Intelligent design

For other uses, see Intelligent design (disambiguation).

Intelligent design is the claim that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." It is a modern form of the traditional teleological argument for the existence of God, modified to avoid specifying the nature or identity of the designer. Its primary proponents, all of whom are associated with the Discovery Institute, believe the designer to be God. Intelligent design's advocates claim it is a scientific theory, and seek to fundamentally redefine science to accept supernatural explanations.

The unequivocal consensus in the scientific community is that intelligent design is not science. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has stated that "intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life" are not science because they cannot be tested by experiment, do not generate any predictions, and propose no new hypotheses of their own. The National Science Teachers Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have termed it pseudoscience. Others have concurred, and some have called it junk science.

"Intelligent design" originated in response to a 1987 United States Supreme Court ruling involving constitutional separation of church and state. Its first significant published use was in Of Pandas and People, a 1989 textbook intended for high-school biology classes. The following year a small group of proponents formed the Discovery Institute and began advocating the inclusion of intelligent design in public school curricula. The "intelligent design movement" grew increasingly visible in the 1990s and early 2000s, culminating in the 2005 "Dover trial" challenging the intended use of intelligent design in public school science classes. In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, a group of parents of high-school students challenged a public school district requirement for teachers to present intelligent design in biology classes as an alternative "explanation of the origin of life". U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III ruled that intelligent design is not science, that it "cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents", and concluded that the school district's promotion of it therefore violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Overview

The term "intelligent design" came into published use after the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in the 1987 case of Edwards v. Aguillard that to require the teaching of "creation science" alongside evolution was a violation of the Establishment Clause, which prohibits state aid to religion. In the Edwards case, the Supreme Court had also held that "teaching a variety of scientific theories about the origins of humankind to school children might be validly done with the clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science instruction." In drafts of the 1989 high-school level textbook Of Pandas and People, almost all derivations of the word "creation", such as "creationism", were replaced with the words "intelligent design". In the 1990s the term "intelligent design" was increasingly used by advocates of teaching a creation-based alternative to evolution, particularly in the United States.

Intelligent design is presented as an alternative to natural explanations for the development of life. It stands in opposition to conventional biological science, which relies on the scientific method to explain life through observable processes such as mutation and natural selection. The stated purpose of intelligent design is to investigate whether or not existing empirical evidence implies that life on Earth must have been designed by an intelligent agent or agents. William A. Dembski, one of intelligent design's leading proponents, has said that the fundamental claim of intelligent design is that "there are natural systems that cannot be adequately explained in terms of undirected natural forces and that exhibit features which in any other circumstance we would attribute to intelligence." In the leaked Discovery Institute manifesto known as the Wedge Document, however, the supporters of the movement were told, "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. 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."

Proponents of intelligent design look for evidence of what they term "signs of intelligence": physical properties of an object that point to a designer (see: teleological argument). For example, intelligent design proponents argue that an archaeologist who finds a statue made of stone in a field may justifiably conclude that the statue was designed, and reasonably seek to identify its designer. The archaeologist would not, however, be justified in making the same claim based on an irregularly shaped boulder of the same size. Design proponents argue that living systems show great complexity, from which they infer that some aspects of life have been designed.

Intelligent design proponents say that although evidence pointing to the nature of an "intelligent cause or agent" may not be directly observable, its effects on nature can be detected. Dembski, in Signs of Intelligence, states: "Proponents of intelligent design regard it as a scientific research program that investigates the effects of intelligent causes ... not intelligent causes per se." In his view, one cannot test for the identity of influences exterior to a closed system from within, so questions concerning the identity of a designer fall outside the realm of the concept. However, no rigorous test that can identify these effects has yet been proposed. No articles supporting intelligent design have been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, nor has intelligent design been the subject of scientific research or testing.

Origins of the concept

Philosophers have long debated whether the complexity of nature indicates the existence of a purposeful natural or supernatural designer/creator. The first recorded arguments for a designer of the cosmos are in Greek philosophy. In the 4th century BC, Plato posited a "demiurge" of supreme wisdom and intelligence as the creator of the cosmos in his Timaeus. Aristotle also developed the idea of a creator-designer of the cosmos, often called the "Unmoved Mover", in his work Metaphysics. In De Natura Deorum, or "On the Nature of the Gods" (45 BC), Cicero stated that "the divine power is to be found in a principle of reason which pervades the whole of nature."

The use of this line of reasoning as applied to a supernatural designer has come to be known as the teleological argument for the existence of God. The most notable forms of this argument were expressed in the 13th century by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae, design being the fifth of Aquinas' five proofs for God's existence, and by William Paley in his book Natural Theology (1802). Paley used the watchmaker analogy, which is still used in intelligent design arguments. In the early 19th century, such arguments led to the development of what was called natural theology, the study of nature as a means to understand "the mind of God." This movement fueled the passion for collecting fossils and other biological specimens, which ultimately led to Darwin's theory of the origin of species. Similar reasoning postulating a divine designer is embraced today by many believers in theistic evolution, who consider modern science and the theory of evolution to be fully compatible with the concept of a supernatural designer.

Intelligent design in the late 20th century can be seen as a modern development of natural theology, which seeks to change the basis of science and undermine evolutionary theory. As evolutionary theory has expanded to explain more phenomena, the examples that are held up as evidence of design have changed. But the essential argument remains the same: complex systems imply a designer. Examples offered in the past included the eye (optical system) and the feathered wing; current examples are mostly biochemical: protein functions, blood clotting, and bacterial flagella (see irreducible complexity).

The earliest known version of the particular line of reasoning that would come to be called "intelligent design" began, according to Barbara Forrest, "in the early 1980s with the publication of The Mystery of Life's Origin (MoLO 1984) by creationist chemist Charles B. Thaxton with Walter L. Bradley and Roger L. Olsen. Thaxton worked for Jon A. Buell at the Foundation for Thought and Ethics (FTE) in Texas, a religious organization that published MoLO."

Intelligent design deliberately does not try to identify or name the specific agent of creation — it merely states that one (or more) must exist. Although intelligent design itself does not name the designer, the personal view of many proponents is that the designer is the Christian god. Whether this was a genuine feature of the concept or just a posture taken to avoid alienating those who would separate religion from the teaching of science has been a matter of great debate between supporters and critics of intelligent design. The Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District court ruling held the latter to be the case.

Origins of the term

Prior to the publication of the book Of Pandas and People in 1989, the words "intelligent design" had been used on several occasions as a descriptive phrase in contexts that are unrelated to the modern use of the term. The phrase "intelligent design" can be found in an 1847 issue of Scientific American and in an 1850 book by Patrick Edward Dove. The words are also used in an address to the 1873 annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science by Paleyite botanist George James Allman:

No physical hypothesis founded on any indisputable fact has yet explained the origin of the primordial protoplasm, and, above all, of its marvellous properties, which render evolution possible — in heredity and in adaptability, for these properties are the cause and not the effect of evolution. For the cause of this cause we have sought in vain among the physical forces which surround us, until we are at last compelled to rest upon an independent volition, a far-seeing intelligent design. - George James Allman, 1873

The phrase can be found again in Humanism, a 1903 book by one of the founders of classical pragmatism, F.C.S. Schiller: "It will not be possible to rule out the supposition that the process of evolution may be guided by an intelligent design." A derivative of the phrase appears in the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967) in the article on the Teleological argument for the existence of God : "Stated most succinctly, the argument runs: The world exhibits teleological order (design, adaptation). Therefore, it was produced by an intelligent designer." The phrases "intelligent design" and "intelligently designed" were used in a 1979 book Chance or Design? by James Horigan and the phrase "intelligent design" was used in a 1982 speech by Sir Fred Hoyle in his promotion of panspermia.

The modern use of the words "intelligent design", as a term intended to describe a field of inquiry, began after the Supreme Court of the United States, in the case of Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), ruled that creationism is unconstitutional in public school science curricula. Stephen C. Meyer, cofounder of the Discovery Institute and vice president of the Center for Science and Culture, reports that the term came up in 1988 at a conference he attended in Tacoma, Washington, called Sources of Information Content in DNA. He attributes the term to Charles Thaxton, editor of Of Pandas and People. In drafts of the book Of Pandas and People, over one hundred uses of the root word "creation", such as "creationism" and "creation science", were changed, almost without exception, to intelligent design. The book was published in 1989 and is considered to be the first intelligent design book. The term was promoted more broadly by the retired legal scholar Phillip E. Johnson following his 1991 book Darwin on Trial, which advocated redefining science to allow claims of supernatural creation. Johnson, considered the "father" of the intelligent design movement, went on to work with Meyer on the formation and execution of the wedge strategy, and became the program advisor of the Center for Science and Culture.

Irreducible complexity

Further information: Irreducible complexity

In the context of intelligent design, irreducible complexity was put forward by Michael Behe, who defines it as "a single system which is composed of several well-matched interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning."

Behe uses the analogy of a mousetrap to illustrate this concept. A mousetrap consists of several interacting pieces — the base, the catch, the spring and the hammer — all of which must be in place for the mousetrap to work. Removal of any one piece destroys the function of the mousetrap. Intelligent design advocates assert that natural selection could not create irreducibly complex systems, because the selectable function is present only when all parts are assembled. Behe's original examples of alleged irreducibly complex biological mechanisms include the bacterial flagellum of E. coli, the blood clotting cascade, cilia, and the adaptive immune system.

Critics point out that the irreducible complexity argument assumes that the necessary parts of a system have always been necessary and therefore could not have been added sequentially. They argue that something which is at first merely advantageous can later become necessary as other components change. Furthermore, they argue, evolution often proceeds by altering preexisting parts or by removing them from a system, rather than by adding them. This is sometimes called the "scaffolding objection" by an analogy with scaffolding, which can support an "irreducibly complex" building until it is complete and able to stand on its own. Behe himself has since confessed to "sloppy prose", and that his "argument against Darwinism does not add up to a logical proof." Irreducible complexity has remained a popular argument among advocates of intelligent design; in the Dover trial, however, the court held that "Professor Behe’s claim for irreducible complexity has been refuted in peer-reviewed research papers and has been rejected by the scientific community at large."

Specified complexity

Further information: Specified complexity

The intelligent design concept of "specified complexity" was developed by mathematician, philosopher, and theologian William Dembski. Dembski states that when something exhibits specified complexity (i.e., is both complex and specified, simultaneously), one can infer that it was produced by an intelligent cause (i.e., that it was designed) rather than being the result of natural processes. He provides the following examples: "A single letter of the alphabet is specified without being complex. A long sentence of random letters is complex without being specified. A Shakespearean sonnet is both complex and specified." He states that details of living things can be similarly characterized, especially the "patterns" of molecular sequences in functional biological molecules such as DNA.

Dembski defines complex specified information as anything with a less than 1 in 10¹⁵⁰ chance of occurring by (natural) chance. Critics say that this renders the argument a tautology: Complex specified information (CSI) cannot occur naturally because Dembski has defined it thus, so the real question becomes whether or not CSI actually exists in nature.

The conceptual soundness of Dembski's specified complexity/CSI argument is strongly disputed by the scientific community. Specified complexity has yet to be shown to have wide applications in other fields as Dembski asserts. John Wilkins and Wesley Elsberry characterize Dembski's "explanatory filter" as eliminative, because it eliminates explanations sequentially: first regularity, then chance, finally defaulting to design. They argue that this procedure is flawed as a model for scientific inference because the asymmetric way it treats the different possible explanations renders it prone to making false conclusions. Richard Dawkins, another critic of intelligent design, argues in The God Delusion that allowing for an intelligent designer to account for unlikely complexity only postpones the problem, as such a designer would need to be at least as complex.

Fine-tuned universe

Further information: Fine-tuned universe

Intelligent design proponents also raise occasional arguments outside biology, most notably an argument based on the concept of the fine-tuning of universal constants that make matter and life possible and which are argued not to be solely attributable to chance. These include the values of fundamental physical constants, the relative strength of nuclear forces, electromagnetism, gravity between fundamental particles, as well as the ratios of masses of such particles. Intelligent design proponent and Center for Science and Culture fellow Guillermo Gonzalez argues that if any of these values were even slightly different, the universe would be dramatically different, making it impossible for many chemical elements and features of the universe, such as galaxies, to form. Thus, proponents argue, an intelligent designer of life was needed to ensure that the requisite features were present to achieve that particular outcome.

Scientists almost unanimously have responded that this argument cannot be tested and is not scientifically productive. Some scientists argue that even when taken as mere speculation, these arguments are poorly supported by existing evidence. Proponent Granville Sewell has stated that the evolution of complex forms of life represents a decrease of entropy, thereby violating the second law of thermodynamics and supporting intelligent design. Critics assert that this is a misapplication of thermodynamic principles. Victor J. Stenger and other critics say both intelligent design and the weak form of the anthropic principle are essentially a tautology; in his view, these arguments amount to the claim that life is able to exist because the universe is able to support life. The claim of the improbability of a life-supporting universe has also been criticized as an argument by lack of imagination for assuming no other forms of life are possible. Life as we know it might not exist if things were different, but a different sort of life might exist in its place. A number of critics also suggest that many of the stated variables appear to be interconnected and that calculations made by mathematicians and physicists suggest that the emergence of a universe similar to ours is quite probable.

Intelligent designer

Further information: Intelligent designer

Intelligent design arguments are formulated in secular terms and intentionally avoid identifying the intelligent agent they posit. Although they do not state that God is the designer, the designer is often implicitly hypothesized to have intervened in a way that only a god could intervene. Dembski, in The Design Inference, speculates that an alien culture could fulfill these requirements. The authoritative description of intelligent design,, however, explicitly states that the universe displays features of having been designed. Acknowledging the paradox, Dembski concludes that "no intelligent agent who is strictly physical could have presided over the origin of the universe or the origin of life." The leading proponents have made statements to their supporters that they believe the designer to be the Christian god, to the exclusion of all other religions.

Beyond the debate over whether intelligent design is scientific, a number of critics go so far as to argue that existing evidence makes the design hypothesis appear unlikely, irrespective of its status in the world of science. For example, Jerry Coyne, of the University of Chicago, asks why a designer would "give us a pathway for making vitamin C, but then destroy it by disabling one of its enzymes" and why he or she would not "stock oceanic islands with reptiles, mammals, amphibians, and freshwater fish, despite the suitability of such islands for these species." Coyne also points to the fact that "the flora and fauna on those islands resemble that of the nearest mainland, even when the environments are very different" as evidence that species were not placed there by a designer. Previously, in Darwin's Black Box, Behe had argued that we are simply incapable of understanding the designer's motives, so such questions cannot be answered definitively. Odd designs could, for example, "have been placed there by the designer... for artistic reasons, to show off, for some as-yet undetectable practical purpose, or for some unguessable reason." Coyne responds that in light of the evidence, "either life resulted not from intelligent design, but from evolution; or the intelligent designer is a cosmic prankster who designed everything to make it look as though it had evolved."

Asserting the need for a designer of complexity also raises the question "What designed the designer?" Intelligent design proponents say that the question is irrelevant to or outside the scope of intelligent design. Richard Wein counters that the unanswered questions a theory creates "must be balanced against the improvements in our understanding which the explanation provides. Invoking an unexplained being to explain the origin of other beings (ourselves) is little more than question-begging. The new question raised by the explanation is as problematic as the question which the explanation purports to answer." Dawkins sees the claim that the designer does not need to be explained, not as a contribution to knowledge, but as a thought-terminating cliché. In the absence of observable, measurable evidence, the very question "What designed the designer?" leads to an infinite regression from which intelligent design proponents can only escape by resorting to religious creationism or logical contradiction.

Movement

Further information: Intelligent design movement

The intelligent design movement is a direct outgrowth of the creationism of the 1980s. The movement is headquartered in the Center for Science and Culture (CSC), established in 1996 as the creationist wing of the Discovery Institute to promote a religious agenda calling for broad social, academic and political changes. This campaign primarily targets the United States, although efforts have been made in other countries to promote intelligent design. Leaders of the movement say intelligent design exposes the limitations of scientific orthodoxy and of the secular philosophy of Naturalism. Intelligent design proponents allege that science should not be limited to naturalism and should not demand the adoption of a naturalistic philosophy that dismisses out-of-hand any explanation which contains a supernatural cause. The overall goal of the movement is to "defeat [the] materialist world view" represented by the theory of evolution in favor of "a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."

Phillip E. Johnson stated that the goal of intelligent design is to cast creationism as a scientific concept. All leading intelligent design proponents are fellows or staff of the Discovery Institute and its Center for Science and Culture. Nearly all intelligent design concepts and the associated movement are the products of the Discovery Institute, which guides the movement and follows its wedge strategy while conducting its adjunct Teach the Controversy campaign.

Leading intelligent design proponents have made conflicting statements regarding intelligent design. In statements directed at the general public, they say intelligent design is not religious; when addressing conservative Christian supporters, they state that intelligent design has its foundation in the Bible. Recognizing the need for support, the institute affirms its Christian, evangelistic orientation: "Alongside a focus on influential opinion-makers, we also seek to build up a popular base of support among our natural constituency, namely, Christians. We will do this primarily through apologetics seminars. We intend these to encourage and equip believers with new scientific evidences that support the faith, as well as to 'popularize' our ideas in the broader culture."

Barbara Forrest, an expert who has written extensively on the movement, describes this as being due to the Discovery Institute's obfuscating its agenda as a matter of policy. She has written that the movement's "activities betray an aggressive, systematic agenda for promoting not only intelligent design creationism, but the religious world-view that undergirds[sic] it."

Religion and leading proponents

Although arguments for intelligent design are formulated in secular terms and intentionally avoid positing the identity of the designer, most of the principal intelligent design advocates are evangelical Christians who have stated that in their view the "designer" is God. Phillip E. Johnson, William Dembski, and Stephen C. Meyer are Protestants; Michael Behe is Roman Catholic; and Jonathan Wells, another principal advocate, is a member of the Unification Church. Johnson has stated that cultivating ambiguity by employing secular language in arguments that are carefully crafted to avoid overtones of theistic creationism is a necessary first step for ultimately reintroducing the Christian concept of God as the designer. Johnson explicitly calls for intelligent design proponents to obfuscate their religious motivations so as to avoid having intelligent design identified "as just another way of packaging the Christian evangelical message". Johnson emphasizes that "the first thing that has to be done is to get the Bible out of the discussion"; "after we have separated materialist prejudice from scientific fact ... only then can 'biblical issues' be discussed."

The strategy of deliberately disguising the religious intent of intelligent design has been described by William Dembski in The Design Inference. In this work Dembski lists a god or an "alien life force" as two possible options for the identity of the designer; however, in his book Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology, Dembski states that "Christ is indispensable to any scientific theory, even if its practitioners don't have a clue about him. The pragmatics of a scientific theory can, to be sure, be pursued without recourse to Christ. But the conceptual soundness of the theory can in the end only be located in Christ." Dembski also stated, "ID is part of God's general revelation [...] Not only does intelligent design rid us of this ideology (materialism), which suffocates the human spirit, but, in my personal experience, I've found that it opens the path for people to come to Christ." Both Johnson and Dembski cite the Bible's Gospel of John as the foundation of intelligent design.

Barbara Forrest contends such statements reveal that leading proponents see intelligent design as essentially religious in nature, not merely a scientific concept that has implications with which their personal religious beliefs happen to coincide. She writes that the leading proponents of intelligent design are closely allied with the ultra-conservative Christian Reconstructionism movement. She lists connections of Discovery Institute Fellows Phillip Johnson, Charles Thaxton, Michael Behe, Richard Weikart, Jonathan Wells and Francis Beckwith to leading Christian Reconstructionist organizations, and the extent of the funding provided the Institute by Howard Ahmanson Jr., a leading figure in the Reconstructionist movement.

Controversy

A key strategy of the intelligent design movement is convincing the general public that there is a debate among scientists about whether life evolved, in order to convince the public, politicians and cultural leaders that schools should "teach the controversy". There is no such debate, however, within the scientific community; the scientific consensus is that life evolved. Intelligent design is widely viewed as a stalking horse for its proponents' campaign against what they say is the materialist foundation of science, which they argue leaves no room for the possibility of God.

The intelligent design controversy centers on three issues:

1. Can intelligent design be defined as science?
2. If so, does the evidence support it and related explanations of the history of life on Earth?
3. If the answer to either question is negative, is the teaching of such explanations appropriate and legal in public education, specifically in science classes?

Empirical science uses the scientific method to create a posteriori knowledge based on observation and repeated testing of hypotheses and theories. Intelligent design proponents seek to change this fundamental basis of science by eliminating "methodological naturalism" from science and replacing it with what the leader of the intelligent design movement, Phillip E. Johnson, calls "theistic realism". Some have called this approach "methodological supernaturalism", which means belief in a transcendent, nonnatural dimension of reality inhabited by a transcendent, nonnatural deity. Intelligent design proponents argue that naturalistic explanations fail to explain certain phenomena and that supernatural explanations provide a very simple and intuitive explanation for the origins of life and the universe. Proponents say that evidence exists in the forms of irreducible complexity and specified complexity that cannot be explained by natural processes.

Supporters also hold that religious neutrality requires the teaching of both evolution and intelligent design in schools, saying that teaching only evolution unfairly discriminates against those holding creationist beliefs. Teaching both, they argue, allows for the possibility of religious belief, without causing the state to actually promote such beliefs. Many intelligent design followers believe that "Scientism" is itself a religion that promotes secularism and materialism in an attempt to erase theism from public life, and they view their work in the promotion of intelligent design as a way to return religion to a central role in education and other public spheres. Some allege that this larger debate is often the subtext for arguments made over intelligent design, though others note that intelligent design serves as an effective proxy for the religious beliefs of prominent intelligent design proponents in their efforts to advance their religious point of view within society.

According to critics, intelligent design has not presented a credible scientific case and is an attempt to teach religion in public schools, which the U.S. Constitution forbids under the Establishment Clause. They allege that intelligent design has substituted public support for scientific research. Some critics have said that if one were to take the proponents of "equal time for all theories" at their word, there would be no logical limit to the number of potential "theories" to be taught in the public school system, including intelligent design parodies such as the Flying Spaghetti Monster "theory". There are innumerable mutually incompatible supernatural explanations for complexity, and intelligent design does not provide a mechanism for discriminating among them. Furthermore, intelligent design is neither observable nor repeatable, which violates the scientific requirement of falsifiability. Indeed, intelligent design proponent Michael Behe concedes "You can't prove intelligent design by experiment."

Critics have asserted that intelligent design proponents cannot legitimately infer that an intelligent designer is behind the part of the process that is not understood scientifically, since they have not shown that anything supernatural has occurred. The inference that an intelligent designer created life on Earth, which advocate William Dembski has said could alternately be an "alien" life force, has been compared to the a priori claim that aliens helped the ancient Egyptians build the pyramids. In both cases, the effect of this outside intelligence is not repeatable, observable or falsifiable, and it violates the principle of parsimony. From a strictly empirical standpoint, one may list what is known about Egyptian construction techniques, but one must admit ignorance about exactly how the Egyptians built the pyramids.

Intelligent design proponents aim to gain support by unifying the religious world — Christians, Jews, Muslims and others who believe in a creator — in challenging Darwinism with a God-friendly alternative theory. Mainstream religious denominations have responded by expressing support for evolution. They state that their religious faith is fully compatible with science, which is limited to dealing only with the natural world — a position described by the term theistic evolution. As well as pointing out that intelligent design is not science, they also reject it for various philosophical and theological reasons. The arguments of intelligent design have been directly challenged by the over 10,000 clergy who signed the Clergy Letter Project. Prominent scientists who strongly express religious faith, such as the astronomer George Coyne and the biologist Ken Miller, have been at the forefront of opposition to intelligent design. While creationist organizations have welcomed intelligent design's support against naturalism, they have also been critical of its refusal to identify the designer, and have pointed to previous failures of the same argument.

Defining as science

The scientific method is a body of techniques for investigating phenomena and acquiring new knowledge of the natural world without assuming the existence or nonexistence of the supernatural, an approach sometimes called methodological naturalism. Intelligent design proponents believe that this can be equated to materialist metaphysical naturalism and have often said that not only is their own position scientific, but it is even more scientific than evolution, and that they want a redefinition of science as a revived natural theology or natural philosophy to allow "non-naturalistic theories such as intelligent design." This presents a demarcation problem, which in the philosophy of science is about how and where to draw the lines around science. For a theory to qualify as scientific, it is expected to be:

• Consistent
• Parsimonious (sparing in proposed entities or explanations, see Occam's Razor)
• Useful (describes, explains and predicts observable phenomena)
• Empirically testable and falsifiable (see Falsifiability)
• Based on multiple observations, often in the form of controlled, repeated experiments
• Correctable and dynamic (changes are made as new data are discovered)
• Progressive (achieves all that previous theories have and more)
• Provisional or tentative (admits that it might not be correct rather than asserting certainty)

For any theory, hypothesis or conjecture to be considered scientific, it must meet most, but ideally all, of these criteria. The fewer criteria are met, the less scientific it is; and if it meets only a few or none at all, then it cannot be treated as scientific in any meaningful sense of the word. Typical objections to defining intelligent design as science are that it lacks consistency, violates the principle of parsimony, is not falsifiable, is not empirically testable, and is not correctable, dynamic, tentative or progressive.

In light of the apparent failure of intelligent design to adhere to scientific standards, in September 2005, 38 Nobel laureates issued a statement saying "Intelligent design is fundamentally unscientific; it cannot be tested as scientific theory because its central conclusion is based on belief in the intervention of a supernatural agent." In October 2005, a coalition representing more than 70,000 Australian scientists and science teachers issued a statement saying "intelligent design is not science" and called on "all schools not to teach Intelligent Design (ID) as science, because it fails to qualify on every count as a scientific theory."

Critics also say that the intelligent design doctrine does not meet the criteria for scientific evidence used by most courts, the Daubert Standard. The Daubert Standard governs which evidence can be considered scientific in United States federal courts and most state courts. The four Daubert criteria are:

• The theoretical underpinnings of the methods must yield testable predictions by means of which the theory could be falsified.
• The methods should preferably be published in a peer-reviewed journal.
• There should be a known rate of error that can be used in evaluating the results.
• The methods should be generally accepted within the relevant scientific community.

In deciding Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District on December 20, 2005, Judge John E. Jones III agreed with the plaintiffs, ruling that "we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents."

Peer review

The failure to follow the procedures of scientific discourse and the failure to submit work to the scientific community that withstands scrutiny have weighed against intelligent design's being considered valid science. To date, the intelligent design movement has yet to have an article published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

Intelligent design, by appealing to a supernatural agent, directly conflicts with the principles of science, which limit its inquiries to empirical, observable and ultimately testable data and which require explanations to be based on empirical evidence. Dembski, Behe and other intelligent design proponents say bias by the scientific community is to blame for the failure of their research to be published. Intelligent design proponents believe that their writings are rejected for not conforming to purely naturalistic, nonsupernatural mechanisms rather than because their research is not up to "journal standards", and that the merit of their articles is overlooked. Some scientists describe this claim as a conspiracy theory. The issue that supernatural explanations do not conform to the scientific method became a sticking point for intelligent design proponents in the 1990s, and is addressed in the wedge strategy as an aspect of science that must be challenged before intelligent design can be accepted by the broader scientific community.

The debate over whether intelligent design produces new research, as any scientific field must, and has legitimately attempted to publish this research, is extremely heated. Both critics and advocates point to numerous examples to make their case. For instance, the Templeton Foundation, a former funder of the Discovery Institute and a major supporter of projects seeking to reconcile science and religion, says that it asked intelligent design proponents to submit proposals for actual research, but none were ever submitted. Charles L. Harper Jr., foundation vice-president, said: "From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don't come out very well in our world of scientific review."

The only article published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal that made a case for intelligent design was quickly withdrawn by the publisher for having circumvented the journal's peer-review standards. Written by the Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture Director Stephen C. Meyer, it appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington in August 2004. The article was a literature review, which means that it did not present any new research, but rather culled quotations and claims from other papers to argue that the Cambrian explosion could not have happened by natural processes. The choice of venue for this article was also considered problematic, because it was so outside the normal subject matter (see Sternberg peer review controversy). Dembski has written that "perhaps the best reason [to be skeptical of his ideas] is that intelligent design has yet to establish itself as a thriving scientific research program." In a 2001 interview, Dembski said that he stopped submitting to peer-reviewed journals because of their slow time-to-print and that he makes more money from publishing books.

In the Dover trial, the judge found that intelligent design features no scientific research or testing. There, intelligent design proponents cited just one paper, on simulation modeling of evolution by Behe and Snoke, which mentioned neither irreducible complexity nor intelligent design and which Behe admitted did not rule out known evolutionary mechanisms. In sworn testimony, however, Behe said: "There are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred." As summarized by the judge, Behe conceded that there are no peer-reviewed articles supporting his claims of intelligent design or irreducible complexity. In his ruling, the judge wrote: "A final indicator of how ID has failed to demonstrate scientific warrant is the complete absence of peer-reviewed publications supporting the theory."

Despite this, the Discovery Institute continues to insist that a number of intelligent design articles have been published in peer-reviewed journals, including in their list the two articles mentioned above. Critics, largely members of the scientific community, reject this claim, pointing out that no established scientific journal has yet published an intelligent design article. Instead, intelligent design proponents have set up their own journals with "peer review" which lack impartiality and rigor, consisting entirely of intelligent design supporters.

Intelligence as an observable quality

The phrase intelligent design makes use of an assumption of the quality of an observable intelligence, a concept that has no scientific consensus definition. William Dembski, for example, has written that "Intelligence leaves behind a characteristic signature". The characteristics of intelligence are assumed by intelligent design proponents to be observable without specifying what the criteria for the measurement of intelligence should be. Dembski, instead, asserts that "in special sciences ranging from forensics to archaeology to SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), appeal to a designing intelligence is indispensable." How this appeal is made and what this implies as to the definition of intelligence are topics left largely unaddressed. Seth Shostak, a researcher with the SETI Institute, refuted Dembski's comparison of SETI and intelligent design, saying that intelligent design advocates base their inference of design on complexity — the argument being that some biological systems are too complex to have been made by natural processes — while SETI researchers are looking primarily for artificiality.

Critics say that the design detection methods proposed by intelligent design proponents are radically different from conventional design detection, undermining the key elements that make it possible as legitimate science. Intelligent design proponents, they say, are proposing both searching for a designer without knowing anything about that designer's abilities, parameters, or intentions (which scientists do know when searching for the results of human intelligence), as well as denying the very distinction between natural/artificial design that allows scientists to compare complex designed artifacts against the background of the sorts of complexity found in nature.

As a means of criticism, certain skeptics have pointed to a challenge of intelligent design derived from the study of artificial intelligence. The criticism is a counter to intelligent design claims about what makes a design intelligent, specifically that "no preprogrammed device can be truly intelligent, that intelligence is irreducible to natural processes." This claim is similar in type to an assumption of Cartesian dualism that posits a strict separation between "mind" and the material universe. However, in studies of artificial intelligence, while there is an implicit assumption that supposed "intelligence" or creativity of a computer program is determined by the capabilities given to it by the computer programmer, artificial intelligence need not be bound to an inflexible system of rules. Rather, if a computer program can access randomness as a function, this effectively allows for a flexible, creative, and adaptive intelligence. Evolutionary algorithms, a subfield of machine learning (itself a subfield of artificial intelligence), have been used to mathematically demonstrate that randomness and selection can be used to "evolve" complex, highly adapted structures that are not explicitly designed by a programmer. Evolutionary algorithms use the Darwinian metaphor of random mutation, selection and the survival of the fittest to solve diverse mathematical and scientific problems that are usually not solvable using conventional methods. Furthermore, forays into such areas as quantum computing seem to indicate that real probabilistic functions may be available in the future. Intelligence derived from randomness is essentially indistinguishable from the "innate" intelligence associated with biological organisms, and poses a challenge to the intelligent design conception that intelligence itself necessarily requires a designer. Cognitive science continues to investigate the nature of intelligence along these lines of inquiry. The intelligent design community, for the most part, relies on the assumption that intelligence is readily apparent as a fundamental and basic property of complex systems.

Arguments from ignorance

Eugenie Scott, along with Glenn Branch and other critics, has argued that many points raised by intelligent design proponents are arguments from ignorance. In the argument from ignorance, a lack of evidence for one view is erroneously argued to constitute proof of the correctness of another view. Scott and Branch say that intelligent design is an argument from ignorance because it relies upon a lack of knowledge for its conclusion: lacking a natural explanation for certain specific aspects of evolution, we assume intelligent cause. They contend most scientists would reply that the unexplained is not unexplainable, and that "we don't know yet" is a more appropriate response than invoking a cause outside of science. Particularly, Michael Behe's demands for ever more detailed explanations of the historical evolution of molecular systems seem to assume a false dichotomy where either evolution or design is the proper explanation, and any perceived failure of evolution becomes a victory for design. In scientific terms, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" for naturalistic explanations of observed traits of living organisms. Scott and Branch also contend that the supposedly novel contributions proposed by intelligent design proponents have not served as the basis for any productive scientific research.

Intelligent design has also been characterized as a "god of the gaps" argument, which has the following form:

• There is a gap in scientific knowledge.
• The gap is filled with acts of God (or Intelligent designer) and therefore proves the existence of God (or Intelligent designer).

A god of the gaps argument is the theological version of an argument from ignorance. A key feature of this type of argument is that it merely answers outstanding questions with explanations (often supernatural) that are unverifiable and ultimately themselves subject to unanswerable questions.

Improbable versus impossible events

William Dembski formulated the universal probability bound, a reformulation of the creationist argument from improbability, which he argues is the smallest probability of anything occurring in the universe over all time at the maximum possible rate. This value, 1 in 10¹²⁰, represents a revision of his original formula, which set the value of the universal probability bound at 1 in 10¹⁵⁰. In 2005 Dembski again revised his definition to be the inverse of the product of two different quantities, 10¹²⁰ and the variable rank complexity of the event under consideration.

In "Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences", John Allen Paulos states that the apparent improbability of a given scenario cannot necessarily be taken as an indication that this scenario is more unlikely than any other potential one: "Rarity by itself shouldn't necessarily be evidence of anything. When one is dealt a bridge hand of thirteen cards, the probability of being dealt that particular hand is less than one in 600 billion [1 in 6 x 10¹¹]. Still, it would be absurd for someone to be dealt a hand, examine it carefully, calculate that the probability of getting it is less than one in 600 billion, and then conclude that he must not have been [randomly] dealt that very hand because it is so very improbable."

Polls

According to a 2005 Harris poll, ten percent of adults in the United States view human beings as "so complex that they required a powerful force or intelligent being to help create them". Although the Zogby polls commissioned by the Discovery Institute show more support, these polls suffer from considerable flaws, such as having a very low response rate (248 out of 16,000), being conducted on behalf of an organization with an expressed interest in the outcome of the poll, and containing leading questions.

International status

Intelligent design has received little support outside of the U.S.

In the United Kingdom, public education includes Religious Education as a compulsory subject, and many "faith schools" that teach the ethos of particular denominations. When it was revealed that a group called Truth in Science had distributed DVDs produced by the Discovery Institute affiliate Illustra Media featuring Discovery Institute fellows making the case for design in nature, and claimed they were being used by 59 schools, the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) stated that "Neither creationism nor intelligent design are taught as a subject in schools, and are not specified in the science curriculum" (part of the National Curriculum which does not apply to independent schools or to Education in Scotland). The DfES subsequently stated that "Intelligent design is not a recognised scientific theory; therefore, it is not included in the science curriculum... Intelligent design can be explored in religious education as part of developing an understanding of different beliefs. It is up to the local SACREs (standing advisory councils on religious education) to set the syllabus for how this should be done. The department is currently working with the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority to communicate this message to schools." On June 25, 2007, in response to an e-Petition the UK Government made it clear that creationism and intelligent design should not be taught as science, though teachers would be expected to answer pupils' questions about creationism, intelligent design, and other religious beliefs within the standard framework of scientific theories as established bodies of scientific knowledge with extensive supporting evidence used to test hypotheses. Government guidance for schools is to be published.

The status of intelligent design in Australia is somewhat similar to that in the UK, where religious education occurs in public schools. When the Australian Federal Education Minister, Brendan Nelson, raised the notion of intelligent design being taught in science classes, the public outcry caused the minister to quickly concede that the correct forum for intelligent design, if it were to be taught, is in religious or philosophy classes.

Plans by Dutch Education Minister Maria van der Hoeven to "stimulate an academic debate" on the subject in 2005 caused a severe public backlash. After the 2007 elections she was succeeded by Ronald Plasterk, described as a "molecular geneticist, staunch atheist and opponent of intelligent design." While creationism has strong political clout in many Islamic countries, intelligent design has not been adapted to Islam. Muzaffar Iqbal, a notable Muslim in Canada, has signed the Scientific Dissent list of the Discovery Institute. In general, however, Muslim creationists are partnering with the Institute for Creation Research.

See also

• Argument from evolution
• Argument from poor design
• Clockmaker hypothesis
• Cosmological argument
• Creation science
• Creationism
• Evolution and the Roman Catholic Church
• False analogy

• Flying Spaghetti Monster
• Intelligent design movement
• Intelligent falling
• Junk science
• List of scientific societies rejecting intelligent design
• List of works on intelligent design
• Natural theology
• Neo-Creationism

• Omphalos (theology)
• Project Steve
• Pseudoscience
• Santorum Amendment
• Teach the Controversy
• Teleological argument
• Timeline of intelligent design
• Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District et al.

External links

ID perspectives

• Access Research Network
• Design Inference: The website of William A. Dembski
• Discovery Institute, Center for Science and Culture (Hub of the intelligent design movement)
• EvolutionNews.org Discovery Institute website tracking media coverage of intelligent design.
• ID The Future A multiple contributor weblog by Discovery Institute fellows.
• Intelligent Design Network A nonprofit organization in Kansas to promote intelligent design
• International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID)
• Uncommon Descent William Dembski's blog

Non-ID perspectives

• ACLU site on Intelligent Design
• Intelligent Design? special feature in the Natural History Magazine
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Design Arguments for the Existence of God
• National Center for Science Education articles and other resources about Intelligent Design
• Resolution from the American Association for the Advancement of Science
• Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences Second Edition (1999)
• Talk Origins Archive (Archive of a UseNet discussion group)
• 139 page in-depth analysis of intelligent design, irreducible complexity, and the book "Of Pandas and People" by the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District judge
• Kitzmiller: An Intelligent Ruling on 'Intelligent Design', JURIST
• ID and Creationism
• The Design Argument Elliot Sober, 2004.
• Short discussion on Natural Knowledge and Natural Design as a contrast to Intelligent Design by Richard Dawkins

Media articles

• Discovery's Creation An overview of the origin of the intelligent design movement. (Seattle Weekly)
• Intelligent Design vs. Evolution debate between paleontologist Peter Ward and Stephen Meyer co-founder of the Discovery Institute
• Intelligent Design Deja Vu What would "intelligent design" science classes look like? All we have to do is look inside some 19th-century textbooks. (Washington Post)
• How the media have covered ID (Columbia Journalism Review)
• Judge Rules Against Pa. Biology Curriculum (Associated Press)
• Banned in biology class: intelligent design (Christian Science Monitor)
• Devolution (The New Yorker)
• The Evolution Debate (The New York Times)
• Debating Evolution in the Classroom (NPR)
• Darwin Victorious (TIME)
• Intelligent Design: Scientific Inquiry or Religious Indoctrination? (Justice Talking)
• Intelligent Judging — Evolution in the Classroom and the Courtroom (New England Journal of Medicine)
• Language: Neo-creo: backlash to 'intelligent design' (International Herald Tribune)
• Who Owns Intelligent Design? (American Institute of Graphic Arts)

Further reading

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