The New Road

Intelligent Design is Lazy

I was clicking around last night before going to bed and I ended up finding the entire text of the decision in the ID vs. Evolution court case in Dover. Almost the entire read is fascinating, but the part I found particular engrossing was on the decision about whether ID is science.

The interesting subtext in the decision is that ID is just lazy. The plaintiffs, representing evolution, took the stand first and demonstrated the culmination of thousands of man years of scientific experimentation, testing, peer review, publication and so on. Then a few defendants, representing ID, appeared and presented their stuff, which really hadn't changed in years. For example, the judge points out that Behe, the primary ID defender, acknowledged a large logical flaw in one of his articles but hadn't fixed it in the four years following it's publication.

From the ruling:

... On cross-examination, Professor Behe admitted that: “There are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred.” ...

Oh my. In other words, they have done nothing.

If you read the whole ruling you will learn about this 'wedge' strategy for implementing ID. It's in three phases; build the scientific basis for ID, publicize it, and take it to court to get it in the schools. What's evident is that the first phase, building the science, is all but dead. Their is a book, Pandas, which provides an explanation for life; God did it. And that's it. In fact, the only thing that actually changes with ID is it's definition. And that changes only because court cases keep blocking parts of it, so like water it just changes path to try and find another way around legal barriers.

But why is that the science work on ID isn't being done? You'd think that proponents of ID would be doing research like mad to justify their claims. The problem is that you can't. The moment that you say "then a miracle happens" in your journal article it really can't be reviewed. How can you peer review "God did it". He either did or didn't I guess. But at the end of the day, once you bring an all-powerful super deity into the equation the other variables become kind of irrelevant.

Imagine this is your math homework: "Where a = sqrt( [God] ), solve for [God]". I'm not sure, maybe the correct answer is just '[God]' because I don't think you can square God. In fact, the whole thing is degrading to people's faith since God is beyond any understanding, and certainly not just a factor in some process.

Anyway, long story short. ID isn't going anywhere. The watchmaker argument used in Pandas is the same pro-God argument that's been used since the days of Plato. You can't research it because you already have the answer to every question, God did it.