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Intelligent design (ID) is a theory regarded by some as science and by others as pseudoscience, which purports to rationally support the existence of an "intelligent designer" as the originator of organic life, and to rationally disprove the established scientific principle of evolution by means of natural selection. More broadly, ID is a challenge to the concept of naturalism within scientific philosophy, and an attempt to reserve a place within science for the supernatural.
Intelligent design distinguishes itself from forms of creationism that rest on purely theological arguments or Biblical literalism. Arguments in favor of ID purport to cite principles of biology, information theory, and secular philosophy, and in many cases, ID proponents accept many principles of natural historyNatural history is an umbrella term for what are now usually viewed as a number of distinct scientific disciplines. Most definitions include the study of living things (e. biology, including botany and zoology); other definitions extend the topic to inclu that traditional creationists reject. The ID theory makes no explicit claim about the identity of the intelligent designer, although by definition this designer is "outside" the realm of ordinary organic life, and it is a short leap of faith between the ID theory and the belief in a supernatural godThis article focuses on the concept of singular, monotheistic God . See deity, gods, or goddesses for details on divine entities in specific religions and mythologies. God is a term referring to the supreme being generally believed to be ruler or creator. Because most public proponents of ID are theistsTheism (from Greek , theismos is used in two meanings: Primarily it is the belief in gods or goddesses. The word originated in Ancient Greece and signified belief in the traditional gods, the Olympians. It can also mean the belief in God, a god, or gods,, and a large number of them are ChristianChristian cross and its many variations are widely recognized as an ancient Christian symbol. Christianity is an Abrahamic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as described in the New Testament. Although Christians generally charas, ID is often viewed as a sophisticated outgrowth of the traditional Christian argument from design. As such, there are disputes around the question of whether their religion informs their science, or their science informs their religion.
Adherents to ID theory are particularly active in the United StatesThe United States of America also referred to as the United States U. America ¹ or the States is a federal republic in central North America, stretching from the Atlantic in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west. It shares land borders with Canada in, especially within the Christian rightThe Christian Right or more generally the religious right is a broad label applied to a number of political and/or religious movements with particularly conservative or right wing views. While such elements are found in many nations, the term is most comm. Many of them are advocating that the theory be taught in public schoolThe term public school has two contrary meanings: In common British usage, a prestigious historic school open to the public that charges fees and is financed by bodies other than the state, commonly as a private charitable trust; here the word "public" iss, and presented as an alternate scientific theory to evolution. This presents a number of political and legal controversies, however, because incorporating ID into the science curriculum is seen by many as infringing the separation between church and state, and as potentially undermining students' education and college preparation in the field of natural history.
The Intelligent Design theory has not been well-received by the scientific community, which overwhelmingly considers it to be pseudoscience, in part because it violates the accepted principles of the scientific method, including the principal of falsifiability.
Arguments for intelligent design can be broadly split into three categories:
The mainstream scientific community typically criticizes intelligent design as follows:
Most Intelligent Design arguments assert that the theory of evolution cannot explain certain phenomena, and that these can therefore be more reasonably explained by ID. They include the following.
A key concept in Intelligent Design is what Michael Behe calls " irreducible complexity," the idea that at the earliest stages of the development of life on Earth, science cannot account for the emergence of the complex organic mechanisms that must be present for evolution to proceed. Therefore, it is reasonable to posit that these mechanisms were deliberately engineered by some form of intelligence.
According to the theory of evolution, genetic variations occur randomly, and the environment selects variatiants that have most fitness. Change occurs in a gradual, stepwise manner, and is able to create complex structures from simpler beginnings. Most ID advocates accept that evolution through mutation and natural selection occurs, but assert that it cannot lead to new instances of irreducible complexity.
The term Irreducible complexity" (IC) was coined by biochemist Michale Behe and discussed at length in his book Darwin's Black Box. IC is defined as: "a single system which is composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning" (Behe, Molecular Machines: Experimental Support for the Design Inference). ID advocates assert that IC systems cannot be explained by Darwinian evolution, because each component of the system would be useless, or even disadvantageous, without the others. Behe used a mousetrap as an analogy to explain the concept of IC. A moustrap consists of several interacting pieces -- the base, the catch, the spring, the hammer -- all of which must be in place for the mousetrap to work. The removal of any one piece destroys the function of the moustrap. Likewise, biological IC systems require multiple parts working together in order to function. Natural selection could therefore not create them by successive, slight modifications because the selectable function is only present when all parts are assembled. ID advocates then conclude that IC systems must have been assembled simultaneously by an Intelligent Designer. Behe's original examples included the bacterial flagellum of E. coli, the blood clotting cascade, cilia, and the adaptive immune system.
There are many criticisms of IC. First and foremost, the IC argument assumes that the present function of a system must have been the one that it was selected for. But the concept of cooption, in which existing features become adapted for new functions, has long been a mainstay of biology. Many of the systems that Behe pointed out have functional subsystems, or individual components that have altogether different functions, and would already exist prior to the evolution of the IC system. Secondly, something which is at first merely advantageous can later become necessary . For example, one of the clotting factors that Behe listed as a part of the IC clotting cascade was later found to be absent in whales, demonstrating that it isn't essential for a clotting system. And finally, evolutionary pathways have been elucidated for IC systems such as the immune system and the flagellum. Computer simulations of evolution have also demonstrated that IC can evolve -- see, for example,this article), discussing computer models showing the possibility of developing irreducible complexity through evolutionary algorithms, and this article, discussing recent research regarding the origin of the eye from "light sensitive cells in the brain."
ID advocates respond by saying that proposed models for the evolution of IC structures are not detailed enough, or cannot be tested. They also dismiss computer simulations as biologically unrealistic.
The ID argument of specified complexity was developed by mathematician, philosopher, and theologian William Dembski. The term "specified complexity" was originally coined by origin of life researcher Leslie Orgel, and later used by physicist Paul Davies in a similar manner, to denote what distinguishes living things from non-living things"
Dembski uses specified complexity in a similar manner, to denote a property that makes living things unique. He claims that specified complexity is present when there exists a large amount of specified information. The following examples demonstrate the concept of specified information:.
Dembski defines complex specified information (CSI) as something containing a large amount of specified information, which is assumed to have a low probability of occurring. He defines this probability as 1 in 10-150, which he calls the universal probability bound. Anything below this bound has CSI. The terms "specified complexity" and "complex specified information" are used interchangably.
Dembski and other proponents of ID assert that specified complexity cannot come about by natural means, and is therefore a reliable indicator of design. Dembski has formulated this as his Law of Conservation of Information:
Immediate corollaries of the proposed law are the following:
The soundness of Dembski's SC/CSI argument is strongly disputed by critics of ID. First of all, specified complexity, as originally defined by Orgel, is precisely what Darwinian evolution is proposed to create. It is not enough for Dembski to take a property of living things and arbitrarily declare it to be a reliable indicator of design; he must also provide compelling reasons why no natural processes could create such a property. Dembski confuses the issue by using "complexity" as synonymous with "improbability", thereby assuming that anything complex is also improbable. He defines CSI as anything with a less than 1 in 10150 chance of occurring naturally. But this renders the argument a [tautology]. CSI cannot occur naturally because Dembski has defined it thus, so the real question becomes whether or not CSI actually exists in nature. To demonstrate this, Dembski would need to show that a biological feature really did have an extremely low probability of occurring naturally, an enormously difficult (perhaps impossible) task that would require definitively ruling out all potential theories, including those that may not have been thought of yet. In general, Dembski does not attempt to do this, but instead simply takes the existence of CSI as a given, and then proceeds to argue that it is a reliable indicator of design. Thus far, he has made only one attempt at calculating the odds for the natural occurrence of a biological structure -- the bacterial flagellum of E. coli -- which appears in his book, No Free Lunch. Dembski calculates the odds of the flagellum evolving as being below his universal probability bound, but does so by assuming that all of its constituent parts must have been generated completely at random, a scenario that no biologist believes to begin with. He justifies this approach by appealing to Behe’s concept of "irreducible complexity" (see above), which leads him to assume that the flagellum could not come about by any gradual or step-wise process. This renders the validity of Dembski's calculation wholly dependent on Behe’s IC concept, so it’s not clear that Dembski's own concept of CSI is adding anything to the debate. This has led some critics to contend that CSI is a superfluous middleman, which could be dispensed with altogether.
http://www.talkorigins.org/design/faqs/nfl/
http://home.mira.net/~reynella/debate/dembski.htm
The creationist movement in general perceives several problems with evolutionary theory. The ID movement often accepts various aspects of evolutionary theory, for example common descent and microevolution that other creationist groups disagree with. However, problems perceived by the intelligent design movement include:
In all cases, the scientific community rejects such problems, arguing that proponents of ID are merely creating a "God of the gaps," to whom proponents of ID attribute every phenomenon science has not yet completely explored. They also argue that most of arguments used are deliberately deceptive and no evidence supports intelligent design. They also note that evolutionary theory is in a continual state of refinement, but its central tenets are not in doubt.
Since the ID viewpoint does not prescribe the identity of the designer nor the mechanism by which the design was instantiated, ID is potentially compatible with a large number of different philosophies. The following views are all supportable within the narrow meaning of ID as an identifier of a past design action:
Similarly, the observation of signs of design does not restrict the point of intervention, and the following possibilities exist:
Further, there is no restriction on the number of designers responsible for observed life, so the number and character of intelligent design scenarios is potentially large.
Advocates of ID believe there is empirical evidence that an intelligent designer (or designers) has been at work in the history of life, and many believe that macroevolution of life, particularly the evolution of humans, is not credible. Members of the Intelligent Design movement are typically theists (Christians, Jews, or members of other faiths that believe in a powerful deity), though ID itself does not specify the identity of the designer.
ID is similar to Biblically literal Creationism in that both assert that the life was created, rather than developing purely naturalistically. It is different from Biblically literal creationism, however, in that while creationists assert that God created life as described in the Biblical book of Genesis, ID makes no explicitly religious claims, relying simply on evidence that life was created by an "Intelligent Designer", which could be the God of any religion or no religion, or some other intelligent being that is not God.
Main Article: Center for Science and Culture
The intelligent design movement is centered around part of a conservative Christian thinktank, the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (CSC), formerly known as the Center for Renewal of Science and Culture, which was founded in 1996.
The CSC fellows believe that naturalistic evolution is fatally flawed, and that Intelligent Design is a more scientific theory of origins. They also recognize, however, that explicitly religious claims are beyond the realm of science, and therefore cannot be brought into mainstream scientific discourse.
In their effort to gain entrance into mainstream scientific discourse, they devised the "Wedge strategy." Evolutionary theory is analogised as a log, and ID as a wedge. The wedge may be put into cracks into the log (perceived discrepancies within evolutionary theory) and after some hammering, the log will shatter due to its inherent weaknesses. Because advocates of intelligent design believe that the evidence for intelligent design of one form of another is overwhelming, they believe that the movement should initially focus on advocating more clear-cut issues, such as irreducible complexity, rather than on more questionable issues, such as Noah's flood and the age of the Earth.
The Wedge Strategy document was a document produced in 1998 by the Center for Renewal of Science and Culture but later leaked 1999 and published on the Internet. [1]. It identified the key goals of the movement as:
The godfather of the ID movement, University of California, Berkeley law professor Phillip E. Johnson (now emeritus), is quoted as saying that issues such as the age of the Earth can be taken up once the common enemy of evolution has been done away with. Proponents of ID acknowledge that the wedge strategy is a tactical device, but argue that the use of strategy in achieving a goal does not make the goal any less valuable or true.
Critics of ID argue that the wedge strategy demonstrates that ID is motivated by religion and ideology, rather than an objective search for scientific truth.
Opponents of ID, who include the overwhelming majority of the scientific community, claim that this argument intelligent design has no standing as a scientific hypothesis, i.e. it is considered pseudoscience. There are metaphysical objections, and a lack of scientific discourse.
In the United States, the National Center for Science Education seeks to fight what it calls antievolutionism, and various organisations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science have spoken out against intelligent design.
Some ID proponents claim this is due to a global conspiracy, career requirements, etc. In response, opponents can point out that tenured professors are pretty safe, and anyone presenting convincing evidence of design would be lavishly rewarded and published in the popular press.
The scientific community argues that ID violates scientific philosophy. ID does not present falsifiable hypotheses, and violates the principle of naturalism. (See methodological naturalism) They also point to examples of seemingly poor design within biology. The ID movement in the first place however, say that they wish to redefine scientific philosophy and remove its materialism.
The identity of the "intelligent designer" cannot be inferred; it is assumed to be a monotheistic god . Other problems with the argument from design.
To underscore the allegedly pseudo-scientific nature of ID, in the mid-1990s George W. Gilchrist of the University of Washington looked through thousands of scientific journals searching for any articles on intelligent design or creation science—he didn't find any. Other more recent surveys have also failed to find articles on these subjects in the primary scientific literature (not to mention that only a handful of these articles were even submitted).
To date, intelligent design has been able to publish one single peer-reviewed article in a scientific journal, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. The author is Stephen C. Meyer, Program Director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, the major organization promoting ID. This article is not available on-line from this journal, but a copy is on the Discovery Institute site:
A review of it is available on the Panda's Thumb website:
The paper has subsequently been disowned by the journal, which has stated that it did not go through the journal's approved peer review process. The journal's statement explains that the Meyer paper does not meet the scientific standards of the journal.
In contrast, many articles have been published in highly-ranked journals which specifically deny the claims of ID (for example, Lenski et al. 2003 The evolutionary origin of complex features. Nature 423:139-44.)
Further, say scientists, a body part or organ that has a modern function did not necessarily have the same function in the past. Evolution works on chance and opportunity, with gill bones of mouth-less fishes evolving into jaws, fish air bladders becoming vertebrate lungs, and fin support structures becoming fingers and toes. Scientists have also argued that arguments like the watch argument actually damage the case for the ID theory. Specifically, some of them claim that life is often "poorly designed" on the macroscopic, cellular, and genetic levels. Others just say that we simply don't have enough knowledge about the processes in living systems to draw this type of conclusion.
Mainstream scientists assert that ID is simply an argument against the sufficiency of natural causes, also known as "God of the gaps" arguments, which are highly prone to failure, as the history of science shows that gaps in our knowledge become continuously filled in. It is unreasonable and unneccessary, therefore, to assume a supernatual cause for physical phenomena when science will likely discover a natural cause.
Proponents of Intelligent Design assert that if science caused the God of the Gaps to become less powerful, we could expect His ultimate disappearance. They argue, however, that the course of science has made our concept of the God of the Gaps more powerful, as every advance of science has illustrated greater, more intricate, and inexplicable evidence of design. They argue that every step of science makes purely naturalistic explanations less reasonable, and Intelligent Design more reasonable.
Some people use the term "intelligent design" in a broader sense than that given in intelligent design theory. It can refer simply to the belief that God designed the universe, without any specific claim as to how or when he did so. Many people consider this belief entirely compatible with standard Darwinian evolution, with no divine intervention—life could be produced by a purely natural process, evolution, designed by God. God might merely have written the laws of physics, or chosen the fundamental constants, and left the universe to run like clockwork afterwards. This would be a form of deism. A more theologically robust view is theistic evolution (see e.g., Kenneth R. Miller's Finding Darwin's God cited above), which is too nuanced to explain here. Not all people who believe God was involved in the design of the Universe also adhere to the specifics of the intelligent design belief, as proposed by creationists.
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