
Quote by:
Lullaby Chainer
Oh, how very wrong you are my good friend.
Intelligent Design is supposedly infalliable. In other words, the creationist behind it take for granted that it is true without exception and then go about trying to disprove anything that contradicts. It's not a theory, it's still just mythology. Science is not infalliable.
Science tries to explain how the world works, not why we have this world rather than some other world. It is not part of science to try to prove the world was or was not designed by God. It is not the job of science to try to explain the probability of biological developments happening by chance or not. If anyone wants to speculate about such matters, they are free to do so—as metaphysicians. ID is not scientific, but metaphysical. The fact that it has empirical content doesn't make it any more scientific than, say, Spinoza's metaphysics or so-called creation science.
ID is a pseudoscience because it claims to be scientific but is in fact metaphysical. It is based on several philosophical confusions, not the least of which is the notion that the empirical is necessarily scientific. This is false, if by 'empirical' one means originating in or based on observation or experience. Empirical explanations can be scientific or non-scientific. Freud's idea of the Oedipus complex is empirical but it is not scientific. Jung's notion of the collective unconscious is empirical but it is not scientific. Biblical creationism is empirical but it is not scientific. Poetry can be empirical but not scientific.
On the other hand, if by 'empirical' one means capable of being confirmed or disproved by observation or experiment then ID is not empirical. Neither the whole of nature nor an individual eco-system can be proved or disproved by any set of observations to be intelligently designed.
Science does have some metaphysical assumptions, not the least of which is that the universe follows laws. But science leaves open the question of whether those laws were designed. That is a metaphysical question. Believing the universe or some part of it was designed or not does not help understand how it works. If I ever answer an empirical question with the answer "because God [or superintelligent aliens, otherwise undetectable] made it that way" then I have left the realm of science and entered the realm of metaphysics. Of course scientists have metaphysical beliefs but those beliefs are irrelevant to strictly scientific explanations. Science is open to both theists and atheists alike.
If we grant that the universe is possibly or even probably the result of intelligent design, what is the next step? For example, assume a particular eco-system is the creation of an intelligent designer. Unless this intelligent designer is one of us, i.e., human, and unless we have some experience with the creations of this and similar designers, how could we proceed to study this system? If all we know is that it is the result of ID but that the designer is of a different order of being than we are, how would we proceed to study this system? It is presumptuous to assume that an intelligent designer would create an eye the way a human engineer would design a similar system with a similar function. By appealing to an "intelligent designer" to explain some complex phenomenon is to explain nothing about that phenomenon's relation to its alleged designer. The theory illuminates nothing.
The ID proponents are fighting a battle that was lost in the 17th century: the battle for understanding nature in terms of final causes and efficient causes. Prior to the 17th century, there was no essential conflict between a mechanistic view of nature and a teleological view, between a naturalistic and a supernaturalistic view of nature. Nature could be thought of as a vast purposive mechanism. With the notable exception of Leibniz and his intellectual descendents, just about everyone else gave up the idea of scientific explanations needing to include theological ones. Scientific progress became possible in part because scientists attempted to describe the workings of natural phenomena without reference to their creation, design, or ultimate purpose. God may well have created the universe and the laws of nature, but nature is still a machine, mechanically changing and comprehensible as such. God became an unnecessary hypothesis. Or, if one couldn't live without God, one could identify God with Nature, as Spinoza did, and argue that belief in final causes or purposes in nature is demeaning to God and the height of folly for man.*
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