Editor,
It is time to put the intelligent design debate to rest.
Proponents of intelligent design aggressively market their viewpoint as real science, insisting it is not religion-based. One leading advocate, Michael Behe, writes, "The conclusion of intelligent design flows naturally from the data itself, not from sacred books or sectarian beliefs."
Proponents of intelligent design claim that Darwinian evolution is a fundamentally flawed theory, and that there are certain complex features of living organisms evolution simply cannot explain, but which can be explained as the handiwork of an intelligent designer.
Their viewpoint is not religiously based, they insist, because it does not require that the intelligent designer is God. Design, writes leading proponent William Dembski, "requires neither magic nor miracles nor a creator."
Indeed, design apparently requires surprisingly little of the designer's identity. "Inferences to design," contends Behe, "do not require that we have a candidate for the role of designer." Some have even seriously nominated advanced space aliens for the role.
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Their premise seems to be that as long as they don't explicitly name the designer, it saves their viewpoint from the charge of being religious in character.
But does it?
Imagine we discovered an alien on Mars with a penchant for bio-engineering. Could such a natural being fulfill the requirements of an intelligent designer?
It could not. Such a being would not account for the complexity that design proponents seek to explain. Any natural being capable of designing the complex features of earthly life would, on their premises, require its own designer. If design can be inferred merely from observed complexity, then our purported martian designer would be just another complex being in nature that supposedly cannot be explained without positing another designer.
By the very nature of its approach, intelligent design cannot be satisfied with a designer who is part of the natural world. Such a designer would not answer the basic question its advocates raise: It would not explain biological complexity as such.
Its advertising to the contrary notwithstanding, intelligent design is inherently a quest for the supernatural. Only one candidate for the role of designer need apply. Dembski himself - even while trying to deny this implication - concedes that if there is design in biology and cosmology, then that design could not be the work of an evolved intelligence. It must, he admits, be that of a transcendent intelligence whom he euphemistically refers to as the big G.
The supposedly nonreligious theory of intelligent design is nothing more than a crusade to peddle religion by giving it the veneer of science - to pretend, as one commentator put it, that faith in God is something that holds up under the microscope.
The insistence of intelligent design advocates that they are agnostic; regarding the source of design is a bait-and-switch. They dangle out the groundless possibility of a designer who is susceptible to scientific study only to hide their agenda of promoting faith in the supernatural.
Mark Erasmus
UNM alumnus
