While Intelligent Design (ID) is a term which is becoming more familiar in our culture it is safe to say most people still misunderstand it. Since critics often misrepresent ID, and paint ID advocates as a fanatical fringe group, it is important to understand what intelligent design is, and what it is not.
Contrary to popular belief, to be an ID proponent you do not have to believe that all species were created simultaneously a few thousand years ago.
Until Charles Darwin, almost everyone everywhere believed in some form of intelligent design (the majority still do): not just Christians, Jews and Muslims, but almost every tribesman in every remote corner of the world drew the obvious conclusion from observing animals and plants that there must have been a mind behind the creation of living things.
Darwin thought he could explain all of this apparent design through natural selection of random variations. In spite of the fact that there is no evidence that natural selection can explain anything other than very minor adaptations, his theory has gained widespread popularity in the scientific world, simply because no one can come up with a more plausible theory to explain the development of life, other than intelligent design, which is dismissed by most scientists as “unscientific.”
But, in recent years, as scientific research has continually revealed the astonishing dimensions of the complexity of life, especially at the microscopic level, support for Darwin’s theory has continued to weaken, and since the publication in 1996 of Darwin’s Black Box by Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, a growing minority of scientists have concluded, with Behe, that there is no possible explanation for the complexity of life without intelligent design. If scientists can spend time and money developing tools and algorithms to detect dubious signs of extraterrestrial intelligence in weak signals from outer space, why are they required to ignore the evidence in living cells where design practically leaps out at you?
But what exactly, do these “ID scientists” believe? There is no general agreement among advocates of intelligent design as to exactly where, when, or how design was manifested in the history of life. Most, but not quite all, accept the standard timeline for the beginning of the universe, of life, and of the major animal groups.
Some accept common descent, although most recognize that this “descent” was not really gradual. (In fact, most of the animal phyla appear quite suddenly in the fossil record about 500 million years ago in the “Cambrian explosion,” as documented in Steven Meyer’s 2013 book Darwin’s Doubt.) Probably all reject natural selection as an adequate explanation for the development of life, but so do many other scientists who are not ID proponents. So what exactly do you have to believe to be an ID proponent?
Perhaps the best way to answer this question is to state clearly what you have to believe to not believe in intelligent design. Peter Urone, in his 2001 physics text College Physics writes, “One of the most remarkable simplifications in physics is that only four distinct forces account for all known phenomena.” The prevailing view in science today is that physics explains all of chemistry, chemistry explains all of biology, and biology completely explains the human mind; thus, physics alone explains the human mind and all it does.
This is what you have to believe to not believe in intelligent design, that the origin and evolution of life, and the evolution of human consciousness and intelligence, are due entirely to a few unintelligent forces of physics. The new video A Mathematician’s View of Evolution dramatizes this through reductio ad absurdum, pointing out that if you don’t believe there was intelligence involved in the origin or evolution of life, or in the origin of human intelligence, you essentially believe that a few unintelligent forces of physics alone could have rearranged the fundamental particles of physics on Earth into computers and science texts and jet airplanes.
Contrary to popular belief, to be an ID proponent you do not have to believe that all species were created simultaneously a few thousand years ago, or that humans are unrelated to earlier primates, or that natural selection cannot cause bacteria to develop a resistance to antibiotics. If you believe that a few fundamental, unintelligent forces of physics alone could have rearranged the basic particles of physics into Apple iPhones, you are probably not an ID proponent, even if you believe in God.
But if you believe there must have been more than unintelligent forces at work somewhere, somehow, in the origin of life and the development of intelligent humans: congratulations, you are one of us after all!
Furthermore, the evidence uncovered in the last half century have forced many scientists who insist that unintelligent laws of nature explain everything to accept that design is required to explain the spectacular fine-tuning for life, and even of the laws and constants of physics themselves.
These scientists are sometimes considered to be intelligent design supporters as well. One of the three discoveries discussed in Stephen Meyer’s 2021 best seller Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries that Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe is this well-documented fine-tuning. Notice the long list of distinguished scientists who have formally endorsed the book, including physics Nobel prize winner Brian Josephson who writes, “This book makes it clear that far from being an unscientific claim, intelligent design is valid science.”
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