Defenders of Intelligent Design insist that the 'designer' they have in mind need not be their God. Anyone or anything could, in theory, be the 'designer.' What about Satan? If the identity of the designer is left open, isn't it just as likely that some evil being like Satan designed life? I doubt that any defenders of Intelligent Design would agree with this.

In the November-December 2005 issue of Harvard Magazine, Edward O. Wilson writes:

Many who accept the fact of evolution cannot, however, on religious grounds, accept the operation of blind chance and the absence of divine purpose implicit in natural selection. They support the alternative explanation of intelligent design. The reasoning they offer is not based on evidence but on the lack of it.

The formulation of intelligent design is a default argument advanced in support of a non sequitur. It is in essence the following: There are some phenomena that have not yet been explained and that (and most importantly) the critics personally cannot imagine being explained; therefore there must be a supernatural designer at work. The designer is seldom specified, but in the canon of intelligent design it is most certainly not Satan and his angels, nor any god or gods conspicuously different from those accepted in the believer’s faith.

There is something profoundly anti-intellectual about an argument which reduces to “I can’t imagine how you can explain this naturally, so a supernatural explanation is the only option available to us.” That’s all Intelligent Design is, though — unless you want to include the dishonest aspect of not admitting that they have a very specific “supernatural explanation” in mind.

Flipping the scientific argument upside down, the intelligent designers join the strict creationists (who insist that no evolution ever occurred in the first place) by arguing that scientists resist the supernatural theory because it is counter to their own personal secular beliefs. This may have a kernel of truth; everybody suffers from some amount of bias. But in this case bias is easily overcome. The critics forget how the reward system in science works. Any researcher who can prove the existence of intelligent design within the accepted framework of science will make history and achieve eternal fame. He will prove at last that science and religious dogma are compatible!

Even a combined Nobel Prize and Templeton Prize (the latter designed to encourage search for just such harmony) would fall short as proper recognition. Every scientist would like to accomplish such an epoch-making advance. But no one has even come close, because unfortunately there is no evidence, no theory, and no criteria for proof that even marginally might pass for science. There is only the residue of hoped-for default, which steadily shrinks as the science of biology expands.

This is the same problem with every conspiracy-theory claim that “orthodox” science is preventing the “truth” from being revealed. As Wilson notes, bias is inevitable, but just as inevitable is the fact that the truth always come out in science despite fraud and bias. The scientific method and process is set up specifically to achieve this: regardless of how much resistance there is in scientific institutions to a radical new idea, there is also a lot of incentive to produce something ground-breaking.

The former may mean that change takes a while, but the latter ensures that change will come. If anything, there may be a bit too much fraud and error with people announcing dramatic breakthroughs that aren’t true than with traditionalists holding back or preventing new discoveries from being revealed.

 

Read More:

• Evolution vs. Creationism
• Science vs. Religion
• What is Creationism?
• What is Intelligent Design?
• What is Science?