An exaggerated desire for researching a study of biology without evolution has led Philip Johnson to launch the Intelligent Design movement two decades ago. It had a scientific intent founded in William Paley’s argument about how the intricate mechanics of a watch provide evidence of a designer. The central thesis of ID was that biological systems show scientific evidence of being intelligent designed.
At the end of the 18th century, Paley introduced one of the most famous metaphors in the philosophy of science, the image of the watchmaker:
"When we come to inspect the watch, we perceive that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e.g. that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day; that if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, or placed after any other manner or in any other order than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it … the inference we think is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker – that there must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer, who comprehended its construction and designed its use."
Paley reasoned that living organisms are even more complicated than watches, "in a degree which exceeds all computation." How else to account for the often amazing adaptations of animals and plants? In principle, only an intelligent Designer could have created them, just as only an intelligent watchmaker can make a watch:
“The marks of design are too strong to be got over. Design must have had a designer. That designer must have been a person. That person is GOD.”
Today American biochemist Michael J. Behe is making the same argument about the flagellum of the bacterium and the irreducible complexity of the blood-clotting cascade. The argument that there is a design has grown measurably weaker as research has successfully "reduced" the complexity. Intelligent Design, therefore, didn’t produce new scientific knowledge - which is exactly what science demands - and was unable to update Paley’s arguments for the 21st century. Intelligent Design needs to be large enough to engulf other theories.
Karl Giberson writes:
“Paley-era biologists (many of them Christians) did not abandon Paley because his design arguments were refuted; they weren't. They moved on because his ideas were sterile. Good scientific ideas, like atomic theory, gravity, quarks, and genetics, are rich. Such ideas are like bags of popcorn in the microwave, exploding with new insights into nature.”
What Giberson wants to see is for ID redirecting its energies to developing a genuinely fertile idea. “Little progress has been made on articulating a definition of design,” he said, “and different ID thinkers disagree about such basic questions as common ancestry and the age of the earth. A paradigm so vaguely articulated and inconsistently embraced by its own adherents will not win over a skeptical scientific community.”
To be welcomed in the academy, Giberson suggests that ID’s advocators should:
Stop trying to prove that Darwin caused the Holocaust or that evolution is ruining Western civilization.
Agree among yourselves that the earth is old, since science has proven that.
Not call world-class scientists "cranks," as Meyer implies in Signature in the Cell.
Not claim that evolution is collapsing, when everyone in the field knows it isn't.
Stop claiming that you cannot get your work published in conventional journals when you aren't submitting papers to these journals. Instead, roll up your sleeves and get to work on the big idea.
Develop it to the point where it starts spinning off new insights into nature so that we know more because of your work.
Then the academy will welcome you with open arms because science loves rebels.
NOTES
Karl Giberson is director of Gordon College's Forum on Faith and Science, Stephen C. Meyer, director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, and Marcus Ross, a professor of geology at Liberty University suggest the best ways the intelligent design movement can gain academic credibility. For more information see his post in Christianity Today web-site, 5/19/2010 08:57 A. M.
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