Intelligent Design

"Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, "This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in. It fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well. It must have been made to have me in it!""–Douglas Adams

Intelligent Design (or ID) is the highly controversial assertion, that certain features of the universe and of living things exhibit the characteristics of a product resulting from an intelligent cause or agent.

The basic premise is to look at a pocket watch. The watch is a complex device that did not simply self assemble, or evolve from simpler forms like grandfather clocks. The watch implies a watchmaker, or an Intelligent Designer.

Most ID advocates claim at first that their focus is on detecting evidence of ID in nature, without regard to whom or what the designer might be. ID advocate William Dembski in his book "The Design Inference" lists a god or an "alien life force" as two possible options, however Dembski states explicitly elsewhere his opinion that the designer can only be the Christian God. Dembski has also stated, "ID is part of God's general revelation...Not only does intelligent design rid us of this ideology (materialism), which suffocates the human spirit, but, in my personal experience, I've found that it opens the path for people to come to Christ." Most advocates of ID clearly are using it to put a more scientific shine to creationism

The few scientists who support ID claim it has all the merits of a solid scientific theory. This claim is widely opposed by the majority of the scientific community. Despite ID sometimes being called Intelligent Design Theory, the scientific community does not recognize ID as a scientific theory and considers it to be pure creationist pseudoscience. The National Academy of Sciences has said that Intelligent Design "and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life" are not science because their claims cannot be tested by experiment and propose no new hypotheses of their own. The Intelligent Design concept and the associated movement have come under considerable criticism. This criticism is regarded by advocates of ID as a natural consequence of the cultural dominance of Darwinism built upon naturalism or materialistic presuppositions which preclude by definition the possibility of supernatural causes as rational scientific explanations.

Intelligent Design was born out of opposition to the theory of evolution. Its supposed main purpose is to investigate whether or not the empirical evidence necessarily implies that life on Earth must have been designed by an intelligent agent or agents. Once again, William Dembski, one of ID's leading proponents, has stated that the "fundamental claim" of ID is that "there are natural systems that cannot be adequately explained in terms of undirected natural forces and that exhibit features which in any other circumstance we would attribute to intelligence."

Strangely, Dembski uses the example of Mt. Rushmore to provide an analogy to the underlying premise of ID:

"What about this rock formation convinces us that it was due to a designing intelligence and not merely to wind and erosion? Designed objects like Mt. Rushmore exhibit characteristic features or patterns that point us to an intelligence.”

Well yes of course they do, and so does all the recorded historical evidence of Mt. Rushmore’s construction, obvious tool marks etc. The recently collapsed New Hampshire “Old man of the mountain” was a natural occurring rock formation resembling a native American face that was caused buy natural forces of wind and erosion. Or would he claim that it too was an example of ID?

Proponents of ID claim to look for what they call signs of intelligence — physical properties of an object that necessitate design. Examples include claims of irreducible complexity, information mechanisms, and specified complexity. Many design theorists believe that if living systems show one or more of these signs it is the result of ID. This stands in opposition to naturalistic theories of evolution, which attempt to explain life exclusively through proven natural processes such as random mutations and natural selection.

Critics call ID religious dogma repackaged in an effort to return creationism into public school science classrooms and note that ID features notably as part of the campaign known as “Teach the Controversy”. The National Academy of Sciences and the National Center for Science Education assert that ID is not science, but creationism. While the scientific theory of evolution by natural selection has observable and repeatable facts to support it such as the process of mutations, gene flow, genetic drift, adaptation and speciation through natural selection, the "Intelligent Designer" in ID is neither observable nor repeatable.

The inference that an intelligent designer (God or an alien life force) created life on Earth has been compared to the claim that aliens helped the ancient Egyptians build the pyramids. In both cases, the effect of this outside intelligence is not repeatable, observable, or falsifiable. Empirical scientists would simply say "we don't know exactly how the Egyptians built the pyramids" and list what is known about Egyptian construction techniques.

The phrase "intelligent design", used in this sense, first appeared in Christian creationist literature, including the textbook “Of Pandas and People”. The term was promoted more broadly by the retired legal scholar Phillip E. Johnson following his 1991 book “ Darwin on Trial”. Johnson is the program advisor of the Center for Science and Culture and is considered the father of the intelligent design movement.

As far back as Plato philosophers have reasoned that the complexity of nature indicates supernatural design; this has come to be known as the teleological argument. The modern concept of intelligent design is distinguished from the teleological argument in that ID supposedly does not identify the agent of creation.

Intelligent design arguments are carefully formulated in secular terms and intentionally avoid positing the identity of the designer. Phillip E. Johnson has stated that cultivating ambiguity by employing secular language in arguments which are carefully crafted to avoid overtones of theistic creationism is a necessary first step for ultimately introducing the Christian concept of God as the designer. Johnson emphasizes "the first thing that has to be done is to get the Bible out of the discussion" and that "after we have separated materialist prejudice from scientific fact." only then can "biblical issues" be discussed. Johnson explicitly calls for ID proponents to hide their religious motivations so as to avoid having ID recognized "as just another way of packaging the Christian evangelical message." The majority of the principal ID advocates (including Michael Behe, William Dembski, Jonathan Wells, and Stephen C. Meyer) are Christians and have stated that in their view the designer of life is clearly the Christian God.

For a moment let us consider the motivation of this Intelligent designer. Most ID arguments initialy do not depend on Biblical fundamentalism. They do not explicitly state that their adherents accept the Bible's accounts, they do not explicitly state that God is the designer, but the designer is often implicitly hypothesized to have intervened at so many different points in time and space that only God or an extremely capable, long-lived and persistent alien culture could fulfill the requirements.

The key arguments in favor of the different variants of ID are so broad that they can be adopted by any number of communities that seek an alternative to evolutionary thought, including those that support non-theistic models of creation although the designers might be different. For example, the notion of an "intelligent designer" is compatible with the materialistic hypotheses that life on Earth was introduced by an alien species, or that it emerged as a result of panspermia, but would not be with the designer(s) of the "fine-tuned" universe. Likewise, ID claims can support a variety of theistic notions. Some proponents of creationism and intelligent design reject the Christian concept of omnipotence and omniscience on the part of God, and subscribe to Open Theism or Process theology. It has been suggested by opponents that ID researchers must explain why organisms were designed as they were, and argue that existing evidence makes the design hypothesis appear unlikely. For example, Jerry Coyne, of the University of Chicago, asks:

Would an intelligent designer create millions of species and then make them go extinct, only to replace them with other species, repeating this process over and over again? ... Why did the designer give tiny, non-functional wings to kiwi birds? Or useless eyes to cave animals? Or a transitory coat of hair to a human fetus?... Why would the designer give us a pathway for making vitamin C, but then destroy it by disabling one of its enzymes? Why didn't the intelligent designer stock oceanic islands with reptiles, mammals, amphibians, and freshwater fish, despite the suitability of such islands for these species? And why would he make the flora and fauna on those islands resemble that of the nearest mainland, even when the environments are very different?

Some of these ID researchers would instead argue that we are simply incapable of understanding the designer's motives. They claim that features that strike us as odd in a design might have been placed there by the designer for a reason--for artistic reasons, to show off, for some as-yet undetectable practical purpose.

Of course the final problem faced by ID by stating the need for a designer for objects with irreducible complexity, ID must answer "what designed the designer?" By ID's own arguments, a designer capable of creating irreducible complexity must also be irreducibly complex. Unlike with religious creationism, where the question "what created God?" can be answered with theological arguments, this creates a logical paradox, as the chain of designers can be followed back indefinitely, leaving the question of the creation of the first designer dangling. The sort of logic required in sustaining such reasoning is known as circular reasoning; a form of logical fallacy.

One ID counter-argument to this problem invokes an uncaused causer - in other words, a deity - to resolve this problem, in which case ID reduces to religious creationism. At the same time, the postulation of the existence of even a single uncaused causer in the Universe contradicts the fundamental assumption of ID that a designer is needed for every complex object. Another possible counter-argument might be an infinite regression of designers. However, admitting infinite numbers of objects also allows any arbitrarily improbable event to occur, such as an object with "irreducible" complexity assembling itself by chance. Again, this contradicts the fundamental assumption of ID that a designer is needed for every complex object, producing a logical contradiction.

Thus, according to opponents, either attempt to patch the ID hypothesis appears to either result in logical contradiction, or reduces it to a belief in religious creationism. ID then ceases to be a falsifiable theory and loses its ability to claim to be a scientific theory.

Richard Dawkins, biologist and professor at Oxford University, argues that intelligent design simply takes the complexity required for life to have evolved and moves it to the "designer" instead. ID doesn't explain how the complexity happened in the first place, it just moves it.

Some critics have argued that many points raised by Intelligent Design proponents strongly resemble arguments from ignorance. In the argument from ignorance, one claims that the lack of evidence for one view is evidence for another view (e.g. "Science cannot explain this, therefore God did it"). Particularly, Michael Behe's demands for ever more detailed explanations of the historical evolution of molecular systems seem to assume a dichotomy where either evolution or design is the proper explanation, and any perceived failure of evolution becomes a victory for design. In scientific terms, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" for naturalistic explanations of observed traits of living organisms.