On Intelligent Design : Part I

I've been spending a lot of time recently reading about evolution and its latest "challenger", Intelligent Design. On my travels throughout Europe, I've frequently buried my nose in a book called Intelligent Thought : Science Versus The Intelligent Design Movement on those long bus trips around the continent. It's been a good read, and when coupled with loads of excellent material on the internet (particulaly those sites listed under Science on my sidebar), the intellectual and scientific vacuity of Intelligent Design becomes more and more obvious.

In perusing over the writings of ID advocates (see the links under Anti-Science for examples) it is without question that their opposition to evolution stems from nothing other than a discomfort with its contradiction of their religious beliefs (see The Wedge Document). It doesn't match with the Bible, therefore it cannot be true and should be dismissed. They insist it's pure science with no religious motivation. So how do you explain this Mr Dembski? :

[A]ny view of the sciences that leaves Christ out of the picture must be seen as fundamentally deficient...[T]he conceptual soundness of a scientific theory cannot be maintained apart from Christ.

William A. Dembski,

Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology (1999)

ID advocates try to win supporters not through scientific research, but through a series of flawed criticisms of evolution which are nothing more than creationist talking points dressed up in scientific sounding language like irreducible complexity. Indeed, when forced to debate their ideas purely in scientific terms ID advocates suffer an embarrassing defeat, and their misunderstanding of (or even contempt for) science and the way in which it is conducted is put on display for all to see.

For example Michael Behe, while testifying at the Dover trial, conceded that for Intelligent Design to be considered science that the very ground rules for what is constituted as science would have to be changed. After citing the immune system as an "irreducibly complex" biological system and arguing that no literature explaining its evolution had been published (or ever could be published), he was presented with 58 peer-reviewed publications, nine books and several immunology textbook chapters about the evolution of the immune system. He simply explained that this was "not good enough", and that no publication or research would ever convince him that the immune system had evolved via natural processes - a text book example of the Argument from Ignorance.

More often opponents of evolution resort to emotion and attempt to shift the debate away from science and into areas of philosophy and sociology where they feel more comfortable. I'll be speaking about these aspects in my next post on ID.