Proponents of “intelligent design” claim that their position has nothing to do with religion, that they are as impartial as scientists (which some of them even pretend to be). All they're saying, they claim, is that some parts of the Universe are so complex that the complexity could not have evolved, even over billions of years; the phenomenon in question must be the product of an intelligent designer. It's not their fault that the only intelligent being who could possibly have designed whatever they're talking about is their version of God.
The proponents of ID have even succeeded in inserting their religious doctrine into some public-school science classes, notably in intellectually backward states like Kansas. (Sorry, Kansas, but really, try to catch up to at least the 20th century!) Their claim is that evolution is a theory, and intelligent design is a theory, and therefore the two are exactly equivalent.
Non-scientists tend to think that scientists use the word “theory” the same way ordinary people do — as a synonym for “conjecture, speculation, guess.” In fact, scientists use the word much more precisely. In science, a theory is an explanation that unites various experimentally tested hypotheses to explain some fundamental aspect of nature. For an idea to qualify as a scientific theory, it must be established on the basis of a huge amount of scientific evidence. Its claims must be testable and it must propose experiments that can be reproduced by other scientists. According to this definition, gravity is a theory. The idea that the Earth revolves around the sun is a theory. The idea that light travels at a constant speed of 299,792,458 meters per second (roughly 186,282.4 miles per second) is a theory. The idea that the Earth is an oblate spheroid, not as flat as a dinner plate, is a theory.
“[Evolution is] a ‘theory’ in a special philosophical sense of science, but in terms of ordinary laymen's use of language, it's a fact,” said Richard Dawkins, a biologist from Oxford University. “Evolution is a fact in the same sense that it's a fact that the Earth is round and not flat, [that] the Earth goes round the Sun. Both those are also theories, but they're theories that have never been disproved and never will be disproved.”
A raisin is a fruit, and a watermelon is a fruit — but if intelligent design were a raisin, the evolution watermelon would be bigger than Mount Everest. If evidence were books, intelligent design would be the first chapter of Genesis and evolution would be the Library of Congress and the Great Library of Alexandria put together.
Despite what its proponents say, “intelligent design” is not a theory. It's a hypothesis. And it's not even a scientific hypothesis. There is zero scientific evidence to support the ID hypothesis, since there is no way to prove that a Universe-sized Intelligence exists (no matter what ID proponents say to the contrary). And there is no way to experimentally verify or disprove the central claim of ID: that this putative Intelligence designed the Earth, humanity, or anything else.
Here is the most important fact: The “theory” of intelligent design exists solely to please biblical inerrantists — people who believe that God wrote the Bible, that the Bible is therefore as inerrant as God is, and that the Bible must therefore be treated as a combination history textbook and science textbook. All three premises are false.
For those of you who are as poorly educated and averse to rational thought as biblical inerrantists, let us recap: Scientists observe reality and develop hypotheses to explain what they see. When enough hypotheses have been proven correct, they are unified into a theory, like the theory of gravity or the theory that the Earth revolves around the sun. Scientists test their theories as rigorously as they can, evolving newer theories as necessary. They are open to collegial input and review. They are impartial.
By way of contrast, Christian religious bigots limit their “research” to one 3,000-year-old text. They ignore, dismiss, misrepresent, or mock any fact that contradicts their prejudgment (because that's such a Christian way to to deal with perceived enemies!). They are not open to rational input or review; their version of the truth is the only Truth there is. They privilege their dogma over honest, fair, and rational debate.
Which ought to be taught in public-school science classes: empiricism or Genesis? Which will serve students better as they attempt to learn how to think for themselves — “Trust, but verify” or “Believe whatever we tell you to believe or go to hell”?
And here's possibly the saddest fact of all: Even if you take intelligent design at face value and evaluate it as if it were a valid theory, it's wrong.
Like the 19th-century philosopher William Paley who inspired them, the proponents of “intelligent design” are teleologists. Paley suggested imagining yourself hiking in the wilderness and stumbling across a pocket watch — obviously, an object so complex MUST be the product of an intelligent creator.
This all seems reasonable on the face of it. But the fact of the matter is, it is simplicity, not complexity, that proves the existence of intelligent design. Imagine hiking in the wilderness and stumbling across a spoon, or a plastic drinking straw, or simplest of all, a piece of broken glass. Despite the simplicity of the object, you would know instantly you were looking at the product of intelligent design. Or imagine that you were God, designing an ideal Earth for your creations. Wouldn't you put Earth in a circular rather than elliptical orbit? Wouldn't you make each year exactly 360 days, instead of 365.2421934, and each lunar orbit of the Earth exactly 30 days, instead of 29.53059 days? Of course you would.
But what about complexity? Aren't there things in the Universe that are so amazingly complex that it would be impossible for them to have evolved over the last 15 billion years or so? Proponents of intelligent design point to what they call irreducible complexity. (Hilariously, ID proponent Michael Behe, in his 1996 book Darwin's Black Box, points to a mousetrap as an example of irreducible complexity.)
Every part of an irreducibly complex system is essential: take away even one, and the entire system will crash. Because their parts are so intricate and so interdependent, such systems could not possibly have been the result of evolution, ID supporters argue. Among the systems that ID claims are irreducibly complex are the proteins that make up the human blood-clotting system and a bacterium's flagellum, a microscopic whip-like structure that some bacteria use to swim.
ID proponents never mention the “flip side” to the idea of irreducible complexity: If a system that is allegedly irreducibly complex contains within it a smaller set of parts that could be used for some other function, then the system was never irreducibly complex to begin with.
Behe and other proponents of ID make use of a logical fallacy called “conclusion by analogy.” Here is an example of how this fallacy works:
The proponents of intelligent design fall into this fallacy not once, but over and over again. And yet the fallacy remains a fallacy. Just because A is similar to B does not mean that A has all of B's properties.
Computer programmers use the word “kludge”
| Sample code | |
| Beginner | Pro |
if (a > 0) { | a > 0 ? a * b : -a * b |
And the Universe is full of kludge — take DNA, for one obvious example. DNA is full of “leftovers” from the time in our past when we were aquatic, for example, or when we actually needed our appendixes. If DNA were the product of a super-intelligent designer, one incapable of making mistakes (not to mention one who disdains evolution), why is it full of kludge?
“Intelligent design” is merely creationism, all dressed up in pretty new clothes. Proponents want you to believe that God created the Earth at 9:30 a.m. on October 23, 4004 BCE, and designed and planted artificial fossils to test our faith, or some such nonsense. They want you to believed that God created humanity in its modern form, homo sapiens, at that time. In that case, why do we have appendixes? Why are our spines so poorly designed that hundreds of millions of us are doomed to back problems? Why must human babies be born at a stage when in any other species they would remain fetuses for another 15 to 21 months? Why do men have breasts?
Genesis was inscribed onto tanned animal skins (parchment) around 915 BCE, during the Bronze Age, although it is based on myths that are a thousand years older or more. The highest level of technology was the war chariot. And yet, biblical inerrantists imagine that the Bible is a history textbook and a science textbook — that the biblical account of a flat Earth floating on top of chaos waters, separated from the chaos waters of outer space by a metal dome (Gen. 1:6, Isa. 40:22, Job 26:10, etc.), is much more infallible and inerrant than e=mC2.
And while they cloak their goal with Bushwah about fairness and objectivity, ID proponents are desperate for you and me to believe that Bronze Age science ought to be taught in today's public school classrooms. Three thousand years after Genesis was inscribed onto parchment, U.S. educators, in Kansas and elsewhere, have already crafted study materials proffering “intelligent design” as a theory point-by-point comparable to evolution. We are to believe that the book that inerrantists idolatrously worship as if it were as infallible as God is, is a science textbook and a history textbook — not the primitive writings of Bronze Age and Iron Age nomads, herders, and spear-throwers.
Some ID apologists explain the messiness, the kludginess of nature the same way they explain the fossil record: God deliberately wanted, and still wants, to deceive us. Exactly why would someone who loves us want to deceive us with a whole Potemkin village of biology, physics, astronomy, chemistry, botany, archeology, and so on and so on? So that we would fall into partisan strife (“Creation!” “Evolution!”), and kill each other, as the Sunnis and Shiites are doing in the Middle East? (“Muhammad's brother-in-law in 595 CE!” “Muhammad's brother-in-law's opponents in 633 CE!”) So that the United States might someday become a theocracy crazier than the Taliban, and more repressive to women? Is that what Jesus would do?
God gave humanity the cleverness to invent the atomic bomb, to decipher the genome, to fly to the Moon. Why should God give with one hand and deceive with the other? It would be like God saying, “Here are the keys to my mansion and my Ferrari. Enjoy yourselves. Oh, by the way, you are not ‘very good’ at all (Gen. 1:31), you're scum I'm planning to torture for all eternity, all but a few of you, and to prove it, I'm going to make you believe in internal combustion engines — even though they aren't really based on science, I magic them into working.”
“Intelligent design” is not an intelligent argument for abandoning all modern science in favor of a 4,000+-year-old myth. (Some fundamentalists admit that the first chapters of Genesis are based on much older oral traditions; all of them refuse to admit that there is any difference between ancient myth and empirical fact, if the myth appears in the Bible.)
The proponents of “intelligent design” need to learn that it is possible to be faithful to God without turning off the human brain. God gave us brains to use them, not to have us accepting whatever Bushwah that fundangelical leaders tell us we have to believe, Or Else.
Its proponents also need to learn that if they want a subject taught it science classrooms in public schools, it should be science — not the dogma of their religion elaborately disguised as science. Thanks to the misguided policies of the Bush Administration, the United States is already way behind most of the rest of the developed world in science and math education, and falling ever farther; we don't need any more help going back to the 19th century because sincere and well-meaning but ignorant religious leaders fear that if they admit the truth, that the Bible contains errors, their whole theological house of cards will collapse.
It should collapse. Its triumphalist, prosperity theology is the opposite of Christian; it doesn't need Pat Robertson calling for government-sanctioned murder to prove my point. Fundangelicals worship Jesus as “God in a man-suit,” and they take Jesus's teachings on peace, forgiveness, compassion, and social justice, and interpret them to favor pre-emptive war (who would Jesus declare war on?) and robbing from the poor to give to George Bush's wealthiest friends.
Including intelligent design in public school science classes is not a matter of fairness; it's a matter of equating a raisin with a watermelon the size of our solar system. If we are compelled to include this religious doctrine in science classes, we must also incorporate other biblical “facts”: Biology classes must teach that hares and rock badgers chew their cud like cows (Lev. 11:6, Deut. 14:7), and that some winged insects walk on four legs rather than six (Lev. 11:20-23). Mathematics classes must teach that pi equals three (1 Kings 7:23). Geography classes must teach that the Earth is flat and that the sun revolves around the Earth (too many references to cite).
And sociology classes must teach that it's perfectly okay for you and me to own slaves, according to Leviticus 25:44. They just can't be Canadians. (“As for the male and female slaves whom you may own, it is from the nations around you that you may acquire” them. Canada isn't a nation — it's a dominion.)