Intuition Does NOT Confirm Intelligent Design
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This is part 1 of my review on Douglas Axe’s book titled Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life is Designed. This post concerns only the first 6 chapters of Axe’s book. Please stay tuned for part 2.
Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life is Designed.
I expect you to immediately squirm and recoil at the title of this book if you are an evolutionist, a materialist, or a naturalist. Like flies on feces, people have repeatedly targeted the title over the years. The criticisms against 'undeniable' and 'intuition' in the title are unsurprising to me since I agree that denials and debates are frequent in science, and intuition is shunned by most who practice it.
One commenter on Goodreads said [1]:
"Saying something is undeniable is a pretty aggressive title, because it immediately attacks those who disagree, and makes them out to be ignorant for denying the undeniable."
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Douglas Axe's Qualifications
Before I give my long-winded, naturalistic rebuke against intuition, I should give credit where credit is due:
Douglas Axe is a real research scientist. This Caltech graduate is trying to subvert the theory of evolution from the laboratory. He is not trying to do it from his mom's basement nor by trolling on the internet with ideas made out of thin air.
In his earlier days, Axe had befriended the eminent British scientist and Cambridge University professor, Sir Alan Fersht, who used multi-disciplinary biology and chemistry to study proteins [2]. Having been a colleague to Stephen Hawking helps to brighten Alan's eminence. Axe worked at research centers wherein Alan was a director (see pages 1-3).
So, Axe respects the gnarly experiences of opposing mainstream science from the vantage point of being a scientist himself.
Axe distances himself from creationism by stating that creationism is about clinging to "a particular understanding of the Biblical text of Genesis," but intelligent design merely restricts itself to "a purposeful inventor." He admits there is a logical leap in assuming that 'intelligent designer' means 'God.' Intelligent design takes a minimalist view (see page 48). I see Intelligent Design and Creationism as two bedfellows. They may deny it, but it is hard to separate the two when many Intelligent Design apologists, like Axe, are Christians.
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Intuition is a Shortcut
Axe argues that we intuitively know complexity's demands for a designer. He exemplifies this intuition by stating that shoes have a shoemaker, omelets have an omelet-maker, a buttoned shirt has a buttoner, and therefore dragonflies, horses, and humans have a designer/maker (see pages 21-22).
I believe the skeptic is fair when he/she says intuition is irreconcilable with science because intuition is often deceptive and not objective. I have this nifty idea that intuitive responses are like a heuristic, which is a strategy of taking an alternative problem-solving path meant for efficiency and saving on time [3]. But there is no place for shortcutting in science. We cannot see the whole world for what it objectively is, considering there are trillions of microbial species (including the 99.999% still undiscovered) on Earth that go undetected by our eyes [4]. Even when looking at stuff visible to the naked eye, visual illusions fill in the gaps of our periphery [5]. So, if our perception of the outside world can be poor and deceiving, why should we expect intuition to do any better?
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Axe's Popular Appeal
Axe tries to offer a very down-to-earth definition of intuition as he claims that our design intuitions are universal. Although, he hints at intuition's unreliability for making objective analyses/conclusions:
"As a scientist, I recognize the need for caution here. Intuitions are such slippery things that we can hardly give an adequate firsthand account of them, much less a general account for all of humanity" (page 19).
According to Douglas, our eyes that see the world give us "first-hand experience" that supports our "design intuition." Our eyes employ a "basic science." Our senses are recorders of patterns and behaviors, though in a non-technical sense. We have mental conceptions modeling how the outside world works, and we rectify them whenever necessary. Douglas calls this "common science," which he attaches to "common sense" (see page 60).
I have to appreciate Axe's attempted appeal to the general public. He has a "we-are-in-this-together" kind of attitude by saying that you do not need a technical college degree to arrive at the truth about this question on life's origins.
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The Problem with Common Sense
Science launches continual attacks on our intuitions and common sense. Science tells us we live on a highly fast-moving sphere, but our intuitive feelings tell us we are unmoving. Does intuition or science tell you that hydrogen and oxygen mix to make water? Does intuition or science tell you that salt is composed of explosive sodium and poisonous chlorine? So it is the same for evolution by natural selection, as expressed by Jason Rosenhouse, PhD-holder in mathematics from Dartmouth College [6]:
"Folks, no one has 'intuitions' about what can happen in billions years of evolution by natural selection. Nothing in our daily experience is remotely relevant to understanding what science reveals about the history of life on Earth...The only way to determine whether it is plausible is to do the hard work of high-level science. How interesting that the actual professionals who do this work, who are forced by the practical realities of their jobs to stick with what works and discard bad ideas that lead nowhere, are all but unanimous in finding evolution not just credible, but, frankly, kind of obvious."
I quote Jason to appreciate his logic, though I wish not to ally with the caustic tone of his critique against Axe.
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What Does Psychology Say About Design Intuition?
To make design intuition appear to be universal, Axe quotes Berkeley psychology professor Alison Gopnik:
"By elementary-school age, children start to invoke an ultimate God-like designer to explain the complexity of the world around them--even children brought up as atheists."
He also quotes Boston University psychology professor Deborah Kelemen:
"Even though advanced scientific training can reduce acceptance of scientifically inaccurate teleological explanations, it cannot erase a tenacious early-emerging human tendency to find purpose in nature."
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Children as Intuitive Theists? I Am Unsure
Since I could not find Alison Gopnik's article on children and theism, perhaps Deborah Kelemen's 2003 article titled "Are Children Intuitive Theists" will satisfy this fact-checking [7].
What follows is my attempted abridgment of her work:
Deborah Kelemen discusses the work of early 20th Century Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, who interviewed children and documented their responses about God as the originator of natural objects. Piaget found that children used God to allude to someone that resembles the most influential person in their lives--their parent. While referring to children as artificialists, Piaget believed that children could not distinguish between human and nonhuman causes for objects in the world. Research since then has disputed Piaget's assumptions. It has revealed that children are more abstract than anthropomorphic in their earliest understanding of goal-directed entities that can monitor their environments (i.e., agency). Children can realize that humans make artifacts, but humans do not make nature in general (i.e., trees, grass, sun, etc.). Nevertheless, one Piagetian idea is left haunting us: children are generally inclined to perceive purpose and nonhuman creation behind objects and behaviors.
But does that incontestably show that an intelligent designer or purpose-maker put it in us?
Researchers have found that young children pay attention to inborn, survival-promoting adaptations that they share with other children instead of paying attention to the overall appearance they share. When forming opinions about the transmissible traits from parent to offspring, children ignore origins and focus on what is directly observable: the physical features and quality of life as affected by age and risk-related changes. When relating to body parts, children ignore the physical-mechanical cause and pay attention to how those parts serve the body that possesses them.
These studies on children would suggest that humans rudimentarily depend on teleology for understanding biology. Teleology explains things according to the purposes/goals they serve instead of their causes from which they arose. Teleology is an "innate adaptation" to a convoluted world. When asking American 4 and 5-year-olds about lions and rain clouds, they answered in terms of what they are "made for" and not what they do. Lions are made "to go in the zoo" while rain clouds are "for raining." Kelemen expressed that these results complicate the "innate adaptation" conclusion, whereas I think children's tendencies to teleologically interpret the nonbiological world and the biological world add support. But I am not sure yet that I agree children are intuitively theistic.
Kelemen expresses that religious climate, mood, and exceptionalism (i.e., assumed superiority and uniqueness in the competition against other religions) do not cause these "promiscuous" purpose-oriented ways of thinking that endure into elementary school. She draws that idea from the observation of diminished teleological biases in both American and British 9 and 10-year-olds and the observation that children are influenced by their parents' choosing causal explanations over teleological explanations. Kelemen blames children's purpose-oriented mindset on the "side effects of a socially intelligent mind."
Kelemen cites studies from the 1990s and early 2000s that find children, from both fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist backgrounds, resorting to intentional agents or a god as a cause for the origins of species. The theistic interpretations then wane among the 11 to 13-year-olds.
But Kelemen is reluctant about the conclusion that children are intuitive theists. She asks:
"What evidence is there that children possess any of the conceptual prerequisites that intuitive theism might entail? What evidence is there that their intuitions display any coherence at all?"
Well, infants 12 months of age can pay attention to the "gaze of faceless blobs" and perceive the purpose behind shapes on a computer. Infants at 15 months of age can finish the unfinished doings of nonhuman entities. Thus, infants are very competent at detecting agency. However, their competence to judge the creative aims and plans of impalpable agents, such as deities, is not evidenced here.
Kelemen states that several prerequisites must be present for us to have evidence that children can reason about impalpable agents:
There must be an ability to mentally represent the agent despite its impalpability.
The child must assign mental states to the impalpable agent that recognizes it as distinct from ordinary agents.
The child must see an object's design and purpose as dependent on or generated from an intentional agent.
Kelemen cites late 1990's research on children's prolonged time spent socializing with imaginary persons or animals, betokening that 3 and 4-year-olds are supplied with sharp mental imagery to consistently represent the desires, judgments, activities, and personalities of insubstantial agents. These imaginary companions have a cross-cultural presence. Their cultural transmission takes place at least within families. Children at least have symbolic reasoning and representations about insubstantial agents. Research has delved into 5-year-olds' acute discrimination between the mental states of well-known "non-natural agents" and "earthly individuals."
Again, how does that non-assumptively show that an intelligent designer or purpose-maker put it in us?
Researchers tested 3-year-olds' abilities to impute mental states to others and gauge how others' beliefs can be discrepant with physical reality. Researchers tested this first by letting the children see pebbles inside a cracker box before being asked what they think others would believe (without seeing the contents) is inside the box. Their answer that others would believe "pebbles" assumes that 3-year-olds may see other humans as omniscient. But 5-year-olds answered "crackers," thereby indicating awareness that beliefs can be wrong. However, when asked about God, children of various ages treated God as omniscient.
Kelemen summarizes these findings:
"... these findings suggest that around 5 years of age, children possess the prerequisites to make advanced, distinctive, attributions of mental states to non-natural agents. But are children truly conceptually distinguishing these agents from people or just representing these agents as humans augmented with culturally prescribed, superhuman properties inferred from adults' religious talk? The answer to this question is unclear. Certainly children's supernatural concepts, like those of adults, are likely to be influenced by culturally prescribed, systematically counterintuitive properties."
Professionals have suggested that 3-year-olds can handle man-made objects as though they are specialized for a sole purpose, consensus is lacking as to when they learn how to reason in an adult-like fashion about this. Former studies showed that children will assume that a man-made object is functionally the same as another if they share the same shape until approximately 6 years of age. Later and improved research showed that 2-year-olds can categorize objects based on function instead of similar shapes. Professionals have observed 3-year-olds denying similar shape-based categorizations once they are informed that the objects are meant for dissimilar functions. Kelemen's lab research revealed that 4 and 5-year-olds preferred to believe in the intended function of man-made objects portrayed to them by stories, even after seeing the man-made objects used against their intended function.
A caveat from Kelemen is that research until her time does not reveal children's ability to intuit the designer's role in appointing function.
On page 3, Kelemen makes me think that "theism" has adult connotations. Therefore, children cannot be "intuitive theists." They do not have a proven adult-like ability to reason about the metaphysical truth-falsehoods attached to theism nor do they possess the adult-like emotions that belong to the endorsement of specific brands of theism. Kelemen admits that our knowledge is incomplete about the degree to which children's religious feelings match adults' religious feelings.
There may be a trend among the studies she cited. By kindergarten, children may acquire a consistent way of viewing phenomena in terms of purpose instead of causes. However, the lingering issue is that children's proclivity to view supernatural entities as originators of nature does not entail seeing nature's functionality as also coming from supernatural entities. Children can realize the natural causes of evolution.
Children's perceptions are malleable. If an intelligent designer/purpose-maker gave us intuitive awareness as evidence of his actual presence, I would expect perceptions to not be so malleable.
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Teleology Hiding in the Background
I admit that Kelemen's 2003 writing is old, and we need to discuss more updated research. Since Axe is quoting psychology claims about reduced teleological impulses in adults, let me discuss writing from Deborah Kelemen in 2012 [8].
Studies were performed on scientists to see whether they would default to unjustified teleological explanations when pressured by time constraints. These scientists were esteemed in their writings on chemistry, geoscience, and physics at prestigious American colleges and universities. Participants were asked to choose between "true" or "false" response keys upon seeing various teleological versus causal statements about nature. Scientists were found prone to choosing scientifically unjustified teleological explanations when asked to make speedy and non-reflective decisions. Their non-reflective teleological choices were twice the number of reflective choices made by their colleagues. This tells me that scientific training will mostly censor teleology in the background of one's mind but not entirely uproot it. You can exhume those teleological biases from their graves when restricting your "cognitive resources."
How much teleology can we expect from ordinary people if teleology still hides in the backgrounds of professionals' minds despite its banishment from professional chemistry and physics? The human psyche, in general, may cling to teleology more than we think.
Alzheimer's patients and minimally schooled Romanian Roma adults were found prone to teleological interpretations.
A teleological interpretation could be this: "prehistoric rocks were pointy so that animals would not sit on them and smash them."
A physical-causal explanation would be this: "they were pointy because material built up over time."
Kelemen states her conviction that new teleological ideas would not spring from an Alzheimer's brain. Instead, those teleological ideas are stemming or re-emerging from childhood because they never disappeared upon entering adulthood.
Kelemen's 2009 research was interested in undergraduate students who are scientifically trained to neutralize teleological impulses. Though the undergraduates could prefer non-teleological explanations during reflective reasoning, the speedy and non-reflective tests would reveal something different. When asked to make swift and non-reflective judgments, "undergraduates showed heightened tendencies to accept inaccurate teleological explanations (61%) relative to their unspeeded counterparts (52%)."
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Denying the Intuitive Belief Hypothesis
I found a 2017 Nature report that addresses the Intuitive Belief Hypothesis, which asserts that intuitive thinking guides supernatural belief [9]. Nature appears to put a twist on things by denying that a reduction in analytical thinking (i.e., slow and calculated) will put intuitive thinking (i.e., quick information-processing) in the driver's seat of supernatural belief. Instead, it affirms that the social and cultural factors of one's upbringing play a more decisive role in supernatural belief. Could this report undermine Douglas' assertions about a Universal Design Intuition?
We should be cautious against the assumption that our intuitive vs. analytical systems work like a hydraulic system, as though an increase in one causes a decrease in the other. When thinking about how our cognitions evolved to make us believers since birth, it is tempting to use an intuitive-analytical dichotomy as a measuring tool for the strength of supernatural belief. I feel an even greater temptation to dichotomize this when I consider that brain-imaging technology reveals the ventral medial prefrontal cortex's involvement with belief-based judgments and the right prefrontal cortex's involvement with logical judgments. Seeing it this way would make it easy to understand why humans have tried marrying supernatural ideas with scientific and logical reasoning since the tribal societies of long ago.
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Study 1:
Nature reported on eighty-nine people who took a journey in a pilgrim setting meant to prime them for supernatural identifications. They trekked from a mountain chain, called the French Pyrenees, to the Santiago de Compostela, which made them cross most of Northern Spain. The participants were aged 16 to 67. 34% were Spanish, 13% German, 12% American, 8% Brazilian, 4% South Korean, 3% Polish, and the remaining (less than 3%) were Italian, Irish, and French. They were mostly Christian (71%), spiritual but not religious (20%), atheist (8%), and Buddhist (1%). The journey lasted for an average of 32 days, and after 12 days of walking, they accepted questionnaires. They stopped at hostels for rest and refreshments. After engaging in a probability game that involved selecting colored and transparent beads from a container, they had to rate their level of religiosity/spirituality as a way to gauge their entertainment of supernatural ideas. No intuitive thinking was found associated with supernatural identifications.
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Study 2:
The second study predicted that analytical processing could be exhausted by manipulating the working memory's limited capacity to concurrently handle various mental items. The prediction was that there would be an intensification of intuitive processing and supernatural beliefs if the Intuitive Belief Hypothesis is true. The study notes that it already has been shown that overloading the memory with information beyond what it can hold will impede analytical processing and force individuals "to rely more on holistic, associative judgments, associated with actions that would tempt fate."
Participants were split into an experimental group (those who received treatment) and a control group (those who did not receive the treatment). Thirty-seven members of the general public and the university were selected, aged 18 to 40. 51% were females.
For the cognitive reflection task (CRT), the experimental group participants were given a three-digit number at the beginning. They were required to subtract three for each later trial and input the new number in a random 33% of trials. Researchers wanted to make the subtraction task more difficult and prevent the participants' memories from being strengthened. So, the researchers disallowed frequent use of the new number. But a screen cued the control group to input the number in the random 33% trials.
The Supernatural Signs Tasks required participants to assess pictures about occurrences changing people's lives. People were asked, "If I was in the situation described and saw [that poster/picture], I would think that the picture contained a sign or a message about how [the situation] will turn out." Higher assessments meant that participants saw a supernatural sign or message in the images. Participants were also asked to imagine themselves strolling down the street and imagine what they might think upon seeing a picture of a park bench after hearing a story about losing their home in a fire and getting a paltry refund from the insurance company. They had to rate how religious they are and how frequently they might pray, attend religious services, and read religious books.
Study 2's results uncovered that the experimental group that received treatment had a remarkably lower score than the control group who did not receive treatment during the CRT. As predicted, the experimental group was more intuitive than the control group. Contrastingly, there were no differences in the experimental group and the control group's intensity and speed of ascribing supernatural qualities to things. No statistical dependence or relationship was discovered between the manner of intuiting and self-reported religiosity.
Image credits belong to: Hans | Pixabay
Study 3:
Study 3 selected ninety individuals from the ordinary people of society. The ages were 18 to 64, and 58.9% were female. Transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) was a non-invasive, painless technology used in conveying low electric currents via electrodes attached to the participant's scalp. This technology targeted the positively charged anodes attracting electrons or anions in the participants. It tries to improve the cellular basis of learning by strengthening the pliable synaptic junctions of communication between neurons [10]. Researchers were interested in enhancing task performance via tDCS during this study. The stop signal task, which required quick responses to predetermined stimuli, was used to gauge cognitive inhibition (the ability to stop paying attention to stimuli unrelated to the current task). Researchers calculated individuals' differences in reaction time (i.e., intervals between stimulation and response) before and during neurostimulation. Reduced reaction time (i.e., shortened intervals between stimulation and response) represented improvement on the stop signal task. Forty-four participants (27 females), which included Christians (36.4%), Atheists (22.7%), Spiritual but Not Religious individuals (18.2%), Agnostics (18.2%), and Spiritualists (4.5%) became faster during anodal stimulation, as represented by a difference score of fewer than 0 milliseconds. Participants were faster in the anodal conditions than in the sham condition (which makes a participant believe he/she is undergoing the treatment without actually undergoing it).
The results revealed no change in supernatural attributions after using anodal stimulation to improve cognitive inhibition, even for those who received the sham/feigned treatment.
Again, the scientific journal Nature denies the correlation between supernatural belief and intuition. The idea that supernatural belief is naturally incidental to the ordinary states and processes of acquiring knowledge does not explain why hundreds of millions of people dismiss supernatural beliefs. The scientific journal Nature suggests that perhaps the Intuitive Belief Hypothesis is essentially erroneous. From an evolutionary perspective, non-believers are not exempt from the temptation to default to supernatural belief. It is too cognitively effortful to forcibly put an end to the tendency to ascribe supernatural qualities to things.
Archaeology on the treatment of dead bodies as far back as the Neanderthals' time reveals supernatural beliefs as the most primitive human belief structures. Supernatural beliefs are crucial to how people make meaning by interpreting the self, their relationships, and their life events. Supernatural beliefs are vital for emotional compensation, which involves strategies for distracting yourself from feelings of ineptitude in one part of your life by going on to satisfying a different part of your life. Supernatural beliefs may help to regulate and adjust the body's automatic responses to stimuli. Supernatural beliefs offer certainty on how to estimate the future and how to perceive the world's essence. However, this does not prove that we are born to be believers like we are born to do other things such as learning a language early in life. Education and not cognition nor ancient guts/intuitions predispose you to belief or unbelief about the supernatural.
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Works cited:
[1] Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed by Douglas Axe (goodreads.com)
[2] Professor Sir Alan Fersht FRS | Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry (cam.ac.uk)
[3] Heuristics and Cognitive Biases (verywellmind.com)
[4] Earth May Be Home to a Trillion Species of Microbes - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
[6] A Review of Undeniable, by Douglas Axe. | ScienceBlogs
[7] 2004_Kelemen_IntuitiveTheist.pdf (bu.edu)
[8] kelemenrottmanseston_jepgwsuppmat_professional_scientists_2013.pdf (joshuarottman.com)
[10] What is transcranial Direct-Current Stimulation (tDCS)? (neuromodec.com)