Intelligent design movement

The Intelligent Design Movement is a political movement designed to weaken Darwinism, especially in the U.S. and especially as taught in the schools. It argues that Darwinism is inadequate to explain the world, and that there must have been an "intelligent designer" who thought everything out. ID is primarily a rhetorical device used to attack Darwinism. Almost all the adherents believe in a personal deity who takes a direct interest in human affairs, and reject the idea that there is an intelligent designer separate from that deity.

Proponents of ID spend little time on the theology of the Intelligent Designer. Critics claim that the Designer is largely ignored in their literature because to identify the entity with the traditional monotheistic deity would contradict the U.S. Constitutional principle of separation of church and state, an argument that has been successfully used to remove prayer and any religious education from public schools. Therefore, although ID adherents believe that the intelligent designer takes a personal interest in human affairs and provides a route for salvation, salvation is never discussed publically in association with the concept of an intelligent designer, nor are issues of good and evil. Indeed, there are almost no positive claims made by ID proponents except that some intelligent designer created everything. Did that designer create good and evil? Did the designer have a purpose for man? These questions are not asked.

ID supporters argue that certain fundamental features of the universe and living things are best explained by purposeful causation — a "higher intelligence." See intelligent design for a better explanation of why such claims are not supported by evidence in the scientific literature. Mainstream science has determined that an evolutionary explanation provides an adequate explanation for the diversity of related organism structures in cases, such as bacterial flagella, in which this issue has been raised in the scientific literature.

Modern studies of genetics also provide numerous examples of how mutation, gene transfer and gene recombination allow rapid and often intelligent design to occur rapidly. The human immune system for example, is able to respond to exposure to novel antigens with the creation of antibodies that are purposefully shaped to recognise structures to which the body has never been exposed, and it does this in a short time frame by internal genetic mechanisms akin to natural evolution.

Many of the most visible advocates of intelligent design are fellows and advisors of the Centre for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank established in 1991. The senior fellows at the CSC include some Roman Catholics, a secular (non-religious) Jew, a member of Sun Myung-Moon's Unification Church, and many protestant Christians.

Contemporary and high profile proponents of intelligent design

Prominent ID proponent William Dembski has a PhD in mathematics from the University of Chicago, and is research professor in philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. In 1998, Cambridge University Press published Dembski's first book, a philosophical monograph entitled The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities. Dembski has published several books since, but has published no papers on intelligent design in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Dembski is particularly associated with the concept of 'specified complexity'.

Another prominent proponent, and one particularly associated with arguments related to the concept of 'irreducible complexity', is Michael J. Behe. Behe is professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. Behe holds that some biological structures are too biochemically complex to be plausibly explained as a result of evolution by natural selection. Unlike many in the intelligent design movement, Behe accepts the evidence for the common descent of species, including the conclusion that humans descended from other primates; however, he claims that common descent alone cannot fully explain the differences between species.

Both Dembski and Behe are senior fellows of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture in Seattle. The Discovery Institute is a Christian educational foundation established to promote creationist thought, founded by Stephen C. Meyer, Bruce Chapman and George Gilder. Meyer gained a Ph.D in history and philosophy of science from Cambridge University for a dissertation entitled "Of clues and causes : a methodological interpretation of origin of life studies."

The argument has been made that these proponents are not presenting scientific theory for the purpose of advancing science. Opponents have charged that the Discovery Institute and its fellows are using Intelligent Design as a wedge to drive their particular religious agenda into the public schools, where they hope to rebut the teachings and their perceptions about mainstream evolutionary science. Thus far the efforts of the Intelligent Design Movement have been unsuccessful due to their inability to craft an argument for intelligent design that mainstream science (and the courts) can recognize as scientific hypothesis or theory.

Teaching of intelligent design in schools

Intelligent design has received widespread media attention, especially after in 2005, a case was brought against a United States school board for requiring the reading of a disclaimer in biology classes that mentioned intelligent design as an alternative to the theory of evolution. The judge ruled that intelligent design is not science, and is essentially religious in nature.

Historically, ID arose from efforts to produce a form of creationism the teaching of which in schools would be less vulnerable to legal challenges. As only very few scientists use ID to explain nature, these efforts are widely regarded by scientists as an "assault on the integrity of science education." Not all ID proponents believe that ID should be taught in the science curriculum however: several leading proponents have stated that it should not be, and this is the official position of the Discovery Institute. Instead the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture have called for students to learn about the difficulties with the theory of evolution by natural selection as published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

In 2005, when the Kansas Board of Education proposed new science standards that would include alternatives to evolution as explanations for the origin of species, 38 Nobel laureates (including winners of the prize in physics, chemistry, economics, peace and medicine) wrote to the board saying "[...] intelligent design is fundamentally unscientific; it cannot be tested as scientific theory because its central conclusion is based on belief in the intervention of a supernatural agent.".

In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005), a United States federal court ruled that a public school district requirement for science classes to teach that intelligent design is an alternative to evolution violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution on the basis that it was an endorsement of a religious point of view, that it would be seen as such by a student and by an average citizen of the district.

Furthermore, District Judge John E. Jones III ruled that intelligent design is not science. He stated that "ID is not science and cannot be adjudged a valid, accepted scientific theory as it has failed to publish in peer-reviewed journals, engage in research and testing, and gain acceptance in the scientific community." His statement alludes to three parts of the "Daubert Standard" [2], which governs which evidence can be considered scientific in United States federal courts and most state courts. The four Daubert criteria are:

• Evidence should be based on a testable theory or technique.
• The theory or technique should have been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
• In the case of a technique there should be a known error rate and standards controlling the application of the technique.
• The underlying science should be generally accepted.

In October 2005, in an open letter to newspapers in Australia, nine individuals including the Dean of Science at the University of Sydney, the executive secretary of the Australian Academy of Science and the presidents of the Science Teachers Associations of a number of Australian states signed a statement saying that intelligent design is not science. The nine signatories head organisations with a total membership of about 70,000 science professionals, although no polls of the memberships on the issue was reported. The letter coincided with an episode of science program Catalyst, broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), which showed the Australian Minister for Education, Brendan Nelson, saying that he had no problem with Australian schools teaching intelligent design. An ABC poll showed that around two thirds of respondents believed that ID should not be taught in schools. Brendan Nelson later said he meant that he had no problem with ID being taught in religious classes, but not science classes.

In 2006, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) representing 22 professional societies and 84,000 scientists,declared that "it is critical to preserve the integrity of science education by opposing the mandatory teaching in science classes of creationism, intelligent design, and other concepts not based on sound scientific principles."

This is not to say that all scientists opposed to ID oppose discussing ID in classrooms. Frederick Grinnell, writing in the FASEB journal argues that, as polls show that most Americans do not believe in evolution, "representatives of the scientific and education communities are in denial when they advise "just say no" and expect that intelligent design will disappear." He proposed that ID should be discussed as a controversial scientific claim.

Intelligent design in the news

Intelligent design has received widespread media attention, especially after legal cases were brought against US school boards for promoting intelligent design in their biology curricula. Subsequent letters to the editors of local newspapers suggest that many members of the public view the issue of intelligent design to be a religious one. They deem that the theory is being used as a religious apologetic whether or not the theory itself is formally distinct from the question of a supernatural creator.

Critics of the intelligent design movement

There are many criticisms of intelligent design, and many scientists believe intelligent design to be a philosophical argument and as such outside of the realm of science. Thus, it is fair to say that intelligent design is not accepted science. Much of intelligent design criticism is not so much criticism of the idea as education of the proponents.

It is not uncommon for non-scientific proponents of intelligent design to argue from a position of scientific ignorance. An intelligent design believer will often rationalize that ignorance (either by the individual or the scientific community) is evidence of God in the machine. This form of argument will always lead to endless circular arguments. The problem with any argument wherein ignorance is the basis of evidence is that when the science is revealed to dispel why/how a particular function is understood, the hard-core believer will simply move the discussion to another topic which requires more explanation because the will always be something the believer does not understand. Thus, any full refutation of intelligent design as it is currently presented is not so much a rejection of the idea as it is an education about the scientific method, logic and sciences such as biology or theories such as evolution.

See Also

• Intelligent Design? A special report reprinted from Natural History magazine. Three proponents of intelligent design present their views. Each view is followed by a response from a proponent of evolution. [3]
• Intelligent design
• Design argument for the existence of God

Bibliography

• Simon Coleman and Leslie Carlin, eds. The Cultures of Creationism: Anti-Evolution in English-Speaking Countries (2004) online review
• Lienesch, Michael In the Beginning: Fundamentalism, the Scopes Trial, and the Making of the Antievolution Movement (2007)
• Numbers, Ronald L. The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design (2nd ed 2006)