Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [103]
Intelligent Design Arguments and Rebuttals
The New New Creationists are nothing if not prolific. Their arguments can be found in a number of works published over the past decade, the most prominent and widely quoted of which include: William Dembski’s Intelligent Design (InterVarsity Press), No Free Lunch (Rowman and Littlefield), and The Design Inference (Cambridge University Press); Phillip Johnson’s Darwin on Trial (InterVarsity Press), Reason in the Balance (InterVarsity Press), and The Wedge of Truth (InterVarsity Press); Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe (Simon and Schuster); Darwinism, Design, and Public Education edited by John Angus Campbell and Stephen C. Meyer; The Creator and the Cosmos and The Fingerprint of God (Nav-Press), both by Hugh Ross; Of Pandas and People by Dean Kenyon and William Davis (Haughton); Evolution: A Theory in Crisis by Michael Denton (Adler and Adler); Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? by Jonathan Wells (Regnery).
A number of scientists began responding to the New New Creationism within a few years of the movements rise to prominence. Kenneth Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God (Perennial) and Robert Pennock’s Tower of Babel (MIT Press) were the first two countershots that are indispensable in their analysis. Additional titles that should not be overlooked by those wishing a more in-depth analysis include: Unintelligent Design by Mark Perakh (Prometheus Books); Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design by Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross (Oxford University Press); God, the Devil, and Darwin: A Critique of Intelligent Design Theory by Niall Shanks (Oxford University Press); Darwin and Design: Does Evolution Have a Purpose? by Michael Ruse (Harvard University Press); A Devil’s Chaplain by Richard Dawkins (Houghton Mifflin); Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics edited by Robert Pennock (MIT Press); Denying Evolution by Massimo Pigliucci (Sinauer). Arthur Strahler’s Science and Earth History (Prometheus) remains a classic, as do Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker, and a number of Stephen Jay Gould’s essay collections, such as The Flamingo’s Smile. The two best resources on the Internet on the evolution/creation topic are the Talk Origins forum at www.talkorigins.org and Eugenie Scott’s National Center for Science Education at http://www.natcenscied.org/.
Following the format of the “25 Creationists’ Arguments and 25 Evolutionists’ Answers” that I presented in my book Why People Believe Weird Things, we can review ID creationism in ten arguments and ten answers.
1. The Nature of the Intelligent Designer. Many aspects of the universe and life indicate the fingerprint of intelligent design; thus an intelligent designer had a role in the creation of both the universe and of life. Since ID theory is a science, it cannot comment on the nature of this intelligent designer, let alone personalize it. The goal of ID theory is simply to establish the fact that the evidence is overwhelming that an intelligent designer was involved in the creation and evolution of the universe and life.
The duplicity of the IDers is most apparent, and appalling, in their claim that they are only doing science and, therefore, they cannot comment on the nature of the intelligent designer. Why not? Are they not in the least bit curious as to who or what this ID is? If ID operates on the universe and our world, don’t they want to know how ID works? They claim, for example, that certain biological and chemical systems are “irreducibly complex”—a number of different parts of a system could not possibly have come together by chance or through any other Darwinian or natural system or forces; therefore it must have happened through intelligent design. Granting, for the sake of argument, that they are right, if ID really did put together a number of biochemical