What's The Intelligent Design Debate Really About?

Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
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I will respond to questions and comments as time permits, but if you want to take issuewith any position expressed here, you first have to answer this question:

What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?

I simply will not reply to challenges that do not address this question. Refutabilityis one of the classic determinants of whether a theory can be called scientific. Moreover,I have found it to be a great general-purpose cut-through-the-crap question to determinewhether somebody is interested in serious intellectual inquiry or just playing mind games.Note, by the way, that I am assuming the burden of proof here - all youhave to do is commit to a criterion for testing.It's easy to criticize science for being "closed-minded". Are you open-mindedenough to consider whether your ideas might be wrong?

To me, the most fascinating aspect of the debate over Darwinism versus Intelligent Design is that neither side understands the other side’s argument. Better yet, no one seems to understand their own side’s argument. But that doesn’t stop anyone from having a passionate opinion.

For example, Darwinists often argue that Intelligent Design can’t be true because we know the earth is over 10,000 years old. That would be a great argument, supported by every relevant branch of science, except that it has nothing to do with Intelligent Design.

Intelligent Design accepts an old earth and even accepts the fact that species probably evolved. They only question the “how.” Creationists have jumped on that bandwagon as a way to poke holes in Darwinism. The Creationists and the Intelligent Design folks have the same target (Darwin), but they don’t have the same argument. The average person who has a strong opinion on this topic doesn’t understand that distinction because the political agenda of the Creationists makes things murky.

When the creator of Dilbert, the reigning expert on

Once upon a time, punch cards were used in computing. Generally the process of using a computer ran something like this:

• You entered your data on punch cards.
• You handed the punch cards through a little window in a door to an operator, who snarled at you for interrupting his nap. It was never over the counter, always through a window in a door like you were delivering a message to a besieged castle. Which in fact you were; the people behind the door were convinced they were the only intelligent beings on a planet of apes. You were never actually allowed through the door for fear that your user cooties would corrupt a machine so intricate that it could beat you at tic-tac-toe.
• You went back next day and got a list of when the computer crashed because you had entered data in the wrong column on the cards.
• You retyped the bad cards
• You handed the punch cards through a little window in a door to an operator.
• The operator snarled at you for interrupting his nap and ridiculed your incompetence for not typing the cards correctly.
• Rinse, repeat.
• Eventually the cards are punched correctly. Now you enter the corrected stack of cards through the window and get snarled at.
• You went back next day and got a report of when the computer crashed because of an error in the program. The operator belittled your manhood for being an incompetent programmer. What he would have done to a woman is hypothetical since the only woman in computers those days was Grace Hopper, who as a commodore in the U.S. Navy had the authority to have any insolent computer operator keelhauled.
• You did a core dump, which showed what was in memory when the program crashed.
• You went through the cards and manually recreated the steps of the program, tracing the error.
• You corrected the program.
• You enter the corrected stack of cards through the window and have your manhood belittled for being an incompetent programmer.
• Rinse, repeat.

Nowadays it's:

• Click icon
• Run

Which of those two is intelligent design?

In the punch card era, if you got one character into the wrong space on a card, the program would crash, because the computer could not figure out what was meant to be on the card and interpret it correctly. You had to read and correct the cards by hand. Much as we can criticize Windows - it has security holes big enough to drive a truck through and it's bloated - my word processor corrects a lot of my inadvertent typos as I type. If I inadvertently quit without saving my work, it asks me. If I write a program that doesn't work, I will get a message telling mewhat doesn't work, and why, and sometimes even in a manner that's useful.

Early computers were clunky because we were still learning how to build them and use them, and they were limited in speed and capacity. Operators were surly because computer time went for hundreds of dollars an hour. You didn't even get to run a program unless you had research funds, and mistakes were literally costly. For the times, the design was as intelligent as we could manage (although five minutes' experience would point to obvious fixes that needed to be made). But what would we think of a computer designer today who still expected people to intervene continually to keep a computer running? (Maybe that he worked for Microsoft?) Isn't it far more intelligent, in every sense of the word, to design computers that can run on their own without requiring constant intervention?

(Nicklaus Wirth and other computer purists argue that the apparent efficiency of computers today is merely the result of computer time becoming so cheap that we can "waste" computer time more cheaply. That mentality assumes that computers are an end in themselves whose sole purpose is merely to compute, as opposed to saving human labor. Even people who haven't the money to buy computers of their own nowadays have access to them through libraries, simply because we find the overall productivity of the society has increased through easy access to cheap computing power.)

Or consider automobiles. Once upon a time you set the parking brake, put it in neutral, adjusted the choke and throttle, cranked it, readjusted the choke and throttle, depressed the clutch, stepped on the gas, changed gears, released the clutch, and - maybe - drove off. Now you turn the key, put it in drive, step on the gas, and go. The choke, throttle, clutch and gearshift are handled automatically. Which of those is Intelligent Design?

So which these is Intelligent Design?

• Create Universe
• Create life
• Create multi-celled organisms
• Create fish
• Create amphibians
• Create reptiles
• Create birds
• Create mammals 
• Create humans,

or

• Create Universe
• Run?

Conclusion 1: Constant intervention to keep a system running is the exact antithesis of Intelligent Design

Conclusion 2: If you believe in an Intelligent Designer, Science offers abetter, more intelligent Intelligent Designer than "Intelligent Design."

Conclusion 3: Since the notion of an Intelligent Designer does not conflict with anything in science, and science offers a better Intelligent Designer than "Intelligent Design," the existence of an Intelligent Designer is not the issue.

So What Is the Issue?

Intelligent Design advocates don't find the mere existence of an Intelligent Designer interesting. After all, an Intelligent Designer could be consistent with deism (the idea that God exists but has no interaction with the Universe), pantheism (the idea that the universe is God), Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, liberal Christianity or Christian fundamentalism. Among the logical links that need to be established before you can get from an Intelligent Designer to any particular creed are:

• The Designer has infinite powers. (An infinite regress doesn't prove there's an infinite power at the end of it. You can count progressively larger numbers forever without reaching infinity)
• The Designer made use of supernatural methods
• The Designer has any moral or ethical dimensions (or if so, the Designer's ethics correspond in any way to ours)
• The Designer is concerned with the Universe (maybe we're a science fair project forgotten on a back shelf of someone's fridge)
• The Designer is concerned with or even aware of human beings
• The Designer communicates with human beings
• There exists a reliable record of any such communications
• Some particular document is actually that record
• Any religion has an accurate picture of the Designer
• Any religion interprets the record of communications truthfully
• Some particular sect is actually that religion

So jumping from Intelligent Design to John 3:16 glosses over a few necessary steps. (I love the people who hold up Scripture references at football games and protests. It's like promoting literacy by driving down the street and yelling "Hamlet, Act II, Scene 4" out the window.) But the facts remain:

• Pantheists and deists are conspicuously missing from the Intelligent Design debate.
• Most of the rank and file in the Intelligent Design debate are conservative Christians.
• Most of the rank and file in the Intelligent Design debate are not logically trained enough to see that the jump from Intelligent Design to John 3:16 omits any steps.

So, there's a good, blunt theological term for the assertion that Intelligent Design is anything but a front for religious opposition to evolution: lie. And opponents of Intelligent Design can see it clear as day. The strategy of opposing Intelligent Design at the farthest fringe makes strategic sense. Unfortunately, it also tends to vindicate the logical leap from Intelligent Design to fundamentalism.

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Created 12 October, 2005;  Last Update 24 May, 2020

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