Intelligent Design is Neither
Brian Trent
February 28, 2007
In a debate at the Cato Institute between evolutionist Michael Shermer and so-called Intelligent Design proponent Jonathan Wells, the latter was asked point-blank what his alternative to the evidence for natural selection was.
I don’t think I’m obligated to propose an alternate theory,” Wells publicly stated. “I don’t pretend to have an alternate theory that explains the history of life.”
Therein lies the problem with modern Creationism. Having largely (but far from completely) backed off from the Genesis tale, today’s proponents try a different spin. They claim to have a scientific theory on their hands.
This “theory” isn’t one at all, but we’ll return to that point in a moment.
My recent commentary on evolution and the so-called “Intelligent Design” argument drew a few comments from the ID crowd. Steve Renner, of the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Center, rushed to his ideology’s defense. His first move was to assail me for “denigrating the 90% of Americans who have faith-based beliefs.”
Like much else from the modern Creationist crowd, this comment itself a misdirection.
This isn’t about denigrating religious belief. The debate between evolution and ID-Creationism is about what should be taught as knowledge. Belief is irrelevant; this debate is simply an issue of evidence which, I point out again, Renner, his ally Michael J. Behe, and Wells cannot supply.
They try very hard to manufacture the veneer of science with lots of charts, illustrations, and canned fallacies. But the bottom line argument, when you cut through the pages of desperate justifications of “See? We are teaching science!” is that they look at the natural world and see the fingerprints of a designer. I’m happy for them. As a species, we like to find patterns in things. We see faces in trees, rocks, and even on Mars.
The ID-Creationist groupies like to quote Behe in particular on his irreducible complexity argument. It boils down to belief: The world around us is so complex, it surely must have been designed by a designer.
We’ve been here before. Isaac Newton, in studying the solar system, wrote a spectacular paper on the movements of planetary bodies and concluded by saying that the orbit of the planets was so amazing, so astonishing, so designed, that God had to be responsible. Only “the council and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being,” he wrote, could have created the solar system.
Well, not really. The “perfect” movement of those planets and comets has been thoroughly explained and, aside from the wildest fringes, is not the subject of any debate whatsoever.
Similarly, in his book “Darwin’s Black Box” Behe compares life (like a bacteria’s flagellum) to a carefully-designed mousetrap. Remove one piece, i.e. the spring or hook, and it becomes useless; thus, a biological mousetrap couldn’t have evolved from singular individual springs and hooks because, as Behe claims, they would have been useless on their own. He relates this to a flagellum, which operates like an “outboard motor” for bacteria. If you remove any of the proteins responsible for it, then it doesn’t work at all.
Darwin himself pointed out the fallacy of this argument,” write Robert and Dr. Steven Novella of the New England Skeptical Society, “a fact that calls into question the scholarship and/or intellectual honesty of anyone who would trot it out a century and a half later.”
The Novellas point out what evolutionary biologists have known for some time. “There is no reason within evolutionary theory to assume that the flagellum had to evolve directly to its current usage.” In other words, what is being used for one function has likely been adapted from earlier functions. Dr. Novella points out that there is “compelling evidence that some of these crucial proteins were once used as part of a membrane pump in the cell walls of bacteria.”
As Michael Shermer discusses with terrific eloquence, structures were often used for other purposes in the past and were “co-opted later for a different use.”
ID-Creationists are slick tacticians; having failed with the direct approach, they now try to piggyback in under the banner of science. But again, they don’t have a theory. They have a perspective that a designer must be responsible for what we see around us. And that’s not scientific theory, method, or anything remotely considered science.
This isn’t an attack on theology. In fact, even in sciences like astronomy and physics there are ideas which are currently seeking evidence to support them, but can’t. I personally am a big fan of string theory. I like it tremendously. But it’s not yielding anything testable, and is thus more of philosophy. Maybe that’ll change. Maybe not.
The ID-Creationist crowd try and cry, but they haven’t risen to the challenge of providing real scientific arguments. Saying they are being scientific is not the same as being scientific… a distinction often missed by the public. This, more than anything else, is what the Renners and Behes are trying to exploit.
But they’re losing. Microevolution was once in doubt and now is accepted, even by Creationists. It’s no longer possible to deny the effect of mutations in the rapid generations of microorganisms.
Whether humans evolved through the sieve of time, or were designed by a cosmic watchmaker, are two of many possibilities. But possibility is not probability, is not theory, is not science.
And so we return to Wells again, who stated he wasn’t obligated to provide an alternate theory.
Well, Mr. Wells, you’re not alone among your group in that admission.
Readers are encouraged to look up a couple links for discussion:
http://www.theness.com/home.asp
http://www.skeptic.com/
I don’t think I’m obligated to propose an alternate theory,” Wells publicly stated. “I don’t pretend to have an alternate theory that explains the history of life.”
Therein lies the problem with modern Creationism. Having largely (but far from completely) backed off from the Genesis tale, today’s proponents try a different spin. They claim to have a scientific theory on their hands.
This “theory” isn’t one at all, but we’ll return to that point in a moment.
My recent commentary on evolution and the so-called “Intelligent Design” argument drew a few comments from the ID crowd. Steve Renner, of the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Center, rushed to his ideology’s defense. His first move was to assail me for “denigrating the 90% of Americans who have faith-based beliefs.”
Like much else from the modern Creationist crowd, this comment itself a misdirection.
This isn’t about denigrating religious belief. The debate between evolution and ID-Creationism is about what should be taught as knowledge. Belief is irrelevant; this debate is simply an issue of evidence which, I point out again, Renner, his ally Michael J. Behe, and Wells cannot supply.
They try very hard to manufacture the veneer of science with lots of charts, illustrations, and canned fallacies. But the bottom line argument, when you cut through the pages of desperate justifications of “See? We are teaching science!” is that they look at the natural world and see the fingerprints of a designer. I’m happy for them. As a species, we like to find patterns in things. We see faces in trees, rocks, and even on Mars.
The ID-Creationist groupies like to quote Behe in particular on his irreducible complexity argument. It boils down to belief: The world around us is so complex, it surely must have been designed by a designer.
We’ve been here before. Isaac Newton, in studying the solar system, wrote a spectacular paper on the movements of planetary bodies and concluded by saying that the orbit of the planets was so amazing, so astonishing, so designed, that God had to be responsible. Only “the council and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being,” he wrote, could have created the solar system.
Well, not really. The “perfect” movement of those planets and comets has been thoroughly explained and, aside from the wildest fringes, is not the subject of any debate whatsoever.
Similarly, in his book “Darwin’s Black Box” Behe compares life (like a bacteria’s flagellum) to a carefully-designed mousetrap. Remove one piece, i.e. the spring or hook, and it becomes useless; thus, a biological mousetrap couldn’t have evolved from singular individual springs and hooks because, as Behe claims, they would have been useless on their own. He relates this to a flagellum, which operates like an “outboard motor” for bacteria. If you remove any of the proteins responsible for it, then it doesn’t work at all.
Darwin himself pointed out the fallacy of this argument,” write Robert and Dr. Steven Novella of the New England Skeptical Society, “a fact that calls into question the scholarship and/or intellectual honesty of anyone who would trot it out a century and a half later.”
The Novellas point out what evolutionary biologists have known for some time. “There is no reason within evolutionary theory to assume that the flagellum had to evolve directly to its current usage.” In other words, what is being used for one function has likely been adapted from earlier functions. Dr. Novella points out that there is “compelling evidence that some of these crucial proteins were once used as part of a membrane pump in the cell walls of bacteria.”
As Michael Shermer discusses with terrific eloquence, structures were often used for other purposes in the past and were “co-opted later for a different use.”
ID-Creationists are slick tacticians; having failed with the direct approach, they now try to piggyback in under the banner of science. But again, they don’t have a theory. They have a perspective that a designer must be responsible for what we see around us. And that’s not scientific theory, method, or anything remotely considered science.
This isn’t an attack on theology. In fact, even in sciences like astronomy and physics there are ideas which are currently seeking evidence to support them, but can’t. I personally am a big fan of string theory. I like it tremendously. But it’s not yielding anything testable, and is thus more of philosophy. Maybe that’ll change. Maybe not.
The ID-Creationist crowd try and cry, but they haven’t risen to the challenge of providing real scientific arguments. Saying they are being scientific is not the same as being scientific… a distinction often missed by the public. This, more than anything else, is what the Renners and Behes are trying to exploit.
But they’re losing. Microevolution was once in doubt and now is accepted, even by Creationists. It’s no longer possible to deny the effect of mutations in the rapid generations of microorganisms.
Whether humans evolved through the sieve of time, or were designed by a cosmic watchmaker, are two of many possibilities. But possibility is not probability, is not theory, is not science.
And so we return to Wells again, who stated he wasn’t obligated to provide an alternate theory.
Well, Mr. Wells, you’re not alone among your group in that admission.
Readers are encouraged to look up a couple links for discussion:
http://www.theness.com/home.asp
http://www.skeptic.com/
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