I am sure that some of you have read this already, but here is a printable version of the cogent article published last year in the excellent magazine, The New Yorker, that discusses so-called "intelligent design". This article, entitled Why Intelligent Design Isn't, was published in May 2005 and is still relevant today.
This article should be required reading for all high school and college students who are studying biology.
Several issues it explains regarding "intelligent design", including the scientific refutations of these ID assertions;
- ID is not Biblical literalism.
- Behe's assertion of "irreducible complexity".
- Dembski's assertions that (a) a complex object must be the result of intelligence if it was the product neither of chance nor of necessity and (b) there is "no free lunch".
- contradictions between Behe's assertions and Dembski's assertions
Conclusion: Intelligent design has come this far by faith.
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Thank you.
I had not seen that.
It doesn't have any cartoons!
This is not entirely true. Some ID supporters are in fact Creationists, even Young-Earth Creationists. This includes fellows of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, such as Paul Nelson, and former "Creation Science" backer Dean Kenyon. Orr assumes a sincerity that is not uniformly present in backers of ID.
i can understand the question about irreducible design! until we start messing around with a variety of systems that are like, say, the machinery for transcription from RNA to proteins, trying systems missing various parts... that system certainly looks irreducibly complex at the moment. this is such new stuff we have learned about. of course the past experience over the last coupla hundred years shows that we are making amazing progress in messing around with complex machinery.
we've discovered these amazing things only in the last 50 years of biochemistry! hopefully we will explore and discover the different varieties of systems that chemistry is capable of in the next 50 years!
the article's description of dembski's arguments however i did not understand in the slightest. they made no sense to me.
should i worry about them?
"Let's be clear: This is not evolution versus God," writes David Quammen in "The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution." "The existence of God -- any sort of god, personal or abstract, immanent or distant -- is not what Darwin's evolutionary theory challenges. What it challenges is the supposed godliness of Man -- the conviction that we above all other life forms are spiritually elevated, divinely favored, possessed of an immaterial and immortal essence, such that we have special prospects for eternity, special status in the expectations of God, special rights and responsibilities on Earth." Quammen does not flinch from "the horrible challenge" implied by Darwin's idea: "In plain language, a soul or no soul? An afterlife or not? Are humans spiritually immortal in a way that chickens or cows are not, or just another form of temporarily animated meat?"