What is the intelligent design movement?

Table Of Content

• William Dembski: Specified complexity
• Why do you think some people do not accept evolution?
• A Scientific History — and Philosophical Defense — of the Theory of Intelligent Design
• The Top Evidence for Intelligent Design
• How would you go about testing for the existence of a designer? What is the research program?
• Isn't intelligent design just a newer version of creationism?

The important thing about specifications is that they be objectively given and not arbitrarily imposed on events after the fact. For instance, if an archer fires arrows at a wall and then paints bull’s-eyes around them, the archer imposes a pattern after the fact. On the other hand, if the targets are set up in advance (“specified”), and then the archer hits them accurately, one legitimately concludes that it was by design. After years of receiving apparently meaningless, random signals, the Contact researchers discovered a pattern of beats and pauses that corresponded to the sequence of all the prime numbers between two and one-hundred and one. (Prime numbers are divisible only by themselves and by one.) That startled the astronomers, and they immediately inferred an intelligent cause.

William Dembski: Specified complexity

Based upon our uniform experience, we know of only one type of cause that produces irreducibly complex systems – namely, intelligence. Indeed, whenever we encounter such complex systems – whether integrated circuits or internal combustion engines – and we know how they arose, invariably a designing intelligence played a role. The status of such design arguments inevitably turns on the degree of similarity between the systems in question. If the two effects are very similar, then inferring a similar cause will seem more warranted than if the two effects are less similar. Since, however, even advocates of these classical design arguments admit there are dissimilarities as well as similarities between living things and human artifacts, the status of the analogical design argument has always been uncertain.

Why do you think some people do not accept evolution?

It's a statement of personal belief, a statement of philosophy, not a statement of science. A God-of-the-gaps argument is the theological version of an argument from ignorance. Once an essential constituent of an organism exhibits specified complexity, any design attributable to that constituent carries over to the organism as a whole.

A Scientific History — and Philosophical Defense — of the Theory of Intelligent Design

Ever since the Pre-Socratic philosophers, scientists and physicians have insisted on giving “natural” explanations for “natural” phenomena, leaving miracles explicitly out of science. Christians have done likewise, going back at least to the high Middle Ages if not earlier. It would be easy to cite many “big name” examples, including Johannes Kepler and Robert Boyle. Readers who want to know more about this are invited to consult the essays by Numbers and Davis & Collins in the appended list of references.

A Brief History of the Design Argument

Johnson taught law for over 30 years at the University of California at Berkeley and is the author of the book Darwin on Trial, in which he argues that empirical evidence in support of Darwin's theory is lacking. In this interview, hear why he feels that such evidence is "somewhere between weak and nonexistent," why he feels intelligent design is a testable science, and why he thought the Dover trial was a train wreck waiting to happen. Natural selection purportedly builds complex systems from simpler structures by preserving a series of intermediate structures, each of which must perform some function.

Using Statistical Methods to Model the Fine-tuning of Molecular Machines and Systems

As a theory of biological origins and development, intelligent design’s central claim is that only intelligent causes adequately explain the complex, information-rich structures of biology and that these causes are empirically detectable. To say intelligent causes are empirically detectable is to say there exist well-defined methods that, based on observable features of the world, can reliably distinguish intelligent causes from undirected natural causes. Many special sciences have already developed such methods for drawing this distinction — notably forensic science, cryptography, archeology, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).

The Top Evidence for Intelligent Design

Is the Intelligent Design Movement Christian? - Answers In Genesis

Is the Intelligent Design Movement Christian?.

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The question is whether life originated from a purely undirected material process or whether a mind also played a role. Between these two options uniform experience affirms only the latter as an adequate cause for information-rich systems capable of processing and copying information. Since we know that organisms capable of reproduction constitute information-rich systems, a Humean appeal to uniform experience  actually suggests intelligent design, not undirected processes, as the explanation for the origin of the first life. How do we realize that something has been put together intentionally by an intelligent agent?

How would you go about testing for the existence of a designer? What is the research program?

These arguments are a bit like those sixth-grade math problems in which students are given a ratio of known quantities on one side of the equation and a ratio of an unknown to a known quantity on the other and then asked to “solve for x,” the unknown quantity. In the other case the cause is unknown, but is presumed to be knowable because of the alleged similarity between the two effects. The analogical reasoner “solves for x,” in this case, the unknown cause. Second, the contemporary case for intelligent design (such as the one made in this book) is not an analogical argument, even though many interesting similarities do exist between living organisms and human information technology.

The implications of intelligent design for religious belief are profound. The rise of modern science led to a vigorous attack on all religions that treat purpose, intelligence, and wisdom as fundamental and irreducible features of reality. The high point of this attack came with Darwin’s theory of evolution. The central claim of Darwin’s theory is that an unguided material process (random variation and natural selection) could account for the emergence of all biological complexity and order. In other words, Darwin appeared to show that the design in biology (and, by implication, in nature generally) was dispensable. Accordingly, the design argument developed here does not rely on a comparison of similar effects, but upon the presence of a single kind of effect — specified information — and an assessment of the ability of competing causes to produce that effect.

Among the most prominent of these skeptical scientists were several from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Intelligent design begins with observations about the types of information that we can observe produced by intelligent agents in the real world. ID is not “creationism in a cheap tuxedo,” a provocative description attributed to Kansas University paleontologist Leonard Krishtalka. It clearly lacks some distinguishing features of creationism and the specific theological and biblical concerns that drive it. For example, ID takes no stance on “death before the fall,” an issue related to the theological problem of evil (theodicy) that is a crucial factor behind the presence of the word “young” in YEC creationism (for more on this, see my comments in an earlier column).

Beyond that, advances in our understanding of planetary and cosmic evolution have ruled out the possibility that biological life has always existed, either on earth or in the cosmos. At some point in the remote past, the conditions on earth and in the larger cosmos were simply incompatible with life. The big-bang theory alone implies that the cosmos itself is finite. Thus, scientifically informed people generally don’t argue that biological life always existed or even that it always existed on earth.

Intelligent Design Is Not What Most People Think It Is - Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence

Intelligent Design Is Not What Most People Think It Is.

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Because the central mechanism of Intelligent Design is untestable, ​​evidence relevant to the idea is lacking. However, some ID proponents have made testable claims that deal more with discrediting evolution than with the mechanism of Intelligent Design. These claims (e.g., that the components of bacterial flagella cannot function independently of one another) have been tested and refuted by the evidence.

Biological science responded overwhelmingly to Darwin's evidence and quickly adopted evolution as the prevailing explanation of the development of the universe and life. And by 1940, almost all the biologists in the world believed that natural selection was driving force behind evolution. Unlike creationism, ID does not state that God is the intelligent designer.

Contrary to what many might suppose, ID is much broader than the debate over Darwinian evolution. That’s because much of the scientific evidence for intelligent design comes from areas that Darwin’s theory doesn’t even address. In fact, much evidence for intelligent design comes from physics and cosmology. Advocates of the theory generally do not identify who they think the designer was.

And clearly, the lack of an adequate materialistic cause does provide part of the grounds for inferring design from information or irreducibly complex structures in the cell. Nevertheless, this lack is only part of the basis for inferring design. Advocates of the theory of intelligent design also infer design because we know that intelligent agents can and do produce information-rich and irreducibly complex systems. In other words, we have positive experience-based knowledge of an alternative cause that is sufficient to have produced such effects.

Then, in 1991, law professor Phillip E. Johnson effectively launched the intelligent-design movement with his best-selling book, "Darwin on Trial." The movement quickly gained momentum in the United States. In 1996, the Discovery Institute, a think tank based in Seattle, launched the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (CRSC). The CRSC's original mission statement included studying and promoting intelligent design as a scientific theory. Overall, the most significant objection by the scientific community to intelligent design as a scientific theory is that it not empirical. Scientists cannot test for the presence of design, nor can they disprove the presence of design. By its very nature, scientists claim, intelligent design is not a scientific argument but a philosophical one.