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Intelligent Design Evolution

Introduction

This essay is about the debate between Intelligent Design and Evolution. Who’s right?

Chapter 1 – What is Intelligent Design?

Intelligent Design is about the quest for the origins of life, the universe and the living things.

Intelligent Design is the modern form of the theological argument of creation. The suporters of Intelligent Design don't believe that life comes from evolution. They think there is a intelligent cause. What that intelligence is isn't told by Intelligent Design. That is one of the reasons a lot of Darwinists think the concept of Intelligent Design is dangerous. They think it is a way to bring back creationism into the society. The first supporters of Intelligent Design believed that this supernatural cause of our being alive was God. Intelligent Design supporters like to refer to Intelligent Design as a science.

In the scienceworld they call it a pseudoscience. Pseudoschience uses knowledge that is claimed to be/appears to be scientific but isn't researched by the common scientific methods. They can't be called science because they can't be tested with an experiment. Some people even call it junk-science! Because it is called a pseudoscience it isn't allowed to educate Intelligent Design on secondary education in de USA. More and more scientist begin to believe that Intelligent Design is a concept that can be true. They say that life is too complex to be created by a natural process.

To find the origins to 1987. That was the year court decided about the separation between state and church. It wasn't allowed anymore to teach creationism on public schools. As reaction on this Intelligent Design evolved. According to the Intelligent Design supporters this wasn't a religious thing. This is science! The first book about Intelligent Design was published in 1989. That book was called 'Pandas and People'. This book was intended for high school biologie classes. Around 1990 the proponents of Intelligent Design grouped at the Discovery Institute. This was the moment the Intelligent Design movement began to grow very fast. At the moment more and more people start to accept Intelligent Design. 66% of the Americans wants that Intelligent Design becomes a part of science lessons. The judges think this isn't acceptable because it isn't really science. It is too much coupled to creationism and near to religion.

It disagrees with the Evolution theory, it says that there must be ‘something’ which or who designed the earth, a kind of intelligence. They say some things can’t be explained by the Evolution Theory, like Irreducible Complexity - things are so complex that they can’t be build up by evolution, as the Evolution theory says, example: the mouse trap, it doesn’t work until all parts are there -. The main idea behind Intelligent Design is according to William Dembski: “There are natural systems which can’t be explained sufficiently in terms of unguided natural powers and those who have features which we in every other cirumstances should attribute to an intelligence.”

In fact, it is a new form of the traditional theological argument in favour of the existence of God, however, in history there were also persons who believed in a kind of Intelligent Design, like William Paley. In 1802 he proposed his ‘watchmaker’ thesis. This was his reasoning: “In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there for ever. ... But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think the answer which I had before given [would be sufficient].” [a]

To the contrary, the fine coordination of all its parts would force us to conclude that “… the watch must have had a maker: that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.”[a]

According to Paley, we can conclude the same about natural objects, like the eye. The parts are all perfectly adapted for the purpose of telling us the correct time. In a watch the parts are also perfectly adapted for the purpose of seeing. In this way, we can see the that there must have been an Intelligent Designer.

Darwin himself also saw that if something was found which couldn’t be explained by evolution, his theory would fail, like he said: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." [b]

The modern Intelligent Design is a response to the 1987 United States Supreme Court, involving the separation of church and state. The first book which was published about ID was a textbook for high-school biology classes, in 1989. This book is ‘Of Pandas and People’. Lateron, more and more books about Intelligent Design were published. In the middle of the 1990s, persons in favour of Intelligent Design clustered around the Discovery Institute. When time went on, the ID movement grew bigger and bigger. The proponents wanted Intelligent Design to be taught at school as an alternative explanation of the origin of life. ButJohn E. Jones jugded that ID is not science, and that it “cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious antecedents.”

Chapter 2 – Who are in favour of Intelligent Design

There is an institute, called the Discovery Institute, who is sceptical about Evolution. You can also say, they are advocates of Intelligent Design. They made a list, which you, if you are a person who works in the scientific area, can sign and support in this way the following statement:

“We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged."

This statement is signed by a small 800 persons, mainly professors and doctors in physics, biology, mathematics, earth sciences & nuclear physics, chemistry, biochemistry etcetera. You can find the list on this link:

http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=660

Some of the main advocates of the ID movement are:

• Michael J. Behe

• Jonathan Wells

• Mustafa Akyol

• William Paley

• William A. Dembski

• Bob Inglis

• Roy Spencer

• Paul Nelson

• John C. Sanford

• Guillermo Gonzalez

What did they do for the ID movement:

• He wrote the book: Darwins Black Box; The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, and he worked out the idea of Irreducible Complexity.

• Wrote the book: Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth?, and devoted his life to ‘destroy the Darwinism’.

• He isn’t a Christian, but a muslim, who fights against Islamic Extremism, and is an outspoken promoter of Intelligent Design. He is a columnist and writer.

• He is the one who thought of the famous watchmaker analogy, he was a British philosopher, and a Christian.

• He wrote several books, dealing with Intelligent Design, theology and mathematics. He has also been the first director of the school’s new Center for Theology and Science.

• He is a politician, member of the Republican Pary. He wants to make Intelligent Design allowed to be taught at schools.

• He works for the University of Alabama, in Huntsville, as a principal research scientist. First, he believed in evolution, but when he grew older, he became a proposer of Intelligent Design.

• His grandfather, Byron Christopher Nelson, was a creationist writer, who wrote much books about Intelligent Design. He edited a book about his fathers writings.

• He has been assistant professor, and an inventor. First it was a evolutionist, but lateron he discovered that Intelligent Design was better, that everything must be created by a supernatural being, by God. He also wrote a book: ‘Genetic Entropy & the Mystery of the Genome’.

• He is an astrophysicist. He’s also professor, and he does researches about stellar evolution using spectroscopy, and on extrasolar planets.

Chapter 2 a) – What are the arguments in favour of Intelligent Design

We allready mentioned you some arguments, like the watchmaker thesis of William Paley and Irreducible Complexity. Since Irreducible Complexity is one of the main arguments in favour of Intelligent Design, we will explain it in more detail.

An Irreducible Complex system is according to Michael Behe:

‘A single system which is composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of anyone of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning’ [c]

In earlier times, in the 17^th and 18^th century, there were also some men who said that there must be an intelligent being, an intelligent Deity. Those men were John Ray, Richard Bentley and Wiliam Derham. Wiliam Derham said that if you look how the vision of a bird, the drum of the ear, the eye-socket, or the digestive system works, you can’t deny that an Intelligent Designer exists. Richard Bentley added the law of gravitation, a discovery of Newton, as evidence for Intelligent Design.

David Hume is the most famous critic of these arguments. In Part II of his famous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume formulates the argument as follows:

Look round the world: contemplate the whole and every part of it: you will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, which again admit of subdivisions to a degree beyond what human senses and faculties can trace and explain. All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy which ravishes into admiration all men who have ever contemplated them.

The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance; of human designs, thought, wisdom, and intelligence. Since, therefore, the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble; and that the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man, though possessed of much larger faculties, proportioned to the grandeur of the work which he has executed. By this argument a posteriori, and by this argument alone, do we prove at once the existence of a Deity, and his similarity to human mind and intelligence.

Since the world, on this analysis, is closely analogous to the most intricate artifacts produced by human beings, we can infer "by all the rules of analogy" the existence of an Intelligent Designer who created the world. Just as the watch has a watchmaker, then, the universe has a universe-maker. As expressed in this passage, then, the argument is a straightforward argument from analogy with the following structure:

1.The material universe resembles the intelligent productions of human beings in that it exhibits design. 2.The design in any human artifact is the effect of having been made by an intelligent being. 3.Like effects have like causes. 4.Therefore, the design in the material universe is the effect of having been made by an intelligent creator.

Hume criticizes the argument on two main grounds. First, Hume rejects the analogy between the material universe and any particular human artifact. As Hume states the relevant rule of analogy, "wherever you depart in the least, from the similarity of the cases, you diminish proportionably the evidence; and may at last bring it to a very weak analogy, which is confessedly liable to error and uncertainty" (Hume, Dialogues, Part II). Hume then goes on to argue that the cases are simply too dissimilar to support an inference that they are like effects having like causes:

If we see a house,… we conclude, with the greatest certainty, that it had an architect or builder because this is precisely that species of effect which we have experienced to proceed from that species of cause. But surely you will not affirm that the universe bears such a resemblance to a house that we can with the same certainty infer a similar cause, or that the analogy is here entire and perfect (Hume, Dialogues, Part II).

Since the analogy fails, Hume argues that we would need to have experience with the creation of material worlds in order to justify any a posteriori claims about the causes of any particular material world; since we obviously lack such experience, we lack adequate justification for the claim that the material universe has an intelligent cause. Second, Hume argues that, even if the resemblance between the material universe and human artifacts justified thinking they have similar causes, it would not justify thinking that an all-perfect God exists and created the world.

For example, there is nothing in the argument that would warrant the inference that the creator of the universe is perfectly intelligent or perfectly good. Indeed, Hume argues that there is nothing there that would justify thinking even that there is just one deity: "what shadow of an argument... can you produce from your hypothesis to prove the unity of the Deity? A great number of men join in building a house or ship, in rearing a city, in framing a commonwealth; why may not several deities combine in contriving and framing a world" (Hume Dialogues, Part V)?

Resources:

http://www.iep.utm.edu/d/design.htm

Chapter 3 – Who are against Intelligent Design?

Most of the national or international science academies and professional societies are in favour of evolution, so against Intelligent Design. I will list some of them here.

• The ‘American Association for the Advancement of Science’ is one of the biggest general science societies of the world. Some 10 million persons are served by 262 societies belonging to the AAAS.

• American Association of University Professors

• American Astronomical Society

• American Chemical Society

• American Geophysical Union

• American Institute of Physics

• American Psychological Association

• American Society of Agronomy

• American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology

• Botanical Society of America

• Council of Europe

• Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity Nobel Laureates Initiative

• Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology

• Intelligent Design is not Science Initiative

• Interacademy Panel Statement on the Teaching of Evolution

• International Society for Science and Religion (*)

• Kentucky Academy of Science

• Kentucky Paleontological Society

• National Science Teachers Association

• Project Steve

• National Academy of Sciences

• Lehigh University

• Royal Astronomical Society of Canada

• Royal Society

(*) = Maybe it looks strange to see this society on this list, because it’s also a religious society. But this society says that Intelligent Design isn’t good science, and isn’t good theology.

Those societies are just a small part of all societies rejecting Intelligent Design as a science. Most of them state something like the following: ‘Any claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life or species are not science’. Creationism is also included by this statement. Some of the above mentioned names are not societies, but projects from individual people, who for example made a list which can be signed.

Chapter 3 a) – What are the arguments against Intelligent Design?

...the odds against DNA assembling by chance are 10^40,000 to one [according to Fred Hoyle, Evolution from Space,1981]. This is true, but highly misleading. DNA did not assemble purely by chance. It assembled by a combination of chance and the laws of physics. Without the laws of physics as we know them, life on earth as we know it would not have evolved in the short span of six billion years. The nuclear force was needed to bind protons and neutrons in the nuclei of atoms; electromagnetism was needed to keep atoms and molecules together; and gravity was needed to keep the resulting ingredients for life stuck to the surface of the earth. --Victor J. Stenger

To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer. You have to say something like 'God was always there', and if you allow yourself that kind of lazy way out, you might as well just say 'DNA was always there', or "Life was always there',  and be done with it.  --Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker : Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design p. 141

... rarity by itself shouldn't necessarily be evidence of anything. When one is dealt a bridge hand of thirteen cards, the probability of being dealt that particular hand is less than one in 600 billion. Still, it would be absurd for someone to be dealt a hand, examine it carefully, calculate that the probability of getting it is less than one in 600 billion, and then conclude that he must not have been dealt that very hand because it is so very improbable. --John Allen Paulos, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences

Intelligent Design (ID) is an anti-evolution belief asserting that naturalistic explanations of some biological entities are not possible and such entities can only be explained by intelligent causes.* Advocates of ID maintain that their belief is scientific and provides empirical proof for the existence of God or superintelligent aliens. They claim that Intelligent Design should be taught in the science classroom as an alternative to the science of evolution. ID is essentially a hoax, however, since evolution is consistent with a belief in an Intelligent Designer of the universe and with an unlimited number of other metaphysical myths.

The two are not contradictory and they are not necessarily competitors, though evolution clearly contradicts the creation stories of numerous religions. ID is proposed mainly by Christian apologists at the Discovery Institute and their allies, who oppose the science of evolution because it threatens their hidebound, literalistic view of Bible stories. The approach of the Discovery Institute to scientific discoveries that contradict their literal understanding of the Bible is reminiscent of the early twentieth-century organization known as the World Association of Christian Fundamentalists.

In December 2005, federal Judge John E. Jones III ruled that ID must meet the same fate that creationism met in 1987 when the Supreme Court ruled religious doctrines can't be promoted in secular institutions because they violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Judge Jones wrote in his decision regarding a policy of the Dover, Pennsylvania, school district that added ID to the school's biology program:

The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy....

The arguments of the ID advocates may seem like a rehash of the creationist arguments, but the defenders of ID claim that they do not reject evolution simply because it does not fit with their understanding of the Bible. In fact, some ID proponents (e.g., Michael Behe) claim that they do not reject evolution. However, they present natural selection as implying the universe could not have been designed or created, which is nonsense. To deny that an all-powerful god has the power to create living things using natural selection is to assert something unknowable. It is also inconsistent with the belief in an omnipotent creator, which, presumably, could use any method it desires to do anything it does. (Here we skirt by the deep theological issue of whether an omnipotent being could create an object it couldn't move.)

One of the early-birds defending ID was UC Berkeley law professor Philip E. Johnson, who seems to have completely misunderstood Darwin's theory of natural selection as implying (1) the Judeo-Christian god doesn't exist, (2) natural selection could only have happened randomly and by chance, and (3) whatever happens randomly and by chance cannot be designed by a god. None of these beliefs is essential to natural selection. There is no inconsistency in believing in a god that created the universe and believing in natural selection as well, though it is true that evolution provides a non-theistic explanation of the origin of species. Natural selection could have been designed by a god, though it does seem more in tune with the nature of the Jewish god to have made little clay figurines and blown life into them.

Two scientists often cited by defenders of ID are Michael Behe, author of Darwin's Black Box (The Free Press, 1996),andWilliam Dembski, author of Intelligent Design: The Bridge between Science and Theology (Cambridge University Press, 1998). Dembski and Behe are fellows of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle research institute funded largely by Christian foundations. Their arguments are attractive because they are couched in mathematical or scientific terms and backed by what seems to be scientific competence. However, their arguments are identical in function to the creationists' arguments: rather than provide positive evidence for their own position, they mainly try to find weaknesses in natural selection. However, even if their arguments are successful against natural selection, that would not increase the probability of ID.

Behe is an Associate Professor of Biochemistry at Lehigh University (read this disclaimer from his department). Behe's argument is not essentially about whether evolution occurred, but how it had to have occurred. He claims that he wants to see "real laboratory research on the question of Intelligent Design."* Behe claims that biochemistry reveals a cellular world of such precisely tailored molecules and such staggering complexity that it is not only inexplicable by gradual evolution, but that it can be plausibly explained only  by assuming an Intelligent Designer, i.e., the Judeo-Christian god. Some systems, he thinks, can't be produced by natural selection because "any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional" (Behe 1996: 39).

He says that a mousetrap is an example of an irreducibly complex system, i.e., all the parts must be there in order for the mousetrap to function. In short, Behe has old wine in a new skin: the argument from design wrapped in biochemistry. His argument is no more scientific than any other variant of the argument from design. In fact, most scientists, including scientists who are Christians, think Behe should cease patting himself on the back. As with all other such arguments, Behe's begs the question. He must assume design in order to prove a designer.

His argument hinges on the notion of "irreducibly complex systems," systems that could not function if they were missing just one of their many parts. "Irreducibly complex systems ... cannot evolve in a Darwinian fashion," he says, because natural selection works on small mutations in just one component at a time. He then leaps to the conclusion that Intelligent Design must be responsible for these irreducibly complex systems. Biology professor (and Christian) Kenneth Miller responds:

The multiple parts of complex, interlocking biological systems do not evolve as individual parts, despite Behe's claim that they must. They evolve together, as systems that are gradually expanded, enlarged, and adapted to new purposes. As Richard Dawkins successfully argued in The Blind Watchmaker, natural selection can act on these evolving systems at every step of their transformation.

Professor Bartelt writes:

if we assume that Behe is correct, and that humans can discern design, then I submit that they can also discern poor design (we sue companies for this all the time!). In Darwin's Black Box, Behe refers to design as the "purposeful arrangement of parts." What about when the "parts" aren't purposeful, by any standard engineering criteria? When confronted with the "All-Thumbs Designer" - whoever designed the spine, the birth canal, the prostate gland, the back of the throat, etc, Behe and the ID people retreat into theology. [I.e., God can do whatever it wants, or We're not competent to judge intelligence by a god's standards, or being an Intelligent Designer does not mean being a good or perfect designer.]

http://skepdic.com/intelligentdesign.html

General Sources

1) http://www.arn.org/idfaq/What is Intelligent Design.htm

2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design

3) http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design

4)

Specified Sources

a] /a>William Paley, Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, 12th ed. (London: J. Faulder, 1809), p. 1 & 3.

b] Charles Darwin, ‘On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life’, 1859, p. 158.

c] Michael J. Behe, ‘Darwin’s Black Box: the biochemical challenge to evolution’, September 1996, p. 9

Conclusion

Work plan

General Sources

1) http://www.arn.org/idfaq/What is Intelligent Design.htm

2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design

3) http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design

4) Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: the biochemical challenge to evolution, September 1996

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