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For other uses, see Intelligent design (disambiguation).
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Intelligent design (ID) is a perspective on origins that proposes that "certain features of the universe and of living things exhibit the characteristics of a product resulting from an intelligent cause or agent, as opposed to an unguided process such as natural selection." Proponents say that intelligent design is a scientific theory that stands on equal footing with, or is superior to, current scientific theories regarding the origin of life.

The vast majority of the scientific community views intelligent design not as a valid scientific theory but as neocreationist pseudoscience or junk science. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has stated that intelligent design "and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life" are not science because they cannot be tested by experiment and propose no new hypotheses of their own.

Intelligent design in summary

Intelligent design is presented as an alternative to purely naturalistic forms of the theory of evolution. Its stated purpose is to investigate whether or not existing empirical evidence implies that life on Earth must have been designed by an intelligent agent or agents. William Dembski, one of intelligent design's leading proponents, has stated that the fundamental claim of intelligent design 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."

Proponents of intelligent design look for evidence of what they term 'signs of intelligence' — physical properties of an object that they assert necessitate design. The most commonly cited signs include irreducible complexity, information mechanisms, and specified complexity. Many design proponents believe that living systems show one or more of these, from which they infer that some aspects of life have been designed. This stands in opposition to mainstream biological science, which, through experiment and collection of uncontested data, explains the natural world exclusively through observed impersonal physical processes such as mutations and natural selection. Intelligent design proponents say that while evidence pointing to the nature of an "intelligent designer" may not be directly observable, its effects on nature can be detected. Dembski, in Signs of Intelligence, states "Proponents of intelligent design regard it as a scientific research program that investigates the effects of intelligent causes. Note that intelligent design studies the effects of intelligent causes and not intelligent causes per se." In his view, one cannot test for the identity of influences exterior to a closed system from within, so questions concerning the identity of a designer fall outside the realm of the concept.

Origins of the concept

For millennia, philosophers have argued that the complexity of nature's design indicates the existence of a purposeful natural or supernatural designer/creator. The first recorded arguments for a natural designer come from Greek philosophy. The philosophical concept of the "Logos" is typically credited to Heraclitus (c. 535–c.475 BCE), a Pre-Socratic philosopher, and is briefly explained in his extant fragments. Plato (c. 427–c. 347 BCE) posited a natural "demiurge" of supreme wisdom and intelligence as the formator of the cosmos in his work Timaeus. Aristotle (c. 384–322 BCE) also developed the idea of a natural formator of the cosmos, often referred to as the "Prime Mover" in his work Metaphysics. Cicero (c. 106–c. 43 BCE) stated, "The divine power is to be found in a principle of reason which pervades the whole of nature," in de Natura Deorum.

The use of this line of reasoning as applied to a supernatural designer has come to be known as the teleological argument for the existence of God. The most notable forms of this argument were expressed by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae (thirteenth century), design being the fifth of Aquinas' five proofs for God's existence, and William Paley in his book Natural Theology (1802), where he uses the watchmaker analogy, which is still used in intelligent design arguments. In the early 19th century such arguments led to the development of what was caled Natural theology, the study of biology as a search to understand the "mind of God". This movement fueled the passion for collecting biological and other fossil specimens, that ultimately led to Darwin's theory of The origin of the species.

Intelligent design in the late 20th century can be seen as a modern reframing of natural theology. As evolutionary theory has expanded to explain more phenomena, so the examples held up as evidence of design have changed, but the essential argument remains the same: complex systems imply a designer. In the past, examples that have been offered included the eye (optical system) and the feathered wing; current examples are mostly biochemical: protein functions, blood clotting, and bacteria flagellum (see irreducible complexity).

Intelligent design deliberately does not try to identify or name the specific agent of creation – merely that one (or more) must exist. This is one area in which the modern concept of intelligent design more closely resembles the ancient Greek philosophers than the Christian philosophers, though proponents of intelligent design seek to take the debate into the realm of science rather than simply philosophy. Whether this is a genuine feature of the concept or just a posture taken to avoid alienating those who would separate religion from science-teaching is a matter of great debate between supporters and critics of the theory.

Origins of the term

Though unrelated to the current use of the term, the phrase "intelligent design" can be found in an 1847 issue of Scientific American, in an 1868 book, and in an address to the 1873 annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science by Paleyite botanist George James Allman:

No physical hypothesis founded on any indisputable fact has yet explained the origin of the primordial protoplasm, and, above all, of its marvellous properties, which render evolution possible—in heredity and in adaptivity, for these properties are the cause and not the effect of evolution. For the cause of this cause we have sought in vain among the physical forces which surround us, until we are at last compelled to rest upon an independent volition, a far-seeing intelligent design.

The phrase was coined again in Humanism, a 1903 book by Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller: "It will not be possible to rule out the supposition that the process of evolution may be guided by an intelligent design," and was resurrected in the early 1980s by Sir Fred Hoyle as part of his promotion of panspermia.

The term was again resurrected when in 1987 the Supreme Court of the United States, in the case of Edwards v. Aguillard, ruled out teaching creationism in schools in the U.S.A.. In drafts of the book Of Pandas and People, the word 'creationism' was subsequently changed almost verbatim to intelligent design. The book was published in 1989 and is considered by its authors to be the first intelligent design textbook for use by school children. Stephen C. Meyer, co-founder of the Discovery Institute and vice president of the Center for Science and Culture, reports that the term came up in 1988 at a conference he attended in Tacoma, Washington, called Sources of Information Content in DNA. He attributes the phrase to Charles Thaxton, editor of 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 which advocated redefining science to allow claims of supernatural creation. Johnson went on to work with Meyers, becoming the program advisor of the Center for Science and Culture, and is considered the "father" of the intelligent design movement, as a part of its wedge strategy.

Intelligent design as a movement

Main article: Intelligent design movement

The intelligent design movement arose out of an organized neocreationist campaign to promote a religious agenda calling for broad social, academic and political changes employing intelligent design arguments in the public sphere, primarily in the United States. Leaders of the movement say intelligent design exposes the limitations of scientific orthodoxy, and of the secular philosophy of Naturalism. Intelligent design proponents allege that science shouldn't relying upon naturalism, and shouldn't demands an adoption of a naturalistic philosophy that dismisses any explanation that contains a supernatural cause out of hand.

Phillip E. Johnson, considered the father of the intelligent design movement and its unofficial spokesperson, stated that the goal of intelligent design is to cast creationism as a scientific concept. Nearly all intelligent design concepts and the associated movement are the products of Fellows of the Discovery Institute, and its Center for Science and Culture, which continues to guide the movement. The Institute follows its wedge strategy while conducting its adjunct Teach the Controversy campaign.

Leading intelligent design proponents have made conflicting statements regarding intelligent design. In statements directed at the general public they state that intelligent design is not religious, while they state that intelligent design has its foundation in the Bible, when addressing conservative Christian supporters. Barbara Forrest, an expert who has written extensively on the movement, describes this as being due to the Discovery Institute obfuscating its agenda as a matter of policy. She has written that the movement's "activities betray an aggressive, systematic agenda for promoting not only intelligent design creationism, but the religious worldview that undergirds it."

Intelligent design debate

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A key strategy of the intelligent design movement is in convincing the general public that there is a debate. This debate has not taken place in scientific circles, but in the cultural and political realms.

The intelligent design debate centers on three issues:

  1. Whether the definition of science is broad enough to allow for theories of origins which incorporate the acts of an intelligent designer
  2. Whether the evidence supports such theories
  3. Whether the teaching of such theories is appropriate in public education

Intelligent design supporters generally hold that science must allow for both natural and supernatural explanations of phenomena. They assert that excluding supernatural explanations artificially limits the realm of possibilities, particularly where naturalistic explanations fail to explain certain phenomena, and that supernatural explanations provide a very simple and intuitive explanation for the origins of life and the universe. Proponents say that evidence exists in the forms of irreducible complexity and specified complexity that does not support complexity and diversity of life coming about solely through natural means.

Finally, supporters hold that religious neutrality requires the teaching of both evolution and intelligent design in schools, because teaching only evolution unfairly discriminates against those holding Creationist beliefs. Teaching both, intelligent design supporters argue, allows for a scientific basis for religious belief, without causing the state to actually promote a religious belief.

According to critics of intelligent design, not only has intelligent design failed to establish reasonable doubt in its proposed shortcomings of accepted scientific theories, but it has not even presented a case worth taking seriously. Critics of intelligent design argue that intelligent design has not presented a credible case for the public policy utility of presenting intelligent design in education. More broadly, critics maintain that it is an attempt to teach religion in public schools, which the United States Constitution forbids (establishment clause). They allege that in place of developing the scientific foundations of their theory, intelligent design proponents have been campaigning for public acceptance of the theory. Scientists argue that those advocating scientific treatment of supernatural phenomena are grossly misunderstanding the issue, and indeed misunderstand the nature and purpose of science itself. Furthermore, if one were to take the proponents of "equal time for all theories" at their word, there would be no logical limit to the number of potential "theories" to be taught in the public school system. A cursory examination of mankind's belief systems finds a very large number of potential supernatural explanations for the emergence and organization of life on earth, none of which have any empirical support and all of which therefore are equally deserving of promotion as intelligent design. Proponents of intelligent design, however, rarely if ever appear to note such alternative theological/supernatural possibilities, defaulting invariably to their particular interpretation of the Christian God.

Between these two positions there is a large body of opinion that does not condone the teaching of what is considered unscientific or questionable material, but is generally sympathetic to the position of Deism/Theism and therefore desires some compromise between the two. The nominal points of contention are seen as being proxies for other issues. Many intelligent design followers are quite open about their view that "Scientism" is itself a religion that promotes secularism and materialism in an attempt to erase religion from public life, and view their work in the promotion of intelligent design as a way to return religion to a central role in education and other public spheres. Some allege that this larger debate is often the subtext for arguments made over intelligent design, though others note that intelligent design serves as an effective proxy for the religious beliefs of prominent intelligent design proponents in their efforts to advance their religious point of view within society.

Intelligent design concepts

The following are summaries of key concepts of intelligent design, followed by summaries of criticisms. Counterarguments against such criticisms are often proffered by intelligent design proponents, as are counter-counterarguments by critics, etc.

Irreducible complexity

Main article: Irreducible complexity

In the context of Intelligent Design, irreducible complexity is defined by Michael Behe as

...a single system which is composed of several well-matched interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. (Behe, Molecular Machines: Experimental Support for the Design Inference)

Behe uses the mousetrap as an illustrative example of this concept. A mousetrap consists of several interacting pieces — the base, the catch, the spring, the hammer — all of which must be in place for the mousetrap to work. The removal of any one piece destroys the function of the mousetrap. Intelligent design advocates assert that natural selection could not create irreducibly complex systems, because the selectable function is only present when all parts are assembled.

Critics point out that the irreducible complexity argument assumes that the necessary parts of a system have always been necessary, and therefore could not have been added sequentially. They argue that something which is at first merely advantageous can later become necessary, as other components change.

Behe's original examples of irreducibly complex mechanisms included the bacterial flagellum of E. coli, the blood clotting cascade, cilia, and the adaptive immune system.

Specified complexity

Main article: Specified complexity

The intelligent design concept of specified complexity was developed by mathematician, philosopher, and theologian William Dembski. Dembski asserts that when something exhibits specified complexity (i.e., is both complex and specified, simultaneously), one can infer that it was produced by an intelligent cause (i.e., that it was designed) rather than being the result of natural processes. He provides the following examples: "A single letter of the alphabet is specified without being complex. A long sentence of random letters is complex without being specified. A Shakespearean sonnet is both complex and specified." He states that details of living things can be similarly characterized, especially the "patterns" of molecular sequences in functional biological molecules such as DNA.

Demski defines complex specified information as anything with a less than 1 in 10 chance of occurring by (natural) chance. Critics say that this renders the argument a tautology: Complex specified information (CSI) cannot occur naturally because Dembski has defined it thus, so the real question becomes whether or not CSI actually exists in nature.

The conceptual soundness of Dembski's specified complexity/CSI argument is strongly disputed within the scientific community. Specified complexity has yet to be shown to have wide applications in other fields as Dembski claims. John Wilkins and Wesley Elsberry characterize Dembski's "explanatory filter" as eliminative, because it eliminates explanations sequentially: first regularity, then chance, finally defaulting to design. They argue that this procedure is flawed as a model for scientific inference because the asymmetric way it treats the different possible explanations renders it prone to making false conclusions of design.

Fine-tuned universe

Main article: Fine-tuned universe

One of the arguments of intelligent design proponents that includes more than just Biology is that we live in a fine-tuned universe. They propose that the natural emergence of a universe with all the features necessary for life is wildly improbable. These features include the nuclear forces, ratios of protons to baryons in the universe and protons to electrons among many others. Thus, an intelligent designer of life was needed to ensure that the requisite features were present to achieve that particular outcome.

Critics of both intelligent design and the weak form of anthropic principle argue that they are essentially a tautology; life as we know it may not exist if things were different, but a different sort of life might exist in its place. The claim of the improbability of a life-supporting universe has also been criticized as an argument by lack of imagination for assuming no other forms of life are possible.

They also suggest that many of the stated variables appear to be interconnected, and calculations made by mathematicians and physicists suggest that the emergence of a universe similar to ours is quite probable.

Intelligent design as science

The scientific method is based on a methodological assumption of philosophical naturalism to study and explain the natural world, without assuming the existence or nonexistence of the supernatural. Intelligent design proponents have often said that their position is not only scientific, but that it is even more scientific than evolution. This presents a demarcation problem, which in the philosophy of science is about how and where to draw the lines around science. For a theory to qualify as scientific it must be:

  • Consistent (internally and externally)
  • Parsimonious (sparing in proposed entities or explanations, see Occam's Razor)
  • Useful (describes and explains observed phenomena)
  • Empirically testable & falsifiable (see Falsifiability)
  • Based upon multiple observations, often in the form of controlled, repeated experiments
  • Correctable & dynamic (changes are made as new data are discovered)
  • Progressive (achieves all that previous theories have and more)
  • Provisional or tentative (admits that it might not be correct rather than asserting certainty)

For any theory, hypothesis or conjecture to be considered scientific, it must meet most, but ideally all, of the above criteria. The fewer which are matched, the less scientific it is; and if it meets only a couple or none at all, then it cannot be treated as scientific in any meaningful sense of the word. Typical objections to defining intelligent design as science are that it lacks consistency, violates the principle of parsimony, is not falsifiable, is not empirically testable, and is not correctable, dynamic, tentative or progressive.

In light of its apparent failure to adhere to scientific standards, in 2005 38 Nobel laureats issued a statement saying "intelligent design is fundamentally unscientific; it cannot be tested as scientific theory because its central conclusion is based on belief in the intervention of a supernatural agent." A coalition representing more than 70,000 Australian scientists and science teachers have issued a statement saying "intelligent design is not science" and has called on "all schools not to teach Intelligent Design (ID) as science, because it fails to qualify on every count as a scientific theory."

Intelligent design critics also say that the intelligent design doctrine does not meet the criteria for scientific evidence used by most courts. In its 1993 Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals opinion, the United States Supreme Court articulated a set of criteria for the admissibility of scientific expert testimony, in effect developing their own demarcation criteria. The Daubert Standard governs which evidence can be considered scientific in United States federal courts and most state courts. The four Daubert criteria are:

  • The theoretical underpinnings of the methods must yield testable predictions by means of which the theory could be falsified.
  • The methods should preferably be published in a peer-reviewed journal.
  • There should be a known rate of error that can be used in evaluating the results.
  • The methods should be generally accepted within the relevant scientific community.

Scientific peer review

To date, the intelligent design movement has yet to publish an article in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. One, written by the Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture Director Stephen C. Meyer, appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington in August 2004, but was later withdrawn by the publisher for having circumvented the journal's peer-review standards (see Sternberg peer review controversy).

The failure to follow the procedures of scientific discourse, and the failure to submit work to the scientific community which withstands scrutiny, is regarded by the critics of intelligent design as a strong argument against intelligent design being considered valid science.

Dembski has written that "Perhaps the best reason is that intelligent design has yet to establish itself as a thriving scientific research program." In a 2001 interview Dembski said that he stopped submitting to peer-reviewed journals because of their slow time-to-print and that he makes more money from publishing books.

In 2005 Behe in sworn testimony stated that "there are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred." Despite this, the Discovery Institute alleges that a number of intelligent design articles have been published in peer reviewed journals. Critics, largely members of the scientific community, reject this claim, pointing out that no established scientific journal has yet published an intelligent design article, and that intelligent design proponents have set up their own journals with "peer review" that consists entirely of intelligent design supporters which lack rigour.

Intelligent design proponents believe that in cases where their research is not published, it is because it points toward an intelligent designer and so is often rejected simply because it deviates from these "dogmatically held beliefs," without regard to the merits of their specific claims.

Intelligence, as an observable quality

The phrase intelligent design makes use of an assumption of the quality of an observable intelligence, a concept that has no scientific consensus definition. William Dembski, for example, has written that "Intelligence leaves behind a characteristic signature." Such characteristics of intelligent agency are assumed to be observable without intelligent design offering what the criteria for the measurement of intelligence should be. Dembski, instead, asserts that "in special sciences ranging from forensics to archaeology to SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), appeal to a designing intelligence is indispensable." How this appeal is made and what this implies as to the definition of intelligence are topics left largely unaddressed. Seth Shostak, a researcher with the SETI Institute, refutes Dembski's claim, saying intelligent design advocates base their inference on complexity - the argument being that some biological systems are too complex to have been made by natural processes - while SETI researchers are looking primarily for artificiality.

As a means of criticism, certain skeptics have pointed to a challenge of intelligent design derived from the study of artificial intelligence. The criticism is a counter to intelligent design claims about what makes a design intelligent, namely that "no preprogrammed device can be truly intelligent, that intelligence is irreducible to natural processes." In particular, while there is an implicit assumption that supposed "intelligence" or creativity of a computer program was determined by the capabilities given to it by the computer programmer, artificial intelligence need not be bound to an inflexible system of rules. Rather, if a computer program can access randomness as a function, this effectively allows for a flexible, creative, and adaptive intelligence. Evolutionary algorithms, a subfield of machine learning (itself a subfield of artificial intelligence), have been used to mathematically demonstrate that randomness and selection can be used to "evolve" complex, highly adapted structures that are not explicitly designed by a programmer. Evolutionary algorithms use the Darwinian metaphor of random mutation, selection and the survival of the fittest to solve diverse mathematical and scientific problems that are usually not solvable using conventional methods. Furthermore, forays into such areas as quantum computing seem to indicate that real probabilistic functions may be available in the future. Intelligence derived from randomness is essentially indistinguishable from the "innate" intelligence associated with biological organisms and poses a challenge to the intelligent design conception of where intelligence itself is derived (namely from a designer). Cognitive science continues to investigate the nature of intelligence to that end, but the intelligent design community for the most part seems to be content to rely on the assumption that intelligence is readily apparent as a fundamental and basic property of complex systems.

Argument from ignorance

Eugenie Scott with Glenn Branch and other critics have argued that many points raised by intelligent design proponents are a 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.

Intelligent design proponents often point out that intelligent design's goal is to prove design and not to identify the designer or its origin. Some critics have responded that positing a designer that accounts for many things but which requires no explanation is not a contribution to knowledge, but a rhetorical device used as a thought-terminating cliché.

They feel many intelligent design concepts could be described in these terms, especially the neologisms, which they contend are designed to end the desire for further investigation rather than to serve as the basis of scientific hypotheses.

This has also been characterized as the "God of the Gaps" argument, which has the following form:

  • There is a gap in scientific knowledge
  • The gap is filled with acts of God and therefore proves God.

Scientists state that this argument contributes nothing to scientific knowledge since it can be used for any question. (i.e. Why is the sky blue? God did it.)

The designer or designers

Though intelligent design advocates collectively state that their focus is on detecting evidence of design in nature without regard to who or what the designer might be, the leading proponents have made statements to their supporters that they believe the designer to be the Christian God, to the exclusion of all other religions, and thus there exists a well-established link to Genesis and Creationism.

Intelligent design arguments are formulated in secular terms and intentionally avoid identifying the intelligent agent they posit. They do not state that God is the designer, but the designer is often implicitly hypothesized to have intervened in a way that only an omnipotent being, God, could be capable of performing. Intelligent design proponents, such as Dembski, have implied that an alien culture could fulfill these requirements. But since the authoritative description of intelligent design explicitly states that the universe displays features of having been designed, critics point out that anything requiring the prior existence of the universe, such as aliens, can not logically be its "intelligent cause"; that only supernatural entities can satisfy the authoritative definition of intelligent design. And Dembski acknowledges this point:

The fine-tuning of the universe, about which cosmologists make such a to-do, is both complex and specified and readily yields design. So too, Michael Behe's irreducibly complex biochemical systems readily yield design. The complexity-specification criterion demonstrates that design pervades cosmology and biology. Moreover, it is a transcendent design, not reducible to the physical world. Indeed, no intelligent agent who is strictly physical could have presided over the origin of the universe or the origin of life.

Each hypothesized design poses a new challenge for intelligent design. Is the new design a product of the same designer(s) as any other design, based on external evidence, or evidence internal to the design? Each design, based on the evidence for the original time and place of the appearance of that design, hypotheses that the same or different designers must have been present at that place and time. Since the places and times are often only known imprecisely, there is the possibility that they may coincide with those of some other designs.

The key arguments in favor of the different variants of intelligent design are so broad that they can be adopted by any number of communities that seek an alternative to evolutionary thought, including those that support nontheistic 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 (as taught by the Raëlian movement), or that it emerged as a result of panspermia, but would not be compatible with the designer(s) of the "fine-tuned" universe.

Likewise, intelligent design 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 intelligent design researchers must explain why organisms were designed as they were. Skeptics 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 intelligent design proponents argue that we are simply incapable of understanding the designer's motives. For example, Behe argued in Darwin's Black Box that

ceatures 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, or for some unguessable reason.

Additionally, they may argue that the creator's benevolence does not imply the need for physical perfection in Creation. Critics instead suggest that the possibility of mutually contradictory and "unguessable" motives for the designer means that intelligent design is not falsifiable and therefore not scientific. Coyne responds:

There are only two answers to these questions: either life resulted not from intelligent design, but from evolution; or the intelligent designer is a cosmic prankster who designed everything to make it look as though it had evolved.

"What (or who) designed the designer?"

According to critics, by raising the question of the need for a designer for objects due to their complexity, intelligent design also raises the question, "what designed the designer?" Richard Dawkins and other critics have stated that in their view applying intelligent design's logic consistently to its own claims results in a logical paradox and infinite regression. Dawkins has argued that "If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the intelligent designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation." Unlike with religious creationism, where the question "what created God?" can be answered with theological arguments, this creates a logical paradox in intelligent design, as the chain of designers can be followed back indefinitely in an infinite regression, 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.

Dawkins argues that intelligent design simply takes the complexity required for life to have evolved and moves it to the "designer" instead. According to Dawkins, intelligent design does not explain how the complexity happened in the first place; it just moves it.

Intelligent design has offered several counterarguments to this criticism. One counterargument asserts that the question of the designer's origin is irrelevant to or outside the scope of intelligent design. To the claim that questions about the designer's origin are outside the bounds of intelligent design Richard Wein responds "Of course it is true that scientific explanations often create new unanswered questions. But, in assessing the value of an explanation, these questions are not irrelevant. They must be balanced against the improvements in our understanding which the explanation provides. Invoking an unexplained being to explain the origin of other beings (ourselves) is little more than question-begging. The new question raised by the explanation is as problematic as the question which the explanation purports to answer."

Another intelligent design counterargument invokes an uncaused causer—in other words, a deity—that transcends time and space to resolve this problem, in which case intelligent design reduces to religious creationism. At the same time, the postulation of the existence of even a single uncaused causer in the Universe contradicts a fundamental assumption of intelligent design that a designer is needed for every specifically complex object. Another possible counterargument 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 "specific" complexity assembling itself by chance. Again, this contradicts a fundamental assumption of intelligent design that a designer is needed for every specifically complex object, producing a logical contradiction.

Thus these attempts to patch the intelligent design hypothesis appear to either result in logical contradiction or reduces it to a belief in religious creationism. Intelligent design then ceases to be a falsifiable theory and loses its ability to claim to be a scientific theory.

Religion and leading intelligent design proponents

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 reintroducing 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 intelligent design proponents to obfuscate their religious motivations so as to avoid having intelligent design identified "as just another way of packaging the Christian evangelical message." The principal intelligent design advocates, including Michael Behe, William Dembski, Jonathan Wells (actually a member of the Unification Church, headed by Reverend Moon), and Stephen C. Meyer, are Christians and have stated that in their view the designer of life is God. The preponderance of leading intelligent design proponents are evangelical Protestants.

The conflicting claims made by leading intelligent design advocates as to whether or not intelligent design is rooted in religious conviction are the result of their strategy. For example, William Dembski in his book The Design Inference lists a god or an "alien life force" as two possible options for the identity of the designer. However, in his book intelligent design; the Bridge Between Science and Theology Dembski states that "Christ is indispensable to any scientific theory, even if its practitioners don't have a clue about him. The pragmatics of a scientific theory can, to be sure, be pursued without recourse to Christ. But the conceptual soundness of the theory can in the end only be located in Christ." Dembski 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."

The two leading intelligent design proponents, Phillip Johnson and William Dembski, cite the Bible's Book of John as the foundation of intelligent design. Barbara Forrest contends that such statements reveal that leading proponents see intelligent design as essentially religious in nature, as opposed to a scientific concept that has implications with which their personal religious beliefs happen to coincide.

General criticism of intelligent design

According to critics, intelligent design is repackaged religious dogma that is used in an effort to return creationism into public school science classrooms through the Teach the Controversy campaign. They argue that intelligent design proponents have promoted it politically to the public, education officials and public policymakers, instead of producing original scientific data to support their claims.

Intelligent design is neither observable nor repeatable, which critics argue this violates the scientific requirement of falsifiability. Indeed, intelligent design proponent Michael Behe concedes "You can't prove intelligent design by experiment."

Intelligent design proponents seek to redefine natural science. Many books and statements of principal intelligent design proponents call for the elimination of "methodological naturalism" from science and its replacement with what the leader of the intelligent design movement, Phillip E. Johnson, calls "theistic realism", and what critics call "methodological supernaturalism," which means belief in a transcendent, nonnatural dimension of reality inhabited by a transcendent, nonnatural deity. Natural science uses the scientific method to create a posteriori knowledge based on observation alone (sometimes called empirical science). Critics of intelligent design consider the idea that some outside intelligence created life on Earth to be a priori (without observation) knowledge. Intelligent design proponents cite some complexity in nature that cannot yet be fully explained by the scientific method. (For instance, abiogenesis, the generation of life from nonliving matter, is not yet understood scientifically, although the first stages may have been reproduced in the Miller-Urey experiment.) intelligent design proponents infer that an intelligent designer is behind the part of the process that is not understood scientifically. Since the designer cannot be observed, critics continue, it is a priori knowledge.

This allegedly a priori inference that an intelligent designer (a god or an alien life force) created life on Earth has been compared to the a priori 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, and it violates Occam's Razor. From a strictly empirical standpoint, one may list what is known about Egyptian construction techniques, but must admit ignorance about exactly how the Egyptians built the pyramids.

See also

Notes and references

  1. Discovery Institute, Center for Science and Culture. Questions about Intelligent Design: What is the theory of intelligent design? "The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. "
  2. Stephen C. Meyer, 2005. The Scientific Status of Intelligent Design: The Methodological Equivalence of Naturalistic and Non-Naturalistic Origins Theories. Ignatius Press.
  3. Devolution—Why intelligent design isn't. H. Allen Orr. Annals of Science. New Yorker May 2005
  4. "Creationism, Intelligent Design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life or of species are not science" In Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences, Second Edition National Academy of Sciences, 1999
  5. "ID's rejection of naturalism in any form logically entails its appeal to the only alternative, supernaturalism, as a putatively scientific explantion for natural phenomena. This makes ID a religious belief. In addition, my research reveals that ID is not science, but the newest variant of traditional American creationism. With only a few exceptions, it continues the usual complaints of creationists against the theory of evolution and comprises virtually all the elements of traditional creationism." Barbara Forrest April 2005 Expert Witness Report. Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District.
  6. Dembski. The Design Revolution. pg. 27 2004
  7. Heraclitus of Ephesus, The G.W.T. Patrick translation
  8. Thomas Aquinas, 1265-1272. Summa Theologiae. "Thomas Aquinas' 'Five Ways'" In faithnet.org.uk
  9. 'The British Association', The Times, Saturday, 20 September, 1873; pg. 10; col A.
  10. 'Evolution according to Hoyle: Survivors of disaster in an earlier world', By Nicholas Timmins, The Times, Wednesday, 13 January, 1982; pg. 22; Issue 61130; col F.
  11. William Safire. 'On Language: Neo-Creo.' The New York Times. August 21, 2005.
  12. Phillip Johnson: "Our strategy has been to change the subject a bit so that we can get the issue of Intelligent Design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools." Johnson 2004. Christianity.ca. Let's Be Intelligent About Darwin. "This isn't really, and never has been a debate about science. It's about religion and philosophy." Johnson 1996. World Magazine. Witnesses For The Prosecution. "So the question is: "How to win?" That's when I began to develop what you now see full-fledged in the "wedge" strategy: "Stick with the most important thing"—the mechanism and the building up of information. Get the Bible and the Book of Genesis out of the debate because you do not want to raise the so-called Bible-science dichotomy. Phrase the argument in such a way that you can get it heard in the secular academy and in a way that tends to unify the religious dissenters. That means concentrating on, "Do you need a Creator to do the creating, or can nature do it on its own?" and refusing to get sidetracked onto other issues, which people are always trying to do." Johnson 2000. Touchstone magazine. Berkeley's Radical An Interview with Phillip E. Johnson "I have built an intellectual movement in the universities and churches that we call The Wedge, which is devoted to scholarship and writing that furthers this program of questioning the materialistic basis of science."..."Now the way that I see the logic of our movement going is like this. The first thing you understand is that the Darwinian theory isn't true. It's falsified by all of the evidence and the logic is terrible. When you realize that, the next question that occurs to you is, well, where might you get the truth?"..."I start with John 1:1. In the beginning was the word. In the beginning was intelligence, purpose, and wisdom. The Bible had that right. And the materialist scientists are deluding themselves." Johnson 1999. Reclaiming America for Christ Conference. How the Evolution Debate Can Be Won
  13. "Now the way that I see the logic of our movement going is like this. The first thing you understand is that the Darwinian theory isn't true. It's falsified by all of the evidence and the logic is terrible. When you realize that, the next question that occurs to you is, well, where might you get the truth? ... I start with John 1:1. 'In the beginning was the word...' In the beginning was intelligence, purpose, and wisdom. The Bible had that right." Johnson, 1999. Reclaiming America for Christ Conference. How the Evolution Debate Can Be Won
  14. Barbara Forrest, 2001. "The Wedge at Work." from Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics. MIT Press.
  15. "We are taking an intuition most people have and making it a scientific and academic enterprise," Johnson said. In challenging Darwinism with a God-friendly alternative theory, the professor, who is a Presbyterian, added, "We are removing the most important cultural roadblock to accepting the role of God as creator." Phillip E. Johnson. 2001. Enlisting Science to Find the Fingerprints of a Creator: Believers in 'intelligent design' try to redirect evolution disputes along intellectual lines. By Teresa Watanabe. Los Angeles Times (Sunday Front page) March 25, 2001.
  16. Karl Giberson . Intelligent design’s long march to nowhere Science & Theology News, December 5, 2005
  17. Joel Belz, 1996. World Magazine. Witnesses For The Prosecution
  18. "Our strategy has been to change the subject a bit so that we can get the issue of Intelligent Design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools." Phillip E. Johnson. January 10 2003 on American Family Radio In www.christianity.ca
  19. Jon Buell & Virginia Hearn (eds), 1992. "Proceedings of a Symposium entitled: Darwinism: Scientific Inference of Philosophical Preference?" (PDF)
  20. Dembksi. Intelligent Design, p. 47
  21. Nowak quoted. Claudia Wallis. Evolution Wars. Time Magazine, 15 August 2005 edition, page 32
  22. John S. Wilkins and Wesley R. Elsberry, "The Advantages of Theft over Toil: The Design Inference and Arguing from Ignorance." Biology and Philosophy 16: 711-724 (2001).
  23. Intelligent design is generally only internally consistent and logical within the framework in which it operates. Criticisms are that this framework has at its foundation an unsupported, unjustified assumption: That complexity and improbability must entail design, but the identity and characteristics of the designer is not identified or quantified, nor need they be. The framework of Intelligent Design, because it rests on a unquantifiable and unverifiable assertion, has no defined boundaries except that complexity and improbability require design, and the designer need not be constrained by the laws of physics.
  24. Intelligent design fails to pass Occam's razor. Adding entities (an intelligent agent, a designer) to the equation is not strictly necessary to explain events.
  25. The designer is not falsifiable, since its existence is typically asserted without sufficient conditions to allow a falsifying observation. The designer being beyond the realm of the observable, claims about its existence can neither be supported nor undermined by observation, hence making Intelligent Design and the argument from design analytic a posteriori arguments.
  26. That Intelligent Design is not empirically testable stems from the fact that Intelligent Design violates a basic premise of science, naturalism.
  27. Intelligent design professes to offer an answer that does not need to be defined or explained, the intelligent agent, designer. By asserting a conclusion that need not be accounted for, the designer, no further explanation is necessary to sustain it, and objections raised to those who accept it make little headway. Thus Intelligent Design is not a provisional assessment of data which can change when new information is discovered. Once it is claimed that a conclusion that need not be accounted for has been established, there is simply no possibility of future correction. The idea of the progressive growth of scientific ideas is required to explain previous data and any previously unexplainable data
  28. The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity Nobel Laureats Initiative. Intelligent design cannot be tested as a scientific theory "because its central conclusion is based on belief in the intervention of a supernatural agent."
  29. Intelligent Design is not Science - Scientists and teachers speak out. Faculty of Science, University of New South Wales. 20 October, 2005.
  30. Willam A. Dembksi . Is Intelligent Design a Form of Natural Theology? From Dembski's designinference.com
  31. Beth McMurtrie, 2001. "Darwinism Under Attack." The Chronicle Of Higher Education.
  32. Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, October 19, 2005, AM session
  33. Discovery Institute.
  34. William Dembski. Intelligent Design? a special report reprinted from Natural History magazine April 2002.
  35. "In fact, the signals actually sought by today’s SETI searches are not complex, as the ID advocates assume. ... If SETI were to announce that we’re not alone because it had detected a signal, it would be on the basis of artificiality." Shostak. SETI and Intelligent Design, space.com
  36. Taner Edis. Darwin in Mind: Intelligent Design Meets Artificial Intelligence. Skeptical Inquirer Magazine, March/April 2001 issue.
  37. Eugenie C. Scott and Glenn Branch, "Intelligent Design" Not Accepted by Most Scientists, National Center for Science Education website, September 10, 2002.
  38. "The theory of Intelligent Design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." Discovery Institute. What is Intelligent Design?
  39. Dembski. The Act of Creation: Bridging Transcendence and Immanence
  40. Jerry Coyne, "The Case Against Intelligent Design," The New Republic, August 22 2005.
  41. FAQ: Who designed the designer? IDEA
  42. "If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the Intelligent Designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation. To do so would be to shoot yourself in the foot." Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne. 1 September 2005. The Guardian
  43. "Furthermore, it would not solve the creation problem, for if an "outside" designer created the universe, who created the designer? How did the "outside" come into existence? What created the conditions for the designer and the "outside"? This presents even more difficult questions that leads to endless circular reasoning, absurdum ad infinitum." Jim Walker. 1997. Problems with Creationism
  44. Claudia Wallis. Evolution Wars. Time Magazine, 15 August 2005 edition, page 32
  45. "One need not fully understand the origin or identity of the designer to determine that an object was designed. Thus, this question is essentially irrelevant to intelligent design theory, which merely seeks to detect if an object was designed... Intelligent design theory cannot address the identity or origin of the designer--it is a philosophical / religious question that lies outside the domain of scientific inquiry. Christianity postulates the religious answer to this question that the designer is God who by definition is eternally existent and has no origin. There is no logical philosophical impossibility with this being the case (akin to Aristotle's 'unmoved mover') as a religious answer to the origin of the designer..." FAQ: Who designed the designer? IDEA
  46. Richard Wein. 2002.Not a Free Lunch But a Box of Chocolates
  47. "Christianity postulates the religious answer to this question that the designer is God who by definition is eternally existent and has no origin. There is no logical philosophical impossibility with this being the case (akin to Aristotle's 'unmoved mover') as a religious answer to the origin of the designer. See also an answer to a subissue the implications of whether or not the first CSI come from an unintelligent source." FAQ: Who designed the designer? IDEA
  48. "Intelligent design, on the other hand, involves two basic assumptions: 1) Intelligent causes exist. 2) These causes can be empirically detected (by looking for specified complexity)." Access Research Network. Frequently Asked Questions about Intelligent Design.
  49. "According to contemporary design theory, the presence of highly specified complexity is an indicator of an intelligent cause." Access Research Network. Frequently Asked Questions about Intelligent Design.
  50. "To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer. You have to say something like 'God was always there', and if you allow yourself that kind of lazy way out, you might as well just say 'DNA was always there', or "Life was always there', and be done with it." Richard Dawkins. The Blind Watchmaker : Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design pg 141
  51. "...the first thing that has to be done is to get the Bible out of the discussion. ...This is not to say that the biblical issues are unimportant; the point is rather that the time to address them will be after we have separated materialist prejudice from scientific fact." Phillip Johnson. "The Wedge," Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity. July/August 1999.
  52. "Intelligent Design is an intellectual movement, and the Wedge strategy stops working when we are seen as just another way of packaging the Christian evangelical message. ... The evangelists do what they do very well, and I hope our work opens up for them some doors that have been closed." Phillip Johnson. "Keeping the Darwinists Honest," an interview with Phillip Johnson. In Citizen Magazine. April 1999.
  53. William Dembski, 1998. The Design Inference. Cambridge University Press
  54. Dembski. 1999. Intelligent Design; the Bridge Between Science and Theology. "Christ is indispensible to any scientific theory, even if its practitioners don't have a clue about him. The pragmatics of a scientific theory can, to be sure, be pursued without recourse to Christ. But the conceptual soundness of the theory can in the end only be located in Christ." p. 210
  55. Dembski. 2005. Intelligent Design's Contribution to the Debate Over Evolution: A Reply to Henry Morris.
  56. "Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory," William Dembski. Touchstone Magazine. Volume 12, Issue4. July/August, 1999
  57. "Now the way that I see the logic of our movement going is like this. The first thing you understand is that the Darwinian theory isn't true. It's falsified by all of the evidence and the logic is terrible. When you realize that, the next question that occurs to you is, well, where might you get the truth? When I preach from the Bible, as I often do at churches and on Sundays, I don't start with Genesis. I start with John 1:1. 'In the beginning was the word...' In the beginning was intelligence, purpose, and wisdom. The Bible had that right. And the materialist scientists are deluding themselves." Phillip E. Johnson. 1999 How the Evolution Debate Can Be Won Reclaiming America for Christ Conference" 1999. at ReclaimAmerica.org
  58. "What I am talking about is the essence of intelligent design, and the essence of it is theistic realism as defined by Professor Johnson. Now that stands on its own quite apart from what their motives are. I'm also talking about the definition of intelligent design by Dr. Dembski as the Logos theology of John's Gospel. That stands on its own." ... "Intelligent design, as it is understood by the proponents that we are discussing today, does involve a supernatural creator, and that is my objection. And I am objecting to it as they have defined it, as Professor Johnson has defined intelligent design, and as Dr. Dembski has defined intelligent design. And both of those are basically religious. They involve the supernatural." Barbara Forrest. Expert Testimony. Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial transcript, Day 6 (October 5)
  59. Claudia Wallis. Evolution Wars. Time Magazine, 15 August 2005 edition, page 32
  60. Barbara Forrest, 2000. "Methodological Naturalism and Philosophical Naturalism: Clarifying the Connection." In Philo, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Fall-Winter 2000), pp. 7-29.
  61. Phillip E. Johnson in his book "Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law and Education" (InterVarsity Press, 1995), positions himself as a "theistic realist" against "methodological naturalism."
  62. "My colleagues and I speak of 'theistic realism'-- or sometimes, 'mere creation' -- as the defining concept of our movement. This means that we affirm that God is objectively real as Creator, and that the reality of God is tangibly recorded in evidence accessible to science, particularly in biology." Phillip Johnson. Starting a Conversation about Evolution
  63. William Dembski in The Design Inference" (see further reading) cited extraterrestrials as a possible designer .
  64. Michael J. Murray, n.d. "Natural Providence (or Design Trouble)" (PDF)
  65. William Dembski defends Intelligent Design from "silly claim" that "ancient technologies could not have built the pyramids, so goblins must have done it."

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