Note: this is Part 5 of a series of posts on Christianity and evolution. Read the introduction, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 for background.
5. The Intelligent Design movement is a rather lame attempt by YEC’s at a bait-and-switch. The problem is, their stuff lacks even the sophisitication of some of the more thoughtful Creationist models — it’s self-evidently fallacious, and is simply the old “God of the Gaps†horse dragged out to be flogged yet again.
There is a highly charged debate going on in government and education in the US right now over the school of thought known as “Intelligent Design”. This movement purports to be different from the Special Young Earth Creationist movement — indeed, not all its proponents claim to be Christian — and yet, its modus operandi seems eerily similar. ID people claim that the theory of biological evolution should not be taught in public school, or at least, ID should be taught along with it as an equally valid scientific theory.
But ID is far from a valid scientific theory. It is, in fact, a giant cop-out. As we saw previously, science is all about observing the universe, and then trying to understand and model it accurately enough to make accurate predictions about how it works. ID, on the other hand, goes something like this: we observe a structure or phenomenon in nature that seems too complicated or diffucult to have arisen through natural processes, so therefore it must have arisen through supernatural intervention.
Whatever this is, it’s not science. Science is all about the quest to understand how things work; never will it simply throw up its hands and give up. And ID depends entirely on the subjective judgement of its participants. Who are they to say whether or not a structure is “natural” or not?
What ID is, in fact, is the old “God of the Gaps” idea. Although the Christian idea of a God whose faithfulness was reflected in the regularity of the laws of nature was fundamental to the scientific revolution, there were always those who sought to minimize God’s importance in everyday life. These Deists saw the laws of nature as sufficient unto themselves without God’s intervention, and thus pushed God back to the place of a distant creator or “first cause”. Anything that science didn’t yet understand — the “gaps” in knowledge — was, however, attributed to God.
This is a self-defeating position, however, because scientific knowledge always increases. If God is only responsible for the gaps in scientific knowledge, sooner or later She will get written out of the picture altogether. This was perfectly acceptable for some people, of course.
So it is with ID. As scientific knowledge increases, the examples that ID uses to defend its position will eventually be understood, rendering the ID position untenable.