[Vision2020] Happy 198th BD, Charles Darwin: What Would You Say about Intelligent Design?

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Greetings:

Yesterday was Darwin's birthday so I thought I would do my radio commentary today on a critique of Intelligent Design, an argument that I'm quite happy to debate in a philosophy class but it has not place in a science class.


HAPPY 198th BIRTHDAY, CHARLES DARWIN:
What Would You Say about Intelligent Design?

by Nick Gier

See the full article at www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/design.htm

In 2001 the Discovery Institute, which promotes Intelligent Design, ran full-page advertisements containing the names of dozens of scientists and philosophers objecting to a PBS series defending evolutionary theory. On the Institute’s website one of the scientists admitted that he had not seen the program, but that he had still signed the statement because he was a Bible-believing Christian. 

The Institute was invited by the producer to offer scientifically tested and peer reviewed experiments supporting Intelligent Design.  They were not able to meet this requirement, so they were offered, but declined, a spot on the last segment that covered religious responses to evolution. 

Professional philosophers know Intelligent Design as the “design” argument for the existence of God. Most philosophers reject the argument, but Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne believes that the argument proves that God may have been the creator of the laws of nature, but not the order and structure of the universe, which could have come about by evolutionary development.

Interestingly enough this appears to have been Darwin’s original position.  The first edition of the Origin of Species contains an epigraph that indicates that God created the universe with natural laws that, working solely on their own, could produce both the physical and biological world as we know it.  Darwin was wisely advised not to mix religion and science and he deleted the epigraph in later editions.

Using God as a hypothesis for the order and structure of the universe fails as a scientific explanation.  Christians claim, and their theologians have confirmed the proposition, that with God “all things are possible.”  Therefore, whatever order and structure the world might have, then God could have created it. This is the logical fallacy of arguing in a circle.

The evolutionary hypothesis has been spectacularly successful in demonstrating specific reasons for specific developments in thousands of the earth’s creatures. For example, we know that sickle cell anemia developed for a specific reason in malaria infested Africa, but creationists cannot give the specific reasons that evolutionary theory can. All they can say is “God made it that way," and that does not count as a scientific explanation.

I once witnessed creationist Duane Gish in a debate with Grover Krantz, an anthropologist at Washington State University.  Gish finished his presentation with a series of slides about the stages of development of the Monarch butterfly.  He challenged Krantz to explain how of this intricate and complex process came about by natural selection.  Krantz said that this was not his field, but he assumed that biologists had not yet found an explanation.  Compare Krantz’s humble answer with Gish’s implied but triumphant answer that “God did it.” 

The creationist answer is not only arrogant but ignorant about how science operates, and how it must remain agnostic when there are no plausible hypotheses. Claiming that God created the Monarch such that it would go through these stages explains nothing at all about how butterflies actually develop from caterpillars.

A theory that explains all possible order and structure says nothing about the specific operations of our incredible cosmos.  Evolution has proved itself to be a very successful scientific theory in this regard, but it has nothing to say about ultimate origins.  

At this point people should turn to philosophy and theology and choose their own answers to nonscientific, but critically important, questions such as “Why is there something rather than nothing at all?”  The scientific method cannot answer this question, but the world religions have lots of interesting and worthy answers.