How Intelligent Design fails

Recently in the Philosophy of Science course we discussed, as a means of understanding the necessary material for the entirepurpose of the class, the underlying mechanics and, ahem, science of Intelligent Design. Since the purpose of this lecture was not to proselytize instead give us an understanding to a theory that very much is not understood fully by the classroom, the good Doctor (erm, hello Dr Miller...) quite sufficiently explained the underlying principles of Intelligent Design. I will not be able to give them nearly the same amount of time and detail as he did, but I must underline a few properties and examples that are especially troublesome to myself.

In the broadest strokes, given my inexpert understanding, there are certain properties of organism that are described as Irreducibly Complex (it's important you see, because the letters are capitalized). That is to say they are so complex a structure that if natural selection and the transmission of inherited traits is correct there would be no conceivable way the intermittent structures could do the task the final organ is capable of. The current examples, which these experts say demonstrate a sufficient degree of analogy between their examples and organics, are complex things like the mousetrap and Roman Arch. Accordingly, each item is impossibly useless unless it were 100% complete.

It appears fairly obvious the intelligent design arguments fail inductively. The relevant analogy between their examples and nature isn’t sufficient to give us the conclusion that any part of nature has a creator. The sole similarity is not the complexity issue but includes the implication of purpose. The ideas that

Though it was not explicitly stated in class it’s the white elephant in the room. They (the ID proponents) need this additional similarity for their arguments to hold – that both are created with a purpose. Each example they’ve given has had this facet. Even in their original argument of the eye, they were holding that since none of the pre-fully developed eye stages yielded a seeing capacity they must not have been possible through natural selection. In fact the main way we’ve disproven this argument was by brushing aside their unstated premise of intention behind natural organisms and showing the utility behind intermittent stages.

The telos of the objects cannot be a similarity between the two cases. I.E. stating the new case has a purpose requires the conclusion “both were designed” to be reached beforehand. Doing so begs the question, yet without saying both have a purpose we cannot say there’s a high enough degree of similarity between the two cases to reach the conclusion “both have an intelligent designer.” We’ve given numerous counter-arguments to such things, the various stages of eyes work fine in their own way. There has been a continual repurposing of body parts throughout the whole of natural history from the wing to the femur.

With the various answers provide a reasonable alternate to Intelligent Design at least in the lack of another entity in our theory, God. Given the criteria for deciding what the best theory is for a situation, I must thoughtfully deny Intelligent Design as the best fit theory of how things have come to be.

Comments

[ophalm]

http://jatom82.wordpress.com/2009/02/14/intelligent-design-whats-the-problem/

thought you'd be interesting, I am discussing ID with an ID guy on that blog, he's attacking from a different angle that you're discussing!

I like your work though :)