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9/6/04 Intelligent Design? The central tenet of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement is, of course, that life and the universe betray unmistakable signs of intelligent intervention. It is an extended, argumentative list of rhetorical questions: How could the complexity of modern life have arisen naturally from a soup of disorganized molecules? How could something as wondrously complex as the human body have arisen by chance, or from creatures as seemingly simple as worms or bacteria? How could the delicate balance of Earth's ecosystem have arisen by chance? Having posed the questions that way, it is tempting to throw up our hands and agree that there is some reason to think that someone must have designed the whole thing. But that line of argument begs the question. Those are not rhetorical questions, from a scientific point of view. They are questions: How did the complexity of modern life arise ? How did the human body arise? How did the delicate balance of Earth's ecosystem arise? We can propose two general answers to each question: 1) by natural, probabilistic events that could be replicated if we had enough time and enough information, or 2) through the intervention of some intelligent designer. ID proponents claim that the second answer follows naturally from observations of nature. But a simple examination of the characteristics of systems designed intelligently will show that nature does not display patterns that would be indicative of intelligent design. Systems designed by intelligence are purely functional. A helicopter bears little resemblance to an automobile because they have different functions. Their designs are independent. Their plans are drawn up separately, with no necessary relationship to each other (the designer of the helicopter did not start with the design of a car and start making modifications to it until he found a suitable design for the helicopter). The functional elements of the system are as well-suited to the requirements of the whole system as the designer can make them. Helicopter rotors are designed to be durable and to provide uniform, predictable lift. Designs that do not work well are abandoned immediately in favor of improved designs once flaws have been detected and solutions found. So there is a test we can apply to a system to find out if it has the characteristics that would mark it clearly as having been designed intelligently: 1) Was it designed functionally? If it is the best conceivable design to fulfill its various functions, and it has no elements that have no function or, to put it another way, seem to have been designed to perform a function that is no longer required as part of this design, then the answer is "yes." Otherwise, the answer is "no." 2) Was it designed independently? If the system's design makes it ideally and uniformly suited to the particular functions it performs, the answer is "yes." If it shows signs of holdovers from previous designs or flaws introduced from elements existing in other designs that contribute nothing to the function of the current design, the answer would be "no." 3) Was each element of the system designed aptly? If each element fits together and works together well with other elements of the system, contributing to the overall success of the system in fulfilling its functions, then that element passes the "aptly designed" test. If there are conflicts or flaws or elements which do not contribute to the success of the whole system (which would include elements that harmed the success of the whole system), those elements would not be "aptly designed" and would militate against the ID hypothesis. So if a system and all its elements can be shown to have been designed functionally, independently, and aptly, that would clearly mark it as having been designed intelligently. If not, then it is still possible that was designed intelligently, but the possibility also exists that the system arose by some other process. Life, in general, does not satisfy all three of the requirements of intelligent design. Now that we understand genetics and the chemistry of inheritance through DNA strands containing blueprints for entire organisms, we know that the "plans" for existing species are not independent. The similarities between the DNA of humans and chimpanzees, for example, are more obvious than the physical similarities. A handful of snips, splices, and flips in our DNA code would make it virtually identical to the DNA of chimps. We share parts of our DNA plan with worms, flies, mollusks, and even fungi, which are functionally just about as far apart as we can envision any group of organisms being from each other. Furthermore, this DNA "plan" contains much information that is never used by a particular organism. Parts of the plan are "turned off" (or, to use a metaphor from computer programming, "commented out"). If they were restored and executed, they would produce changes in the current organism that might be harmful or even deadly. Those same plans in a different organism would be vital to its survival. This would be like finding a plan for a helicopter that included "commented out" sections for the creation of an x-ray machine which, if it were included in the helicopter's construction, would make it too heavy to fly. An intelligent designer would not put such things in the plan, because a single change in the plan (removing the sign that this section is "commented out") would call for the construction of a device that would be completely non-functional. Life is also not designed functionally. Most life forms, for example, have features that are neither necessary to their survival nor even in any way beneficial, but which are analogous to features in similar creatures that are necessary to survival. For example, snakes have leg bones. They are not used to construct legs, and they have no other beneficial function. They are not harmful because they simply sit under the skin, so there is no reason to be rid of them. But an intelligent designer would not have put them there. It would be like designing a helicopter with some of the circuitry for an x-ray machine embedded in the hull. The circuitry would not function and would have no discernible purpose other than to suggest that the x-ray machine was somehow related to the helicopter, as the leg bones of the snake suggest that snakes are related to reptiles that have legs. Finally, the elements of life forms are frequently not designed very aptly. The human eye (using a basic design shared with all terrestrial vertebrates) is designed with flaws that make it inferior to the eye of the squid, for example. The human eye is constructed so that the nerves and blood vessels run across the surface of the retina, obscuring view and creating the "blind spot". It is susceptible to many problems such as a detached retina, while the squid eye, which is similar except that the nerves and blood vessels run behind the retina, is not susceptible to those problems and has no "blind spot". The eye of the squid, therefore, appears aptly designed, but the human eye was not so aptly designed. The human immune system was also not aptly designed. While it functions efficiently under most circumstances, it is also a cannibalistic system that will destroy the body if not for a complex dance of prevention. Auto-immune diseases are caused by failures of that complex dance, and it takes miraculous intervention by doctors to keep a person alive once that system has broken down. There are dozens of similar examples: a mother and her unborn child can be killed by incompatibilities between their blood types and other factors. Sickle-cell anemia enhances survival in malarial zones when a person has only one copy of the gene, but is deadly without treatment if both genes in the same person code for sickle-cell. Reproduction is a fairly efficient process, but catastrophic failures are always possible. For all these reasons, there is very little support in nature for the hypothesis that an intelligent designer created or designed life or its forms. Those who are wedded to the idea of ID will perhaps fall back on a handful of arguments to try to reinstate the hypothesis and restore its legitimacy: 1) The designer has made life as efficient as it can be within the constraints of life and chemistry. This is easily refuted. If the designer was all-powerful, then there shouldn't have been any constraints. He could have designed a system of reproduction that was triply- or quadruply-redundant to minimize the impact of mutations, or could have designed a system that was not susceptible to mutation. Those who accept microevolution but attack macroevolution have to explain why microevolution would be desirable to an intelligent designer. Why leave adaptation to chance when you already control all of the ecology? He could have built all creatures for all environments at the beginning, and just put them where and when they needed to go. So if this explanation is used, we must rule out an all-powerful designer. 2) The designer has purposes other than efficiency for life. This is always possible, but then you are not postulating intelligent design, but something else: call it "philosophical design" or "moral design". The question of whether human beings deserve a flawed eye, for example, because of human sinfulness, opens the question of why dogs and cats and birds deserve a flawed eye. One cannot evaluate the claims of "moral design" theory until someone articulates a moral theory attributed to a putative designer (without begging the question, which I suspect is impossible), and then examines the natural world for its conformation to that moral theory. This undercuts the attempt by ID proponents to divorce themselves from Creationism and pretend they are not Creationists. Thus this defense of ID does not defend it, but postulates an entirely different species of design. There is no real support for the ID theory. The facts suggest that all life is related in some way that would be foreign to an intelligent, all-knowing, all-powerful, completely beneficent creator. This does not rule out creation, of course. A creator could have created the world yesterday, created all of us with memories of the past, created a geological and genetic record suggesting that life has evolved over time, and none of us would be any the wiser. But such a creator would not be beneficent, because that history would amount to a lie whose main effect would be to discourage belief in the creator, because it suggests a naturalistic explanation to everything. How could a creator who intentionally distracts his subjects from a belief in him be considered beneficent? Why would such a creator create the world? As an experiment? All-knowing beings don't need experiments. To demonstrate that he can do it? All-powerful, all-knowing beings don't have anything to prove. To amuse himself? Why would such a being need amusement, and how could he ever be amused? Amusement rests on ignorance, since knowing the end of a story beforehand, as an all-knowing creator would, is not amusing at all. The burden of proof is on those who say they can infer from reality that its only explanation is in an intelligent designer, but who can find no evidence other than human mythology and human tales and human beliefs to support their argument. Science has other sources, and all of the things that are hard to reconcile with an intelligent designer are easy to reconcile with a natural, probabilistic process that will result in vestigial elements that have no function, a plan that depends on ancestral plans, and elements that are, taken together, usually functional enough, but often not very apt, with obvious flaws that a designer would scrupulously avoid. Put simply, you would expect evolution to result in imperfect beings with strengths and weaknesses and the very real prospect of extinction, while you would expect an intelligent designer to create organisms more perfectly suited to their environment, without the mechanism to change into something else that might not survive at all. The former is reality. The latter is a vision of heaven. Religion should stick to heaven and leave reality to science. Modified: 09/06/2004 |
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