as about the ultimate nature of law. As a methodological rule, the time-invariance of laws is a sound axiom. But as an ontological claim, it is much more easily contested. Science needs models with stable parameters, but it does not follow that nature is governed by eternally fixed, ahistorical laws existing outside the creative advance. Human habits can be difficult to change after decades. Cosmic habits, established over billions of years, are unimaginably more entrenched. So the fact that we do not observe them changing over a few centuries of mathematical physics is not surprising.
I should also note, in response to Meyer’s claim that we do not observe changes to laws, that we do not empirically observe eternal laws existing outside time and imposing order on nature, either. What we observe are stable statistical regularities. Whether these regularities are interpreted as timeless laws or deeply canalized habits is a metaphysical question. If we assume from the start that laws are timeless, we will build models designed to find timeless laws and treat every anomaly as evidence of a deeper invariance. We may thereby blind ourselves to the possibility that lawfulness itself has a history.
Meyer went on to clarify his disagreement with panentheism. In the cosmological case, he thinks the force of the explanation comes from divine transcendence. A panentheistic God, in his view, seems parasitic upon classical theism insofar as it needs transcendence to explain the origin of the universe. After that, one can ask whether divine ordering is gradually infused through an evolutionary process or whether new design appears discretely along the cosmic timeline. Meyer sees more evidence for the latter: the Big Bang, the abrupt emergence of life around 3.8 billion years ago, the Cambrian explosion of new animal body plans. He is thus inclined toward a theistic view of a transcendent God who creates the universe as a whole and acts detectably at discrete points along the timeline, rather than a primarily gradualist panentheistic account.
I suggested that Peirce, Whitehead, Hartshorne, and company are not denying transcendence but reconceiving it. Meyer acknowledged that the Whitehead-Hartshorne view does affirm divine transcendence as well as immanence, but he thought its emphasis on gradual evolutionary emergence does not fit the empirical pattern as he reads it. He concluded that we were not as far apart as it might seem: both views affirm design in some sense; the difference concerns whether design is effected more gradually and immanently or more discretely and detectably by a transcendent divine agent. I appreciate his attempt at conciliation, but I felt we were much further apart than he was acknowledging!
I ended by saying that we had scratched many surfaces and would need more time to go deeper. Meyer agreed and said this was the most extensive interview he had done on these themes. He also said there is much to appreciate in Whitehead and Peirce, though he is more sympathetic to Peirce’s epistemology and logic than to his metaphysics. I personally do not think the two can be so easily prized apart. Neither did Peirce:
C. S. Peirce’s Guess at the Riddle
To sum up, then:
I remain convinced that Meyer’s intelligent design argument depends on a disembodied, idealized engineering model of intelligence. Intelligence is inferred from fine-tuning, specified information, and the apparent design of biological machinery. Though Meyer explicitly denied reducing organisms to machines, his explanatory imagination remains dominated by an engineering mentality.
My concern is that this model of intelligence treats intelligence as a source of information standing outside the system it designs. It imagines God, by analogy, as a transcendent agent whose creative activity does not alter God’s own being. This is why Meyer finds Hartshorne and process panentheism unconvincing: he assumes that a God affected by creation is somehow less capable of explaining order. But from my point of view, creation is always co-creation. A God unaffected by creation cannot be loving, cannot incarnate, and is nothing at all like the actual intelligences we know in human beings, who are supposedly created in God’s image. If our relational modes of creativity are in any way reflective of God’s, then God cannot remain entirely unmoved.
On my view, God is more the Relator than the Creator of the universe. God lures the world toward richer forms of order, intensity, beauty, life, and consciousness, and God is enriched by the world’s achievements and sufferings. Creation is not a manufacturing operation. Life is not a factory. God’s creative act is risky, a genuine adventure. God is involved in creation and so evolves with us.
Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?