Intelligent Design (ID) is a dishonest way of presenting creationism as science in an attempt to get it taught in science classes as an alternative “theory” to evolution. However, ID is not science and is not intelligent.
Intelligent design (creationism repackaged) is not science, can not be separated from religion, and therefore teaching it in schools has been ruled unconstitutional in a court of law (Kitzmiller Vrs. Dover).
Although ID proponents insist that it is a viable alternative to evolution, they are vague as to when and where an intelligent entity intervened and they contend that evolution is mostly wrong while offering no alternative to common descent.
A critical component of intelligent design is Michael Behe’s irreducible complexity. It does not hold up in a court of law or in the court of scientific opinion.
Although, Behe doesn’t claim that a particular deity intervened in the course of earth history, it is clear his agenda is a Christian one. Behe is affiliated with the Discovery Institute's Center for Renewal of Science and Culture (CRSC). He is a senior fellow of the CRSC. The director of CRSC has stated that the goals of the institute are to “promote Christian theism and to defeat philosophical materialism.”
Since the Supreme Court had ruled that creationism is religion, and therefore not to be taught in school, creationists repackaged creationism as intelligent design. To see their agenda, read The Wedge Document as reprinted by the National Center for Science Education:
The social consequences of materialism have been devastating. As symptoms, those consequences are certainly worth treating. However, we are convinced that in order to defeat materialism, we must cut it off at its source. That source is scientific materialism. This is precisely our strategy. If we view the predominant materialistic science as a giant tree, our strategy is intended to function as a "wedge" that, while relatively small, can split the trunk when applied at its weakest points. The very beginning of this strategy, the "thin edge of the wedge," was Phillip Johnson's critique of Darwinism begun in 1991 in Darwinism on Trial, and continued in Reason in the Balance and Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds. Michael Behe's highly successful Darwin's Black Box followed Johnson's work. We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design (ID). Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.
Since the failure to get ID or creationism in school, creationists have tried different tactics, using their wedge approach. This is from The National Science Center for Education website (
http://ncse.com/book/export/html/116):
Although in the 1990s IDC advocates had encouraged the teaching of ID in public school science classes as an alternative to evolution, in the early 2000s they shifted their strategy. IDCs currently concentrate their efforts on attacking evolution. Under innocuous-sounding guises such as "academic freedom," "critical analysis of evolution," or "teaching the strengths and weaknesses of evolution," IDCs attempt to encourage teachers to teach students wrongly that there is a "controversy" among scientists over whether evolution has occurred. So-called "evidence against evolution" or "weaknesses of evolution" consist of the same sorts of long-discredited arguments against evolution which have been a staple of creationism since the 1920s and earlier.
Not only are the leaders of the Intelligent Design Creationists dishonest, they are not very intelligent. All these attempts are doomed to failure and will fade away in the clear light of science and reason. As science continues to strip away the myths and superstitions of past ages, and paint over man’s ignorance with the bright colors of knowledge and understanding, the image of an intelligent designer fades and disappears into the background.
Perhaps a better approach for creationists to take, is to agree with the obvious fact that evolution is the best explanation that we have for the history of life on earth. They could take the higher ground, align themselves with fact not fiction, and still keep their notion that, “God did it.”
Creationists could take their cue from Francis Collins, physician and geneticist, former leader of the National Human Genome Research Institute and current director of the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Francis Collins is an evangelical Christian that rejects Intelligent Design.
Collins works within the scientific community apparently with no religious agenda or conflicting interests:
In October 2009, shortly after his nomination as NIH director, Collins stated in an interview in the New York Times, “I have made it clear that I have no religious agenda for the N.I.H., and I think the vast majority of scientists have been reassured by that and have moved on.” [Harris, Gardiner (October 6, 2009). "For N.I.H. Chief, Issues of Identity and Culture". The New York Times. Retrieved May 2, 2010.]
From Wikipedia -
Francis Collins: In his 2006 book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Collins considers scientific discoveries an "opportunity to worship". In his book Collins examines and subsequently rejects Young Earth creationism and intelligent design. His own belief system is theistic evolution or evolutionary creation which he prefers to term BioLogos.
Let’s take a look at Behe’s irreducible complexity and compare it to emergent complexity.
Irreducible complexity from wikipedia:
Irreducible complexity (IC) is an argument by proponents of intelligent design that certain biological systems are too complex to have evolved from simpler, or "less complete" predecessors, through natural selection acting upon a series of advantageous naturally occurring, chance mutations.[1] The argument is central to intelligent design, and is rejected by the scientific community at large,[2] which overwhelmingly regards intelligent design as pseudoscience.[3]
In 2000, biologist Massimo Pigliucci criticized The Design Inference in BioScience writing, "Too bad he missed the solution to this riddle, which has been proposed several times during the last few centuries, most prominently (and in various fashions) by Hume (1779), Darwin (1859), and Jacques Monod (1971). According to these thinkers, if a given phenomenon occurs with low probability and also conforms to a pre-specified pattern, then there are two possible conclusions: intelligent design (this concept is synonymous with human intervention) or necessity, which can be caused by a nonrandom, deterministic force such as natural selection."
Emergence from wikipedia:
In philosophy, and art, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems.
Rather than spend a lot of time dissecting the idea of irreducible complexity, let’s look at what science says and common observation shows us. We can then easily recognize pseudoscience when we see it.
Neurons organizing into neural networks, water molecules forming snowflakes and chemicals forming single cells are all examples of the simple becoming the complex.
Telecommunication companies find the optimum location for their com towers, bees find the optimum location to put their bee hives and prediction markets find their customers, all using swarm intelligence (a form of emergence).
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Bottom-up, self correcting systems such as Amazon.com and wikipedia, are
based on the principal of emerging complexity.
Emerging complexity involves a few simple rules and lots of interactions between individual components, to produce hurricanes in the ocean, the creatures in the desert and the plants in the tropics. What science has discovered in all these examples are a few basic principals. Here are three: Quantity produces quality, the simpler the better, and the more random the interactions the better.
What is the mechanism of evolution? Heritability, natural selection and mutation….and lots of time. Couldn’t be a better recipe for life!
Cellular automata can be used as a metaphor for the evolutionary process
which can result in convergence, divergence and extinction.
For a visual representation of how this works, spend a little time looking at cellular automata. Apply a few simple rules and watch divergence, extinction or convergence in action. A successful random combination of black and white boxes, and a beautiful complex pattern emerges. An unsuccessful combination and extinction. Extinction happens most of the time, just like in nature.
Professor Robert Sapolsky, of Stanford University, gives an excellent lecture explaining the principal of emerging complexity and uses cellular automata here:
Here is a real life illustration of how this emerging complexity works with bees determining where to nest optimally near a food source.
A first generation bee leaves the hive, finds food and returns randomly to the hive. It gets in the middle of the group of bees there and does a figure eight dance wiggling its tail. The angle of the tail indicates the direction to the food source, the extent to which it wiggles its tail indicates how far away to the food source, and the duration of time it wiggles its tail indicates how good the food source is.
A 2nd generation bee returns randomly and bumps into another bee doing a dance and goes where the longer dancing bee tells it to go. So we see random interaction between bees as they come and go. Longer dance increases odds of other bees bumping into them. Briefly dancing bees are less likely to bump into other bees, and all this optimizes the route to the food source. Eventually the hive moves closer to the best food source.
