John Kilpatrick recently posted an interesting email on the Genevanet list server. I hope he does not mind me recycling his post, but he pointed us to an interesting article at Tech Central Station entitled Why Intelligent Design Is Going to Win by Douglas Kern. I don’t think Mr. Kern has a particular axe to grind in the argument – if he does then he covered it well – but the article made the following headline points:
- ID will win because it’s a religion-friendly, conservative-friendly, red-state kind of theory, and no one will lose money betting on the success of red-state theories in the next fifty to one hundred years. [“Red-State” = Republican-voting – Ed.]
- ID will win because the pro-Darwin crowd is acting like a bunch of losers.
- ID will win because it can be reconciled with any advance that takes place in biology, whereas Darwinism cannot yield even an inch of ground to ID.
- ID will win because it can piggyback on the growth of information theory, which will attract the best minds in the world over the next fifty years.
- ID will win because ID assumes that man will find design in life — and, as the mind of man is hard-wired to detect design, man will likely find what he seeks.
Read the whole article to see why.
Doggie's Breakfast 
Sounds like damning with faint praise to me. In translation:
1. ID is a political/religious belief
2. ID sucks less than Dawkins-style scientism
3. ID is untestable and unfalsifyable
4. ID is a buzzword
5. ID is a product of the way our minds evolved 🙂
Actually I do believe that the universe is the design of the triune God, but I believe this by faith. I don’t expect (or trust) mathematical proof.
The article makes some good points, but is flawed from the start:
“Intelligent Design theory is destined to supplant Darwinism as the primary scientific explanation for the origin of human life“
This is something that seems hard for many people to grasp, but ID (whatever its merits might be) is simply not a scientific explanation for anything. At best, it’s a justification for a supposed lack of a scientific explanation! To be scientific, a theory must be (as anonymous above said) testable and falsifiable. ID is neither.
This is betrayed when he says things like this:
“Is it possible to speak of a “science” of concepts? Right now, the scientific establishment says no. This unhelpful understanding of science will soon be discarded in favor of something more useful in the information age.“
The understanding of science can change, he is right there, but there are certain concepts that cannot be discarded if what remains is to be called “science” at all. And among those concepts are the inconvenient ideas of observation, experiment, theory and falsification. There are many kinds of knowledge possible without these things – but they are not science. And confusing them with science only makes understanding harder.
However, when it comes to politics, the article’s conclusions are more probable:
“ID will be taught in public schools as a matter of course. It will happen in our lifetime. It’s happening right now, actually.“
This is plausible. He might even be right. The only question is whether ID is taught in science lessons or RE lessons. If it’s science then, despite his protestations, it will harm science. Because basing your “science” on a nonscientific ground means that your science is floating free. If ID is the basis for biological research, many possibilities will be missed and mistakes will be made – because it deliberately sets out not to explain many parts of biology! The most telling point here is that the entire edifice of ID is based on two things – pointing out that scientific knowledge is not complete (Duh!), as though that somehow proved that scientific knowledge is false, and constructing cloud castles that don’t stand up for a minute once some real science is actually applied to them (as in their supposed examples of “irreducible complexity”).
The stupid thing (and I use that term advisedly) is that many scientists who believe that evolution is a true and accurate description of the development of life on earth are both Christian and hold a belief that might be termed “weak ID”. That is, we believe that God is involved in history and guides events, that God planned this world, that God is in charge. But we would refute vigorously all the twaddle spouted by the “ID crowd” about “irreducible complexity”, which is a willful misrepresentation of the facts. We don’t need this ID nonsense to sustain a belief in an involved Creator God. That is, the author seems to confuse the scientific theory of evolution with a certain “scientism” that uses this as a launching point for a materialist philosophy.
pax et bonum