Intelligent design in the hot seat

I never finished covering the chapter in I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist that deals with evolution. I wanted to spend some time now with the authors' discussion of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution. They organize their discussion by looking at objections to intelligent design with responses to those objections.

The first objection is that intelligent design is not science. Of course, Darwinists make this claim based on their own biased definition of science. Science used to be a search for causes. But Darwinists say now that all answers must be materialistic, not allowing as they say a "divine foot in the door." The irony is that if intelligent design is not science, than neither is Darwinism because both are trying to discover what happened in the past. Darwinists would also have to rule out archaeology, cryptology, criminal and accident forensic investigations, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence since they are all legitimate forensic sciences that look into the past for intelligent causes.

Another charge against intelligent design is that it commits the God-of-the-gaps fallacy, which occurs when someone falsely believes God caused the event when it was actually natural phenomenon. At one time people used to believe lightning was caused by God, but now we know the real reasons. But it's not that we lack evidence of a natural explanation; it's because we have positive and empirically detectable evidence for an intelligent cause. In fact, intelligent design scientists are open to both natural and intelligent causes rather than being opposed to continued research into natural explanations for the first life. In addition, intelligent design is a falsifiable premise. It could be proven wrong if natural laws were someday discovered to create specified complexity. But Darwinists don't allow falsification of their story because they don't allow any other creation premise to be considered. Actually, it's Darwinists who claim that someday they will have answers to explain how complex, information-rich biological systems came into existence--they believe in science-of-the-gaps, it appears.

Another charge against intelligent design is that it is religiously motivated. Here's a quick answer to that – so what? Truth does not lie in the motivation of scientists, but in the quality of the evidence. After all, it's not just religious people that have a worldview. So do atheists. Intelligent design is not "creation science" either. Proponents don't make the same claims of a young Earth or a worldwide flood.

One final objection to intelligent design has to do with imperfections in creatures. The fact that scientists complain about sub-optimal design implies that they know what optimal design is. It sounds like actually an argument for a designer. When they claim something is designed correctly, they're implying they could tell if it were designed correctly. Secondly, even if something was sub-optimally designed,it doesn't mean there was no design at all. In addition, all design requires trade-offs. For example, cars want to get good gas mileage but they need power, so some sort of compromise is reached. One final thought here – the book does not discuss it, but many of the complaints about bad design have turned out to be incorrect. Many systems in our bodies which at one time were considered poorly designed have actually proved to have important, helpful features.

There's one final section in this chapter dealing with motives behind Darwinism, but I think I'll save that for a future blog.