Design? - Yes. Intelligent? - No.
"ID is old creationist wine in new designer label bottles." - Richard Dawkins
Years ago T. H. Huxley said, "life is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once". Yet once again it is necessary to debunk creationism, now under its new name of intelligent design (ID). And be concerned lest it be included in school science courses.
The latest assault is by a Sydney-based group, the Campus Crusade for Christ. They have 1000 copies of a DVD, Unlocking the Mystery of Life, on offer free to high schools and others. The DVD promotes ID as a preferable explanation to Darwin's theory of evolution, of how life arose in all its complexity.
ID has only been around about 15 years. Its advocates, several holding academic positions in US, claim that many features of living things are too complex to have arisen by chance. They therefore claim that complex features are the product of ID and therefore of a designer! Biologists readily counter this argument by pointing out that complex features, e.g. the many steps involved in blood clotting, or the eye, do not appear fully functioning in one go. Instead they emerge in stages by modifications to pre-existing features. ID therefore does not stand up under the rigours of scientific scrutiny, and has gained no acceptance within science.
In contrast, the theory of evolution through natural selection has stood the test of time. It is one of the most important concepts in modern biology. It helps us interpret the fossil record, understand how bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, and shows that all organisms to be related to one another. It also explains how life has evolved from simple to complex over hundreds of millions years, and that humans are also an evolved species.
Evolution challenges literal christianity, which declares the earth to be very young, and all life to be created by god, at more or less the same time, and that humans were made in god's image. After years of struggle with the implications of evolution, mainstream christianity has made peace with science. But this is not the case with christian fundamentalists. They still reject evolution in favour of the biblical creation story. Hence their enthusiasm for ID, as a useful wedge aimed at weakening naturalistic interpretations of, Where did we come from?, Who are we?, and Where are we going?
