Intelligent Thought (eBook)

Jerry A. Coyne Intelligent Design: The Faith That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Intelligent design is not an evangelic Christian thing, or a generally Christian thing or even a generically theistic thing. . . . Intelligent design is an emerging scientific research program. Design theorists attempt to demonstrate its merits fair and square in the scientific world-without appealing to religious authority.

-William A. Dembski, The Design Revolution (2004)

[A]ny view of the sciences that leaves Christ out of the picture must be seen as fundamentally deficient. . . . [T]he conceptual soundness of a scientific theory cannot be maintained apart from Christ.

-William A. Dembski, Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology (1999)

Well, which is it? Is intelligent design (ID) merely a sophisticated form of biblical creationism, as most biologists claim, or is it science-an alternative to Darwinism that deserves discussion in the science classroom? As the two quotations above imply, you won't find the answers in the writings of the leading advocates of ID.

The ambiguity is deliberate, for ID is a theory that must appeal to two distinct constituencies. To the secular public, ID proponents present their theory as pure science. This, after all, is their justification for a slick public-relations campaign promoting the teaching of ID in the public schools. But as is clear from the infamous 'Wedge Document' of the Discovery Institute, a right-wing think tank in Seattle and the center for ID propaganda, intelligent design is part of a cunning effort to dethrone materialism from society and science and replace it with theism.1 ID is simply biblical creationism updated and disguised to sneak evangelical Christianity past the First Amendment and open the classroom door to Jesus. The advocates of ID will admit this, but only to their second constituency, the sympathetic audience of evangelical Christians on whose support they rely.

Nevertheless, let us give the ID movement the benefit of the doubt. Let us suppose that ID might indeed be an alternative and superior scientific theory-one that explains the natural world better than Darwinian evolution does. Can such an argument stand up to scrutiny? Is it time for Darwinian evolution to go the way of Newtonian mechanics, as a theory good for its time but ripe for replacement by a new paradigm? No. Not only is ID markedly inferior to Darwinism at explaining and understanding nature but in many ways it does not even fulfill the requirements of a scientific theory.

What are those requirements? A scientific theory isn't just a guess or speculation, it is a convincing explanatory framework for a body of evidence about the real world. A good scientific theory makes sense of wide-ranging data that were previously unexplained. In addition, a scientific theory must make testable predictions and be vulnerable to falsification. Einstein's theory of relativity, for example, received a definitive test (and confirmation) by measurements of the bending of starlight by the sun during a solar eclipse. If a theory can't be tested or falsified, it is not a scientific theory. The theory that God caused the Big Bang, for example, isn't a scientific theory, because (while it may be true) there are no observations we can make to disprove it. When a theory has withstood many tests and made many correct predictions, it becomes a scientific fact, which we can understand as a theory having such strong support that all rational people would accept it. The theories of atoms and of chemical bonds, for ...