Posted by This article by someone named Kazmer Ujvarosy, the founder of some group called Frontline Science, is truly one of the strangest defenses of intelligent design I’ve ever seen. It’s so incoherent that one wonders if it’s a parody of some sort; it reads a bit like Alan Sokal’s famous Social Text hoax, the sort of thing that just leaves you shaking your head and wondering what on earth the man is talking about. He begins by accusing ID critics of offering “lame and demonstrably false arguments”, then says:
First of all, they allege that ID theorists failed to name the designer. The fundamental problem with this criticism is that intelligence in fact has been named as the designer–after all, the theory itself is called Intelligent Design. Thus the designer is intelligence. And because there is absolutely no demonstrable evidence that an intelligence above and beyond human intelligence exists, by default the credit for design in nature goes to human intelligence.
Things that make you go….huh? This is just plain bizarre. Humans have been in the universe for a geological microsecond; it’s obviously absurd to argue that human intelligence is responsible for design in the natural world, which existed for some 15 billion years before we arrived. And of course, human intelligence is merely a label we give to the set of capabilities that human beings have, capabilities that are an artifact of the evolution of the human body, the brain in particular. But it just gets weirder:
If ID critics want me to be even more specific, Christ identified himself as that intelligence which created the universe to make reproductions of himself in the form of human beings. In other words we find design in nature because Christ constitutes the seed of the universe, or the cosmic system’s input and output. As he disclosed it in Revelation 22:13, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.”
In essence Jesus is telling us that he constitutes the beginning and the end of the cosmic system, similarly as a seed constitutes the beginning and the end of a plant system.
Now, now, now. John West is not going to like it that you’re defending ID in such starkly Christian terms; that script is supposed to be used only when you’re speaking to churches and other groups of believers. To echo Bull Durham, you’re gonna have to learn your cliches. You’re gonna have to learn them, you’re gonna have to know them. Write these down:
The identity of the designer is not relevant to the inference of design; if you came across Mt. Rushmore, you don’t need to know what color or religion the sculptor was in order to infer that the faces were carved by the willful application of intelligence.
Okay, number two:
Intelligent Design Theory is a scientific research program embraced by a growing number of scientists. Darwinists like to claim that it’s religiously motivated because it serves their materialist agenda and the fact that we offered the same definition for creation science that we now offer for intelligent design does not matter.
Okay, last one:
I just want to take em one game at a time and the Intelligent Designer willing, things will work out.
The weirdness continues:
Second, ID critics allege that the theory fails to provide testable claims. Again, this criticism is demonstrably false: ID is eminently testable, has been tested, and is being tested constantly. As a matter of fact, ID needs no testing at all. The fact that design is the basic quality of intelligence is so self-evident that anyone who doubts it has to be exquisitely ignorant or entirely delusional.
Well isn’t that interesting? Let me translate: “ID is testable, but it needs no testing so I don’t have to tell you how it could be tested. Because I say so.” Thanks, Kazmer; that cleared things right up.
What needs to be demonstrated is not the fact that design is the basic quality of intelligence, but the abysmal absurdity that the formation of systems in nature–from atoms to the universe–is the basic quality of zero intelligence. Needless to say, the burden is on the critics of Intelligent Design to demonstrate that structure formation in the universe is the product of zero intelligence. Those who rabidly promote that nonsense are most qualified to do the demonstrations, having near-zero intelligence themselves.
Zing! Good line, Kazmer, but you’re still being quite incoherent. Since humans did not exist until the last couple hundred thousand years ago, and came about as a result of evolution, you’re still making no sense at all. Human intelligence is tied directly to the human brain; indeed, it is an artifact of the human brain, without which it does not exist. What you need to do is find some source for a disembodied intelligence, something no one else has ever produced any evidence for.
It just gets more and more bizarre from there on, leading to statements like this:
Overwhelming evidence for the relation of all creatures to Christ by universal common descent has been provided by paleontology, comparative anatomy, biogeography, embryology, biochemistry, molecular genetics, and other scientific disciplines. Whereas evolutionists stick to Darwin’s invention tenaciously–namely to the supernatural entity misleadingly named “natural selection”–, we predict that universal common descent’s mechanism is epigenesis. Thus the process of development from Christ’s genotype to the mature universe for the production of progeny in Christ’s image is epigenetic.
All of these predictions are falsifiable, provided ID critics can demonstrate that instead of Christ the universal common ancestor is a minimal life form, and ultimately zero intelligence; that universal common descent is not a fact; or that epigenesis is not a viable mechanism for development from the seed of the universe.
Based on the knowledge that Christ created the universe to have children in his own image we also predict with great confidence that the cosmic system yields end-product or output in the form of human beings. This prediction is falsifiable, provided ID critics can present a being that exists beyond and above human beings. If they have such a superhuman being in their closet, we’d like to have it presented for our examination.
If at this point you’re beginning to wonder what sort of substance Kazmer has in his pipe, you’re not alone. This sounds remarkably like the sort of gibberish that a freshman philosophy student would babble out after far too many bong hits of some really strong redbud. There’s much more of this sort of thing in his essay, which is worth reading in full just so you can join me in scratching my head and wondering if he actually means it or not.
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