The ID claim that life is “too complex” to ever be explained by natural means is outrageously presumptuous. “Too complex”? Who could possibly know such a thing based on our current knowledge? The orbit of Earth around the Sun was once “too complex” for science. Should we have stopped trying to figure it out? Everything was “too complex” at some point in our past. Who can say that one day in the future we won't understand how life originates and functions in complete detail? Intelligent design proponents must know the future, for how else can they declare a cell to be forever beyond the reach of natural explanations as revealed by science? How do they know?
Anyone who looks into intelligent design will run into something called “irreducible complexity.” Again, this is nothing more than jumping to extraordinary and unjustified conclusions: we don't know how all the parts of this cell could have evolved to work in unison like this, so it must have been put together by an intelligent designer. This is transparent nonsense. What about nonliving things that are complex? “[I]ntricacy and organization can be readily inferred even from things that were clearly not consciously designed,” argues scientist Jonathan Marks. “Snowflakes are intricate, but does anyone really think that God unleashes a horde of microscopic chiselers in constructing a blizzard? I may not know much about the physics of crystal formation, but it's got to be a better explanation than that one.”1
This is really the same old creationism. The difference is that intelligent design is packaged and marketed to appear scientific, though it is anything but. Slick promotion has fooled much of the public into thinking that the ID/evolution controversy is about fairness rather than antiscience and religion masquerading as science. “Teach both sides,” is often heard. No less an authority figure than a former president, George W. Bush, said both evolution and intelligent design should be taught in science classes. One could advocate for astrology to be given equal time in astronomy classes. It would make just as much sense.
The fatal flaw of intelligent design has nothing to do with the identity of its proponents, their politics or religious beliefs, who funds it, or anything else along those lines. All that matters is that there is no good evidence, rational argument, or valid theory to support the idea that life was created by a god, extraterrestrial, or other intelligent being. None. Maybe it did happen that way. But until someone comes up with some real scientific evidence for it, we can't know for sure and should not pretend that we do.
The best argument one can make against intelligent design has nothing to do with DNA or fossils. Simply point to where its leading advocates choose to fight their battles. This reveals everything we need to know because they do not wage war with their arguments and evidence in academic conferences and on the pages of scientific journals. No, they do their fighting in courtrooms, school board meetings, political campaigns, on websites, and in books and pamphlets. University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne describes the stark absence of intelligent design from the scientific process: “Since 1973, more than one hundred thousand peer-reviewed papers on neo-Darwinian evolution have been published. ID is represented by just a single peer-reviewed paper, and this is a generous estimate because that paper has been refuted.”2
This is not how proper science is done. It's not how we go about determining what is real and what is not. Real science grows from the clash of ideas and claims where the victor is determined by who has the superior evidence. It's not a popularity contest. It doesn't matter if a scientific claim is presented by good people, bad people, ugly people, nice-looking people, religious people, atheists, poor people, or rich people. All that matters ultimately is who can put the best evidence on the table for all to see. Sometimes winning takes a long time. And winning is always conditional; it's never final. Some see it as a weakness, but it's the best thing about science. It's a good thing to change when change is called for. Nothing is written in stone when it comes to science. Everything is always up for grabs, open to revision, and vulnerable to attack. If I happen to have a eureka moment while I'm taking a shower tonight and figure out something that tears down the theory of evolution, my first impulse will be to write it down and send it to the journal Nature. My first move definitely would not be to attempt to pack some school board with people who agree with me so that high school kids can be taught my new theory—no matter what the world's scientists think of it. No, I would go the route of publication, fame, and fortune, as anyone would who had a winning theory. I suppose I could put up a slick website and print pamphlets to hand out in churches, but I would rather pick up a Nobel Prize for my Darwin-destroying theory on my way to the bank to deposit all the fat checks I would receive from book advances and speaking engagements.
Those who think intelligent design is scientific should ask themselves why the leaders of the ID movement don't act like scientists. More to the point, why don't real scientists take intelligent design seriously and embrace it? If there were anything to it, there is absolutely no doubt that many would. It is ludicrous to suggest that they choose not to rock the boat in the evolution-loving subculture of science or can't due to censorship. Even if mainstream secular universities were silencing scientists who possess powerful new evidence capable of sinking evolution, it doesn't explain why we do not see game-changing ideas and data emerging from religious universities. Surely Oral Roberts and Liberty Universities would not censor their professors or students if any of them could make a compelling case for intelligent design. There is also the opportunity for intelligent design proponents to write their own books or start their own science journals. If they knew something significant, they could and would make it public. And, if there were anything to it, the world's scientists would not ignore it. We can only conclude that ID proponents have no case to make beyond the political campaigning, lobbying, and public sales pitches that we have seen.
“What is really going on in the ID movement is that highly educated religious men are justifying their faith with sophisticated scientific arguments,” explains Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and the author of Why Darwin Matters. “This is old-time religion dressed up in newfangled language. The words change but the arguments remain the same. As Karl Marx once noted: ‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’ The creationism of William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes trial was a tragedy. The creationism of the intelligent design theorists is a farce.”3
GO DEEPER…
Books
Brockman, John, ed. Intelligent Thought: Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement. New York: Vintage Books, 2006.
Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.
Dawkins, Richard. The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. New York: Free Press, 2009.
Forrest, Barbara, and Paul R. Gross. Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Humes, Edward. Monkey Girl: Education, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.
Margulis, Lynn, and Dorian Sagan. Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Smith, Cameron, and Charles Sullivan. The Top 10 Myths about Evolution. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006.
Soutwood, Richard. The Story of Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Tattersall, Ian, and Rob DeSalle. Bones, Brains, and DNA: The Human Genome and Human Evolution. Piermont, NH: Bunker Hill Publishing, 2007.
Weinberg, Steven. Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Young, Matt, and Taner Edis. Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006.
Zimmer, Carl. The Tangled Bank: An Introduct
ion to Evolution. New York: Roberts, 2009.
Other Sources
Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial (DVD), Nova.
If things were different, things would not be the way they are.
—Robert L. Park,
Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science
A common justification for believing in a god or gods that I have heard from people around the world is that the universe and Earth are so perfectly tuned for life that their god (always their god over millions of others) must have designed and created it. All of this around us could not possibly have just happened by chance. This must be a very attractive idea to religious people because it's repeated in the same way by many followers of many contradictory belief systems. Like any idea, however, popularity doesn't necessarily mean that it makes sense.
If the extent of one's awareness about animal life stops at a dog, a goldfish, or an occasional visit to a zoo, then I suppose it may be understandable if one doesn't appreciate how incredibly difficult, violent, disgusting, and unfair existence is for most life on our planet. Right this moment, as you are reading this sentence, millions of creatures are being pierced, clawed, snapped in half, chewed and swal-lowed—while still alive. A constant and incomprehensible flow of pain and suffering is standard operating procedure, just the way life goes on this planet. If our world is finely tuned for life, then why is the overall extinction rate more than 95 percent? If this planet is intelligently designed specifically for life to flourish, then why are struggle, disease, agony, misery, and failure the norm?
If Earth had significantly more mass, or less mass, if there were no water, or if the atmosphere were different, then we couldn't exist. So what? If the conditions were so different that we could not exist—then we would not exist. Nothing should be so difficult to understand about that. There is life here and no life on the Moon, for example. That's just how it is. If the Moon had an ocean and an atmosphere like Earth's, then maybe there would be life on it. But since there is no life there, should we conclude that the Moon was intelligently designed to exclude life? By this sort of logic, any kind of environment can be attributed to an intelligent designer no matter if it can support life or not.
Those who believe the Earth is tuned for life get it precisely backward. Life has been tuned for the Earth. And the tuning was/is done by the natural process of evolution. This makes more sense than anything else, especially in light of all the dead ends and unintelligent designs that are found in many life-forms, including us. A basic understanding of evolution makes it easier to grasp why there are so many oxygen-breathing animals on a planet that has lots of oxygen. It explains why there are so many life-forms with fins and gills on a planet that has so much water. And it makes sense for all these sun-dependent plants to exist on a sunny planet. If life fits on Earth, it's because it evolved here.
Look around the Earth. Some creatures evolved in extremely hot environments; others evolved in extremely cold environments. If the entire Earth had been freezing cold for the last one hundred million years, then hot-weather creatures would either not be here today or they would be very different. Should we conclude, then, that the Arctic was “designed” for polar bears because that's where polar bears live? Isn't it more likely that polar bears have evolved to survive in cold environments and that's why we find them in a cold place like the Arctic If they hadn't evolved for cold weather, they either wouldn't exist or they would have evolved to live someplace else. What we can say for polar bears on one part of this planet, we can say for all life on this planet. If conditions were different, life would be different—or simply not exist.
Many people say the entire universe, like the Earth, is fine-tuned for life. But this claim falls far short too. Of course there are key qualities to this universe that we rely upon to live, but most likely that is only because we exist in this universe and we evolved under these conditions. If our universe was fundamentally different—say atoms didn't exist and matter was constructed of something else—then we would either be made up of something other than atoms or we would not exist. It's as simple as that.
Another problem with this claim of a universe designed to cater to our needs is the fact that the universe doesn't seem very hospitable to us! Most Earth life, with the exception of some microbes, would not last long in space or on any other known celestial bodies. We certainly can't survive without making a significant effort to fend off the hellish environment that seems to be standard throughout virtually all the universe. Space is too cold, too hot, and has too much radiation for most life-forms we are familiar with. It's also mostly empty, hardly ideal for building a home and raising a family. Overall, the universe does not appear to be the most hospitable place one could imagine, or design and create for humans if one had such powers and such a desire. Earth is also far from ideal and certainly does not seem to be intelligently designed and built specifically with human needs, comfort, and safety in mind. If it were, why are there hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, supervolcanoes, the Ebola virus, and so on? Any designer with an ounce of compassion would have left those out of the recipe, right?
I suspect that this common belief of an Earth and an entire universe created and catered for us is nothing more than human arrogance. Don't forget, we had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, away from believing that the Earth was the center of the universe. Now many of us are clinging to the belief that we are still centrally important, if not centrally located. “The universe was made just for me,” sounds a lot like the imagination and insecurities of a self-centered child. But in fairness, who knows? Maybe the universe really is custom-made for us by divine design. But until we learn a lot more about this universe we find ourselves in, it is preposterous to make such a bold assumption without evidence.
GO DEEPER…
Ferris, Timothy. Life beyond Earth. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001.
Ferris, Timothy. The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998.
Greene, Brian. The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.
Greene, Brian. The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos. New York: Knopf, 2011.
Hawking, Stephen. The Grand Design. New York: Bantam, 2011.
Potter, Christopher. You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe. London: Hutchinson Radius, 2009.
Sagan, Carl. Cosmos. New York: Ballantine Books, 1985.
Stenger, Victor J. The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe Is Not Designed for Us. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011.
I have not sent these prophets, yet they have run with their message: I have not spoken to them, yet they prophesied.
—God, quoted in Jeremiah 23:21
For as long as I can remember I have heard talk of prophecies.The gods, it seems, are always sharing with us key information, critical facts, important predictions, dire warnings, and spectacular insights about what is happening and about to happen to us. I have had Nostradamus experts and pulpit-pounding preachers declare to me with absolute confidence that earth-shattering events were close. Over time, however, I began to notice that the end was always near but never quite here. While such talk may have been mildly concerning the first few times I heard it, I'm a bit more skeptical these days. I have since learned that supernatural prophecies are not the rock-solid predictions of future events they are so often made out to be. Nonetheless, claims of “fulfilled prophecies” serve as powerful anchors of faith for many millions of believers who follow many different religions.
All around the world, prophecies are cited as justification for believing in the accuracy and validity of entire belief systems. In the Middle East, for example, some Muslims have told me with deep conviction that the Koran contains a prediction that foretold the Apollo Moon landings: “The Moon has split and the hour has drawn closer.”1 They explained to me that “the Moon has split” refers to the return to Earth of Apollo a
stronauts with lunar rocks and “the hour has drawn closer” refers to the fast-approaching end of the world. They insist that a seventh-century book accurately predicting an important twentieth-century event is ironclad proof that Islam is the one and only true religion. I'm not sure how you feel, but I'm not convinced that this was an accurate prediction of the Moon landings. I am sure, for example, that if the Moon cracked in half tomorrow, many Muslims would then say that the “Moon has split” line referred to that and not astronauts taking away rock samples. This is typical of the problem with most religious predictions. They are too vague and can be interpreted by believers in ways that may make them appear to fit actual historical events when they really don't. Christianity has its prophecy of a messiah that is predicted and fulfilled all within the same limited collection of sources. That doesn't seem fair, or very convincing. Imagine if I showed you a book that described in chapter 1 a magical city made of gold rising up in Australia ten thousand years ago. Then, in chapter 20 of the same book, the city was said to have vanished forever without a trace five thousand years ago. Would you be impressed if I then declared that the city of gold is a fulfilled prophecy and proof that my book is true? Didn't think so.
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