Why Intelligent Design is Not Science
This post was prompted by this article at Marginal Revolution, which was in turn prompted by a recent court case denying ID “scientific status” and access to science classrooms.
The article presents the hypothetical situation - if you find a watch in the forest, do you assume that it was the product of endless iteration and random chance, or do you assume it was made by a watchmaker? The only time the former is plausible is if you do not allow for the possibility of a watchmaker. Where this argument fails is that it simply presents a hypothesis, which is decidedly not the only step necessary in science.
The Scientific Method presents the following iterative sequence of steps:
- Use your experience
- Form a conjecture
- Deduce a prediction from that conjecture
- Test - run experiments both to confirm and falsify the conjecture.
If the conjecture is falsified, then you must go back to step #2 and form a new conjecture that takes into account the new information.
Intelligent Design fails as a scientific theory in two very crucial ways:
- Intelligent Design offers no predictive value. Given the theory of Intelligent Design, there is no way to make a logical prediction of how the universe works that is not already in evidence. Any prediction made by a proponent of ID is simply random guesswork.
- Intelligent Design is not falsifiable. There is no way to disprove Intelligent Design. Any evidence that is presented contrary to the theory can be hand-waved away by saying “God made it that way” - the “theory” never adapts to new information, it simply accepts any new information without any need for critical thought.
There’s also the infinite regression problem - Intelligent Design requires the axiom that a Designer exists. Taking the existence of a Designer as a hypothesis, the theory has the same problems as Intelligent Design - it provides no predictive value and is not falsifiable. In the event that unquestionable proof that Designer(s) exist is found, we’re still left with the question of how that Designer came to be, why he chose to design life, and most importantly why he chose to add so much superfluous “junk” DNA and otherwise pointless organs like the human appendix. It’s somewhat ironic that the latter can most easily be explained by assuming that the Designer was intelligent enough to realize that he could create an infinite variety of robust lifeforms using the relatively simple mechanism of genetic drift and natural selection - rather than spending billions of years hand-crafting lifeforms.