A common complaint about ID is that no mechanism is proposed. And all sides appear to treat this complaint as if it has obvious and great substance. But what exactly does this complaint mean? The dictionary defines "mechanism" as a "process or technique for achieving a result." Seen in this light, ID is a mechanism. Through intelligent design, one can achieve a result whereby a free and rational mind directs and imposes boundary conditions on the natural world. This form of causation is known to exist for human artifacts, and with the development of biotechnology, the biotic world too is being progressively shaped by rational minds. ID simply extrapolates such causation given there is no reason to think only human beings possess and have ever possessed rational minds.

Yet it seems this type of response is not specific enough for the critics of ID. But always keep in mind the mechanism complaint is really nothing more than the question "how?" If we ask how did a biological feature come into existence, ID is indeed a possible mechanism that answers this very question. But the ID critic appears to take the question further and now wants to know the specifics about how the biological feature was designed. That is, how was ID implemented?

While this is an interesting question, we have to be realistic. That is, how does one determine the actual procedure that implemented intelligent design billions of years ago? If we had independent knowledge of the designers, we could speculate from this base of knowledge. On the other hand, if we had some form of testimonial evidence (lab notes or personal interviews with the designers), we could answer this question with a good degree of confidence. But we have neither independent evidence of the designers nor their lab notes. Thus, the actual specifics of such applied design cannot be answered. But is this really a devastating complaint against ID?

To say that ID has no proposed mechanism means only that we don't specifically know how ID was implemented. So what? Do we have any good reason to think that if ID was implemented at the origin of life (for example), then we should be able to determine how ID was implemented? Of course not. The truth of ID does not entail the ability to describe the process of design. Thus, the inability to describe the actual process that was implemented is essentially meaningless apart from its rhetorical appeal.

And is this really that much different from the non-teleological viewpoint? When I weigh the case for ID, I do not do so against some abstract, idealized target. I weigh it relatively, that is, how does it compare to non-teleological explanations? And since the consensus explanation from the non-teleological vantage revolves around the neo-darwinian interpretation, I end up comparing design at the hands of an intelligent watchmaker to that of a blind watchmaker. At this point, the non-teleologist answers the question "how?" by appealing to random variations culled by natural selection (the blind watchmaker). But it seems to me that a raw appeal to the blind watchmaker is not all that different from that appeal to ID as a mechanism. Sure, we can say that something happened to confer a hypothetical selective advantage for a hypothetical species in the ancient past, just as we can speak of a hypothetical designer implementing a hypothetical plan in the ancient past. But just as the ID critic may demand the specifics of the implemented design, the critic of the blind watchmaker can make a very similar demand. Exactly what appeared to confer a selective advantage? What was the mutation? Why did this create a selective advantage? What species did this appear in? What selection coefficients were involved? Etc. Attempts to answer mechanism questions like these force the non-teleologist into telling a story that almost always comes off as a just-so story. But as even biologist and Behe-critic, Robert Dorit noted,

"Any one of us can come up with multiple, plausible stories concerning the evolution of a given biological feature. But plausibility is about the weakest criterion one can apply to an evolutionary hypothesis." [1]

Thus, the mechanism complaint is not that much more of a problem for an ID proponent than it is for a Darwinist. This is why Mike Behe could correctly note:

In fact, none of the papers published in JME over the entire course of its life as a journal has ever proposed a detailed model by which a complex biochemical system might have been produced in a gradual, step-by-step Darwinian fashion. Although many scientists ask how sequences can change or how chemicals necessary for life might be produced in the absence of cells, no one has ever asked in the pages of JME such questions as the following: How did the photosynthetic reaction center develop? How did intramolecular transport start? How did cholesterol biosynthesis begin? How did retinal become involved in vision? How did phosphoprotein signaling pathways develop? The very fact that none of these problems is even addressed, let alone solved, is a very strong indication that Darwinism in an inadequate framework for understanding the origin of complex biochemical systems. [2]

It thus seems the Darwinist really does not have that much of advantage over the ID proponent when it comes to the mechanism complaint. Not all scientists are convinced that all biological history = microevolution + deep time. [3] And when it comes to outlining the specific mechanisms at play, Darwinists often have little more to offer than just-so stories which have yet to be told in glorious scientific detail. Thus, if we are to be satisfied with a vague appeal to the blind watchmaker as the cause behind some biotic feature, there is little room to complain that "ID is the mechanism" is too vague. And if we demand the specifics of the implementation of ID (the actual mechanism), then we should be willing to offer the specifics of the blind watchmaker's ancient work.

We must also remember that our thinking about mechanisms has been shaped by a non-teleological approach. From this perspective, one considers only the regularities that express themselves as laws and chance. But a teleological viewpoint introduces a discontinuity into this causal chain in the form of an expressed free and rational will. One cannot deduce the action of mind from a study of regularities in the world. Mind imposes a form on the world that is not traced to law and chance. It is neither law, nor chance, nor a combination of the two, which completely accounts for the organization of letters that appear on your screen. What accounts for their organization is the action of my free and rational mind (I've always found in interesting that Dembski's Explanatory Filter finds design in forms by eliminating chance and law, yet this also happens to be the place where we find the free and rational mind, as a free and rational mind is enslaved neither to law or chance).

Now if we are used to thinking about natural history only in terms of regularities, our thinking about mechanisms takes on a particular shape. Here we want to know what interplay of law and chance works to bring about some particular phenomena. And since regularities occur all the time, we can study them at work in the here-and-now and extrapolate into the past or future. But if mind has imposed itself on some aspect of our biotic history, the whole concept of mechanism takes on a different flavor. Mind does not impose itself like a law of nature nor does it do so like a chance event. You will not find the frozen traces of mind by extrapolating from regularities. You will find them as discontinuities [4] interspersed among the regularities, and perhaps forming a coherent pattern.

Howard Van Till is another critic of the ID movement who thinks mechanism complaint is significant. To make his point, he distinguishes between the mind-like action of design, conceptualization, and the hand-like component, actualization. He writes:

there is an intolerable (and, I presume, intentional) ambiguity in the way in which proponents of ID use the very word that names their movement--"design." In modern usage "design" is an act of mind--the conceptualization of something for the accomplishment of a purpose. Wholly distinct from this mindful and purposeful action of design is the additional action of actualizing what was first designed--the formation of parts and/or the assembly of component parts into a system that functions to accomplish the original purpose. This action of forming/assembling is not mind-like, but hand-like. In other words, forming/assembling is an act of intervention.
For years I have been asking the proponents of ID to make the necessary distinction between the mind-like action of design (using this word in its contemporary sense) and the hand-like action of forming/assembling. That distinction must be made before anyone can begin to evaluate the standard claim that "we have positive empirical evidence that X must have been intelligently designed." One must know whether one is evaluating evidence that something was (a) thoughtfully conceptualized, or (b) formed/assembled by non-natural means. [5]

I think this distinction is important, yet when we speak of design, I don't think the actualization of design is "wholly distinct" from conceptualization (more on this below). A designer's "hands" are guided by his/her thoughts. And a design that remains only in the conceptual realm is a design that is not part of the physical world.[6] Yet I think the distinction is important because it helps us to see just how unimportant the hands-mechanism is from an investigative teleological perspective.

Currently, the design inference ultimately is an extrapolation of what we know about human designers and human design. I think the extrapolation is strongest when dealing with design as conceptualization (the mind) rather than design as actualization (the hands). Why? Intelligence, reason, logic, problem-solving, etc. are the core of the causal extrapolation. Actualization, on the other hand, depends on power and/or technology and here extrapolation is shaky. For if life was designed and deposited on a sterile earth such that is has spawned what we see today, then it is safe to say that the designers possessed a knowledge base that is far superior to ours. Now, exactly how does one speculate about such aspects of applied power or technology when we don't have the technology or power ourselves? Imagine the brightest men living in 1500 AD trying to describe current satellite technology, space travel, biotechnology, computer technology, etc. It would be futile. Try to explain what technology will be like in the year 20,000.

In fact, this brings me to ETI as the intelligence behind possible design after abiogenesis. This concept is often ridiculed as little green men coming in their flying saucers to snatch organisms, genetically modify them, and then replace them. But might this explanation sound silly simply because we are trying to describe a highly advanced technology with our relatively primitive understanding and technology?[7] Again, what will our knowledge base and technology be in 20000 years? I'd say advanced beyond our imagination. Yet 20000 years is a mere few seconds against the backdrop of our 3.5 billion year history. Is there any reason at all to think it impossible or unlikely that thousands of years worth of advancement in computers, space travel, nanotechnology, robotics, etc. would enable another form of intelligence to impose upon our biosphere?

What all this means is simple. The ability to describe the actualization of design depends on our knowledge of the designer or some form of textual data that testifies to the design procedure. We have none thus far. We can extrapolate from our current base of understanding, but that is likely to create a "silly-sounding" explanation because we are likely dealing with very advanced technology (if indeed we are dealing with design). And all of this would be true if indeed an advanced intelligence designed life. Thus, while it would certainly be interesting and great to describe the detailed actualization of design, the inability to do so is simply not important and has nothing to do with the truth of any given design inference.

What to do? Don't try to think about detecting teleological mechanisms in non-teleological terms. Non-teleological mechanisms are detected by studying and extrapolating from natural laws and chance, the one place we will not find teleological mechanisms. To detect teleological mechanisms requires a new way of thinking - more on this later.

(work in progress..)

[1] See the September-October 1997 issue of American Scientist

[2] Behe, M. DBB, p. 176

[3] See http://www.arn.org/ubb/Forum3/HTML/000005.html

[4] A good example of a non-teleological discontinuity is a machine. As Michael Polanyi once noted, without men, there would be no machines.

[5] See Metaviews 100--> http://www.meta-list.org/

[6] Van Till himself is never clear that his view of God the Creator escapes his complaints against Dembski. Van Till seems to think Dembski is a 'creationist' because Dembski views design as a type of "form-imposing intervention" on Nature. Van Till apparently denies such form-imposing interventions for theological reasons, including his belief in a "fully-gifted universe." Yet how did the universe get those gifts? How did it come to be fully gifted? Van Till merely reserves the form-imposing interventions to the creation of the universe itself.

[7] For example, if you could go back 500 years and talk to professors in the University, and you told them that in 2001, men will live in the heavens (the space station), people on opposite sides of the planet will talk to each other (satellite technology), and babies will be conceived in glass plates (in vitro fertilization), a skeptic might go back to tell his friends about this using his understanding of things in his time. He'd scoff and say "Can you picture men flying into the stars on the back of eagles? Can you picture a horn so big that when blown, it is heard on the other side of the planet? Can you picture a bowl full of water growing a man?"