Proponents of this latest attempt at formulating a "scientific" creationism say, "Not so!" They claim not to support many creationist claims such as a "young earth". On the other hand they claim to support many scientific claims such as change and variability within species. Some of them are scientists and they say this proves their ideas are scientific. (The true author of this idea -- Phillip E. Johnson -- however is a professor of law.) They say that they simply do not believe that Evolution can explain how life in all its complexity can arise. For this they say that it is necessary that there be a designer. They say that even the simplest microbes are so complex that this is the only way they and other living things can be explained. This is self evident they say.
But they stop short of saying God is this designer and in not naming him they claim that they are therefore not creationists.
In fact ID must be counted as creationism on at least one point. It claims that it only proposes that there is a designer to explain biological complexity. In fact there must not only be a designer in this explanation, but a fabricator as well for we know that it is not enough to design. Designs have to be executed or they are just day-dreams. And immaterial imaginings are not what is called for here but a real world of real complexity. So there must be a maker somewhere in this system or it is no system at all -- at least not one that would explain the real world.
So ID is creationism -- whether it wants to be called that or not.
Proponents of ID say that it is not God that they invoke to be the designer. It could be space aliens (as opposed to the kind from France [sorry for the old Saturday Night Live/Conehead reference]). Fair enough. There is a sect known as the Realians (oddly enough they are based in France) who believe precisely this. But still there is a problem. From where did the Intelligent Designer(s) come? It is hard to see how this can be resolved in the framework of ID without an infinite regression -- the designer(s) come from yet more advanced designer(s) and so on. To paraphrase an old joke: it's all Intelligent Designers from there on down.
ID proponents do not address whether there is a Prime Designer behind it all. Perhaps there is not, in which case it is hard to see how their system explains anything at all. In fact I suspect they just haven't thought this through.
It seems to me that there is another problem with ID -- while life has many awe inspiring features it also has its resounding failures. If we are to accept ID then we must also accept Intelligent Design Failure. The mammalian eye may be a wonderful thing but what about the human appendix? Speaking of the eye, why are its photoreceptors on the back of the retina? Wouldn't a better design be to put them on the front? That's the way a film camera works. (Most CCD's have their photodiodes on the back because that's the easy way to make them -- but not all and specifically not the best.)
There are countless ways in which the human body could be improved. Scientific American published an article on this -- If Humans Were Built to Last -- in its March, 2001 issue. Almost everybody becomes aware especially as they age of the many ways we could (and with medical technology sometimes do) improve our bodies. It hardly seems worth elevating some of the obviously ad hoc ways living things work to the level of "design". In fact we often think that we ourselves could do better. Wouldn't a real designer have done the same? And if not then at least they would provide improvements and replacements for their design failures. Where are these? It is not just evolution which needs evidence of change and improvement over time.
Of course the idea that we could do better is itself an illusion since the main feature of any human designed and built mechanism is that it must eventually break down. And this is another weakness of ID -- design as we know it may be the height of our technical prowess, but it simply does not produce anything like the living organisms we see in the natural world. Design as we know it and practice it hardly seems a worthy metaphor for living things. We might aspire to such durability and subtlety but we can only imagine that it is within our creative power. Despite a lot of speculation these days about self replicating nanotechnology what we forget is that we have yet to produce a self replicating mechanism of any size. On the other hand self replication is one thing that all living things handle quite well.
It would seem that applying the term "design" to the biological world is little more than prideful whistling in the dark.
Finally in any case it is clear that there are limits to which its proponents can carry ID. If at any point Quantum Mechanics (QM) becomes important to understanding life the ID model will fail. The reason being that QM presents us with a model of physical reality (the reality underlying everything including living things themselves) that eschews design. QM shows us that at the bottom the world is uncaused event without any mechanism whatsoever. Einstein's criticism of QM that "God does not play dice" suggests that ID only becomes Intelligent Gambling (surely an oxymoron) in a QM world.
In short the ID program is not one
which
can be extended universally and perhaps that is the surest sign that it
is not even true locally in biology.
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Created March 23, 2002,