What Intelligent Design Is…

…And isn’t

Some arguments seem odd and awkward. No matter how hard people argue about their position, it is almost as if they don’t want to make progress. They don’t want to come to resolution or agreement. When you see this happening it is usually a sign that the argument is bigger than it seems, that it is an argument of symbols and worldviews more than facts and figures. The arguments going on right now about Intelligent Design clearly fit this model.

Intelligent Design (ID) - in simplest terms - posits that there are certain aspects of biology and the record of biological development that simply do not fit with the currently accepted evolutionary model. ID does not dispute evolution, per se. ID does not seek to replace Evolutionary Theory with its own. Because it can’t. It isn’t a coherent scientific theory. It is more of an “anti-theory.”

What Intelligent Design does, and very effectively in my view, is challenge the accepted materialist underpinnings of modern biology. It challenges the gospel-like assumption that the engine of evolutionary change is natural selection based on changes driven by random mutation. And it shows that the folks who developed these current ways of thinking took great liberties with facts in order to push their theories through. This stuff can get mind-numbingly complex, invoking complicated statistical modeling and the like, but the thrust can be explained very simply: Nobody doubts that the manner in which the words are arranged on this page indicates that a sentient being specifically designed them. Regardless of how much you like or dislike the words, there can be no doubt that they did not appear on the page because of some random natural phenomenon. An “intelligent agent” (i.e. me) had to be involved in their creation. We like to joke about what happens given monkeys, typewriters and infinite time, but the hard cold reality is that they would not create the works of Shakespeare. This notion is called “specified complexity.” Given the fact that the natural order of things is disorder, any time an extremely complex process is arranged to accomplish a very specific thing, it gets very difficult to explain it away as based on random change.

Specifically, if the odds of such a thing happening are greater than 1:[the sum of the known atoms in the universe] we can safely assume it wasn’t an accident. Life as we know it is full of examples that exceed these odds.

That, in very amateurish terms, is the essence of ID.

So why all the hoopla? Why do scientists of all stripes - including conservatives of a scientific bent, and even my otherwise sane and brainy physicist brother - react to ID as nothing more than retrograde creationist folderol?

Because the argument is not primarily about science, it is about culture.

The culture of modern science - which some people are calling “Scientism” - has built a nice neat little self-contained box for itself. The walls and ceilings of that box are the materialist worldview. It starts from a no-God assumption, and will not permit anything into the box that doesn’t buy in to that materialist premise. Some argue that science must behave thus, that to do differently is to do something other than science. This would be a valid complaint if anybody were asking science to embrace faith, mysticism or something other than facts. But we’re not. All the proponents of ID are asking is that science allow itself to be open to objectively review facts and data that simply may hint at answers that lay outside the box. If the arguments and facts of ID are not scientifically valid, then they should be rejected on that basis. But I have not seen that. I have mostly seen sneering, condescending refusal to even address the challenges of ID. A cultural response. Of the worst sort.

I don’t like to fit everything into a Red/Blue dichotomy, but that is in essence what is happening. It is another reminder that Red/Blue does not uniquely represent Conservative/Liberal. There are Blue Conservatives and (a few) Red Liberals. Baked in to the culture of Scientism is an assumption of aristocracy and a scorn for the poor backwards folks in intellectual flyover country. A very “Blue” attitude. To admit that ID has validity would poke holes in the walls of Scientism, to let Cletus and Daisy Mae and their hordes of simple barbarians cousins in. Pretty soon Pat Robertson would be in charge of science curricula, and the specialness of being a scientist would seem to be diminished.

That, more than anything, explains what we see going on. What ought to be an argument about things scientific - about facts - has become a quarrel based on cultural worry. That way does not bring resolution, or consensus.

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