Intelligent Design

From SkepticWiki

1 Definition
2 Quotations
3 Discussion
4 Politics
5 External Sites
6 Books promoting Intelligent Design
7 Books criticizing Intelligent Design
8 Related Articles

[edit] Definition

Intelligent Design (ID) refers to the hypothesis that intelligent causes (sometimes equated to the God of Genesis) are responsible for the origin of the universe and specifically for the creation of life on Earth in all its myriad varieties. Proponents of ID specifically contrast their hypothesis with the Theory of Evolution.

[edit] Quotations

"The Intelligent Design movement starts with the recognition that "In the beginning was the Word," and "In the beginning God created."" Phillip Johnson, founder of the Intelligent Design movement, foreword to Creation, Evolution, & Modern Science (2000).

"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, founder of the Intelligent Design movement.) [1]

"Intelligent design is just the logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory."

(William Dembski, leading proponent of Intelligent Design.) [2]

"Christ is indispensable to any scientific theory."

(William Dembski, Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology)

"Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency with their distinctive features already intact: Fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks and wings."

(Of Pandas And People, the world's only textbook on Intelligent Design, as it was eventually published.)

"Creation means that the various forms of life began abruptly through the agency of an intelligent creator with their distinctive features already intact. Fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, etc."

(Of Pandas And People, the world's only textbook on Intelligent Design, as it was first drafted.) [3]

"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 Johnson, founder of the Intelligent Design movement.) [4]

[edit] Discussion

Advocates of ID specifically claim that their theory is "scientific" instead of religious and that it should be taught in school and in science classrooms as an alternative or rebuttal to evolutionary theory. Critics of ID reject this claim, pointing out that ID is not scientific, that there is no direct evidence supporting this hypothesis, that it makes no testable predictions, and that it is not falsifiable.

Intelligent Design comes in a number of different flavors: a Young Earth Creationist is, technically, a believer in "intelligent design", but the converse is not necessarily true; an Intelligent Design proponent might accept an old Earth and may even accept the fact of evolution, which denying that the theory of evolution is sufficient to explain it: preferring instead some mechanism such as front-loaded evolution; or the process of "slow design" (descent with divine modification) suggested by Michael Behe during the Dover Panda Trial.

The notion of irreducible complexity is, perhaps, the most often-touted argument among the advocates of ID. If all the parts of a system have to be present for the system to work, so the ID advocates claim, then it is impossible for the system to have evolved in stages. This argument is flawed for three reasons: (1) It mischaracterises the theory of evolution, which does not work by the wholesale addition of parts; (2) It assumes that the system in question will not operate at all if one part is removed, when in fact it may simply function more poorly if one part is removed (e.g. an eyeball without a lens can still see better than no eyeball at all); and (3) It assumes that simpler, more primitive versions of the system could not have been useful for other tasks (e.g. bacterial flagella are still useful as a kind of cilia if they don't move). For more information, see the main article on irreducible complexity.

[edit] Politics

Historically, intelligent design arose out of the previous Creation Science movement, an attempt to find scientific support for the ideas of the origin and development of life as expressed by Christianity, specifically in the book of Genesis. After creation science was found to be unconstitutional because of its explicitly religious content (Edwards vs. Aguillard, 1987), prominent creationists, including Berkely law professor Philip Johnson, attempted to find a reformulation of the primary anti-evolution message that would pass constitutional muster.

One of the primary supporters and proponents of ID is the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank founded by Johnson and staffed by prominent creationists like William Dembski and Stephen Meyer. As part of an ambitious "Wedge" strategy [5], the Discovery Institute proposed

"nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies. Bringing together leading scholars from the natural sciences and those from the humanities and social sciences, the Center explores how new developments in biology, physics and cognitive science raise serious doubts about scientific materialism and have re-opened the case for a broadly theistic understanding of nature."

Part of this Wedge strategy involved sponsoring scholarship and research, while the lion's share focused on explicit political actions to re-shape the American political, scientific, and legal landscape.

Intelligent design suffered a serious setback in late 2005 when it was taken up seriously by a small town in central Pennsylvania. In the landmark Dover Panda Trial, more formally Kitzmiller vs. Dover (2005), the Dover Area School Board was found to have violated both the United States and Pennsylvania constitutions by requiring the teaching of ID. The trial court found that, like creationism before it, ID was a form of religious teaching and not "science."